The Painted Kiss (19 page)

Just then there was a determined rapping at the front door. Gustav frowned with annoyance.

“Ignore it,” he said. “Farmer Naumann has lost his dog again, the third time this week. On Tuesday I lost two hours and sprained my ankle looking for it.” The knocking continued for some minutes, then stopped.

“The red pointer?” I asked. “It’s just a puppy.”

“Maybe it was hit by a cart.”

“Gustav, how can you say that?” I knew he wasn’t serious.

“I’ll send Tristan out after him next time. That cat could make mincemeat of any dog.”

Then we heard the sound of someone forcing the door.

“What the hell?” said Gustav. I dropped my pose and turned toward the hallway to wait for whoever it was to appear: the police, the farmer with the missing dog, a model, a burglar. But it was not any of these. It was Alma.

“I suppose you thought I would just go away if you cowered in here,” she said. I had never seen her hair loose and she looked much younger that way, a child. She waved her cloak, with its scarlet silk lining, like a matador. “I suppose you thought you could stop answering my letters and I would just disappear.” She turned to the platform where I was still standing, ludicrously, as if I could make myself invisible. “And I suppose this is somehow your doing,” she said, “though I can’t imagine what you could have done or said that would make him come back to you.”

“Alma,” Gustav said in what he must have supposed was a soothing tone, “leave Emilie alone.” He said that they should go out and have a talk in the garden, that she should take a few deep breaths.

“You think I can breathe in this dress? I wore it especially for you.”

“Alma,” said Gustav, then stopped.

She was working herself up to a dramatic act of violence, but I couldn’t tell whether she was going to fling herself at Gustav or rip his favorite dress to shreds in front of his eyes. Finally she removed her glove and swept the contents of Gustav’s worktable to the floor. The three of us listened to the glass smash and the metal containers roll with a sound like spinning tops until at last they came to rest and it was silent again.

“Emilie, make Alma some tea,” Gustav said. He had decided that something stronger than appeasement was required. He took Alma by the shoulders and pushed her to the platform. She collapsed onto it.

I was glad to leave them. I was afraid she might throw something at me. There was already hot water on the stove. I rinsed one of Josef’s new cups and poured Alma’s tea into it. Some of the glaze appeared to be dissolving into the liquid, turning it rusty red. When I returned to the studio with it Gustav was kneeling beside her, stroking her hand. I held out the cup and she took it without looking at me.

“You play with people’s feelings, you know,” she said to Gustav. “You seem to think you live in a painting, or an opera, where there are no consequences. Have you ever thought of another person other than yourself?”

It dawned on me that she was enjoying herself. I am swooning on my lover’s settee, she was thinking to herself. Our love is tempestuous and passionate. He will see the tears glittering like diamonds in the corners of my eyes and will not be able to resist me. I knew she was going to write it all down when she got home. Her breath rose and fell quickly. His favorite dress was moss-colored and showed plenty of décolleté, of course.

I was not sure what Gustav would do. It was an affecting performance. Would he send me away? I didn’t think I could bear to be exiled, not in front of Alma. I got the broom and dustpan and began sweeping up the shards of glass. I tried to make it look as if I wasn’t listening.

“Mahler wants to marry me, you know,” she said.

“Of course he does,” he said. “Who wouldn’t?”

“You don’t.”

“I’m a fool,” he said. “I’m a second-rate, broken-down paint dauber. I’m old and ugly. I don’t deserve you.”

“I don’t care.”

“But I do. I’m thinking of you, Alma. How long would you be happy with someone like me? You wouldn’t be able to be the queen of society married to me. I stay at home and work. I don’t go out, I don’t really fit in society. You’d be embarrassed by me. You’d be unhappy and have affairs, like Adele Bloch-Bauer.”

“You’re not thinking of me, you’re thinking that Carl will have you shot.”

“You really think Moll would shoot me? I’m not afraid of him.”

“I love you,” she said.

“You’re twenty-three,” he said. “You have many loves ahead of you. You’ll look back one day and laugh that you ever thought of me.”

“You’re in love with her,” she said accusingly. He looked up at me, still sweeping aimlessly, and lowered his voice. I couldn’t hear what he said to her, so I watched her face. It did not turn pale and shocked, or satisfied and mocking. She drooped a little, but smiled at the same time.

After that he got her back into her cape and led her to her carriage. I watched him get into it with her and ride away. Since there was nothing else to do, I locked up the studio and went home. I didn’t cry, that would have been weak. I would’ve had to admit to myself how relieved I had been not to see or hear about Alma, how horrified I’d been to have her reappear, how crushed I had been to see Gustav leave with her without a backward glance. Brutally repressed tears are the most painful kind: boiling hot and choking, as if someone had covered your head with a pillowcase. Afterward, a vile headache and a contorted crimson face. Better to let them out, I learned many years later. They’re cooling, they effect a calm. Afterward, you can think.

I came to the studio the next day to sit and to see what he would say, but I could not ask what had happened with Alma. I could not ask him what he had said about me. He seemed unusually cheerful, even singing as he prepared for the day’s work in a hoarse, off-key tenor. He looked as if he would burst out laughing at any moment.

“Is something funny?” I couldn’t resist saying.

“Everything,” he said. “Everything is funny.” I couldn’t tell whether that boded well for me, or ill.

In a few weeks he was ready to begin painting. Our routine changed, became more serious. Gustav did not like to waste time and had no patience with mistakes.

He had often described his daily ritual to me: he arrived early and pulled up all the shades, lit a fire, and put water in the kettle. Then he roamed the studio, picking things up, putting them down. He didn’t look at whatever he was working on, not yet. Sometimes he looked at the background that was set up on the model’s platform, or he examined a sitter’s clothing as it hung on hooks in the hallway.

He took time preparing his materials. No one else was as reverent. People who didn’t know him imagined a careless, messy studio, but they were wrong. Now that he worked alone everything was clean and precise. His linseed oil was so pure you could cook with it. He liked to rub it into his hands, which were often chapped. He cleaned his brushes with flannel rags and soft soap. He sorted his rags. The stiff ones were sent to the laundry. He liked to breathe in the smell of the turpentine, and joked that it had made him crazy.

By the time I arrived the studio was warm. The oil that had been as thick as corn syrup when Gustav arrived in the chill room now had the consistency of vinegar. It was time to mix the paints. He poured the pigments onto the palette, umber and sienna and ocher and amaranth. They smelled like chalk and dirt and limestone dust. With a palette knife he layered oil into the powders. The wax paper became gray and saturated.

Gustav turned his palette knife in a puddle of oil and pigment. He touched everything on his table in a sort of talismanic ritual. He cleaned every brush on the hem of his smock. He stirred the mud-brown turpentine, half-filled with sediment, like the Danube in the spring. He dumped his knives and sponges out of the bags in which he kept them. Finally, for at least ten minutes he stood before the painting and studied it to discern the plan for the day.

While I waited for him to look at me I did jumping jacks and toe touches and jogged in place. It was the only way I could tire myself out enough to stand still for so long and keep from twitching. Gustav liked the color it brought to my skin. When I knew he was ready I got into position, knowing he would come over and adjust it. He liked to ask me to do impossible things, like put my foot behind my ear. I would ask him to show me, and he would spend several minutes in painful contortions before he said “Enough!”

I tried to relax my face into a pleasant expression, and arrange my body exactly as it had been the last time. If I slipped by the tiniest fraction he would notice, and reprove me. I couldn’t see the painting while I modeled, and Gustav covered it with a sheet during breaks.

Not being able to see the portrait he was making of me drove me crazy. I could not ask him about Alma but I thought the painting might tell me something he would not. I tried asking him in a general way how the work was going, but he was on to me; he refused to tell me a thing. He just shook a brush at me and said, “No questions until it’s finished!” While I was at the studio he never left me alone; he knew temptation might get the better of me, that I might run over and lift the sheet if he went to the kitchen or signed for a telegram.

I had to do something. I could’ve come to the studio at night, or when I thought Gustav would be gone, but he kept such odd hours that I was afraid I would be caught. So I went to my sister.

After Ernst’s death Helene brought her daughter back to live with us. They shared a room that was meant for a maid’s room, but she didn’t seem to mind. She took over most of the housekeeping and never complained at the sad turn her life had taken. She was still the most beautiful widow in Vienna. That day she wore a pink silk scarf tied around her head and tiny tourmaline earrings. She looked like a girl in a Dutch painting. Helene, now nine years old, lay on the rug reading an illustrated Hans Christian Andersen while I told my sister what I needed her to do.

“Just pull the sheet off and look at it,” she said. “Why all the cloak and dagger?”

“He won’t let me see it until it’s finished.”

“He won’t let me. You act like you’re about eight years old. Actually, I take that back. At eight you would’ve yanked that sheet off right in front of him.”

“Will you go tonight?” I gave her my studio key. “Gustav and I are going to the Opera, but he’ll probably go back to the studio afterward.”

“And what is it that I’m supposed to look for? Some psychological insight? Something about his feelings?” It sounded stupid when she said it out loud.

“Something like that.”

I don’t remember what we saw that night, I was too anxious. I thought that he could see through me and know what I was up to, but he must have decided it was what had happened with Alma and the fear of seeing her in public that made me so nervous. His way of making it up to me was to bound around me like a puppy, beseeching me with his innocent eyes and charming me with his boyish high spirits.

I kept him out late afterward, pretending to be hungry. Then I went home.

When I saw Helene the next afternoon she did not bring up the painting right away. She had been put in charge of finding a location for the salon and had visited several buildings in Mariahilf, where we lived. She wanted to tell me about square footage and the terms of the various leases and the pros and cons of each of the spaces, but it was the last thing on my mind at that moment.

“Well?” I said when I couldn’t wait any longer. She knew what I meant.

“It’s nearly finished,” she said. “Another week or two, I imagine.”

“What does it look like?”

“It’s good,” she said unhelpfully. She wasn’t looking at me and trying to cover it up by pretending to help Helene with the little piece of embroidery she was working on. Maybe she thought the tableau was so pretty I’d get distracted.

“You mean a good likeness?” Her vagueness irritated me.

“Some people might think so.”

“But not you?”

“In the painting you’re…” she tried to think of the right word, “slinky. Or snaky. You’re like one of the water sprites. Which would be fine except that it is you, it’s uncannily like you, and yet it’s not.”

“What about it is like me?”

“It’s hard to describe. You really have to see it.” I wanted to scream at her in frustration.

“Helene, you have to tell me something more.”

“It’s blue and purple and gold and silver.”