The Painted Kiss (24 page)

“She’s delightful,” he said. “I can’t understand a word she says, but she is lovely to look at.”

“Have you started the painting, or are you still sketching?”

“I think I finally captured the right pose today. She’s interesting, so it’s easy. The hardest part, you know, is always creating character for a face that is lacking it. I don’t have that problem with her. And her dress is going to be a dream to paint.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. “I thought you’d like it.”

“I’m doing too many portraits,” he said. “I’m booked all the way through April. I’ll be glad when summer comes and no one can bother me. I think I’m going to paint the field of poppies this year, or perhaps the orchard. Or we can hike up to the castle.”

“That’s a long time from now,” I said. “A lot can change between now and then.”

“What, you’re not going to invite me?” He was grinning; the possibility had never crossed his mind.

“We’ll see,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. An idea had come to him. He felt in the pocket of his coat for a pencil and pulled out a box. He looked at it in surprise, as if he had forgotten it was there.

“I have something for you,” he said. “A present.”

“My birthday was months ago,” I said. “And you got me something, the Charles Rennie Mackintosh book.”

“It’s your belated salon opening gift,” he said. He handed me a marbled paper box tied with a black grosgrain ribbon. I could tell that Hoffmann had made it; it was a work of art in itself. I shook it because I thought Gustav would enjoy the suspense. It rattled loudly and something slid from one side of the box to the other. It was too big for a ring and too small for a book. Unless the size of the box was a ruse. Gustav would do something like that. I contemplated the box for a long time, until Gustav got impatient and started whistling. I untied the ribbon.

At the bottom of the box, wrapped in tissue paper, was a large silver pendant, shaped like a cat’s face, on a short chain. Across the pendant was a chevron pattern of lapis and carnelian.

“Hoffmann made it,” he said. “Do you like it?”

I fumbled with the clasp, hoping he wouldn’t see my fingers trembling. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “Did you design it?”

“Of course. Do you think I’d trust Hoffmann with something like this? Turn around and let me put it on you.” I gave him the pendant and lifted up my hair.

“Forgive me,” he said, and paused. I couldn’t see his face, but he sounded very serious. I waited. “It was supposed to be ready the day of the grand opening, but the gems got held up in Antwerp or something. That’s why it’s so late.”

“Since I had no idea it was coming, it’s not late to me,” I said, looking out of the window. I could see the crowds of people walking in the Volksgarten.

“You can put it on a longer chain if you want,” he said. “Are you sure you like it?”

I wanted to turn around and kiss him, but I did not. “Of course I like it,” I said. “I’m going to have some coffee. Do you want some?” I went into the kitchen to brew it so he wouldn’t see me cry.

When it was ready I brought everything on a tray and set it on the table. When I sat down to pour myself some I noticed that there were sketches strewn across the floor.

“I got bored sitting here, waiting for you before,” he said, when he saw that I’d noticed the drawings. “Frau Koehler went on and on, it was really terrible. I didn’t like to look at her, she has that hairy mole on the left side of her chin and she insisted on staying turned that way through the entire conversation.”

“How trying,” I said. “Of course I’m the one who’s going to have to see her undressed.” I picked a cup and filled it for him, over-flowing into the saucer with whipped cream. That was the way he liked it.

“You’d better hope she drops you then,” he said. “Or that her husband the colonel suffers a reversal of fortune.” He opened the window and looked down on the people sitting on the terrace of the Casa Piccola restaurant. “Poor souls,” he said. “That place has terrible coffee.”

“And worse sandwiches,” I said. “No meat at all.” I went to the window and looked out. Despite the coffee and the sandwiches, the tables on the street were crowded. A man with a bright green feather in his hat looked into his cup as he stirred, while his companion pulled her roll apart and looked at the street. At another table a thin young man stood up suddenly and knocked over a wrought iron chair. Gustav came and stood beside me, holding one of the sketches he’d made earlier, now folded into a shape resembling a crane. I took it from his hand and flicked the paper out of the window. For a moment it rose on an air current, then fell lazily down, landing on the table of the man with the green feather in his hat. The man reached for the paper, unfolded it, and looked up, puzzled. I ducked back inside.

“My precious drawing!” said Gustav in mock agony. “How could you?”

“You have so many,” I said, pointing to the carpet. “If we run out you can make more.”

“You show so little respect for my work,” he said. “Everyone else is so careful with it, holds it by the corners, sprays it with fixative, puts it behind glass, even the most careless scribbles. I think of everyone you are the only one to catch on to how worthless it all really is.”

“Of course I don’t think it’s worthless,” I said, feeling guilty now.

“I’m teasing you, silly,” he said. “Of course I don’t care. Throw it out the window, set it on fire, wipe your ass with it, it’s all the same to me. It’s just thinking out loud. It doesn’t mean anything. If it were a painting you were chucking onto poor innocent people that would be different, but…” I had to smile in spite of myself.

“Go on,” he said. “Do the next one.” It landed on one of the umbrellas, but a student who had seen what happened to the green feather man stood on a chair and retrieved it. By now many people were looking up at our window and waving. Some of the waiters were scowling. The drawings rained down on the café patrons like so many cherry blossoms in the spring, but it didn’t take long to exhaust our supply.

“Last one,” said Gustav, handing me a drawing folded in the shape of a leaf, which upon unwrapping proved to be a sketch of my own face. I tore it into bits and dropped the pieces from the windowsill. It landed on the tulle hat of a woman sitting alone. She shook her head and brushed at it with her gloved hand. She had large dark eyes and she looked sadly at me, wanting to know why the others had been so much luckier than she. I closed the sash.

I
have six drawings of Adele, all very similar. She is wearing a voluminous striped dress. The folds of the skirt cascade down the page and spill off of it. The pencil drawings contain only shades of gray, but I know that the dress she wore was pink, the pink of a blush wine, or of inflamed skin. In most of them she has no eyes and only the barest outline of nose and mouth, but her twisted hands and her thick bow-shaped lips give her away. There is one, though, in which he has drawn in her eyes, and it stares out at me with shocking likeness. When I look at it I can smell her jasmine perfume and the cherry pastries that were her favorite. I keep that one near the bottom of the pile. It’s too unnerving.

Tonight, after Helene had gone to sleep, I pulled the drawing out of the portfolio. Then I locked my bedroom door, though I knew that was silly, like a grown woman hiding candy under her bed. From whom was I trying to hide? Gustav? Adele?

My room was stifling and smelled of the emergency gasoline I’d paid a small fortune for in the village and spilled on my clothes walking home. The blackout curtains made the room feel like a cave. I blew out the lamp and then rolled up the curtain and opened the window. Let the Russians find us. They’re going to anyway, no matter what we do. The coolness of the dark night air dried the tears on my face.

I made that dress, the one she wore in those drawings, hating it, hating the sickly pink color, the soggy thin silk, the prim stripes. The way she smiled at me when she chose the fabric I knew she’d hated it, too. Something had happened since I had last seen her to make her change her mind completely. I’d tried to talk her out of the style she’d picked, it was from another dressmaker’s book, something from some long-ago season, tight-waisted, full-skirted, a whalebone bodice. I reminded her that she’d wanted something radical. Nothing I could say would convince her. She’d had it made to get back at Gustav, to flaunt her respectability in his face, to torment him, to hide herself. He drew it over and over, but the face never seemed to belong with the body, so when it came time to do the portrait he made an outline and filled it in with something that suited her better.

I left the drawings on the table by the window, underneath the lamp so they wouldn’t blow away, and stumbled to the mantel to fetch the matchbox. I had been thinking about what I was going to do for a long time. I stood there at the window, thinking about them, then I struck a match. The flame was the only light for miles and miles. For a moment I only watched the blue flame and inhaled the sulfur. I let the first match burn down to my fingers. Then I sifted through the pile and pulled out the drawing near the bottom, the one with the eyes. I held the next burning wisp of wood to it and it ignited so fast that it was gone, blown out of the window in a shower of ash, before I had time to register what I’d done. I lit the next one, a larger drawing. The heavier paper took longer to burn, the pieces were larger and glowed red as they fell. Tiny bits of ash floated and drifted and finally settled on the windowsill.

Then one by one until they were all gone, lost.

He had made two portraits of Adele. She had modeled for the first in the pink dress, but when it was done there was nothing of the pink dress in it. Instead she was wearing a dress of gold, Byzantine in its intricacy, patterned with triangles and eyes and peacock tails. Above this stylized mosaic her face was as stark and real as a photograph. Some critics said that he didn’t care about his sitters, he was only interested in the thickets of design he built up around them, but that was not true. That portrait said what was important to say about Adele.

It said plenty about him, too; he was in love with her when he painted it, of that I feel sure.

The second portrait, done years later, is chalky, pastel. He was in a different phase, using a different style. And the affair was over. He was playing with a Chinese motif in the background, warriors on horseback. Adele stood under a dark cloud of a hat, in the same pearl choker she wore in the first, middle-aged now, not quite the mysterious sexual being she had been.

Sometimes I think about destroying the paintings. If I set them on fire the canvas would scorch before it finally caught. There would be a smell of burned hair and gasoline. The pigments would turn the flame many different colors. Sparks would fly off the paintings, and I’d have to chase them down and stamp them out. The paintings would fight against extinction, crackling with tiny explosions. I’d burn my hands. Adele’s face would melt like wax and disappear. Her hands would be the last thing to go, withering in a cloud of acrid smoke.

Moll has those paintings now; perhaps he has burned them. The thought wakes me from my stupor, and I’m consumed with guilt. What kind of curator destroys the work she is charged with protecting? How could I do it?

I can’t stay in my room with the evidence and so I dress and walk out to the lake. Perhaps I’ll stumble, hit my head, then I won’t have to think all of these tormenting thoughts.

But of course I don’t. I’ve been hiking all of my life, and I’m still surefooted. Every so often the moon comes out from behind the clouds and I am able to orient myself. By the time morning comes, I have arrived in Unterach, on the other side of the lake. In the gray dawn I sit in the church until it is a reasonable hour to appear at the door of friends we have there. They give me breakfast and dry my shoes, and then row me back across the lake.

It is only June but it is already unbearably hot in the apartment in Josefstadt. How three people can live in such a small room is a mystery, even if two of them are children. The room is on the fifth floor with no ladder. If there were a fire they would all perish. It happens all the time in Vienna. The windows are clean on the inside but so coated with grime on the outside that very little light gets in. The room smells like a chamber pot. When Gustav comes to visit he complains that the place isn’t fit for human habitation, and he’s right. He wonders aloud what foul mess her downstairs neighbors could be cooking to create such a stench. They’re from Bucharest, Mizzi says shortly. He goes to the window, already open as wide as it will go, and pushes on it. Why do I come here, he moans out of the window. Mizzi slaps him, hard, on the back and then both of them sneak a look at the boy.

The boy has alert hazel eyes and a wide nose like a saddle. He sits cross-legged on the floor, ignoring both of them, absorbed in the top Gustav has brought him. He spins it again and again. The sound has already begun to grate on Mizzi’s nerves. Go outside with that, she snaps. The boy obediently leaves the apartment without a backward look. “Outside,” for him, is the dingy hallway. The tenement they live in is on a crowded street of buildings just like it. There is no place to play.

You’ve got to get out of here, Gustav says. With what money, Mizzi almost says, then doesn’t. You should be here in August, she says instead. Of course Gustav is not there in August. He is in the lake district with his wealthy, successful mistress. My being here wouldn’t make it cooler, Gustav says, selfishly ignoring the fact that it is because of him that they are there at all. Why doesn’t he make life easier for her, when he could obviously afford it? Yet he comes to visit her at least once a month, sometimes more, and brings things for the boy, oranges and pencils and picture postcards. Mizzi wants to tell him not to bother with that trash,
will he just give her the money for good shoes and hearty, meat-filled stews in the winter? Will he pay for a proper school? She writes him long pleading letters and he writes back that her letters upset him and that she should be more cheerful. While she reads she screams in rage and her neighbors pound on the walls to shut her up.

Let me draw you, he says. He pushes her gently toward the mattress on the other side of the room.

For three crowns, she says, pretending to be joking. That’s more than the daily wage for a seamstress.

Two, he says.

How do you want me, she says, resigned. She strips off her dingy skirt, her chemise. She’s bonier in the chest than she used to be. Having the last one, the baby in the cradle in the corner, has shriveled her breasts, and going without so the boy has enough to eat has wasted her figure.

Leave your boots on, he says. He places her face down on the bed. Her ass is the best part of her. He has often said that its countenance is more beautiful and noble than many a face. He arranges the bedclothes around her into a disheveled pile, as if something illicit had just happened. Nothing will, though. He is tired of her. Her looks are gone; all she is to him is a whining shrew who threatens to expose him to his family. It’s the only power she has left.

Mizzi falls asleep while he works. Modeling always bored her, but the money was too good to turn down. When she was younger she would daydream about dresses she would buy when she was married to Gustav, the house she would live in, the people she would meet. She was a fool, that girl, her younger self. She had all of the arrogance of youth and beauty. Now her thoughts are painful to her and she blots them out with brandy whenever possible.

In the hallway the boy is bored with the top. He wants to go back into the apartment and eat a piece of the cake he knows Papa has brought. The door won’t open, though. It’s a situation he’s used to. Instead he kicks the new top down the hallway as if it were a ball. It hurts his foot a little when he kicks it and makes a horrible clatter as it
bounces past door after door. Mrs. Koppelmann is sure to come out and smack him with a broom, like she did the time he hurled the heavy, fat oranges at her door again and again until they broke open and bled their sticky juice everywhere. He can still feel the pull of it at his shoes as he runs past. He grabs the top and hides in the stairwell.