The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  It made little sense, but I used Samantha’s eyes, that woeful glance, to stand in for Mrs. Charbuque’s, copying the color, the subdued gleam, and capturing in the aperture of the lids that look of loss. With this small part of the portrait complete, the project took on a reality that drove me forward with increasing confidence. It was as if my painted subject were watching me in the process of creating her. At times when a grain of uncertainty would halt the gear work of my imagination, I would look to those eyes for either approval or a hint toward a new direction.

  As I have said, I wanted the flesh to glow, and though I knew that much of this effect would be gained through the various glazes and varnishes I would apply during the process of rendering the figure and after its completion, it was necessary for me to make the skin lighter in tone than usual. Toward this end I mixed the usual portions of cadmium yellow pale and cadmium red but a greater than normal amount of titanium white with just a dab of Windsor blue as a concession to the night and the moon.

  Time must have passed, though I never felt its presence at all. When I finally stepped away from the work on Mrs. Charbuque, I realized that night had fallen and that at some point, though for the life of me I could not recall it, I had switched on the lights and built a fire. As was my custom, I poured a drink and lit a cigarette and sat down before the easel to view my work. There was much to finish, but there was also no mistaking the personality and looks of the figure that stood before me on the canvas. I was pleased to see that the effect of her coming out of the night like a dream was working so far, and could foretell how the varnishes would enhance it. This was the finest portrait, if not the finest painting, I had ever done.

  Again I let the excitement dissipate from my bloodstream at its own pace before retiring. Once in bed, I fell directly asleep. My last thought, though, was not of the portrait but of Samantha walking away.

  SHENZ OF THE POPPIES

  I WAS AWAKENED by the creak of a floorboard and opened my eyes to the dark. Leaning up on my elbow, I listened intently, trying to remember if the noise had been part of a dream. It did not come again, but as my pulse settled I became aware of another, quieter sound emanating from the hallway outside my room. At the same instant that my eyes adjusted somewhat to the murky night, I recognized what it was I heard—the sound of someone breathing. A silhouette of a figure stood in the doorway. I could make out no distinguishing features of my visitor.

  “Samantha?” I said.

  There was no response, and my heart began to pound.

  “Who’s there?” I said. I grasped the cover to throw it back.

  “Stay where you are,” he said.

  I recognized the voice from the theater box. “Charbuque,” I said. “What do you want?” My hands began to tremble, and the rest of my body went weak with fear.

  “I have a pistol aimed at you,” he said. “It would be a splendid idea for you to remain where you are.”

  “Have you come to kill me?” I asked, expecting at any moment to hear the report of the gun.

  “Not yet,” he said. “Perhaps sometime soon. I’m here to tell you that your painting is all wrong.”

  “You’ve seen it?” I asked.

  “Rather licentious, Mr. Piambo.”

  “A classical pose,” I said.

  “My ass,” he said. “In any event, the woman you have depicted is not my wife.”

  “You’ve seen her?” I asked.

  “I’m her husband, you fool.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “Where have I gone wrong?” I said.

  “The question is, Where have you gone right? I’ve taken the liberty of adding a few strokes of my own to it. And the sketch—you’ll find it in ashes in the fireplace. I will give you a hint,” he said. At that moment he moved, and I was able to peer through the darkness and make out the vaguest detail of the gun in his hand.

  “What can you tell me?” I feared my impertinence might anger him, but I was willing to risk it for just one clue.

  “My wife is stunningly beautiful,” he said. There was a long pause. “And the most manipulative bitch this side of the Pillars of Hercules.”

  “Yes?” I said, expecting at least one precise physical characteristic to follow.

  I waited for his response until I realized he was gone. As this fact dawned on me, I heard the front door in my parlor open and close. I rolled out of bed and dashed down the hall. As I reached that room, I could hear the diminishing sound of boot soles on the sidewalk outside.

  He had left the light on in the studio. I went in and sat before the easel. The painting was completely mutilated, the canvas punctured and sliced. Shreds of canvas hung down showing their white backs. Scraps of it littered the floor. I tried to reflect upon the anger that had fueled his attack, but instead broke down and cried. There is no other way to put it but that I wept like a child. What was worse was that the image I had carried so clearly in my mind for the past few days had also suffered irreparably. When I looked within my memory to find it, I saw the dark room, but instead of Mrs. Charbuque, I discovered that her figure had fragmented into a whirling gyre of snow.

  Here was utter defeat. I had but two weeks remaining to assemble another image and complete the portrait. The task, at that moment, seemed impossible. Charbuque had spared my life but slaughtered my confidence, my hope, my will to continue. I was no better off than when I had begun. In fact, I was a damn sight worse off. My nerves were frayed, Samantha was gravely disappointed in me, and I doubted whether I was worthy to reach beyond my present station and further develop my art. Hours passed, and I sat rigidly still, staring at the tattered remains of my dream.

  The sun had been up only briefly, the rays that fell through the skylight having just turned from red to gold, when I heard a knocking at my door. I got to my feet and staggered through the house to the parlor. Upon opening the door, I found Shenz standing on my front steps.

  “You look haggard,” he said.

  “I’m finished,” I said.

  He broke into a smile. “You’ve completed the portrait?”

  “Come,” I said, and led him to the studio. “There it is,” I said.

  “Were you painting with a razor?” he asked.

  I told him all that had happened, about my work and the visit from Charbuque. When I had finished, he shook his head and sat in the chair I had recently vacated. To his credit, I could see that he clearly shared my grief, for he looked as distressed as I felt.

  “This romp is over,” I said.

  He took out one of his cigarettes and lit it. The strange, sweet smell of the opium soon wafted around us.

  “Grim,” he said, and handed me the cigarette.

  I hesitated for a moment and then took it. It was the first taste of the drug I had ever had. We passed it back and forth two or three times, and then he held on to it and smoked it down to a nub.

  “How did it look before Charbuque carved it up?” he asked.

  I glanced down at him from where I stood. He had removed his hat and rested it on his lap. Something about the way he looked struck me. The sun was shining, golden, upon him, and with his graying beard, thinning hair, and the distinctive lines in his face, he appeared for all the world like some biblical prophet as depicted by Caravaggio.

  “You look like a saint just now, sitting there,” I said.

  “Saint Shenz of the poppies,” he said. With this he rose, stepped forward, and pushed the easel backward onto the floor. It landed with a crash, lifting a minor dust cloud. For some reason this struck me as comical, and he and I both laughed.

  “Roll your cart over the bones of the dead, Piambo,” he said.

  “What?” I asked.

  “In other words, onward!” he said. “Pull yourself together. Perhaps Charbuque has done you a favor.”

  “Why would he do that? From the way he has talked during our brief encounters, he thinks he will probably have to kill me sometime in the near future.”

  “Then you’d better get moving. You ha
ve a painting to do. I’ve come today, at the perfect moment it seems, to take you to see the Man from the Equator. In him, I guarantee you, you will find help.”

  “We’re going somewhere?” I asked.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  “Light,” I said. “My head is filled with light, and everything appears somehow clearer than usual.”

  “You may see and hear some odd things,” he told me. “The effects will only last for an hour or two. Then you will want to sleep. So hurry. Get out of your nightshirt, get dressed, and put on your coat and hat.”

  At the same time that I knew Shenz was cajoling me, I still felt a certain sense of excitement about the prospect of our journey. Why? I couldn’t begin to tell you. For all this newfound verve, though, I seemed to be moving twice as slowly as usual.

  Out on the street, as we walked over to Broadway to find a hansom cab, the world appeared unusually liquid, the outlines of the buildings blurring and mixing with the sky. At one point I thought I saw Mr. Wolfe, dressed in his female disguise, coming toward us on the sidewalk.

  “Shenz, there’s Wolfe,” I said, and pointed.

  “Look again,” said Shenz. “That’s a police officer.”

  In actuality, when the figure passed us, I could see we were both wrong. It was a handsome young woman dressed in a blue coat and hat. Shenz and I exchanged glances and laughed.

  “Well,” said Shenz, “at least I knew it couldn’t be Wolfe. Didn’t you read in the newspaper the other day that he was shot dead by the husband of that woman he went to meet in the Village after our caper?”

  “No,” I said. “Poor Wolfe. I rather liked him.”

  “The husband discovered his wife’s high jinks and, shall we say, persuaded her to draw the locksmith into a trap. There is a rumor in the Kitchen that his body was interred sans that remarkable hand of keys and that there are those now seeking a taxidermist to preserve it.”

  “How poetic, in a way. He will continue to gain entry to secret places even while his spirit cavorts above in heaven.”

  “Or below,” said Shenz as we reached Broadway. He raised his hand to signal to a passing driver, and we had our ride. The address he gave was somewhere in Greenwich Village.

  “Shenz,” I said as we headed downtown, “I am, as I speak, seeing the city alternately as it usually is and then in ruins, as if it were the remains of an ancient kingdom.”

  My friend laughed. “You see all manner of bizarre curiosities when under the influence of the poppy. None of it is real, though much of it is interesting. For instance, as we passed Nineteenth Street, I thought I saw a woman standing on the corner, weeping blood.”

  I was about to slide off my seat and put my head out the window to look back up the avenue, but I caught myself, remembering that I had not divulged my knowledge of this disease to Shenz out of consideration for John Sills. My concern lasted only a moment until I noticed a blue djinn issuing from the exhaust pipe of a motorcar.

  THE MAN FROM THE EQUATOR

  WE STOPPED in front of a small shop on Twelfth Street. Above the entrance was a sign on which the letters making up The Man from the Equator had not been painted but instead appeared to have been gouged with a chisel. A wooden figure stood out in front, but it was not an Indian, which is often seen standing guard at the entrance to a tobacconist’s shop. This statue was of a very thin man or woman, I couldn’t tell which, draped in a robe. The head, with high cheekbones and a pointed chin, faced forward, eyes closed in an expression of ecstasy. Ringlets of hair hung to the shoulders. In each of the hands, held palm up, there sat a miniature replica of the world. I was intrigued by the piece, for it was very deftly carved.

  “Nice work,” I said to Shenz, nodding at the statue.

  “Yes,” he said. “I believe it is Eastern in origin.”

  We entered the shop’s dim front room, its floors made from wide, coarse beams. The first thing I noticed was the various scents that filled the air, combining to create a thick, spicy perfume. Inverted bunches of dried flowers and weeds, pale twisted roots, and sprays of brittle fern hung from the low ceiling. There were rows of shelves holding variously shaped bottles. These contained a panoply of different-colored concoctions—some black as tar, some like liquid chocolate, others of beautiful clear blues, greens, and violets. Some of the shelves were stacked with boxes, labeled with odd titles written in grease pencil—Ox Brain Flakes, Powdered Adder Venom, Queen Hebspa’s Footstool, Gallstones/Puma…. Hanging everywhere on the walls were hand-drawn maps of countries and territories I did not recognize.

  “Come,” said Shenz, leading the way into the shadows.

  I was about to follow when something flew directly over me. I could feel the sweep of wings, and when I ducked and reached up to cover my head, I knocked my hat off. “What in hell?” I yelled.

  Shenz laughed. “That’s the blasted owl,” he said. “I forgot to warn you. The first time I came here the thing nearly frightened me to death. Don’t worry, it’s harmless.”

  I lifted my hat off the floor and put it back on my head, meager protection against another low pass. As we moved toward the back of the place, I spotted the bird perched atop a coatrack. Sitting there with its wings drawn in, it looked for all the world as if it were stuffed, a blunt-shaped creature about two feet high with a rounded head and white face. As we passed it, though, it suddenly twisted its head to watch me with large round eyes that reflected the faint light from the front window.

  Leaving the main room of the shop, we passed down a long hallway, lined on both sides by floor-to-ceiling shelves of old books. There was a right-hand turn, another hallway of books, and then we stepped into a room drenched in light. With the exception of a low wall running around the perimeter of the space, the rest of its structure was made of large panes of glass. The minute I passed into this new area, I could feel the warmth. Tables ran along each wall and upon them sat rows of potted plants; more plants were suspended from twine above. In the middle of it all, as if awaiting our arrival, stood a tall, wiry man with close-cropped hair. The first things I noticed about him were the smoothness of his skin and the clarity of his eyes. He exuded a sense of vitality.

  “Shenz,” he said to my friend, and stepped forward to shake his hand.

  “Goren,” said Shenz, “meet Piambo, the fellow I told you about.”

  “The painter,” said Goren as his hand clasped mine.

  “You are the Man from the Equator,” I said.

  He nodded.

  “From where along the equator do you hail?” I asked.

  “Brooklyn,” he said.

  “I grew up there myself. Some of its parts, I would guess, are as exotic as Madagascar,” I said.

  “And you would be right,” he said, smiling. “Come, we can talk in the shop.”

  The effects of Shenz’s cigarette were still upon me but had settled into a feeling of weary comfort. I thought the optical curiosities I had witnessed during the cab ride had abated, but as we left the sunlit plant room, I turned to glance out-of-doors, and just then, framed by a long pane of glass, I saw a configuration of brown leaves falling that was the precise image on Mrs. Charbuque’s screen. With my sudden recognition of the design, the leaves froze in midfall for a good two seconds before continuing to the ground. I shook my head and followed Goren and Shenz back into the dim cave of homeopathy.

  Goren sat behind a low table in the rear corner of the shop. Two chairs were positioned nearby, indicating that people occasionally stopped in to chat. Shenz and I sat down, and when we were all three settled, the owl flew in and perched atop a large globe that rested upon a columnar stand.

  The Man from the Equator began by giving me a brief résumé of his accomplishments. I suppose this was to persuade me that his words had merit. In short, he was a doctor trained at the University of Pennsylvania. He had, from youth, been a loner who liked to wander. Once he had become a physician, he could not settle down but decided to travel the world. He moved off the beaten pa
th, to wild and remote corners of the globe, and in these places witnessed the medical practices of shamans and witch doctors who rendered remarkable cures. When he returned to civilization, he brought back with him the cures he had collected, and set about a course of locating and studying ancient texts in order to cull more. He interspersed all this information with snippets of hermetic and transcendental philosophy that I could not follow and at which it appeared even the owl was rolling its eyes.

  “And so,” Goren finally concluded, “for some reason our mutual friend, Shenz here, thinks that I can offer you a way of thinking about this commission of yours that will enable you to be ultimately successful.”

  “Can you?” I asked.

  “Let me begin by saying that the entire pursuit strikes me as being wonderfully absurd. I have found in the past that it is often extremely worthwhile to contemplate the seemingly impossible. There is much to be gained by it. One is presented with a brick wall, and the first thing one thinks is, ‘How am I going to get around this brick wall?’ Instead, you must change your thinking. Meditate upon the existence of the brick wall. Study the brick wall past the point of frustration, until it becomes fascinating. In short, become the brick wall.”

  “At this point, I am at least as immobile in the face of this problem as a brick wall might be,” I said.

  “He’s always been as thick as a brick wall,” Shenz added.

  Goren did not smile. “Do you see this image behind me?” he said, pointing to a page ripped from a book and affixed to the wall with a nail. It was a circle, containing equal parts of white and black. They were not divided down the middle but swirled around each other while remaining distinct. In the largest dollop of each lay a small circle filled with the color of its opposite.

  “Yin and yang,” said Goren. “Do you know what they mean?”

  I shook my head.

  “Ancient Chinese symbols meant to describe the sun and moon—the fundamental concepts of the universe—but also having implications for the nature of the human drama. The white and the black are the opposing forces that make up the universe. They are constantly moving, changing, affecting each other. This action is the heart of existence. Light and dark, good and evil, yes and no, male and female, hardness and softness, intelligence and ignorance, you see?”