by Tanith Lee
Five weeks after Zwarian had left her, held in that season of cool and filmy weather, another letter was brought to Valmé. It was not vulgar, not scented, and yet a reflex in the handwriting gave it away. Before she opened it, the artist knew she had hold of something of Yshtar’s.
“Mademoiselle, it has been suggested to me that it would be useful to my career at this time to have painted a portrait of myself. Your name in turn was recommended, the freshness of your work, its faithful yet unflattering likenesses, which I have myself seen and been moved by. Your fee is yours to state. My agent will attend to that. I hope most sincerely that you will be able to undertake the commission, and trust that you will not find it inconvenient if I call on you tomorrow at the hour of eleven in the morning. I am, mademoiselle, very truly yours. Yshtar.”
There was no question or offer of evasion. Like an empress, the actress presented herself, inescapable, and sensitively tactful as only such authority demanded.
Then again, Valmé had no wish to evade. To her slight surprise, her pulse had quickened. She was to meet, here in her “cave,” her lover’s lover. She was to see her, hear her voice, was to be given indeed the ultimate power over her, that of painting her picture.
Could it be Yshtar knew nothing of her connection to Valmé? Or had she too been drawn to see the ghost of the shell?
Rain was falling, and the City was a wet slate where nothing could be written, when Yshtar’s carriage entered the yard below the apartment. Shielded by a manservant’s white umbrella, Yshtar entered the building. Five minutes later she stood in the L-shaped room.
“It’s very kind that you should allow me to call.”
“You gave me little choice,” said Valmé quietly.
“My God, is that how it struck you? I’m sorry. If you prefer, I’ll return another day.” Yshtar too was quiet and composed. Naturally, she said without a word, I must remain.
“Naturally, you must remain,” said Valmé. “Do sit down. Will you take coffee or tea?”
“A small glass of kirschvasser, if you have it.”
“I do,” said Valmé. She kept the liqueur on her sideboard in the corner opposite the bed. Had Zwarian told?
Yshtar wore a pale-gray dress, white gloves, a hat with a smoke of feathers. In her ears were silver chains of pearls. That was all. Her skin and hair, her garments, were in accordance with the weather. How does she garb herself in the heat of summer? In winter?
After they had sat in silence a long while, the actress sipping her drink, Valmé coiled in her chair, studying her, Yshtar finally spoke. “Will you be able to grant my request?”
“Probably. I must discuss the fee with your agent.”
“I have his card here with me.” The white glove laid the small card on a table, where it might be picked up or not as the artist chose.
“Why,” said Valmé, ignoring the card, “are you disposed to favor me? My name’s scarcely well known.”
“Perhaps,” said Yshtar, with total un-bad taste, “I can make your name for you.”
“Yes, that’s a chance. You’re very beautiful and your bones would be a challenge to anyone, and your pallor. One of the oldest exercises, mademoiselle, is to paint a still-life, lilies, and clear glass on a plain table napkin. White on white. Who,” said Valmé, “is the portrait for?”
“For myself. But obviously the theatrical management is interested in it. A classical play, something in the Greek mode. Will that be possible?”
“You would make,” said Valmé, as if hypnotized, “a sensational Antigone. But could there be songs in such a play?” she added to insult.
“They would be written especially,” said Yshtar, implacable. “But you must be a reader of minds, mademoiselle. That’s the very part.”
Valmé said, “You’ll hang at the end.”
“Off stage,” said Yshtar.
Valmé thought her a worthy opponent. She gestured to the bottle of kirschvasser, the bowl of almonds. Disappointing her, Yshtar shook her head. She said, like a princess, “I may come to you, then?”
Valmé felt a deep masculine surge. Again, it was not sexual, but it caught her, was not deniable.
“I’ll look forward to it, mademoiselle. Whenever you wish.”
“Tomorrow,” said Yshtar.
“Tomorrow.”
She sat for her portrait for two hours almost every day, between noon and two o’clock. If she was unable to attend the studio, a message was brought around at about ten. Valmé became apprehensive until this hour was passed. Then she would begin her preparations. At twelve, Yshtar would manifest in the doorway. Her clothes were never the same, but for the sitting she would put on, behind the ebony screen (while Valmé prepared coffee), the Antigone costume, with its clusters of unreal but creamy pearls, its darted pleats. Her flax hair was already in the Grecian mode.
They spoke very occasionally throughout the sessions. Yshtar might eat a candied fruit, sip coffee or water – never again the social kirschvasser.
Valmé wore always the same dark smock, striped with tines of chalk, clay, oils.
They never mentioned Zwarian.
The painting, beginning like a scatter of pastel seeds, the faint outlines of the map of a garden, gradually blossomed out in tones and contours, colors and form.
Valmé was excited by the canvas. It seemed to her the finest thing she had fashioned. She would not let her sitter see the work; Yshtar obeyed this stricture without a hint of unease. When the actress was gone, punctually always at two, Valmé would labor on at the picture, perfecting, exacting from memory every iota she had missed in present time. In the night, wakened by rain upon the skylight, she would get up, light a lamp, prowl about the picture, the brush in her hand.
She has known all along that he and I were lovers. Didn’t she place before me the clue of the liqueur? And how else had she heard of me?
At three in the morning, under her lamplit parasol of roof and rain, Valmé stood considering the portrait she made of Yshtar. Soon – four more sittings? – it would be done. The task would be over. And what then?
As the artist worked, the actress sat, each woman had maintained her trance, with only those occasional movements, words. Now and then, Valmé had crossed the room to rearrange a pleat of the Antigone dress, to draw a highlight onto a coil of hair or jewel. The body of the actress she never touched. She was not afraid of the firm muscles and damask effect of Yshtar’s skin. But it was as if she knew Yshtar through. It was as if Yshtar were her own self, a reflection: altered, new, the same. And Michael Zwarian the pane of glass that separated yet made each one accessible to the other.
Shall I confront her? What shall I ask?
How beautiful she was, there was no need to be beautiful oneself if such stars rose from the mass of humanity.
Valmé studied the lines of the painting. As she had studied the face. As if in a magical spell. Surely, surely she had captured the soul of Yshtar.
Standing before the conjuration of her own sorcery, Valmé felt start up in her a winding wave, emotion, thought, part unidentifiable. She had never felt it, its like, before. She clenched her fists, and in the right of these the sturdy paintbrush, pointed forward like a weapon, snapped and splintered. Valmé gazed after it, amazed.
Jealousy. It had come to her at last. The eternal beast, the creature of the shade by the glim of whose eyes all things are made freshly visible. Could it be?
Why ask her anything? I have her here.
Valmé remembered a story she had illustrated, in which a cheated lover, a great portraitist, had thrust into the painting of his mistress the knife for grating colors.
The women of Valmé’s world were real. Through the truth of Yshtar, Valmé had found the way, by night, onto the shining terrible path of actual feeling.
Suddenly she let out a cry. Through the mirror of Yshtar, she saw what she had lost. The tears ran down her face, as the natural rain poured in the water of the canal.
Four, five further sittings arrived
, were. And had ended.
“And may I see my painting now, mademoiselle?”
“No … Not yet. If you’ll be patient just a little longer. Some further details that are best worked on alone. And then,” said Valmé.
“But, mademoiselle,” said Yshtar, the first time that Valmé had known her arch – perhaps a method kept for inferior opponents – “I shall start to wonder what you’re hiding.”
Valmé said, with pain, “You’re too beautiful, mademoiselle, to have any qualms. The only danger would be that I’d paint only your beauty and not yourself. But I don’t think I’ve failed you there. You’ll be able to judge quite soon. Let me get all as perfect as I can before you look. If you’d be kind enough to return tomorrow, say –”
“Alas, not feasible. Rehearsals begin for the new play. You will have to send the portrait to the theater. Tomorrow? My agent can arrange the means. What hour would be suitable?”
“But then,” said Valmé, “I shan’t know if you’re pleased with what I’ve done –”
“You’re too modest. I have no doubts,” said Yshtar, dusting off the weeks of their duality so it scattered in tiny motes about the room.
Valmé must say, “Four o’clock would suit me.”
A minute more and the actress was gone. Her carriage was gone. The rain filled up the spaces.
Valmé knew a feverish tension. The last vestige of Michael had been drawn out like a thread from a needle. She had let it go, could not have held on to it. For Yshtar had long since become Michael. She had brought him to the studio tinted on her fresh skin, smoothly tangled in her hair and breath. Yshtar’s lips had caressed him. Her arms had held him. Now everything was gone.
What shall I do?
Valmé stared at the painting, which needed no further work – to work further upon it would be to mar, to unmake.
Taking up paper and a crayon, she began to draw the face of Michael Zwarian, to sketch with now unsure lines his body. She blushed as she did so.
What would follow? Enormities of time, and she adrift in them. There were two commercial commissions. She glanced at them in a sort of scorn, for what could they be to her now?
Days not like any others, and nights without sleep. She saw them waiting. The vista was like that of a cathedral, a place of anguish.
She did not even doze until dawn. At midday she started up from a pit of nothingness. Remembered: Yshtar – Michael – would not be with her anymore.
At four o’clock three strong men appeared in the doorway where Yshtar had gone in and out as a nymph of rain.
They took away the portrait. They were like warders, jailors.
Valmé tore the sheet from the Dionysos and began to polish its cold dead limbs. She knew the great madness that this god was able to inflict – drunkenness, hate, religious mania, or love.
There would be omens. There began to be. (She had longed for them.) A sudden shaft of sunlight through the forward window, over the canal, so clearly wrought twice, outside and in the tilted mirror. A boat passing down to the river with a shadow sail at twilight, in the glass a barque upon the Styx. And a crack in the skylight through which the rain had commenced to infiltrate, a single tear dropped over and over on the worktable. He will be mine again. No, he never will be mine.
Days not like any others. And nights without sleep. But the days grew slumberous, as if impregnated by opium – easy to sleep then, deathlike, and to go back in dreams. To see him. At night there were the confines of her marvelous prison cell which she might not leave, and where she could summon up no wish to labor. Waking dreams, hallucinations, omens, in every corner. He had said this to her, and that. She was full of hunger, the greed for pain, and almost knew it. She rubbed herself against the razor’s edge. She reveled in her wounds. She had loved him. She loved him now. It was always to be so. She drew his face over and over. She depicted him as a knight, a priest, a king, as one who had died. She sketched the lines of his body, blushing.
When she must go out, how sharp as broken glass the intervals of sun. The knives of the rain entered the mirror of the canal a million times over. On the street, returning with her meager provisions, she would weep. (She had wept before the laundress, who had not known what to make of it, had asked if she was bereaved. And Valmé recalled her mother like a stranger.)
Yshtar had all of him now.
Valmé dreamed of Yshtar. She sailed on a mirror of water, dressed in white, the white sail of the boat above her and copied out below, a swan. In the dream Valmé yearned and became Yshtar. Yshtar-Valmé raised her white arms and Michael Zwarian lay down in them.
Waking, she wept her rain into the pillow.
Her clothes were all too big for her. She was growing thin, and in the darkness of her hair had come all at once a strand of white, Yshtar’s hair brought on by grief.
Valmé went one night to the Goddess of Tragedy, where Yshtar’s latest play had been put on. To her astonishment, in the foyer, an exquisite painting was displayed, Yshtar as Antigone. Valmé’s portrait. (He will have seen it, he will have understood that I painted it. He will recognize how I have captured her, a butterfly on a pin. But no, of course he will see her quite differently, imagining I have fashioned wrongly.) The fee for the portrait had long since been sent to Valmé, who had scrupulously placed the money where it would do most good, old teachings of her thrifty mother – but without being quite aware of what she did. Yshtar’s small note of praise and gratitude she had had too. She had kept the note. The hand that penned it traced the flesh of their lover.
At the theater, a woman alone, she was somewhat insulted. She watched Yshtar from a great way off. Could Yshtar, after all, act? It seemed so. She had something of the quality of a vacuum, elements and passions, powers and perhaps angels flowed in, and filled her. Her stasis expressed more than the ranting of the best of her accomplices upon the stage.
Valmé remained through the several acts of the play – in which no songs occurred. At the end, a standing ovation bore up Yshtar like a lily.
Valmé pictured Zwarian among the audience, alight with applause. Now he would go behind the scenery, up into the cliff behind the proscenium. Aloft, he would take her to him.
The artist walked through the night, twice accosted, on the northern bank, as a whore. In the gutters peelings and papers. In windows miles high the sweet dull lamps of love.
Never in her life had she known such hurt. Nor lived so, from the gut of the heart.
Those very few who had believed themselves to be intimates of Valmé discussed her briefly. She had become thin and peculiarly graceful. She had the qualities of an actress immersed in a serious and probably classical role. It must end in her death, whatever it was: She walked in the rain, ate nothing, drank too much wine or that odd liqueur of hers. She would fall prey to a consumption. She would be consumed. A pretty, a fearful death. Who would have thought her legitimate for it? She had always been so practical. And her work suffered. But there, she had become her work. She had become one of her own pictures, an exquisite witch bereft and languishing after some deed of terror. She was almost lovely, now.
Those who had known of Zwarian did not guess that he might be the cause. No, this was some other swift affair that had sunk its teeth in her.
And some of them mentioned the glass dagger they had located in her studio. It had recently been hidden behind a pile of books – they glimpsed the locked box. Had she not said, despite the information given her on its uses, that she still asked herself its proper purpose – for there was more to a dagger of glass than mere butchery, mere murder.
It was as if the glass dagger chiseled away at her, as her own implements had down at the stone, finding out the thing within. Whittled, pared, polished fine by an agony of crystal. Down, down, to the bone of the soul’s soul.
Michael Zwarian had been away on business in the north. It was winter when he returned to the City, everything set in a pre-frost waiting whiteness. He had had letters every fifth or seventh day from Ysht
ar, during the weeks of his absence. She was clever, the actress. He was intrigued by the network of spies she had amalgamated – what a criminal she would have made. He had never fathomed her fully, or maybe it was only that he had not felt the driving need to sound her depths. Or again, probably she was quite straightforward, by her own lights simple nearly in her dealings, her cunning only learned through the rule of survival, put to his service with the selfless, careless largesse he had formerly associated only with saints.
The building, the stair, were adorable to Zwarian. He could not stop himself running up the steps like a boy. He was anxious too, and behind him the man was already toiling with the hamper and the wine. “Wait a moment,” said Zwarian. The man halted thankfully a flight below. Zwarian knocked. His circulation was sparkling in him. He was conscious of not wanting to shock, and of wanting to shock, that she might scream or shout, slam the door at once, drop in a faint, and he would be ready to catch her. He was remorseful. He was half frightened by what he had achieved – or what Yshtar and he had achieved between them. He longed for this to be over. He desired these moments stretched to infinity. Like Valmé, although he did not consider it, he had found true feeling, its colossal rush like wild horses, winds, chariots, blood.
The door opened. The artist stood at the entry of her cave, the irritating and beloved L-shaped room. He did not see it. He saw her, haggard, demented, and voiceless before him, her eyes glazed, her hair lank and unwashed, her lips colorless and dry. Love churned in him. He was the master magician who had produced this awful wreck. He gloried in her ruin, for he could repair it. Yet he was stunned, despite all that Yshtar, through her own observation, her web of gossips, had relayed to him. Valmé was his, could not exist entire without him. It was so cruel what he had done, what he had allowed Yshtar, clever Yshtar, who had thought of the scheme of the portrait, to do. And he loathed Yshtar at that second, and himself, naturally.
“Don’t speak,” he said softly. “Let me come in.”