The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Excuse me for a moment,” she said, and I heard her chair begin to squeal slightly as if she were rocking back and forth in it. “For the third night’s show I dressed in black and carried a black shawl. I also took a hat pin with me onstage. Before the event got under way, while the audience was taking their seats, the lights were usually very low…”

  There came a noise something like wet kisses in rapid succession followed by a gasp. If there had been others in the room, I would have been the first to appear scandalized, but knowing we were alone made all the difference.

  “That is when I reached forward from my chair and made a pinhole in the screen. This hole would never be detected by someone sitting only a few feet away, but if I leaned forward and put my eye to it, I could view a wide field, taking in a goodly portion of the seats…and…”

  Frustrating seconds passed filled with brief murmurs of delight. When she spoke again, her voice had a slight edge of urgency. I looked over my shoulder and wiped the sweat from my brow. I shooed a disturbing image of the monkey arm from my thoughts.

  “I was unusually nervous about the performance, hoping all the time that the fellow with the question ‘Will she return?’ would return. His was the very last leaf passed to me. I pronounced the imagery of his future just as the Twins had dictated it to me, and then leaned forward to see who would speak. I saw…I…I saw a handsome young man in the second row with wavy hair and a trim mustache. I hoped it would be he who would speak. As reality would have it, though, it turned out to be a gentleman five seats away, somewhat older than myself, who stood up. Impeccably dressed in a tweed suit, he had sandy-colored hair and a ruddy complexion and wore small glasses with circular lenses. He spoke, and ohh…”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “Ohhh…”

  “Yes?”

  “I knew what he looked like. As soon as the show was over, I left the theater before the patrons and went outside into the street. There, I ducked down an alley, wrapped the shawl around my head, and waited for him to pass by. He finally came walking past, and giving him plenty of distance, I began to follow him. The walk was brief. He entered a small shop a few blocks away. After he had gone in and locked the door behind him, I passed by it in order to mark the spot clearly. It was, of all places, a tiny museum of some kind. The…Museum…of Phoenician Antiquities, read the sign…above…”

  An unladylike grunt rose from behind the screen. Then it sounded as if she were beginning to weep until that crying quickly transformed itself back into her story. Her words now came forth with desperately increasing speed and volume. “The next day…yes…I went there dressed in normal attire. Made believe I was visiting from another nearby town. Staying only a few days. Interested in the contents of the museum. Involved in a conversation. Told me he was…yes…an amateur archaeologist. He’d been to Carthage on a dig and had…oh…these treasures. A golden mask…a small, armless statue of a young woman with half its face broken off…stones with ancient writing…a silver lamp with a long spout…”

  She hit a crescendo, and I got to my feet. I swear, she let loose a groan that sounded to me as if she were expiring on the spot. The panels of the screen rattled. She spoke no more for a time, but her breathing was rapid and pronounced.

  “Are you ill, Mrs. Charbuque?” I asked, fanning myself with the sketchbook.

  Her answer did not come immediately, but eventually, after catching her breath, she said, “I’ve rarely felt better.” I heard her again shift her position in her chair and then the faint sound of material being maneuvered about. “Now where was I?” Her voice had returned to its normal tone.

  “A lamp,” I said, returning to the chair.

  “Oh, yes. He was a charming fellow, very serious. While he spoke, he used his hands a good deal, especially to indicate a motion, like a boat sailing on the vast ocean, when explaining how the Phoenicians were the masters of the sea in the ancient world. He believed they had circumnavigated the entire globe. I listened with feigned interest to how they warred with Rome and eventually lost the city of Carthage. The Romans destroyed everything, killed all the men, carried off the women, and sowed salt into the earth so crops would not grow there. I was somewhat bored with his lecturing, his rattling off of dates, but I liked to watch his hands in motion. They were like pale leaves falling and rising in an autumn wind.

  “I was amazed that I was not more frightened at having left the safety of the screen, that I willingly let his eyes gaze upon me. I was in a kind of trance, as if I were outside of myself watching me play the part of this shrewd young woman. In any event, he made me a cup of tea and told me he did not have many visitors to the museum. ‘The people in this town know nothing, nor do they care about the ancients,’ he told me. ‘They think of me as some kind of fool, but I have more money than any of them. And although I have no official degrees, I am highly thought of in my field. I’ll have you know that I was asked to contribute to the research of Francis Borne.’

  “That evening he again attended my performance. The next day I again returned to his museum, and he confided to me that his fiancée, whom he hoped to marry upon his triumphant return from northern Africa, had run away to New York City. I comforted him with words, and with this coddling he appeared to take a real interest in me. As I made ready to leave his place that second day, he fleetingly placed his hand upon my shoulder when I said good-bye. He asked if I would be returning, and I told him I would have to see what the future brought. His touch was the first I had felt in years, and it roused my passion.

  “After that day on which he touched me, he did not return to my performances. I did go to see him, though, each and every afternoon that I remained in town. On the last day, I told him I would be leaving the following morning. He wanted to know my name, which I had not told him, where I was going, where I lived. I told him nothing, save that I would return that night, late, and say good-bye to him. ‘Leave the door unlocked and the lamps unlit,’ I said. With that declaration, he reached for me, but I backed away, giggling, and left the museum.

  “It was midnight, and I sneaked along the empty streets, staying to the shadows, dressed only in a black dress and my shawl. I had forsaken any undergarments for that assignation. My desire was at the boiling point. The chain of my locket was searing hot, and the Twins were sending out a steady stream of imagery, speaking unspeakable scenes to me that made me slightly dizzy. I arrived at the museum and found the door ajar. I entered into the darkness and crept slowly up the main aisle. Near the back of the place I saw one small candle burning. I went toward it, and as I did, I felt his arms close around me. He had been there, waiting, behind a row of shelves.

  “His hands were all over me, as if he had a dozen more than two. I felt them on my breasts, my face, my stomach, between my legs, and when he realized I was wearing nothing beneath the thin dress, he whispered, ‘Mother of God.’ It was then that he forced his lips upon mine, and the Twins, at that exact moment, ended their hours-long discourse of imagery with one clear picture that formed with the force of an explosion and remained in my mind. It was of my father. With the presence of that image, the trance was broken. I returned to myself and was repulsed by this groping hundred-handed beast. Frantically I tried to escape his clutches, but he forced himself against me yet more ardently. I felt every inch of him pressing on me, felt his inanity infecting me, and thought I would be suffocated.

  “My arms flailed out to the sides, and my left hand grazed against something in one of the displays. I lunged in that direction and grasped a heavy metal object in my hand. With all my fear and my revulsion, I struck him in the side of the head with the object. He quietly grunted, his body went limp, and he slid to the floor. I fled the museum and made my way back to the hotel.

  “By the time he probably awoke from the blow the next day, I was on a train, traveling swiftly away from that accursed town. Sitting in my lap was the object I had used as a weapon, for I would not relinquish my grasp on it. The lamp was made of silver or tin or
pewter, I could not tell, and was covered with the most amazing filigree—looping knots of design. At the end of its long spout was a stopper, capturing whatever sloshed around inside it. I once had a book of fairy tales as a child, and this lamp was much like the one in an illustration from that volume. The lamp in the story held an evil djinn. I resolved never to remove the stopper.

  “Do you know what I learned from this incident, Piambo?” she asked.

  At this point I had to clear my throat and wet my lips in order to answer. “What would that be, Mrs. Charbuque?” I said.

  “It made me think of my mother. I realized that she had every reason to want more from her life than a lunatic husband who cared less about her than about the insubstantial marvel of snow. She wanted the present, not some illusory future. I saw things for the first time from her perspective. I allowed myself to recognize that she deserved the pleasure she sought with the tracker, and that for this small comfort my father had murdered her. Being a cloistered child, I could never have known that she wanted nothing more than a real life and that my father had enlisted me early on to aid him in keeping her a prisoner. From that moment on the train, fleeing my jackass of an archaeologist, I knew that my act was a fraud and that the voices of the Twins, though they continue to plague me to this day, were a delusion.”

  “Then why,” I asked, “do you remain behind the screen?”

  “I seek a kind of freedom a woman cannot find in society. When I don my disguise of anonymity and venture forth into your world, I see in a million instances that I am right. In my world, here, as you witnessed today, I can do anything I want. I can satisfy any whim at any moment, from the most basic to the most complex.”

  She said nothing more that day. Five minutes later, when Watkin appeared, I wished her a pleasant weekend and left the room. “Be careful now, Mr. Piambo,” said the old man before closing the door behind me, and his verbal send-off was eerily devoid of cynicism.

  A KNOCK UNANSWERED

  FOLLOWING MY meeting with Mrs. Charbuque, it took quite a few minutes out in the cold wind for my temperature to fall within its normal range. That day’s installment of her story had required, on my part, the consumption of so many inordinately large drafts of the incredible, I was drunk on the stuff and moved through the crowds on the street like one giddy from excess of spirits. In regard to the, shall we say, heated aural sideshow that had gone on during her recounting, it was impossible to tell if she had been merely fulfilling a whim, as she had said, or if her lustful demonstration had been a bit of cunning subterfuge meant to distract me. Perhaps it was, as her father might have put it, a sizable red herring; nothing, of course, on the order of the one that had so urgently crowded my trousers.

  I took the streetcar down to Twenty-seventh Street and made a beeline to Broadway, where I entered Kirk’s Saloon. The company of gentlemen, the oak paneling, the famous oil paintings on the walls, the whiskey, all served to subdue me and return my system to its mundane homeostasis. Luckily there was no one there that I knew, so I sat by the main window, looking out onto the avenue, and watched the city perform its daily rituals. I lit a cigarette and tried to rationalize all that I had been told. As I reviewed Mrs. Charbuque’s story, small disconcerting contradictions erupted and blew me off course. For instance, the mere idea of Carthaginian remains in a small street-front museum out in the wilds of the Midwest was difficult to believe. But could she have manufactured that detail on the spot?

  She had dropped a mention of Francis Borne and her archaeologist’s donation to the excremental oracle. That was a turn of the screw that had momentarily spun me once and passed by in a flash as we rushed headlong toward her satisfaction. Watkin was actually a fellow by the name of Carwin Chute, who had readily accepted as his life’s work a rather shoddy portrayal of a heinous affliction. The Sibyl, prophesying below the Mason-Dixon line, had gained a kind of religious status. The sudden ascendancy of her mother and the corresponding fall from grace of her father. All of these bread crumbs she had dropped along the path were compressed sagas in which a traveler could lose himself for days.

  By my third whiskey, I realized that, unlike the Phoenicians, I would not be circumnavigating Mrs. Charbuque’s experiences. With my fourth, I was content to drift aimlessly in the placid Sea of Confusion. It was there, becalmed by my inability to undo the Gordian knot of her confession, that I came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter, for clearly shining in my mind was my vision of her, at night, behind the screen. My conception of her had come through the tempest unscathed. I paid my bill and headed home to paint.

  After a lengthy nap, I rose around eight o’clock, retrieved the sketch from its hiding place in the closet, and went directly to my studio. I did not sit down and stare at the drawing as I had the previous night, knowing that it would again enchant me. Instead I prepared my palette, chose my brushes, and set to applying a dark base to the canvas. I wanted the foundation of the piece to contain the colors of night—purple, blue, gray, and green—a kind of iridescent, blended indigo, darker than black in its mood and more alive with swirling mystery than the flat absolute. With oils one works from dark to light—a fitting metaphor, I hoped, for my pursuit of Mrs. Charbuque.

  Once the ground had dried somewhat, I roughed out the basic form of the nude figure in chromium green, which would eventually be a counterpoint to the flesh tones applied later. Another painter might sketch the subject in charcoal, or in this case, since the ground was so very dark, chalk, but I preferred to work only with the brush. I then set to delineating the structure of the face with titanium white. Using a dry-brush technique that allowed me to create halftones, I indicated the lines, prominences, and hollows that formed her unique expression. Once her fundamental visage had been rendered, I layered white on certain areas to add depth and more completely depict shape. Then I had to let the canvas dry more thoroughly and so ceased work for the night.

  It was after three o’clock, and I should have gone off to bed, but my entire system was abuzz with the electricity that attends the act of creation. There is nothing better for one’s health than that surge of energy, for it is the unmitigated essence of life. I knew better than to battle against it. Instead I sat before the easel with a cigarette and a drink and contemplated the physical attitude of the pose I had chosen.

  It had come to me from out of the blue to portray her from the knees upward, her shins and calves disappearing into the shadows. She was ever so slightly bent at the waist, the right arm thrust out in front of her and the left held so that her hand on that side was at shoulder level. Her breasts did not lie flat against her chest but hung forward at a minor angle. The head was turned a bit to the side, cocked in a manner not quite as pronounced as Watkin’s rendition of the blind, listening, chin thrust slightly upward. She would peer from the painting with a sidelong glance and smile, not mischievously, but like a child who has successfully lacquered a snowflake for her father.

  Eventually I staggered to bed and slept for a few hours. It was still early, but I was drawn from sleep by my desire to work on the portrait. I would have forsaken breakfast and begun immediately, but the piece still needed more drying time, so I went out to Crenshaw’s and ate. There, while I dined on hash and eggs, I read in the paper about the failing economy, Cleveland’s stance against “free silver,” which led to his resultant ill health in the polls, and about a group called the Anti-Saloon League, who, God save us, wanted a prohibition placed upon alcohol. I could see that, since coming under the influence of Mrs. Charbuque, it was as if I had slipped behind a screen of my own that separated my consciousness from the doings of the world at large. I loitered, drinking too many cups of coffee and chatting with Mrs. Crenshaw. Two hours had passed before I finally paid my bill and returned home.

  I probably should have waited a few more hours to begin work, but I was anxious to lose myself again in the timeless trance that envelops me when I am painting. Back in the studio, I reconnoitered my plan of attack. I smiled at the prospect of
spending the entire day with Mrs. Charbuque’s flesh, for that was, with the exception of hair and eyes and the surrounding night, the totality of the portrait. I do not brag when I say that I was a master at depicting material, its folds and myriad creases, the texture of velvet, the smooth sheen of silk. People often commented to me first about the clothing my subjects wore, only later mentioning the expression on the face or the overall likeness to the original. Now, though, there was something liberating about discarding the clothes and embracing the naked form. I had painted a thousand nudes, but none like this, and the prospect titillated me in a profoundly sensual manner.

  Where else to begin but with the eyes? Burnt sienna, of course, to form the outer ring of the iris, but when it came to their actual color, I had to stop for a moment and think about what I had envisioned. At that juncture I heard someone knocking upon my front door. I knew it must be Samantha, but how could I let her in just then? I went to the parlor and peered out from behind the drapes of the window. From my hiding place I could see her on the front steps, dressed in her long winter coat and wearing a woolen hat. Her appearance annoyed me. “She most likely wants me to go somewhere with her,” I thought. Then there would be all the necessary explanations once she saw my progress on the portrait. She knocked again, and when I did not answer, her expression turned, with a nearly imperceptible movement of her brow and lips, from her usual one of good cheer to one of subtle sorrow. She obviously knew that I knew she was there. I had never locked her out before. Eventually she turned and slowly walked away down the street. Just before she moved out of my line of sight, she shot a glance over her shoulder, and I saw a look of betrayal in her eyes. I felt it in my heart but made no move for the door.