The Painted Kiss (2 page)

It is a very cold afternoon in the studio, but the transoms must be cranked open to keep the turpentine and other chemicals from poisoning the air. Gerta, with bones as light as straw and pale flesh like paraffin, stands with her wrists crossed in front of her breasts, waiting for instructions.

Gustav doesn’t see her nakedness. She hardly registers as a woman to him. He sees a taxing problem of light and dark, of geometry, of volume.

“Could you cup your breast? The left, not the right. Good. Now could you lie down on the pallet? Open your legs. Turn that knee inward. All right.”

Gerta does these things without comment, with the patient boredom of women who make money from their bodies. He draws her over and over, knuckles and knees, elbows and stomach. She does two-minute poses and thirty-minute poses. Gustav turns the pages on his drawing pad again and again.

It is early afternoon but it is already twilight and he works feverishly to beat the encroaching darkness. When he can work no more he tells her enough. Her flesh is goose-pimpled and sickly pale, he notices. The flesh under her toenails is purple. She has become a woman again, more than a visual exercise and also somehow less. He climbs the ladder and closes the transoms. She pulls on her chemise, her stockings. She buttons her dress and ties her boots. It all seems like such a wasted effort to him.

Would you like to stay? he asks. She nods.

There is a bed in the corner and he leads her over to it. While he undresses she waits, her head propped on one narrow hand. He sits on the bed next to her and unbuttons and unfastens and unties until she is naked again. Then he draws his palm across her skin as if his hand were a brush.

O
n my twelfth birthday I went with my father and my two sisters, Pauline and Helene, to watch an imperial procession.

For the Viennese, an imperial procession was the most important event in the calendar. It was more important than Easter and Christmas put together, and the Viennese were in general very devout. It was as if God himself had chosen to come to Vienna and ride around town on the back of a horse. For me, as a child, to be able to witness such a spectacle was the most wonderful thing I could imagine.

We stepped into the street from our apartment building to the clangor of the noon bells at St. Ann’s, on the corner. Faintly, like an echo, we could hear the bells at St. Stephen’s, a mile away. They were pounding out the same Bach melody. We all turned to look up to the third-floor window where Mother was standing. She would not come with us, no matter how much we begged. She had no use for pageantry, she said.

Our building was so new it still smelled of cedar and whitewash. It was yellow stucco with stone Sirens gaping grotesquely from the cornices. It sat between the older, smaller buildings on either side like an oversize cat playing with two feeble gray mice.

We had moved there the year before, from a shabbier place a few blocks away. The ceilings were so tall that Papa could not touch them while standing on a stepladder. Plaster cupids on the moldings draped skeins of grapes. There was a tile stove in every room.

We waved good-bye to our mother and she waved back, but I knew she wasn’t seeing us. She wasn’t even hearing the bells. She was staring across the roofs of buildings toward the river and humming an aria she was composing to see if it worked. The acoustics in our new apartment were stunning and her full-size concert grand piano was the one thing we owned that looked like it fit.

Across the street the tobacconist was pulling his shutters closed, leaving early so that he could join in the festivities. My father ran over to buy a packet of tobacco. He bought a Turkish kind that came in translucent red-striped paper. He would smoke it at home, later, after we went to bed.

“Need anything, Georg?” Father asked as he examined the man’s selection of pipes.

“It’s a holiday, Mr. Flöge,” answered Georg with a grin. “Why don’t you worry about it tomorrow? Enjoy the day.”

He gave each of us a plug of toffee and said he would see us later. Father was still writing things down in a little notebook. He told the tobacconist he’d send someone over in the morning.

My father owned a factory that made meerschaum pipes. He employed sixteen men in a small warehouse on the river. Since I was old enough to walk it had been a special treat to visit him there, and to watch the artisans at work. Many times I had watched a man pull a block of meerschaum from a tub of water. The quarried stone was soft and white as cheese. The man would carve into it with his knife, always knowing in advance exactly where to cut. He could dig from the mineral a horse, or a bull, or a plump-faced man, just like a sculptor. The men had different specialties: kings, caricatures of politicians, animals.

After the bowls of the pipes were carved they were fitted to their stems and fired in a kiln. Then they were polished and waxed. The apprentices did these things. When the pipes were finished they were light and smooth as eggshells, but stronger than porcelain. Flöge Meerschaum was embossed on each one in tiny gold letters. They were very popular and Father said that the emperor himself had one.

He never tired of telling us how lucky we were. His father had been a poor blacksmith and had died of tuberculosis before we were born, while we lived in a six-room apartment in Vienna, the most beautiful, cosmopolitan city in the world.

The medieval cobbled streets and marzipan-colored buildings were magical, and the dimly-lit shops selling sheet music or crystal goblets were enchanted, but I didn’t know it yet. It was just the place I lived. I believed that all other cities, all other towns, must be similar.

But that day was different. We joined the crowds streaming like rainwater from the narrow alleys to the wide avenues and finally to the Ring, the road that had been built just decades before to replace the old medieval fortifications. It encircled the old town like a necklace, passing the emperor’s palace and the government buildings and the new art museum. All kinds of people were on their way to watch the procession. The factories were closed. It was a school holiday. Even the university students were excused from classes.

Carts and carriages that were stopped by the throngs clogged the streets and the drivers cracked their whips against their wheels and shouted for people to move, but no one seemed really angry. Children were running into the streets with apples for the lathered horses.

The day was bright and hot. As we got closer to the Ring the shady streets where moss grew on the roofs gave way to wider, treeless avenues where the monumental stone buildings offered little shade. I felt the pavement through the soles of my boots. Pauline remarked that we should have brought parasols. All of the ladies had them. They threatened to decapitate those near them with every step.

“Little girls don’t carry parasols,” snapped our father. “What’s next? Low-cut evening dresses and beaux?” He gripped me tightly by one hand and my sister Helene by the other, as if someone might snatch us if he relaxed his grip for even a moment. If he could’ve carried Pauline on his back I’m sure he would have, but as it was she was ordered to hold on to my other hand. It made navigating through the crowds a complicated waltz.

Pauline looked as if she was going to remind him that Mother had been seventeen when she married, not much older than she was now, but she knew it was futile and so she bit her lip hard instead. I saw the drop of carnelian blood in the center of her lower lip. Father was overwhelmed with anxiety at the thought of steering three girls safely toward marriage, and his solution seemed to be to deny that we had grown up at all. Even Pauline had to wear the high lace collar of a little girl, though she had just turned seventeen. The challenge was not to scratch at it or squirm uncomfortably. Mother said it was good practice. She said that lace collars were nothing to corsets.

Across from the opera house we passed a silk tent. Shadows moved behind it. We could only guess at who was there and what was happening. Nobility were gathering there, sitting on velvet cushions and eating oysters. Their footmen filled their crystal glasses with cider. People milled nearby and waited to see who would alight from the carriages that kept arriving. We watched a thin man with a monocle and a variegated sash escort a plump woman in a turban into the tent.

In the crowd, boys sold commemorative newspapers and confetti, old men sold sausages with sweet mustard, old women sold roses. My father bought four blood-red ones from a woman in a gold bonnet for us to toss when the emperor passed. Some people around us held bouquets wrapped in paper. The street smelled of frying meat and horse manure.

It became increasingly crowded, and the throngs moved more and more slowly. I wished I were still young enough for my father to lift me on his shoulders. I was small for my age and there were people crowding me in front and on either side. I couldn’t see the avenue where the procession would soon be.

“Don’t worry,” said Pauline. “When we get to the steps we’ll be up high. Then we’ll be able to see.”

Next to me, Helene was worrying her neck through her lace collar and I could see red scratches like streaks of paint on her skin. I poked her; if Father saw we’d all be in trouble. Pauline showed us smugly how she didn’t move her neck at all, turning her whole body when she wanted to look at something.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Father, catching sight of her. “You look like a chicken.”

Pauline didn’t answer. “Why do you look so comfortable?” she said irritably to me. “You haven’t squirmed all morning.”

When Pauline had turned away I showed Helene my secret. Underneath my collar I had pinned a pilfered linen dinner napkin. It was practically invisible, and I could turn my head in comfort.

We looked almost like twins with our curly red hair, but Helene was nearly three years older than I. Sometimes she thought of things first, and sometimes I did, but we always shared our discoveries. We formed a strategic alliance against our proper older sister, our rule-bound father, and our mercurial mother. In sartorial matters, Pauline was our most dangerous adversary. It wasn’t just the lace collars. It was the enormous hair ribbons ruthlessly attached to our scalps with pins. It was the vigorous scrubbing of our chapped hands with freezing-cold water. It was the precise calculation of how long each of our steps should be, and the angle at which we should hold the prayer book in church. She watched us all of the time, and when she couldn’t, Father did. Our mother could leap to our defense or come down on us hardest of all, and we never knew which it would be. But Helene I could always depend on.

“How did you get it?” she whispered to me.

I told her about the elastic band I’d placed around my thigh so that I could hide the napkin under my skirt.

“You’re crazy,” she said admiringly. “What if you’d been caught?”

She couldn’t figure out when I could have found the opportunity to hide my napkin at one of our formal, silent, and endless dinners. I sat with Father on one side and Pauline on the other. My hands, since they held the glass and the knife, fork and spoon, were always being watched. I might spill something, or hold my knife in a barbaric way, or take bites that were too big, and these errors must be quickly and harshly corrected. I suspected that since there was little conversation, it gave Father and Pauline a way to pass the time.

I reminded her that Mother had had a coughing fit at dinner the Thursday before last, and said that I had taken the opportunity when Father was pounding her on the back and Pauline was up getting water for her to drop my fork.

“What are you two giggling about?” Father asked, not very kindly.

We said nothing, trying not to look at one another. Sometimes that alone could set us off again. I felt that my face was pink and hot, and my lungs were full of unexploded laughter. Beside me I felt Helene shaking.

“Well, compose yourselves,” Father said, and when he spoke in that tone all of the merriment inside of us died.

A balding man in spectacles passing us checked the fob on his coat and announced to no one in particular, “They should be here in twenty-six minutes.”

We passed a woman selling ices from a painted cart.

“Would you girls like an ice?” Father asked. We were stunned. Normally we were not allowed to eat sweets, and certainly not from a street vendor.

Pauline looked doubtful. “Really, Papa? Are you sure it’s all right?” Helene and I held our breath and squeezed the other’s hand tightly.

“It’s Emilie’s birthday, after all,” he said. When he smiled, which wasn’t often, his ruddy face was briefly handsome. He gave the money to Pauline. “Don’t be shy. Go right up to her.”

The woman called out to the crowd: “Hurry! Get an ice before they melt! It’s getting warmer by the minute!”

We stood in line in back of a woman carrying a green parrot in a wire cage and watched the ice woman shaving ice for the customers ahead of us. Her arms were very tanned and she wore a red apron embroidered with fruit: lemons and pears and pineapples.

Off to the side, a little girl in a white dress and expensive boots was screaming. Though she looked to be about ten, I noted with envy that her parasol was made of pink lace and that the embroidery on her dress was like nothing I’d ever seen. I think it was her clothes that made me watch her so carefully. That, and the scene she was making. I’d never seen a little girl throw a fit in public. No one I knew would have dared.

“Adele,” a man said, “you know we don’t eat things sold on the street.” He was her father; he was large and lumpy and had a dark mustache. This only made her scream louder. Helene and I exchanged looks.

Her father was embarrassed. Next to him, her stylishly dressed mother tapped her foot.

“Shame on you!” her father said. “People will think you don’t love the emperor.”

“I hate the emperor,” the little girl said. “I hate the emperor.” She said it a little louder this time. The people next to them pretended not to listen.

“I hate the emperor,” she shouted. Her mother took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes for a long time. Then the mother shrugged. “Buy the girl an ice.”

Her father wouldn’t let her go to the cart with him. So I watched her standing off to the side while he got into line. Her eyes gleamed like emeralds.

Then it was our turn. The woman shaved some ice into paper cups and asked us what flavor we wanted. There were three kinds: strawberry, cherry, and lemon. We decided to get one of each. She poured the syrup from three different watering cans onto our ice. Pauline handed her a coin, which she put in a leather belt at her waist. Then she wiped her face in her apron and went on to the next.

We waited, licking our ices, to see what the girl would do. When it was her father’s turn he fumbled in his pocket for the money. The woman in the apron teased him but he didn’t smile. He held the ice awkwardly, as if it were a small animal. When he returned to the girl he handed the paper cone to her without looking at her. If he had looked at her he would have seen that Adele held the cone without tasting it until it melted down her arm and dried into a sticky poultice. The sleeve of her beautiful embroidered dress was stained sickly pink.