The Empress of Tempera

by Alex Dolan

  Paire would saunter toward the back of the Fern until she reached the empress, fooling herself that the crimson cheongsam was something that just happened to catch her eye, something that ignited a fledgling interest instead of a surge of delight. Her skin always prickled as she approached. After ensuring that she wasn’t being watched by Mayer or Lucia, she combed the woman’s face, closely studying the brushwork.

  Her heart surged just to look at her. The way the empress stared out from her sun-soaked spot on the wall, she seemed genuinely regal, as if everyone else were just a guest in the court. Paire resisted the impulse to kneel. When she turned away she still felt its ghostly summons, like a faint whisper in the wind.

  One of Paire’s primary duties was to sort through the mail, and within a few days she’d opened several letters concerning the painting. A woman from Iowa who had visited New York for the first time several weeks before wrote that her arthritic knee had been pain-free since she saw “the young Japanese queen.” A man from Connecticut sent his résumé and a headshot, and offered the Fern a thousand dollars to forward the contact information of the model who sat for the portrait.

  The letters paled in comparison to the uninhibited fits of revelry from those who absorbed the empress in person, and this helped Paire control her urges. There but for the grace of God, she’d think. Within the first week, she could spot gawkers in the front window.

  Mayer would point them out too. Possibly he did this for his own amusement, but Paire wondered if he might be warning her as well. “Look. There’s another one,” he said at least once per shift.

  Once, a college boy slouched on the sidewalk just outside the window, loitering in a tightly zipped windbreaker with a half-open backpack sliding off his shoulder. He kept his back to the window, and occasionally turned to look inside, past Rosewood’s HERO, all the way to the rear wall. If he was an MSAD student, Paire didn’t recognize him. He seemed about her age, but his face had a virginal sheen to it, still glossed in adolescent oils. While not at the ideal proximity for viewing, the boy would have been able to gain a general impression of the red cheongsam bursting off the back wall.

  She tried to make an excuse for him, defending herself in the process. “He’s just waiting for the bus.”

  “No one takes the bus in Manhattan. And buses don’t run on this street anyhow,” Mayer reminded her.

  Paire stepped in front of the painting, interrupting the line of sight between the boy and the portrait. When he turned again for a glimpse, he fluttered his eyelids, as if he’d been snapped out of hypnosis. He seemed ashamed of having been caught staring, and walked away briskly.

  “You’ll get used to it after a few weeks,” Mayer said. “You know, there are people who faint in front of the David in Florence.”

  “I did know that.” She’d learned that bit of trivia in her art history classes.

  “No one knows why that happens, but it happens. Everyone loves the empress too. Don’t act surprised, and treat them as if they’re the first person to notice it. Some people have extreme reactions. Nothing like Franconi, but you’ll see some notable reactions from time to time. Roll with it.”

  The next day, a toddler in overalls led his mother into the gallery and stumbled all the way to the portrait, leaping as high as possible while swiping at the bottom of the birch board until his mother caught up and swept him up in her arms. His face looked as if he had just tasted chocolate for the first time. When his mother pulled him away, he bawled loud enough to shatter crystal.

  On a sadder occasion, a morbidly obese man stopped in front of the glass and glared at the back wall. He’d been drinking a gigantic soda, and after a long stare at the window, he dropped the plastic cup, letting it splash on the pavement by his ankles, where the cola mixed with the blood residue left by the old Italian. The man wept in blubbering, convulsive torrents. Mayer stepped outside to speak to him, and the giant man’s forehead came to rest on his shoulder, soaking into his suit coat. Whatever words were exchanged, Mayer seemed to comfort him enough that he could move on.

  Paire spotted an old woman outside the window, petite and skeletal with a spiny hunched back, dressed in jeans frayed at the knees and a shirt with the red-and-white check pattern of a picnic tablecloth. She pressed herself up against the glass, as if no one would notice. Mayer barely reacted. “Don’t mind her. She’s a regular.”

  The woman stretched out her arms, pressing palms flat against the glass. She pushed her body into the window as if trying to embrace the building. Smooshing her cheek on the window, she began swaying on the pane. It wasn’t a sexual reaction. Her gyrations stemmed more from some sort of divine bliss. This went on for several minutes.

  Paire dubiously asked, “She’s a regular?”

  “Been coming here a few days after the Qi went in the front window. She’s harmless. It’s a shrine for her. Watch. When she’s done, she’ll kiss the glass and go.”

  The woman eventually gave the glass a tender peck, and shuffled toward Seventh.

  Of all the eccentric behavior that happened around the empress, the incident that most startled Paire happened at the end of the week, involving one Phyllis from Arkansas, a mountainous housewife in her fifties dressed in a floral muumuu and tennis shoes. The empress hooked her like a trout and reeled her into the gallery. Her eyes glazed, she plodded through the Fern and stopped a foot before the painting.

  Paire said hello to her. Without taking her eyes off the canvas, the woman extended an unsteady hand. “Phyllis.” Her voice wavered with a prominent rural accent.

  “Welcome.”

  Phyllis spoke automatically as she glanced over the painting. “There was an airfare deal, so the tickets were cheap. Keith asked why I wanted to come to New York City, and I told him I wanted to see something I couldn’t see in Arkansas.” Phyllis heaved a longing breath and took in the woman in the crimson cheongsam, while her Pledge of Allegiance hand covered her heart. “This is it, isn’t it?”

  “She’s unique,” Paire affirmed. In moments like this, Paire played the part of the distant admirer, pretending the portrait didn’t have just as resounding an effect on her.

  “Who’s the artist?”

  “A man named Qi.”

  “Is that right?” Phyllis mused, almost giggling while her eyes traced the edges of the canvas. In the background behind the empress, Qi had painted a small window deep inside sepia shadows, revealing tree branches with pink petals. “Cherry blossoms,” observed Phyllis.

  “That’s right.”

  “Where’s Mr. Qi from?”

  “China.”

  Phyllis didn’t take her eyes off the tempera. When Paire had first noticed the tree, she thought it strange, since she’d always thought of cherry blossoms as being Japanese. But when she looked it up, cherry trees grew in China too. If Phyllis made the same assumption, she kept it to herself. She just commented, “Is that right?”

  What happened next felt as haltingly quick as a hiccup. Phyllis closed her eyes and moved her lips in what might have been a silent prayer. Paire didn’t speak because she didn’t want to interrupt her moment. She expected that when Phyllis’s prayer was over she would trudge out of the Fern like the rest. But instead, Phyllis wilted.

  Paire had never seen anyone faint. The woman’s knees gave out first. The hand that covered her heart dropped to her side, and Phyllis’s head swayed as if supported on a swan’s neck. She tumbled into Paire. The woman was heavier than she, and although Paire managed to hold her for a moment, her ankle rolled and the two women toppled clumsily to the ground.

  Mayer rushed to them, ready to phone an ambulance, but Phyllis came to almost instantly. Paire rolled out from under her and jostled her head, gently calling her name, and the woman blinked as if she’d woken up to birdcalls.

  When Phyllis realized what had happened, her face flushed. “Oh no,” she said. Taking in her surroundings, she was visibly mortified. She reached for the hem of the muumuu and pulled it down to maintain her modesty,
even though it had only risen to midcalf. “Oh no.” Mayer insisted that they call a doctor, but Phyllis refused. “Just need some fresh air.” When she left the Fern, Paire was certain she would look over her shoulder, but Phyllis couldn’t bring herself to look at the empress, lest the painting send another wave of overwhelming ardor crashing over her.

  When Paire closed at night, she shadowed Mayer or Lucia when one of them set the alarm by the back door. Each time she would open the door and peek into the narrow alley behind the building, a corridor of painted gray brick just wide enough for a car to lop off both its side mirrors. Paire was too new for them to trust her with keys or alarm codes. Lucia had told her, “Don’t take it personally. I was here two years before Mayer gave me the access PIN.”

  Sometimes while Mayer or Lucia turned off the lights in the back office Paire stood out in the gallery alone, where she could take a minute and savor a private viewing of the empress. The rest of the time in the gallery she had to suppress her desire to look at the painting, but when the space was hers for these few seconds, her temperance was rewarded. Paire approached the portrait within touching distance, and took in some of the finer details of the cheongsam. At times, she considered that she’d only ever thought of her mother as a two-dimensional portrait, something she stared at in frames. Then she would immediately wipe away that thought.

  In the Qi piece, the stitching looked so realistic that she wanted to press her finger into the pigment to test it. Studying the patterns, she found more shapes, in the same way one might make their own constellations of the stars. Paire found something that looked like the Venus symbol, the circle atop the cross. She saw something that might have been a Chinese character, but when she leaned in close she recognized the symbol, the interlocking N and Y that marked the logo for the New York Yankees. She closed her eyes and smelled the paint, which to Paire was scented like perfume. These moments were a guilt-ridden satisfaction, much like a sugar addict stuffing her face with a private stash of cupcakes. Her audience with the empress was an indulgence so audacious it made her lightheaded in anticipation and guilty afterward that she took so much pleasure from it.

  During these moments she took photos with her phone, which she would later use as reference to draw the Jia Shun Empress. Sometimes, when flipping through her photo stream, curiosity would get the better of her and she would swipe through images of Nicola Franconi. There he was, still standing, almost warning her to stay away. Yet she always came back to the empress and sketched her at night, in Rosewood’s bed.

  Paire started working on the hands, trying to recreate those pianist fingers. She couldn’t get enough of them. She sketched pages of feet. By the weekend, Paire needed a professional manicure and pedicure. She marveled at the polished skin and nails of her fingers and toes, and compared them to her drawings and photos of the Empress Xiao Zhe Yi. At some level, Paire recognized that she was becoming too emotionally attached, but just as Lucia and Mayer had fallen in love by accident, Paire formed her own taboo adhesion. She allowed herself the exhilarating decadence of becoming the empress’s caretaker.

  When Paire went to her regular studio modeling gig, the professor seated her on a plain wooden stool with her hands on her hips. The seated pose was easy to hold, but the wooden seat dug into her ass, and Paire’s right buttock would fall asleep. She wore a red silk robe bought for fifteen dollars in Chinatown. The professor told her she could improvise poses, and she kept the robe partially on her, opening it across her middle so that the edges of the fabric framed her nipples. She dared to sit with a wide stance like the empress, so the rows of scribbling students would be able to see the most private expanse of skin from her chin down to her feet. Paire sat a little more proudly than usual, and hoped the class would take special notice of her fingers and toes, buffed to a satin luster.

  Chapter 6

  Rosewood and Paire stood at the base of an indoor rock climbing wall. The facility had once been a warehouse in the industrial interior of Brooklyn and had been gutted, leaving only the brick superstructure and windows that let in a cascade of sunlight. The giant room now housed an artificial landscape of cliffs, with multicolored plastic holds bolted on the sides.

  Since Paire didn’t own shorts, they had to buy her some along the way. She had on her loosest T-shirt, which had a quote stylized in old typewriter lettering: Adventure must start with running away from home. William Bolitho.

  The harness fit too snugly around her hips, and she wasn’t used to the sensation of being gripped and pinched in those places, at least not like that. From where she stood on a bouncy mat, a rope rose from the harness like an umbilical cord, all the way up the wall, some fifty feet above them. She’d picked out a red rope, naturally choosing crimson when she had the chance. Rosewood fastened it to the belaying device and a few screwgate carabiners. At the top of the wall, the rope fed through an anchor, and descended back to Rosewood, who served as her belayer.

  “Are you ready for this?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, sounding more confident than she felt.

  “If you fall, it won’t be very far. I’ll anchor you.”

  Paire understood why they were there at the rock wall. Or at least, Rosewood had explained his reasons for bringing her here. Every night, she’d been dreaming about the empress. It was always the same scene. In her dream, the empress was a real, flesh-and-blood woman instead of a painting. The Jia Shun Empress stood on the far bank of a river while Paire watched from the opposite shore. Her bare feet sank into the mud. Rather than slipping in it, she was glued to the bank securely by it, so she wasn’t afraid of being so close to the water. Between them the river was a rapid, silty flow, thick and chocolaty like the Mississippi. Paire could smell the rich clay stirred up by the scour. Unlike a real freshwater river, it also carried the trace scent of sea salt in a brisk breeze she’d only felt on Maine’s stony beaches. Another step and she could be carried off. In the water, several multicolored buoys bounced along the surface, pulled by the current, but not carried off, because they were anchored beneath the water. She recognized them instantly—they were lobster traps. This made the water even more dangerous than the current. She didn’t want to cross. It was safer to stand glued to the clay bank and admire the empress from a distance. Still, when she beckoned to her with those long, perfect fingers, Paire couldn’t refuse the invitation. She stepped forward, hearing the audible suction as her foot ripped out of the mud. The moment her foot landed in the river Paire was pulled as if caught in a snare. Her body slipped into the water. She flapped her arms to fight it, but she felt the moisture envelop her, then hood her head, clogging her mouth and nose, deafening her when it flooded her ears. She struggled against the current as it spun her. When she found the surface of the water, she bobbed like one of the buoys, fighting for air even though she was only dreaming. Something caught her leg. The lines from the lobster traps had wrapped around her ankles. The ropes led from the buoys down to the caged traps at the bottom of the riverbed. Water splashed in her eyes, but occasionally she caught glimpses of the woman in red on the far shore, who stared back impassively. Paire kept swimming in her direction, against the underwater tether on one ankle, then another. She couldn’t break free from those lines no matter how hard she kicked. The ropes caught her arms next, preventing Paire from treading water. The buoys clustered around her. The ropes pulled slowly but firmly until her head sank under the muddy water. She opened her eyes under the river and saw nothing but a brown murk, and her limbs thrashed wildly against her restraints as she sank to the bottom, where the graveyard of lobster traps waited for her. Paire lost sight of the empress while gasping for her life.

  What this meant for Rosewood was that Paire kicked him in bed every night until she woke him up. Two nights before, when her dream had startled her awake at three, she found Rosewood already up, flipping through her sketchbook, looking at pages of hands and feet, and, more damning, sketches of the empress’s face.

  At the climbing wall, s
he looked at the top and wondered how much it would hurt if she lost her grip.

  “I better not fall,” Paire said.

  “You might fall, but you won’t get hurt.”

  Rosewood had described the climbing gym as a “useful distraction.” As she pulled at the harness around her hips, she dwelled on the word useful. “When am I ever going to use this?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Rosewood said.

  She looked up at the wall. Fifty feet up, and she knew it would look even taller when she was at the top looking down. The only help she’d have getting up there were those multicolored grips. “I’m having doubts about this.”

  Rosewood placed a hand on her back, between the shoulder blades, where Paire was convinced he could feel how forcefully her heart was pumping. He said, “You’re letting that thing get the better of you.” She remembered how Rosewood ignited when he first saw the empress, how he had to rush them home and strip down in the foyer. Had he forgotten about that, she wondered.

  “You know me that well?”

  “I’ve known you long enough to see a change. You’ve never reacted like this to anything else. By process of elimination, it’s the Qi.” He spoke so tartly she wondered if he might actually be jealous of what the empress evoked from his girlfriend. Rosewood wouldn’t say it, but he must have noted that Paire had never had reactions like this to his work, artistically or otherwise. He added, “Don’t fixate on any one thing. It won’t liberate you. It’s more likely to keep you trapped.”

  She didn’t want to admit any allegiance to the painting, but she found herself making excuses. “It’s not a bad thing to be inspired.”

  “You’re kicking me in your sleep. I need to get some rest.”