by Susann Cokal
Wanted. Reward.
Information about oil painting. Features red-haired subject, feminine, posed artistically in a cave. Urgently sought by a serious collector. Painter is English and canvas is large. Please direct reply to . . .
There followed a New York address, an agent at a shipping company. Harry had seen no reason why he, whose information was slim but genuine, should not see what it might yield him. He wrote to tell the prospective buyer about Royal Barnes’s auction of the probable painting; he asked, incidentally, if there were any information to be had about the model. And now here was the reward: twenty-five green American dollars, as much as he got for a well-researched story, his simply for writing a few unpublished lines. The agent thanked Mr. Hermes for providing the name of the painting’s auctioneer and requested that if he came across any other information he should send it on immediately. About the model there was no word.
Harry pocketed the money but made no plan to do further detective work. The funds would buy gaspers and a supper or two in the next month, but then his book would come out and twenty-five dollars would be petty cash indeed.
Or perhaps, he decided on further reflection, he might use this windfall to treat himself to some feminine company. Opal Cinque had recently presented a girl with a cloud of hair as orange as her own, and Harry, like many of Opal’s visitors, was curious to see whether the cumulus below matched the cirrus above. The effect must be particularly striking under electric light.
The discovery of Ophelia’s true identity sparked a complex reaction in Edouard. With that crude line drawing on the handbill, it was as if a bright light had suddenly shone upon her, revealing details and facets hitherto hidden in shadows. Now, instead of a memoryless waif, she was a wife; and wives commanded respect, even after they had left their husbands. Edouard’s own parents had spent more than a decade apart while Edouard, Senior, built his fortune in the mountains up and down California, and their bond had been no less strong as a result.
And yet Ursula Summerfield Goodhouse was a third wife; a Mormon. It was a simple matter to rebaptize her, and he had it done immediately; any religion would be preferable to that one and would strengthen her case against Goodhouse, and she knew the Latin catechism well enough. But as long as she stayed married, she was compromised. Who knew what strange rites she might have participated in as a member of that tenebrous faith? What strange beliefs she might now hold? Whether she believed in the infamous Miracle of the Gulls, or that God had a wife to whom men could pray . . . Her mental integrity had been shaken, and though he would never ask her new father confessor to reveal Famke’s secrets, Edouard’s mind was full of questions. How would it be possible to flush such disturbing notions out of her now? If he could find a way, how rapidly she might improve, how easily she might become fit for a complete life. A complete life such as the one he occasionally allowed himself to envision for himself.
At times, he wandered the grounds, dodging zebra and exotic fanged deer and mulling over other questions. He fed the panthers in the cat house and daydreamed about at last taking a wife and fathering children of his own. He and his hospital would restore life to more than a few; didn’t he have a right to happiness as well? But the sight of the small Taj was always enough to pull him up short. Those white walls and moldering sarcophagi marked the fate of those who devoted themselves selfishly to one another, without sufficient view to communal health and hygiene; they indulged in a kind of hygienic flushing, true, through the marriage debt, but it was a limited and necessarily inferior process, dependent as it was upon the passions that so disturbed peace of mind. And yet, Edouard dared to think, with the modern technology there might be a way to introduce the more salubrious galvanic crisis into marriage and still enjoy the other . . .
So the winter waned, and despite occasional setbacks Famke continued to grow stronger. By the time the first daffodils had bloomed, she was able to leave her bed to visit the water closet, and more than once Edouard looked up in his wanderings about the grounds to find her at the windows of her room, gazing down on him. When they met in person, she complained of boredom and asked repeatedly for a pair of spectacles and something to read. He dutifully arranged for an oculist to visit and gave her a book of domestic poetry, and she thanked him unenthusiastically; but he did once catch her reading the more sensationalistic parts of Miss Pym’s New Testament—which passages he then carefully excised with his razor, much to Miss Pym’s indignation. It was time to find his patient something useful but soothing to do.
Ophelia (Edouard still could think of her by no other name) claimed to be no needlewoman, and the idea of a watch fob made of her own hair struck her as odd; but she informed her benefactor that she had a way with a paintbrush. “Albert taught me,” she said. “He told me I had a natural gift for it.” Edouard thought of the Hygeia painting and frowned.
“You say you do not like the painting,” she acknowledged. “Well then . . . You might let me change it for you—I am sure that will give me useful occupation, and it is quiet work.”
Edouard did not confess that he liked Hygeia so little that, after Famke’s first brief visit to the house, he had almost succeeded in having the thing burnt. Now he told his three Chinese maids to remove the painting from the stable, brush off the cobwebs, and deliver it to Ophelia’s suite. It was far too big for the inner staircase, of course, so Ancient Jade had workmen remove a large pane of glass from the wall and slide the enormous picture inside.
Famke nearly swooned with the memory of Nimue making the reverse journey out of Fru Strand’s rooming house a year before. She could not give in to the impulse, however, for then Edouard would not allow her to leave her bed again; so she bit down hard on her lower lip and said, as she had said then, “Treat it gently, please.”
The nurses had been moved out of their bedroom and the space was now dedicated to Hygeia, because Famke should not sleep with the odors of paint and turpentine. The inner walls and floor were sealed to prevent the circulation of noxious air in the rest of the house, and Edouard had the carpenters build a special easel and set it against the central wall. The easel could tilt inward, for easy reach. They also constructed a collection of ladders in varying heights, all topped with chairs; no matter what section Famke was working on, she could sit.
But in the brilliant morning sunshine, Famke chose to stand before Hygeia in a white wool dressing gown, unsteady on legs that had grown unused to supporting even her slight weight. She put on the new pair of spectacles, made just for her with real gold-plated frames, and studied the canvas gravely. No, certainly not Albert’s best work, but his all the same; and because it was his, she found in it a germ of beauty. The ice was very nice, and it contained the familiar dead flowers. Certainly the work held possibility.
She assumed her most professional air, the one she had used to such good effect with the madams and prostitutes of Colorado. “What would you like to see different here, Mr. Versailles?”
Edouard considered the two women before him: the recovering patient and the painted Hygeia. Beauty and a feminine beast, or a princess and one ugly stepsister.
“It is really the central figure,” he said at last. “Her colors, her—” His hands made vague shapes in the air, and Famke understood these were criticisms of Hygeia’s form.
“I can change those things,” she assured Edouard. It would be a pleasure to do so.
While they stood gazing, the light shifted suddenly as the sun popped over the mountainside. When the glass walls magnified the winter rays, the colors of the painting began to glow—all except for those that made up Hygeia herself, for they were curiously dull, as if Albert had mixed them much more hastily and cheaply than he had done with the tints for the background, then laid them on more thinly. In the background, among the familiar jags and lumps of ice, Famke recognized Albert’s old attention to detail, and that same painstaking work was found in the castle signature. It was only Hygeia herself—big-nosed, straw-haired, and somehow vague and unformed—
who suffered in this composition. And that was easily remedied. Then too, as tribute to Edouard and the living waters that brought health, she might add a series of springs among the ice crystals . . . Surely Albert would not mind . . .
Edouard coughed delicately, to get her attention. “Miss Summerfield, do you think”—he tried to ask as if the idea had just occurred to him, though it was first in his mind—“she might have hair of your color?”
Famke rewarded him with a shimmering sapphire stare. “It will be easy,” she said.
It was as if a figure from a painting had dropped from the wall into his arms. But the girl Viggo held was indisputably alive: warm to the touch, with skin smoother than the most finely finished canvas, and—he sniffed—a most definite odor as well. Tobacco, perspiration, the omnipresent whiskey; a faint scent of something sweet. Perhaps it was lemons. Her likeness hung on a wall in the parlor of her boardinghouse, but this was the real thing. Her hair was pale orange rather than brown, and her lips were thinner, but still she was recognizably the same woman, and in his drunken state Viggo found this simple fact to be fascinating.
She squirmed out of his embrace and struck a pose where he could see her. It was the same pose in which she had been painted as a woman of music; only now her arms held no lyre but curved instead around empty space, and behind her flopped a set of spangled wings. Most of the girls were wearing them tonight, for once a week they played at being fairies. The wings had given the parlor a dreamy atmosphere, and after one glass of whiskey Viggo almost believed the girls could have flown away if they chose.
After holding the position a few seconds, she lifted her hands slowly to her head and untied the ribbon that held her pale red locks in place. The hair was dry and coarse, once curled and now limply straight; but it fell nearly to her waist, and when she shook her head the scent of lemons grew stronger.
She began to undress. Off came the lace-and-spangle wings and the green basque and skirt; she hung them carefully over the back of the room’s one chair. Then the ruffly white corset cover, and her breasts were exposed.
Propped up by a dingy white corset, they were small and firm and pink, with a network of blue veins that reminded him of a corpse and the most startling nipples he had ever seen—so puckered and dark they looked almost brown.
“Should I take the corset off, too?” she asked, twisting the ribbon tie around one finger and fluttering her lashes at him coyly.
Unable to speak, he nodded. Any resistance he might have made was lost in a haze of whiskey and curiosity.
“It’s two dollars extra, on account of how long it takes to lace up again.”
Once more, helpless, he nodded.
So she removed the corset, and her waist expanded as it met the air. Her middle was covered in red wrinkles and welts left by the corset. Then, moving swiftly because the air in the room was chilly, she stepped out of her pantaloons, posed briefly again, and jumped into bed.
Viggo had never seen a live woman naked, and because the madams dressed the expired girls before he painted them, it had been months since he’d seen a dead one. It came as a shock to see the flesh of this one move: the undulations of her breasts, the jiggle under her arms, the dimples that formed in her buttocks and thighs when she lay down. The greatest surprise of all was the tuft of hair that fronted her sexual parts—not just because it was brown rather than orange, like the hair on her head, but because it was there at all. Viggo was so used to looking at the artist’s cloudy rendering of that area that to see it now as coarsely covered as his own gave him a lurch in the stomach, as if he were looking at something unnatural.
“What’s the matter, lover?” she asked in a low voice, propping herself up on one elbow and holding out the other hand to him. “Aren’t you coming?”
Viggo shifted awkwardly, and he felt Famke’s money rub against his foot.
In a way, this pregnant pause was Famke’s fault, and the Catholic in Viggo blamed her, for his present situation was the direct result of that scrap of canvas that he had bought in Leadville. At first it seemed to have brought him luck; or maybe he had simply scoured Colorado so thoroughly that he was bound to have made some progress by now. Town by town, the various stages of Famke’s journey had fallen into place, and he felt he knew exactly where she had been and when. He took the junk dealer’s scrap out of his boot every night before going to bed, and in his dreams the hair waved and the arms beckoned him forward.
Now those arms had guided him to the capital of New Mexico Territory, where suddenly he found spring had begun. Very little snow lingered in the muddy streets when he stepped out of the stage coach and inquired, with his beautiful manners and confident new English, where he might find “the district of the whores.”
So it was that he found himself in the gleaming salon of a Mrs. Opal Cinque, surrounded by winged girls and gazing at the enormous Evening of the Ladies, in which Famke was all but unrecognizable, fatter and paler of hair—in fact resembling Mrs. Cinque more than the Famke he had come to know. In his surprise he found himself accepting a glass of unusually strong drink from a man in a money-green suit, and feeling so awkward and out of place that he actually drank from it. One glass followed another; in short order he was drunk, and was swept dizzily away to a room occupied by a girl whose name he did not know, except that it was painted on her door and had something to do with springtime.
“Well?” She hopped from the bed and took both his hands in hers. Shyly—or with the pretense of shyness—her brown eyes looked up into his blue ones. “This your first visit to a woman, dearie?”
Feeling as if he were in the confessional, Viggo nodded a third time. If he had had control of his feet, he would have run; but he was discovering that whiskey had a number of strange effects. Only one part of him could move now, and it was not a part to aid in general locomotion.
“Well!” she said again, her cheeks dimpling to match her stippled bottom. She put her arms around him and drew him close, so the chill in her body penetrated his clothing, even where his trousers were most warm. “Isn’t that a treat! Oh, there’s nothing to be afraid of. We’ll go very slowly . . .”
Before he knew what had happened, he was in this earthly fairy’s bed, and his trousers were undone, and her thin red lips were—of all things—down below his stomach, drawing more heat from him than he’d ever imagined.
For the first time in his life, Viggo swore. “Fanden!”
Chapter 45
The bee has a full year’s work in South California: from March to August inexhaustible forage, and in all the other months plenty to do,—no month without some blossoms to be found.
HELEN HUNT JACKSON, “CALIFORNIA,” IN
GLIMPSES OF THREE COASTS
Ophelia—Miss Summerfield, Edouard reminded himself yet again—took an immediate turn for the better when he let her into the studio. With each stroke that she made in her effort to improve upon Hygeia, her own health improved as well, and far more rapidly than ever before: Her stride became firmer, her voice more steady; breasts began to push against the warm wool of her gowns. She even seemed to grow taller. It was as if she were painting health into her own body while she made Hygeia more like her.
At least, such were the changes Edouard hoped she was making to the figure in the painting. Famke had forbidden anyone to enter her studio, other than the maids who cleaned her brushes, and Edouard considered it a point of honor not to ask them about her activities. Alone all day, she worked with a dedication verging on dangerous zeal. Very quickly, Edouard realized he would have to limit her hours in the studio or risk seeing her exhausted again. Thenceforth she was allowed only two hours in the morning and, after an enforced nap, one in the afternoon.
“But it is impossible to accomplish anything in such a time!” she protested, angry tears hovering. “I need at least an hour to achieve my inspiration—I mean to feel I am one with the painting. It is,” she said with a true burst of inspiration, “as if something inside is telling me what to paint, and
I am obeying. You must give me more time.”
This argument was virtually the only one that might have swayed Edouard, and indeed he did waver a moment; it was entirely possible that her newfound health was taking on a palpable life of its own and expressing itself in pictorial form. She might have prevailed if he had had any faith in her teacher. But: “No,” he said firmly, “your recovery is more important than a painting. Become fully healthy first, and then you can dedicate yourself entirely to your work.” He did not mention that he hoped she would eventually find some worthier occupation. To smother further protest, he ordered her to take an extra galvanic treatment. At least she never refused those, and he was so used to giving them now that he hardly blushed at all. In fact, the treatments were calming to his nerves as well.
Thereafter, Edouard watched the clock carefully during Famke’s time in the studio. Each morning, he had a manservant bring a watch up from the village, where the more conventional living conditions made time run more smoothly, and he kept one eye on the slow black hands as he addressed himself to business.
He found much to do around the house. Now that Famke was moving about more, she had complained about the heavy odor of jasmine; so Edouard directed the Chinese gardeners to remove the vines his father had planted and to replace them with frangipani, which Famke liked better. He loved to see her bury her face in the fragrant blooms and come up radiant with scent. He hired another indoor gardener and ordered gardenias, hyacinths, and orange trees; the smells warred with one another and triumphed individually according to the time of day.
In the evenings, Edouard and Famke sat on the mildewed parlor sofa, surrounded by pots of whichever flower she favored that day. Together they read agreeable poetry by the likes of Alfred Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, and he began to postpone his walks and visits to the Taj in favor of the more immediately soothing pleasures of literature.
