by Karen Moline
“Can I ask you something, M,” she said.
“Yes.” I steeled myself, involuntarily.
“How do you stay so fit?”
“Fit?” This was not what I’d expected.
“Yes. You’re very strong, it’s like your strength is there, it’s solid, and believable, but not pumped up. Hidden.” She was still smiling. “It makes me feel safe.”
“I make you feel safe?” I was astonished. I half-turned my head to see if Nick was watching, but he was table-hopping on the other side of the room, autographing napkins, and I sighed in relief that he could not see my face.
“Yes, you,” she said. “I don’t know why, I just feel it. You must make Nick feel safe, too, or you wouldn’t be together, right? And you’re observant, as I try to be, but I expect that no one ever notices because of your face.”
I inhaled deeply, calming breaths. Maybe it was anxiety about Nick making her talk this way, and I couldn’t blame her if that was so, or maybe she just wanted to know. I couldn’t yet let myself relax into trusting her.
“Well, I like your face. And the least you can say,” she added, sensing my discomfort, “is that it’s unique.”
No one had ever said that to me before. I didn’t believe her, but I tried to smile. I knew she wanted me to, and I wanted, absurdly, to please her.
“I’m sorry,” she said, folding her napkin into neat triangles. “Sometimes I talk too much. You can get very self-conscious, being an American in London, when people are always judging you by the way you talk, and how fast, and not by what you say.”
“Even you?”
“Even me. Especially me.” She sighed. “I’m just hypersensitive. And somehow I get the feeling Nick is going to be a handful.”
I did smile, then, that time for real. “Boxing,” I said.
“What?”
“How I stay fit. I never answered your question.”
“Oh,” she said, biting her lip not to laugh. “Right. I should have guessed.” She looked at me, sideways. “So can I ask you to do something for me?”
“Yes.”
“Will you come keep me company during Nick’s sessions? There’s plenty of space in my studio. You won’t be in my way.” The words came tumbling out, the only true marker of fears she’d rather have kept hidden. “I think you’d keep me calm.”
Safe, she meant to say. She is watchful enough to have imagined what I do, why I am always with Nick, to keep him in line, to save him from himself. To save her from him. This, yes, she knows.
How could she imagine anything else?
All she knows is that, instinctively, she needs me. She needs to be protected. She feels Nick’s eyes, she feels his desire rising even though he hasn’t moved. It is perfuming the air, invisibly potent. She sees his face, but her training is too fine, her concentration is fierce, she feels it, yes, she knows it is hovering, a mist seeking to invade her pores, but she wants to paint, and so she ignores its full implications, and instead plucks it from the air and transmutes it into the face beginning to take shape before her, grinning softly, wickedly sensual, and very hungry.
She will make him breathe on canvas, standing in a maze.
I close my eyes. I do not need to see her. I hear the soft rustle of her movement, her busy hands swooping up and down. There is music playing, always. I know it is Olivier, his supple fingers scampering over the keyboard, Chopin, Schubert, a sonata, quartet, ballade, it is flowing over us, tranquil and yearning.
There is a world outside, a horrible, gray, empty world, but we are sealed, three figures in a large white room, the ceiling high above it, the dim noontime sun filtering through the skylight, the floor gleaming, burnished, thick Moroccan rugs the color of pale cream scattered around it, needed, she explained with a laugh, for all her prayers when the painting was going badly. Bolts of Belgian linen and stacks of canvases are turned toward the wall, we see only their stretchers and faint streaks of paint along their sides. Jars of the pigments she grinds herself, oils and bristled brushes, a funny-shaped spray bottle of fixative, and tubes of paints are aligned in perfect rows like little fat soldiers on her work table. It smells of primer, of supplies bought in delirious abandon at Cornellessens, of linseed and turpentine, of the wonder of creation.
The ghosts of portraits painted sit near me in the corner. I can feel them, lingering in the peacefulness of this room. Even they are silent, content. There is no need to talk. Only the soft sound of a piano, and a charcoal stick sketching.
We do not wish to leave.
Be there by noon, don’t be late, she told us, if you’re late I won’t let you in, this is the only time I can have the sitters here, don’t ask me to explain it. Four sittings, four sittings only. That is all she requires, for the face, for the body, the rest she can imagine. The rest fills her hours when the sun swings west and fades from the skylight, when the images float through her head and are transferred, miraculously, to the canvas, where they take shape and form, recast, born in layers shimmering, their souls captured, living forever.
WE ARE back, a week later. Olivia is relaxed, happy, it is going well, I can see it on her face. She is humming, idly, along with the glorious shower of Schubert’s notes. Different hyacinths are blooming.
Nick stands, lounging comfortably against the pillar, easily sinking into the pose. This time he feels like talking. She feels like talking too, he can sense it.
“Olivia,” he says, the very syllables a caress, “can I ask you a question?” He is going to try the pseudo-intellectual approach, proving that he can indeed talk about subjects more pungent than the latest restaurants or box-office grosses.
I’d often thought Nick should divulge more of his buried self, although he wouldn’t have believed me had I told him so, but he remained convinced that it was better for me to write the lines, clever but not too brilliant, and for him to say them. In that way, he gave me my voice. I hear it as he speaks now, calm, unthreatening. He’ll talk, she’ll grow accustomed to his talking, and she’ll begin to crave hearing the sound of anything he might have to say.
After that he can pounce, when she is lulled into believing the silken cadence of his words.
“Mmm,” she says. She has barely heard him.
“How do you paint?”
She looks at him, bemused.
“No, I mean, where do your ideas come from? What do you think when you’re painting? What’s in your head when you look at me?”
Her charcoal stick dances across the canvas. “I don’t know. The ideas, if that’s what you call them, just arrive, I see them. I wake up with them.”
She steps back, cocks her head, steps forward, a minuet.
“We meet at lunch, as you know. Even then, no matter how much they want a portrait, I’m still waiting for—I don’t know, this sounds a bit crazy—but something unique.” She smiles to herself, thinking of Olivier. “A word’ll jump out, or a sigh, or the way they cock their heads, and it’s as if this meaningless gesture becomes, instead, the actual DNA of the portrait, the key to their essence. That’s when I can hope it might work.”
“So that’s what you were thinking when we met,” he teases.
“Well, not all the time.”
“Oh, so there is some hope.”
“ ’Fraid not, dearie.”
“I’m crushed.”
“Sure.” She rolls her eyes. “There’s not a whole lot I can do to make a dent in your ego. That’s one of the things I admire about you. During a sitting, even with someone as full of himself as you are, it’s like automatic writing for me. I mean, even though I paint what I want, deep down I still want to please my sitters. I try not to show that because I really wish I didn’t feel that way. Being freed from it might make my work better.” She sighs, deeply. “So it’s a constant struggle, because I have my own ideas about what I want to do, but I st
ill know that drawing is just finding out what the drawing will do. It’s like groping in the dark for something you know is there, hidden in the shadows. The marks come and you have to accept them. Only then does the painting really begin to happen. It’s like discovering the heart of a pearl, there, buried beneath the layers of nacre, the pearl’s true color. Even though I can’t see it yet, it’s not tangible, I still know it’s buried there under what I haven’t yet created. My hand moves, I don’t think, I look, I see, but it’s already there.”
“How can you be such a poet and so mean to me at the same time?”
“I’m not mean,” she says in mock protest. “Try to make me believe you don’t get off on it.”
“Why, Olivia,” he says, drawling, “I do believe you’re flirting with me.”
“Dream on,” she says, laughing. “It’s just chitchat to keep me going. Maybe I make it sound so easy, but it isn’t. I’m just used to it, I guess.” She wipes her elbow across her brow. “People are at their most vulnerable during these sessions. Even someone like you, who’s used to being looked at. All you’ve thought about who you are and how you appear to the world becomes terribly exposed.”
She glances over at me, and smiles, soft. “Artists know that—or should know that—and feel torn between this incredible responsibility to that vulnerability, and the struggle between their own intellectual ideas and their gut instinct guiding them, or guiding me, I should say, to what I hope is the truth.” She frowns, eyeing the canvas. “Anyway, isn’t it a bit like acting, when you’re so submerged in character that your unconscious takes over?”
“I guess,” Nick says, looking thoughtful. “I try not to think about it either. If you think too much it never works. I just do it.”
“You empty out your self so something else can flow in. There’s an old Chinese proverb: When you’re taking a boat through the rapids, you haven’t got time to think.”
He laughs. “Never anything that profound, especially with all the wonderfully trivial movies I’ve made.”
She smiles. “Yes, but I can’t do much with my talent. Actors can reach millions and millions. They see you, they want to touch you, they want to be you. All I can do is react to the moment in my own imagination.”
“I don’t think you should put yourself down like that.”
“I’m not, it’s just what painting is. I was born into the wrong century, I suppose. No one appreciates us portrait painters anymore, not truly, not the way they used to be appreciated. Why paint? Take a picture instead, even though a successful portrait can be so much more alive, more truthful, than any photograph will ever be. It’s because people’s faces change all the time. It’s why we look at photographs and say, ‘That’s not me, I don’t look like that, really, do I?’ A photo is only a snatching of one teeny part of a second. But a portrait, well, it’s a record of changes over time, of how much your face changes even as I’m watching it, of who you are and all the emotions flooding out of you and colliding with mine.
“But now,” she adds, “it’s ‘Here, smile for the camera. Look, it’s a Polaroid.’ Instant gratification. I get so exasperated. In case you hadn’t noticed.” She grimaces. “Put it on film. Watch it. Watch it again.”
Nick turns his head to look at me.
“Don’t move,” says Olivia.
“Sorry.”
“Actors,” she says, gently mocking.
“I thought you didn’t know who I was.”
“I didn’t really, but I do now. Besides, I have painted a few of you before, usually against my better judgment.”
“And here I was just beginning to think you liked me.” He can risk the glib lines, the pleasure of this easy banter loosening his limbs, tripping his tongue as he would have it trip over Olivia’s breasts.
She is smiling. “You, all those actors, all that idiot Hollywood bullshit, how can you stand it? It’s such useless energy, all that gossip and dealmaking and my car is bigger and my parking space is closer. What an utter waste of time.” She steps back again, coolly regarding. “All I know is that everyone out there drove Olivier nuts, when he was working on Jamie’s film. All that energy sucked out of him for no reason except to stroke someone’s misguided self-importance.” Her eyes narrow in concentration. “You, all of you precious stars, you’re what painters used to be. Important.” She sighs. “We mean nothing save to the very few who choose to seek us out.”
“I’ll tell everybody I know to buy your art.”
“Please don’t. I can’t think of anything more revolting than a bunch of so-called superstars begging me to be immortalized.”
“Excuse me, your royal highness,” Nick says, mockingly pompous. “I suppose I should kiss your feet in grateful appreciation.”
“Well, I am too harsh,” she says, shrugging away a smile. “I don’t want fame, or adulation, or the public panting to examine my dirty laundry. I’m lucky I’m successful, that I can choose who I paint. That’s very rare. Most of my friends, artists I know from school, certainly can’t. But choosing my subjects is the only control I have, really. I’m only doing you so you’ll get off my case and leave me alone.” She stops, steps back, steps forward, concentrating. “And because . . .”
“Because what?” Nick says. He is too eager.
“I don’t know,” Olivia says. “Never mind.”
It is the first time she is really letting herself relax into a true look at him, not as a subject she knows she needs to paint, not as a curiosity, but as a man. He feels the heat of her gaze, he grasps it instantly as if he were starving, the potency of his presence is palpable, inescapable. The air is suddenly thick with the surprising fog of unspoken wishes.
“Painting a portrait is a little bit like working very hard on a courtship,” she says, she must speak, she cannot bear the weight of his eyes upon her, she turns back to the solid ground of her work, her eyes hooded. “It’s so intimate, and so revealing. When it’s finished and they see it, see themselves for the very first time, it’s like the moment of your courtship when you declare your love for each other. Either they don’t like it, or are bewildered by your vision of them and your hopes are dashed, usually because you can’t fulfill their expectations. Often, with my work, they simply don’t understand the setting I’ve put them in. Or, if they do like it, you’re swept right into their arms.” Her eyes on Nick. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
“Of course,” he says.
“Other painters say that a portrait is no good unless the sitter likes it,” she goes on, “although that’s not always true for me. What I hope is that, perhaps, someone, someday, will be able to read a deeper meaning into what I do. That they will find a sort of—oh I don’t know, this sounds so pompous—a sort of profundity, maybe one that is even unintended, and it will move them. Shake them. And if that happens, I will have given a stranger an unexpected gift of seeing another reality, if only for a second.”
“But doesn’t that happen every time?”
“Are you kidding? Of course not. I’m always telling myself that each one is the last one.”
“But you seem so, I don’t know, confident. Capable. Fluid. Sure of yourself.” Long pause. Long pregnant pause. “Sure of what you want, and who you want it with.” Another pause. “And who you want it for.”
She stops. Even from where I sit I can see a flicker of panic light up her eyes and her shoulders tense. “Why do you say that?”
Nick shrugs.
“Well,” she says, attacking the canvas once more, “you don’t see what I do every day before I start.” She smiles ruefully. “I am the world’s worst procrastinator.”
Nick is surprised. “You? I don’t believe it.”
“Believe it. Every time I wake up I wonder how much courage I’ll find that day. That I will have lost my instincts in the night, that even when I start this will be the last one, the Bobby
Fischer of my paintings.”
“But even he came out of retirement,” Nick says.
“I know,” she says with a rueful grin. “Still, I’ll look at the light and say it’s no good, it won’t do. I’ll look at the mail and say there are too many bills to pay, oh right, I’d better read this magazine, I might get inspired. I’ll look at my hair and say it needs a wash. I’ll look at my shoes and say the heels are worn down and I must go get them fixed. I’ll look at the pile of nice clean canvases waiting to be painted and say I need to prime another, it takes six weeks, and I’m not ready. I feel my little jars of pigments and tubes of paint behind me, I feel them boring into the back of my head saying take me, touch me, use me. Usually that’s when I can start. I don’t know.” She shakes her head. “What am I talking about?”
She was not talking to Nick, to me, she was talking to herself, she doesn’t even hear it. Her charcoal stick dances wildly, she is moving, shifting, she looks at Nick, she looks at the canvas, she looks up at the sky, her eyes narrow in concentration. She is talking to keep her mind free for what she is drawing, she is talking because she needs to, because if she does, Nick cannot talk back. He cannot say what he is feeling, so surprised is he to be feeling it, he cannot tell Olivia that she is looking at someone without realizing that what she sees is a sham shadow of his real self, appearances are so deceiving. He cannot say that she might think she can figure out what fearsome insecurities and cravings fuel his life—and they are there, little butterflies of apprehension hovering over the opened flowers of his ego: Can he do it, is he slipping, do they love me, will I always be a star—but she will never truly know what machinations churn ceaselessly in his mind.
He cannot say he is transfixed by her odd beauty, mesmerized by her words and her seeming confidence in the telling of them so openly, aching to tear himself away from the pillar against which he lounges, appearing so cool and relaxed, and grab her in his arms, throw her on the work table, on her fat tubes of paint, crush her down on them, their weight squeezing the tubes till they burst, the colors running together, on the table, staining their clothes, he taking her, not just her body but everything that makes her, she cannot escape the firmness of his grasp, he will not let her go, her back a riot of colors, flowing together.