The Fine Art of Truth or Dare (9 page)

Then I found a little pocket of poetry and fiction.
Jane Eyre.
Treasure Island.
The House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton. I haven't read that one, but I've read
Summer
, about sex and longing and growing up. It was published in 1917, the year after Edward died. In the one letter from Edith to him that has made it into print, she talks about it. At least she's probably talking about that book. I tried to remember the letter.
“I am consumed by this fierce compulsion to tell a true fiction,”
she'd written. Or was it “
an honest fiction
”?

I flipped carefully through
The House of Mirth.
There weren't any letters tucked inside, but on page 89, I found a note in the margin.
“How true,”
it read. I couldn't be sure, but I thought it probably referred to the line
“The real alchemy consists in being able to turn gold back again into something else.”

My search changed. Now I gently fanned hundreds of pages and I found notes. Most were single words:
“Check,”
“Rubbish,”
“Hah!,”
but sometimes there was more. I discovered
“Read to Diana, pref. in bed”
inked next to an Ezra Pound poem called “Fish and Shadow.” There was a mention of a woman and bed, but the important part apparently was in French:
“Qu'ieu sui avinen,
Ieu lo sai.”
I didn't understand a word of the French. Or the poem, for that matter. The notation was pretty obvious.

I could feel myself blushing a little as I put the book back, but not before I'd copied the line on my note sheet. Then I went back and stood in the middle of the room. There was something there for me. There had to be.

“Let me guess—” I spun to find Dr. Rothaus standing in the doorway. “You're having a large disappointment,” she drawled, “with a side of rare pissed-offedness.”

I thought about lying outright. But as it was medium dis-appointment with a side of self-pity, I just shrugged. “It's not what I expected, but that doesn't mean I'm not finding interesting things.”

She leaned one sharp shoulder against the doorframe. “How well do you think you know Willing?”

I figured
“I chat with him in my bedroom on a regular basis”
wasn't the right answer. “Fairly well. He's my favorite artist.”

“Mmm. Cute, wasn't he?”

“Gorgeous!” I took the line, hook and sinker.

Dr. Rothaus rolled her eyes. “God, devotees.” She sighed. “Let me give you some advice for your future, Willing Girl. If you idolize someone, stay away from where they live. You're never going to see what you want to see. Whatever good they produce is usually somewhere else, and there's always a poo stain on the toilet. Now go home. It's closing time.”

I scooped up my bag. She stepped back to let me out of the room. I got a few feet down the hall, then stopped. “Thank you,” I said.

“For what?” she asked sharply. “The advice?”

“For letting me in,” I told her. “Being here was . . . an honor.”

She snorted, and pulled the door shut with a snap.

• • •

“She had a point, you know,” Edward commented a few hours later. “Unnecessarily crude, perhaps, but apt. Our public personas frequently do not match our private ones. You, of all people, should know that.”

“This isn't about me,” I said grumpily. “This is about needing to find more information about the private you. Something I don't already know.”

“I have terribly ugly feet.”

“Not what I had in mind. And probably untrue anyway.”

Edward glanced down at the empty space below his rib cage. “Probably. So, what did you have in mind?”

“A letter, maybe. From Diana. Something that connected your love to your work.”

“I rather thought I did that through my paintings.”

“You did. I mean, that's what attracted me to you in the first place. Well, no, that was your smile, probably, but the paintings helped. It's just that I need to know more about your muse.”

“Ah, darling Ella, the artist's muse is Ego. Nothing more.”

“You don't mean that. You married Diana because she made you feel like no one else in the universe ever did or could.”

He nodded. “She was extraordinary.”

“But not everyone saw that. Your family went nuts. Half of your friends stopped inviting you over, at least for a while.”

“Their loss. She was a woman who comes along once in a lifetime.”

“And . . .” I was on a roll. “Your sales increased dramatically after your marriage.”

“Ah, now that wouldn't stand up in a thesis, and you know it. My sales increased after my 1902 show at the academy, and more after I died. It wasn't the love story, perhaps, so much as the end of it.”

Of course I suspected as much, but hated saying it out loud.

He didn't. “You've read my letters, Bella Ella. According to you, the museum shop is now selling the sixth edition of the appallingly illustrated version my niece put together. It's a simple truth: people like you better if you've suffered a little. Vincent van Gogh wouldn't have half so many calendars and coffee mugs had he been quieter about his demons.”

I'm inclined to agree, although I think van Gogh was a pretty amazing painter. I never mention that to Edward, especially since van Gogh's
Portrait of Doctor Gachet
sold for eighty-two million dollars, and the Sheridan-Brown got Edward's
Portrait of Doctor Tapper
for forty-two thousand.

“You'd think that philosophy might have put the kibosh on some of the Freddy Krueger stuff,” I mused, tilting my jaw until I felt the pull of the scar.

“And well it might, if you ever let on that it hurt.”

I'm inclined to agree with that, too, but there's a limit. “So I should start going strapless.”

“Don't be snotty. You don't have to show your pain literally. You insist you are an artist, Ella. Be an artist. Use your joys—and your traumas. Tell me, how much did Vincent's
Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear
sell for?” When I kept my mouth shut, he shrugged. “Fine. I am simply suggesting that you could be just a tad less self-protective. Show some scar.”

“You sound like Frankie.”

“Of course I do. So . . . ?”

“A hypertrophic, hyperpigmented scar is just ugly. An irrevocably broken heart is beautiful and poetic.”

“The breaking is not nice,” Edward said, a little sharply. “I don't recommend it.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

He grunted. “What is it you
want,
Ella?”

“What you had,” I answered softly, “with Diana. That once-in-a-lifetime connection that makes everything good.”

“Fine. But you do realize that in order to be loved like that, you have to let the lucky gentleman see you. I mean truly
see
you, scars and all.”

“Yes, Edward, I am fully aware of that.”

“But you don't want anyone to really look at you.”

He had me there. “Well, no.”

“Good luck with that, then,” he said, then yawned and closed his eyes, telling me the conversation was over.

12

THE REVIEW

From
The Collected Correspondence of Edward Willing
, edited, enhanced, and with illustrations by Lucretia Willing Adamson. Henry Altemus Company, Philadelphia, 1923:

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

 

October 23

The Plaza Hotel

 

My Darling,

Well, it is settled. The Metropolitan Museum shall buy Cleopatra. You may send your profuse thanks to Mr. F. W. Rhinelander for his invaluable assistance in removing it from your sphere to his.

I lunched with him today and was introduced to his granddaughter, Edith Wharton, who is visiting. She is not especially pretty, but is quite clever and excessively well read. She prefers the design of gardens, I believe, to that of art, and dabbles in both poetry and prose. She is not entirely well; she and her husband will be returning to Europe soon, she hopes, so she may take some cures in France. She recommended several spas there from which you might benefit.

Shall we go to Paris next spring? You will certainly be well by then. I agree that Dr. Tapper is far more intelligent and sensible than many of his profession. If he tells you that you are not to be slogging through the Wissahickon in this weather, you must desist with your daily slog. Your lungs are fragile, my love. I would not have you expiring for a sight of interesting lichen. Love is one of two things worth dying for. I have yet to decide on the second. It is most certainly not colorful fungus.

I shall be home as soon as this business is settled, certainly no more than a week. My mother complains that you will not have her to dinner. Good for you. Take pity on Hamilton's new wife and have her to tea. Fire the cook, please. I cannot face another dish of sweetbreads.

With all my love always,

Edward

• • •

From
Incomplete: The Life and Art of Edward Willing
, by Ash Anderson. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983:

 

The academy exhibition of April 1902 marked a notable departure from Willing's past style. Rather than the small brushstrokes and sunlit colors so characteristic of his earlier works, this collection was bolder and darker. Missing, too, were his familiar depictions of single persons. A local critic wrote:

 

While one might expect either the complete absence or overwhelming presence of the late Mrs. Willing in this collection, one would, perhaps, be justified in feeling startled by the complete lack of any people whatsoever. It is as if Willing has excised all human contact from his sphere, finding his muse instead in the flat gray of the Schuylkill River or the lumpen boulders of the Wissahickon Valley. While there is no question that Willing's work has been, through the years, alternately tolerable and uninspired, his pitiable loss of just over two years ago might inspire a bit of sympathetic latitude. However, for my part, I left the exhibition feeling very low-spirited and slightly damp.
(9)

 

For the next three years, Willing traveled extensively (see Chapter 20), and completed the eight uniquely abstract landscapes that came to be known as the Elysium series. (10) The only known portrait from that time was one commissioned by a Willing family friend, art collector, and philanthropist John Girard Hamilton, before Diana's death. As it was to be of Hamilton's wife, the sittings were understandably postponed, and the picture was not completed until mid-1905. For the remainder of his life, Willing would paint very few portraits, although he did resume the use of models for figure studies sometime in 1906 . . .

Notes

Chapter 19 (cont.)

(9) Stuyvesant Gumm,
The Philadelphia Inquirer
, April 17, 1902. Gumm was never kind in his reviews of Willing, and in fact once publicly called him a “s**t-shoveler.”

(10) A somewhat ironic term, as the titles:
Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Avarice, Wrath, Heresy, Violence,
and
Fraud
are reminiscent of Dante's Circles of Hell. While there is no direct evidence of its presence there,
Betrayal
is assumed to have been lost in the Jordan Cooper Gallery fire of December 1905.

13

THE MAGIC

“Okay, people. I'm throwing all caution to the wind. Ha. Taking a leap of faith. And assuming you finished reading
Gulliver's Travels
. I thought I'd shake things up a little, upset the status quo, so to speak, and try something new. Let's really splash out here and have you be . . . Reviewers. Like in the
New York Times Book Review.
Lay it on me. Tell me what you think . . . Anyone? . . . Anyone? Yes, great, Alexander. Your review.”

“It was somewhat lacking in magic, Mr. Stone.”

“
Excuse
me?”

“Well, this class is called the Magical World. So, if I were to compose a review, I think I would have to begin with, ‘For a book intended to represent a magical realm, it was somewhat lacking in magic.'”

“Mr. Bainbridge, I would expect such glibness from some of your . . .
peeps
, is it? But you are usually a gentleman of sensibility.”

“Thanks, Mr. Stone. But I'm being totally serious.
Gulliver's Travels
is at best an adventure story. Maybe not exactly the wildest and hairiest . . . but, anyway. It's not magical. It's just satire, pretty much aimed at government. It tells us the stupid, ineffective way things truly are. Okay, so some of the folks in charge are actually talking horses, but that's not magic. That's just Washington.”

“Quiet, people. Yes, yes, very clever. Your point, Alexander?”

“My point is this. In magical things, it's all about the way things
could
be. Right? If we just look at them a little differently. And about that feeling that the whole world has been, I don't know . . . repainted. Or totally turned upside down.”

“I'm still not getting you. So . . .”

“So, maybe, Mr. Stone, and I say this with all due respect, we should be reading
The Lord of the Rings
. Or
American Gods.
Harry Potter. Something where the magic is . . . well, there.”

“Ah. Of course. Harry Potter. Believe me, I know how you all feel about anything older than you are, but established and classic does not necessarily imply difficult and without value.”

“Believe me, Mr. Stone, I hear you. But wouldn't it stand to reason that if you follow the same logic, new and different doesn't automatically imply inferior and worthless?”

“Rejoice, Mr. Bainbridge. We will be reading
Le Morte d'Arthur
later in the term. And our next subject is Shakespeare's
The Tempest
. Oh, people. Come
on
. It's about beaches and monsters. Great stuff. Just great . . .”