The Painted Kiss (13 page)

T
he next year Gustav, Ernst, and Franz were being considered for the commission to paint University Hall. The theme was Philosophy, Medicine, and Jurisprudence. They moved to a new studio, in Josefstadt, where they had a garden and more room to work. They began making sketches for presentation to the Arts Committee of the Ministry of Education. It was an important commission and all three wanted it desperately. Ernst, in particular, drove himself hard. Helene had just had a baby, a girl also named Helene, and he keenly felt this new responsibility.

Then he got sick. He continued to work for as long as he could, but after several weeks he stopped going to his studio altogether. I watched him grow even thinner than he had been before. When I played cards with Helene at night, the wracking coughs that came from the upstairs bedroom were unnerving. Helene and I both cringed at each attack. He would not let Helene call the doctor, though the baby, not six months old, came to stay at our apartment so she would be safe.

He said he was not concerned. If the baby had been sick, that would have been something to worry about. But he had been sick many times; as a child he had had pneumonia three times, and whooping cough twice. He always got well, he said.

When the doctor finally came he said that Ernst had scarlet fever. He was worried Helene would catch it, too, but she refused to leave him. As it turned out, he left her.

It was December and dark at three o’clock in the afternoon. The gravediggers used pick-axes to break the ground in the cemetery. Gustav stood between his mother and Helene, but as to who was holding up whom, I couldn’t be sure. I was on Helene’s other side, and she stood up straight, holding the baby, without any help from me. She wouldn’t look at me and none of us said a word.

Both of the gaunt haunted shells next to me were, I knew, wracked with guilt about something they should have done. Gustav had not gone to visit Ernst on the last day; he had actually seemed better. Helene thought that if she had called the doctor sooner, something might have been devised to save him. There was no way to tell either of them that they had done all they could. They wanted to blame themselves, which was easier than blaming God.

The priest was young and it was his first funeral. His cassock billowed around his thin legs and he kept his eyes in his book of prayers, where he had placed a piece of loose paper filled with tiny script. He attempted consolation, saying that there was a reason for Ernst’s death, that God must have wanted him for Himself, but he didn’t seem to believe this anymore than we did. Then he implored us to be hopeful, forgiving, and mindful of God’s grace. Gustav spat on the ground when he said that, and the poor priest leaped backward as if he’d been attacked.

Gustav stepped forward to give his eulogy. He had a crumpled piece of paper in his hand but he never looked at it or at any of the mourners. Instead he looked into the horizon as if it were a gem he was examining for flaws.

“My brother,” he said, “was a fool. An idealistic, optimistic, smile-happy fool.”

Here Helene looked over at me in terror and the other mourners shifted in their shoes as if they were suddenly too tight, but none of us made a move to stop him from talking.

“He grew up poor,” Gustav went on, “but never let it make him bitter. He was often ill as a child but was seldom petulant. He made many friends in art school, and never became competitive or backbiting or gossipy. He actually helped others with their work on his own time, even though he knew that raising their marks would work against him. He shared his supplies even when he could not afford to buy his own.

“He was the same way in the Kunstlerhaus and in the studio we shared. He was an excellent draftsman, better than I. The clients liked him, and he knew how to talk to them. He knew how to say what they wanted to hear. He knew how to listen to them and repeat back what they’d said with some artist jargon thrown in to make them feel intelligent. And with touching obedience he’d give them exactly what they wanted, even if they wanted something gauche or gaudy or stupid.

“Not that his work was bad, not at all. It was conservative, but it was good. He could not draw an ugly line, he could not mix an ugly color. He had a gift for the figure, and an attention to detail that bordered on obsession.

“As a man he was honest and decent and kind. While other artists were off with actresses and dancers, he married a lovely girl and had a child.” Here I lifted my eyes from the spot on the ground and glanced over at the clump of artists to my left. Franz caught my glance and gave me the smallest smile.

“He did everything right,” said Gustav, “and look what it got him.”

There was excruciating silence as we waited for him to say more, hoping fervently that he wouldn’t, even though it was a nihilistic place to end. The poor young priest jumped in front of Gustav at the first moment that it was clear he was finished and read a passage from First Corinthians in a hoarse voice.

When it was over Helene dropped a box of pencils onto the casket. Gustav would not watch them shovel the dirt on. He walked away. I watched him recede into the distance, wondering where he was going, if he was all right, but I didn’t follow. The Klimts’ house, where the wake was to be, was not far away. Perhaps, I thought, he would walk there, though the blowing ice pierced like needles.

The wake was a sad mirror of the wedding we had hosted less than two years before. My mother was rocking the baby and singing to her. Pauline tried to get Helene to eat a roll with apple butter. My father listened attentively to the wails of Mrs. Klimt. Gustav had not come back.

The artists milled around the staircase, looking awkward in their best suits and trying not to talk about their latest commissions and their difficulties of space and perspective. I went toward them, meaning to ask if any of them had seen Gustav, but when Franz saw me coming he detached himself from them and made for me. He had been away from Vienna for some time. He looked plump and rested, but that may have been because everyone around me was so hollow-eyed with worry and sleepless nights. He smiled another timid smile, the broadest one propriety allowed. His very health made me despise him suddenly.

“I was in Budapest when I got the news,” he said. He had not dared to ask Gustav anything, and he wanted to know: How long had Ernst been ill? Had he been bled? What medicines had they used? Was he delirious, and had he said anything? I tried to listen and to answer his questions, but as he talked I scanned the room. When I next looked back at Franz he was waiting for a reply to some query I had missed entirely.

“Gustav’s run off,” I said.

“He probably needs to be alone,” Franz said. He touched my hand. “It’s the best thing for him, really. But you, you look as if you need something hot to drink. Even your bones are cold.”

“I’m fine,” I said, brushing him off. “It’s Gustav I’m worried about.”

“That eulogy was a little…unhinged. But he’ll be all right.”

I allowed Franz to fetch a cup of hot cider for me, but as I drank it I thought of Gustav. I knew where he was, of course. Was it true; was it better for him to be alone? My instinct told me it was not, but I wasn’t sure I was the person who should go to him. But who else was there? I got my coat and slipped out the door. There were carriages waiting outside and I commandeered one of them. It was a lengthy drive. I shivered into the cheap silk lining of the carriage, wishing I had remembered my gloves.

The studio gate was open and the cats were huddled together on the steps. I picked them both up and carried them under my arms like loaves of bread.

It was gloomy and dark in the entrance hall. The shades were shut and none of the lamps were lit. I released the cats and they scuttled away. In the studio there was no fire and it was nearly as cold inside as out. Gustav was hunched over a stool, staring at the easel. He had thrown off his suit and put on his painting smock. Socks and spats and collar littered the floor as if a passionate affair were in progress, but he was alone. If I hadn’t seen him in the smock every day for years I would have thought he had escaped from a sanitarium. The gown was made of rough cotton and couldn’t possibly keep him warm. He’d even taken off his shoes. The painting was a portrait of Helene in a white dress on a couch of Mediterranean blue.

“Such a good painting to go unfinished,” said Gustav, not looking up. I went no closer.

“You could finish it,” I said.

“That would be like making love to someone else’s mistress,” he said. I saw that he was holding an artist’s knife in his hand. “Like making love to the mistress on the day of the funeral.”

“Why don’t you put your clothes back on and come back to the house?” I said slowly and carefully, as if talking to a child.

“Shut up,” he said. “I’m listening to the painting.”

“Do you want me to go?” I asked.

“I don’t care,” he said, not taking his eyes from the canvas. I took that as a positive sign. I walked over and stood behind him to look at Ernst’s painting. Helene looked very soft and serene. She stared straight out of the canvas. She was stretched out on the sofa à la Madame Recamier, but everything was slightly blurred, as if in candlelight. Behind her was a black-and-gray Chinese screen.

“I didn’t know he liked Whistler,” I said.

“He hated Whistler,” Gustav said. “It was for your bitch of a mother. Look how disgustingly hopeful the damn thing is despite that.”

“He didn’t know he was going to die,” I said.

“We’re all going to die,” he said. “What right do any of us have to be hopeful? What right did he have to paint this?”

“He had to paint something,” I said.

“No he didn’t,” he said. “He could have gone to work in a bank and lived a long and healthy life.”

“He could just have easily died young working in a bank,” I said. “It wasn’t art that killed him.”

“It was me,” he said. “He only went to the Academy because I did.”

“He stayed because he wanted to. And how did the Academy give him scarlet fever?”

“Long hours standing in those unheated rooms. He didn’t have the constitution for it.”

“Your mother’s been asking for you,” I said. “I didn’t know what to tell her.” I was eager to shift the conversation in a more reasonable direction, but I wondered why. Why should he censor his thoughts to make me comfortable? And what was so terrifying about his grief that I wanted him to suppress it?

“I wish she had died, the whore,” he said. “He got his weak constitution from her. From her and from living in rat-infested hovels as a child. And never having enough to eat.” He put his face in his hands.

Quietly and gently I stretched out my arms to touch his shoulders. I put my hands on them lightly, as if he were a precious piece of sculpture. I tried to breathe my sympathy and my love into the touch, but I must not have done a very good job, because he threw off my hands, drew his arm back and in one angry and assured movement he sliced the canvas from one wooden stretcher to the other, diagonally, left to right.

It was as if the air went out of the room. I gasped for breath. If Gustav would destroy a piece of art, any piece of art, much less Ernst’s, then he would do anything. He would kill himself, or me, or anyone. I felt sick at the thought. Sick, and weak, too weak to fight him, but I had to.

I grabbed his arm and pried the knife from his hands. If he had resisted I would never have succeeded, and we would have both been sliced open like melons, but he didn’t fight me. When I had it I threw it as far as I could. It landed near the fireplace.

Helene’s face was ripped apart. I almost expected to see blood coming from it. The unpainted portion of the canvas waved loosely and forlornly, but the other side curled stiffly, defiantly upward. We stood and looked at the mutilated painting.

“We can probably repair it,” I said after a while.

“Get it out of here,” he said. “I can’t look at it anymore.” As I took it off of the easel I glanced quickly at his face, painfully contorted but dry of tears. I propped the ruined canvas against the wall, facing inward, like a child being punished.

I went back to Gustav.

“Burn it,” he said. “Some day when I’m not around.”

He had nothing to look at now except for me, and I had nothing to look at except for him. I was afraid to get too close to him, for many reasons. I was acutely aware that he was naked underneath his smock.

“At least put your shoes on,” I said.

He lunged for me and grabbed me around the waist. Instinctively I pulled away. Then he fell to his knees and sobbed into my dress. I was no longer frightened. It was like soothing the baby, or my sister; it required the same caresses, the same gentle sounds.

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s all right.” He had some freckles on the crown where the hair was thinning. I stroked the back of his neck.

“Why didn’t I get scarlet fever?” he said. His voice was hoarse and thick. “Why couldn’t I have died?”

What could I say? Should I take the tone of a minister and tell him that God’s mercy is great but inscrutable? Or that of an intellectual and tell him that God is dead?

“I don’t know,” I said, “but thank heaven you didn’t. I would have had to go after you.” I couldn’t say this as fervently as I felt it, so I spoke lightly, as if making a joke.

His eyes were those of an icon, wide and opaque. There was no spark of mischief or vigor or curiosity.