Breath and Bones

by Susann Cokal

  “Etude de nu, by Paul Gauguin. A simple tableau of an unclothed seam-stress was painted during the artist’s exile in Copenhagen, Denmark . . .

  “Bathers, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. This splendid picture, completed only two years prior to the present date . . .”

  Two years ago, Edouard had still been experimenting with electricity while workmen cleared the land for his hospital. Precious Flower had been recovering from the disease she’d picked up in her horrible crib. The magnificent old lion, centerpiece of his father’s menagerie, had still been alive. And he had not heard of Famke Ursula Summerfield Goodhouse or of the painting that had brought her to him; and, he told himself as the red drapes parted yet again, he had been happy.

  While du Garde extolled the beauties of yet another full-bodied woman in a bath, Edouard admitted that this trip to San Francisco had been a mistake. He had found nothing worth bringing to Hygiene: Few artists painted canvases large enough for his needs, for one matter; and for another, most of those pictures were either military in subject or, like these women on stage, utterly unsuited to a hospital, even one that prescribed frequent immersion for its patients. He had become so depressed he did not even look at the mail that the two remaining maids dutifully forwarded from Hygiene. Wong the butler, who had accompanied his master on this trip but naturally was not allowed in auction rooms, galleries, or performance halls, made no bones about the fact that he was at his wits’ end.

  “You buy something,” he said. “Plenty good paint here.”

  But even under this duress, Edouard could not bring himself to buy; and after interviewing all the major gallery owners and calling upon the best-known artists in the city, he was preparing to leave empty-handed. Yes, he decided as he looked at the large blonde woman caught climbing into a tub, in this very moment he was giving up; tomorrow he would go home. He could always move a potted palm or two from the glass house down to the hospital; they would make a striking show against that troublesome blank wall.

  So the unfortunate whim that had led him here to the living waxworks had brought an unexpected benefit. Edouard had made a decision: Clearly, it was most appropriate that he depart as soon as possible, both from the Thalia Festival House and from San Francisco itself.

  Edouard peered down the row of men to his right and left, all of them in thrall to what they had convinced themselves was art. He could not squeeze past without disturbing them and drawing unpleasant attention to himself; he would have to bide his time, wait for an auspicious moment. So he shrank down in his seat, pulling his collar up nearly to his chin and veiling his eyes with thick lashes.

  And now,” trumpeted the voice of Charles Martin du Garde, “ze work that has inspired admiration for more than two thousand years, ze single most perfect female form ever captured in stone.”

  The audience leaned forward. This was du Garde’s most famous representation, and they were hot for the viewing; but the professor refused to satisfy them just yet. He left his listeners to stare at red velvet folds undulating in the current of their breath while he exposed the history of the piece they were about to view.

  “In 1863, a French archaeologist unearthed over one hundred pieces of marble on the Greek island of Samothrace. At ze great Louvre museum, he was able to assemble those bits of stone into the figure you are about to see here. Posed as if to adorn the prow of a grand stone ship, zis magnificent statue once stood on the cliffs overlooking Samothrace Harbor—although, triste, her arms and head disappeared so long ago that we have no record to show what they were. Instead, we must gaze and imagine what might have been, as I give you . . .” He paused, allowing them and himself to savor this moment. “. . . Winged Victory.”

  At last, the curtains parted, the gaslights dimmed, and the audience vented a collective gasp.

  There was utter silence as the diamonds reflected upon a young woman’s breasts and hips and legs. Hers was in fact a nearly perfect form: perhaps a shade too slender for the current tastes, but exquisitely proportioned. There was something to say, too, for the aesthetic pleasure of seeing the skeleton beneath the flesh clearly. Victory was veiled in a sort of shift, but it was so thin and clinging that the outlines of nipples and the deep stop of a navel were clearly visible, before the veiling thickened slightly over what appeared to be a private region completely bare of private hairs. So arresting was this vision that one scarcely saw the arms were stumped before a pair of massive, ragged wings, and the lack of a head hardly registered. A shape this lovely had no need for a face—indeed, some might say its beauty was heightened by the sense of what was not there. One could not but imagine the act of violence that had robbed Victory of her laurels, and one treasured her the more for her fragility.

  In the stage wings, Du Garde parted the red velvet backdrop and watched his creation weave her silken spell over the audience, as she had done this week running. To be sure, a few among the audience appeared to be alarmed, as if this were the most outrageous sight of the evening; these, it was clear, must be parsons and schoolmarms who had wandered in by mistake. Far more were staring outright, trying to catch the flutter of ribs that would prove this statue, at least, was alive; and feeling somehow triumphant when the chest stayed still, as if they had willed a creature of stone into being. How, they wondered, was it possible to produce a woman with no arms or head? And how was it possible for such a woman to be so beautiful?

  Eventually, those who were properly susceptible to beauty stopped asking themselves how it had come to be and merely let it hold them in in its spell.

  Regrettably, not everyone present was such an elevated soul; for, suddenly, the tide of attention turned. Down toward the front, a man dressed in black had got to his feet and was stumbling toward the aisle, floundering on knees and hats and angry whispers. He tripped and nearly fell before catching himself on a stout woman’s shoulder. A whiskery man stood up and began taking him severely to task.

  The stout woman shrieked out at the audience—“That man—assaulted me!”

  “Patience, my friends!” Du Garde’s voice quavered, as if the disturbance beyond the footlights put him in dread of an outright riot. The stage wings were filling with models eager to see the spectacle among the seats. “There is one final representation of the evening, the most magnifique of them all . . . ”

  The man in black began to rush, stumbling over more legs and feet, nearly falling into a lap or two but keeping his hands in the air. A watch fell from his pocket and swung like a pendulum on a reddish rope.

  “Friends, friends!” called du Garde. “There is more to come!”

  A wave of outrage against the man in black swept through the audience. The artful spell was broken; they began to move, and the diamond sparkle swept crazily over faces and shoulders and coiffures as they became suddenly aware of what the beauty before them consisted of: Everyone was conscious once more of plain nakedness, even unto what each of them had under his or her clothes.

  “I’ve been touched, too!” exclaimed another woman. Some ladies and gentlemen got to their feet and followed the masher toward the door.

  As if this were their cue, du Garde’s curtains swished shut—but not before one or two of the spectators saw, faint but distinct, the swell of Victory’s breasts as she took a most definite, mortal breath.

  Chapter 56

  It is an odd thing, but everyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco. It must be a delightful city, and possess all the attractions of the next world.

  OSCAR WILDE

  With shaking hands, Famke pulled the black bag off her head and took a deep gulp of air. If she had had the capacity for irony, she would have recognized it here: She had never felt so vulnerable in her life as when she posed as the statue called Winged Victory. In front of hundreds of eyes, she was blind in her hood, naked but for her paint; if the audience decided to storm the stage, she would be completely at their mercy.

  Du Garde saw her standing still when she should not be, the white chalk misting off
the greasepaint base on her skin. “Ursie Summer!” He grabbed the hood from her hands and gave her a push. He did not bother with the French accent when he was alone with his models. “Don’t stand there—prepare for the finale!”

  Too dizzy to do anything but obey, Famke ran backstage, shedding the cardboard wings as she went. She seized a fingertip between her teeth and peeled away the long black gloves as well. Once she had thought it was so clever, the way they faded into the darkness when the stage was lit dim, making her disguise as the shattered statue complete. The hood did the same—but, she vowed to herself, she would never wear it again. It was too terrifying when the audience went mad.

  “Quickly!” du Garde hissed. The other girls were arranging the few props necessary for the last tableau: some blocks of papier mâché, some white paste jewels, a cardboard mask or two. “Ursie, that audience won’t wait on you all night.”

  Hastily she rubbed more paint onto her arms, where the gloves had been, and smeared her face with it, then dusted herself with powdered chalk for the proper sheen. She made herself cough a good long time, so she would not have to cough later. She cast an appraising eye over the papier mâché lumps and made a few adjustments here and there. Then, shaking out her hair, which was startlingly red against the white paint, and pulling the damp chemise away from her body for a more floating effect, she stumbled back onstage and assumed her pose.

  When she raised her arms in the air and froze, du Garde ceased complaining. He did have an eye for beauty, and out of all the handsome girls in his employ, Ursie Summer was the master of the trade: She knew just how to engage the onlooker’s eye, how much to display, what to conceal in order to keep the audience both titillated and intrigued. It was almost as if she were a painter or sculptor herself. The other girls’ tableaux were sometimes called vulgar, sometimes offended San Francisco’s churchgoing ladies (who had little appreciation for art anyway); but if Famke’s scenes disturbed their viewers, it was because she tapped into a part of their being that felt primal, dangerous. She was the wild part of themselves distilled into one static image.

  So accomplished was she that du Garde had allowed her to serve as his collaborator, and this final scene, bringing together all of the girls, had been her inspiration. Thus far it had proved popular both with critics, who admired the technical skill it showcased, and with casual viewers, who enjoyed the spectrum of feminine charms—alabaster, golden, fleshly pink—it displayed. The audience never failed to be astonished to find that on a given evening they had watched only nine women, not half a hundred. Each viewer came away with a new respect for the manipulations of art.

  Now the other girls fell in before Famke, and du Garde returned to his megaphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in what he hoped was a commanding—yet soothing—tone, “I give you one final spectacle: Evening of the Muses, in a Castle of Ice.”

  The stagehand pulled the curtain, and there they were: gleaming here, glittering there, nine females arrayed in poses surprisingly familiar to certain habitués of the western demimonde. Their like was found in Boulder, in Santa Fé, in towns that even Famke had not yet visited; and tonight there were several men who recognized the picture before du Garde launched into his final description, as written by Famke: “This notable composition, featuring the classical demigoddesses of drama, dance, and so forth, is rapidly gaining a réputation throughout America . . .”

  Alas for the maestro, his audience did not fall silent; the buzzing that the earlier fracas had started, continued now, drowning out du Garde’s speech about the young artist’s significance to contemporary culture. The painter’s name vanished in the room’s apian murmurs; and as to the somewhat rigid composition itself, and the impressive feminine talent it displayed—the finer points of even these wonders melted away, and there was only naked flesh, raw and material.

  Then came the moment at which, each night, du Garde moved among the girls and, just when the audience expected the poses to be broken, affirmed their fixity by contrast with his own motion. Tonight he stepped hesitantly, and his trepidation communicated itself to the models.

  Famke sensed the place was ready to erupt. So she did what she had never, in all her nights at the Thalia, allowed herself to do: She blinked.

  Now the scene came into focus—the eight girls spread before her with the attributes of the Muses, in the positions in which Albert had painted one coop of soiled doves after another: The skinny girl of The Little Fur, the golden ones who posed as Bernini’s bronzes and Cellini’s salt cellar, the pink Renoir and Ingres and Crane girls, all now holding their flutes and pens and masks, both laughing and tragic. All beginning to look a little nervous. The light glowing and sparkling in the paste crystals, the hair blowing in the audience’s brisk wind. Famke’s shift slapping her legs like a wet wing until the lyre at her feet—for she was Terpsichore, Muse of the dance—toppled over.

  This tableau vivant was the most effective advertisement she could think of. It was her WANTED poster, her announcement in the newspapers, the equivalent of a gleaming sign on the side of a building saying, Albert, I am here. Come quickly. It was Famke’s masterwork, and it was beginning to crumple. She fixed the girls with a stern eye, to freeze them in place.

  While du Garde took his bows and the girls remained more or less still, the mood in the room continued to swell. People were speaking out loud now, and there was a sense of tension drawing them toward the stage. Famke heard them speculate: Which one had been Winged Victory? She heard men getting to their feet and stepping forward. Some few, mostly ladies, took the opportunity to step back, toward the doors and sanctimonious, thick-swathed freedom; but the majority wafted irresistibly up. Nothing would do but that they should make their experience of art physical, feel the warmth of real flesh where they saw cold metal and stone, force the illusory two dimensions of famous pictures to assume the third, most vital, dimension.

  Famke blinked again, and her eyes swivelled outward, beyond the foot-lights, where there was nothing she could see but a diffused sparkle from so many diamonds dipping toward her. The glare pricked her eyes and blinded her again. She sneezed. Then she coughed.

  At the glass outer doors of the Thalia Festival House, Edouard heard the audience begin to swarm. He was aware that a few souls had followed him out of the auditorium—and for this he was grateful, as they confounded both his accusers and the gentlemen who sprang to defend them—but he did not realize that, simply by leaving his seat, he had broken the artists’ enchantment. Neither did he apprehend, as Famke and Charles Martin du Garde were starting to do, that because of him the spectators wanted to handle the painted girls. Edouard merely wanted to leave. He felt ill and in need of a bath; for hygienic reasons, it was also high time to let his juices down.

  But Thalia’s doors, he discovered, were locked. He shook the handles and rattled the panes in their frames.

  Presently, a red-coated usher came running, straightening a bit of braid coming loose from one sleeve. “We have to lock ’em, sir, or the riffraff come in. This program is of a very delicate nature.”

  “Open this door,” Edouard demanded with an air of tragedy. He thought he saw the riffraff now, in the darkness beyond the glass—dirty faces, many of them yellow, black, and red—thrusting forward just as the Winged Victory had seemed to do. In the theater, he had thought she might topple into his lap; now he feared the famous San Francisco hoodlums and jayhawkers would set upon him and cover him with filth. Surreptitiously he adjusted the congestion in his trousers. More men and women assembled behind him, the usher fumbled with a ring of keys, and Edouard stroked his watch fob’s silky thickness.

  “Sir? I beg pardon?” The voice came from behind him and was exquisitely deferential. Blushing to a shade he could not explain, except to hope that his trouserly manipulation had not been witnessed, Edouard turned halfway round and gave the man his ear.

  But the next voice to address him was a woman’s.

  “We noticed you’ve a rope of red hair there,�
�� she said in the accent of the American South. “My companion, Mr. Viggo, and I. We were wondering if you know—”

  “We wonder,” said the man’s voice again, “if you are Mr. Edouard Versailles.”

  At that moment, the key turned in the lock, and with a triumphant smile the usher held the door open.

  The girls onstage were starting to betray their humanity. They made little movements, minute softenings of their poses that drew them slightly farther from the edge of the stage. After that first cough, Famke tried to remain steadfast, but the scratching in her lungs would not be denied—it was as if a whole flock of butterflies had hatched in there at once and begun to flutter about. At last she dropped her arms and doubled over in a fit of hacking.

  When Famke broke her pose, she affected every person in the room. The other girls allowed themselves to uncurl and flee the stage. Du Garde melted away, glad to let his star model crest this wave of public aggression—though he thought he might scold her for it later, if all turned out well; it would not do to give her too heady a sense of her own power. The audience, however, froze solid, too awestruck to budge. They had just realized what a gift it was, this ability to hold still and create illusion. A sudden quiet seized the room, a quiet in which Famke’s ticklish breath rasped like a struck match.

  And that was call enough for one viewer: One man in all that crowd managed to find his feet again and step forward. He shouldered the others aside and walked to the stage, where he gazed up at Victory. She looked very tall to him. He looked rather short to her. The recognition was complete.

  “Famke,” he said simply, holding his arms out. “Darling.”