Stamps, Vamps & Tramps (A Three Little Words Anthology)

by Rachel Caine

  Meanwhile, without another word, the man slid on his mirrored glasses, set the fedora on his head at its former rakish angle, and rose smoothly to his feet.

  “Wait!” Fay had to stop herself from reaching out to physically restrain him. More than anything, she wanted to sketch him again. Really do it, just the two of them alone somewhere, with no distractions, no hurry, nothing to interfere with an experience whose memory was already fading like the petals of a flower closing with the setting of the sun. “You mentioned a commission,” she said hurriedly to her twin reflections.

  His face gave nothing away. The makeup was intact, unsmeared, as if he hadn’t shed a single tear.

  “Please,” she was surprised and embarrassed to hear herself say, for all the world like a street person begging for change.

  At that the man produced what looked like a white business card from the same jacket sleeve that housed the handkerchief (and, Fay was beginning to suspect, a plethora of other items). She reached for it eagerly, but at the last second he gave his wrist a flick that sent the card flitting through her fingers like a falling leaf. It landed on the sidewalk at her feet.

  He might as well have slapped her across the face. Fay’s cheeks burned with mortification and anger. She felt as if she’d ceased to be an artist in his eyes and become something else, something lowly and contemptible and deserving of meanness. She didn’t understand what had happened. Despite his tears, she was sure the sketch had pleased him. Had he sensed her pity and taken offense? But then why give her the card at all? And why did it matter so much to her what he thought?

  But it did. Although part of Fay wanted to ignore the card, let it be scuffed and trampled out of existence by ten thousand pairs of careless feet, she couldn’t do it. She wanted another chance at him too badly. All the same, the act of retrieving it cost her something substantial, as if, instead of simply reaching down and picking up the card as she might any other dropped object, she was kneeling to him, abasing herself in acknowledgment of his authority over her. She sat up quickly, determined to disabuse him (and herself) of the notion. But it was too late. The man had gone, taking the sketch with him.

  Fay sprang to her feet, craning her neck to catch a glimpse of him amid the masses of people streaming by. For a second she thought she saw the sleek dark wedge of his hat rise above the surface like a shark’s fin, but it disappeared before she could be sure. The Friday night bustle and noise crashed over her like a breaking wave. It was, Fay thought, as if the city had gone away for a while, or she had, the man standing between them like a sea wall, his very presence enough to keep them separated… just as his absence had brought them rushing violently back together.

  Feeling queasy, she sat down. After a moment, when the sidewalk had stopped lurching about like the deck of a ship in choppy seas, Fay remembered the card. She held it up to the light. Raised black letters spelled out the name A.E. Talag and an address on Cedar Street in lower Manhattan. The name sounded vaguely Indian, but beyond that didn’t ring any bells. On the back of the card, 9:00 p.m. had been written with elegance and flair in ink the color of henna. It was like receiving an invitation from the nineteenth century. It occurred to Fay that she’d forgotten to ask, and he to tell, anything about the nature of the commission she’d apparently just been given. There was no telephone number on the card, and she kind of doubted she’d find one in the phone book, either.

  Just then a gaggle of giggling Emo girls her own age or slightly older with assorted piercings of the face and body descended upon Fay to have their portraits darkly and starkly done. Talag, it seemed, had brought her luck. And more than luck. Drawing him had left her drained, but now the embers of what his presence had ignited in her blazed up again, and in that fierce, pure, unadulterated light her subjects opened to her like flowers. She saw into them as never before, her eye sharpened to an acuity that went far beyond the superficial guessing games she was used to playing as she worked. In the pasty faces and kohl-rimmed eyes of these purple-haired-and-lipsticked girls alike as clones, Fay saw the fears and yearnings, the memories and secrets they kept hidden—sometimes consciously, sometimes not—from each other and from themselves.

  Not that she could have expressed any of it in words. Not even silently, to herself, could Fay have said, for example, “Here is a girl teased and tormented by one loopy, drunken, not-quite-sisterly kiss between roommates that hasn’t been repeated or even mentioned since it happened weeks ago yet which she dreams of incessantly with all the considerable guilt, anxiety and longing available to a nineteen-year-old, nominally ex-Catholic, upper-middle-class college student coming face to face for the first time with the mess that is real life.” Or, “Here is a girl who sleeps in a bed that was thrown out more than ten years ago, lies there each and every night snug as a bug in a rug and listens with an intensity born of terror, in a lassitude born of experience, for muffled footfalls on the stairs of the dumb, dark house that inhabits her like a haunting.” But Fay didn’t need words. Her sketches spoke in their own quiet and direct voices of all these things and more.

  The giggling girls grew silent as they watched her work. They didn’t consciously know, any more than Fay did, what made the portraits so compelling. Why they mattered so much. They only knew they were seeing parts of themselves and of each other that no mirror or photo or video had ever shown them before. Beautiful parts… and ugly parts, too. The longer they looked, the less important or even possible it seemed to differentiate between the two, to celebrate and embrace the one while rejecting the other.

  For the sitters, unable to see their own portraits taking shape, the experience was stranger still, as though each mark Fay made upon the page, every line and smudge and shading, was simultaneously being set down inside them by obscure arts of magic that were changing them in ways and on levels they couldn’t begin to define, as if the sketch, or the act of sketching, was more real than they were. By the time they held the finished product in their hands, they couldn’t judge any longer whether the portrait resembled them or they the portrait… a confusion similar to Fay’s earlier sense that she and the world had somehow slipped or been pushed out of alignment. But a second later it was as if there had never been anything remotely odd or disquieting. It wasn’t that things were back to normal; they’d never left in the first place. This sort of thing happens more frequently than people imagine. And not only on the streets of New York.

  By around two in the morning, Fay’s hand had stiffened into a claw and was starting to cramp. She’d lost track of how many sketches she’d done. A few people were still waiting for a turn, but she was too worn out to continue. She felt used up. She packed her things and hailed a cab. An extravagance to be sure, but (she told herself) well worth the expense considering how easy it would be to conk out on the subway. She could see herself sleeping through her stop and waking at some empty tomb of a station to find all her stuff had been stolen. She saw it so clearly it might have been a vision.

  Riding uptown, Fay counted her earnings by headlight and streetlight. Then counted them again. There was no mistake. This night, which had begun so unpromisingly, had ended as her most profitable ever. But there was still another surprise in store. When she reached into her pocket to pay the cabbie with the twenty that Talag had given her, Fay found herself gazing into the hundred-dollar eyes of Ulysses S. Grant.

  That night, as had happened a handful of times since her arrival in the city, Fay returned to North Carolina in her dreams. Or, rather, to some fog-enshrouded hill country of her unconscious mind that insisted on calling itself by that name, for going home can be just as difficult and unsatisfying in dreams as it is in the waking world (which in Fay’s opinion was totally unfair). But never before had she come up against a barrier beyond which she couldn’t go, no matter how often she flung herself against it.

  The barrier was different in each successive dream of that night, but it always began in the familiar and innocuous and ended with her catapulted into wakefulness by a su
rge of terror that left her heart racing. Her mother’s worry-lined face, for example, would smile at the sight of her and then slowly begin to morph into that of the second-shift manager at Popeye’s, piggy Mr. Peery, whose nickname of Greaseman had been as richly deserved as his reputation for what he guffawingly referred to as “sex-you-all hair-ass-ment.” More than a year of laughing off his smirking innuendos because it was the best-paying job she could find and she needed the money too badly to tell him to go fuck himself had been nightmare enough, surely. Or so Fay would have thought. But apparently not. And there were dreams even stranger and more troubling, such as one in which her mother (why always her mother?) cracked open Fay’s bedroom door to announce that her long-lost dad had shown up at last and was waiting outside to say hello, the door meanwhile swinging slowly wider to let light from the hallway come streaming in along with a figure who—surprise!—turned out to be the same man she’d selected years before to play the part of Humbert to her Lolita… except back then his skin hadn’t been as white as alabaster. Is it any wonder that Fay got up the next morning feeling more exhausted than when she’d gone to bed?

  Fortunately, at the age of eighteen there’s very little a quick shower can’t cure. That and half a dozen cups of coffee. Fay had the former, then pulled on her cut-offs and a fresh T-shirt and went out in search of the latter. At the local Starbucks, she took out her cell phone and did some searching for Talag’s number, based on the address he’d given her. As she’d expected, no listing turned up. She briefly considered paying him a visit now, but she was pretty sure he wouldn’t take kindly to it, and she didn’t want to jeopardize her commission. He could still change his mind and refuse to sit for her. So she forced herself to wait. She was good at waiting. She’d been doing it her whole life.

  The address turned out to be an old brownstone incongruously nestled between two warehouses. Cedar Street was empty of people, its cobblestones littered with the day’s refuse. What cars there were did not seem parked so much as abandoned. Night was filling in the spaces around the streetlights. She climbed the steps then hesitated, looking for a bell. But there was only an ornate brass knocker in the shape of a fleur-du-lis. Fay lifted it slightly and let it fall. The resulting sound was louder than she’d expected, and she involuntarily retreated a step just as the door swung open.

  She’d half-expected a butler or servant of some sort, but it was Mr. A. E. Talag himself who stood there. He wore a silk dressing gown whose deep russet tones merged into the shadows of the hallway behind him. His slippers looked like something Fay imagined a Renaissance Pope might have worn. His pale skin seemed to shine with a light of its own.

  “Nice to see you again, Mr. Talag,” she said.

  “Right on time.” His smile was a consummate performance. “I am very glad to see you as well, my dear. Very glad indeed. Please come in.”

  Fay stepped across the threshold. Mr. Talag fascinated her more than ever. Without the theatrical makeup he had employed the previous night, his features seemed even more exotic and youthful. Or, rather, ageless. Without a wrinkle or blemish. In combination with his snow-white hair and antique mannerisms, the effect was uncanny. All at once she realized that he had worn the makeup to lessen the strangeness of his appearance, not, as she’d assumed, to heighten it. Far from wanting to draw attention to himself, Mr. Talag had been trying to stand out as little as possible in the freak parade that was Greenwich Village on a Friday night. Fay didn’t know what to think.

  Mr. Talag seemed aware of her confusion and, if anything, amused by it. He stood almost unbearably close as he ushered her down the hall, which was lit with flickering gaslight, and spoke in a whisper that she had to draw closer still to hear. “I’m so pleased you decided to come, my dear. Times being what they are, it’s not every young woman who would accept an invitation like mine.”

  “I had to sketch you again,” Fay heard herself saying without having intended to confess it. She felt drugged by his presence.

  “Of course you did,” he agreed smoothly. “I present something of a challenge. A mystery. Do you find me attractive? Please be honest.”

  “Yes.” She was unable to lie. “And repellent.”

  “Such is the nature of art, is it not?”

  Mr. Talag led her to a room that seemed to have been preserved unchanged from the mid-nineteenth century. Gas lamps flickered on the walls, which were painted an off-white, like faded parchment. There was a marble fireplace like a vast grotto, in front of which, and to either side, were low divans whose plush upholstery hinted at reds and golds. The ceiling was so high it reminded Fay of the rooms at the Art Students League. Strangely, there didn’t seem to be any windows.

  Upon the walls were portraits of her host. Oils, water colors, sketches in charcoal or pen and ink. Fay examined them in a daze. Mr. Talag appeared in costumes ranging from the early nineteenth century to the present, and each portrait was executed in a style appropriate to the period whose dress he affected. She realized that she was looking at a virtual timeline of modern art history: Romanticism, Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Post-Impressionism… The works bore the signatures of Géricault, Delacroix, Renoir, Sisley, Whistler, Picasso, de Kooning, Warhol, Basquiat, and other names she knew and didn’t know. A portrait in swirling lines and colors was signed, simply, Vincent. The only constant from portrait to portrait was the subject, who seemed to be the same age in all of them. They were the most perfect forgeries imaginable.

  “I think you’ll agree I have ample cause to be proud of my little collection,” said Mr. Talag.

  Fay turned to him. “How… ?”

  “They are all genuine, I assure you. As you can see, many artists who subsequently achieved a certain renown assayed my portrait over the years. Yet until last night, not a single one of them succeeded to the extent of making me weep. That was a gift, my dear. A true gift. And a sign. For when my kind weep, it means we have lived too long.”

  “Your kind?” Fay wondered if she was about to faint. She let herself sink heavily into one of the divans. “What… what are you?”

  A look of “sadness” settled over Mr. Talag’s perfect features. “An old man sick to death of a life without joy or meaning. Neither beauty nor ugliness exists for me anymore. Neither good nor evil. Everything has been equally debased by this culture of mindless irreverence and vulgarity. To exist in such a tasteless and insipid age pains me more than I can say. It is an affront to everything I believe in. I’ve been looking for you, or someone like you, for a very long time.”

  “Please don’t kill me,” Fay said, fighting in vain against the strange listlessness that had possessed her.

  “Put that thought from your mind. Would it calm you to sketch me?”

  Fay fumbled for her sketchpad. “I… I can’t stop shaking.”

  “Please try.”

  She couldn’t help but obey. As she worked, Fay began to lose herself in the sketch as she had the night before. Her perceptions of her subject were keener now, sharpened by the terror she felt, and by the helplessness, too, as if her only escape lay on the rough paper, in the portrait taking shape there line by line. When it was finished, she fell back in the chair, exhausted. Somewhere a million miles away a needle was pricking her. She felt as if she had been drawing upon her own skin, the stick of charcoal in her hand as sharp as a razor, as cold as an icicle.

  “Not yet,” Mr. Talag said.

  Fay forced her eyes open. He was standing in front of her, examining the sketch; she hadn’t even felt him take it.

  “Exquisite,” he said. “You have a rare talent for capturing the soul of your subject, my dear. Now you must come with me. Don’t be afraid.”

  “I can’t help it,” she said.

  “All of this will soon be over,” he replied soothingly.

  Fay rose to her feet and followed him into another room. An artist’s studio, also gaslit. All around her were paintings and sketches such as she had never imagined a human being could create. Everywhere she
looked she saw something wholly new and undreamed of. Her fear was overwhelmed, extinguished. “Are these yours?”

  Mr. Talag “smiled.” “A hobby of mine.”

  The paintings and sketches exposed her own work as crude and sentimental, utterly bereft of talent. The work of other artists fared no better by the comparison. Talag’s compositions were daring yet finely controlled, so flawless in conception and execution as to be utterly impossible. “They’re perfect,” she said, almost crying. “The work of a great artist.”

  “Do you think so? I find them, on the whole, disappointing. But perhaps we always judge our own work too harshly. Or perhaps your eyes, my dear, are simply dazzled by a light to which they have not yet grown accustomed.”

  There were no self-portraits among the many works in the studio. This struck Fay as rather odd. She asked Mr. Talag why, with all his talent, he relied on other, lesser artists to render his portrait.

  “You’ve touched the very heart of the matter,” he said.

  In the center of the studio stood a large oblong object covered by a paint-bespattered cloth. Mr. Talag yanked away the cloth, unveiling a full-length mirror. He stepped up to it. His dressing gown and slippers were reflected in the glass. But not the body within. Not his head, not his hands. “You see that my condition precludes certain modes of expression. I can, so to speak, hold a mirror up to nature, but not, alas, to myself. I want you to sketch my portrait here, on the face of the mirror.”

  Fay felt the blood in her veins turn to ice. “I don’t understand.”

  “I think you do,” he said. “You’ll be giving me a rare gift. Something I parted with a long time ago, never dreaming I would miss it.” He struck a pose. “If you’re ready, my dear… ?”

  Crayons were laid out on a table beside the mirror. Fay picked up a black stick and began to draw. It came easier now, as if her brief exposure to Mr. Talag’s influence had improved her talent somehow. Her concentration was so intense that she lost sight of her own reflection in the glass. It seemed to Fay that she was not so much sketching his features upon the surface of the mirror as calling them up from its depths. She lost all track of time. All that existed was the portrait taking shape. When it was done at last, her strength deserted her, as if she’d poured her life’s blood into the drawing. She collapsed to the floor.