The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (24 page)

"Shenz," he said to my friend, and stepped forward to shake his hand.

"Goren," said Shenz, "meet Piambo, the fellow I told you about."

"The painter," said Goren as his hand clasped mine.

"You are the Man from the Equator," I said.

He nodded.

"From where along the equator do you hail?" I asked.

"Brooklyn," he said.

"I grew up there myself. Some of its parts, I would guess, are as exotic as Madagascar," I said.

"And you would be right," he said, smiling. "Come, we can talk in the shop."

The effects of Shenz's cigarette were still upon me but had settled into a feeling of weary comfort. I

thought the optical curiosities I had witnessed during the cab ride had abated, but as we left the sunlit plant room, I turned to glance out-of-doors, and just then, framed by a long pane of glass, I saw a configuration of brown leaves falling that was the precise image on Mrs. Charbuque's screen. With my sudden recognition of the design, the leaves froze in midfall for a good two seconds before continuing to the ground. I shook my head and followed Goren and Shenz back into the dim cave of homeopathy.

Goren sat behind a low table in the rear corner of the shop. Two chairs were positioned nearby, indicating that people occasionally stopped in to chat. Shenz and I sat down, and when we were all three settled, the owl flew in and perched atop a large globe that rested upon a colum-nar stand.

The Man from the Equator began by giving me a brief resume of his accomplishments. I
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suppose this was to persuade me that his words had merit. In short, he was a doctor trained at the University of

Pennsylvania. He had, from youth, been a loner who liked to wander. Once he had become a physician, he could not settle down but decided to travel the world. He moved off the beaten path, to wild and remote corners of the globe, and in these places witnessed the medical practices of shamans and witch doctors who rendered remarkable cures. When he returned to civilization, he brought back with him the cures he had collected, and set about a course of locating and studying ancient texts in order to cull more.

He inter-spersed all this information with snippets of hermetic and transcendental philosophy that I could not follow and at which it appeared even the owl was rolling its eyes.

"And so," Goren finally concluded, "for some reason our mutual friend, Shenz here, thinks that I can offer you a way of thinking about this commission of yours that will enable you to be ultimately successful."

"Can you?" I asked.

Let me begin by saying that the entire pursuit strikes me as being wonderfully absurd. I have found in the past that it is often extremely worthwhile to contemplate the seemingly impossible.

There is much to be gained by it. One is presented with a brick wall, and the first thing one thinks is, 'How am I going to get around this brick wall?' Instead, you must change your thinking.

Meditate upon the existence of the brick wall. Study the brick wall past the point of frustration, until it becomes fascinating. In short, become the brick wall."

"At this point, I am at least as immobile in the face of this problem as a brick wall might be," I said.

"He's always been as thick as a brick wall," Shenz added.

Goren did not smile. "Do you see this image behind me?" he said, pointing to a page ripped from a book and affixed to the wall with a nail. It was a circle, containing equal parts of white and black. They were not divided down the middle but swirled around each other while remaining distinct. In the largest dollop of each lay a small circle filled with the color of its opposite.

"Yin and yang," said Goren. "Do you know what they mean?"

I shook my head.

"Ancient Chinese symbols meant to describe the sun and moon—the fundamental concepts of the universe— but also having implications for the nature of the human drama. The white and the black are the opposing forces that make up the universe. They are constantly moving, changing, affecting each other. This action is the heart of existence. Light and dark, good and evil, yes and no, male and female, hardness and softness, intelligence and igno-rance, you see?"

"Twins of a type," said Shenz, "yet opposites."

"When they are balanced, there is health, there is understanding, there is the potential for creativity.

Hence one desires always to reside at the equator. When that balance is disturbed, there is illness and chaos," said Goren.

"My yin and yang are out of balance," I said.

"Now notice this," said Goren, tracing the boundary that contained the yin and yang. "Think of it as an atom, the smallest particle of matter. Each atom contains the full nature of the universe, just as each individual, like a god, contains within his mind the entirety of the universe. Think of the insignificant size of your brain in relation to the immensity of the ocean, yet your mind can encompass the vastness of that entity in a single thought, with room left over for the Parthenon, the entire layout of New York City, the pyramids, and more. To quote Emily Dickinson, 'A brain is wider than the sky.' This concept goes as far back as the earliest recorded human thought. It can be traced from the

Tao Te Ching to the teach-ings of Buddha to Pythagoras to Plato to Averroe to Giordano Bruno to Emerson and my personal friend Walt Whitman."

Here the owl had had enough and rose into the air.

"Do you see what I am telling you?" he said.

"No," I whispered, feeling as if I were back in school and forced to decipher outlandish numbers.

"You, Piambo, contain all the knowledge of the uni-verse, as do both Shenz and I. The portrait of

Mrs. Charbuque already exists within you. You must merely discover it. Think about when you have painted a picture for yourself and not a commission. Did you place each brush stroke as if you were laying the bricks for that wall we spoke of earlier? Or was each application of your brush uncovering something that was already in existence in your soul? Wasn't it Michelangelo who spoke of releasing the figures from stone? He chose his blocks of marble for the human forms he knew they already contained."

This, I have experienced," I said. "But how do I uncover Mrs. Charbuque? You don't know her.

She is quite an elusive woman."

he normal course would be five years of exile, isola-tion, and intensive daily meditation along with a diet of green vegetables, figs, and a liquor made from the pulp of the quince."

"There you go," said Shenz.

"I've got two weeks," I said.

"I am aware of this. So we will need something to catalyze the process. Therefore I have prepared this elixir for you." Goren reached beneath the table, out of sight, and brought forth a large round bottle with a cut glass stopper. It was filled with some sluggish yellow crud. "Ten dollars," he said.

Awakening

In the cab on the way home, with my eyelids nearly closed, I held fast to my bottle of yellow goo.

Goren had told me that this tonic had been used in the realm of Prester John to inspire court-appointed artists to realize the cosmic in their work. He had found the list of ingredi-ents and recipe in a facsimile of a volume said to have been brought back from Asia by Sir John Mandeville and more recently translated by a professor at Oxford. The trans-lated name of the ancient brew was Awakening.

Shenz, who sat across from me, could have used some awakening, for he had nearly passed out.

My mind was now unbefuddled enough to realize that my friend had saved me from a dangerous depression resulting from the ruined portrait. For this I was much in his debt. Although his drug was a boon in that it diverted my anguish, I was amazed that he had the vitality to take it daily and yet withstand its ravages. That day's one fling with the poppy was enough to make me wish to avoid it for the rest of my life.

I was on the verge of sleep, and my mind had moved on to a consideration of yin and yang.

Picturing them enclosed in Mrs. Charbuque's locket, I saw their black-and-white forms swirling round like two fish chasing each other's tails. Just as my eyes closed completely, Shenz awoke and leaned forward.

"Piambo," he said.

I opened my eyes.

"I didn't tell you, I found some information about that ship, the Janus.

A couple of old seamen down at the har-bor knew of it. About fifteen years ago it left London on a return voyage to New York. It never arrived at its desti-nation, and its true fate was never completely established. In other words, it completely disappeared. The theory is that it went
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down in a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic. The story was in all the newspapers, and when they mentioned the details to me I seemed vaguely to remember it. One of the old salts told me that from time to time there is a report of it being sighted and then vanishing from view, like a mirage. His partner, though, laughed and said that was all malarkey concocted by bored sailors to frighten women and children and keep one another amused."

"Funny, I don't have any recollection of it," I said.

"The two gentlemen I spoke to were most helpful because they directed me to an official building nearby where a registry of all ships was kept. There, I was allowed to go through the papers concerning the

Janus.

The pas-senger roster for its last voyage listed no Charbuque."

"Interesting," I said. "Mrs. Charbuque seems to be dealing in a little malarkey herself."

We rode on in silence until we arrived at my house. Before leaving the cab I asked Shenz to remind me what dosage of Goren's elixir I was to take.

"I forget what he said. Take a few snorts every day. If some is good, more is better. But if I were you, I would seriously consider what he told you about Mrs. Charbuque already existing in your mind."

"I thought I had found her," I said.

"Think of that attempt as nothing more than a severed monkey arm. You are getting close, I'm sure of it," he said, and then was off.

I was exceedingly weary, but not wanting to awaken later to the mess in the studio, I spent some time cleaning it. After disposing of the murdered canvas and setting my painting things to rights, I decided to take a dose of my medicine. Half of me considered it a farce, and the other desperately hoped that it would fulfill its promise. When I removed the stopper, a sulfurous aroma wafted from the bottle like an evil djinn. I held my breath and downed a goodly portion of it. After a moment I became conscious of the taste, like a sugary syrup made from rotten eggs, and gagged twice. My eyes watered as the saliva

retreated to the corners of my mouth. There was a brief period dur-ing which I thought my stomach was going to reject it, and then things settled down.

Going to my bedroom, I removed my shoes and pre-pared to disrobe when I felt something shift violently in my bowels. I tell you, Awakening was not the word for it.

Rude Awakening might have been more apt. I literally sprinted for the outhouse and proceeded to spend a solid hour there. There is no telling what passed for cosmic in the realm of Prester John, but the effects of Goren's elixir seemed, at best, a circuitous route to its discovery.

After my ordeal, I did then go to bed and slept soundly. At some point during the night, I roused very briefly to the dark and again had a sense that someone was with me in the room. My fatigue was so great, though, that I could not muster the appropriate fear and fell immediately back into a dream of walking through a snow-covered wood at daybreak. In Goren's favor, I have to confess that when I

woke on Monday morning, I felt completely refreshed and more at ease than I had since beginning the commission.

With this said, I still took the bottle of Awakening to the outhouse and dropped the whole thing down into that place where it was in any case ultimately destined to rest.

Later that afternoon I sat before the screen. At this meeting I had a definite mission and did not bother with the sketchbook.

"I saw your friend Samantha Rying on the street yesterday, Piambo," said Mrs. Charbuque. "She looked somewhat forlorn."

I ignored her comment. "Tell me now about your hus-band," I said.

"Moret Charbuque," she said. "Yes, the love of my life."

"Do I detect a note of sarcasm?" I asked.

"An entire symphony might be more to the point," she said.

"He was untrue?" I asked.

"Yes, but not in any mundane sense. Charbuque was complex if he was anything. We were, for a time, desper-ately in love. Actually, we remained desperately in love, but our love became something dangerous. If anyone were to see it, they would immediately describe it as hatred, but it wasn't. I'm sure of that."

"From the beginning, please," I said.

"The beginning may be hard to trace, for this type of affair always starts long before the participants become aware of each other, but I will tell you how we met."

"Very well," I said.

"After having crossed the country and returned to New York yet more wealthy and famous, Watkin and I spent quite a number of years performing in the city During this time I was approached now and then by any number of gentlemen who let it be known that, no matter what my appearance or strange gifts, they would be inclined to enter into matrimony with me. Most of them I dismissed without granting a private audience. When I say private, I merely mean away from the crowd of an audience, mind you, not free of the screen. Occasionally I would get one of my urges, as we have discussed, and I would have

Watkin show a fellow to my room, where I would engage him in conversation. To a man, they all failed my review. I was not about to enter into a relation-ship with a fool, as my mother had done. Of this, I

was particularly wary.

"Be that as it may, when enough time had passed that Watkin and I thought the act was again about to reach its limit of interest in the city, we began to cast about for places that might offer new patrons and new revenue. All the time, we were making lavish amounts of money and our venues were growing in size. Since I lived a very con-tained life, I had only minor expenditures. I put some of my earnings away, and the rest I invested in burgeoning industries. Like Ossiak in his prime, I could not perpetrate a failure if