A Muse to Live For

by Katherine Wyvern

  She does, a little primly, not quite at ease.

  “And if you could take off your hat and gloves, and, and…”

  “And…”

  “Just, you know, let your hair down.” Her hair is an almost Pre-Raphaelite mane, not the crimped and teased monstrosity so fashionable in polite society. She wears it in a simple knot at the nape of her neck, with no bangs and no curls, just two soft waves covering her ears.

  “Ooh, racy. Let’s hope your landlady doesn’t turn up,” she says, but she does as I asked and she carefully unpins her hair and lets it fall over her left shoulder in a river of gold. And then she unbuttons the neck of her jacket, showing the whole enchanting sweep of her long white neck, highlighted by the dark ribbon.

  She looks more truly herself like that, as if the tightly buttoned bodice, the gloves, the chignon are not really her. Perhaps there needs to be a bit of wildness to her. She’s no bread-and-butter miss, that is for certain.

  I get my pencils and paper, and sit down in front of her and begin to sketch the main lines of her body, and when I look up, I meet her eyes, square in my face.

  “Oh, please! Please, don’t. Just look at that picture over there.” I point the pencil to a large watercolor behind and to the left of me, my own copy of one of Rossetti’s Proserpines. She arches one eyebrow briefly, but makes no comment. “Good. Please just keep looking at that, unless I tell you different.”

  Now that she’s not looking at me, I can truly study her eyes. They are indescribable, wonderfully luminous. Her eyelids are deep and yet without any languor or drowsiness, and by some strange magical property they seem scarcely to veil the light of her irises even when she briefly looks down from time to time.

  I have traveled to Greece and Italy, and I know that her eyes are the unfathomably transparent and yet glistening blue-green of the Mediterranean at its warmest and clearest.

  It will be a painter’s puzzle—and joy—to render their translucence, the shadow of the long lashes in the curving depth of the irises, the flash of sunlight on the clear surface. To do all this, and capture the enigma of their intensity, and give it all life.

  It is worth living for.

  ****

  Gabrielle

  And so I’m here, sitting for this great painter, feeling rather glum. It was quite flattering to think that an artist had crossed half the city to find me and beg me to sit for him, not to mention that three pounds a week for sitting in a comfortable chair in a warm room on a rainy day are truly a blessing at this time of the year.

  Three pounds! How is this poor chap ever going to find three pounds a week for me? Judging from his room and his clothes I doubt he has three pounds a month to live on, himself.

  And that painting on the easel, those drawings of Jesus with his eyes turned melodramatically to heaven, is just too dismal. I don’t really care what he does with a picture of me as long as I get paid, but to end up as a penitent Magdalene or a pious Mary is just so bloody depressing.

  I steal a glance at him now and then when he’s busy. He does look like he just had an epiphany. Must be all the religious fervor.

  I don’t know what he has to look so star-struck about. It’s like having a great puppy staring at me, except that he does not stare. He just gapes, rolling those shifty eyes about like kidneys in a skillet. All right, that’s nasty. His eyes don’t roll about, they are just dead crazy, but what can you expect in an artist? If he didn’t look so damn odd, he would be almost tolerably handsome, in a sort of hang-dog, defeated way. I could almost like him, almost, if only he would look at me, instead of staring at my feet, or a spot somewhere above my left ear, or the corner of the room, or maybe whatever it is that he sees in me, angels, and gods and nymphs and the whole cluttered useless gauntlet of ancient mythology and religion, like I’m a transparency to him, through which he can copy the old legends in pencil.

  My mouth gives a twitch at the thought, and he looks startled for a moment.

  “Anything the matter?” he asks.

  “No. Nothing at all.”

  I stay put, staring at the wall beyond him, as instructed. The picture he told me to look at is of some sort of medieval lady, in a great shapeless blue gown, holding a fruit of some kind, maybe a pomegranate.

  Pomegranates, forsooth. Boiled cabbage is more in your line, my poor friend.

  I sit for about two hours, and he sketches on, furiously, occasionally asking me to shift this way or that, move my hands, or turn to the window, before the light mercifully fades and I can finally get up from my chair. It seemed comfortable enough at first, but I swear it must be made of iron. My butt is as flat as a plank by now. As if it weren’t flat enough already, damn.

  I draw my hair back into a knot, careful not to dislodge it. It would be embarrassing to drop it on the floor, and then I pick up Alice’s hat and my shawl, ready to go. My behind is so numb that I might even walk the six miles home, just to get some blood circulating into it again.

  “Would you like to see the drawings?” he asks, very shyly.

  “Uh, yes, sure, why not,” I say doubtfully. Poor man, for three pounds a week, I can as well look at his stupid pictures.

  But the drawings take me totally by surprise. It is no angel or martyr, or Arcadian shepherdess after all.

  It is just … me.

  Except that … it is a woman.

  A tall, thin, elegant woman, sketched again and again sometimes from a distance, in full figure, sometimes just my face and upper body. The last sketch is of my face alone, very detailed.

  Is that what he sees in me?

  Does he think I am a woman? It is impossible to tell—he is so absurdly simple. I am not even sure he’d know the difference.

  These drawings are entirely unlike those I saw on the table, and the horrid painting on the easel. I don’t know much about art, sure, but these are alive and nervous, and full of feeling. Whose life infuses them, I don’t know. His or mine? Or both?

  They are full of a strange, ethereal yet powerful beauty. They are me. They truly are, and yet they are me without weakness. They are me made into something timeless and wondrous and yet without artifice. I cannot understand it.

  The eyes … the eyes in the last drawing are uncanny. I almost turn the paper over, to see where the intense depth of those black pupils leads. Then of course I chide myself for silliness, frowning. They are just pictures, damn it, just pencil marks on flat paper, a clever trick, an illusion.

  But how is it possible that this strange, half deranged man who has never looked at me in the eye, has seen my eyes, has seen me, so exactly?

  How is it possible that this illusion is more me than I am? I shiver to think that in this man’s eyes I may be my true self. The person—indeed the woman—I could have been, if my life had not been such a train-wreck.

  I do not know if it is black magic or enlightened madness.

  He stands nervously by the table, and I realize that I have been silent for a long time, frowning, as I turned the pages slowly. He is in agony, poor creature, like my opinion of his art really matters to him. I feel suddenly a sort of aching tenderness for him.

  “You—you don’t like them,” he says, seeing me looking up from the paper.

  “No, no, I do. They are beautiful. Very precise. They are perfect. You are very talented.”

  And at that for the briefest moment, he does look into my eyes, and something passes between us.

  Perhaps it’s magic, perhaps it’s madness.

  “I will see you tomorrow,” I say quickly, because I am suddenly unnerved by his intensity. It is too much. It searches too deep inside me, like he wants to own me whole, body and soul, and I cannot have it. I cannot be owned, ever again. “Tomorrow,” I repeat, “Tomorrow we can go on. I will try not to be so late.”

  He nods. “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”

  I give him back his drawings. I grab my green shawl and Elsie’s umbrella, and almost flee out of the room and down the steps, out of the front door
and down the street.

  I do not know why I am almost crying.

  ****

  The next day, I show up a bit earlier, and knock at the traders’ entrance. It grates a little, after all the work I put in my fine new dress, but there’s no point upsetting the old lady. I have a suspicion that she leads that poor man a wretched life as it is, and I don’t want to get him in too much trouble. I am not sure his nerves can take it—he’s so strung already.

  “You are here,” he says, when I get to the door, as if he was not certain I would come.

  “Fancy that,” I say, and then I take pity on him, and smile. “Of course I am. You hired me for a whole week, right?”

  “Yes, of course, and, and longer, maybe? If you have the time?”

  “Maybe…” I say vaguely. I am still not sure that he can actually pay me. I have warmed up to him somewhat since yesterday, but I am not going to trudge across half of London every day for free, not even to sit in a warm room. Hell, for free, I can lie in my bed and sleep.

  He is setting out his paper and his pencils, and he watches me nervously as I pace around his room. It is a room worn thin and soft, like an old coat. There is the old leather chair where I sat yesterday, which must be where he reads. It’s polished dark and shiny in places and rubbed almost through in others. There are carpets where the tread of his feet dug bare paths in the pile. There are bookshelves and books, books everywhere, with bulging covers and broken spines, and pages hanging askew. Books that have been lived in, like the room. I can read, but badly and slowly, and I can hardly really write, and books make me sort of angry. I always have the vague feeling that these learned types are looking down on me from some imaginary lofty height, when in fact they know absolutely nothing about real life.

  He looks even more anxious when I pluck at one or two of the volumes, rifling quickly through the pages, and then put them back. I am not sure if he’s hiding compromising papers in his books or if he’s worried that I might hurt them. Probably the latter. What kind of compromising papers can he possibly hide?

  He’s so utterly innocent. He would not stand a chance out there in the real world.

  I am suddenly sorry that I thought him shifty for not looking me in the eye. He’s just not a person that looks out at anything much. He lives inward, in his head, like he lives in this room, I think. I wonder how on earth he did find the nerve to come all the way to Leicester Square on his own to find me.

  I feel a new stab of tenderness for him and slap myself, mentally, for being sentimental. He doesn’t want me. He wants a model for his precious pictures. Well. I owe him that much at least. That he has seen me, and put me on paper.

  I don’t have to imagine myself anymore. I have seen myself, in his pictures.

  When I go to sit in the old chair, my hair loose over my shoulders, I feel different from the last time. I know, more or less, what he wants to do, what he is seeking and seeing in me, and now I want to give it to him, so I sit easier. I let myself shine, and do that look I do so well, a bit saucy, a bit teasing, a bit mysterious, and although he didn’t ask me to, I stare straight at him.

  When he looks up from his paper he blinks once or twice, like he suddenly got the sun in his eyes, and although his face is in fact in shade, I could swear that he blushes, hot-poker-red, like a schoolboy. It’s all I can do to choke down a snort of laughter, but I keep my pose and poise somehow. He says nothing, and goes back to his drawing, and looks again, and something strangely live flows between us. I don’t know what it is, but it is real, some sort of energy, a connection, like the famous electric arc everybody is nattering about these days.

  I think this is what he wants, this energy, this drive. Not me, as such. I do not know if am glad or sad for it.

  And as he looks at me, I look at him. I had not noticed before that his eyes are the warmest shade of chestnut brown, and despite that undeniable madness that there is in them, they are profoundly kind, like the eyes of a seal.

  In the next few days, his sketches become more complex as he tries different poses and compositions, and some are painted, quickly and vividly, in ink, just to put in deep shadows and volumes, no color. He never asks me again to look away, and sometimes he comes and sits closer to draw my face only, or my hands, which seem to fascinate him. I wonder when this famous great portrait will make its appearance. For now, he seems just obsessed with drawing me, as if he wants to learn me by heart before putting me into color on a canvas.

  My eyes stare eerily out of each paper he shows me, right back at me, riveting, mesmerizing. It is slightly alarming, but also astounding, as if a mirror had suddenly taken a will of its own, and given back to me some of the life I gave to it.

  I am not nothing, I think, as he draws. I am not nothing. He has seen something in me. Something of me.

  I am whole for a moment, here, in his eyes, not broken, not split. I am not nothing. I am perhaps almost everything, in this infinite reflection, I in him, he in me, as something passes between us, back and forth, like the shuttle in a loom, and together we weave these amazing pictures.

  He certainly captured something of me … and I wonder if something of me is now taken forever, his forever.

  And on Saturday afternoon, when it’s almost dark, and I pick up my hat and gloves to go, he ahems and hands me a handful of coins. Two pounds, one old, one new, and four crowns, assorted. He must have scraped up his last savings for this, I think.

  “Hey, listen,” I say, suddenly abashed. “Maybe, maybe two pounds a week is plenty, you know?” I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the words just tumble out regardless. “I mean…”

  “I would not dream of it. Please. That was the agreement, and you are … you are so…”

  He grinds to a halt, and I am not sure I really want to know what I am, but I wait a moment and he whispers, “You are pure magic.”

  I almost, almost want to kiss him. No, in fact, I realize with a shock that I have exercise a certain violence on myself to restrain the urge to kiss him, right here, right now. I am shaking where I stand, staring at the coins in my hand because I am too confused to look up at him.

  “Thank you,” I say. I have been called a lot of things in my life. Some of them rather flattering, too. But pure magic… That is a first. It certainly deserves more than a bald, bland thank you.

  But I just put away my earnings, with some amusing contortions, in the secret purse inside my skirt that no pickpocket can reach without undressing me first.

  “Thank you,” I say again. “Not just for the money. For…”

  For what? For seeing me? For making me feel real and beautiful and unique, without trying to fuck me? It’s just too pathetic to say, so I just shake my head, and smile at him, and go. And I know that he’s standing at his window, watching me walk away along his small road, and just for the space of this one street, the time when I know he’s watching, I feel different. I feel strangely warm, and cared for, and precious.

  I wonder if this is what it feels like, to be loved, and cherished. It wouldn’t be so bad, would it? But why would he love me? I am just a whore with a pretty face.

  On Cheyne Walk, being at least a well-off whore now, I hail a cab for once. High living, indeed. The cab takes me all the way to Houndsditch, but there’s some commotion ahead, a brawl of some sort, a small riot? Either way, the cabbie is adamant that he won’t go into Spitalfields tonight.

  “For crying out loud, are you serious? You are kicking me out here of all places?”

  “Sorry, miss, but it’s more than my life is worth. I have a wife and little ones. Besides, that’s six miles, or as good as, and I am not going any further than this.”

  It’s either sitting here in this damn cab all night or walking, so I pay him his three shillings, and go off on foot. I am a little shaken by the uproar, and decide to stick to the better lit streets, for once.

  It is a mistake.

  I walk home from work every night, almost always alone, and I never minded it much, but t
onight, as I pass St. Jude on Commercial Street, in the silence now, after I left the hullabaloo behind me, there is something … something not right … and then the smell hits me like a bat, a whiff carried on the air, just as I turn into Wentworth Street. It’s the scent of cheap cologne slathered much too thickly onto sweating skin, and it twists my innards into a knot of pure terror. For a split second I almost run. But it’s never been any good, running, so I freeze stiff, which is even worse, because everyone knows, the stiffer you keep the more it hurts.

  The steps approach, slower than the breeze that carried the scent, but much, much too fast.

  I try to walk on, but my limbs are rigid. The soft footfalls are accompanied by a slow tap, tap, tap, a sound I know so well that I am almost weeping long before he overtakes me, not in any hurry, lazily. When he’s in front of me, a step or two ahead, he stops and turns and leans against the wall, barring my way.

  He is tall, taller even than I am, and far, far more massive. He’s muscled like a boxer, like a bruiser, which is exactly what he is. A former prize fighter, and a regular at the Blue Anchor. I should never have taken Whitechapel Road.

  My stomach is made of heaving stone. I am about to throw up gravel.

  “We-ell,” he drawls. “Look what we have here. A proper lady, you’ve become, with respectable friends and pretty ways and all, hmm? What a fine dress, too.”

  He taps that cane against his calf like he always does. It’s like it’s glued to his hand. As if his hands are not bad enough. Hands like a side of beef, I always thought, giggling, in the old days, when I drank champagne, and he was not to touch me.

  Now I don’t think it’s funny anymore. He takes my elbow, almost gently, but it’s the gentleness of a steel vise just before it crushes.

  “I will walk you home. You are much too fine to be on the street alone. But first a word. Here.”

  He leads me into a small alley, then a filthy backyard.

  “Browdie…” I whisper. I don’t know what to say. There is nothing I can say that will save me.

  “Mr. Browdie, dear. Such a fine girl surely knows her manners. Going up into society, are we?” he asks.