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Marshall’s consort, Corinne, was the first to act. She was screaming (alto) at me, “You bloody French perv. This is our picnic. Piss off!” and then she threw an oyster bottle - empty of course. I ducked, and then she threw the little bread basket at me. That missed too, and I kept mowing.
She was very angry now, and spun around looking for more things to throw at me. The others were comically grabbing food from the cloth to prevent Corinne from throwing it, laughing even as they yelled abuse. Unable to get her hands on anything else to throw, she undid her heavy-buckled leather belt and swung it around her head, cowboy style, but her release was badly timed, and it spun behind her and twisted itself around the rotary hoist.
“Ooh!” she fumed, and threw both sneakers hard at me; they landed ineffectually on her side of the paling fence. With barely a pause she then dragged her T-shirt over her head and threw that as well.
That seemed to be a signal to Lindy. She and Corinne looked at each other without speaking, and then both undid their jeans. Corinne slipped hers right off, and threw them as accurately as she had thrown the belt: they spun in the air a moment before plopping into the Clark pool. Lindy simply dropped hers to her ankles, stepped out of them, turned away, bent over, and pulled her panties down to show her pointy pink bottom to me. I believe they call it “mooning” in this country. Then she pulled her panties up, and turned back to me with a smile more like the serpent’s in the garden than the Mona Lisa’s.
Corinne, meanwhile, appearing to consider her mispropelled jeans, Lindy’s belated triumph, and my roaring Victa, exclaimed “Bugger you and bugger everything!” to the air, and continued with her determined protest.
She reached back to unclip her bra, and slid it off. I brought the mower to an awkward halt, as she spun her bra bolo-fashion round her head before flinging it at me. It floated like a large white butterfly and landed on the fence, one cup on either side.
For a moment she stood there with her arm raised above her head - her breasts were large and round with small pink nipples, like those of my favourite model, Olympia.
My motor by this time had choked and died, and now I could clearly hear the sobbing laughter of Bart and Marshall and Lindy - still dressed in her man’s white shirt, she was wandering about the yard, collecting Corinne’s clothes where they had fallen.
“Edouard,” I heard my wife calling from the back patio. “Edouárd, what are you doing?”
“Mowing the lawn, ma cherie,” I said over my shoulder, but she did not look convinced.
I turned back to start the mower, trying not to look at my wife or at the picnic charade next door. By this time, Corinne, now with my wife to defy as well, had slipped off her panties and, attaining accuracy at last, flung them at me. They landed on top of the Victa, which was shuddering but failing to start; I quickly picked them up and slipped them into my pocket. At that moment, Madame Manet grabbed my ear and pulled me up the steps. Just before the door slammed, I glimpsed the final tableau - Bart was leaning back laughing, Corinne had collapsed in a drunken and hysterical heap by Marshall’s side, and Lindy was climbing wetly out of the pool with Corinne’s jeans; she was nearly doubled over with laughter.
*
To write these words has been painful, but now I have cleared my mind completely of the incident: I have just finished painting the tableau I saw over my shoulder that day. I have, however, made it more genteel: it is still a picnic lunch set in vegetation with a jumble of picnic things in the foreground, two dressed men and a naked woman sitting in the middle ground, and a partly-clad woman emerging from a pond in the background.
This morning, when I returned here to sign the corner and write this account, Corinne was still looking out of the picture directly at me; she kept her eyes focused boldly on me even as I wiped paint from my hands with her panties.
And so I have made something worthwhile from this painful experience, something beautiful in paint; whether I have rid myself of it by painting and writing I cannot yet know. Though I miss them now, I will always have the painting. I will call it Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and only the six of us will know its secret.
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