by John Gardner
“I want to go home,” the tiny voice wailed. “You’ve all gone crazy! I don’t look like her at all!”
Vlemk raised his eyebrows, closed his eyes, and pressed one finger down gently to stop the painted mouth. He set the box on the table, still in its black velvet cloth, and waited for the guests to gather and the Princess to take her place. It was not strictly true, apparently, that the moustached young man had been too scrupulous to read Vlemk’s note. On every side of him Vlemk could hear whispered speculations on whether or not the painted picture would talk. At last a servant pulled back the Princess’s chair, his head bowed in the way people bow when they quickly and casually say grace, and the Princess seated herself, unsmilingly, opposite Vlemk. When the room had quieted, Vlemk, with infinite weariness, scorning himself for this obedience to mindless ritual but seeing no way out, boxed in by the illusory infinity of mirrors, bent forward and removed the black cloth. The Princess for an instant looked not at the box but at Vlemk the box-painter, as if assuring herself that, like her, he meant harm. Then her gaze dropped to the box, and she seemed to pale. The room was faintly humming. After a moment she looked up at the man at her left, the old servant. “Do I actually look like that?” she asked quietly, her voice so sweet that Vlemk’s heart wrenched. The servant seemed to muse, bending closer, two fingers on the corner of his spectacles—for all one could tell, he was sincere and honest. At last he said, “I’m not sure, Your Highness. I don’t really see the resemblance.”
Vlemk smiled.
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” whispered the picture, making sure that no one heard but her maker.
Now the Princess was looking hard at Vlemk the box-painter. “You say it talks?” she said.
“She talks if she wishes to,” he wanted to say, but being unable to speak, Vlemk simply nodded.
Then, to Vlemk’s horror, the picture said crossly, with undisguised contempt, “So you’re the famous beautiful Princess.”
A gasp went through the room, and the Princess’s face went blank. People began whispering; here and there someone laughed; others began shushing them for silence, hoping to hear more from the box.
When everything was still again, the picture said: “You find your image unflattering, Princess?” The painted face paused, waiting for full attention. “Perhaps you’ve been painted too often by people who ‘respect’ you.” The picture smiled.
The Princess, to her credit, was as calm as stone. To Vlemk she said, “Is the picture always so insulting?”
Vlemk nodded, then in fairness shook his head, then shrugged. He rolled his eyes in the direction of the box and hoped that it would soon learn resignation and, if only for his sake, make peace.
At this moment there was a commotion, and, looking up, Vlemk saw—guided by the eyes of all the others—that on a balcony high on the wall behind him, a balcony he’d failed to notice before, a golden door was opening. After a moment a man in a wheelchair came carefully through the door, assisted beyond his need by eager servants. Vlemk knew the face at once, ravaged and sorrowful, infinitely patient yet capable of flying into rages over trifles, the face of a man of keen intelligence, plagued by some constant, nagging pain and bearing up as well as he’s able. It was the King, whose picture was on the coin. He seemed at death’s door. His eyes were slits, his body so wasted beneath the splendid clothes that a small child might have carried him in her arms like a doll. He tipped his head—he wore no crown—as if gazing down at the company, then feebly waved his bejewelled hand as a sign that the business of the evening, whatever it might be, should go on as before. The people bowed and bent their knees to him, some with tears in their eyes; he solomnly nodded back; and then, gradually, all eyes returned to the box.
The Princess said, “Vlemk, my friend, whatever the personality of this toy you’ve created, there can be no denying that you’re an amazing painter of boxes. We accept your gift with pleasure.”
Vlemk sadly nodded, ignoring the look of wild outrage from the box, the tiny wail of “Toy indeed!” If he closed his eyes, he knew he would see his friend the Princess as she’d looked that day when she’d refused, out of kindness, to throw him a coin from the carriage. All that was a long time ago, and Vlemk (so he told himself) had no regrets. Nevertheless, he was careful to keep his eyes open, and pressing his hands on the arms of the chair, he prepared to get up and leave.
But the picture on the box was not so pleased with the way things were going, and spoke again: “If you find me unflattering, you should look at the pictures in his studio. He’s painted you again and again, Princess. Perhaps in one of the others you’d find something to your taste.”
The strength went out of Vlemk’s arms, and he sat as he was.
“Is this true?” asked the Princess, both interested and uneasy.
Like images in a nightmare, Vlemk’s dreadful pictures of the Princess rose up before his eyes. It was not that he believed them false, exactly—indeed, the drooping eyelid he had predicted was now an actuality, at least when the Princess was angry. Nevertheless, the pictures were not things he desperately wanted her to see. He tried to think whether to nod or shake his head, and at last he pretended he hadn’t heard her.
“I must admit,” said the Princess almost apologetically, as if admitting that the fault might indeed be her own, “though I’m naturally impressed by the picture you’ve brought me, I’m not quite sure I see the likeness.”
A noise came from the balcony, and instantly everyone looked up. “It speaks,” cried the King in a wheedling, childish voice, banging his tiny fist on the arm of the wheelchair. “Think about that, girl! It’s real enough to speak!” Instantly a terrible coughing fit took him, blood fell from his nose, and his servants rushed him—shuddering and shaking and snapping his teeth—from the room.
6
Though she hadn’t admitted it the Princess was disturbed by the picture Vlemk had left her, and as the spring days passed, her discomfort in its presence increased. She would have had it destroyed if she could bring herself to do so, but the thought nagged at her that facing the whole matter squarely might somehow be important. Moreover, the idea of destroying the picture, even when it attacked her with its vulgar little tongue, made her tremble with superstitious alarm. If she threw it in the fire, might that not be a kind of murder, even though the substance of the creature she destroyed was just paint? And there was this, though she hardly dared think of it: as the flames leaped up around the picture, destroying it, might not she suddenly feel an onslaught of mysterious heat—might she not, in fact… She refused to let the thought complete itself.
Sometimes, if she was lucky, she was able to catch the picture in its sleep, and could gaze at the image thoughtfully for long periods, as she could never have gazed at her image in the mirror, for then the eyes were of course always open and every flicker of thought was reflected, so that nothing was to be trusted, she could never get inside herself. It had struck her as true of many people—the man with the moustache was only one—that what they saw as most interesting or charming in themselves was never in fact what was best in them: their finest expressions, their most beautiful aspects, were things unknown to them, because never shown in any mirror. She could see that the man with the moustache, for example—a prince who was considered by the kingdom’s chief ministers to be an excellent match—had been persuaded by his mirror that his noblest expression was the one in which he lifted an eyebrow in ironic amusement. Personally she found that supercilious look downright offensive. She could imagine how tiresome and stupid it would look when he was eighty. What drew the Princess’s heart to the man—despite her displeasure at being treated as a brood mare, an ambush piece in a political chess game—was the look of childish perplexity that sometimes came over him, a look she was sure he’d never seen on himself and would have done almost anything to avoid.
Though at first she’d been convinced that the box-painter’s image was nothing at all like her—a surprising lapse in the box-painter’s art or
a proof that his manner of living had done damage to his brain—she had gradually begun to revise her opinion, examining the image when the eyes were closed. She saw blue lights in the temples that vaguely frightened her: she was more mortal than she thought. She saw, in addition to the many things that pleased her, little troublesome hints of cruelty, vanity, and stinginess. She began to think the portrait was accurate, and she was filled with a feeling like moths fluttering in her chest.
It was worse, of course, when the picture on the box was awake. It would sit watching her, smug as a cat, or it would say things she never would have dreamed of saying; that is, things she would never have said to herself even in a dream. By the slightest twist of a phrase, the picture on the box could make her heart turn to ice. The most innocent remark—“You do have your little ways, don’t you?”—spoken in her own unmistakable voice (unmistakable to her), with her own secret ironies ringing down and down, could emotionally disable the Princess for a week. Her anguish at such moments was so bewildering and complex she could hardly make out what it was that she felt; she could only go to bed and weep. What the box said to her was for one thing so infuriatingly stupid, which meant, she knew, that she, the Princess, was for all her fine airs stupid, tiresome, in fact worthless. Though she was outwardly young, the tedious clichés with which the box attacked her—her own clichés, her own forms of attack—revealed to her that nothing was any longer new about her, the prettily painted box might as well have been her casket. At the same time, what the box said was true, however monstrously unfair—undeniably true. The picture on the box hated her; that was the gist of it. She hated herself. She needed healing, needed the touch of some loving magician who would transform her, return her to her childhood innocence, but who could love her? And if anyone did—the Prince, for example—could an intelligent woman give her heart to such a fool? There were plenty all around her who were willing to give her praise, plenty to whom she could play the Good Princess like a skillful actress, hating herself all the more as she played the role. But there was no one who could silence the voice of the truth-telling box. Even when the picture on the box was quiet, like a watchful animal, a murderer biding his time, it seemed to the Princess that it could fill all the high, square room with its crackling contempt. The picture hated her; if that was all there was to it, she would have been ruined, and that would have been that.
But the picture on the box had another side to it. Sometimes it spoke its emotions without thinking, forgetting its hatred and simply responding to the warmth of the sunlight pouring through the window, the music of the songbirds, or the beauty of the wheatfields sloping away toward the river to the west of the palace. She, the Princess, would feel herself splaying anew to the warmth of the summer, or noticing again, as she hadn’t in years, how lovely the wheatfields were, yellowing into season. That voice too, the voice that gave her unthinking and unstinting praise, was unmistakably her own, and the Princess was in those moments as pleased with herself—however briefly and unsurely—as a child who’s been given some wonderful gift for no reason.
The feeling was not all sweetness. It inevitably heightened in the Princess’s mind the disparity between what she felt to be her best self and knew to be her worst. One day, for instance, walking in the garden with the Prince who wore the moustache, pointing out to him the glow of a blooming tea-rose, she was suddenly overwhelmed by anxiety, wondering which was the truer feeling, the innocent delight which had sprung the remark or the manipulative instinct that had turned it to a ploy in their game of political-romantic approchement.
“As lovely as your eyes,” said the Prince, idiotically.
“Are my eyes red, then?” asked the Princess, lowering her lashes and giving him a smile.
“I was really thinking of your cheeks,” said the Prince, with that look of childish vexation and befuddlement she usually liked on him. Today she was only annoyed by it—annoyed partly, if she told herself the truth, by the virginal innocence it revealed in him, an innocence she could not match. “Is it not true,” she asked herself angrily, “that the Prince’s remark was stupid and manipulative?—aesthetically stupid, a floundering metaphor, and both politically and sexually manipulative? Why should a woman’s cheeks (or eyes) be celebrated for their redness, as would a child’s, and not a man’s?”—for her Prince would be insulted beyond words, she knew, if she should seek to flatter him by praise of his pretty, red cheeks. (They were red, in fact, and for a manic instant she thought of trying it.) Yet alas, both the stupidity and the attempt at manipulation came bubbling from the Prince in the moustache as innocently as water from a well, as unconsidered and open-hearted as grapes on a grapevine or pink and blue hollyhocks blooming beside a farmer’s brick house.
“Are you all right?” asked the Prince with a look of alarm. Her face was flushed—as red as a rose, he might have said if he’d thought of it—and for no clear reason there were tears in her eyes.
“My dear, dear Princess,” he said, in panic now, “is it something I said?”
“It’s nothing,” said the Princess, and put the tips of her fingers to her forehead.
“Perhaps we’d better go inside,” said the Prince, and gave an irritable glance up past his shoulder, as if the heavens’ over-brightness were at fault.
“Yes, perhaps we’d better,” the Princess said.
At the door to her room they parted with a touch of hands, the Princess promising to be out again soon, as soon as she’d had a little rest. The minute the door was closed, she hurried to her bed and lay down with her head on the pillow, one hand draped limply across her forehead.
The picture on the box was feeling talkative. “Have a nice time?” it asked, ironically putting on the voice of an old woman.
At once, in a fury, the Princess sat up again.
“Not the quilt! Not the quilt!” cried the picture—for of late it was the Princess’s habit to cover the box with a heavy yellow quilt in hopes of silencing it. “I’ll be good! I’ll be nothing but sweetness and light! You have my promise!”
The Princess lay back again and closed her eyes, not resting, ready to spring if the box started in again.
After a long time the box asked, trying to sound innocent, “Did he talk dirty?”
The Princess groaned.
“It’s not that I mean to be troublesome,” said the picture hastily, thinking of the quilt. “And of course it’s none of my business what your suitors say to you. It’s just that life’s not very interesting for a person who’s not real, if you know what I mean. Has it ever occurred to you that all I have is a head and neck and shoulders? I can’t even play with my—”
“Stop it!” cried the Princess, sitting up again. “Where in heaven’s name do you get those vulgar, obscene, unspeakable …” She did not finish, but put her hands to her face and bent forward like a person in pain. “Why do you hate me?” she whispered. “What is it you want of me?”
“I don’t hate you, really,” said the picture, then abruptly went silent, thinking her own thoughts.
After a long time the Princess said, “You told me once that Vlemk the box-painter made other pictures of me.”
The picture on the box let the sentence hang in the air a moment, then brought out, in a voice strangely quiet, “Yes …”
“What are they like?” the Princess asked.
The picture on the box said nothing.
“Well?” asked the Princess.
“You’d have to see them,” said the picture, again in that quiet, reserved voice that might mean anything.
“Perhaps I will,” said the Princess thoughtfully, and dropped her hands to her knees, one hand on the other, her eyes staring vacantly at the farther wall. After a moment she said, “I’m told the box-painter is very poor. Perhaps if I went with a few friends to his shop, people who could afford to pay him well if he happened to have something that struck their fancy …”
Again the picture on the box said nothing.
“I don’t mean we’d g
ive him charity,” said the Princess. “It’s just that I thought …”
The picture on the box said, “I’m sorry I don’t please you. I don’t blame you for being angry, I’ve been thinking of no one but myself, I admit it. Perhaps if we both could try harder—especially me, I mean—”
