The Painted Kiss (9 page)

O
ne winter morning I woke up and saw that the amber sky was spitting snow. In my classroom the wind would whistle through the gaps where the windowsills had warped, and my desk was next to the window, by my own choice. From it I could watch the nuns gliding to prayers, or unlocking the big gate on their way to bring food or medicine to the poor. They weren’t very interesting, but it was better than paying attention. But on that day it would be too cold to press my forehead to the glass. I would shiver through the test on French verbs and my Goethe recitation. It was a day that demanded feigned illness.

At first I just planned to stay at home in bed. It wasn’t difficult to convince my mother of this plan; she believed in bed rest for everything from headaches to indigestion to skin rashes. She brought me a fat hot water bottle and a steaming drink of lemon and honey. I half-hoped she might stay with me, read something to me or play a card game, but she was going marketing. Everyone else had left already for work or school. All of a sudden the apartment was eerily quiet. Even the street noise was muffled by the snow.

Helene had recently bought a Parisian fashion paper with her birthday money. I got it and propped myself up on my pillows, intending to read, but my French wasn’t good enough for it to be effortless, so I just looked at the pictures. It was a winter preview issue. There were pages of women in walking suits, tight little jackets with jabots of lace at the throat. The skirts were pleated or gathered, bustled or peplumed in back. The hats were tall and plumed. The tea dresses were filmy concoctions buried under bows and lace and ribbons. They said that blue was the color of the season: ice blue, sky blue, dove gray. The ball gowns were fantastic, silk brocade creations, with bows at the shoulders and tightly cinched belts. They were hugely crinolined. I admired the ball gowns but thought they looked uncomfortable. I liked the bicycling costume the best: velveteen bloomers and a double-breasted jacket of the same material. The girl in the drawing looked exuberant and proud.

Most of the drawings weren’t very well done: cow-eyed women with extremely long torsos so out of proportion they’d never be able to stand up in real life. With my pencil I lopped off most of their bosoms, and their posture immediately improved. I raised their waists and they smiled gratefully. In the margins I drew my own ladies; their heads were the right size for their bodies, their corsets were loosened by inches and their dresses had lost most of the furbelows. It made me feel better.

I’d had a racy novel hidden under my bed for weeks, waiting for the right opportunity, so I tried that next. The wrongfully accused and fleeing marquess had been shipwrecked and was hiding in the castle of the mysterious and ill-tempered lord by the time I decided that racy novels were only amusing if Helene was there to laugh at them with me. Unfortunately she was going to her friend Amelie’s after school and wouldn’t be back until seven or eight o’clock. After awhile I got up and looked out, just to make sure the world hadn’t disappeared.

Outside the window the street was dim and turbulent as the snow fell faster and faster. It was hypnotizing in its changing patterns. As I watched my breath fogged the window and I wiped it with my sleeve, but that made it blurry, so I leaned to the left. The few people on the streets had their shawls wrapped tightly and their hats bent to the wind. They pulled the shop doors open and the gusts of air slammed the doors shut behind them.

You’d think this sight would reinforce my desire to stay inside, but instead it made me lonely and restless. I got dressed before I had announced to myself where I was going to go, but there was never any real question. I opened Pauline’s underwear drawer to fish out the fare, a by now familiar habit. In the months we’d been going to the studio, she had never counted it. At least she had never said anything. I hoped she’d win another prize before we used it all. I put on my second-best boots and tied a scarf over my head and went out the back door of the building in case any of our neighbors happened to be watching the front.

The studio would be even colder than the schoolroom, but it would be lit up and active and loud. There would be jokes, and laughter. I could walk on my hands if I felt like it, though at fifteen I was too old for gymnastics. Gustav had been known to juggle oranges when he was waiting for an answer to a problem. There would be sweets, and the earthen smells of pigments.

I passed the little park down the street from our building. Some intrepid children had convinced their governesses to take them out. The governesses stamped their feet underneath the one sheltering larch. They were young and from the country and soon they would trade in these miserable children for a lower level civil servant and a ticket to the Office of Transportation’s annual Fasching ball. For now, though, they playfully warmed their noses on one another’s necks and gossiped about Thilde’s recent engagement.

A boy in a red coat with glinting brass buttons lay down in the snow and began flapping his arms to make a snow angel, and was promptly and roughly brought to his feet by his stout guardian and pulled away. Two little girls with golden hair streaming out of their hoods crouched and patted snowballs gently with matching green mittens. Under my clothes my skin was already pink and itching with the cold, and it made me want to fall into a snowdrift myself to cool the burning, but my new gray coat made my eyes look very blue, and my dress had real Valenciennes lace on the collar and cuffs, and I didn’t want either of them to get wet or dirty. As I passed I was hit from behind by a snowball, but it was light dry snow and broke apart on impact. I turned, but the little girls were innocently patting and the boy was digging a cave with his back to me.

I packed a snowball and tossed it. It hit the park’s wrought iron fence and powdery shrapnel blew into the faces of the startled governesses. I ran, gulping the icy air and watching for slick passages on the sidewalk. I got a stitch in my side from laughing and running at the same time, but I didn’t care, I was so intoxicated by the freedom of being out alone.

On the streetcar to Leopoldstadt I peeked at a theatrical paper over the shoulder of a woman with waxy skin. There was a drawing of the inside of the Burgtheater that I recognized as Gustav’s. He’d shown it to me months before. I wanted to tell the woman that the man who drew it was my drawing teacher, but she’d probably call the conductor, thinking me crazy. Instead I tried to read the articles and to siphon warmth from the woman’s rabbit coat.

I was aware that some of the women on the streetcar were looking at me with disapproval, so I tried to look as if I were on an important errand: laudanum for my dying father, or belladonna for my brother who had whooping cough. The conductor took the ticket from my hand and looked at it closely, as if I might have cheated somehow. I waited breathlessly until he punched and went on. The circles of white confetti floated to the floor. The men on the streetcar read the papers or stared straight ahead. They seemed not to see anything that passed the windows. I wondered how they got off at the right stop. Perhaps they counted.

It was December 1889. In two years I would be out of school. Pauline had already finished and was taking a secretarial course. We weren’t rich enough for her to enter society, but we were too well off for her to take most kinds of jobs. The secretarial course sounded horrible, but she didn’t seem to mind it. She helped with the bills at home and had a bookkeeping ledger and a sheet of carbon paper that she carried with her all the time. In the spring Helene would be finished, but I couldn’t imagine her in a secretarial course. Perhaps they would let her study music. Eventually she might be good enough to sing with the Opera.

As for me, I was an absentminded but competent student. I had no interest in science or medicine. In order to go to university in those days a woman had to be brilliant and highly motivated, and I was neither. I wasn’t musical like Helene. I felt most alive in the studio, but what that meant I had no idea.

Neither my parents nor teachers had ever expressed the slightest suspicion of me or what I might be up to, which says more about the preoccupation of my parents and the innocence of my teachers than it does about my cunning. If Helene hadn’t been there to anxiously watch the clock, I would have frequently been late getting home, and there would have been questions, but she was there, and we were never late. It never seemed to occur to the nuns that we might lie, and they believed our breathless stories about an illness at home with perfect faith. At home, Father attended to his business, and Mother slept and composed. As long as we didn’t lose weight, cough incessantly, fail in our examinations, or get expelled, all was well as far as they were concerned.

The streetcar deposited me a few blocks from the factory building that housed the studio, and when I arrived I looked up to see if the lamps were lit. They were. I smelled challah baking as I went up the stairs. I tripped on a loose nail and fell heavily against the banister. I half expected Gustav to poke his head out and drop something on me from above. He had done that to Ernst once, with eggs. But there was no sound above me. When I got to the studio door, I paused for a moment and listened. The artists were usually so loud that the baker next door was continually opening his window to yell across, waving his rolling pin. But I didn’t hear anything. Maybe someone had left the lamps lit, a fire hazard and a waste of kerosene. They would thank me when they found out that I had come by and put them out.

I pushed the door open. The floor was gritty under my feet and little sandy puddles began to form under my boots. Rivulets of water melted from my hair down my face and into my mouth. I had forgotten to wear a hat. No wonder the ladies on the streetcar had looked at me. Only a slattern went out without a hat. The melting snowflakes tasted like buttermilk soap, rich and salty. I stared silently into the studio, frozen stiff like a squirrel in the path of an oncoming cart. Gustav was alone in the studio, or rather he was the lone artist there. His hair was disheveled and he looked tense and taut, wound like a watch. He frowned with his whole face, but his eyes caught the lamplight and glowed like a cat’s. I had never seen him look like that before.

The lamps were hung above the dais in the middle of the room. It was piled with blankets peaked like meringue. They looked as soft as a baby chick. On the blankets were two women I had never seen before. They moved continuously, quite unlike the way models were normally instructed to behave. They writhed and twisted and the white downy blankets twisted around their bodies. Their silk robes, Chinese red and yellow, were crumpled on the floor near the platform. They were intertwined, the two women, like serpents, a Celtic pattern of thighs and spines and necks and red and black trailing hair. Their bodies braided like silk dress trim. Woven together like warp and weft. Both were laughing as they paused at short intervals to let Gustav make a sketch. They nipped and slapped and licked. Laughing. The shadows on their bodies were smudged in the yellow light. I watched the shadows moving. It was beautiful, this shadow play. I don’t know how long I stood there. Long enough for it to stop snowing and the sun to pierce the clouds painfully and to harshen the shadows and light the orange-haired woman like a sunset.

The black-haired woman looked up and saw me. Smiled. Gustav was deep in concentration and I tried to back out of the room before he noticed me, but the model said his name and flicked a shoulder in my direction. He dropped his pencil. Told the models to stop. The many-limbed creature ceased its frolicking and the disentangled pieces became two women again.

He was at my side, kissing me on the cheek. “You look frozen,” he said. “I thought we said Thursday. And why aren’t you in school?”

“Sick,” I gasped.

“You sound terrible. Let me make you some tea.” He was being gentle, pulling me into the room and out of my coat. He sat me down on the plush blankets. He did not snap at me for interrupting. That alone was enough to make my stomach knot and the nausea rise.

The models had slid into their robes and were heading toward the changing room. He called them over. The red-haired one was flushed and her chest was mottled. She was very thin but I was shocked to see the protuberance where the baby was. I hadn’t noticed it before. She hunched her shoulders over her belly as if to protect it. She had blue circles under her eyes. The black-haired one looked me in the eye; I felt that she was laughing at me.

“Emilie Flöge,” said Gustav, “meet Minna and Helga.” They nodded; neither dared offer me her hand. I recoiled from them, barely able to mouth a greeting. They frightened me, the upthrust belly of one, the grin of the other.

“They live in Hietzing,” he added, irrelevantly. I managed a nod. For a moment no one said anything. Then Helga slapped Minna on the behind.

“Get moving, you scrawny thing.” They sauntered away, and once dressed, they left without saying good-bye; apparently they were regulars and knew when to return and when they would be paid.

Though they had gone, their afterimages lingered, fluttering like bats’ wings at the corners of my vision. When I closed my eyes, the blocks of color floating on the inside of my eyelids were bloody and golden. I wrapped one of the blankets around myself, but it was not as soft as it had looked from afar. It made me itch. Gustav stood at the stove and watched the water boil. He was saying something about arithmetic, how I was so good at fractions and must help him with the proportions on one of his drawings. Ernst was home with a cold, he’d always been delicate, Gustav had made him promise to get some rest. Poor Emilie, she probably caught her cold from him. And Franz, he was off somewhere with one of his girlfriends, he said, and then winced. I mean, he’s having lunch with his mother and his sisters, very genteel people, very correct. They didn’t like his being an artist, they thought it was vulgar. He winced again. It pained me to hear him try to censor things for my benefit.