by John Gardner
“Heartless monster!” cried Vlemk, clumsily rising and staggering a few steps in the direction of the swiftly departing carriage. He was so angry he raised both fists to the sky and shook them.
But secretly, Vlemk did not blame her for her words. All she’d said was true, and if he was wise, he knew, he would thank her for her righteous severity. “Woe is the kingdom,” he said to himself, “whose rulers are dismayed by every sniffle.” Besides, when she’d parted the curtains wide, he’d gotten a very clear look at her face, and with the force of a knife in the back or an arrow in the chest it had struck him that the Princess was the most beautiful creature he’d ever set eyes on.
When he returned to his studio that day he found he was incapable of painting. His brushes had a malevolent will of their own, dabbing too deeply, as if angrily, into the paints, so that every stroke he made in the picture was slightly off its hit and inefficient, like the work of an amateur, so that he had to wipe it off and start over. By midafternoon he understood that his case was hopeless. He’d lost the will to do perfect paintings of animals or flowers or rural landscapes, paintings of the kind that had made him famous. Indeed, he’d lost the will to paint at all. Carelessly, irritably, he put away his materials, hardly noticing that the brushes were less clean than usual, the paints not well capped, one bottle of thinner tipped sideways and dripping on the floor. “What a box I’m in!” he said, but dully, without feeling.
In the tavern he discovered that nothing the establishment had to offer was exactly what he wanted. The wine, he knew without tasting it, was bitter, the beer too full of froth, the brandy too sugary and thick. “What is it I want?” he thought, sitting with his mouth open, hands clasped in front of his chin, eyes rolled upward, staring without interest at the cracks in the old, sagging ceiling. All of the regulars of the tavern threw puzzled, slightly irritable glances in his direction, perplexed at his seeming so unlike himself. By this time, people grumbled, he should be singing, if not kicking up his heels or starting arguments. One might have thought they would be pleased, since Vlemk could be a nuisance when behaving in his normal way, but in general this was not the case. Even the laziest and most base of the regulars—not including three who were all in some sense artists themselves—were simple people who led complicated lives, and Vlemk’s disruption of what little routine they could persuade themselves they kept was distressing.
“What is it I want?” Vlemk asked over and over, inaudibly, sitting by himself at his table by the window.
“Why doesn’t he drink?” grumbled the regulars, or all except the three. “Why doesn’t he do something?”
The three or, rather, four—the barmaid and three glum men who wore their hats low and went about armed—said nothing, hardly noticing. The flaxen-haired one, formerly a poet, was fast asleep with his eyes open. The one in the glasses, an ex-violinist, was picking the pocket of the laborer just behind him. The third one only stared, like a cat before a mousehole. He was the axe-murderer.
Secretly, of course, Vlemk had known from the beginning what it was that he wanted, and when he came to full awareness of what that something was, he was filled with such misery that he could no longer stay indoors. He rose without a word to anyone, not so much as a glance at the sullen, fat barmaid, and with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his painter’s frock, which in his misery he’d neglected to leave behind in the studio, he walked to the door and, after a moment’s hesitation, out onto the street.
He walked quickly, like a man with some urgent purpose, though in fact he had nowhere in particular to go and nothing much in mind. If someone had asked of him the time of day, he would have had to look around to determine that it was evening, almost nightfall. He walked from street to street and from bridge to bridge in this dejected state until, to his surprise, as the last glow of sunset was fading from the clouds, he found himself standing at the gates of the royal palace.
The Princess, as it happened, was at just that moment returning from walking her greyhounds on the palace grounds. At sight of the box-painter, the greyhounds set up a terrific rumpus and jerked fiercely at their leashes in an attempt to get at him and scare him away, with the result that the Princess was drawn, willy-nilly, to where Vlemk stood gazing in morosely at the palace door. When they reached the iron gates between Vlemk and themselves, the dogs leaped and snapped, dancing on their hind feet and lunging at the bars, all to so little avail that the painter hardly noticed. At last, at a word from their mistress, the dogs fell silent, or, rather, fell to whimpering and sniffing and running around in circles. The Princess, cautiously keeping well back lest Vlemk be some dangerous anarchist, leaned forward at the waist and, holding the leashes with one hand, shaded her eyes with the other, trying to make out whether she knew him. Suddenly she gave a start and cried, “Vlemk the box-painter!” Whether or not she had actually recognized him Vlemk could not tell. At very least, she had recognized his frock.
Vlemk sadly nodded. “Yes, Your Highness,” he said, “it’s Vlemk.”
“For heaven’s sake what are you doing here?” asked the Princess. “Surely you don’t think we give hand-outs!”
“No,” said Vlemk, “I have no reason to think that.”
“What is it, then?” asked the Princess, a little more kindly.
For a long moment Vlemk said nothing, so sunk in misery that he could barely draw a breath. At last he pulled himself together and said: “I will tell you the truth, since then at least I will have it off my chest. It’s not that I expect any good to come of it.”
“Very well,” said the Princess, and abruptly, as if at a premonition, dropped her gaze and went slightly pale.
“I have come,” said Vlemk, “to ask for your hand in marriage.” He was so abashed at having said the words, though he couldn’t help saying them, that he wrung his hands and stared fixedly at the knobs of his shoes.
To her credit, the Princess did not laugh. “That is an exceedingly odd request,” she said, and glanced up at him, then away. “As a man who’s had dealings with wealthy aristocrats, you must surely be aware that it’s unusual for members of the royal family to marry box-painters.”
Even the dogs seemed to notice that something was taking place. They abruptly stopped their antics and stood motionless, their heads raised crookedly, like the heads of jurors.
“Yes,” said Vlemk, “I’m aware of that.”
“No doubt you’re also aware,” the Princess continued, her voice slightly husky, as if her heart were beating too fast, “that I saw you this morning in the gutter with some bottles and papers and the remains of a cat.” Now she too cocked her head, studying him. Whether or not she was smiling Vlemk could not be sure in the enfolding darkness.
“Yes, I’m aware of that too,” Vlemk said. The memory so abashed him that he was unable to say another word.
But as luck would have it, the Princess took over his argument for him. “I suppose you will say,” she said, “that you are nevertheless an aristocrat, in your way, and worthy of any princess alive, since no one in the world is your equal at painting little boxes.”
Poor wretched Vlemk could only nod and wring his hands and make his knuckles hurt. In the palace behind the Princess the windows were now all lighted—so many lighted windows it was like snow in the air. Above the highest tower, the moon was just breaking free of clouds.
“An interesting argument,” the Princess said, though the argument was her own. She touched her forehead with the tips of three fingers and gave her head a queer, just perceptible jerk. “But I’m afraid I’m not persuaded. How can I know that, living as you do, you haven’t lost all your former ability?”
At this, Vlemk’s gift of speech rushed back. “Believe me,” he said recklessly, “I could paint you a picture of your face so real it seems to speak!”
“Interesting,” said the Princess thoughtfully. “Make it actually speak, and I’ll permit you to talk with me again about these matters.” So saying, giving him a mysterious smile—p
erhaps mocking, perhaps affectionate; in the frail moonlight and the glow of the palace not even a wizard could have decided for sure—she turned from him, gave a little tug at the leashes, and walked away toward the arched palace door with her greyhounds.
“Make it actually speak!” thought the artist, his heart beating wildly. It was hopeless, of course. Though a man had ten times the talent of poor Vlemk, no amount of care and skill could make a painting so true to its original that it could speak. If he couldn’t make a painting so perfect that it could speak the Princess would never again talk to him. And if he couldn’t find some way to talk further with the Princess—bask in that beauty that had struck him like an arrow in the chest this morning—how was he to paint? He was boxed in for certain, this time!
On the other hand, he thought, walking more rapidly down the hill toward the city, perhaps it was possible. It was, after all, an effect he’d never before attempted. The idea grew on him, and when he reached the city limits he was running full tilt, his long white artist’s frock flying out behind him, his hat mashed down on his head under one long hand.
“Ah, he’s himself again,” said the regulars at the tavern as Vlemk ran by. The four—the barmaid and the three who carried arms—said nothing.
He ran full tilt, as if devils were chasing him, until he came to his house, paused only long enough to jerk open his door and slam it shut behind him, then ran full tilt up the stairs to his studio in the attic, overlooking the city. He sorted through his boxes, took the best he had on hand, and began on his project that same night.
2
When Vlemk had worked for six weeks without sleeping, he began to get morbid, unsettling ideas. Sometimes it crossed his mind that what the Princess had said to him might be nothing but a grim, unfeeling joke, that she had no intention whatsoever of marrying him, indeed, that her purpose in giving him the seemingly impossible task was simply to make sure that he never again spoke to her. As an artist, he had difficulty believing such things, for if one gives in to the notion that visions of extraordinary beauty are mere illusion, one might as well cut off one’s hands and sit on street-corners and beg. With all the strength of his carefully nourished and trained imagination he cast back in his mind to that morning when he’d seen her in the carriage, peeking out through the curtains, and with all his dexterity and technical trickery he labored to set down that vision in paint. He could not doubt the intensity of the emotion that had surged in him or the accuracy of the vision he set down line by line. Every flicker of light in her pale blue eyes was precisely correct; the turn of the cheek, the tilt of the nose, the seven stray hairs on her forehead—all, insofar as they were finished, were indisputable.
Nevertheless, he was bedeviled by misgivings. It occurred to him for instance that the paint was controlling him, creating not an image of the Princess but something new, a creature never before seen under the sun, the painting growing like a plant under his brushes, faithful to the form of its parent but unique, evolving to singularity by sure, ancient laws—the white of the earlobe calling to the white in the lady’s eyes and demanding from the painter infinitesimal changes not true to the actual lady but true, instead, to the natural requirements of the picture on the box. It alarmed him to discover that the throat was taking on, slowly but inexorably, a greenish tint very rare if not unheard of in human beings. “Yet why am I so fretful?” he rebuked himself. “Is it not true that the emotion I feel when I look at the painting is precisely the emotion I felt when I looked at the lady, except for certain small mistakes which can easily be fixed, such as the cock of the nostril and the false glint of the eyelid?” He stood back and looked at the painting to see if it was true. It was. “Then all is still well,” he said, moving the brush again, his left eye closed; “let the throat be green as grass, so long as it feels right!”
But that was the least of his misgivings. It struck him that the feeling that had surged in him that morning was mere chemistry, nothing more. “I’d drunk a good deal the night before,” he said aloud, bending over his table, mixing paints. “Just as now if I straighten up suddenly, tired as I am and tending toward dizziness, the room will strike me differently than it would if I rose slowly, so that morning—dehydrated, soaked to the bone with dew and gutter wash—I must undoubtedly have seen what I would not have seen at some other time, in some other physiological condition. Is it possible that I’m painting not the Princess but, say, my own uric-acid level? my blood pressure?” The question vexed him, but even this misgiving he was able to quiet, to some extent, with the thought—which burst out of him when he was standing at the window looking down at the old crooked streets of the city—“Very well, my condition was abnormal that morning; but the abnormality was one very common among mortals—or anyway human beings—so that the vision can hardly be called freakish or divorced from reality.” If the answer was not as comforting as the painter of boxes might have liked, it was nevertheless an answer, and Vlemk for a time went on painting.
But the greatest misgiving of all was this: the character of the face taking shape on the box was not altogether admirable. One saw faint but unmistakable hints of cruelty, vanity, and stinginess. He did his best, as any honest artist would have done, to undo them or overcome them, but the faults seemed ineradicable; they went, literally, to the bone. Vlemk stood patting his beard, pondering. It was not the first time he’d had this experience. Indeed, more often than not when he’d set out to capture some image which had given him pleasure, he’d found as he painted that the image, under scrutiny, proved slightly less appealing than he’d imagined. This had not much troubled him on those earlier occasions, because his purpose then had been simply to paint a pretty box. As a public minister unobtrusively rephrases the remarks of an irate king, fixing up the grammar, dropping out the swear words, here and there inserting a line or two that the people will perhaps find more memorable, so Vlemk had offhandedly edited Nature, straightening crooked stems, giving life to drooping leaves, suppressing all traces of dog manure. In the project at hand, that was, of course, impossible. He began to perceive clearly the fact that he’d known all along but had never quite confronted: that Beauty is an artist’s vain dream; it has, except in works of art, no vitality, no body.
Abruptly, Vlemk found himself profoundly depressed. Slowly, meticulously, as if going through empty motions, he cleaned his brushes and carefully capped his paints, saw to it that his oils and thinners were exactly as they should be, removed his painter’s frock and hung it on its hook, then poked his arms into his overcoat, stepped out of the studio, and locked the door behind him.
At the tavern, things were just beginning to hum. The regulars were singing and arguing politics; the sullen, fat barmaid was pretending to smile in the arms of an old drunken seaman. Old Tom was, as usual, asleep under the stove.
“Ha!” cried one of the regulars as Vlemk came through the door, “it’s Vlemk the box-painter!”
Instantly, everyone smiled, delighted, for it was a long time since they’d seen him. “Vlemk!” they shouted, “where have you been? Pull up a chair!”
Soon poor Vlemk was as drunk as he’d ever been in all his days, riding on a horse with a milk wagon behind it—where he’d gotten the horse he had no idea—milk bottles crashing on the cobblestone streets at every jolt or sudden turn, bringing cats from every doorway; trees careening by, looking drunker than he was; people on the sidewalks going flat against the walls at his approach. Then, sometime later, he had no idea how long, though he dimly remembered sitting in some woman’s apartment, staring with drunken fixity at the birthmark on her throat, he found himself chatting with an old, bony monk in a graveyard. They were sharing a bottle of some fennel-flavored drink.
“Ah yes,” said the monk, “Beauty is momentary in the mind, as the poet saith.” He handed Vlemk the bottle. After a moment he continued, “I’ll tell you how I got into this business in the first place. It had to do with women.”
Vlemk tipped up the bottle and thoughtfully drank.
The graves all around him tilted precariously then righted themselves.
“By the highest standards I am able to imagine, I have never known a beautiful woman,” said the monk, “or even a good woman, or even a relatively good mother.” He sighed and tapped the tips of his fingers together. “It occurred to me early on that since we can conceive of a beautiful woman, or a good woman, or even a relatively good mother, though we find none in Nature—always with the exception of Our Saviour’s Mother—” He cleared his throat as if embarrassed, and a quaver came into his voice as he continued, “It occurred to me early on that Nature is not worthy of our attention. Even the best we mortals can conceive, if we believe old books, is but a feeble reflection or ethereal vibration of the beauty God sits in the midst of, millennium to millennium.”
Whatever more he had to say, Vlemk did not hear; he was fast asleep.
Sometime much later, as the sun was rising, Vlemk found himself standing at the door of his house, studying the doorway with tortuous attention, noting every stipple on the wall, every crack in the wood, making sure it was indeed his own doorway. He had never examined it quite so carefully before, which was perhaps the reason that, the more he looked, the more uncertain he was that the doorway was his own. What he did know, with certainty, was that the doorway was extremely interesting, as these things go. He ran his numb fingertips over the stone and cement and then, carefully, for fear of splinters, over the wood. He thought, for some reason, of the arched door of the palace where the Princess lived, and suddenly there welled up in him an emotion as curious as any he had ever experienced: pity for the Princess’s doorway. It was not that there was anything wrong with that grand, solemn arch. Its proportions were perfect—though more appropriate, perhaps, for a church than for a palace. Its elegance was properly understated, its craftsmanship inspired though not original—the quatrefoils, the lozenges, the mournful beaked face that formed the keystone were all done to perfection. Yet the fact remained that, like his own humble doorway, it was obscurely ridiculous. No sooner had he thought this than he was ambushed by another thought more curious than the first. If he were to be granted, like Saint John in the Bible, a vision of heaven, he would certainly feel this exact same emotion, a faintly ironic amusement mixed with pity. Let all the architects of heaven and earth work together on the project, the result would be the same: not disappointing—nothing at all like that—but touchingly ridiculous.
