by Lee, Tanith
“What – is it?”
“What do you think?”
Ruth felt a flicker of actual fear. Not of Vera – but at Vera. Ruth had known she was a tigress, but the tigress now defended her cub.
“Her father,” said Ruth.
“Indeed. Her father. But maybe not in the way you think. Let me tell you a story, Ruth Isles. It’s one of three that I know about. This perhaps the least.”
Ruth sat down on a chair, and Vera, standing up, paced about, every so often returning to fill Ruth’s glass with the deceptive, sweet apricot cognac. (The dog lay, head raised and watchful, still.) And all around them, the skeins of the doomed young composer Chopin were glittering and coming apart.
“There is a rumor that Blaze uses the backs and bums of young girls as his mixing table. He does. Sometimes he grinds up colors on their backs, sometimes he liquefies the paint, blending and making exact. Skin, he’s told me, is far superior to any wooden palette, or even the ivory palettes of certain old masters. It has, he’s said, a staying quality – a natural fixative.
“Perhaps you conclude he’s done this to me, or to my daughter. Let me instantly disabuse you. He hasn’t. I would have cut his heart out if he’d tried that with me. If with her – I would have hunted him with dogs to the coast and killed him in the sea.”
(Ruth, her heart galloping, hypnotized. This passion, this protective, astonishing passion – and the inner voice which whispered, under all the outer attention, How could you not love one like this?)
“Blaze has almost always picked his models, whether for shepherdesses or Greek goddesses, Arthurian maidens or nuns, from the shoals of the hapless and the needy. Oh, I’ve seen plenty of them coaxed or dragged into the town house by the back door, bathed and combed and stuffed with food, beer and gin. Drugs too, from the easy laudanum any chemist will sell one, to the burnt black hashish of India. Anyway, after that he can do what he wants with them. He paints them, he fucks them. And some he mixes paint upon. Do you think this is a lie?”
“I’ve heard – he did that. Mixes the paint.”
“Yes. Heard. But I doubt you heard about the results.”
Ruth’s head swam. She put down her glass. She watched the beloved object of desire, prowling to and fro, her hair lashing around her like the striking tail of a lion.
“There was a woman called Jane Wilkins. He found her in a laundry. Her hands were ruined, he said, but her body was divine. You may have seen the painting – Phryne at a Window. An odd compendium of ancient Greece coupled to some sort of renaissance idea – stained glass – trees and leaves – this woman caught by the light. Notice, if ever you see it again, her hands are hidden in her hair.”
“I’ve seen the picture. I remember.”
“Then you know. Well, besides painting her, she was one he used as a palette. She was the initial experiment. At first apparently she laughed and said it tickled. Then she liked it. Then she went to sleep. He woke her up to model again while he achieved the first strokes of color on the canvas. Afterwards he sprayed off her skin with oil of turpentine, and then milk, to cleanse. Sent her away with money and her head ringing with wine. This was thirteen years ago. One day, when he was in Italy again, this woman came to me, this Jane Wilkins. She was in a splendid old rage. I saw her in London, in the sitting-room, and before I knew what she was at she’d torn off her clothes and she was naked in front of me. I thought, poor old girl, life’s not been kind to you at all. It hadn’t. She turned her back, and showed me. What do you think had happened?”
“I don’t know. How could I know?”
“I’ll tell you, Ruth. Her back – her back – the paint had eaten it away, in dappled leprous scars. No, there’s no reason such a thing should occur. He’d cleaned it off, I assume, promptly – as promptly as he ever does anything but paint. Or maybe he was rough – or she was, even, trying to clean herself thoroughly. But she was scarred, dappled, just like a leper – a leprous leopard. I’ve a strong stomach, or I’d have been sick. I gave her a lot of money, and of course she often returned for more. But, poor thing, why not. I kept her, you might say, until she died. Do you know how she died? No, as you say, how would you. She was a whore by then and some man, having had her, glimpsed her back. He thought she had syphilis, which she hadn’t, so he clubbed her to death and then, blew out his brains.”
Next door, along the amber walls drawn with mandarins, Chopin wafted away, began again.
“I see you don’t ask me,” she said, “his response to the woman’s disfigurement or her death.”
“Did he have a response?”
“He knew nothing of it. My money, you see, or a great amount of it, is still mine. So long as he receives what he needs, and he’s expensive, of course, being a man, so long as he can do as he likes, so can I.”
“You didn’t tell him.”
“Why would I tell him? I’ve said, there are two other stories I know of, and so does he. Before ever Jane came to me, I’d seen his response to those. Once he said to me, An artist must have room. He meant God had made him a genius, so he can do what he wants. I haven’t any belief in God, myself. A pity. If God existed, Blaze might eventually burn in hell.”
She was far across the long room. Night was settling, deep blue as her former dress, along the windows, lining them. Soon someone would doubtless come to light the lamps and candles. They might even trip over that static basalt shadow of a dog—
Vera swung back through the room, her hair flaring, her eyes igniting from some non-existent fire.
She stood over Ruth, then bending, with a choreographed, non-harmful, couth violence, she gripped the girl’s head in her hard warm hands, and kissed her full on the mouth.
Ruth fell into the pool of that kiss. Drunken, released, she looked up into the eyes of her lion-lover.
“Sweetheart,” said Vera, “I want something from you.”
“Any – thing—”
“No, you can’t agree until you know.”
“But—”
“My husband is a monster, and he has almost destroyed my daughter. Not in any sexual or obvious way, in any way, for example, some talentless devil in a slum might use – which in fact might be, ultimately, the cause of less injury. He has destroyed her with his deadly presence and his disgusting gift, his obsession with gothic death and classical obliterations. His egoistic thought that women are made, like the beasts of the field, to serve.”
Vera bowed her head and kissed Ruth once more, her tongue moving inside the fragrant taste of the brandy, a snake of firm flame. Then, again, drawing back, Vera put her hand gently over Ruth’s lips.
“Listen, dear girl. Tell me the truth. What will you do for me?” And the hand, like the seal of a confessional, was lifted.
“Whatever you want.”
“Then, my dear friend, I want you to rescue my daughter in the one way I can’t – must never – could never – do.”
“What way is that?”
“Seduce her.”
Two
It was Vera I desired. That’s obvious enough. And to her daughter – I was frankly averse. That cold, drifting, slightly crazed creature, with her red-golden hair and stones of eyes. I’d been glad I hadn’t touched her. She would have been chilly, surely, clammy, like smooth outdoor marble after winter mist.
And now here I was, walking through the morning rose-garden with her, with Emerald, myself holding a basket into which, now and then, she dropped a forward-blooming rose, perfectly cut, before its hour, by her executioner’s blade.
“It seems rather cruel,” I said.
I didn’t think she would answer. Half the time she didn’t. She had never once called me Ruth. But then: “Oh, it is.”
“Cutting flowers...?”
“Yes.”
“But really, after all they die anyway. It’s just these are so young.”
“Many die young,” she said. “Things, and persons.”
The silky rhythm of her voice made me want to slap her.
He has destroyed her, Vera had said.
It wasn’t he had ever abused her, either carnally or in the way of physical or verbal unkindness. No – Emerald had always been his darling, when he was at home. And when the demon of painting had him in thrall? “Oh then,” Vera had said, “he shut her out of the studio, like the dog.”
Apparently she had then sat outside, Emerald the child, on a little chair. She would lay her head on the wall, in order to be able to listen to any movement he might make, or word he might say, more clearly. As his activities in the studio must sometimes have been sexual, I wondered why Vera had allowed Emerald to do this. Vera told me in fact his fornications were rare during the daytime. He preferred to fasten on any model he fancied at night. “He likes darkness for that act,” Vera remarked. “Midnight, or a thick forest.” And by nightfall, the child was in bed.
When Blaze was not at home, which was very frequently, as his fame soared, little Emerald would pine.
“She did it in such a terrible way. Not sulky or screaming, not bloody awkward and damnably annoying, slamming doors and pulling faces. Oh no. She would be sad. She would wilt. He’d told her, you see, that she was his daughter, and that he wished at all times to be made proud of her. He told her what a woman should be, calm, serene, even in sorrow; how she should express herself with soft dignity in her behavior, even in her thoughts.”
I had sensed in this Blaze might well have been attacking, by a backhanded route as it were, his forthright, vital, gorgeous wife. But Vera didn’t mention that aspect, and nor did I.
From the earliest age Blaze had stroked and molded and suppressed his daughter into what he considered the ideal female icon. My God. Had his notions come from the East, with which he was so greatly – if often inaccurately – involved? Vera suspected this. She had also said, “But in China, they only bind a girl’s feet to cripple her. Her mind is allowed some freedom.”
Vera had naturally attempted to extract her daughter from this ‘benign’ tyranny. She had wished to teach Emerald to ride, to swim, to live, had tried to take her off to other locations, Florence in spring, and Venice during the Carnival. But Blaze wouldn’t go then, though he was often abroad ‘alone,’ and since Blaze would be in England, Emerald wished only to be there beside him – or even beside the studio wall, listening. Twice Vera had excavated the precious vessel of her daughter from this clinging soil, and whisked her away. “In Rome she almost died of some fever. In Paris she wouldn’t eat, and finally fainted in the street, banging her head so badly I had to bring her home.
“She is in love with Blaze. Not sexually. Even that I could grasp, though I would loathe it – it would give me too the rights to separate them. But no, it is this awful ‘proper’ filial love he sometimes paints. Do you know his picture, The Dying Sheik and His Daughters? No. Well, he depicts some desert prince on his death-bed, and these sorrowing lovely wisps of girls clustered round, all dripping with gold adornments and grief-stricken tears. Then there’s Oedipus and Antigone – the old chap hanging on to a pillar and his frail loving daughter propping him up, all in tasteful Greek drapery. This is what a daughter must be. And as a woman – well, there are all the other paintings for that. The good and lovable women shining with virtue and sweetness, male-worshipping, tender, self-sacrificing. Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot, Ophelia drowned in a madness of loyalty to father and lover, Lucrece, for God’s sake, who kills herself rather than besmirch her husband’s honor after her rape at the hands of a blackguard. And then there are the evil, distaste-provoking women too. Take a glance sometime at his Images of the French Revolution. Some of the ugliest and most ferocious-looking bitches you’re likely to see this side of hell.”
(Out in the morning garden, Emerald snipped another defenseless bloom, and dropped it in my basket. She was a princess, lost in her own pure, spiritual thoughts, I the servant or slave, a balancing afterthought at the corner of the canvas.)
“So you see, he is killing her,” Vera had swiftly said to me the night before, as the Chopin faded again, began again. “Not only by trammeling her, chaining her up in every aesthetic and physical way. He has made her, perhaps only incidentally, obsessed with his gothic imagery – maidens who pine and die, exquisitely, of course, well before their youth and beauty leave them. She isn’t solely in love with Blaze. She’s in love with death. Let me tell you something else. Less of a story, almost an anecdote. One day when he’d been gone a month – she was about sixteen – I went to her room and found she had – how else can I put this – laid herself out, as if for burial. It didn’t duplicate one of his studies – but one has sights of these tableaux in his, and other current works. Vases of lilies she’d had them fetch from the hothouse – a white robe – her hair combed over the pillows – her maid had done it, and then, not liking it, come to me. My daughter’s hands were crossed on her breast, her eyes shut as if pinned down. I couldn’t see her breathe – and for one stupid second I thought she’d taken some poison. Then I stopped being a fool.”
“What did you do?”
“Said, It’s stuffy in here, and threw up one of the windows. It was a blowy cold March day. She had to get up.”
And that was when the Chopin concluded and didn’t resume. Emerald Emily came back into the room, and the topic of her mother’s and my unbelievable dialogue spun elsewhere. Emerald said very little. We three then had dinner in an Indian dining room of blood-red wallpaper and curtains, against which Vera glowed like a lamp, and Emerald shimmered like vague fading steam.
Hadn’t I, and didn’t I, at all remonstrate with Vera – if not in those extraordinary moments in the Chinese room? Of course. I was outraged. All the more so because what I wanted had stood in front of me, kissing me to the roots of my spine and soul, telling me I must love – and in such a contrived way – elsewhere. Of course I protested. I said I would leave. (All this after the weird dinner, when every mouthful had threatened to choke me – once did – and I had the infuriating delight of Vera thumping me between the shoulder blades.)
I even said, alone with Vera again at last in a salon – Persian, I think – where she smoked her cigars, that should she not try a more ‘accessible’ route in the reclamation of her daughter. That was, a young man?
“Because surely, Vera,” (I was upset enough to be quite brusque with her by then) “if she has been so trained by him, a man is all she’ll ever want.”
“So I’d thought, too,” she answered, slowly. “And therefore I have been cultivating young men for her, those of the right type, looks, wealth and so on, for the past two years. Why else do you think I became entangled with that wretched neighbor whose protestations of lust so enervated me on the ride down this evening? But Emily, confronted by even the most winning male, can only compare him to Blaze. Even one she once agreed was nearly as handsome as her father did not, of course, possess her bloody father’s genius.”
“And I,” I stated, “possess no genius whatsoever.”
“Oh, you,” she said, seeming amused again, “you are much more than you say, my girl. The instant I saw you at that peculiar NO charity affair. Why else do you think I sped across like a hungry wolf?”
“I’d flattered myself because the hunger was for me.”
“It is, my Ruth. But I have to tell you, of all the loves possible to a woman, whether for women, or for men, the love she may feel for her child can gain an incredible ascendancy. Will you – ah, Ruth, for me, as you promised – will you simply try? Only think. If you were to succeed with her, you would have broken her free of him – quite free – and perhaps of all men, forever.”
My mother was Sabella Asherton, the actress. She had little time for me and in the end that was mutual. However, having seen her on stage on several occasions, I greatly admired her ability. After her sudden alarming death – she was flung from a speeding carriage at the age only of thirty-four – I never had the resource of complacence to believe I could imitate her skills. Her slowly dwindling little fortune supported me s
o far, and I was grateful to it. I did much as I liked. These, her only legacies.
Nevertheless, perhaps she left some seed in me of her sparkling theatrical knack, unused till then through all my nineteen years.
Something happened to me in the morning rose garden.
It was very abrupt, without any warning I was aware of. Perhaps I only wanted the little pale monster to stop cutting newborn roses.
I went forward and lightly seized Emerald’s left hand.
I did this impulsively, and startled her, too, which had been my immediate intent.
Her wide blank eyes stared into my face, her lips slightly parted. She had dropped her scissors.
“Miss Blaze – I can’t bear another minute of this!”
No reply, but I did have her attention.
“I must know—” I said – what, for Christ’s sake, what was I supposed to want to know? “Tell me, please,” I said, gazing at her stricken, a player of some small part who has forgotten her lines, longing for the prompt to speak, but the wretch is asleep—
“Tell you? What?” whispered Emerald Blaze, echoing my thought.
Then it came. Oh of course. It was the single possible thing.