The Crimson Portrait

by Jody Shields

  He continued speaking so softly that she leaned forward to catch his words. “My face is imperfect, but otherwise I’m whole, like any other man. I survived battle with nothing but my own map of veins.”

  Framed by his blank white bandage, his face was flushed and creased with worry. “Let us make an agreement. I will do anything you ask. But you must never look at my face. Why? Because I cannot look at myself in the mirror. You cannot have more knowledge than I do.”

  Catherine leaned over him, and the veins in her arm became crooked rivers given another purpose as his fingers traced their lines on her skin. Julian wouldn’t let her touch his face but worshipped hers with his hands and eyes. She slid her hand inside his sleeve and held the fabric between two fingers to anchor herself. She knew every expression his half face could command, except one. The lost, unguarded expression of intimacy.

  His gentle weight against her was surprisingly heavy, and they slept together on the hillside. She awoke holding him in her arms, a man able to reveal his defenselessness only while collapsed in dream. She didn’t dare to move, to change her position.

  “This is impossible,” she whispered.

  “Impossible?” He stirred himself awake, his voice harsh with astonishment.

  “How will we hide our joy from others?”

  The next day Catherine returned alone to the same place near the bridge, compelled to re-create her encounter with Julian. She found herself thinking of Charles, who had loved these hills, and had walked, ridden, been taken by wagon and motorcar, over the landscape he possessed, which was wholly tended by other hands. He never picked Catherine a flower from his own garden but bought her jewels. She immediately felt ashamed, using her husband to judge another man.

  She lay on the grass in order to see the landscape from Julian’s viewpoint, imagining she’d slipped into his skin and they were joined eye to eye, skull to skull. This was closer than she permitted herself when they were together, as she treated Julian’s frail, dangerous face with its aura of medicine as if it were ice she’d break herself against.

  THREE O’CLOCK in the morning was the charmed hour when those who couldn’t sleep gathered on the tiny stage of the terrace to smoke, stare at the still-colorless lawn, and speak softly in the company of others. Occasionally, the light of a suspended cigarette carved a face out of the darkness, notching a chin, nose, lips into place.

  McCleary had joined this group, grateful that the dimness obliterated everyone’s identity. The tender muscles orbicularis oculi around his eyes slackened, and the dry whisper of the burning cigarette in his fingers was the only connection to his awareness. The quiet weighed on him, eerie after the closeness of the operating theater, the intimacy of bodies, the intense heat of the lamps over his shoulders. Was it morning? Had he slept?

  A pall of haze obscured the ragged violet clouds on the horizon, and he reflected that it could be smoke from guns across the channel, the chaff rising from battle. Was it drifting gunpowder that made his eyes water and burn?

  Anna had told him that when Krakatoa erupted in 1883, plumes of ash and smoke had drifted ’round the globe, transforming the sky, and even the sunsets in the far northern countries had become scarlet. Several painters had recorded this phenomenon, and thousands of witnesses had believed it was a harbinger of the world’s end.

  “That’s what we deserve to see,” McCleary had answered Anna. “Every sunset should be a blood-colored reminder of war. Let the mighty generals gaze upon it until there is peace.”

  His thoughts turned to Artis. Military officials had failed to respond to McCleary’s letters. He had telephoned the War Office and been startled when a female voice brusquely answered. He was not surprised when the woman claimed there was no file on his request, no documentation of his letters. He had considered appearing before the War Office Board, imagining himself—a gray-haired man in surgeon’s garb—standing before a table of hostile officers. He would beg them to excuse Artis from service, would volunteer for a transfer to a casualty clearing station at the front. A life for a life. But what was the life of one man? A blink.

  A figure emerged from the shadow of a standing urn, and he recognized Catherine. She sat next to him on the bench.

  “The weather is surprising for this late in the season,” she said, as if to ease their strained relationship.

  “Yes.” He didn’t care to talk and wished her away.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “No one can sleep.”

  “Every night is the same.”

  He searched for another cigarette. “Brownlow could give you a bromide, something to help your nerves. Many nurses need a draft, even after working several days with little sleep.”

  “The constant noise bothers me, but I can bear it. Someday my house will be quiet again. Although it will always be haunted by suffering.”

  “Ah, I cannot let your remark pass, ma’am. You could dismantle the house with the most delicate instruments down to bricks and timber, but there’s nothing to discover. You create your own ghosts.” McCleary spoke to benefit himself, and in the leisurely lilting light of sunrise, he saw Catherine’s dismissive shrug. “Imagine that we occupy your house as if it were a stage. The characters will make their bows and take their leave when the performance is over.”

  “I will remember you. Or should I say that I won’t forget?”

  “Hopefully you will remember me with kind regard.” McCleary flexed his fingers to ease their stiffness, considering his next words. “It’s fanciful, but to distract myself occasionally, I visualize the ballroom filled with your guests.”

  Catherine was silent for a moment, and he was certain an image of dancing figures spun in her memory.

  “On the afternoon of the grand balls, the lamp boys would light the chandeliers, hundreds of candles. It took hours and hours. My husband was a superb dancer. We were so breathless after dancing.” She clasped her arms around her body. “The tables were decorated with sugar flowers, and huge floral arrangements stood between the windows. Lilies. The fragrance was overwhelming.” Her attention moved back to him. “Even today, I cannot bear the scent.”

  CATHERINE AND JULIAN never spent the night together but found sanctuary in the vast lawn and woods. She now routinely dressed in dark-colored clothing in order to be inconspicuous, to move unobserved. They frequently met at the tall hornbeam hedge, where she’d discovered a hidden bay cut into the living branches, irregular, green, and secret, just wide enough for two bodies side by side. They met in deep woods, where soft pine needles had made a springy, straw-colored cushion for them under trees.

  At midday, they occasionally risked an encounter in the yew walk, a shadowed tunnel of gnarled, rough-barked branches. Nothing grew underfoot, no sun lit their faces or reached their straining bodies, intertwined against a tree. Under cover of dusk, they enjoyed the strange spaciousness of a forgotten amphitheater carved into a hillside the previous century, its gentle slope overgrown with grasses and wildflowers.

  It was in this place that she haltingly explained herself to Julian. “You’ll think I’m mad or selfish. I am constantly afraid, but I’ve never felt so alive. It’s because of the war.” She had expected him to be angry or scornful, but there was recognition and sad acceptance in his expression.

  DURING THEIR EARLY intimacies, Catherine had craved the tension created as she held back, watched herself, careful not to disturb Julian’s bandages, hurt his delicate face, wound him with words or expression. This changed. As Anna proceeded with his portrait, Julian became less cautious and self-contained, as if Anna’s eye had freed him, the last veil torn away, the brick wall of his face finally revealed.

  Gradually, he taught Catherine that her body was strung with a network of nerves, denser in certain sensitive places under her skin where he slowly, remarkably discovered them.

  It was Catherine’s desire to have Julian witness her intimate face. She became lost in his embrace, assuming multiple guises—like a mythical creature—experi
encing pleasure in each one. She was transformed into a shower of coins, a reed, a thing of hands and lips, appetites and movements that she experienced but did not control. Catherine didn’t recognize herself.

  ANNA HAD BEEN delayed on her way to the studio. Julian waited quietly, wearing only a shirt as cover, his other clothing arranged on another chair. Catherine folded lengths of canvas at a table facing the curtain hanging between them. She gradually became aware that their breathing was synchronized and, drawn by this rhythm, slowly approached the curtain, then stood so it touched the length of her body. Her face nestled into its velvet folds overlaid with a smoky scent from the fireplace in the room where it had originally hung. Minutes passed, marked by the slight, sonorous movement of water in another chamber.

  Catherine heard Julian stand, then he moved against the other side of the curtain. Tenderly, he pushed the fabric against her face and down her neck. She closed her eyes. His hands found her shoulders, and she pressed her weight into him, curving like a diver. He became more aggressive, intimate, as if tracing the outline of a continent, forming a map of her body.

  The curtain cushioned her hand as she touched the undamaged side of his face, his brow, the pressured orb of the eye, his nose, the hard line of teeth, the rounded rim of his perfect ear. His features felt primitive as a mask through the soft fabric.

  He stripped off his shirt, and she imagined the angled cord of muscle in his neck, his shoulders, the hollow under his arm, then her fingers completed these images. His ribs and hip bone were prominent, her thumb rounded over its shape and then her palm curved against another bluntness.

  Anna entered the room with the stealth of a goddess, undetected until the wrathful stamp of her sandal, the spume of her whirling gown. She violently swept the curtain aside.

  Catherine recoiled as if she’d been struck.

  Anna’s eyes enlarged, filled with Julian’s face and body. “I’ll start a new portrait tomorrow. It’s time to sketch your naked face.”

  ARTIS GROUND CHARCOAL in a mortar alongside Anna, shy when they were alone in the studio.

  “What did you do before the house became a hospital, Artis?”

  “I cleaned plate for the butler. Cut and aired the newspapers. In the afternoon, I lowered the blinds, prepared the candles, and lit the lamps. I walked from room to room. Then everyone left for war, even the house steward and the stable boys.”

  She didn’t ask if any of the men had returned. “Will you be called up to join the service soon?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You’re tall enough.”

  “But I want to stay here and learn to be a doctor. Dr. McCleary has lent me his books, and I’m memorizing the muscles of the face.”

  “A doctor?” She kindly masked her skepticism, having been discouraged from pursuing her own work when she was young. “Ask Dr. McCleary if it isn’t true that a surgeon must also have the soul of an artist. Don’t smile.”

  He considered this for a moment. “I only ask the doctor serious questions.”

  ANNA HAD ONCE passed an entire summer furiously cutting and arranging roses in a still life, trying to capture their elusive color on canvas and paper. The roses had defied her, seeming to change color every hour.

  Years later Jules Gravereaux, the great rosarian of Roseraie de l’Hay, explained this phenomenon to her. The rose petal itself was actually white, veneered by a film of color on both sides. Within hours of the rose’s blooming, sun and wind evaporated the color, made it transparent, so red petals became pink and paler petals faded to white. Yellow was the most fugitive color. “It dies almost as you gaze upon it, madame,” he had said.

  Years ago, when Anna had seen her newborn baby for the first time, she was awed by the fineness of his skin and fiercely memorized every inch of his tiny body. Gradually the color of his skin had faded, a change too delicate for her eye to register, as the fragile boy began the process of dying before he was three days old. The color of a lost child.

  CAPRICIOUSLY SHADOWED by leaves, Anna balanced on an unsteady bench, pruning the roses that had advanced fearlessly over the pergola. Her secateurs steadily bit through wood and weak stalks, eliminating buds so the few remaining on the stems would flourish. The muted peal of a distant church bell overlaid her pleasure at the calm deliberateness of this activity.

  Kazanjian monitored her, watching closely as if Anna would tumble from the bench or discard some precious thing about herself that he’d miss. Sensing his desire, she recast him as a dark shape at the edge of her eye.

  The thin stems cut from the roses—green whips studded with thorns—fell around him, streaking across his spectacles. He began to gather the branches on the ground, wary of thorns despite his thick gloves. Without looking at her, he said, “Anna, we work well together.”

  “Work is our entire experience of each other.”

  “Yes. I’ve seen firsthand how you comfort others. You were a comfort to me too.”

  Anna knew he was thinking of his grief at the young soldier’s death. “Dr. Kazanjian, I once thought pleasure revealed the truth of a body. Until the war. Now I know the wounded body is the most truthful.”

  “You’re very harsh. I had hoped for a tender answer.”

  Hadn’t she made it clear he shouldn’t declare his heart? His disappointment gave her strange relief. Released by her secateurs, a shower of leaves blurred green between them.

  “May I ask you a question?” His face tilted up to her. “You don’t need to answer me with words, but allow me to watch you. Please don’t turn away.”

  She had dreaded this inevitable confrontation and set herself against him.

  “Anna.” He was stiff with tension and held the branches as if arming himself for her reply. His voice was hoarse, nervous. “Anna, how do you regard me? Do you love me?”

  Anna’s expression softened as she looked down at him, and she instantly understood that he had read an answer in her eyes. He was an intruding, observing presence and had discovered her. Panicked, she shook her head No, I don’t love you.

  “That isn’t what your face revealed. You aren’t telling the truth.”

  “Your observation is wrong. You deceive yourself.” Anna’s words were arrows.

  He dropped the branches in his hands, bowed his head, and walked away from the pergola.

  It took all her strength to grip the secateurs, press the blades together, cut through a thick and unwilling branch and crush her regret for the hurt she had dealt him.

  ANNA COULD GAUGE certain properties by touch or sight: the temperature wax could be manipulated, when the ground on a paper was dry. By instinct, she knew the plastic strength of clay, the amount of water a brush would hold, the amount of mastic and dammer to dissolve in linseed oil to produce a varnish with a luminous quality. Paint possessed a strangely carnal essence, and she could blindly identify some colors by the weight of the tube in the palm of her hand. White paint felt solid, thick with zinc and lead titanium. Reds were medium weight, except for the deepest shades. Black paint contained airy substances: powdered charcoal, ash, soot, dust, burnt bone and horn. Naples Yellow was light, containing very little oil. Brown was recognizable by another kind of sensation, a sober dullness.

  How would Kazanjian’s body feel to her hand? Anna imagined the tenseness of his muscles, the heat and odor of his skin. To replace these troubling thoughts, she allowed a single color on the palette—Crimson Lake—to fill her mind as if it were projected on a blank wall, a camera obscura. Then she focused on Rose Madder, Blue Verditer. This state of nothingness she created calmed her.

  She couldn’t lie to Kazanjian. But she would lie to herself.

  FLAKES OF GRAY CLAY scattered over the table as Anna thoughtfully scraped out a bowl. This was busywork, a spell against decision and indecision. She had watched soldiers polish buttons and boots, mend clothing, and carefully fold blankets over their cots, the fullness of repetition calming their minds, keeping away grief, despair, a dreaded event.


  The previous night, her dreams had been sorrowful. Julian’s unbandaged face was presented to her, his skin torn like paper and discolored by bruises, dark as leaves. After she had awakened, she remained motionless in bed, allowing a sense of foreboding to expand until tears held the edge of her eyes. Her dream had been a rehearsal. Now in full light of day, Julian’s true face would be revealed without his bandages. He would be stripped of the frail privacy he had guarded while remaining ignorant of his own appearance.

  JULIAN’S FEET GROUND gritty powder on the floor, announcing his arrival. Catherine had been sent away on some pretext so he was alone with Anna in the studio.

  “You’re here early.” Anna concentrated on sticking a wetted tape to the drawing board, and her voice was stiff with effort to remain neutral.

  “You seem to be having difficulty,” he observed.

  “The tape is too damp.”

  “Let me help you.”

  He held one side, and she pressed the tape down, her hands hesitant and clumsy. Finished, she nodded her appreciation to him and steadied the drawing board on the easel, a habitual action that now felt as if she were setting up a target.

  Julian stepped onto the modeling platform, his footsteps uncharacteristically loud. “Once my bandage is removed, you’ll see me differently.” His low voice carried the authority of his encounter with suffering.

  Anna stopped her automatic response to comfort him, although certain that he was correct. How could it be otherwise?

  Julian carefully began to unwind the bandage from his face as if in slow motion. The gauze was weightless as a veil, thin as a crosshatch of white pencil lines, and his skin was visibly pink through the last transparent layer. The gauze strip gently spiraled free from his face, draping itself over one shoulder. He stood without moving, his face completely exposed.

  His good eye—the deep blue of flint—fiercely held her gaze, refusing to let his witness withdraw. The pitiless overhead light intensified the unevenness of his ruined skin. The left side of his face was misshapen, as if the flesh had been crudely torn off and violently flung back in place, unformed as raw clay. It had no symmetry. His face a plowed furrow. A trench of flesh. An angry map of red.