The Painted Kiss (23 page)

Our mother was there, minding young Helene and critiquing the looks of the bohemian types that filled the strange rooms. Berta came and brought her cook to make the short ribs and spaetzle and beet salad and orange cream cake. Once the room had been decorated and the vase placed and the cook set to work, the six of us, Hoffmann, Moser, Berta, Helene, Pauline, and I began to get very drunk on light and fizzy new wine.

Adele brought me a calla lily that Hoffmann promptly banished to the stairway. I promised her that after he left I would bring it back. Moll’s wife brought roses and told me that Alma was far too busy to come, now that she had married Mahler. What a shame, I said, as I put her flowers on the stair with Adele’s. More and more people streamed in, each with a token and some kind word. As I spoke to everyone and thanked them and pointed them in the direction of the wine and the food, I was waiting for Gustav. He still had not come.

In the weeks before the salon opened, Gustav had been strangely absent. Helene and Pauline had worked as hard as I and we had the unstinting support of Hoffmann and Moser, but when there was a crisis or a sudden decision, I had no one to turn to for advice. The weight of the venture was on my shoulders, and where was Gustav? I suspect that he did not want to take the attention away from me, did not want other people to think that this was a vanity project that he had underwritten. I didn’t care. Gustav should have been with me in the front of the room, at my side, accepting congratulations alongside me. He was the only one who could make me laugh and release all of the anxiety I was feeling. He knew all of the right things to say to me. Even Helene, who had known me longer than anyone and knew how nervous I was, had already sent me into a panic by matter-of-factly telling the daughter of the master painter Rudolf Von Alt that we really knew very little about sewing.

Moll was making a toast, saying something about a creative alliance and supporting each other, when Gustav slipped in. There were lots of cheers; Moll was a good speaker and the wine had been flowing very freely. But I had stopped listening when I saw Gustav.

I hated myself for it, but the first thing I noticed was that he was empty-handed. If Alma’s mother could bring something, why couldn’t he? The second thing I noticed was how tired he looked. Lots of people turned to greet him, but he stayed in the doorway instead of pressing through to the center of the room, where I was. He caught my eye and I was surprised to see a wistfulness in his, grief almost.

When Moll finished speaking there was a lull as everyone waited for Gustav to give a toast. He pretended not to notice, and after a moment someone else got up to say something. Then when he was done everyone looked at Gustav again, but he just smiled and shook his head. Even the jeers of his friends in the Secession couldn’t rouse him. When everyone had spoken and people began drifting toward the door, I was finally able to reach Gustav.

“It’s wonderful, Emilie,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he meant the party or the design of the room or the venture itself, or some combination of all three. He sounded vague and distant, as if he were surrounded by glass. He could have been talking to a visiting dignitary from Spain.

“Thank you,” I said, formally, and then, “It’s yours, too, you know. You can take some credit for its success.”

He shook his head. “It’s yours.” He seemed to be trying to rouse himself from his mood. “Yesterday Hermine Gallia asked if I could help her get an appointment with you. Usually people are asking other people to help them get appointments with me.”

The guests had all gone and Helene and Pauline were collecting glasses and putting them on a tray. The lights of the Ringstrasse were as starry as they were at Berta Zuckerkandl’s.

The salon was an immediate success. In the months before the salon opened my friends and I had managed to generate great excitement among a certain small circle of the very rich and the avant-garde. Schwestern Flöge quickly became their salon. Our clothes were very expensive; a skirt could cost as much as a seamstress might make in a year. No one seemed to mind. I soon discovered, however, that ignoring Paris altogether would quickly result in insolvency. We couldn’t survive on Reform dress alone. So I compromised. We made progressive clothes for those who wanted them and more conventional, stylish clothes for everyone else.

Gisele Koehler and her mother, who paid me a visit in the month after we opened, were typical. Gisele was a large blond girl, and her mother was a moonfaced woman who stood behind me and criticized every move I made. Hadn’t I better put the silk camellia at the bosom? It looked strange on the left shoulder, unbalanced. Gisele was lopsided, you know. Her right shoulder was higher than the left. It wasn’t usually noticeable, but to put the camellia on one of them would call attention to it. The last thing a bosomy girl like Gisele needed was more bulk at the décolletage, but I didn’t say anything. Poor Gisele was already blushing at her mother’s matter-of-fact recitation of her faults. In a few years her blond hair would turn ashy and she would be elephantine. I hoped she’d be married by then. I vowed to banish the camellia entirely. Already the dress was a shiny pink nightmare. That was the drawback of trying to make money. Sometimes you had to sacrifice taste altogether.

“I have a lovely black silk with an embroidered camellia pattern,” I said. “Why don’t we try the dress in that instead?”

“Black? On such a young girl? Are you crazy?” said the mother. “No one’s died. And Gisele looks wonderful in pink.” I sighed.

“Gustav’s here,” said Helene, quietly, from the doorway.

“Klimt is here?” said Frau Koehler. “I must speak with him. I want him to do a portrait of Gisele.”

Helene gave me a look that said, Lucky Gustav. “He’s in the sitting room,” she said to Frau Koehler. “Come down and I’ll bring you some coffee.”

Frau Koehler looked from Gisele to me and then back again, hesitant to leave her precious daughter alone with me. She’d heard stories. She narrowed her eyes at me and then said, “All right, but I’ll only be a minute.”

When Frau Koehler was gone, I grimly kept pinning. Grimly was the only way to pin, otherwise the pins would fall out of my mouth. I slipped my hand into the silver chalice as if I was pulling a carp out of a pond. Pins briefly stuck to my hand and then dropped to the floor.

“This dress is a disaster, isn’t it?” said Gisele from the dais. Her voice was surprisingly soft and melodious. I wondered if she sang.

“It’ll be fine,” I said.

“You know it’s a disaster,” she said. “Mother wants this pink satin and it’s all wrong for me. She wants tight sleeves and a high waist and that’s all wrong for me, too.” I stopped pinning and looked up at her.

“What would you like?” I asked.

“I saw a dress in the book I liked,” she said shyly. I went over to the table and picked up the pattern book. “Show me,” I said.

The pattern she liked was a more modern style, looser and much more forgiving. “This is the dress for you,” I said. “Forget the other dress. I’ll tell your mother I lost it or something.” That made her laugh.

“She’ll kill us both,” she said. “But she’ll let me keep the dress so she can say she got it here.”

“Do you want to look in the fabric books for a material?” I asked her. “I can cut a piece off a roll in the back and bring it to you if you like.”

Gisele didn’t want to look at the fabric books. She wanted to come with me and see the fabric room. I never took customers there, but something about the way her eyelids drooped at the corners touched me. She was as innocent and helpless as a baby seal.

“Come,” I said. I gave her a robe and some slippers to wear.

The fabric room had previously been a workshop that made wooden toys. There were no windows, which was good for the fabric. It was dim and cool. It was the closest thing to a fashion designer’s paradise. Roll after roll of fabric, satins and velvets and brocades and lace, organza, chiffon and wool. They were arranged by color, all the whites together segueing into the creams and the yellows and the peach and orange and scarlet and violet and indigo and green. I could wander the aisles for hours. “How about dark blue?” I said.

On the way to blue we passed a bolt of green peau de soie and without thinking I reached out and ran a hand over it.

“That’s so pretty,” Gisele said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “I once made a dress for myself with it. But then I gave it away.” I don’t know why I told her, except that she had sympathetic eyes.

“Such a beautiful color,” she said politely, not understanding. “So bright.”

“Maybe we’ll use it to make you a dress someday,” I said. “For your engagement party, perhaps.” I pulled her on.

“If Mama ever lets me out of her sight long enough to find a beau,” she said. “And if he doesn’t mind that I’m so plain.”

“What do you think of this?” I asked, pulling out a softer, less starchy silk than the peau de soie, and in a deep ocean blue.

“Nice,” she said.

“We can do a chiffon overlay if you like, perhaps a lighter blue, or a net. I think we have some embroidered nets that would look incredible.” I pulled the bolt out of its place and carried it to the section where the nets were. We found a robin’s-egg blue one, embroidered with silver chrysanthemums. When I had noted the fabrics on her order form I took Gisele back to the fitting room to pin a muslin prototype on her. The new dress was of a style that was very easy to pin, and it took only a few minutes. I was thankful, because despite my sympathy I was growing weary of Gisele. So she was plain and her mother was a tyrant. She was nineteen years old and she would marry and have fat homely children and be perfectly unhappy like everyone else. It was no tragedy.

When we were finished I waited for Gisele to dress and brought her down to the sitting room. Gustav was standing by the window looking down at the patrons of the Casa Piccola restaurant while Frau talked loudly at him from the white sofa.

“I’m so sorry,” said Frau Koehler, “I lost track of time. This is my daughter, Mr. Klimt. Won’t she make a lovely portrait?”

I waited to see what he would answer. But he had been flattering people like Frau Koehler for many years now, and there was no hesitation or falsity in his voice when he told her how Rubenesque Gisele was, how charming, how beautiful. She lapped it up.

“I trust that everything is all settled with the dress?” she said to me, several degrees more coldly. Now it was my turn, and it was hard to keep a straight face with Gustav looking at me with mock solemnity.

“I think you’ll be very pleased,” I said.

“What did you decide about the camellia?” she asked. “Because I really feel…”

“Gisele wants to surprise you,” I said. “But trust me, you’ll love it.”

“Well, I don’t like to pay for things I haven’t seen, but I came here on the advice of Frau Moll, you know, her first husband was my husband’s first cousin, and I always trust her taste.”

“I’ll need to see Gisele in two weeks,” I said. “Helene can make an appointment for you in the office.”

Gustav promised to appear at their apartment the following Thursday, and somehow the two of us managed to bundle them out of the room and shut the door.

I sat down where Frau Koehler had been and took a piece of pastry off of the tray Helene had brought down for her. I put it on a little plate, but after a bite I decided I wasn’t hungry and began to tear it into little pieces instead of eating it.

“Look at you,” Gustav said. “Hermann Koehler’s daughter.” He pushed his chair backward against the wall like a schoolboy.

“Hoffmann would kill you if he saw that,” I said.

“Koehler’s in thick with the emperor,” he said, balancing his weight so that the chair hung between the wall and the floor before slamming down. It made me wince.

I shrugged. “She thinks I’m a harlot. She only comes here looking for scandalous gossip.”

“So what if people talk?” he said. “People have been talking about me for fifteen years at least, and there’s no sign of it letting up.”

“I can’t do the things you do,” I said. “I’d be stoned to death.”

“You’re incredibly popular,” he said, ignoring my bitter tone. “I read an article about you in the
Times
. And Helene told me you were written up in
Mode
.”

“It won’t last,” I said. I wasn’t feeling very celebratory. “How are things at the studio?” I asked. “How is Miss Wittgenstein?”