The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Twins of a type,” said Shenz, “yet opposites.”

  “When they are balanced, there is health, there is understanding, there is the potential for creativity. Hence one desires always to reside at the equator. When that balance is disturbed, there is illness and chaos,” said Goren.

  “My yin and yang are out of balance,” I said.

  “Now notice this,” said Goren, tracing the boundary that contained the yin and yang. “Think of it as an atom, the smallest particle of matter. Each atom contains the full nature of the universe, just as each individual, like a god, contains within his mind the entirety of the universe. Think of the insignificant size of your brain in relation to the immensity of the ocean, yet your mind can encompass the vastness of that entity in a single thought, with room left over for the Parthenon, the entire layout of New York City, the pyramids, and more. To quote Emily Dickinson, ‘A brain is wider than the sky.’ This concept goes as far back as the earliest recorded human thought. It can be traced from the Rig Veda to the Tao Te Ching to the teachings of Buddha to Pythagoras to Plato to Averroe to Giordano Bruno to Emerson and my personal friend Walt Whitman.”

  Here the owl had had enough and rose into the air.

  “Do you see what I am telling you?” he said.

  “No,” I whispered, feeling as if I were back in school and forced to decipher outlandish numbers.

  “You, Piambo, contain all the knowledge of the universe, as do both Shenz and I. The portrait of Mrs. Charbuque already exists within you. You must merely discover it. Think about when you have painted a picture for yourself and not a commission. Did you place each brush stroke as if you were laying the bricks for that wall we spoke of earlier? Or was each application of your brush uncovering something that was already in existence in your soul? Wasn’t it Michelangelo who spoke of releasing the figures from stone? He chose his blocks of marble for the human forms he knew they already contained.”

  “This, I have experienced,” I said. “But how do I uncover Mrs. Charbuque? You don’t know her. She is quite an elusive woman.”

  “The normal course would be five years of exile, isolation, and intensive daily meditation along with a diet of green vegetables, figs, and a liquor made from the pulp of the quince.”

  “There you go,” said Shenz.

  “I’ve got two weeks,” I said.

  “I am aware of this. So we will need something to catalyze the process. Therefore I have prepared this elixir for you.” Goren reached beneath the table, out of sight, and brought forth a large round bottle with a cut glass stopper. It was filled with some sluggish yellow crud. “Ten dollars,” he said.

  AWAKENING

  IN THE cab on the way home, with my eyelids nearly closed, I held fast to my bottle of yellow goo. Goren had told me that this tonic had been used in the realm of Prester John to inspire court-appointed artists to realize the cosmic in their work. He had found the list of ingredients and recipe in a facsimile of a volume said to have been brought back from Asia by Sir John Mandeville and more recently translated by a professor at Oxford. The translated name of the ancient brew was Awakening.

  Shenz, who sat across from me, could have used some awakening, for he had nearly passed out. My mind was now unbefuddled enough to realize that my friend had saved me from a dangerous depression resulting from the ruined portrait. For this I was much in his debt. Although his drug was a boon in that it diverted my anguish, I was amazed that he had the vitality to take it daily and yet withstand its ravages. That day’s one fling with the poppy was enough to make me wish to avoid it for the rest of my life.

  I was on the verge of sleep, and my mind had moved on to a consideration of yin and yang. Picturing them enclosed in Mrs. Charbuque’s locket, I saw their black-and-white forms swirling round like two fish chasing each other’s tails. Just as my eyes closed completely, Shenz awoke and leaned forward.

  “Piambo,” he said.

  I opened my eyes.

  “I didn’t tell you, I found some information about that ship, the Janus. A couple of old seamen down at the harbor knew of it. About fifteen years ago it left London on a return voyage to New York. It never arrived at its destination, and its true fate was never completely established. In other words, it completely disappeared. The theory is that it went down in a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic. The story was in all the newspapers, and when they mentioned the details to me I seemed vaguely to remember it. One of the old salts told me that from time to time there is a report of it being sighted and then vanishing from view, like a mirage. His partner, though, laughed and said that was all malarkey concocted by bored sailors to frighten women and children and keep one another amused.”

  “Funny, I don’t have any recollection of it,” I said.

  “The two gentlemen I spoke to were most helpful because they directed me to an official building nearby where a registry of all ships was kept. There, I was allowed to go through the papers concerning the Janus. The passenger roster for its last voyage listed no Charbuque.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Mrs. Charbuque seems to be dealing in a little malarkey herself.”

  We rode on in silence until we arrived at my house. Before leaving the cab I asked Shenz to remind me what dosage of Goren’s elixir I was to take.

  “I forget what he said. Take a few snorts every day. If some is good, more is better. But if I were you, I would seriously consider what he told you about Mrs. Charbuque already existing in your mind.”

  “I thought I had found her,” I said.

  “Think of that attempt as nothing more than a severed monkey arm. You are getting close, I’m sure of it,” he said, and then was off.

  I was exceedingly weary, but not wanting to awaken later to the mess in the studio, I spent some time cleaning it. After disposing of the murdered canvas and setting my painting things to rights, I decided to take a dose of my medicine. Half of me considered it a farce, and the other desperately hoped that it would fulfill its promise. When I removed the stopper, a sulfurous aroma wafted from the bottle like an evil djinn. I held my breath and downed a goodly portion of it. After a moment I became conscious of the taste, like a sugary syrup made from rotten eggs, and gagged twice. My eyes watered as the saliva retreated to the corners of my mouth. There was a brief period during which I thought my stomach was going to reject it, and then things settled down.

  Going to my bedroom, I removed my shoes and prepared to disrobe when I felt something shift violently in my bowels. I tell you, Awakening was not the word for it. Rude Awakening might have been more apt. I literally sprinted for the outhouse and proceeded to spend a solid hour there. There is no telling what passed for cosmic in the realm of Prester John, but the effects of Goren’s elixir seemed, at best, a circuitous route to its discovery.

  After my ordeal, I did then go to bed and slept soundly. At some point during the night, I roused very briefly to the dark and again had a sense that someone was with me in the room. My fatigue was so great, though, that I could not muster the appropriate fear and fell immediately back into a dream of walking through a snow-covered wood at daybreak. In Goren’s favor, I have to confess that when I woke on Monday morning, I felt completely refreshed and more at ease than I had since beginning the commission. With this said, I still took the bottle of Awakening to the outhouse and dropped the whole thing down into that place where it was in any case ultimately destined to rest.

  Later that afternoon I sat before the screen. At this meeting I had a definite mission and did not bother with the sketchbook.

  “I saw your friend Samantha Rying on the street yesterday, Piambo,” said Mrs. Charbuque. “She looked somewhat forlorn.”

  I ignored her comment. “Tell me now about your husband,” I said.

  “Moret Charbuque,” she said. “Yes, the love of my life.”

  “Do I detect a note of sarcasm?” I asked.

  “An entire symphony might be more to the point,” she said.

  “He was untrue?” I asked.r />
  “Yes, but not in any mundane sense. Charbuque was complex if he was anything. We were, for a time, desperately in love. Actually, we remained desperately in love, but our love became something dangerous. If anyone were to see it, they would immediately describe it as hatred, but it wasn’t. I’m sure of that.”

  “From the beginning, please,” I said.

  “The beginning may be hard to trace, for this type of affair always starts long before the participants become aware of each other, but I will tell you how we met.”

  “Very well,” I said.

  “After having crossed the country and returned to New York yet more wealthy and famous, Watkin and I spent quite a number of years performing in the city. During this time I was approached now and then by any number of gentlemen who let it be known that, no matter what my appearance or strange gifts, they would be inclined to enter into matrimony with me. Most of them I dismissed without granting a private audience. When I say private, I merely mean away from the crowd of an audience, mind you, not free of the screen. Occasionally I would get one of my urges, as we have discussed, and I would have Watkin show a fellow to my room, where I would engage him in conversation. To a man, they all failed my review. I was not about to enter into a relationship with a fool, as my mother had done. Of this, I was particularly wary.

  “Be that as it may, when enough time had passed that Watkin and I thought the act was again about to reach its limit of interest in the city, we began to cast about for places that might offer new patrons and new revenue. All the time, we were making lavish amounts of money and our venues were growing in size. Since I lived a very contained life, I had only minor expenditures. I put some of my earnings away, and the rest I invested in burgeoning industries. Like Ossiak in his prime, I could not perpetrate a failure if I tried. Eventually Watkin came to me and suggested we head to Europe. ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘your abilities of conquest can only be done justice by a fresh continent.’

  “And so we went. Madrid-Rome-Munich-Paris-London was to be our itinerary. We began with those cities that were not English-speaking. It was our plan to end with the easiest, London, because we knew we would be exhausted by that point in the tour. We hired translators, who stood in front of the audience along with Watkin and let my words be known in the local tongue. America has not cornered the market on enjoying being hoodwinked. Although I denied the authenticity of the Twins’ whispered prophetic imagery, believing that it was merely my own mind playing tricks on itself, the snowflakes did not fail me even once. The phenomenon continued as it always had with great ease, no matter what the surroundings, no matter how fatigued I was by travel.”

  “If you had not experienced their illusory messages, would you have continued?” I asked.

  “It would have been impossible,” she said. “When you have a quiet moment, try to conjure up a list of random images that hint at portending the future. Perhaps you could do it once, or maybe even twice. I doubt it. But to do it again and again, night after night, without repeating yourself, now that would be something. I had enough money. If I were forced to consciously formulate driveling strings of mind-pictures, I would have immediately retired.”

  “And you were popular in Europe, I take it?”

  “The Spanish viewed me mainly as an oracle of romance. The Italians couldn’t have made my job easier, wanting first and foremost to learn about the fate of their relatives in the afterlife. The French saw the entire thing as a brilliant, complex entertainment with metaphorical significance for life itself. I rather think the Germans were frightened of me and therefore were the most adoring. Was I popular? Look around you, Piambo. This house and my estate on Long Island were both built on the gullibility of Europe. Had I the mind to go to China, I would most likely now be an empress presiding over my own province.”

  I laughed, but she did not. “What of London, though? You did not mention the British,” I said.

  “London, the city we thought would be our simplest engagement, early on threatened to be colder than the mutton they served. The British are not easily frightened or amused. I thought, from the initial meager audiences, that we would have to fold up and return to the States. Then one night a pronouncement of mine in response to a woman’s question could have been construed, I suppose, as hinting at her husband’s infidelity. Her husband happened to be a member of Parliament. What the British love is a scandal, and as it turned out, my words prompted the woman to dig into her husband’s affairs. Alas, she found not one mistress but three, and in an attempt to ruin him, she went to the Times with the story. Had I distributed a million broadsides announcing the show, it couldn’t have been better advertised. Another monumental success was on the brink of dawning, and then I fell in love.”

  HIS LITTLE COCOON

  IT MAY be true that the sun never sets on the British Empire, but while in London I wondered when it was going to rise. We arrived there in autumn, and the weather was perpetually cold and damp—miserable fogs and drenching rains. Because of having to exit swiftly from the heat of whatever theater we were performing in into the chill night air, I had developed a bad cold by the end of the month. I did my best to ignore its effects, but it remained with me and became serious. Eventually I found I could not draw a decent breath, and my voice could not penetrate the thin boundary of the screen to reach the audience. We had two weeks of shows remaining when I finally told Watkin to reschedule them.

  “I was now shipwrecked, so to speak, in my hotel rooms, so absolutely drained I barely had the energy to crawl out of bed to a chair to watch the goings-on in the street below. I tried the usual assortment of home remedies—steam, herbals, compresses—but nothing seemed to alleviate my symptoms. Watkin was frantic, fearing that something might be seriously wrong with me, and insisted that I see a doctor. I told him I was seeing no one and no one was seeing me. But he persisted, and eventually I gave in to his demands—only on my own terms, of course.

  “Careful to protect my anonymity, he found an American physician who was visiting London at the time. This young man had recently graduated from medical school and was on the grand tour of Europe and places beyond. He had been at one of my shows a few nights earlier and had chatted with Watkin, merely by way of wishing to speak to someone who had been more recently in the States. My manager assured me that the young fellow was in need of cash and that we could buy his silence if it proved necessary for him to have a direct audience with me. I told Watkin that a direct audience was out of the question but to bring him to me.

  “He arrived at my hotel suite on a night when I was at my lowest. I had slept straight through for two days in a row. My spirits were as drained as my body, for with all that inactive time on my hands, now adding up to two weeks of static maundering, I had far too much opportunity to reconsider my life. Memories of my father and mother, my almost fairy-tale existence on the top of the mountain, came back to me both nostalgically and stripped down to reality. What was left was a dark and twisted mess. I wept profusely at never having experienced true love, at my utter loneliness, the curse of the Twins, the murder of my mother, the designs of my father to trap me in this foolish sideshow existence. For all it mattered, I could very well have been a hairy she-ape of a prophet and it wouldn’t have made a whit of difference.

  “‘Hello, Madam Sibyl,’ came a voice from outside my bedroom. I swear, the mere sound of that phrase did something to me. There was a light innocence in the voice accompanied by a real sense of concern. I answered immediately, before I even knew what I was doing, not in my trumped-up stage voice but in my real one. The doctor introduced himself and gave his name, telling me that he was a native of Boston and that his family had originally emigrated there from France. I remember telling him that he had a lovely name. And do you know, Piambo, I was certain I could hear him blush.

  “He insisted that I allow him to see me. ‘Your secrets are safe with me, Madam Sibyl,’ he said. ‘I have taken an oath of confidentiality concerning my patients.’ We bargained back
and forth, and he won. I opened my bedroom door the width of a dime and strode quickly back and forth in front of it three times. When I was finished, he asked me if that was to be the extent of it. ‘Of course,’ I said, and this drew a peal of laughter from him. He then went on to inquire as to what my exact symptoms were and what my schedule had been like of late.

  “‘You are more than likely simply run-down,’ he said. ‘I believe you have a bad cold and that your body is requiring you to rest both physically and mentally. You are exhausted.’ His words made me realize how hard I had been pushing myself and how the strange surroundings had contributed to my weakened nerves. ‘You may call me Luciere,’ I told him. ‘That is my true name. I am a real woman and not an ancient creature.’

  “‘Yes, Luciere,’ he said, ‘I quite suspected that. I want you to stay as warm as you possibly can. Cover up so that you can sweat. Drink hot tea and soup. Tomorrow I will bring you some medicine and check on you.’ I thanked him, and he told me how miraculous he thought my performance was. He returned the following day bearing his medicine, which was a kind of hot soup made of cabbage, carrots, and garlic. I had already begun feeling a bit better by then, but I did not let on, because I wanted him to continue to visit. This he did, and on the third day I had Watkin set up the screen for me in the parlor of my hotel suite. I held an audience with him there, thus allowing me to peer through the pinhole and view him. I liked very much what I saw. He was neither large nor small but of perfect stature. He wore his dark hair long, had a mustache, and was dressed casually in a maroon jacket. He wore neither tie nor hat.