The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  Instead, as we strolled along the sidewalk, we spoke about poor Mrs. Reed. Samantha seemed particularly horrified at the woman’s situation.

  “You would never force me to shoot you, would you, Piambo?” she asked.

  “There are moments when I’m surprised you haven’t already,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” she asked, turning to stare at me.

  “Good Lord,” I said, “I’m not talking about philandering. I simply mean for being such a boor at times.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “That I can forgive, but if I were to catch you making a fool of me with another woman, I would not be so helpless as Mrs. Reed. I can’t tell you how many times I am propositioned, either subtly or outright, in the course of a year. I fend off the advances of other fellows because I have chosen you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said.

  “This is where you are supposed to say that you have also chosen me,” she said.

  “I thought that was obvious,” I told her. “Need I say it?”

  “It wouldn’t kill you,” she said.

  “Don’t shoot,” I said. “Yes, I have chosen you. Are you really that uncertain?”

  “Well, you seemed so very pleased by those flowers from your Mrs. Charbuque last night,” she said.

  “Come, come,” I said, “the woman is insane.”

  “It wasn’t so much the flowers,” she said. “It was more the look in your face, as if you were hiding something.”

  “I was astonished that she would do such a thing. I can’t believe that after all the women whose portraits I have painted, you are now becoming jealous. For heaven’s sake, I painted Mrs. Reed. I didn’t hear a word about her from you.”

  “This commission is not the same,” she said. “You are completely preoccupied with it.”

  “It is rather unusual,” I said.

  “She has some hold on you, I can tell.”

  “Nonsense,” I said.

  “You have not seen her?” she asked.

  “I go to her house and communicate with a talking screen,” I said.

  “Then why, in your conception of her, that sketch you made, is she both stunningly beautiful and naked?”

  I stopped walking. Samantha went on and then turned to look at me. “I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps she is like a myth to me, being invisible and so forth. In the classical style, nudity was part of depicting the gods and goddesses of antiquity.”

  “Goddesses?” she said.

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “Think of Sabott’s paintings.”

  She cocked her head for a moment, as if reviewing in her memory a catalog of his works. “I can’t think of one nude,” she said.

  “What?” I said, but in quickly reviewing them myself, I realized she was right. I started walking again, since standing still seemed to be making me stupid.

  “I tell you, that woman has your mind, Piambo. If you are not careful the rest will follow,” she said.

  “She has nothing,” I said, shaking my head. “Except my money.”

  Silence reigned for the remainder of the walk to my house and still had not relinquished its rule as we undressed in the bedroom. Finally I could stand it no more and, in an attempt to change the subject, asked, “What did you think of Shenz tonight?”

  Samantha sat on the bed, removing her stockings. “His actions were very gallant, but Shenz himself appears old to me suddenly, as if he has aged years in recent months.”

  I was thankful she had taken my bait and was willing to forget the earlier matter. “The opium has its claws in him, I fear,” I said. “It is taking control of him. Insidious.”

  “There’s something you two have in common, losing control to an insubstantial entity,” she said.

  I turned to her as I removed my jacket. “Please, Samantha,” I said. “I swear it is you I love. I have been devoted to you for fifteen years now.”

  “Twelve,” she said.

  “Don’t doubt me,” I said.

  She stared at me for some time and then smiled. “I’m sorry, Piambo,” she said. “I trust you.”

  “We’ve got to trust each other,” I said as I hung my jacket in the closet. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I saw, hanging to the right of the jacket I had just put away, the one that held hidden in its sleeve my sketch of Mrs. Charbuque. Before I could even consider the folly of the act, my hand reached for it. Luckily, I stopped myself short, pulled back my arm, and closed the closet door.

  The lights were turned off, the nutmeg candle, whose scent I had come to loathe, was lit, and we lay there beneath the covers. My mind was filled with the image of the sketch, and it alternated with my own complete vision of Mrs. Charbuque in the moonlight behind her screen. I did not want to disturb these thoughts and prayed that Samantha would quickly fall asleep.

  My prayers, alas, went unanswered, as Samantha turned to me and I launched into it with a pervasive sense of doom. My implement of desire was as useless to me that night as it turned out Mrs. Reed’s derringer was to her. I did not need the Twins to foretell that there was a lot riding on this misadventure. The pressure was intense, and out of it was born true American ingenuity.

  It was not long afterward that Samantha’s breathing regulated to the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. I lay still and waited for a few minutes, and when I was certain she was truly out, I waited yet another few minutes. Then, with stealth and grace combined, I slowly pulled back the covers on my side of the bed. Exerting great control over the musculature of my body, which, believe me, was not easy, I more levitated than sat up. I remained there on the edge of the bed for a moment or two, waiting to see if I had roused Samantha. When I could finally hear her steady breathing over the beating of my heart, I continued, carefully getting to my feet.

  I literally tiptoed around the bed and across the room, like one of Mr. Wolfe’s compatriots slinking through a darkened warehouse. I knew the hinges on the closet door were going to be murder and they were, but I opened it quickly so as to not draw out their whine. I turned and looked back at the bed. She lay facing me, but her eyes were closed. Reaching down the row of hanging garments, I found the smoking jacket and dug down into the arm. The sketch was there. That was a major relief, as I’d half expected it to be missing. With one quick pull I retrieved the tube of paper from its hiding place. Common sense prevailed, and I left the closet door ajar, not wanting to risk worrying the hinges again, and turned to leave the bedroom.

  Before I stepped out into the hallway, I realized I should extinguish the candle. Leaning over the dresser, I gave a quiet puff and then stood in utter darkness.

  I nearly jumped when I heard her speak. “She has you, Piambo,” Samantha said.

  I hoped against all odds that she was dreaming, that she had spoken in her sleep, but I wasn’t going to stay to find out. Without so much as looking back once, I went directly to my studio. There, I turned on the lights and built a blaze in the fireplace. Then I sat down and unrolled the sketch. I perused every inch of it carefully until it reignited the original vision in my mind, and that part of me that had but an hour or so earlier proved despondent in the physical fray now stirred to attention.

  HANDS

  BY THE time I finally pulled myself away from the sketch, the fireplace had gone cold and daylight was trickling in through the skylight above. I returned the sketch to its hiding place and crept back to bed. Later, when Samantha rose, I pretended to be asleep. She left, but I remember that she kissed my cheek before going. Then I did fall asleep and dreamed of my conception of Mrs. Charbuque in a hundred sordid scenes, rendered in paint and hung on the walls of the main gallery of the Academy of Design.

  When I woke later in the day, her image followed me out of sleep, and I saw her projected, like one of Edison’s moving pictures, upon the day—a miasmatic phantom looking over my shoulder in the shaving mirror, drifting through my parlor, hovering above the crowds on Madison Avenue. I speak neither metaphorically nor literally
here, but somewhere between the two. Samantha had never been so right. Mrs. Charbuque had my mind the way the Sun has the Earth and the Earth, the Moon. For my part, haunted as I was, I was certain that my vision of her was correct, and on my journey uptown that afternoon I verily beamed with self-satisfaction.

  I even had a kind word for Watkin, complimenting him on his violet suit. It seemed to fluster him more than when I was rude. On our usual jaunt through the house, he actually missed a corner and lightly hit his shoulder on a doorjamb. And then I was in the room, before the screen. I took out my sketchbook, brought the charcoal pencil to bear, and she spoke.

  “It is the last day of the second week, Piambo,” she said.

  “I’m aware of it,” I told her. “I’ve begun your portrait.”

  “Am I coming together nicely?” she asked.

  “I should say. At present I am fleshing out the details of your hands. Hands are important to a portrait; in their intrinsic physical character and their placement within the picture, they are second only to the face. A person holds the story of her life in her hands.”

  “You know I can’t describe my hands to you,” she said.

  “Of course not. Please just continue with your story from where we left off,” I said.

  “I will tell you about that time, but allow me to focus on one particular incident as well. It has everything to do with hands.”

  “Perfect,” I said as I drew the half-moon in a thumbnail.

  “After paying for my father’s funeral and settling all his debts, I had a substantial amount of money left over. Enough, in fact, to allow me to subsist in a moderate fashion for two full years. In that time, my days were like those of Thoreau at Walden Pond or Defoe’s shipwrecked Crusoe before him. I remained isolated, seeking out no acquaintances, forming no bond with any other person. Sitting behind my screen, I read libraries of books in those years. As isolated as I was, the world flowed into me and reinforced my belief that I was its hub. The Twins were my only companions, and they whispered to me daily, showing me their prophetic imagery, solidifying our mutual trust.

  “My nights, on the other hand, were quite different. When evening began to fall, I would put on a kerchief, pull a wide-brimmed hat down low to hide my looks, and sneak out of the building to buy my groceries before the markets all closed. I avoided people’s glances as well as I could, but I went forth with the knowledge that no one knew me. Anonymity is its own form of invisibility. After securing the few things I needed for my meals and perusing the bookstalls that remained open, I liked to walk the streets for a few hours. Very often I would see enacted scenes and incidents that had been predicted by the Twins. I returned home to the safety of the screen before it grew so late that the streets became dangerous.

  “I was completely content with this life, but after two years had passed, Father’s money began to run low, and I was forced to consider working. I knew all along that I would again return to my role as the Sibyl. There was something about the performances that validated my sense of omniscience. I put an ad in the newspaper and interviewed applicants for the job of manager. The act needed a second, someone who could deal with the audience so I could remain an enigma. I also required someone to book the shows, a task that required face-to-face contact with the owners of the different venues.

  “Remember, Piambo, I was no more than fifteen or so at the time, yet I understood clearly what was required, and proceeded to arrange the situation. I interviewed quite a few people in my apartment. Of course, I remained behind the screen while I spoke to them. It had not been so many years since the Sibyl was the talk of the town, and many of these applicants knew full well that procuring the position could eventually make them wealthy.

  “The man I chose for the job was a gentleman who had worked for some years for P. T. Barnum and before that had a history in vaudeville. His name was Carwin Chute, and he had all the attributes I was looking for—a sense of the melodramatic, a keen mind for organization, a willingness to perform his duties without ever actually seeing his employer. It was his idea to insert pure white theatrical prosthetics in his eyes and pretend to be blind. I had told him of my aversion to being seen and to the sight of eyes in general, so he thought that if I chanced to see him, the illusion that he was sightless would be a comfort to me. Also, in relation to the act, he had said, ‘Think how appropriate, Luciere. A man who cannot see, bringing to the public a seer who cannot be viewed.’ I knew my father would have loved the juxtaposition. It was, like the monkey arm, another red herring.”

  “Chute, then, is Watkin,” I said.

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Charbuque. “I have paid him very well through the years, but no matter how he has benefited monetarily, I owe him much more for his dedication to service. The man has proved a godsend. I will tell you honestly that what motivates him, and his personality, are as mysterious to me as I must be to him. He has never laid eyes on me, yet he remains ever devoted.”

  “I will have to reassess my estimation of Watkin,” I said.

  “He booked us for the highest amount being paid in hotels, theaters, meeting halls, and at private parties given by the wealthy. Once again the Sibyl was voicing her visions to the populace and receiving praise and adulation. By the end of the first year, I was wealthy. And beyond mere money, I was able to influence the powerful, to coax from them whatever favors I needed. From that, Piambo, comes a wealth that exceeds any to be made by laboring for an hourly wage, no matter how grand.

  “After two years of working the city, Watkin—as I had begun to call him, for by then Chute had completely dissolved and reformed as the blind person you now know—came to me and suggested that in order not to saturate the public’s desire for the Sibyl, we should take our performance on the road. I thought it was a wise move. We traveled anonymously by train, each of us at different times so that he would not know me. He would go ahead and set up a room for me in a particular city or town, and I would arrive later, either under cover of night or in some disguise. Remaining hidden from view was a chore, but my desire to do so was so great that I managed the ingenuity necessary to make it happen. St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco—the Sibyl took all these cities by storm, and in the small towns of the prairie and the South, I believe I came to be revered in a manner bordering upon the religious. We never stayed too long in any given place, just long enough to satisfy the citizens’ appetite for the future, and then we moved on.

  “It was somewhere in the Midwest—Missouri, Oklahoma, they all seemed the same to me; the people all asked the same questions, reacted in the same manner to my pronouncements—that I discovered I had become a woman. I had recently turned seventeen, and when I caught sight of myself in a mirror one day, a practice I tried to avoid, for the sight of my own eyes disturbed me as much as anyone else’s, it was evident that my body had changed drastically from that of the lonely little girl who had spent her winters in the Catskill Mountains. The reality of it struck me all at once, more deeply than even the actuality of menstruation had two years earlier. Please excuse the candor of my language, Piambo.”

  “I am not easily offended,” I said, but the charcoal left the paper with her declaration.

  “The Twins began to show me imagery of a very graphic nature, so to speak. My reading had included romances as well as smutty dime novels, and all of this had been digested by my mind without my conscious acknowledgment. Now it all seemed to fall into place. I wanted to remain behind the barrier of the screen, but at the same time my body longed to explore the physicality of the world at large. Do you understand?”

  “Sexuality?” I ventured, and felt a certain heat rising beneath my collar and elsewhere.

  “I’m so pleased I can speak openly to you,” she said. “At night, in my bed, after the shows, I would fantasize about the male voices from the audience that would offer a word or two of thanks after one of my predictions. From those few meager words, whole men sprang to life in my imagination. They were every bit as vivid as the images sen
t me by the voices of the Twins. Their hands, Piambo, became mine. Their fingers groped in the dark like those of the blind, and what thrilling discoveries were made.”

  I heard Mrs. Charbuque move in her chair behind the screen. Then came the rustling of material, and if I was not mistaken, the rhythm of her breathing changed from its usual measured pace to an almost inaudible panting.

  SHOUTS AND MURMURS

  LONG SECONDS passed in silence. There was then a soft sigh, and Mrs. Charbuque began speaking again in a dreamy voice, the emphasis of certain words falling in the wrong places, unforeseen pauses, more panting.

  Good Lord, I thought, should I leave? But she continued with her story despite all this breathy interference.

  “One night in one of those wretched towns, I was giving the first performance of our engagement, which was to last for a week. I thrust out the monkey arm and retrieved a green leaf on which was written the question ‘Will she return?’ I forget what my response was, but when I had given it, the gentleman who had obviously written the question said, ‘Thank you so much, Madam Sibyl, you have forestalled my heart from breaking.’ I was struck by the earnest tone of this man’s voice, his ability to speak candidly about a private matter before a packed audience. I continued with the show but remembered his words later and built a grand scenario that evening concerning lost love and a passionate reunion. I can still see…” Her voice trailed off into heavy exhalations.

  “Please go on,” I said, leaning forward in my chair.

  “The next night the same man asked the same question of me again. I conjured for him a reply that had more to do with my imagined scenario than with the imagery whispered to me by the Twins. He, in turn, said something equally enchanting, as on the first night, and this fired even more my interest in him. What came of it was that I decided I had to see him. I could easily have asked Watkin for a description but felt my infatuation with this stranger was somehow illicit, and so instead devised another way.