The Stronger Sex (27 page)

“No, I… I'd rather keep that to myself, if you don't mind.”

She didn't let it drop at once. “And suppose I do mind?” Then she laughed again. “No, no, don't worry! I'm not about to interrogate you. We all need our little secrets, don't we?”

I hesitated. “I'm not sure that one can say that.”

“Yes, one can.” She suddenly sounded very decided, but she didn't seem to want to continue this conversation. “Well, what can I do for you?”

I said, “I really only wanted to know how you are. And… and ask when you'd have the time and inclination to discuss those two articles with me. The one about Tippi Hedren and the one—”

She interrupted me. “Yes, yes, I know. The one about Albright and his Ida.”

“That's how we left it.”

“Of course.” She laughed. “I wouldn't have expected you to come back to that subject.”

“But that's what we… I mean…”

“You're a surprising young man,” she said.

I didn't know what to say to that. For a moment a plain “Why?” was on the tip of my tongue, but that would have sounded too silly.

Before the silence could become embarrassing, she said, “When would
you
have time? And inclination, of course. Today, maybe?”

“Let me see… yes, I think I could manage today.” A little reserve seemed to me necessary in case she might think I couldn't wait to see her in her studio again. I said, “I shouldn't think it will take us hours.”

She asked laconically, her tone dry, “Right away?”

I involuntarily swallowed. Then I said, “Fine. I'll be on my way. I could be with you in about a quarter of an hour. Would that be too early?”

“No, no, go ahead.” And she finished the call.

I sat there without moving for a moment. My pulse was beating loud and hard, and I had the feeling that I couldn't move my legs. What the hell was that all about?

As I was driving there, it struck me that I ought at least to take her a few flowers. What would my father have recommended in such a situation? I wasn't sure. But I found a florist's.

The salesgirl began showing me the lavish display on offer and giving me a little professional lecture on each species, but I said, after looking at the time, that I was in rather a hurry, and please would she just make me up a bouquet of the yellow roses.

“Of course. How many would you like?”

For God's sake, why couldn't the girl decide that for herself? “Thirteen. No! Not thirteen… fifteen.”

When I got out of the car with my fifteen long-stemmed yellow roses in the crook of my arm – their cellophane wrapping was tied with a yellow ribbon – I glanced up at the attic storey of the former fitters' workshop. If there really was an old lady still living up there after Klofft had sold the
rest of the premises, and she wanted to do kind Herr Klofft a favour, then she would certainly have something to tell her landlord today.

28

Cilly was standing in the open doorway wearing her painter's smock. I wondered whether she took it from one studio to the other or had several. This one, anyway, was flecked with paint just like the one I had seen at the Kloffts' house. And it too left her brown knees bare.

“Oh,” she said, “are those Mabella roses? And so many of them!” She took the bouquet from me.

“Have I done something wrong?” I asked a little uncertainly.

“Oh, please!” She closed the door behind me and went ahead. “I'm not used to such gallantry, that's all! I can tell you, when one of my old friends or a colleague comes to see me, he's hardly inside the door before asking, ‘Do you have a shot of spirits in the place? Or a glass of red wine?' They usually even forget to say good day. Oh!” She stopped, turned to me and kissed me on the cheek. “Good day, Alex!”

“Good day, Cilly.”

She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “A first, isn't it?” Then she put the roses on the table and undid the cellophane. “Do sit down. And
would
you like something to drink? A shot of spirits? A glass of red wine?”

“No thank you, I'm driving.”

“Oh yes, so you are.”

I looked around. On a table by the window I saw a large sketchpad and several loose sheets of paper beside it. I asked, “May I look?”

She looked up only briefly from the roses. “Yes, if you like.”

I went over to the table. They were all sketches of a man's head. Head and shoulders, the loose sheets and the one she had been working on, the top sheet of the sketchpad. Charcoal sketches of a man, hair neat and tidy, wearing a suit and tie.

The sketches were all drawn in rough outline, the proportions sometimes slightly distorted, lines going beyond the contours of the head here and there. But there was no mistaking the fact that my head was the model for all of them.

On the last sketch, the one still on the pad, the man's eyes were drawn in detail. He was looking at the viewer with a sceptical, no, a distrustful expression.

“Do I really look like that?” I asked.

“As I see you, yes. Well, sometimes you look like that.” She turned away and took the roses and their cellophane wrapping into the kitchen. She stopped in the doorway and turned back, smiling. “It's the lawyer looking at the viewer then, I think. You don't always look the same.” She disappeared into the kitchen.

I glanced at the sketches again. What did she mean? How did I look to her when I wasn't looking like a lawyer?

I went over to the corner where the sofa and chairs stood, hesitated for a moment and then sat down in an armchair. After a moment I strained my ears for sounds from the kitchen. I heard the snip-snap of scissors as she trimmed the rose stems. I quickly got up and moved to the sofa where I had been sitting last time, on my first visit to this bewitched place.

Bewitched? What did I mean? What was the matter with me, for God's sake? I heard my heart beating fast and loud. I took a few deep breaths.

She came back with the flowers in a vase, held it out and looked at the roses that she had arranged informally. “Do look, aren't they lovely? Yes, they're Mabella roses.” She
put the vase down to one side of the table and dried her hands on her smock. “Thank you so much, that was very, very thoughtful of you.”

I muttered something inarticulate. She sat down in a chair opposite me, placed both hands on her thighs and looked at the flowers, smiling. I was afraid my eyes might move down to her knees and the shadowy place between them that the smock didn't quite hide.

I cleared my throat and then said, “What do I look like the rest of the time?”

She looked at me blankly for a moment.

“When I'm not looking like a lawyer,” I said.

“Ah, I see!” She laughed, looked down at her lap and then back at me, smiling. “Won't you have something to drink now after all?”

“Well… if you do happen to have one of those mini-bottles of champagne like the ones we…”

“Of course!” She stood up. “There are even a couple chilled.”

When she went into the kitchen, I thought I saw the curve of her buttocks outlined under the smock.

She opened the little bottles standing up, poured the champagne, pushed a glass over the table to me and came round the table with the other to clink glasses with me. “Your good health, Alex!” Then she sat down again, not in the chair opposite but in the one on my left.

She smiled at me. After a while she said, “What do you look like when you're not looking like a lawyer?”

“Yes. That would interest me. I didn't know I had two different faces.”

“Oh yes, more than two, in fact. Most people do.”

I smiled. “Which of my faces do you like… more than the others? The legal face?”

“No, not necessarily. I like the lawyer's face because it looks so vital and self-confident.” She put her glass down,
leaned a little way toward me and let her eyes wander over me. “But there's another face that I like better. When you show
that
face I could almost think I'm seeing into your heart. It's so open, so… forthcoming. Free of any ulterior motive. It's… sympathetic in the original sense of the word.”

“You mean feeling sorry? Feeling pity?”

“Well, not exactly as we understand it today. It's more empathetic, really. One knows, when you show that face, that you can feel for other people.”

This compliment, I felt, was overdoing it. I smiled and said, “A shame you didn't sketch me with the sympathetic face, then.”

She was silent for a while, and then said, “Well, we can make up for that.” She rose, went over to the table, tore off the top sheet of the sketchpad, glanced at it and put it with the other loose leaves, and came back with the sketchpad and a couple of sticks of charcoal.

I realized that in spite of my declining her request before, she had induced me to model for her. I could have prevented it by getting up at once and cutting the sitting short. But apart from the fact that this dramatic gesture would have been right out of place, something else interested me much more.

She sat down opposite me, rested the sketchpad on her thighs and held it at a slant with her left hand. As she did that, she spread her thighs slightly to support the sketchpad better. The light fell on that shady gap between them. I saw the inner sides of her brown thighs to quite high up, and in between them I thought I caught a glimpse of a little piece of fine white fabric.

I was afraid she would notice my intent look, and I raised my eyes. She was busy looking from me to the sketchpad and back again, obviously marking out the paper. Finally the preliminary work seemed to be done, and she began running
the charcoal over the paper with long, rapid strokes. Now and then she quickly added short lines, obviously hatching in part of the sketch.

Without looking at me, she said suddenly, “You don't have to sit there in silence, you're welcome to talk to me, tell me something. Something pleasant would be best, of course.” She smiled.

I said, “I don't know if you'll think this pleasant, it's probably rather stupid, but I've hardly ever thought much about painting before… or the art of drawing. It's a mystery to me, or let's say a miracle, how someone can sit down and create a picture of reality with a stick of charcoal or a few brushes, I mean a picture that other people can recognize. And that makes them feel something. A… a kind of melancholy, for instance. Like your big picture of the rubbish heap in the backyard, and the tall apartment buildings behind it, and the horizon of their rooftops… those sharp black outlines making them into something…”

Here I ran out of words. After a while she looked at me across the sketchpad. She said, “Nice of you to say that. But of course you know that not all art is representational.”

“Of course not. I was also thinking that some kind of abstract shape or colour combination can strike the same note when you look at it… I mean, give you that sense of recognition. How can I put it? An experience of feeling, ‘Oh, I know that, it's something that really exists!' Not in the other reality, maybe, not in the reality we perceive with our five senses, but a reality in our minds. I mean, maybe an abstract picture will remind me of a dream I had. Or no, of a feeling that I couldn't really have described myself.”

She said, still working, “Yes, I understand.”

I said, “Although what you're creating now… it's something I like better. Better than your colleague Ferber's pictures. Willy Ferber, we met at his private showing.”

She nodded without looking up from her sketch.

I looked at the hand holding the pad on the slant. Her fingers were slender but not thin. Veins were visible on the back of her hand, but only one was a little thicker than the others and stood out. I imagined passing a fingertip over it.

I said, “Your kind of art is more accessible to me. It says more to me. Much more.”

She did not reply. Suddenly she shifted to the edge of her chair and leaned back, almost lying back in it, and from that greater distance carefully examined the sketch she was working on. Her smock was riding up a little further. I took the chance of glancing quickly at her legs. Yes, I'd been right. The scrap of fine white fabric I thought I'd seen was part of her underwear.

I was startled when she suddenly straightened up, dropped her stick of charcoal on the table and shook her head. “No, this is no good!” She looked at her sketch again, then put the sketchpad down and picked up her champagne glass. “That's not the face I wanted to draw.”

She got to her feet, came round the corner of the table and sat in the armchair next to mine. She smiled, raised her glass and drank to me.

When we had put our glasses down, I asked, “Was it because of me?”

She didn't give a direct answer. She said, “You know best what's going on in your mind.” After a pause she added, “Anyway, your expression wasn't the one I wanted to catch.”

I reached over the table to pick up the sketchpad. “May I?”

She nodded.

I recognized myself in the portrait. I'd been afraid an observer could tell from the look of the man she had drawn that he was trying to reach the intimate side of the artist opposite him. In fact, to put it plainly, that he was acting like
a voyeur. But you couldn't see much of that kind of thing in his face. Maybe a third person wouldn't notice at all.

I looked at the sketch again. I sensed that she was watching me. She said, “It's not the face I described to you.”

I shrugged my shoulders. Suddenly I had a suspicion that she was playing games with me. And I remembered what Klofft had said to his detective. The remark that I'd wanted to clear up anyway.