He took up some paint on a palette knife and started on the canvas. His arm moved with bold, confident strokes. She sat still, and when he looked at her again she said, “Do you want me to sit like this?”
She struck a pose which she imagined to be a painter’s subject’s pose—chin tilted slightly upward, shoulders back.
He smiled, but he seemed to be a little distracted. He was like a doctor involved with a patient, lost in that sort of concentration. “Oh, you don’t need to sit still. I’m not putting you in any sort of pose. I’m looking at you for reference, but I’d prefer that you move, that you act natural. Otherwise, it’s too much like painting a corpse. And you also need to, um ...” He gestured at her waist with his brush.
She stood up. She normally wore cotton, but for some reason today she had worn a ninety-ten orlon/spandex blend. She liked the feel of it. She kept her eyes on him (he stared into the canvas, seemingly oblivious) and reached behind her midriff. She slipped the middle and ring fingers of each hand into the waistband of her panties and smoothly slid them down off her backside, down her thighs and shins, and stepped out of them. Between some people there are no secrets.
After about twelve minutes of sitting there in the mid-morning sunlight she said, “Have you ever done that?”
“Done what?”
“Painted a corpse.”
He kept his eyes on the canvas. He swiftly moved the brush back and forth from the canvas to the palette. The brush held an umber and gray blob of paint. She wasn’t sure if he was going to answer or not.
“Yes,” he said.
Chrome yellow, in its original form, is exceptionally brilliant—as in Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”—but with the centuries it transmutes to a macabre greenish-black.
The boy was carried by wagon to the castle of the Count.
The castle was a stone and beam tower surrounded by a wall. It dominated the hillside and was silhouetted in the dusky light like a brooding, armored and cloaked figure.
Count Senescau had had once been described by his official chroniclers as “Senescau the Great, Father to Orphans, Patron to Widows, Eye of the Blind, Foot of the Lame.” But he had traveled to the Orient during the Crusades, and when he returned he was said to be suffering from some rare unspeakable disease, some disorder which beset him during campaigns in the Balkans and Carpathians.
It was whispered that the Count was blind; it was rumored that he was decomposing and could not tolerate sunlight or fresh air; it was feared that he had become mad and had abandoned Christian philosophies and beliefs for Eastern occult practices.
The boy was admitted into the castle. He trembled. He thought that he would die there.
In the donjon Jews and children were held. Hooded men worked with flaying tools and pinions. None of the cries pierced the stone floor.
The boy was led into a great hall. Count Senescau sat upon a throne carved of ebony and bone. The throne was carved with draconian motifs of claw-and-ball feet, heavily tendoned and scaled reptilian arms, with a riser back on which was carved in bas-relief the screaming face of a dragon.
Two distant torches illuminated the great hall. In their flickering light the Count appeared to be eaten by the shadows, appeared to be a skeleton gauzed in a greenish-black skin.
The Count spoke. His lips barely moved and his eyelids were merest slits through which the boy could see coal-black eyes.
“My clergy tells me that you were caught in a sunflower field with a girl from the neighboring farm. True?”
The boy nodded.
“And she was naked? You looked upon her? Learned her ... secrets?”
He nodded again.
A slight smile played over the Count’s face, although it could have been a trick of the lamplight. As his lips parted slightly, the boy saw cruel teeth. The Count reached beside the throne and picked up something to pass to the boy. It was a leaf of hand-pulped and pressed rice paper, a crow quill, and a cork-stoppered jar of ink. (Or was it ink? It was a fluid which reflected the torchlight in glittering scarlet and indigo highlights.)
The Count spoke. “Draw my castle. Draw it from memory. You saw it as you rode up. Draw it. Pour your soul and your will and mind into that quill; place them outside your body for me to see. Your success or failure at this will determine your fate.”
The boy took the tools and crouched on the stone floor before the Count. The lamps failed to cast enough light for him to see the paper. It didn’t matter.
Occasionally the Count leaned forward to stare into the paper over the boy’s shoulder. The scratching of the pen on the grainy tooth of the rice paper was like the scrabbling of myriad tiny claws within the stone walls.
Later, the lamps weren’t burning as brightly and the shadows had deepened. The air in the reception hall had chilled. The boy set down the pen and leaned back away from the paper. The Count reached down and took up the sheet.
He stared into it for a long time. The castle was rendered in perfect detail, but the boy had betrayed himself. The buttresses and parapets of the tower gave the structure the subtle but distinct appearance of a man in aristocratic armor and cloak. The castle walls were cross-hatched to a shade of black similar to an etching, and embedded in the crosshatch patterns were dark and twisted forms, like the insides of a slaughtered animal.
“Don’t you wish that you could capture it all, boy? Don’t you wish that you could somehow go beyond the limits of ink and paint and paper, that your eye could see the Beyond, that you could reach through the Illusion into the Truth? It can be done, boy, and you can have it, at a price ...”
The Count somehow—the boy saw no spark or torch nearby—set fire to the sheet, and held it in his hand while it burned.
As if that were a signal to some hidden attendants, tapestries were pulled aside and women padded into the hall. Unseen instruments which the boy couldn’t identify began a throbbing, Oriental song of hypnotic complexity. The women were naked except for various bracelets of gold around their wrists and ankles, and necklaces inlaid with darkly gleaming stones. Some of the jewelry was fashioned with staple loops, as if the jewelry was designed to double as instruments of forcible restraint. Most of the women were anointed and oiled and perfumed so that the hair on their bodies glistened with beaded droplets like delicate flowers or spider webs coated with hot morning dew. Pungent spicey scents from the women curled to the boy’s nostrils like invisible snakes.
The women began to dance.
The boy watched, his body responding. The Count leaned forward with a rusting sound and whispered into the boy’s ear. “What do you see? What do you see?”
He couldn’t answer. The women were exquisite beyond words.
“Man’s confounder?” the Count suggested.
“Luscious sin?
“Mad beast?
“Stinking rose?
“Sweet venom?
“Sad Paradise?”
Black, obtained by burning organic substances to render pure carbon, is not recommended for the painter’s palette. Black effects will better be gained by mixtures of complementary colors.
The form on the canvas stunned Sandra. The painter smiled at her as he looked at her face. “Like it?”
“It’s marvelous. It’s me. It’s like a photograph.”
He grimaced from where he stood straightening up his brushes and palette. “Photography? I always said that won’t last.”
“But I mean it’s me, it’s like looking into a mirror. That’s amazing.”
“Just good draftmanship,” he said, shrugging.
“I have one question,” Sandra said. “Why is it all black and white and gray?”
He looked back at the picture and then to Sandra. He looked into her eyes briefly and she noticed that he could well have been very old. He seemed vital and spry, but he also seemed dignified, and somewhat weathered.
“That’s an underpainting. I do your form in the minutest detail, completely. Then in the next two sittings all of the color will be added
, and that’s when it will come alive.”
Sandra couldn’t take her eyes from the canvas. It was her. It was realistic, and showed her every fold and curve and nuance. She had lately started to think of herself as unattractive, but she realized as she looked at the picture that that wasn’t so, that she was beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than she had ever been or had ever hoped to be.
With a start she realized that her robe was open, and that her left breast, her belly, the triangle of hair between her legs and her left leg were all in plain view to the painter. Inexplicably, she felt a wave of shyness, and quickly closed her robe. She immediately chided herself for not being logical since he had just been staring at her fully naked for over three hours.
“You know, since I haven’t seen anything else you’ve painted, I guess I was a little afraid that you might be one of those, uh, abstract-type artists.”
“Afraid that I would reduce you to blobs and squiggles? Don’t be afraid of that. I’d never do that; I’m too interested in capturing things as they really are. Those other people aren’t artists, they’re symptoms. They can’t really draw and they’ve cowed blind and insecure people who are phonier than they are into buying into their charade.”
Emotions started to coalesce within her. This man, this older man, said this in such a confident, quiet way, it reassured her. His face, a mix of youthful wonder and an almost ancient maturity, was so contradictory it fascinated her. If there was anything that could be said for certain about him, it was that he knew how to look at a woman. He knew how to see.
She noticed that he rubbed his hands delicately as if they were sore, as if they might be arthritic, or as if possibly his skin was irritated by exposure to the oils and solvents and binders he worked with every day. She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to take his hands in hers.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. “I serve the Old Masters.”
Sepia is extracted as an ink from cuttle fish. It is impermanent.
Sandra, in order to accommodate the painter’s wish for her to sit for her portrait over three straight days in the early morning, had to shift her sleep time to the afternoon. With her shades drawn and the door to her bedroom closed, she lay between the sheets and waited for sleep. She found that she was tired, not just because she’d shifted her sleep time back, but the act of sitting for a portrait seemed to take so much more out of her than she had expected.
As she lay there, she had time to reflect on her life. She sensed that she needed direction, that she had to rethink her purpose. She felt, as sleep started to overcome her, that there was some insight to be had, that the key to her problem was just within her grasp.
In a world filled with people who were tremendously unhappy, people who were miserable, Sandra felt a sort of dull hollowness, and she realized why. She had no standard. Her family, her youth in an ugly little factory town, her divorce, the boyfriends, all started to burn into a sort of colorless past. She had her work now, but she didn’t have any goals there, or any ambitions beyond what she was doing. She couldn’t help but think of herself as a reliable but replaceable part in a machine. She couldn’t stop the parade of death she saw every day, and she had, without knowing it, become resigned to it.
With this insight she gave herself up to a sound, restful sleep. The things she had cut out of her life—religion, ambition, desire, intimacy—could be sources of great pain, but they could also be possible keys to becoming involved again.
In her sleep, she occasionally turned. She reached out with her arm as she turned to her side. She drew up one leg to rest bent on the mattress and support her. Her motions and gestures were such as one would expect from a person sleeping with a companion.
Cinnabar has on occasion remained unaltered for five centuries or more, and in other cases has blackened completely in a matter of weeks.
He spoke as he painted, much more so that second sitting than the first.
“The sad thing about paint is that it fails. It inevitably fails. The work and the painters we admire are special because they are the most spectacular and tragic failures.
“You cannot capture the visual effects of the sun, the moon, or the stars. Light is dynamic and living. Fire or electricity can never be captured onto canvas. These phenomena strike and stimulate the eye with a dynamic play of light which can only be feebly suggested on canvas by pigment in binder. A properly spaced white slash, surrounded by darkness of sufficient richness, may strike the viewer as brilliant light, but the effect will only be a pale imitation of life. The medium fails, even in the hands of the most accomplished master.
“And living things? They can’t be captured either, not by mere paint. The luster of the living, seeing eye can only be adequately suggested by daubs of slick white suggesting a wet surface. With the right interplay of underpaint a woman’s body can be suggested in the mass of the forms, in the glisten of the skin, in the warmth and pulsation of blood beneath the surface, but it’s all just a suggestion, an illusion.”
As he spoke, he furiously looked back and forth from Sandra to the palette to the canvas. He was glazing the underpainting and the brush in his hands looked like a criminal knife as he flashed it through cinnabar, carmine, madder lake, alizarin, and chrome. The reds were affirmation; he balanced them with denials of gamboge, sepia, sienna, mango, and lapus lazuli.
Every motion of his hands over the surface of the canvas was, as Sandra watched him from across the studio, enormously suggestive, and gave her involuntary thoughts. Her skin and the canvas were surfaces which were entirely accessible to him. Could he not notice an unusual pertness in her? Could he not see an unusual glistening, a slickness if he looked closely enough, and in the right place? She imagined that if the sun and moon and stars were all to fade to darkness that he would be able to detect a glow emanating from her and find her in that encompassing night.
When he finally set down his brushes, it was well after noon. He invited Sandra to come look at the result.
Two days before, she would have been stunned to see a man pour so much insight, so much vision into mere paint and canvas. Two days before she wouldn’t have believed that anyone would be able to find anything attractive about her, much less be able to look within her and find such solid, absolute beauty. But that was then, and now she knew differently. She looked at herself there on the square of stretched canvas and saw a woman of form and feeling, the black, white, and gray now overlaid with swaths of hue and warmth.
“I’m very impressed,” she said softly.
She had the belt of the robe loosely tied before her. As she turned slightly to face the painter it opened again, just as it had the day before. She knew from the coolness and motion of the air against her skin that she was revealed to him. He was close enough to reach and touch her if he so chose. She didn’t feel any of the shyness she had yesterday, and she didn’t look down at herself but kept her eyes on his, watching for any sign that he was taking advantage of this opportunity for a closer look.
The painter, with his young-old aspect, now looked very tired. He slouched forward a little and his eyes were reddish around the viridian green irises, the skin somewhat dark and encircled around the sockets.
“I’m a little hungry,” she said. “I could certainly do for some lunch.” Please say you’d like to spend some time with me. Please say you want something more from me. I’ve got a lot to give.
But the painter set down his tools and walked away, a little unsteadily. “I’m—I’m tired,” he said. “Very tired. Sometimes I forget that it takes a lot of out of me, too. It’s hard work, although it may not look it.”
“Of course,” she said. She hoped her disappointment wouldn’t show. If anyone can see me, really see me, it’s you!
“Forgive me. Forgive me. I’m tired,” he said, and walked out of the studio to the small back room which held his bed.
Sandra dressed, looking at the portrait. He knows I’m beautiful, but does he want me? She looked into the room whe
re he lay on the bed. She went in to stand over him. He hardly breathed as he lay there. His skin was pale, but a close look revealed that it held a myriad array of colors.
Sandra bent over and lightly brushed her lips against his. Then she left, and didn’t lock the door behind her.
Bitumen, used as an underpainting, enables gleaming heavenly effects, but will bleed and blacken with time, as in the “Black Madonnas” of Czentochau.
That night, two of Sandra’s patients in ICU died.
When the oldest woman there passed away (no, died) she did so with the silent inevitability of a blossom closing at sunset. Only the machines monitoring her vital functions gave any sounds, any external signs. The alarms of these machines Sandra disabled with the simple gestures of flipping switches and depressing buttons.
Later, the second patient expired.
An eleven-year-old boy in a coma, a bicycle accident victim, regained partial consciousness to scream once before his life ended. The scream woke some of the patients who had enough strength and resistance to sedation to hear it. When the boy was pronounced lost (not lost, dead) by the shift physician, Sandra had to place the sheets over his face, a face which now looked both young and old, both wise and yet innocent.
Because there was a wait for the orderly to transport the boy from ICU to the morgue on the basement level of Sacred Heart, Sandra had to pull the off-white curtained dividers around the boy’s bed so that he would be out of the possible fields of vision of the living.
As she did this, she remembered this phrase: “In the midst of life we are in death.” Another time she stood beside a grave as she watched a Christian burial, the interment of a body into sanctified earth. It was long ago. As she stood behind the curtains with the boy’s body, she couldn’t control the memories within and had a heightened ability to recall details of her past. She remembered that the phrase was not from the Bible but from the Book of Common Prayer, and thence not the word of God but the word of men, although she had long ago left the belief system which would make that a relevant point. She felt a momentary urge to bend over and kiss the lips of that dead boy.
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