How to Gracefully Disappear in a Room

Is it odd that I think about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec from time to time? Henri, the brilliant, but biologically and psychologically troubled, French post-impressionist painter, who I imagined must have been as uncomfortable out in society, alone, as I can be at times. Henri was a dwarf. I don’t know what my excuse would be. In my head, I create imagined scenes of his isolation. Inside the cabaret, fin de siècle Paris, the opening of the Moulin Rouge. Henri’s posters are what drew the crowd to this nightspot. They put the red windmill on the map, so to say. But in my meditations, Henri is left alone.

Henri Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa was born in 1864, in the South of France to an aristocratic household; his last name being a gift from the towns his relatives were the counts of. Also, Henri was born from aristocratic familial breeding traditions; his physical afflictions being a gift from the history of inter-nobility European marriages. His grandmothers were sisters. This pragmatic and perilous desire for “pure blood” and strengthened family alliances produced homozygosis in poor Henri. His torso was normal size but his legs remained child-sized. This set of crossed genetics also bestowed upon Henri, gigantic genitals. Unable to engage in the activities of other young, aristocratic, French males, Henri immersed himself in art. He fled to Paris to study art. Drawn to bohemian Montmartre, he met his first prostitute, Marie-Charlotte, apparently hired by his friends. Around this time, the Moulin Rouge opened and hired Henri to make its promotional prints. Henri always had a seat reserved for him there, and his paintings adorned the new walls. He painted all of the dancers of the Moulin Rouge. His work was shown in the Independent Artists’ Salon. But demons manifested in Henri. His alcoholism pulled him to new depths, aided by the deterioration of a rumored syphilis infection. In 1899, his mother had poor Henri institutionalized. Two years later, Henri had passed. Aged 36 years.

I imagine Henri sitting at his reserved seat. Women who may be working, women who may be kept, comparing curls in the corners. They never see poor Henri. He sees them. Above the rim of his glass, lifted by tiny hands to his tiny lips, perched high atop his seat. His cane has fallen to the floor. Henri does not want to ask anyone for help. He would rather remain invisible tonight, and deny the aristocratic attention others often crave. Henri is taking mental photographs, perhaps to recreate in his masterpiece, At the Moulin Rouge, later.

I, too, have sat alone at a bar. But this has produced few masterpieces of my own. I spent one night alone in Chicago, just to have spent one night alone in Chicago, amidst a cross-country trip and stumbled along the streets downtown, full of deep-dish pizza and Budweiser, until I found myself in a piano bar. It was crowded for a Wednesday night. I settled in at the bar, ordered another bottle of Budweiser and turned around on the stool to swallow the surroundings better.

People are strange, when you’re a stranger. The regulars lined up at the bar, swaying upon their stools, adjacent to me. I overhear their dark and lonely conversations, attempts to hide the same loneliness we are all plagued by at times. Others seated in their guarded groups, facing each other around tabletops, their backs to everyone else. All across this place. Some groups of only guys, with hungry eyes wading through the room like lost sharks. There are a few groups of only girls, who know that they are being watched from seven possible directions, simultaneously. The heterogeneous groups, men and women together, are having the most fun, laughing at something, when they are not drinking. Waitresses weave between, balancing drinks and bar food on the moon-shaped platters they hold out, above and away from their heads on their way to coalesce at the end of the bar area, to flirt and being flirted with by the inattentive bartenders, who have left me waiting for another beer.

It is really just like any other bar I have been to in my life, alone or accompanied by friends. But tonight I am the stranger. I don’t know these people. I will never know these people. What on Earth could I possibly have to say to anyone here? Or they to me? I found myself quoting Kerouac, “I had nothing to offer to anybody except my own confusion.” It probably came from reading On the Road, too many times in my younger, more impressionable years.  

Two pianos, empty for the moment, sit back to back upon a small stage waiting to be played. It is only a matter of time before the rollicking and dueling pianos will flood the whole bar, and the poly-symphonic singing of the trained professionals at the pianos and the drunken coeds at the tables will bellow and wail the clichéd lyrics of all the clichéd songs you hear at any piano bar. Let everyone else sing every tired verse of “American Pie”, and “Piano Man.” They are the type of songs should only be sung when you’re part of a group, anyway.
In this bar, on this night, invisible, I stole the scenes I will recreate later. 

My mind wandered back to At the Moulin-Rouge, its diagonal composition and, glowing, grotesque faces. Figures in black seated around worn, wooden lacquered tables take turns leaning in and laughing. Men beneath black chimney pot hats, black beards, black frock coats. Women, black from ornate collars to pointy shoes, rest under Victorian plumes. They cradle glasses of cognac and glasses of absinthe in their black velvet gloved palms. The gaslights, centered in each table, cast a ghost green glow, illuminating chins and nostrils. Each group, across this cabaret, engrossed in its own conversation as the accordion dances through the air, mingling with clove and perfume. Each group, oblivious to the existence of every other group.

  Their little tribal circles. The stories they share. The color of their jewelry, the glistening of their hair. Someone laughs loudest. Someone has always had too much. Sometimes, it is Henri who had too much. One too many tremblement de terre. He is the life of the cabaret. He is the only source of natural light in this place. The women surround him and play with his tiny ears. Twirl his miniature mustache. Pinch his thighs, just above the knee. They whisper together, rumors about his immense and distorted genitals. His legs dance in staccato steps, Three legs, counting the cane, rapping and tapping upon the floor as he stumbles beneath the frills and ruffles of can-can dresses and can-can kicks. Henri is dancing. They say he will never die. Mad with alcohol and syphilis. Cursed by the conditions of old aristocratic inbreeding traditions. They say he will never die.

 But on the night when he only wanted to disappear, Henri watches from his roost at the bar. Behind his glass. Capturing the night and its sway, and storing it somewhere far away. Sometime later he will paint this night, and carefully place himself in the scene, behind a group in the cabaret. Right in my line of sight as I raise my glass and remain invisible.