Emilie Rommel
Bargain Books (les livres de bon prix) Olympia, Edouard Manet, 1865 She reclined across two glossy pages, propped against a mound of square white pillows, so that one white shoulder, one white breast was slightly raised above its asymmetrical twin. Her dark hair parted smoothly above the straight line of one eyebrow, tucked neatly behind one long and delicately pink-tipped ear. The other ear was concealed by a thick-petaled flower, too colorless against the dark hair and white skin to be called exotic. The rounded expanse of her pale, naked body appeared as a single brush stroke, interrupted only—only!—by a pale, rounded arm stretched across the shallow rise beneath her navel. At the end of that arm, spread fingers, white and round, curved over a pale thigh. At the end of one crossed leg, a heeled slipper barely hid the toes of a white, arched foot. Edie snapped the book shut and put it—nearly threw it—back onto the table. Unsettled by her own response to the painting, she breathed sharply, in through her nose, out through her mouth, and glanced over each shoulder once. She ran a self-conscious hand through her own straight, blonde hair, convinced someone must have seen her. But Edie was alone in the second story back corner of a large and almost clinically impersonal chain bookstore, alone under the yellow sign proclaiming “Last Chance Bargains,” and protected from view by tall shelves filled with surplus-ordered non-fiction, unpopular first novels, and over-ambitious hardback biographies. Stacked in untidy piles across a low glass table, were several oversized art books. It was one of these, The Impressionists that had scalded her. Impressions? Impressions of what? Edie wondered. Nonchalance. Nudity. Sex. She bit her lip. Such unabashed nakedness in front of a lens or a mirror was completely foreign to Edie, and didn’t seem very safe. As for posing—really posing—for an artist, it was unthinkable, as was the idea that such an impression could be left so quickly by a woman in a painting. 32
Saxifrage