The Painted Kiss (4 page)

The easel was surprisingly light. “Wouldn’t it blow away?” I asked.

“Emilie,” my father called, “stop badgering Mr. Klimt and do as you’re told.”

“It’s all right,” Klimt said to my father. “Open it up and see,” he said to me. I unfolded the easel and saw that its three legs, splayed wide apart, made it more stable than it looked. He took the easel from my hands and moved it back to the middle of the room.

I stood while Klimt attached some paper to the easel with what looked like clothespins. I waited for him to tell me what to do. When he was finished with the paper he turned around but didn’t say anything. He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at me. It made me very uncomfortable, but I tried not to squirm.

“Well,” he said. I waited. The expression on his face was alarming in its intensity. I couldn’t wait any longer. I rocked from one foot to the other and scratched my face, though it didn’t itch.

“What should I do?” I asked. It was if I had woken him from a trance.

“Sit in the red chair, and be as still as you can. If I want you to move I’ll move you.” He spoke abruptly, almost rudely.

I sat the way I had been taught in my posture lessons. When Klimt turned to me he sighed. He came to stand just inches from me and frowned. His jacket smelled of cedar shavings, as if it had been stored for a long time.

“How would you sit if you could sit any way you wanted?”

No one had ever asked me such a question. It didn’t matter to anyone what I wanted, only what they wanted. I looked at him blankly.

“I don’t know, sir,” I said.

“No idea?” he said.

“No, sir,” I said.

“All right,” he said. He looked tired all of a sudden. “Stay that way, if you like. Do me a favor though, and look straight at your father and don’t move.”

My father was not nearly as interesting as the artist and his drawing, so it was hard to keep looking at him. Klimt put a smock on over his jacket, which made him look like an apostle. He stood in front of the easel and chewed at the end of a pencil while he looked at me. It was hard not to fidget. I tried to smile prettily.

“Do you normally smile?” he asked.

“Not very much, sir,” I said.

“Well, then, by all means don’t smile now,” he said. “Just a normal expression, please.”

“How do I look, Papa?” I asked, wanting Klimt to hear me praised. Father set his paper aside and glanced over, but he barely seemed to see me. “Very fine,” he said. He tried to think of the highest praise he could bestow. “You look like your mother,” he said, which I knew wasn’t true. My mother was beautiful. She had glossy chestnut hair and a soft, round face. My father, his task accomplished, lifted his paper again and immediately fell asleep.

Klimt didn’t have any paint, only some chalks lined up on a piece of wax paper. A glass of water was next to them. I wanted to ask him what they were for, but I had remembered my manners. He saw me looking at them.

“I use the water to wet some of my lines,” he said. “It creates a different effect, as you will see.”

He was looking at me so closely that I blushed. I hoped he wouldn’t notice, but I knew that was unlikely. No one had ever looked at me like that before. It made me want to crawl underneath the sofa.

“Do you always spy out of the window at visitors?” he said. I noticed that the tendons in his wrist as he drew were as taut as the mainstay of a sail.

“Excuse me?” I said, pretending I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“When I rang the bell you were at the upstairs window.”

“Was I?” I said. “I didn’t see you.” He stopped drawing a moment and grinned at me. Just then he reminded me of my friend Ulrike’s older brother, who liked to pull our hair and punch our shoulders and trip us at every opportunity.

“What do you look at when you stare out of the window?”

“People,” I said. “I like to look at what they are wearing, and the way they walk. Some people are fast and others sort of waddle, or hobble. I see some of the same people every day, and some days they look cheerful and other days not. Some days they’re alone and some days they’re with their families. It’s interesting.”

“So you haven’t had all the personality trained out of you after all,” he said. He went back to work.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” he said next. He had figured out by now that I had trouble avoiding direct questions.

“An actress,” I said. This time he didn’t grin. He kept his eyes on his paper. “Have you been to see many plays?” he said.

I had to admit I hadn’t.

“I don’t go often, but I know a lot of actresses,” he said. “Some of them model for me for extra money.”

What I knew about actresses I had gleaned from the papers, and from watching the ones I recognized parade down the Mariahilferstrasse. They were always stylishly dressed, and carried themselves with such grace it was hard to imagine them needing extra money, though if their modeling involved what I was currently doing, it didn’t seem so bad.

“They’re not as glamorous as you think,” he said as if he could read my mind. “They’re all right. Poor, most of them. It’s not an easy life, you know. You’re much better off here with your parents.”

That made me angry. How did he know what it was like with my parents? But I wasn’t allowed to contradict an adult.

“Sometime I’ll take you to the theater,” he said. “You’ll see.”

Then he furrowed his brow and stopped drawing. He stepped back and looked at his paper for a minute, then went back. But he was still frowning. I wondered what I had done wrong. He put down his pencil and came over to where I was sitting.

“I don’t like your hair this way,” he said.

“This is how we wear it at school,” I said.

“It’s ugly,” he said. Roughly I started to pull the bow out but he stopped me.

“Let me,” he said. His hands moved toward my face and I saw that they were stained brown in places.

“No, thank you,” I said. “I can do it myself.”

“All right,” he said. He backed away slowly. He went to the window and opened one of the casements. I struggled with the ribbon, yanking at it until tears sprung to my eyes, but Pauline had pinned it with ferocious thoroughness, and without a mirror I couldn’t pull it loose.

Klimt came back.

“I promise I won’t hurt you,” he said. “Now, let me take your hair ribbon out.” He was very gentle with the tangled parts.

“We must put it up properly,” he said when he was finished. “Do you have a pair of combs?” It surprised me, that Klimt should be so familiar with a feminine accessory like a comb. Papa could never remember what they were called and referred to them as “hair contraptions.” I looked over at my father but he was still snoring underneath his paper.

“Shall I go look for some?” I said. I went into the hall. No one was there. I heard mother in the kitchen, singing Verdi. I ran upstairs to her room and opened her jewelry box. Inside were strands of pearls and a diamond bracelet, a gold watch, as well as a variety of pins and combs. Mother had several plain tortoiseshell combs for everyday, and then there were the small cloisonné combs she had bought when she and Father went to Paris. Dare I borrow them? I conveniently decided that Father would like the portrait even more if he saw them.

Back in the parlor, I sat in the chair again and let Klimt put up my hair. When he was finished he stepped back to look at me and seemed pleased.

“It’s much better this way because the line of your jaw will show more clearly.”

That didn’t make sense to me. I’d always been told that my jaw was too strong, unfeminine. I was told that I should camouflage it at all costs. Why was he going to play up my worst feature? I began to suspect that the drawing would not be what I hoped.

“Do they teach much drawing at your school?” he asked as he worked.

“A sketching teacher came for a while, but then he left to do military service and they didn’t get another one.”

“Did you like drawing?”

My foot was asleep and my neck was getting a crick in it, which is the only explanation I can offer for what I said next.

“Not very much,” I said. “It bored me.” Immediately I clapped my hands to my mouth in horror, completely forgetting that I was supposed to remain still. I looked over at my father. He was still asleep and could not have heard me. I waited for Klimt to scold me and threaten to tell my parents how insolent I was. But to my surprise, he laughed.

“Maybe it comes too easily for you. People like me, who have to work very hard just to be competent draftsmen, don’t get bored with drawing.”

I was afraid to open my mouth again, for fear something rude would come out.

“What did you draw that was so boring?” he asked.

“It was always the same still life,” I said. “Two glass bottles, three apples, and a bunch of grapes.”

“You can learn a lot about volume and light and shadow drawing apples and bottles, you know. And grapes! They’re too difficult for beginners.”

I fervently hoped that the subject could now be dropped.

“What do they teach at your school then, if not drawing?”

“History, German, mathematics.”

“Sewing?” he asked, glancing at my blouse.

“Once a week,” I said.

“Tell your teacher it should be every day,” he said. He was laughing at me.

“I will, sir,” I said as politely as I could.

We were quiet for a while. I heard the clock chime three, four, then five more times. I wondered why my drawing had taken the longest. Finally, he turned his page around. “What do you think?” he asked.

My twelve-year-old vanity immediately sustained a mortal wound, seeing myself through the artist’s eyes. The drawing showed just my head and shoulders. There was my jaw, jutting like a rock formation on a mountainside. My mouth was grim and stern, like a general’s. My eyes were glowing with light like rays of sun. How had he done that with just chalk? The little of my body that showed was indistinct, just a round white blouse shape with just a hint of a peach glow underneath to indicate flesh. He’d left the parlor out completely, the red chair, the wallpaper. For background he’d simply rubbed an apricot shade over the paper with the heel of his hand. I thought if this was what I looked like, I must be the ugliest girl in all of Vienna.

“Do you like it?” he said. He actually sounded worried about what I thought. I was too mortified to take his feelings into account. Only my strict training saved me.

“I think it’s lovely,” I said, but he knew I was lying.

Klimt woke up my father and sent me to fetch my mother to see the finished products. He leaned all three drawings up against the parlor wall and we all gathered around to look at them. Pauline was smiling and soft. He’d drawn the whole room in around her, and the drawing was bright and busy. Helene of course looked like an angel. There was even a corona around her head. I was the only one who looked like I could turn people to stone.

“They are wonderful,” pronounced my mother. “I especially like Emilie’s. You have really captured her personality.”

Klimt caught my eye and winked. I looked away. I just wanted him to leave. Then my father asked Klimt to stay for dinner. To my despair he said he would be delighted.

As we walked into dinner Helene nudged me. “Do you like yours?” she whispered.

I stared at her incredulously.

“It does look like you,” she said reluctantly. I wanted to cry.

“I like yours better than Pauline’s,” she said. “She’s hardly even in it.”

I had never seen anyone eat as much or as fast as he did. His hands were tanned, and wide, with thick flat thumbs like wooden spoons. They were clumsy with a knife and fork; it seemed incredible that I had just watched him wielding pencil and chalk with such skill. It was bad manners to draw attention to other people’s bad manners, but I made sure that he could tell what I thought from the way I was looking at him.

He was telling my mother about some work he was doing for the imperial family.

“I’m going to do some murals for the empress’s villa in Italy,” he said. “Something lighthearted, colorful, not too difficult. I’ve never been to Italy so it will be a great chance for me to see Rome and Florence.”