The Painted Kiss (25 page)

I
n 1905 Gustav admitted defeat and gave up the University Hall ceiling panels. The continuing controversy—the endlessly critical newspaper editorials, the contentious meetings with the committee—was wearing on his health and affecting his other work. He returned the commission and advised the committee that since he had given back the money the paintings belonged to him. They didn’t see it that way, and sent some men out to his studio to collect the paintings. Gustav held them at bay with a shotgun, an incident that only deepened his reputation as a renegade. In the end they sorted it out. Gustav got to keep the paintings and eventually sold them.

That year he also left the Secession. Some of the other members felt that Carl Moll’s association with the Gallery Miethke violated the tenets of the Secession, that it made him too commercial. Gustav defended him, but when they put it to a vote, Moll and his friends lost. Moll would have to cut his ties with the Gallery Miethke or leave the Secession. So he and his friends left.

The salon was wildly successful. I dressed everyone: Fritza Riedler, Mäda Primavesi, Elisabeth Bachofen-Echt, Berta Zuckerkandl and her daughter Amalie, Johanna Staude. I dressed them, and Gustav painted them. At the opera people nudged each other when I passed, and not because I was a famous concubine. I worked very hard. I got rich, not Adele Bloch-Bauer rich, but enough to pay Gustav back and support my mother, and my sisters and my niece. I could hire a cook, and then a chambermaid and a chauffeur.

Attersee became even more of a refuge, now that I was so busy and had so many responsibilities. The month I spent there was blissfully free of bills of sale and fittings and demanding customers. Gustav met me there every year, no matter what he was working on or where he had been traveling. It was the one time in the year when we were not separated, living in different houses, working long hours, traveling to different places. When I woke up and came down the stairs I knew he would be on the terrace, waiting for me. I knew that we would spend the afternoon hiking, or swimming, and the evening playing games. I knew that there wouldn’t be anyone else in his studio, no models, no society ladies, no friends. I had him all to myself.

We were at breakfast, in August 1905. The mail was delivered and Gustav received two letters. When I handed them to him I noticed that they were from Tigergasse, in Josefstadt. Helene raised an eyebrow at me, but I pretended I didn’t see.

“Who’s this assiduous correspondent, Gustav?” she asked, not very subtly.

“Aren’t you nosy,” said Gustav, and put his letter under his plate with a wink.

“Of course. What did you expect?” But all she could get from him was that they were from “a friend.”

The clouds toward Mondsee looked threatening, so Gustav and I decided to take our usual swim in the morning instead of the afternoon. Mother was taking Helene, Pauline, and little Helene shopping in the village. They were to have lunch at a restaurant and would be gone most of the day.

As Gustav pushed away from shore with one of the oars, we floated through the lily pads in a congenial misty rain. I rowed us to a spot a few hundred yards from shore while Gustav set up his easel and began daubing at a small canvas, trying to capture the wisps of fog floating near the bank before the weather forced us in again. I took a stroke now and then and tried to think of a way to find out who the letters were from without sounding like a shrew. Josefstadt was a slum, but a young artist could be writing him from there, or an aspiring journalist. I thought about Minna and Herta and hated the poisonous ideas I was having.

“Do you have a secret admirer?” I finally asked, trying for a jesting tone. I spoke to his back, as we both faced the shore.

He didn’t answer at first.

“I don’t have any secrets,” he finally said. His hand continued to move, washing the canvas with the gray of a female bluebird. “I always tell the truth, you just have to ask me straight out instead of trying to tease things out of me.”

“Who were your letters from, then?”

“Adele,” he said.

“From Josefstadt?” I was incredulous.

“She keeps an apartment there.”

Now I understood where they went the night of the engagement party. It filled me with rage that I had defended him. Now I wanted to know it all, before I lost my nerve and settled back into an anxious, hopeful state of denial.

“Is there anything else I should know?” I asked. “As long as we are being honest?” He didn’t answer me. I would have to ask yes or no questions, as if we were at a trial.

“Are you secretly married?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Do you have children?” He nodded and it took my breath away. Every time I thought I knew all there was to know, he surprised me.

“How many?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Three that I know of.” I wanted to jump out of the boat and swim to shore. And he kept painting.

“Who’s the mother?” I asked next.

“Mothers, plural,” he corrected. “Mizzi Zimmerman and Maria Ucicky.”

“Are they models?”

“No,” he said. “Well, Mizzi used to be.”

“Prostitutes?”

“Now Mizzi is a seamstress,” he said. “Maria is a laundress.”

I trailed my hands in the water, and without me to steady it the boat began to drift and turn. At last Gustav was forced to stop painting. He grabbed the idle oars and, turning to face me, rowed furiously toward the middle of the lake. Perhaps he knew that I was contemplating abandoning ship.

“Stop,” I said. “I want to go back.” I expected the pleading expression, the wheedling, little boy grin he used so effectively when he was in trouble, but the soft hazel eyes were hard and dark.

“No,” he said. “You have to understand, Emilie, it’s not…” he struggled to find the words to explain. “It isn’t…these things, they happen, you know…they’re not…I don’t.”

Words were not his medium. His floundering made me sick, and I cut him off.

“The children?”

“Three boys,” he said. “Ten, seven, and three years old.”

“Are you still with them?”

“Maria I have not seen in many years.” A pause. “Mizzi…sometimes.”

We were well past the swimming float and almost to the point where the lake’s depth drops suddenly from nine to a hundred feet, when the light mist that had been falling suddenly became a full-fledged downpour. Gustav began covering the paintings and supplies with a blanket to keep off the worst of the rain. The storm was nearly upon us and the thunder sounded like heavy trucks crossing a rickety bridge though we could not see the lightning bolts, only the clouds turning on and off like lightbulbs. “Hadn’t you better row?” I said.

“I’m spent,” he said. “We can watch the storm from here.” I reached back to grab the oars but he pulled them away from me.

“Give me the oars,” I said. “I’d rather not die out here with you.”

He smiled and let them slip from his hands into the water, where they drifted cheerfully away. I watched for a moment in shock. Without the oars we’d be floating in the lake until someone came along and rescued us. We’d be helpless.

“Christ!” was all I had time to say before I dove in after them. It was glacially cold. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. My lungs seemed to have contracted, receded like mollusks into protective shells. The cotton robe I wore to boat in was now as heavy as iron, pulling me under. I managed to untangle myself from it. Now I was in only my chemise and it was much easier to move. I surfaced. The small stinging drops warmed the surface, at least relative to the depths. I couldn’t touch bottom so I tread water and scanned for the oars. In a minute I located them several feet from the boat, the cherry-red stripes on the handles bobbing in the whitecaps. I swam over to them and grabbed them. They were fairly heavy and it was hard to swim with them. I held on to the side of the boat and threw them over one at a time. I was about to climb back in when the rage hit. He was just sitting there, in the boat, watching me.

I dove under the boat and capsized it.

The canvases, Gustav’s paint box, Gustav himself, the oars again, everything crashed into the water. The boat floated upside down like a turtle shell. I reached for it and turned it over. Gustav was nowhere to be seen. For the moment I didn’t care; I found my robe and threw it into the boat, I found the oars again and tossed them in.

Gustav still hadn’t appeared. I saw a couple of paint tubes floating in the water and grabbed them. Now I was starting to worry. I had no idea how long it had been since the boat had capsized. Two minutes? Three? It was a long time to hold one’s breath. Instead of getting back into the righted boat I decided to swim around it and look for him. I called his name, but all I could hear was the wind. I dove and felt around in the water; the rain had made it too cloudy to see clearly. Panic was setting in. What if I’d killed him?

Then from behind me something grabbed me around the waist and threw me up into the air and down into the water. When I came up he was laughing. Lightning cracked like a whip as it struck a tree across the lake. I watched it catch fire.

“You thought I had drowned,” said Gustav with glee. “You were beside yourself.” He squirted me in the face with water he had cupped in his hands.

My legs were weak with relief, but I didn’t want him to know that, so I floated on my back and looked at the clouds. “I was worried about the canvas,” I said. “The water will ruin it.”

“Who cares?” he said. “I hadn’t really begun yet.”

We began diving to recover his paintbox and his favorite brushes, which floated on the surface like needlefish. We even found the painting, though it was ruined with mud. We tossed everything back in the boat and hauled ourselves over the side. On the way back we each took an oar, with the wind, straight into the fog that had now completely enveloped the land. We couldn’t see where we were going, but we could hear the wind chimes on the front porch and steered toward them. Gustav whistled as he rowed, and every now and then he would grin at me.

When I could see the shore was only twenty yards away, I let the oars rest on the water and coasted, catching my breath. The boat slid into the space next to the dock like a hand in a glove. Gustav tied a hasty knot to secure it, and I handed him all of the things in the boat.

Gustav had twigs in his hair and mud on his face. His shirt was torn and smeared with blood from where he had caught himself on the side of the boat when he fell in. Puddles of muddy water formed around him on the dock.

I ran to the bank and collapsed on it. Raindrops fell into my eyes and into my mouth. The sky was the color of an old dingy chemise. I couldn’t breathe properly and I wanted to cry, but then I was laughing silently, racked with it, there on the bank, in the mud. The whole thing was so ridiculous. Gustav must’ve thought I was having a seizure. He came and sat down next to me, though the bank was rocky and cold. We watched the leaves blowing off of the trees.

He rolled onto me, not kissing me, just looking at me, pulling the leaves out of my hair, wringing out the curls and watching the rainwater drip onto my soaked shift. The pressure of his body was warm but I began to shiver uncontrollably.

Then as if someone had blown a whistle, we stood up and ran for the house. Our wet clothes made a sucking sound as they were pulled apart. We left everything we had so carefully rescued from the lake to blow right back in again. I left the robe I had embroidered by hand with designs I had found in a book of eighteenth-century Czech patterns.

We untangled ourselves from our wet clothes in front of the fire, still giggling like children. When we were naked and more or less dry, there was nothing to do but run up the stairs and hop into my bed under my thick comforter. Gustav couldn’t very well go back out to the damp and drafty greenhouse.

It was like the time of Ernst’s funeral in the sense that one emotion transmogrified into another. This time, it was rage that had become lust. My skin was warm and damp and cherry pink. My limbs were sleepy with warmth and rest. I felt a little drunk as I reached between his legs. I wasn’t virginal and innocent this time, though. It was I who seduced him. It was I who made him cry out.

He fell asleep but I could not. I propped my head on my arm and watched him.

If he and I stayed together, I realized with a shudder, every day would be like today. I would carry my suspicion in my heart like a tumor, and it would grow and grow and eat me from the inside. I would worry about who else he was with and how many times and was he in love with her. I would begin to read his mail and open his journal when he was out. I would cry every day. Soon I’d be throwing tantrums like Alma and slicing at the skin on my arm with a kitchen knife. I would be as crazy as Alma and Adele put together and Gustav would come to hate me. Perhaps one day I would turn the boat over and not look back to see if Gustav was all right. Perhaps one day I would get in the boat alone and row away. Perhaps I would swim to the middle and drown and neither of our bodies would ever be found.

I thought about what Berta had said, that I could have him all to myself if that was what I really wanted. But under what terms? At what cost to him, and to me?

Gustav and I could be coconspirators and like minds, but we could not be lovers. The fact that I had come to this realization all on my own was of no comfort whatsoever.