The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (2 page)

—all the machinations and intricate webs of intrigue perpetrated by its patrons.

Since Sargent was the reigning king of portraiture, my own style had slowly metamorphosed into a slightly less resilient copy of his slick realism. I should say I had a bet-ter take on it than most of my contemporaries who were following suit, but still, there was only one Sargent, and I was not he. The money and a certain fame came along all the same, though, and I had, almost without realizing it, done for myself what I had recently done for Mrs. Reed. With much less to lose than she, I also had opted for the definite but invisible boundary of the goldfish bowl and so was also withering inside like those cut flowers ensconced in the ornate vase that was my life.

As I walked on, the fresh air doing its job, it became clear to me that the important question was not

"What have I become?" but more "What am I now to do?" How was I to return to myself and paint something of worth before I grew too old to care, too weak to try? I turned and looked at my shadowed self passing in the glass of a shop window, and it was at that moment I remembered a paint-ing I had seen at the National Academy of Design a year or so earlier. That work was titled

The Race Track or

The Reverse and had been painted by the enigmatic Albert Pinkham Ryder, originally of New Bedford.

He now resided at an undistinguished address on East Eleventh Street and worked in a cramped, run-down attic studio on Fifteenth. I had met him briefly through Richard Gilder, the editor of

Century

Magazine, who was a neighbor of mine in Gramercy.

The painting was harrowing in its imagery of the fig-ure of skeletal Death wielding a scythe while riding atop a horse racing alone clockwise around a track. In the fore-ground was a writhing serpent and in the background a lowering sky rendered in shades of ochre, burnt sienna, and some indistinguishable but lurking scarlet that, together, perfectly captured the somber stillness
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preceding a storm. The piece projected the raw emotion of dread, and anyone brave enough to have purchased it and hung it in a parlor would have been inviting a nightmare into their home.

That picture had truths to tell and was the oppo-site of the technically perfect, stylistically safe work of Sargent's that was so popular with the moneyed class.

Gilder had told me that Ryder painted it after hearing the story of a waiter who had worked in his brother's hotel. The poor fellow had scrupulously saved five thou-sand dollars and then lost it in one fell swoop on a single race at Hanover. Following his loss he committed suicide. This then was Ryder's eulogy for him.

Ryder sold his work when there were buyers, but he worked regardless of money, toiling to capture those things in paint that could not be expressed in words. By all accounts he was a strange fellow, somewhat shy and retir-ing, who used anything at hand on his paintings—alcohol, candle wax, varnish, oil. When his brushes failed him, he supposedly used the palette knife to spread thick gobs of paint.

When the knife failed him, he used his hands, and when the varnish did not bring forth the quality he desired, it was said he used his own spit. He would paint a picture and, before it dried, paint another over it. I would not say he was naive, but when I met him I sensed a pal-pable innocence about him.

With his calm demeanor, his large stature and full beard, he struck me as being like a biblical prophet.

I remembered encountering one of his seascapes when I was a young apprentice to my mentor, M.

Sabott. It was of a small boat in a wild ocean, and it radiated the over-whelming power of Nature and

the courage of the insignificant sailor in the prow. Sabott, who stood next to me, labeled it a muddle.

"This fellow is like a baby paint-ing with his own shit upon the nursery wall. The sign of a master is restraint," he said, and for some time that assessment stuck with me when I would happen upon one of his canvases at Cottier & Co., his gallery, or at one of the juried shows. Sabott may have had a point, but oh, to be that baby once again and revel in that singular vision, ignoring the Reeds of the world and their wealth.

An acquaintance of Ryder's had once quoted to me something the painter had written to him in a letter. It went like this: "Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve for a moment in the air, feeling for something, to reach something? That's like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing."

I made a left at Twenty-first Street and headed toward my address, realizing that this was precisely what I needed. The trick was to reach beyond the safety of my present existence and rediscover myself as an artist. My only fear was that in reaching out, I might grasp nothing. I had already surmounted the crest of my years and begun on the denouement. Or let us say, I could feel the quick-ening wind in my thinning hair. What if I were to fail and on top of it lose my position as one of the most sought after portraitists in New York? I thought again of Ryder's painting of Death on horseback, and then of the fool who had saved and squandered everything at once. After all my serious contemplation I was more confused than ever. The pursuit of wealth and safety and the pursuit of a kind of moral truth had ingeniously changed horses, so to speak, in midstream. My longing to be other than what I was had risen to the surface, fraught with good intention, and then burst like a bubble in champagne. I shook my head, laughing aloud at my predicament, and that is when I felt something lightly strike my left shin.

I looked up to see a man leaning against the wall, and it gave me quite a start. I composed myself and said, "Excuse me, sir," not without an air of irritation. He with-drew the black walking stick
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with which he had accosted me, and stepped forward. He was quite large but old, with a short white beard and a ring of white hair forming a perimeter to his otherwise bald scalp. His three-piece suit was pale violet, given interesting undertones of green by the glow of the street lamp near the curb. This unusual play of light took my attention for a moment until I looked him in the face and was startled by the discovery that his eyes had lost the distinction of pupil and iris and clouded to a uniform whiteness.

"I believe you are the one who signs his paintings

Piambo,"

he said.

Anything ill to do with the eyes truly upsets me, and it took me a few moments to recover from the sight of his. "Yes," I said.

"Watkin is the name," he said.

"And?" I asked, expecting him to put the touch on me for some change.

"My employer would like to commission you to paint her portrait," he said in a soft voice that held a hint of menace in its precision.

"I'm afraid I'm engaged for months to come," I said, wanting to be on my way.

"It must be now," he said. "She will have no other but you."

"I admire the good woman's taste, but I'm afraid I have given my word on these other projects."

"This is a job like no other," he said. "You can name your price. Take all the other commissions you have given your word on, tally the amount you would have received, and she will triple it."

"Who is your employer?" I asked.

He reached into the pocket of his jacket and retrieved a rose-colored envelope. The manner in which he prof-fered it, not so much to me but to the universe at large, assured me now that he was blind.

I hesitated, sensing that I did not want to become involved with this Mr. Watkin, but there was something in the way he had said "a job like no other" that made me finally reach out and take it.

"I will consider it," I said.

"Good enough, good enough," he said, smiling.

"How did you know to find me here?" I asked.

"Intuition," he said. With this, he angled the walking stick out in front of him, turned to face west, and brushed past me. He intermittently tapped the tip of the stick against the building facades as he went.

"How did you know it was me?" I called after him.

Before he disappeared into the night, I heard him say, "The smell of self-satisfaction; a pervasive aroma of nut-meg and mold."

First Wind of Autumn

According to my pocket watch it was 2:05 A.M. by the time I finally arrived home. The creak of the door closing behind me echoed faintly through the still rooms. I immediately turned on all the lamps in the parlor and the front hallway (electricity had recently come to Gramercy) and set about building a fire in the main fire-place to offset the sudden appearance of autumn. I threw an extra log on as if to cure the chill that had spread through me from the inside out upon hearing that damn Watkin's closing remarks.

The mold part of his assessment I had a vague understanding of, like a ghost creaking floorboards in the attic of my conscience, but nutmeg?

"What in hell does nutmeg have to do with anything?" I said aloud, and shook my head.

I knew that no matter how late the hour, sleep would not readily come. A nervous tension resulting from the incident at Reed's and my subsequent crackpot rumina-tions had left me wide awake, with no recourse but another visit with the demon rum. I picked up a glass, the bottle of whisky, and my cigarettes and retired to my stu-dio, where I always did my best thinking. That
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vast space was also wired for electricity, but I chose to leave the lamps off and instead light a single candle, hoping the shadows might lull me into weariness.

The studio, which was attached to the back of my house, was nearly as large as the living quarters.

Ironically, it was the wealth that resulted from those por-traits I had spent all night disparaging that enabled me to design and have the studio built to my exact specifications. I had included a fireplace to allow me to work there in any season. Three large tables topped with expensive teak-wood, which was hard enough to resist the insults of pen nibs, razors, and pallet knives, were positioned around the room.

One held my painting equipment; another, the materials I sometimes used to make wax models as studies; and the last, which I did not bother with much anymore, the stones and various inks and solutions for lithographs.

My drafting board, its surface composed of the same hardwood as the tabletops, was an outlandishly ornate piece of furniture with lion paws for feet and alternating cherub and demon faces decorating the legs. During one of his frequent visits, Shenz had said, "I don't believe I could muster the presumption to create upon that altar."

The most remarkable aspect of the studio was the system of pulleys and gears that operated the overhead skylight. By merely turning a crank handle, I could draw back the ceiling and allow the fresh light of morning to flood the room. When lit by the sun, what with all the materials, the paintings lining the walls, the drips and puddles of bright color everywhere, the place appeared to be a kind of wonderland of art. That night, though, as I sat there sipping my whisky in the dim glow of the single taper, it showed quite another side. If it were possible to peer through the eye of a madman into the chamber of his mind, it might resemble the shadowed, cluttered mess I now beheld.

The failed and refused portraits that hung on all four walls of the studio made up the family I had only recently so longed for in my midlife loneliness—a dozen or so of kin, framed, suspended by tacks and wire, glazed into stasis, and composed not of flesh but of dried pigment. The blood of my line was linseed oil and turpentine. It had never before struck me with so much force how poor a substitute they were for the real thing. My own dogged pursuit of fortune had brought me many fine things, but now they all seemed less substantial than the trail of smoke rising from my cigarette. My gaze followed its spiraling upward course, while my mind drew me back and back, rummaging through my memories of earlier days. I sought to recall the precise moment when those seeds were planted that would latently germinate and blossom into the present flower of my discontent.

My family had come to America from Florence some-time back in the early 1830s and settled on the North Fork of Long Island, which at the time was little more than pas-ture and wood. The name

Piambotto, my full surname, was well known as far back as the Renaissance as belong-ing to a line of

artisans and artists. There is mention in Vasari of a certain Piambotto who had been a famous painter.

Although my grandfather had been forced to take up farming when arriving in the New World, he had continued to paint gorgeous landscapes every bit as accomplished as those of Cole or Constable. Until but a few years ago, I would still see his work from time to time at auction or hanging in a gallery. He, of course, retained the name Piambotto, as did my father. It was I, now living in this whirlwind age of truncated moments with an emphasis on brevity, who shortened it.

I signed my work Piambo, and to one and all I was Piambo. I don't believe even my intimate friend, Samantha Rying, knew I had spent my early years speaking Italian and that my first name was really Piero.

My family moved from the wilds of eastern Long Island to Brooklyn during the building boom that prompted some to think that eventually Manhattan would become merely an addendum to its neighboring borough. My father was an interesting fellow, reminiscent of the ancient Greek Daedalus in that he was a supreme artificer. He was a remarkable draftsman and an equally accomplished inventor who had the ability to give physi-cal form to the varied products of his imagination. I was too young at the time to remember exactly how things transpired, but during the Civil War, because of his renown as a machinist and engineer (he was completely self-taught in both fields), he was solicited by the powers in Washington to create weapons of war for the Union army. In addition to making some parts to, of all things, a submarine, he also designed and built a weapon called the Dragon. It was a kind of cannon that used compressed nitrogen to shoot a stream of oil that was ignited as it spewed forth. It could hurl flames at advancing troops from a distance of twenty yards. I remember having seen it tested and can tell you it was aptly named. This strange piece of artillery was used just once, at the battle of Chinochik Creek, and its results were so horrific that the Union commander given responsibility for its first deployment refused to use it again. He returned it to Washington accompanied by a letter describing the ungodly scene of rebel soldiers "running, screaming, con-sumed in flames.