Uncanny Magazine Issue 39

by Lynne M. Thomas

  I am invisible, even as my naked form hangs upon the wall. As a model I am a footnote in the story of the artist, and as a painter I cannot win over the Salon jury. What I want most of all is to be remembered, but I cannot even manage to be seen.

  VERMILLION

  “Surely he will change his mind and paint you again?” I’m sitting with Victorine at the Café Guerbois, nursing my coffee as she sips absinthe. It is Thursday, and Manet is here, presiding over his Batignolles group—this is no coincidence, of course, for I am familiar with their usual schedule…and having parted ways with Louis, I could use the work. The smoke-filled air inside the café still holds the day’s heat, and by all appearances the discussion at Manet’s table is similarly heated.

  Victorine gives a bit of a shrug. “Perhaps. And what of your vampire friend?”

  My eyes widen. “Victorine! You must not call him that. People will think he drinks blood.”

  “As you like,” Victorine replies, “but that doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I want to be the artist, not the art. Surely you of all people understand.” I take a sip of coffee and try to hold back my jealousy that she is taking art classes at the Académie Julian.

  “You and I,” she says, “do not have the advantages afforded to women of means and social standing. Morisot and Cassatt need not give music lessons or pose nude to pay for paint. Surely you of all people understand that.”

  I bristle at her tone but the observation is true enough. Worse, a young woman with fine features and a striking green hat has entered the café and captured the attention of the Batignolles group. Renoir in particular seems quite taken with the girl, who looks not a day over fifteen.

  “What you need,” Victorine continues, paying little mind to the new arrival, “is to make a connection with an art dealer. You’ve had no success at the Salon, but Paul Durand-Ruel has had some success selling paintings in America, where the tastes are less refined.”

  “What a horrid thing to say!”

  Unrefined. My paintings? I should stay in hopes of getting work but I cannot bring myself to spend a moment more in her company. I storm out of the café, my mind churning with accumulated insults. Victorine’s barbs, the indifference of the painters I had hoped to charm, the deplorable youth of the woman in the green hat.

  The heat rising from the cobblestones makes the world shimmer, as though the air itself is melting. It reminds me of all the times my immortal artist turned to mist and everything around us melted away. I crave the cold white snow of that first winter, the thrill of his embrace.

  I am on his street before I have even truly decided to see him, and I knock upon his door quickly, before I lose my courage.

  He is there, and Suzette is not, thank God.

  “I wanted…” I trail off into silence because I am not entirely sure what I want, and I am even less sure that he is the one who can bestow it. Recognition? Respect? A way to be seen as more than an exotic courtesan who graces the canvas of painters.

  “Time,” he says.

  He is staring at me, dissecting me not into shapes and angles or light and shadow but deconstructing my ambitions and my dreams, seeing a pattern that I cannot because once, centuries ago, he was not entirely unlike me. A mortal artist, striving for something greater, grasping without knowing what it was he sought.

  “Time?” I echo weakly.

  “Where were you, before you came here?”

  “At the Café Guerbois,” I admit.

  “Trying to secure work from Manet and his lackeys, no doubt.” He scowls at the mere thought of Manet, which I find rather heartening, that even he, my immortal artist, is jealous of his rivals.

  “I need money for paint,” I tell him.

  “Ah, and now we are back to time again,” he says. “Immortality is, obviously, all about time. When you come right down to it, time is the thing that everyone most values, even you mortals who have so little of it. You simply shift it around instead of trading it directly. Three hours of work for five francs, which then can be used to buy paint.

  “An art collector is hoarding time. Time spent by the artist applying paint to the canvas, yes. But there is more to it than that. Each successive painting contains something of the time that went into all the previous canvases, not to mention the time spent studying, practicing. And the art holds other time as well—the model that sits for the painting, holding a pose for hours on end. Time that she has devoted, perhaps, to keeping a certain figure, or creating an appealing hairstyle.”

  I scowl. “Time spent building the resentment that burns in the model’s eyes as she glares at the painter.”

  He tilts his head, thoughtful. “Perhaps.”

  “The other girls say you have never turned anyone.” The words slip out before I can stop them, my heart racing, knowing the conversation is in dangerous territory now, territory that I have always scrupulously avoided. “They say that you drain away your models’ lives and leave them with nothing. That all you care about is light and paint.”

  “Light and paint. Legacy and time.” He leans in so close that I can feel his breath against my ear as he speaks. “You have a good eye for light, and with time you could master the rest.”

  “No one tells Jean that he has not mastered the rest, or Jules. People praise them for work that is nowhere near what I do.” I gesture at his wall, largely covered with the works of his fellow Frenchmen, paintings ranging from brilliant to mediocre. There is a sunspot on the back of my hand, a single dark freckle that I had never noticed before.

  “Time,” I whisper.

  “I cannot give you everything you want,” he admits. “But I can give you time.”

  This. This is why I have always been so careful to avoid this conversation. I have always known that he would offer. And that I would accept.

  “Yes.”

  He dissolves into mist and seeps through my skin. It is different than it always was before. His impressions of the world are mine to take, not mere glimmers at the edge of my perception but a clear vision of his entire being, like slipping into a photograph that holds his centuries of experience, living through a lifetime in an instant. Everything I have thirsted for since our first meeting—knowingly and not—all of it is here in this moment of connection. I am complete as I can only be when he is with me, and I absorb all that I can, drinking from him as deeply as I dare, taking him into myself and pulsing with the sheer power of it.

  There are but wisps of white mist remaining when I realize that I must let him go. When he withdraws he does not steal a part of me, as he always has before. Instead he leaves behind what I have taken.

  He has given me the gift of time.

  Energy courses through me like a vermillion flame. I am no longer a mere model from whom he draws inspiration, but an artist, immortal. Time stretches out before me and I long to take him to bed that both of us might burn hot with passion.

  But he has vanished, just as he did that first night, winter white and cold. As he always does when I most crave his presence.

  I wait the entire night, but he does not return.

  COBALT BLUE

  I paint the English Channel at Étretat, shortly after sunrise. The sun is a fiery vermillion and the water shimmers cobalt blue. It is roughly my hundredth impression of a sunrise, spread across the year on whatever days I can gather up the energy to greet the dawn with my easel at the shore.

  I have painted skies both cloudy and clear, water in a variety of hues. When the tide permits I paint from the beach and include the white cliffs, and when the tide is high—as it is today—I paint the vast expanse of the channel from atop them. Sometimes the dark silhouettes of ships break the line of the horizon, and sometimes there is fog, a thin white mist that gives me shivers not entirely accounted for by the crisp morning air. Monet set off a movement with his Impression, Sunrise, painted not far south of here. Monet, and before that Manet, changing the world of art forever. Or so the historians like to spin the tale, imposing
order onto the chaotic jumble of the past, pulling a single narrative thread from the fabric of time. Providing a focal point, like the bright orange sun that hovers above the water. And their focal point, of course, must always be a man.

  “You could have painted a hundred portraits of me, and instead you paint the sunrise.” Victorine has come up the trail behind me, carrying her own easel which she sets up next to mine. Her hair is like the sunrise reflected on the water, vermillion streaked with silver. She arrived here last week, at my invitation.

  “Manet painted the definitive portrait of you years ago,” I say, teasing.

  “And Monet painted the definitive impressionist sunrise,” Victorine replies, “Yet you seem to have no issue painting those. Besides, I painted the definitive picture of me. They showed it at the Salon. Honestly it is unfair that you should be immortal and I am not. Clearly I am the one with all the talent.”

  Her voice takes on an edge of bitterness as she says it, cobalt blue tinged green, like the underside of a wave in the bright light of a midday sun.

  “I would turn you if I could.” I hadn’t known how precious the gift was that my immortal artist gave me, or how rare—he had gathered time for all the centuries of his existence, and even so had only barely enough to share his gift with me. The process had nearly destroyed him, leaving him unable to take any form but mist for over a year.

  “Then paint me,” she says. “Give me that at least.”

  I cannot paint her without stealing precious moments of her time, and I cannot bear to lose my oldest friend. She is already slipping away so fast.

  “Please,” she says. “Just this once.”

  I let her convince me because in my heart of hearts I long to paint her. I direct her to an outcropping of rock and have her look out over the water, her face glowing in the morning light. Her dress is a pale blue, the perfect contrast for the orange-streaked sky, and, of course, her hair.

  The wind has freed a lock of it and when I go to pin it back in place the edges of my hands thin into mist and I can feel her energy, the wildness only barely contained beneath her skin. Where my immortal artist was cold and white, she is a fiery vermillion, and this neatly composed painting is entirely wrong.

  “Let your hair loose in the wind, and take off your hat.” I tell her, my fingers still brushing against her face, the tiniest sliver of my hands still within her, our energies pulsing together, her passions tempting me to drink deeper, to take more of what she unknowingly offers. So sweet and heady, this sensation of pulling her out of herself.

  I force myself to withdraw and she gasps.

  She stares off into the distance and for a moment I am not sure if she heard my request.

  “Is that always what it’s like?” she asks. “The thrill and then the loss.”

  “Yes.”

  Victorine removes her hat and takes down her hair, then tousles it—carefully but with a result that looks careless. The hat she lets dangle from her hand. Everything about it is exquisite, and I paint in frantic dabs of color to capture it before we lose the light. Victorine holds her pose flawlessly, and I know from experience how difficult it is to stand so long, especially in the sun. I highlight the graceful curve of her shoulder, the determined set of her jaw.

  I have always signed my paintings Mari, but this painting of Victorine captures her with such honesty that on impulse I sign this one with a name I have not used since my mother died—Mariko. In red as a nod to tradition, but spelled out in the French alphabet for I do not trust my ability to write the kanji even for my own name. That, too, is honest—an admission that I am of neither world and of both.

  “This is your best work so far,” Victorine says, admiring the painting. “We can go in turns—you shall paint me and I shall paint you. It will be a series of a hundred portraits and historians will speculate about—”

  “No, I cannot. Never again.” I know the longing she feels. It was cruel of me to paint her. Cruel of me to invite her here, to ease the loneliness of being fixed in time as the world keeps passing on. And in truth, I hunger for her as much as she does for me, for the taste of her humanity. I can feel my fingertips thinning into mist, reaching out for her…but no. Already her life flits away far too fast, and I will not speed her to her grave for the sake of my art. I will find another way.

  “I cannot stay, knowing what I will not have.”

  “Take the portrait, if you like.” I turn away from her and look out over the English Channel, pretending that I don’t care what she chooses.

  She leaves without another word. She doesn’t take the painting. The water stretches out before me, an endless chasm of blue.

  CADMIUM YELLOW

  My work is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago, thrilling for the venue but disappointing for the exhibit—Cassatt merits an exhibition composed entirely of her own work, but I am tucked away in European and Oriental Art. Still, they have invited me to the opening, and I have done my best to look fashionable though I cannot pull off the yellows that are quite popular this season and the angular lines of flapper dresses are better suited to women who are straight where I am rounded. Never have I paid so much for so very little fabric, though I must admit the beadwork is lovely and the freedom of movement compared to the dresses of my youth is divine.

  The exhibit is laid out so that I must walk through the European artists in order to reach my own work, and I am startled to encounter a painting with which I am intimately familiar—Woman, Reclining (Mari). It is, to my surprise, exactly as I remember it from the Salon. By now the varnish should have darkened and the yellows should have shifted brown, for he had favored the cheaper chrome yellow during that period.

  “I had them restore it.” He has appeared from nowhere. Like the painting, he is exactly as I remember from our last meeting—only his clothing has changed. “It seemed fitting, given the subject. An unchanging painting of an unchanging model.”

  He means it as a compliment, but I am half a human lifetime away from being the woman that graces his canvas, and no longer mortal. To imply that I am static and unchanging simply because I do not physically age…I had thought him more insightful than that.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” he says.

  “And I you.” I’m flooded with emotions. Surprise, yes, and also a longing that I thought I’d put behind me, that old familiar yearning to connect with him, to let our energies flow together and feel the pulse of time itself. But I pity him, too, because for all his success as a painter, he is not keeping up with the world, and his popularity is fading. If he cannot come up with something new, he will be swept into the past as a historical footnote, or perhaps be forgotten entirely. “What are the odds that we would finally be in the same exhibit, after all these decades?”

  He shakes his head. “What I meant was why Chicago? Why not San Francisco or Seattle? You could blend in there.”

  “The handful of Japanese living in Chicago are a curiosity, like kimonos displayed in a department store. People aren’t as hostile to me here as they might be on the West Coast because they do not see me as a threat. I’ve taken up correspondence with a young artist there—Chiura Obata, who is doing some promising work—and he says resentment for the Japanese community there is building. Besides, it isn’t my intention to blend in. I want to be remembered.”

  There are three of his paintings in the exhibit, and the other two both feature Suzette. Time has not been kind to these. The thick strokes of paint are cracking, darkened in places with grime, faded in others from light.

  “Yes, but you want to be remembered for your art. Being so out of place will only distract people from your paintings—”

  “And yet you are also here, some 300 years older than everyone else.” I tire of looking at Suzette, indeed I tire of looking at his paintings at all. I drift deeper into the exhibit as we continue our conversation, searching for my own work. It is quieter here, away from the growing crowd of patrons who have not yet made their way this far
in. “Why must I blend in when you do not? Why is your story so much easier for them to accept than mine?

  “They can see themselves in me. Envision themselves as immortal. I am what they wish to become. You are the foreigner they fear. The outsider.”

  “And a woman besides,” I mutter. “If I don’t carve out space for myself, they will steal whatever inspiration they like from my culture and my art and erase me from the conversation entirely.”

  There is only one of my paintings on display, which I had been excited about before I’d known that they had three of his. My sole piece in the exhibition is the painting of Victorine, standing on the rocky shore, surrounded by the cobalt blue of sky and ocean, and seeing it I am filled with sadness.

  “Have you seen her lately?” he asks. “Victorine, I mean.”

  “Not for many years, though she writes me letters occasionally.”

  “She must be very old now, yes?” he says. “She and Monet are the last of your mortal cohort. It is easier to bear after that, the fleeting nature of the lives around us.”

  His expression is sad and I wonder about his mortal cohort, the people he had known when he was still alive. He never speaks of them, which I thought was for lack of memory but perhaps he is trying to avoid the pain of his loss. I put a hand on his shoulder, cold against cold. When he does not speak further on the subject, I turn my attention back to the exhibit.

  The curators have opted to hang my painting at the transition point, the very edge of the European artists, for though I am French—or was, at the time of the painting—they clearly do not see me as having been truly European. Worse, they have placed my painting alongside two others, not a trio of my own work but with a pair of paintings that share the same model—Victorine’s self-portrait…and Manet’s Olympia, which bears more resemblance to Woman, Reclining (Mari) than it does to Victorine.

  “Of the three of you,” my immortal artist says, “Manet has captured her the most realistically.”