The Painted Kiss (5 page)

“How did you get the job?” Father wondered.

“The usual way,” he said. “There was a general announcement at the Kunstlerhaus about it and I submitted a proposal. But I think it was the Burgtheater commission that got me the job. I’ve met a lot of important people. Everyone wants his portrait to be on the wall. Two or three judges and doctors and court officials come to my studio every day now.”

I watched him drop a piece of boiled beef into his lap and smiled at him evilly.

“Did you meet the empress?” asked Pauline shyly. Papa glared at her but Klimt ignored him.

“I never saw her,” he said. “No one sees her anymore, not even the emperor, you know.” A piece of potato fell from his mouth back onto his plate. My mother coughed and asked if anyone wanted more cabbage.

“Emilie says she doesn’t do any drawing at her school. I think that’s a shame. Every girl should be able to sketch a little.” He turned to Mother. “I imagine you are quite accomplished yourself.”

My mother blushed. “Oh no, I have no talent at all. I can’t imagine that the girls have any.”

“Nonsense, you have a wonderful eye.”

“Well, I did study drawing with Hans Lerner when I was in school.”

“Hans Lerner, he’s a legend. And for him to take you as a student, what an honor!” Helene kicked me under the table. Why was he flattering our mother so outrageously?

“And I went to Italy,” she said. “Before I was married.”

He sighed in rapture over her descriptions of the Fra Angelicos and the Tiepolos and the Masaccios she’d seen.

“Your girls should have the opportunity if they wish.” I waited for Papa to say that it was his business to decide what opportunities we should have, but he didn’t.

“Helene is musical,” said my mother. “She has lessons every afternoon. I doubt she’d have time for more.”

“What about the other two?” said Klimt.

“Pauline is scheduled to begin a special language course when she finishes school in the spring. But Emilie is free.”

I looked at her beseechingly but she either didn’t understand my look, or didn’t care.

“I know she must be busy with her acting,” said Klimt. “I see by her sash that she must have been practicing before I arrived.” It was only then that I noticed the pink silk band tied around my waist, poking out from under my school blouse with the brooch still attached. I had missed it in my rush and we’d all been too preoccupied by the sittings and the dinner to notice. But now, thanks to Klimt, everyone in the family was staring at it.

“Emilie!” shrieked my mother, “go upstairs and take that off right now!”

I left the table, wishing I didn’t have to go back, that I could crawl into bed and stay there until Klimt had gone. I tried to remember what the punishment was for borrowing Mother’s things without asking. Was I to go without dinner for three days? Though this time it would be worse since I had embarrassed my parents in front of a guest. Would Father take out the strap? As I climbed the stairs I could hear my mother making excuses for me. “I know she’s too old to play dress up, but she enjoys it so much, and it seems harmless.” I pulled the clasp around my waist, unhooked it, and balled the sash up in my fist, wishing it was Klimt’s face.

When I came back down, it had already been decided. Klimt was going to be my drawing teacher, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

T
he day of the first lesson I woke up before it was light. I tried to wake Helene, hoping her soothing voice would calm my nerves, but despite my vigorous prodding, she only frowned, and rolled onto her back, eyelids fluttering and hand dangling dramatically, as if she were a society queen with the vapors. She was obviously having a dream from which she didn’t want to be taken. I threw off the covers, which Helene promptly grabbed. It was cold. The bones in my feet ached as I walked over to Pauline’s bed. She was muttering in her sleep, explaining to her teacher why she was late and why she wasn’t wearing shoes.

I went to the windowsill and pulled my cambric nightgown over my feet. Soon it would be time to bring our flannel nightgowns out, and our heavy goose-down comforters, stuffed by the farmer’s wives in Attersee.

When I was in a temper, I often sent my thoughts to Attersee, a small town in the lake district several hours west of Vienna. My family had been spending summers there since before I was born. Mountains ringed the glacial lakes there and the hills were covered with wildflowers. It was impossible to think of it and be upset.

The air outside my window was foggy and dense. The apartment building across the street looked as if it were underwater. A few people were out; the man who sold newspapers on the corner came into view rolling a dolly loaded to the handle and slid its pile of Vienna
Times
onto the pavement. He pulled a knife out of his pocket and sliced the twine on the bundles and stacked them in his cart. Then he disappeared around the corner to do it again. Rolling, unloading, cutting, stacking.

The carts were just starting to arrive from the country with produce for the market. There was always a man in a wide-brimmed hat driving and a few children of various ages sitting on pumpkins in the back. They rattled and bounced like seeds in a gourd. Idly I wondered how early they had to wake up to get to Vienna at that hour. Most likely they were used to it. It might even be fun, to see the countryside in the half-light, clopping into the city when everyone there was still asleep.

The light paled. Soon shafts of sunlight would pierce the watery early morning and things would get stark and clear. Soon I would have to wash my face with cold water that would bring up the goose bumps on my arms. I would have to eat every bite of the coarse porridge mother said was the best thing for us, though I noticed that she ate pastry stuffed with raspberry or apple. I would have to listen to many admonitions to mind my manners and apply myself. I would have to put on my ugly felt hat and leave the house and walk past the newspaper man. I didn’t want to think beyond that.

More than cannibals, more than inoculations, more than tripe, I feared being laughed at. What would the artist say when he saw my clumsy attempts at drawing? It was going to be so humiliating. My stomach cramped at the thought. Maybe I would be sick and not have to go.

Helene appeared next to me, wearing her coverlet over her head like the Virgin Mary. “It’s too cold to sit there like that,” she said. “Go back to bed.”

I shook my head and turned back to the outside. One of the men with a cart was trading a bag of yellow apples for a newspaper. The children were throwing what appeared to be chestnuts at one another.

“Are you nervous?” she asked sympathetically.

“About what?” I said.

I had never had a lesson that wasn’t given by a nun. Not that they didn’t have their terrifying qualities: their stern, thin-lipped mouths; their ghostly costumes; their fondness for standing over your shoulder while you worked on an assignment until you were so flustered you couldn’t even remember what subject you were doing. But a nun was a known quantity. I already knew what pleased them: tidy hair, clean hands, wide-open eyes, and a slight smile, but never a grin. I could fall asleep with my face arranged like that.

“When I had my first singing lesson I was terrified,” said Helene. “I thought I would forget all of the notes. The night before I had a dream that I was a pigeon and could only make that horrible cooing sound. But then Mrs. Schraft was not so bad.”

Mrs. Schraft was seventy and her wool coat always smelled like a sheepdog. She carried hazelnut candies wrapped in colored foil in her skirt pocket and liberally dispensed them to her students.

“I wish I was going to Mrs. Shraft.”

Helene sat down, unfurled her headdress and wrapped me in it as well. We sat back to back, like caryatids.

“I wish I could go with you,” she said.

I wished she could, too. It would take half of the attention off of me. Maybe afterward Papa would let us go to a café and we could order hot chocolate and laugh about it.

“You want to learn to draw?” I asked her.

“I want to see the studio. I wonder if anyone famous will come while you’re there.”

“I doubt it. I think he made all of that up.”

Helene shook her head. She didn’t understand why I didn’t like Klimt. She thought he was interesting.

“What are you going to wear?” she said. I leaned forward and dumped her off of my back. I turned to glare at her.

“Why does it matter?”

“Don’t you want to make a good impression?”

“I don’t care if I make a good impression on Klimt.”

“You’d better say Mr. Klimt,” she said, shocked. “What if Mama and Papa heard you?”

Then I told her my secret plan: I was going to be polite, and quiet, but completely inept. Klimt wouldn’t be able to complain about me, but I would frustrate him so much that he would give up, and return me to my family as unteachable. Then everything would go back to the way it was, and I wouldn’t have to see him again.

“You’re not the least bit curious?” she asked. “You’re not the least bit interested in the studio, or the artists, or learning how to draw?”

“No,” I said, but she knew me better than that.

“Maybe I’ll let you borrow my new gray skirt,” she said. “It would look nice with your pink blouse.”

After breakfast my father took my arm and walked me briskly toward the east, toward the Naschmarkt.

“I thought the studio was in Leopoldstadt,” I said.

My father was annoyed. He hated any evidence that we had failed to listen to our instructions. “We’re not going to the studio,” he said. “Whatever gave you that idea? We’re going to their house, it’s in Hietzing.”

Hietzing was a long way away, in the countryside. It was where the summer palace was. I had never been there.

A man my father knew passed us, reading the newspaper as he walked. My father stood in front of him and the man nearly collided with him. The man folded up his newspaper and shook my father’s hand.

At the corner was a cab stand. The horse-drawn carriages were lined up for a block, waiting. My father gave a wave that was more like a salute, and the driver nodded and hopped down to open the door. He was in his shirtsleeves, and underneath his oily mustache a cigar as fat as a snake was clamped between his teeth. The smoke was acrid, not sweet and spicy like the tobacco I was used to. I coughed without meaning to as he helped me into the compartment.

“Ever smoke a pipe?” asked my father. “Much healthier.”

I curled into the corner of the carriage, trying not to breathe. Why did my father try to sell pipes to everyone he met?

The man’s laugh was full of phlegm. “Don’t worry about me. My wife’ll kill me long before these things do.” He wrapped a plaid blanket around me, rather too tightly.

We passed the dry goods stores, the florists, the churches, and bakeries that lined the busy street. There was a gaping hole where they were building the new theater, in between two somber stone apartment buildings. Men were standing in the muddy maw passing stone blocks to one another. We passed blocks of rowhouses with windowboxes cascading ivy and geraniums and impatiens.

His house! Whatever small appeal the morning had was now lost. A studio was mysterious, exotic, peopled with men with fevered eyes. A house had lace antimacassars pinned to the furniture.

My father pulled out his pipe and the leather pouch in which he kept his tobacco, maybe hoping that in the process of packing and lighting and smoking he would entice the driver with the aroma. I was turned away from him but I could tell he was ready to speak.

“You know, Emilie,” he said, “this is a great honor for you.”

I wanted to say that I had ridden in a carriage before, when Pauline had scarlet fever, but I didn’t.

“Yes, Father,” I said instead.

“And for our family,” he continued. “I trust that you won’t do anything to jeopardize our good opinion of you.”

“No, Father.”

“I expect to receive a full report on your performance from Mr. Klimt at the end of the lesson.”

With a nod of his head, the interview was over. I was free to turn back to the window. We had passed the train station and things had started to change. A bareheaded man in a bright red vest was selling what looked like small pieces of paper.

“What is that man doing?” I asked my father. He explained that the man was a charlatan. He sold fortunes, the cheapest ones preprinted on a card, the more expensive ones written out after a consultation. The flowers in the florist’s were limp and tinged with brown, like burned toast. A knife-sharpener pushed his cart. Three wizened old men with white beards were lurking outside a bakery, waiting for the day-old bread.

“Have you ever been to Klimt’s house?” I asked nervously, forgetting to call him Mister, but my father didn’t notice.

“Of course,” he said. He, too, looked a little nervous. “Now that the boys are working they’re doing fine. Their house is very serviceable.”

It was a tiny cottage covered in creeping vines that were just starting to turn a brilliant red. The tiny panes of the casement windows gave the façade a medieval look. On one side was a brick tenement, on the other, a cannery. The neighborhood smelled of fish and sulfur from the nearby smelter.

My father opened the gate and hesitated there as I went through. He seemed uncertain whether or not to leave. He followed me up the steps and rang the bell. Then he took out his pocket watch and looked at its ivory face.

“It’s quarter past nine,” he said. “I’ll be back at eleven.” He handed the watch to me and I put it in the pocket of my coat. “I’ll expect you to be ready.” I didn’t ask him how he would be there on time if he didn’t have a watch. He was never late.

Holding the watch gave me courage when the door opened and Mrs. Klimt appeared. She was a tiny woman who had the wrinkled, tanned face and rough hands of someone who had worked outdoors for many years. Her gray hair was pinned in a haphazard knot on top of her head, and her apron was variegated with ancient stains that had not washed out.

“Come in,” she said grimly. Her bright eyes took in my neatly combed hair, my coat, a gray-purple felt with a plum velveteen collar and trim. She pulled it from my shoulders and held it in her arms like an infant. I even saw her stroke it.

She led me into the dining room and sat me down at the table. Then she left with my coat. I was afraid she might squirrel it away somewhere and I’d only see it again on the back of some farmer’s daughter at the Naschmarkt, but I had to give it to her. Later I realized that she admired a good coat the way an engineer might admire someone else’s ingenious architectural plans. She knew the work that had gone into it, and appreciated it. All I knew then was that it was expensive.

I wondered what I was supposed to do. I had brought a pad of paper and a sheaf of pencils. The paper was cheap newsprint. I could see wood chips in it. I put a pencil to the paper but didn’t know what I might want to draw. Of course, that was what teachers were for.

Mrs. Klimt returned with a dirty-looking smock.

“Put this on over your dress,” she said. “Can’t have that merino getting soiled, it’s too good.”

I put it on, wondering if the smock would dirty my dress more than the art lesson. It smelled faintly of clay, which wasn’t unpleasant. Mrs. Klimt sat down next to me.

“Lovely day,” I said politely. She said nothing, but continued to stare at me without speaking. Was I supposed to keep trying to make conversation, or not? I smiled at her, but she didn’t smile back. In fact, the wrinkles between her eyebrows deepened, as if she were looking at something very far away.

There was nothing in the room to suggest that an art lesson was going to happen. It was an ordinary dining room, like ours, only shabbier. The carpet was worn to the backing and the soot-blackened windows turned the light sepia. The table was rather primitive-looking and several of the chairs had broken legs, including the one I was sitting in, but the red cotton cloth on the table was embroidered with yellow flowers, and the china cabinet was full.

When Klimt came in a few minutes later, he carried the by now familiar toolbox. Without so much as a look at me he set it on the table and began pulling out bits of chalk, stubs of pencils, erasers that looked like gobs of glue, some discolored sponges, and rags stiff with paint. They were as mysterious to me as Egyptian artifacts.

“Here’s what we need,” he said brightly, holding up a piece of charcoal he’d dug from the bottom of the box.

“I brought pencils,” I said, showing him the brand-new tin case.

“It’s too early for pencils,” he said. “Charcoal first, then pencils.”