The Painted Kiss (6 page)

Reluctantly I held out my hand for the gray shard. Why a piece of burned, compressed wood no bigger than my pinkie was a better tool than a pencil, I had no idea, but I had to obey him. As his hand touched mine I saw that there were calluses on the inside of his middle finger and on his thumb. Would I get them, too? The hands of young ladies were supposed to be very smooth and white. Every Saturday we bathed ours in buttermilk and scrubbed the freckles off with lemon juice.

“Don’t worry,” he said, “charcoal is hard enough to use, you’ll see.”

I looked down at my paper and said nothing.

He sat down across from me. “Now what’s wrong?” he said. “And don’t tell me everything’s fine. You have a transparent face.”

That was a horrifying statement, and I blushed and tried not to blush and blushed even more. “I wish we could go to your studio,” I said. “This place doesn’t seem very artistic.”

Klimt laughed and pushed the front legs of his chair off of the floor, leaning back. “There’s nothing magic about the studio, I promise. But if you like I’ll take you there sometime if you’ll stop frowning for a little while.”

“The studio’s no place for a young lady,” said Mrs. Klimt, giving me a stern look.

“But won’t we get your nice dining room all dirty?” I asked politely.

“As long as you are presentable when you go back to your mother, that’s all I care about,” said Mrs. Klimt. “I wouldn’t want her upset with me.” I wondered if she knew my mother. Did she know that my mother could forget who we were for weeks at a time?

I examined the charcoal in my hand. It was long and thin and incredibly light. It imprinted my fingers with a gray shadow.

“Are you ready?” asked Klimt.

“But where’s the easel?” I asked in surprise.

“Today we’ll sit at the table,” said Klimt. He swept the red cloth aside. Mrs. Klimt took it up, folded it, and put it on her lap. Then he taped a sheet of paper to the table and pulled a brick out of the toolbox. I tried to guess what the brick might be for. To keep the paper from blowing away? To sharpen the chalk? He placed the brick in front of me and stood with his arms folded. I waited.

“Well,” he said. He looked at me expectantly. The morning sun made his eyes blue and brilliant, too brilliant to look at directly. I looked at his beard instead.

“Well what?”

“Draw.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What am I supposed to draw?”

He nodded toward the brick.

“Draw the brick?” I said incredulously.

“That’s right,” he said. “Draw the brick.”

“But it’s just…a brick.” I knew I sounded like an idiot.

“And what is a brick?” he said. He sounded like he was teaching a very young child. Was this a joke? But he was waiting.

“I don’t know, clay that’s baked in an oven…”

“Stoneware is clay baked in an oven, too, but you wouldn’t confuse a pitcher with this brick, now, would you?”

This wasn’t how a drawing lesson was supposed to go. I should have been sketching a bowl of fruit, or some bottles, like we used to do in school with our art teacher. I didn’t know how to respond. “No, sir,” I said.

He laughed. “I know you think I’m insane,” he said, “but this was my very first lesson in art school when I was eleven, and it will be yours. Try to give me a better definition. It won’t hurt.”

I took a deep breath. “A brick is a rectangular piece of clay that is fired in an oven and used as a building material.”

“Excellent. Now forget everything we’ve just said and draw what you see.”

I picked up the charcoal and drew a rectangle. I didn’t even fill it in. It took ten seconds. I put the charcoal back down and placed my hands in my lap.

“Are you finished?” he said. I nodded.

“Interesting,” he said thoughtfully. He picked up the paper and looked at it closely. “That’s really what you saw?”

Why was he being so deliberately stupid? “Yes, sir,” I said. “That’s what I saw.”

“All right.” He smiled. “Your next assignment is to look at the brick for twenty minutes, and then draw it again.”

“I have to look at it for twenty minutes?”

“I will time you. Begin.”

I thought I would die of boredom. The brick sat there in front of me, dull and solid. I looked at it. Mrs. Klimt was still sitting next to me. She had not shown surprise or amusement at anything that had happened. She was staring into the kitchen, as if she were thinking about the pies she had in the oven. Probably she was. The tablecloth was still in her lap. Some of the flowers had missed stitches in them. Many of the flowers had black yarn outlining the petals. I looked at the shelf across from me, where a parlor ivy in a ceramic pot appeared to be slowly dying. Below it, two china shepherdesses glared at one another, vying for possession of a lone china sheep. Klimt sat in front of me, idly whistling and drawing. I looked at his paper. He was drawing the brick.

He felt me looking at him.

“You have ten more minutes,” he said.

“Why are you drawing it?” I asked. “You’re an artist already.”

“Because an artist can always learn by looking, no matter how mundane the object.”

His answer shamed me into looking at the thing I was supposed to be drawing.

It was red. A dark-orange red, like stewed tomatoes. Parts of it looked burned black, and parts of it looked charred to ash. It was pockmarked. There were grooves on one end of it. I picked it up. Some brick dust crumbled onto the table. I looked at Klimt to see if this was all right, but he was not paying any attention to me. He was bent over his drawing with an eraser.

The corners of the brick weren’t straight, as I had thought. They wobbled like my voice when I tried to sing. How to make the object three-dimensional? How to show texture?

I looked at the clock. Three more minutes.

“This is too hard,” I said. My eyes were filled with tears of frustration. Surreptitiously I tried to wipe them away with my hands. Klimt looked up. He closed his sketchpad and put it on the floor.

“Now you’re ready to be taught,” he said. He turned his drawing around. It looked like a wedge of moldy cheese, yet there was no doubt that it was a brick, and there was no doubt it was the brick on the table in front of us. It was more detailed than a fingerprint.

“I can’t do that,” I said. The tears were in my throat, and I tried to cough them out.

“Of course you can’t,” he said. “At least not today. But if you keep looking, you will.”

At the end of the lesson I had several pages of what was supposed to be the brick, but looked more like a set of bruises. When our time was up he put the charcoal back in the box and locked it. He pulled the papers off of the table and asked me if I’d like to keep them. I shook my head. I thought he would crumple them into a ball and throw them in the stove, but he folded them carefully. Take them, he said. You’ll want to see these some day. You’ll laugh about it, he said. I found that hard to believe, but I agreed. Then he directed me to the sink where I could wash up. When I looked at myself in the mirror I saw that I had streaks of charcoal under my eyes where I had tried to wipe my tears away. I looked like a grieving widow. And he had never said anything.

I met my father at the door. “Wait here,” he said. “I need to speak to Mr. Klimt.”

I was afraid for the first time. My drawings were very bad, in spite of the fact that I had tried. I thought that Klimt must be annoyed that he had made such a mistake. He was telling my father that it wouldn’t work out after all. My father would be angry with me. He was going to tell me I was an embarrassment, that I had failed.

I sat in the carriage and waited for the inevitable. I hid myself under the blanket, but in spite of that I still shivered. Father came out to the carriage whistling “My Vienna,” which was unlike him. He did not look at all angry, but I thought maybe his cheerfulness was for the benefit of the driver.

“Would you like to stop at Demel’s on the way home? Don’t they have a chocolate walnut torte that you like?”

What had Klimt said to him? I never found out.

I showed my drawings to Helene when I got home.

“What are they supposed to be?” she asked. I told her.

“No wonder he picked you,” she said. “It’s going to cost a fortune before you can draw.” She brightened for a moment. “But you did these on purpose, right? So you wouldn’t have to go anymore?” She saw my face. “Oh.”

The next Saturday my father took me to Klimt’s house. And the next, and the next. Every Saturday I sat at the table with the red cloth. At the second lesson I progressed to spheres drawn with the flat of the charcoal, for volume. I drew with my eyes closed. I drew without looking at the paper. I drew in loops and squiggles, in one unbroken line, in sharp crosshatchings. I drew things I would never have thought to draw: a book lying open on the table, a dead pigeon. At the end of the lesson Mrs. Klimt always brought out raisin scones in a woven basket, and poured coffee for Klimt, steamed milk for me. I tried to unobtrusively pick out the raisins.

Klimt was generally patient and cheerful, but several things I did made him crazy. For one thing, after the first lesson I refused to wear the smock. I didn’t want to look ugly while I was drawing, I said. He reminded me that no one cared in the least what I looked like. Were Ingres’s drawings rejected by the Beaux Arts because his hair was awry? Was Toulouse-Lautrec barred from painting because he was deformed? But I was obdurate. When I got home I shook the charcoal dust from my dresses and brushed my shoes and coat, but my sisters still took to calling me the scullery maid.

I held the charcoal wrong, he said. It wasn’t a fistful of money, it was a skein of silk to be unwound. Held too tightly it would catch or snare. I said that if I held it too loosely I would drop it. He said held too tightly I would break it, that I was supposed to trust it. How can I trust it, I thought, when it gives me these horrible, ugly drawings? I drew better when I was a baby and I was allowed to scribble on the back of used wrapping paper. But I said nothing and tried to do as he asked.

But his main complaint was that I was too impatient, that I didn’t take enough time to look. I wanted to be good, but I didn’t want it enough to submit fully to the grueling apprenticeship. That was true. I was never patient. And at twelve it’s hard to look at anything for long, except oneself.

One Saturday he met me at the door and said we were going to the Volksgarten.

I had ridden with my father in the carriage for half an hour to get to his house. It was more than a half hour back to the center of town. Why hadn’t he made arrangements the week before? And how were we going to get there?

On the train, he said. Why were we going to the Volksgarten, I wanted to know. Was I going to draw flowers, or people, or the tempietto? I was to leave my sketchbook behind, he said. For an hour I was to do nothing but look. It seemed no different from looking out of the window, and was a welcome relief from the tedious exercises.

It was noisy on the train. We stood without speaking on the platform where the cars attached, as the train stopped and started. I concentrated on not losing my footing and accidentally bumping his sleeve.

We got off at the Karlsplatz. I had never been alone with him before and I had no idea what to say as we walked. I waited and looked down at my skirt, whipping itself into whitecaps in the wind. The speckled leaves under my feet were as soggy as bread dipped in milk. We had spent so many bright fall Saturdays sitting indoors, why had he decided that today was the day to go to the park? Was he exasperated by my poor performance? Was he tired of giving me lessons?

“There’s the Kunstlerhaus,” he said, finally, pointing at a grand building. “All the artists meet there, they post the calls for submissions on the wall there, we have lectures and shows.”

“It’s pretty,” I said politely.

“Do you really think so?” he said, and stopped walking. “Or did you just say what you think I wanted to hear?” He turned me by the shoulders and faced me toward the building. I felt caught out.

“Of course it’s not pretty,” I said. “The bottom is too delicate for the top, or the top is too heavy for the bottom, and all those marble carvings are just vulgar.”

He laughed. “That’s my girl. You’ll never offend me with the truth, remember that.”

“Why is the artist’s building so ugly?” I asked.

“Because of committees,” he said. “A committee tries to appease everyone and ends up with the worst parts of all the ideas that are discussed. The Kunstlerhaus is full of committees. I’m on one myself, the Traveling Show committee. We try to bring the work of foreign artists like Pissarro or Turner or Burne-Jones here so people can see them. But the Finance committee wants to abolish the Traveling Show committee on the grounds that it costs too much, and absorb it into the general Exhibition committee. That’s the latest controversy. Artists are horribly political.”

“So you think it would be better if the Kunstlerhaus was a monarchy?” I asked pointedly. I don’t know why I said that. I suppose I was showing off; we’d been studying political systems in school.

“Yes, with me as king,” he said teasingly. “What’s wrong with that?”

I shrugged, because I didn’t really care who ran the Kunstlerhaus, and paused to look in the window of a bakery we were passing, where a particularly delicious-looking caramel cake sat atop a crystal cake plate.