The Painted Kiss (20 page)

“Thanks, that helps.”

“I’m trying, Emilie, I really am.”

“Do you think he loves me?”

“From looking at the painting or from everything else?”

“Either one,” I said.

“You know I don’t know the answer to that.”

“But what do you think?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“When you looked at the painting, did you think, ‘He is in love with this woman’?”

“I thought, ‘He wants her to be someone else.’ ”

When the painting was finished, Gustav at last asked me to look at it with him. I was glad that Helene’s surreptitious examination of it had prepared me. We stood in front of it silently for a few minutes, and he poked at a corner with a sponge and touched some spots with flecks of titanium white. It was always hard to get him to declare that there was nothing more to do.

On the canvas, the dress I had made was unrecognizable to me. It was a royal purple and moved toward the floor like a river; aquamarine blue fish with golden eyes swam lazily down it while the silver beetles on the jacket pilled tightly. The attenuated figure inside the dress had fabric wrapped tightly around her slender neck. She had a bare décolleté and long slender fingers wrapped around her jutting hip. Her dress tapered off into the bottom of the picture, leaving her footless and bound. The face was mine, but it was blurry and indistinct, the cloud of hair like my own on a rainy day.

Helene was beautiful. Everyone knew that. My own case was trickier. Some days and from some angles I thought I was pretty, but a change in the light or a shift in perspective, and I was quite plain. In the sixteen years since Gustav made the pastel drawing of me I had still not reconciled myself to my strong jaw, but I now wore my hair in a way that minimized its severity. I looked good in hats. Pro-file was my best angle. My face looked too wide straight on. My forehead was a little low, and my neck was a little short. Occasionally I was forced to admit that my complexion was good, or that my eyes were a lovely shade of blue, but most often when I looked at myself in the mirror I saw only the structural imperfections.

The woman in the new portrait was stunning and—I blushed at the thought—sexy. She had challenging eyes. Her expression was powerful and just a bit sinister and it spoke of an inner life entirely different than the one I thought of myself as having. Was there any of her in me? Did I not know myself?

According to Helene, who knew me better than anyone, my assessment of myself was accurate and it was Gustav who did not know me. But I wondered if Helene had been looking at me too long to see me clearly. Maybe I was more like the woman in the portrait than I could admit.

“What do you think?” he said. He had been up all night with the painting; he danced in front of it with the wild energy of an exhausted man. I hesitated. It was an unfair question, like trying to assess your own intelligence. It was a gorgeous, swirling, painterly masterpiece, but because it was of me, it was impossible to be objective.

“Is this really what you see when you look at me?” said the self-absorbed girl, while the artist remained silent. Gustav sighed, but he seemed more amused than offended.

“Once you said that a drawing I did of you made you look like a child. Now you think I’ve made you look—what? Too womanly? You must admit you are inconsistent and hard to please.”

“Why am I stretched?”

“I thought you’d complain I’d made you look like Berta,” he said.

“I just wonder if you really see me at all,” I said, echoing Helene, “or whether you’ve created someone you want me to be.”

“I’m a portraitist, not an anatomist. Of course my view is subjective.”

“I think I look…” All I could think of were Helene’s adjectives. “Snaky.”

“Does it frighten you?” He was serious now. We didn’t look at one another, but only at the painting. I felt exposed, naked.

“Yes,” I said.

He was silent for several minutes and I listened to his thoughts pass through the air like clouds.

“It frightens me, too,” he finally said. “That’s why I had to paint you this way. Painting you any other way would have been the easy way out. There’s nothing more despicable than a cowardly painter.”

The idea that Gustav could be frightened of me, of some aspect of me, was ludicrous. I might frighten myself, but that was different.

“It’s like
Philosophy,
” he said. “It would be easy to represent it as rational and orderly, like the School of Athens, but that would be dishonest. It’s completely terrifying to make visible the chaos of human existence, to admit the darkness of the human mind, but once you’ve done it you can see that there is light there.”

“The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “If you want to put that interpretation on it.”

“Do you wish I was more like her?” I shrugged toward the painting.

“But you are,” he said. “You just don’t realize it.”

The woman in the portrait would have worn something erotic that day, something like the emerald Alma always had cradled in her bosom. She would have put soot on her lashes and rouge on her cheeks and brushed up against Gustav as he spoke and given him come-hither looks. But I would have felt ridiculous.

I love you, I didn’t say. Instead I suggested we have lunch. I had brought smoked mackerel and rye bread.

Gustav gave the portrait to my mother, but she disliked it. She kept the painting in a closet and refused to display it anywhere in the house, even when visitors asked to see it. After a few years Gustav asked for it back, and sold it to the Historisches Museum der Stadt Wien in 1908. The tourists come and peer at me and check their guidebooks and stare some more. I’m so real they think they can smell it on me.

W
e spent the day sewing blackout curtains. Among the packages Herta sent, among the antique textiles and glittering jewelry, was a soft parcel tied in brown paper: thirty yards of unglamorous black cotton, stiff and waxy. Its only redeeming feature is that it is woven extremely fine so that it is completely opaque. If you fell from the sky next to the house in the middle of the night you wouldn’t be able to tell that anything was there. If you were flying above you would think you were over water, not a quilt of farms and towns and castles. You’d become disoriented, not believe your instruments were right. Maybe you’d crash into the mountains and die in fire and ice. That, they tell us, is the idea.

Soon after we arrived the local magistrate had sent us a notice: all houses were to conform to the regulations within thirty days. There followed, in typical Austrian style, a precise description of what cloth was and was not acceptable, detailed measurements and instructions for making the curtains, hours during which the curtains must be in place, and the penalties to be imposed for those who failed to abide by the rules. There will be a surprise inspection.

Other people had known for weeks that this was coming. The only stores that still had the right cloth in stock were charging five times its value. I could have paid the outrageous markup, but it might have killed me. Instead I went to see Heitzmann, but he had none to spare. In a last-ditch effort before admitting defeat and giving the profiteers their reward, I wrote to Herta in Vienna, without much hope that she would be able to find the stuff, or that she could get it to us in time. But she and the mail service are as reliable as ever.

My fingers are stiff and I can hardly see what I’m doing; I prick myself every few minutes. The material is ugly and you would never want to make clothes out of it. I try to imagine a suit, say on Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the idea makes me shudder. It might work for a coat with a small round collar and shiny plastic buttons, something to wear in the rain, in the country. Something to wear when you are old and no one cares how you look, least of all yourself.

The sewing, though, is strangely satisfying. I haven’t sewn in a long time. I pinned, and I draped, I measured, I drew, but other people did the sewing, women with graying hair pinned up to expose their bent necks, clenched and screaming in pain. I told them what to do and they did it on machines. Unless they did the beading or finishing work, in which case the work was even more arduous. A girl didn’t last very many years at beadwork.

When I lift up the cloth and hold it to the light, I note with satisfaction that the stitches are tiny, precise, and even. The hem is as straight as the edge of a table and the thread shines on the dull cloth like tarnished silver. These stitches wouldn’t be out of place on a ball gown.

When we received our first commission Helene, Pauline, and I sewed two hundred and fifty aprons, by hand, in the parlor, since we had neither a seamstress nor a sewing machine, not yet. They were made of coarse, unbleached cotton the color of oatmeal. They were unadorned, unlined, and one size. The pattern was given to us to copy. There was little more to do than cut out a shape, hem it, and attach ribbons at the neck and waist. It seemed there was no way to impose any of my personality. To me then, longing to play with yellow silk and beaded net, they were mind-numbingly dull, but in the end it was good for me. It taught me that the expensive fabric and the gaudy trim are the rosettes and not the cake itself.

Somewhere along the way I thought to add pockets to the front of the apron. I thought a cook might want to put a thermometer in there, or a whisk, or a pair of shears. The owner of the cooking school raved about them, those pockets. It made me realize how little, and how much, it takes to please people. All you have to do is give them exactly what they asked for with some addition that they didn’t even know they needed until you showed them.

Neither Helene nor Pauline seemed to mind that I had essentially drafted them. Both of them needed something to take their minds off of the knowledge that they were alone. So did I.

It was a start. We were being paid.

I told Helene of those times as we sat in the matching pink chintz chairs in the parlor of the lake house sewing widow’s weeds. She’s heard the stories a thousand times before, but she never shuts me up. The drab fabric in our hands stood out oddly in the colorful room, like a dead flower in a beautiful arrangement. The rain poured like a waterfall from the gutters and the fireplace smoked and made us smell like sausages. I wished I could go out for a walk, but there was a curfew now. And I can’t say that the chilly rain was very appealing. If only I had a coat made of black oilcloth, something to make me invisible in the night, then I could go.

“When I first began I was always afraid of making a mistake,” Helene said, “cutting something wrong and wasting good fabric, or sewing a pocket on crooked. I was afraid you’d be disappointed in me. Now I can drop a stitch and no one will care.”

“Maybe the inspectors will,” I said. “Maybe they’re sticklers for good sewing.” She said she doubted it, seeing some of the things the women in the village wore, and I had to agree.

Then a menial job could seem like a once-in-a-lifetime chance, a few shillings could seem like a fortune. We had everything ahead of us: riches, fame, success.

Helene reminds me how hard that time was for her mother. You had everything ahead of you. She was a twenty-three-year-old widow with a two-year-old child. All she had ahead was grief and drudgery, dependence and loneliness.

Do you think it was so terrible? I wanted to know. Was she miserable?

No, she said. I don’t think so. But I would never want to be where she was.

The moment was becoming too painful for both of us, and with relief we turned to a discussion of aircraft, a convenient topic because neither of us knew the first thing about them. We tried to imagine how they navigated, what kind of instruments they might have, what kinds of engines. Did they use the same kind of fuel as my little yellow roadster, long since commandeered?

“I don’t think we can stop them,” Helene said, “we can just make it harder. It’s really Vienna we’re protecting, you know. Nobody cares about us out here.”

“And they shouldn’t,” I said. “We’re nothing. It’s the Secession they should be protecting, and the Kunsthistorisches.”

I tried to imagine Poiret, slender and modish, perhaps in a specially designed aviator’s cap and goggles, firing down on me. The image was ridiculous, but comforting somehow, like poking out the eyes on a photograph of an unfaithful lover.

It was already twilight at four o’clock when we hung the curtains, nine sets of them, in the kitchen, the parlor, the six bedrooms. and the bathroom. The house shrunk to half its former size. I had forgotten how much space windows create, even on a moonless night, or a cloudy, starless one. I felt claustrophobic, the scope of my world reduced to this tiny unprotected box. If anything came at you, you wouldn’t be able to see it until it was too late.

I cut the sprouting eyes from our potatoes and put them in a paper bag. Later we’ll plant them. Boiled in salty water, eaten with stewed greens from Heitzmann’s garden and fresh bacon, they didn’t make a bad meal. After that there was nothing to do but go to bed.

It is well known among certain people that Adele Bloch-Bauer takes lovers. Publicly, many are disapproving of a married woman carrying on that way. At the very least she could be more discreet about it. In private, among the women, especially, the tone is somewhat different. Her husband, it’s said, beat her unconscious when he found out she couldn’t have children. He keeps another family in the provinces somewhere. Poor Adele, the lament goes. She’s so unhappy, so lonely. Let her find her consolation where she can. Women feel protective of Adele, her physical frailty and her self-destructive recklessness touch their hearts. It’s unlikely she’ll live long, they think, between her abusive husband, her melancholy, and her fragile health. A cold could send her off, but it’s just as likely to be a bottle of pills. Only her family thinks to themselves that Klimt is the one to be concerned about, not Adele.

For the gossip is that her current lover is Gustav Klimt, the painter. Of course he denies it. Frau Bloch-Bauer is a lovely woman, he always says. She is a joy to paint. The subtext is clear to all: he would not presume to conduct an affair with a client, a wealthy woman of society. He is graceful in his denials, practiced and smooth. Of course no one is fooled for a minute, nor does he expect them to be.

For her part, Adele has many acquaintances but few, if any, friends, so no one is sure just what is happening. She glides alone through the parties she attends, seemingly everywhere, but afterward no one remembers having talked to her. And when her husband is in town, Adele gives parties where butterflies are released in the conservatory and ice sculpture towers over the guests in the drawing room. She enjoys the theater of it, enjoys the stage managing and the set design. She invites people known to be sworn enemies and places them next to each other at dinner. Yet people still come, because of her husband. And because one
week it will be spider monkeys shipped from Madagascar and the next it will be red velvet drapes and dancers from the Bolshoi.

There has never been consensus concerning Adele’s beauty. She is the kind of beautiful woman who is most admired by men, leaving the women in her circle slightly bewildered but not threatened. The men are bamboozled, the women decide together. They feel for her, of course, but they are as brutally honest in discussing her looks as they are in discussing each other’s when the person in question has stepped away. Adele’s face is long and bony, her body gaunt, her hair too dark, her eyebrows too thick, like a Gypsy’s, her features rather thin. Her eyes are lovely, it is true, green in some lights and gray in others, but they are heavy-lidded, reptilian. Her teeth are too prominent. Adele is striking, in her way, but that’s not the same as beauty. At dinner the women argue with their husbands. They never see what the men do, the abandon hidden below the quiet exterior, the sexual energy, the capacity for violence. After sex with Adele Bloch-Bauer, a lover might be advised not to fall asleep. Eventually the men are beaten down. Perhaps the wives are right, they say. Perhaps it isn’t beauty at all. But each one is wondering when Adele will be through with Klimt and if she might be persuaded to look his way.

Adele and her husband are giving an engagement party for Gustav Mahler and Alma Schindler. It is a rare event; Mahler hates parties, especially ones in his honor, and only agreed to this one because Alma cried and threw things. They stand on the parquet in the entrance hall, Mahler and Alma, one gray and uncomfortable, one foot planted toward the door as if he could escape, the other, lit up like the Ringstrasse at night.

Gustav Klimt enters the room, greeting the groom and kissing the bride, who holds the kiss just slightly longer than etiquette proscribes;has she forgiven him? he wonders. They have barely spoken since the day at the studio, when was it, two years ago. He’s had several angry letters from her since then, which he has not answered. By answering he would have to concede that there was something between them, and he prefers to believe that these grievances of Alma’s are delusions.

Gustav dislikes parties almost as much as Mahler does—the mindless chatter, the late hours, the distraction from his work, the chance of an uncomfortable encounter with an old lover or ideological foe, the chance of making a slip in etiquette or revealing some ignorance that twenty years of polishing hasn’t managed to cover—yet he goes to every party where he knows Adele will be. Not because he desperately wants to see her, though he does, but because he enjoys watching her from across a room while thinking graphically of what is under her dress. The thrill of the charade. Will he go too far? Will she give him away? The threat of being unmasked, the danger of a loss of self-control arouse him the minute he sees her.

“You are looking lovely,” he says to her, leaving Alma’s confining embrace and brushing Adele’s hand with his lips. He thinks of the crippled fingers underneath the gloves and what they are capable of. Of her painted lips and where he would like them to be.

“How very kind of you,” she says, looking over his shoulder in a vague way. It is a trick she has that he cannot stand. Is he boring her? Is she thinking of him at all? It is intolerable and in order to master the situation he leaves to greet other friends. He feels her eyes follow him. He will not return to her for the rest of the night, he vows. To see how she will respond. To see what her next move will be. Before long, though, the anticipation has become unbearable and he feels compelled to force Adele’s hand. When he sees her watching he slips into the library and pretends to examine a very bad oil painting. There is a man in the library reading the titles of books, but when he sees Gustav he looks ashamed of this display of social awkwardness and disappears. Gustav is alone in the library. Soon he feels her breath on his neck.

“You always ignore me,” she says.

“Quite the opposite,” he says. “I am never more acutely conscious of you than when we are not together.”

She has a high-pitched, barking laugh, tinged, he thinks, with hysteria. She produces the sound a few seconds longer than seems appropriate. Others may fall for your facile lines, her laugh says, but you have met your match in me. I have no illusions left to shatter. Ironically, what he
has just said is true. When she is near him she is a woman. He is familiar with the parts, the limbs, the sexual machinery. He is expert at saying the things that will induce a woman to spend the night with him. He knows what will make her look upon him with passion, with affection, and, when the time is right, with hurt or annoyance or anger. It is only when she is standing across the room, when she is talking to someone else, pretending not to look at him but tracking his movements with her peripheral vision; it is only from this distance that he knows her fully. There is no sense in insisting. Instead he places his hand on her waist. His thumb presses against her ribs. Sometimes he thinks something inside of her will snap.

“I saw your little friend downstairs,” says Adele. “I’m afraid I may have slipped up. It’s so hard for me to be dishonest, you see.” Gustav’s sudden anger is a surprise to him. He feels that the moment is absurdly melodramatic, like something from a novel; he thinks that he might strike Adele, who has moved away from him as if anticipating this and stands with her back to the painting, eyes veiled under those hooded lids.

“She will never find out,” he says. “If you tell her I will kill you.”

“My husband threatens to kill me all the time, and if he hasn’t, you won’t,” she says.

“I’m not joking, Adele. She must never know.”

“It’s charming the way you protect her. Fatherly, almost. And yet isn’t it rather insulting, too? She’s very intelligent. Don’t you think she knows already?”

He has no response. I am not a subject he ever discusses, not with Hoffmann, not with his mother, not with anyone. I am in his life and he does not want to know why, or in what way. It repulses him that the woman standing before him is discussing me as if I were some guest at the party about whom some especially fascinating gossip is known. There she is, poor thing. Doesn’t know. Maybe one of us should tell her. I heard she does know. After she greeted Adele I saw her take a glass of champagne and down it in one gulp. I saw you do the same thing, that doesn’t mean anything. But I think she knows. Look at the set of her mouth. Not many women of her age have a mouth like that.

“She’s not to know, she’s not to be hurt,” is all that Gustav can say. He knows that on Tuesday he will return to Adele’s house and for the sitting she will wear something I have made; though the salon is months from opening I have taken to making things for a few select people, for publicity. I had made some scarves and shawls and Adele had insisted she must have one of each. He will sketch her in this apparel as the tension grows unbearable. They will not speak, waiting to see which one of them will break first. Finally he will have to put his pencil down and at least stand and stretch his shoulders. When she sees him move Adele will walk out of the room without a word. She won’t go to her adjoining bedroom, but to a guest room down the hall. When he gets there she will already be draped across the bed, limp and pale. She’ll show no excitement or enthusiasm as Gustav undresses her; she wants him to think she doesn’t desire him. When he’s reached the final layer, when he’s discarded corset and petticoat and chemise, she will tell him that she wants to wear the scarf or the shawl while they make love, and he will press his flesh against Adele’s with this square of fabric entangled between them.