by Susann Cokal
That night the audience of the Thalia Festival House saw a brilliant light break out over the face of the chief Muse, the Winged Victory, the most perfect example of feminine flesh San Francisco had ever seen. It started with her smile. It grew as she ran a few steps forward, to the lip of the stage, and launched herself into the air.
For several seconds she seemed to float above the footlights, as if she still wore Victory’s wings; a trick of the stage set made her appear momentarily to be made of the footlights’ gas flames. When she began to fall, she did so slowly. First her chemise unfurled itself, streaming away from her waist and past her ankles; as she fell, she fell into that filmy garment, and it pressed so close to her body as to become invisible. The audience saw that underneath it all, she was very naked indeed.
And then Albert caught her; and he who used to sprint through the streets to relieve tension, now sailed through the amphitheater, with Famke in his arms cleaving the sea of faceless bodies in two to let them pass.
.6.
WINGED VICTORY
I went half mad with beauty on that day.
WILLIAM MORRIS,
“THE DEFENSE OF GUINEVERE”
Chapter 57
San Francisco is a mad city—a city inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.
RUDYARD KIPLING,
“HOW I GOT TO SAN FRANCISCO AND TOOK TEA WITH
THE NATIVES THERE,” IN THE PIONEER, ALLAHABAD
When they were alone together, in a spendthrift cab, Famke could not wait to begin telling Albert a version of her long journey toward him: the places she had looked, the methods she had used, the marvels she had contrived. She was so eager to do this that she forgot about kissing; but Albert did not forget.
He kissed her. It was just a gentle brush of lips on lips, but it quickened Famke’s heart until there was no room in her chest for anything but its hard, fast thumping. She could not catch her breath—but breath was hardly necessary at this important moment. She would breathe later.
“Darling,” Albert said, and his voice seemed unsteady, “you are alive.”
Famke giggled—how silly everything was, in the great wonder of their finding each other. She had always known he must be looking for her, and now he spoke like a man who had prayed for a miracle and, against all expectation, received it. She said, “Both of us are alive.”
“But I thought—”
“No, wait.” She put a finger on his lips and settled back into the curve of his arm, quite drunk with happiness. “You shall tell your story from the beginning, and I shall tell you mine.”
“But first,” Albert said practically, “you must tell me where you live. We’ll collect your things and you can come to my lodgings.”
“I have no things to collect,” she said, as the wheels rolled onward. “My only dress and shoes are at the theater, and I won’t go back for them.” She did not mention the cheap room she shared with three other girls or the men’s clothes in which, as funds allowed, she had begun to visit the city’s parlorhouses; such things did not deserve attention when she was with Albert. He had given her his jacket to wear, and he did not seem to mind that she was coating it, and the upholstery, with chalk and greasepaint. It was all she needed in the world. “All the money I own is in that dress pocket and is much less than a dollar. I could not even pay to see the living waxworks—is that not funny?”
Albert kissed her again, for he could think of nothing to say that would measure up to that overwhelming revelation; and again there did not seem to be air enough in the carriage for all she needed to breathe. She opened the carriage window to gulp down the dark night air. It was scented with the loose green balls their horse had just dropped, but it smelled sweet and nourishing to Famke, for she was breathing it with Albert, and he was giving the driver his address; she was going to Second Street with him.
“Tell your fortune, madam?” called a gypsy-woman, and Famke declined happily.
Once her lungs were working on their own again, she leaned her head against the reassuring hardness of Albert’s shoulder and began her story. How much she had to tell him—how pleased he would be with her. “In Boulder, I met a woman named Ma Medlock. Her daughter had just died, and you had painted a picture of the Muses—”
But this was not what Albert wanted to talk about, or not yet. “Darling,” he interrupted, with a faraway cast in his eye, “I must ask you. Up on the stage—I did not recognize you until the end, when you were Nimue. It was astonishing—even marvelous, quite different from the other girls. Tell me how you achieve the effect.”
Famke wiggled until she could look him in the face again. His dear face. He was saying such lovely, admiring things to her. “What effect do you mean?” she asked, though she did have some idea.
He touched her where the jacket gapped above her breastbone, where she wore nothing but paint and powder. Then his hand, stained gray and brown with his own old paint, slid down to where the filmy shift bunched in her lap. “The artistic effect,” he explained. “The one whereby you appear to be—well, darling, you know the word is code for appearing without clothes. You appear to be completely naked—I can see you don’t wear a body stocking, like the other girls—and yet there is no natural covering over your privates. It is, as you once said, as if a cloud is passing over . . .”
“Oh, that.” She giggled; this, too, was silly, and yet perfect, that he wanted to discuss her hair Down There after a year apart. “I barber it away. I learned from watching you and your beard. Then I put a little white clay into the—the—”
“Crevasse,” he supplied. The word came out as a croak.
“—yes, and then it is quite smooth. It looks better than the body stocking, don’t you agree? More like a real painting or a statue.”
“Yes,” he said, and lifted her chin so her lips would meet his, “it looks like a real painting.”
After a little while, she said, “I did not know ‘artistic’ meant ‘naked.’”
When the cab stopped at Albert’s rooming house, both of them were suddenly awkward. Famke even felt shy—she who had not hesitated when Albert pulled his buggy into the farmyard and invited her to live with him; she who had married Heber and lived with Edouard and still kept searching for Albert. Somehow the fact of having sought and found, the awareness that this was the end of that adventure, made this homecoming different from the others. The cottager returns after a long journey . . . Her heart began to skip, the clay Down There to slide a bit. She made a great business of gathering his coat around herself and bunching the shift so she would not trip going down the carriage step and up the rooming house stairs. (Albert paid the driver handsomely, but she could not be expected to notice that.) She read the sign in a grimy ground-floor window: ROOMS AND BEDS TO LET: 25, 50, 75 CENTS. The house was something less than Fru Strand’s had been, but somewhere inside was Albert’s bedroom and studio, so to Famke it looked like a palace. She floated down the narrow, empty hallway, hardly registering the reek of cabbage that linked it to all the other drab places she had lived.
Albert unlocked his door and led her in and turned up the gas that even simple rooms enjoyed in this wonderful city. At last he could really look at her, knowing full well who she was. Famke, standing in the gaslight, shrugging out of his coat but with her arms still trapped in it: the Winged Victory of Samothrace. Then she freed herself of the coat and reached up to adjust the gas jet, and she was Nimue again.
“Darling,” Albert murmured, and he dropped to his knees.
He had intended to take her hands in his and cover them with kisses—a romantic gesture, one appropriate to the moment—but in his new position his face was level with what would have been her lap, if she were sitting down, and that was so fascinating that for a moment all he could do was look. Through the thin shift he saw that the soft white clay was pulling away from her cleft, exposing a faint line of moist pink within the marble whiteness. It was the most tender, arousing sight A
lbert had ever seen. He pressed his lips to it through the gauzy fabric.
Famke, too, wanted to make a dramatic gesture. She seized the shift’s low neckline and ripped it, pulled it up and ripped some more, until it fell open and then slid away from her shoulders. She was naked.
Albert dug out the clinging clay and kissed her again, just where he was, on her bare skin. Famke could not help thinking of Edouard Versailles and his pig-snouted galvanic device. She was astonished to find that, soon, Albert was performing much the same procedure on her; only he used his mouth rather than a mysterious current in the wall. His tongue in place of Edouard’s knobby node. It was strange, but not unpleasant; and then it was wonderful.
“Fanden,” she breathed, clutching Albert’s hair in greedy fingers.
She did not notice that his hair had thinned in the past year, but her gesture reminded him of the unhappy fact, and he pulled away from her. “Would you like a bath?” he asked.
If Famke was disappointed, she tried not to show it. She reasoned that he was only thinking of her comfort, and it was true that she had not had a real bath since she’d left Hygiene. “You are right,” she said, looking down at her white body, rosy where Albert’s mouth had been; his face now wore some of the whiteness. “I will dirty your bed if I get in it this way.”
“Dirty . . . ,” he repeated with some dubiety, wiping at his lips with a handkerchief. But the opportunity to make love to an alabaster statue was one Albert knew he would not soon find again; all the urgency of his desire returned, and he pulled her, tinted as she was, on top of the narrow bed. They proceeded to ruin his landlady’s Log Cabin quilt and his own best trousers and shirt. Albert declared the experience divinely worthwhile—and even if her pleasure did not exactly approach his, Famke at least was gratified that he should be willing to sacrifice such a good suit to their love.
Spent and satisfied, Albert dug in his coat pocket for a cheroot and a match, and he began to smoke and tell her his story. By now he wore almost as much white paint as she; they looked like two half-glazed porcelain statuettes. Even the base of the cheroot was soon ringed in white, and while he spoke, it grew a long white ash at the tip.
He said that he had been looking for Famke in every town he had visited and in every face he had painted. He might not have known as much at the time, but it was none the less true for all that.
Famke wriggled to scratch herself discreetly Down There, where Albert’s motions against the bare skin had created some irritation. “But why didn’t you look for me?” she asked practically. “In Denmark, for example.”
“Because, darling”—he seemed surprised, and released a cloud of fragrant smoke over her face—“I thought you had died.”
Famke gasped and struggled in his arms. “Died! Why—” She broke off, overcome by an eerie feeling that she had died, and that what had happened tonight was merely a dream. And when had she died? In Utah, when she felt the worms gnawing at the soft tissue of her lungs? Or in Hygiene, when she felt Nimue burn and freeze her, burn and freeze . . .
“Why did you think that?” she asked, curling back into him again.
Albert tapped his cheroot to rid it of ash. “Well, darling, it was the letter. The one your employer sent me.” He quoted: “‘The person of what you write is no longer in this life.’ Her English wasn’t much good, but I thought the meaning clear enough.”
Famke broke in, “My employer?”
“I wrote to you at Mrs. Strand’s, but the reply came from this other woman. Grub, I believe her name was—”
“Grubbe.” So, Famke thought, Fru Strand’s nephew had forwarded the letter as promised—but too late. Famke had already left Herr Skatkammer and Denmark, and Albert, who had at last received his reply in New York, believed she was dead. He gave up on her and moved on to other models, out in the West.
“But they weren’t you, darling,” he said into her ear as she lay still rigid with the shock of her own death. “They weren’t you. They could not hold a candle.” He did not say that it was only that very night, after seeing the extravagant representation of his greatest work, that he had realized fully the extent of his need for her; for as he told the story, he became more and more convinced that he had in fact spent the last months on a romantic quest to regain some elusive essence of her.
Now Albert confessed to her what she already knew, describing his months among the prostitutes. Famke did not comment, for she no longer cared much that Albert had painted the Ludere, or even if he had more than painted Mag; of course he would not do it anymore. This had been his way of grieving, and she must not mind anything that had happened while he thought she was dead. She pinched herself hard on the thigh and was reassured to feel the sharp pain that tied her to this world.
She was alarmed, however, at his next words: “I say brothels, but I should say butcher shops—for they butchered my paintings there.”
He explained that in November he had experienced a crisis of artistic inspiration and had decided to revisit some of the pictures he had made in the summer. “Almost every one of them had been cut and pasted together differently, darling—almost every one! Can you imagine that someone would do such a thing to a work of art!”
“Did the ladies tell you who had done it?” Famke asked in a very small voice.
“I did not identify myself, and they did not know me,” he said, much to Famke’s relief. “The inhabitants in those places change so rapidly; I saw new girls everywhere, with their faces and features painted crudely over the ones I had done so carefully. Given that, I promise you I did not linger to chat with the madams who had allowed the—well, I believe I shall call it vandalism.”
Famke took a few deep, slow breaths.
Mercifully unaware of her distress, Albert lit another cheroot and told her what had happened to the painting he now called Nimue, a Nymph Enchanting. The captain to whom he had traded the picture had been traveling with a mistress who had always wanted her portrait done—“just like a society lady”—and Albert had seen a chance to earn money for his start in America. He agreed to paint over the frame and alter the central figure: Slender Nimue had become a thick-waisted blonde.
The blood puddled in Famke’s veins. “Did she have brown eyes? And a mole on her cheek?”
“Yes, she did.” Albert twisted his head to look at her. By a trick of the gaslight his eyes were bright green and particularly amphibious. “How did you know?”
“Because that painting sold again.” Famke pulled away from him and began to fray the sheet. She itched fiercely all over. “To a man here in California—his name is Edouard Versailles. I went to see him because I thought I could find a clue there . . . It is where I lived the past five months.”
Now the fate of Nimue hardly registered to Albert; he was caught by another name. “You know Edouard Versailles?” he asked excitedly.
Chapter 58
The ladies of San Francisco are noted for the excessively scant style of their costumes.
SAMUEL PHILLIPS DAY,
LIFE AND SOCIETY IN AMERICA
The next morning, while Albert went out to buy her a new dress and shoes, Famke washed the last bit of paint off herself. She let her skin dry in the air while she emptied the meager contents of his clothes press into a carpetbag.
The two of them were going to Hygiene. Hygeia Springs. Albert wanted it badly, and why had she chased him across the globe if not to follow his wishes and further his dreams?
“He is as rich as Croesus—that’s a very rich man—and has hundreds of blank walls to cover. If you could introduce me . . .” Remembering her old gesture, he had framed her face in his hands and kissed her on the nose; after that she could refuse him nothing, even though she was uncomfortably sure both that Edouard would sneer at Albert’s paintings and that he would be cold to her. She could no more tell Albert these things than she could slap him. And in any event, Albert said he’d kept a few pieces from the winter’s work, and that he had returned to his earlier more painstaking
methods: Perhaps there would be something there to appeal to Edouard Versailles and ensure a welcome for both Famke and Albert.
With a faint glimmer of hope, she hunted around the bare little room until she found a stack of pictures under the bed. She pulled them out into the gaslight, and her heart sank. One oil depicted a heap of sardines; the other showed the same sardines neatly stacked in a basket held by a grim Chinaman. There were two sketches of boats on the Bay and one of a corner of Albert’s room. What had become of Nimue, or even of the regimented Muses? These were the dullest pictures Famke had known him ever to make, and not one of them featured even a hint of her. Looking at them, she got the sensation that a heavy stone was settling somewhere in her belly. But after a moment’s contemplation, she packed the pictures up in a slender portfolio. Albert must have samples to display, if he were to present himself as a professional artist. And she must do her part; she would have to make a good introduction, give Albert every slim chance of succeeding. Again, why else had she chased him around half the world?
“This is Albert Castle,” she practiced out loud. “My brother, the painter, who grew up with a family in England.” She had told that lie so many times that it should feel natural to her by now, and yet she was certain that Edouard would detect a stiffness and artificiality in her voice. This is the painter of dead fish. Still, she had to keep the story alive; she could hardly expect Edouard to believe her innocent of involvement with the Dynamite Gang—for Albert had promised to clear her of all suspicion—if she were confessing to other lies. Running the town as he did, he might clap her in a hoosegow for his suspicions, and then what would become of her, and of Albert?
Once the portfolio was packed and set on the bed with the carpetbag, everything was done. The day was foggy and Famke realized she was chilled, so she draped a sheet around herself; her torn chemise was good for nothing but the ashcan. She wondered what color the dress Albert would buy might be and wished that it could be blue or green. Blue or green silk.
