The Painted Kiss (17 page)

“I’ll invite you to the wedding, of course. Maybe you could even make the dress. Gustav says you’re training to be a designer.”

I had to get out of there. I snapped the pomade tin shut.

“You really ought to get married,” she said. “I could find someone for you. I know lots of people.”

“I don’t need your help,” I said, standing up and taking a final glance in the mirror. I tried not to look at the condescending little smile on Alma’s rouged lips.

I went back out to the exhibition. The temperature in the hall had dropped several degrees. The rooms were now filled to the point of immobility. Scanning the crowd, I saw my sister and began weaving my way toward her.

The next day I took all of the papers so I could read the reviews. The
Times
said the exhibition was an intellectually muddled collection of the ugly, the degenerate, and the merely stupid. The
Neue Freie Presse
said it was a welcome display of contemporary artistic talent and wished the Secession much success.

The gallery was packed with people for the two months the exhibition ran. Even the emperor arranged to have a private viewing. The art sold well. Adele bought a Puvis de Chavannes. Alma’s mother bought two Meuniers.

T
hen my father died, suddenly, of a heart attack. He was at the factory, as usual, examining some equipment, when he collapsed. There was nothing to be done for him; he was dead before the doctor arrived. Though his hair and beard had been white for years, I did not think of him as old; in fact he was fifty-nine. I had depended on his experience and his business sense to guide me through the opening of the salon. I had imagined a grand opening party at which he served as master of ceremonies. His ruddy face would beam with pride as he toasted his talented daughter. Now that could never be.

We planned to go to Attersee as usual that summer, but it would not be the same. Who would show me the hawks hidden in the trees around our house? Who would take us to church in the village and tend the vegetable garden and fall asleep in a chaise on the terrace as soon as luncheon was over?

We invited Gustav to come. He had been asked for years, but something had always kept him away: traveling, too much work, some woman or other. Each time he complained that Vienna was warm and uncomfortable and boring. Everyone else was away. Each time he wrote to me and begged me to come home. This year, though, I made it clear that I could not do without him. Knowing how fragile I was, how heartsick, he disentangled himself from his obligations and we spent two months together.

Not together, of course. My mother was there, and my sisters, and my niece. Gustav had a bedroom down the hall from mine, but he hardly ever used it; he preferred the camp bed he had set up in the greenhouse, which he used as a studio. He said he was up so early that it would disturb us to hear him clomping around, especially since he was prone to losing his shoes and turned everything upside down when he was looking for them.

In the morning he took bracing swims while everyone else slept, and joined the rest of us for breakfast on the terrace just as the sun cleared the mountain peaks. Most days he and I would row out on the lake; or rather, Gustav rowed, an oar in each hand, furiously, to work his muscles, while I sat back and enjoyed the breeze. When we reached the middle and had anchored, Gustav would plunge into the water, thrashing in the icy cold, and strike out for the pier on the opposite shore. On the return trip he would roll onto his back and spit water into the air like a whale. Climbing back into the boat, where I lay soaking up the sun, he would push me in and make an elaborate play of rescuing me, though I was the stronger swimmer. I wore a hat to protect my skin, and to prevent a headache from reading in the hot sun, but he grew tan and weathered from the sun, wind, and water.

Often he took his easel out in the boat and did paintings of the mountains and the town of Unterach, houses piled on top of one another like children’s blocks, or a clump of birches on the shore. My job was to steady the boat and row just enough to keep us from drifting with the current. Or we would hike into the hills and he would paint the fields and the alpine wildflowers en plein air.

When we were completely worn out we would go back to the house and eat sandwiches and lie in the sun. Gustav took his work back to the greenhouse studio and refined it. He had sworn to forget his portrait commissions and the University Hall paintings for the summer.

The greenhouse looked much different then, with all of the glass side panels open on a sunny day, the floor neatly swept, and everything in its proper place. There was an old chaise I called my own, and while Gustav worked in the afternoons I liked to study French fashion magazines and Arts and Crafts journals and make sketches.

One day, when I was deep into drawing a print of Japanese umbrellas, which I hoped could be produced, Gustav asked me to look at the new sketches for
Medicine,
the first of the University Hall paintings. His resolve to forget them had lasted all of a week.

He seldom asked me what I thought at this stage, but earlier in the year the committee had criticized his sketches and asked for changes. He had considered resigning, but in the end Franz talked him out of it and they signed the contract just before he came to Attersee. Now he had to figure out how to incorporate the changes in a way he could stomach.

I knew that there were general objections to the supposed indecency of the sketches. I knew they thought the girl that represented suffering mankind was obscene, and wanted a youth in her place, but having never seen the sketches I wasn’t sure what that meant. I just assumed that the committee members were a bunch of repressed idiots who knew nothing about art. I wasn’t prepared for what Gustav showed me.

Ten or twelve large sheets of paper were tacked together to the wall to form one enormous mural. It had to be large, of course, because it was to be mounted on the ceiling of the Great Hall, and no one would be able to see it if it wasn’t. Its size was breathtaking, but that was the least of it.

I don’t know how I had imagined Medicine should be portrayed: Hippocrates under an olive tree, teaching a group of eager, chiton-clad youths, or men in modern dress bending over the beds of the ill in some spotless infirmary.

In Gustav’s allegory of medicine, Hygeia, the goddess of health, was in the foreground, looking like an avenging angel, dark, mysterious. I could not help thinking that she was an Adele Bloch-Bauer type. Had he been thinking of her? Hygeia was hardly compassionate-looking, holding her snake and her cup. You could not be sure whether she was coming to heal you, or kill you.

Alone on the left side was a nude woman, arms outstretched, who floated in space, held aloft by a watery substance, like amniotic fluid. Here was the obscene girl. Her pelvis was tilted forward in a suggestive way. All of the figures seemed to be suspended in the same viscous liquid. They were clumped on the left side of the painting like a pile of corpses. Some were in fact skeletons, shrouded in the long hair of others. Pregnant women, old men; all of humanity was included, suffering, tormented, dying.

It was a nightmarish painting.

“It seems…very personal,” I said. I hated myself for sounding like a tactful, disapproving patron.

“Not at all,” he said, already defensive. “It’s a philosophical work. Why would you think it was personal?”

He rarely said Ernst’s name. He paid Helene a generous sum every month and was a conscientious godfather to his niece. But he never talked about him. The day after the funeral he cleared out Ernst’s studio and hauled everything to the dump. The only thing he kept was a ratty wool pullover that Ernst wore when the studio was cold. Gustav didn’t wear it; he hung it on a chair. When he moved his studio the sweater came with him. It looked like Ernst had gone for a walk and would be right back.

“When I look at it I can’t help thinking about Papa. All the doctor could do for him was close his eyes. And Ernst, the insanity of a twenty-eight-year-old dying of pneumonia, with all the best doctors in Vienna listening to his heart, and telling us to rub his chest with camphor, and none of it doing any good, and watching him slowly choke to death.”

“That might be what you think about, I can’t control your thoughts. I’m sorry about your father, but he was the last thing on my mind.”

“And Ernst?” I said.

“I don’t think about him,” Gustav said. “What good would it do?”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“I can’t listen to this,” he said. “What are you trying to do to me?” He seemed to be in physical pain.

“In eight years have you ever talked about him?” I said.

“I am talking about him,” he said, gesturing toward the painting. “Didn’t you just say so? Do I have to cry, and tear my hair, and put on sackcloth and ashes? Would that satisfy you? If I acted like the wife of some Bedouin herdsman?”

I tried to interrupt him but he went on furiously. “This isn’t about Ernst, it’s about what happened after his funeral. You want me to talk about that, don’t you? You probably want me to tell you that I love you, that I’ve been in a fog of grief, but now I’m ready to come out and marry you. Is that want you want?”

It was cruel and unfair, and all I could do was stand before him with tears slipping down my face. I had never mentioned it, never thrown it in his face. I had silently endured months of torture about Alma, waiting for him to tell me they were engaged. And now, this.

I left the studio without answering him and walked to a poppy field about a mile from where we lived. I lay down in the red and orange flowers that rustled like paper when the wind blew. It was hot in the sun.

Gustav and I rarely fought, so neither of us knew how to make up. When I came back to the studio he was standing in front of the painting. He looked at me penitently.

“Something isn’t right about Hygeia’s crown,” I said. “And she’s too fuzzy. She looks too much like your dying shades.”

He nodded.

I pointed to a figure on the far right. “She unbalances the whole thing. I think she’d be better an inch toward the center.”

“You’re right,” he said. He went on drawing.

Everyone else was playing charades that evening, but neither of us felt like it. We decided to sit out in the garden and listen to the crickets.

We walked down the brick path, away from the greenhouse, toward the other side of the garden. The stone bench at the very edge of our property was the destination. We wouldn’t be able to hear any laughter from the house, or see the lights in the parlor. When it was dark enough we wouldn’t be able to see the house at all.

Our garden was in the English style, weedy and disordered. Climbing roses and lilacs and wisteria grew over a row of trellises. The stone bench was cold underneath my hand. The roses were about ready to bloom; I counted a dozen hard green buds on each bush.

He took my arm and, pushing the sleeve up to my shoulder, drew on my skin with a charcoal pencil he pulled from his pocket.

I drew back, confused.

“I’ve had an idea,” he said, “and I don’t seem to have any paper handy.”

“So I am to be your canvas?” I said.

“Why not?” he said. “You’re washable.”

It was a new headdress for Hygeia. What had been a crown of leaves in a corona around her head was replaced by a pattern of circles and crosshatchings, more like a snood than a crown. That was what he was drawing onto me.

I shuddered with a sudden chill as he varied the pressure from the gentlest tickle to a bruising press into the flesh for a darker, more adamant design. The light was almost gone, grainy, like in a photograph, and I wondered that he could see to draw.

“Haven’t you drawn enough today?” I asked. The charcoal crumbled in his hands and he pressed his hands to my face and covered it with shadows.

“You look like a little girl I used to give drawing lessons to,” he said.

“Or a widow,” I said and winced at my mistake.

“Do you remember when we first met?” he said. “I hated you that day. With your expensive blouse and your soft little hands and your self-satisfied smirk. I hated your father and his expensive tobacco and your mother and her tacky French combs. I wanted to gnaw you all to pieces and spit your carcasses into the gutter.”

“What stopped you?” I said.

“I didn’t only hate you,” he said. “I wanted you, too. I wanted to possess you and I wanted to be you in all your robust health and full stomach and comfortable innocence. I wanted to corrupt you and I wanted to protect you.”

“You’ve done neither,” I said. To myself I added, So he has always wanted me.

“You see,” he said, “I always fail at everything.”

I pressed my lips to his shoulder.

“At the studio…” he said. I waited. “It wasn’t just Ernst, you know.”

“It’s all right,” I said.

“You know,” he said and paused. We were getting very close to something, and I felt as weightless as the woman in the drawing of Medicine. Any moment now I would float away, or dissolve into the bench like a dead thing into the earth.

“What is it?” I said.

“I want to paint a portrait of you,” he said.

“Aren’t you sick of portraits?” I asked.

“I’ve never done one of you,” he said. “What a disgrace! You should design a dress and I’ll paint you in it.”

I took the pencil. “Hold out your hand.” I held his hand in my lap and wrote on his palm, as a teacher might do for a blind person. I wrote my name into his skin. Then I smeared it until it was illegible.

“What did it say?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Turn your hand over.” The skin on the other side was drier and took the pencil more easily. I began to draw a school of fish that swam upward toward his elbow. He shook with silent laughter as the pencil tickled, then took it back and began to trace the bones in my hand.

“You have a hand like the wing of a bird,” he said. “Your bones must be hollow.”

The moment hovered there, wrapped in gauze, and his beard was soft against my face, nuzzling my cheek. I love you, I thought, but did not say.

“Dear Emilie,” he said, and kissed me. It felt like diving into the sea from a granite promontory: I closed my eyes, put aside my fears, and leaped. For a moment there was no sight, only taste and touch and smell.

He stopped.

“What is it?” I said.

He stood up. “I’m tired,” he said. “Today has kicked the stuffing out of me.” He began walking toward the greenhouse. I followed.