The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque

by Jeffrey Ford

  “On that day we talked of things other than my health. He told me of his childhood and of his medical studies. I inquired as to his age and found that we shared the same birth year. His favorite pastime was reading, as was mine, and we soon discovered that we had read many of the same works. Our conversation veered into a discussion of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, and he concurred with me about how wrongly Hester had been treated by society. All the time we spoke at this meeting, Watkin sat nearby as both an interested party concerning my health and a kind of chaperon.

  “On the following day, when Charbuque was due to call, I sent Watkin out on an errand that I knew would last quite a few hours. It was when he realized that Watkin would not be present that Moret began to press me about my relationships, as a means, no doubt, of determining whether I was engaged or married or had a sweetheart. I let it be known that I was altogether unattached, and this pleased him very much. Then he told me he had brought something for me. I reached out the monkey arm, and he slipped beneath the grip of the thumb a small box decorated with colored paper and a pale yellow ribbon. Struck dumb by this gesture, not knowing whether it was too forward or simply an act of kindness, I opened the gift. It turned out to be a cameo; somewhat odd.

  “He told me that when he saw it in a shop, he knew it should belong to me. In white relief on a royal blue background was the image of a handsome woman whose hair consisted of writhing snakes emanating from her scalp like a sunburst. ‘The Gorgon Medusa,’ he said. At first I was shocked, knowing that the Medusa had been a monster in ancient legend. ‘And like Perseus,’ I said, ‘do you plan to cut my head off?’ ‘Never, Luciere, but I long to be immobilized by your gaze,’ he said. ‘If you remember the tale, her blood gives birth to the winged horse Pegasus…as your voice has given wings to my heart.’

  “Utterly trite, I know, Piambo, but when you are a young woman as isolated as I was, such poetry can be the loaves and fishes of your days. This was all it took to win me over. From then on, after only a few days of knowing each other, I was committed to Mr. Charbuque. Watkin never interfered. I think he hoped that the young man would draw me out from behind the screen. He had always told me that I did not need to be a recluse for the act to work and that he thought it unhealthy that I should be forever hidden.

  “Our relationship advanced and, if I may speak plainly, as before, reached a point of physical union. It was not that I had decided to reveal myself—that I felt I could not do—but methods for intercourse were devised. Where there is a will, there is a way, you know. I would not allow him to put his hands upon me, but he wore a blindfold, and with me giving directions, I would allow him to approach me from behind. I wrapped myself in a large blanket with a perfectly placed hole cut in it. He called me his little cocoon. We practiced these unusual connections and others yet more exotic with a good deal of frequency.

  “The shows that had been canceled owing to my illness were never rescheduled, but I stayed on in London, my time consumed by my new relationship. Two short months following our meeting, we were married in my hotel suite. I sat behind the screen and spoke my vows. Watkin was the witness. It was a joyous day, and we three drank champagne along with the public official who married us. Charbuque had promised me before the ceremony that he would respect my wishes not to be seen and that he thought our lives together, though not run-of-the-mill, could be very happy.

  “By the end of the first week together, though, he began demanding that I show myself to him. He told me that when we were together intimately he needed to touch me. Believe me, I considered it. In fact, I wanted it, but my ways were too ingrained by then. There was too much fear, too much, I thought, at stake. My husband’s mood then began to grow very dark indeed. He became increasingly belligerent until one afternoon as I sat behind the screen in the parlor arguing this very issue with him for the hundredth time in two days, he dashed the screen aside and lunged for me. The instant he saw me, his eyes seemed to tear right through me. As a reaction to that pain, I lifted the monkey arm, which sat nearby, and batted him across the side of the head. He went down upon the floor, which gave me a chance to retreat to the bedroom and lock the door.

  “When he rose from my blow, he spent a long time showering me with the most horrible curses. He called me a ghost whore, a succubus. He finally left, but not without stealing from me—a large sum of money, my ancient lamp, and some expensive jewelry that I had received from the mayor of Paris for a personal performance I had done for his family and friends. I was distraught and could easily have fallen again into depression, but I too desperately wanted to return to New York. I had Watkin arrange things.

  “Charbuque never left me alone. He stalked our every move. At any time of the day or night I could look out my window and see him standing in the street below my window. Daily he sent me letters filled with the most depraved descriptions of sexual violation, mayhem, and murder. One night, while we were awaiting the day of our departure, he attacked Watkin in the lobby of the hotel. The staff managed to subdue him and toss him into the street.

  “On the day we were to leave, ever-resourceful Watkin hired some local toughs to, shall we say, detain Moret. Still, he followed as soon as he was able. Luckily we had enough of a lead to elude him, and our ship sailed leaving him behind. He took the very next ship headed for New York, which left port two days after ours. That vessel, the Janus, met the storm we had barely missed in our own crossing, and was lost at sea.

  “You are sure he was on board?” I asked.

  “Positive,” she said.

  “How can—?” I was interrupted by Watkin’s entrance.

  “I never performed again,” she said, and that was all for the day.

  PARTY MASK

  MY LITTLE cocoon,” I said under my breath as I walked away from Mrs. Charbuque’s house. For some reason her tale of romance gone awry made me think of visiting Samantha to beg her forgiveness for having been so absent recently. At the same time, that blasted deadline, now less than two weeks off, loomed large. I took the coward’s path and decided to return to my studio and work for the remainder of the evening. As it turned out, work consisted of polishing off half a bottle of whiskey and two dozen cigarettes as I sat at the drawing board searching my thoughts for a new image of my patron.

  I could easily picture her as a snake-haired demon. It was no problem at all for me to see Charbuque, neither large nor small, severing the head of that demon and watching as the spilled blood gave birth to the winged horse, Pegasus. Yes, my mind was a carnival of bizarre scenes, but to summon the face of a real woman, any woman, had become an impossibility. I was so frustrated that I even briefly considered consigning the bottle of Awakening to the pit a grave error. Finally I gave in to exhaustion and went to bed.

  The next morning I rose late and went to Crenshaw’s for breakfast. While I was drinking coffee and perusing the newspaper, a young fellow carrying a bag with a shoulder strap and wearing a messenger’s cap approached me.

  “Are you Mr. Piambo?” he asked.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  He handed me a lime-colored envelope. As soon as the lad left, Mrs. Crenshaw moved in to see what it was I had received. Using great tact, I ordered another plate of stew so that in filling the order she would have to give me some privacy. I opened it with one tear and took out the card inside. The message read:

  Piambo: A change of venue this afternoon. The Hotel Logerot at Fifth Avenue and Eighteenth Street. Room 211. There will be a blindfold on the doorknob. Put it on before entering. Say nothing.

  Your Creature,

  Mrs. Charbuque

  Before I even had the card and envelope stuffed into my jacket pocket, I began to feel a growing sense of excitement. I surmised that either I was to stand in for Charbuque as a ravisher of cocoons or, equally titillating, she was going to reveal some clue to me concerning her secret visage. “Calm down, Piambo,” I told myself. “Proceed with caution.” I knew I would eventually rebuke her sexual adva
nces, if that was what she had in mind, but I could not forgo the opportunity of doing so. What interested me in this regard was, if only for a moment, to hold the reins of power in our grotesque relationship. Before Mrs. Crenshaw returned with the stew, I had already paid and left. The day was frigid, but I did not notice the temperature, for I was glowing from within—a dynamo of expectation. I went directly home and washed and shaved.

  While I dressed I considered Mrs. Charbuque’s use of the word venue. It was a word she had used frequently in her descriptions of the places she had performed. Was this, then, to be a performance? Or had they all been performances? It seemed now, with the change in our meeting place, that she was taking her act, as she had put it, on the road. Throughout all my appointments with her there had always appeared some connection, like an allusion, a type of metaphorical link, between what happened in my own life and what happened in her stories.

  This line of reasoning led me to believe that perhaps the Hotel Logerot, with its European name, was to stand in as her trip across the Atlantic. If this were the case, then I was, in my role as her gentleman caller, Charbuque, being summoned to a tryst away from the purview of Watkin. The only question that remained was whether I was the Charbuque she was falling in love with or the Charbuque she believed had betrayed her. Not knowing which man I was, I could not be sure which woman she would be.

  The Hotel Logerot was a rather new establishment, founded by Richard de Logerot, a bona fide marquis, who moved in the stratosphere of New York society’s famous Four Hundred. I arrived at the address a few minutes before our usual two o’clock appointment time. The attendant at the desk asked me what my business was, and I told him I was there to visit room 211. He smiled and told me that I was expected.

  I passed up the lift for the stairs. Besides the fact that I was only going to the second floor, I regarded all mechanical contraptions with the same sense of suspicion I had for Reed and his Industrial Revolution. The carpets on the hallways and the stairs were wonderfully thick. The entire place was lavishly appointed with crystal light fixtures and highly polished walnut paneling.

  True to her word, there was a blindfold hanging on the doorknob of room 211. It was black and looked much like a party mask sans eyeholes. When I tied its two strings at the back of my head, I made sure they were securely knotted. The last thing I wanted was for it to slip off and negate any chance I had of finishing the commission. Once I was blind, I decided to try the doorknob before knocking. To my surprise, it turned. I opened the door, walked five paces into the room, and stood perfectly still, listening intently for the presence of another. I heard the floor creak quietly and the door closed behind me. It was only then that I realized I could have been playing directly into the hands of Moret Charbuque.

  A few tense moments passed during which I waited, not knowing whether I would be knifed in the back or invited to enter into one of Luciere’s ingenious games. Then I felt a hand on my shoulder, and its touch was light. She removed my coat and hat. I learned that day that the loss of the faculty of sight does, in fact, increase the acuity of one’s other senses. I smelled lilac perfume, heard the excitement in her shallow breathing, felt the heat of her hands just before they touched me. What I wanted more than anything at that moment was to speak just one word in a normal tone of voice as a way of establishing my presence in reality. I knew better than to reach out, I had been warned to say nothing, and I could not see. When those hands removed my jacket, and then my vest, my desire to speak turned into a desire to shout.

  There was no mistaking what her intentions were when she began unbuttoning my shirt. The objection I had to her actions was not the only thing on the rise. I knew that to continue any further would be wrong. Moistening my lips, I prepared to speak my aforementioned rebuke, but then my shirt came away and I lost my voice. When I felt her lips lightly graze my stomach, I knew I was in trouble. The tug at my belt spelled certain doom.

  She worked quickly then, and in no time at all I was standing completely naked. There was something about the inability to respond to her advances that exponentially increased my desire, and from where she stood I’m sure that was more than evident. I felt her walking around me. After three complete circles, I heard her stop directly in front of me. Before she even touched me, I felt her fingers close around my member, and then they did.

  “Piambo,” she said.

  I quietly gasped at her touch, but at the same instant a thought rose in my mind, slowly as a bubble in maple syrup, making its way inexorably through the thickness of my ecstatic confusion. When it reached the surface and broke, I realized something was wrong. Her voice.

  “Samantha,” I said, just as the blow to the left side of my head landed, knocking me to the floor. I reached up, not wanting to look but having to. I lifted the blindfold and saw her glaring down at me. My first reaction was to say, “I knew it was you all the time,” but…Need I say more?

  “My new name for you is Reed,” she said. That statement hurt nearly as much as the kick to my groin that followed. She strode past me and out the door.

  I lay there long minutes before the open door, not caring if I was discovered. There was no avoiding the truth; in mere minutes I had become what I despised. It might have been possible to construct an argument that I had not, in the physical sense, done anything untoward. Another man might even accept the crippled logic of entrapment, but for a woman, intention is everything. There is no charade of pleasing actions, no matter how deftly presented, there are no kind words, no matter how poetic, that a woman will not eventually get to the bottom of. I roundly cursed Mrs. Charbuque, for her commission was costing me more than all her money could buy. Then I got up, closed the door, and dressed.

  I sneaked out a back entrance of the Hotel Logerot—a pox on it—and made for the closest saloon. I can’t even recall the address of the place, I was so beset with the situation I had allowed myself to fall into. All that remains clear to me was that I took a seat far back in the shadows, where I could talk to myself and weep without anyone noticing me. There I sat for who knows how many hours, steadily drinking and concocting elaborate plans to win Samantha back. Even though I became increasingly inebriated as the afternoon faded into night, I still could not convince myself of the viability of any of the foolish schemes I had worked out with charcoal pencil on linen napkins.

  Eventually I passed out, and the waiter brought the manager to evict me. As soon as they had awakened me from my stupor, I assured them that I would leave on my own accord and they would not have to throw me out. “Very well,” said the manager. I staggered to my feet, and eyes bleary, head spinning, I tottered toward the door. My recollection is somewhat dim, but I recall actually making it through the door, barging through a group of gentlemen who were just entering, and then tripping and diving headlong into the street.

  I pushed myself onto my elbows and looked up to see that the group of men had stayed outside to watch my spill. When my eyes finally cleared, I recognized at least two of them. The portly older gentleman was Renseld, the art dealer. Then there was a tall thin blond youth I did not know. The third was of all people Edward, whose painting of the beheading of Saint John had nearly been the backdrop for Reed’s execution. I must have appeared a horrible mess, but still I thought one of them might give me a hand and help me to my feet. Since I did not think I could manage standing, I reached out to them.

  “Edward, don’t you know that old sot? Wasn’t he your teacher or something?” asked the blond fellow.

  My onetime student couldn’t meet my eyes, and he hesitated ever so briefly before saying quickly, “I’ve never seen him before in my life.” Then they turned and entered the saloon.

  I scrabbled to my feet and limped through the cold night toward home, the dirt of Fifth Avenue still in my mouth.

  THE MEDUSA

  I WEAVED AND stumbled through the night, so nauseated that I had to stop and rest for minutes at a time in shop doorways. Since young Edward’s denial, my troubled thou
ghts of Samantha had given way to fitful memories of M. Sabott. I recalled him telling me once, “Piambo, always keep a clear conscience or your colors will become muddied, your brush strokes erratic.” It was far too late for that, though, as I finally fell against the wall of an apartment building somewhere around Broadway and Twentieth Street and vomited. I came ever so close to passing out completely but managed somehow to hold myself together. As I pushed off that wall and began again on my hellish journey, I heard someone behind me say, “That’s him.”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw two large, shadowy figures less than a block away, quickly approaching. When they were aware that I had seen them, they broke into a run. I did my best to flee, but my condition allowed me to go no more than a few feet before I stumbled and sprawled upon the sidewalk. By the time I managed to regain my feet, they were on me.

  Each of them took me by an arm, pinning my back against the nearby window of a shop. They wore their hats low and their collars turned up, so I could not get a good look at them. All I could make out were squinted eyes, rotten teeth, and stubbled jaws. With my bleary vision and frayed nerves, I registered them as twins, each a hideous doppelgänger of the other.

  “Charbuque sends his greetings,” said the one on my right in a blast of foul, fish-smelling breath. I didn’t see the blow coming, but he punched me in the side of the head. Then the other hit me in the stomach. Once the beating started, I retreated to some safe place inside my mind, and there I thought to myself, “They are going to kill me.” The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, and they were kicking me. That is when I passed out. I did not come to until I heard the gunshot.

  As its echo diminished, I heard my attackers running off. I lay there surprised that I was alive and yet more surprised that, given the night’s circumstances, I counted that a good thing. A gloved hand reached out of the dark and touched my shoulder.