Stolen Beauty

by Laurie Lico Albanese

  “Close your eyes,” Klimt said.

  I closed my eyes and opened my lips. Alone in my bedroom I’d held the mirror to my face and watched how I looked at the moment of climax. I was brave, but I wanted to be braver. I raised a fist, imagining Judith’s knife slicing through the air.

  “Frau Bloch-Bauer.” Klimt said my name gently, and circled my wrist with his thumb and forefinger. I could smell the turquoise air that was always around him. “You need to be softer.”

  There was a catch in my throat. For weeks I’d been waiting for him to kiss me again. Ferdinand might expect fidelity of me, but with a mistress of his own in the countryside, his demand didn’t seem fair. And I was capable of keeping secrets. I’d always been capable of that.

  “Judith is a warrior,” I said.

  My mangled hand was folded in my lap beneath the end of a scarf. Klimt felt for it among the fabric, and I let him take it. He ran his finger along the edge of the purple scar and the ladder of dark stitches. He traced the blue lines beneath the skin, just as Karl had once done.

  “She shows him that she’s vulnerable,” he said. “That’s how she seduces him.”

  He ran his fingers along my palm, and then threaded them each between mine. He moved closer, and his bare foot touched my naked heel. My toes curled, deliciously.

  I knew he had lovers. I knew he wouldn’t belong to me and that I would never belong to him. But he was so heady and so near. He was more alive than anyone I knew.

  I murmured something about being fierce.

  “You have to be soft,” he said.

  My heart was racing. I could feel it beneath my dress. One last blue scarf slipped to the ground.

  “Show me,” I said.

  When his mouth came it was warm and hot, one tongue, two lips. He touched my clavicle and ran his hand beneath the necklace. He put his finger on the pulse at my neck, and the line between my heart and groin tightened like one long muscle.

  “You smell good,” he said. I had to strain to hear him. His words were so faint they were almost my words; his voice was almost my voice. His hand was moving my hand and sliding up my thigh, pushing aside the folds of my dress.

  His tongue slid down to my breast.

  I pushed the dress off my shoulders and it fell to the floor. I was naked and he was pressing against me, he was licking my stomach and his tongue was between my legs and then he was rolling a sheepskin condom onto himself like a cap and lifting me off the chair.

  He was strong.

  There were animal skins for the setting. There was dense shearling rubbing against my naked buttocks, a soft, bushy friction that I’d imagined a hundred times. He kissed my shoulders, parted my thighs, and pressed into me slowly until I cried out—it was pleasure, but it came in a full, deep cry—and then he turned me over and took me from behind, just as I’d dreamt, and I was split wide open. I was screaming and he was bellowing and then I was laughing and crying because I’d taken him and I’d surrendered, and nothing would be the same for me, ever again.

  “You have a lovely figure,” Klimt said. I was stretched out on the animal skins in front of the fire, a blanket pulled over me.

  On the table in the front room I’d seen the usual cluster of new sketches: bare limbs, splayed legs, shock of red hair.

  “I’m sure you see a lot of lovely figures.” I meant it to be a joke but it fell short, and my words faltered.

  He put his hand under my chin.

  “Let’s understand one another,” Klimt said. His expression was serious. His mouth was pulpy and wet. I wanted to toss my head and say something clever, but words refused to come.

  “All right,” I said. Was this how lovers spoke? “Let’s.”

  “You’re brilliant and beautiful, and I adore you. But we can’t be possessive of one another. I’m not like that. I can’t be.”

  It hurt, a little, but I also understood that I didn’t have to promise him anything, either.

  “There’s also the small matter of my husband,” I said, finding my voice and hoping it sounded light.

  “Who has an astonishing and charming wife,” Klimt said. “And excellent taste in landscape paintings.”

  I laughed.

  “And who expects fidelity from me,” I added. “As well as a child of his own.”

  He kissed both of my palms, flat in the middle where the skin tingled.

  “The sheepskins won’t fail you,” Klimt said. “And you can keep careful track of your menses, it’s just as reliable.”

  Then he pulled on his robe and seemed ready to work again. It shocked me for an instant, but I saw it made perfect sense.

  “Here are my plans for the Judith,” he said. We looked together at a long row of sketches laid out along his worktable. The measurements and colors were indicated in penciled notes and fat dots of paint—there was to be a wide golden frame, my jeweled necklace, a halo of dark brown hair. My eyes rolling up into my head. One naked breast. My mouth in two red pencil strokes.

  “And here,” he waved a hand toward a corner of one page. “You’ll have Holofernes’s head in your hand. You’ll be holding him by the hair.”

  I held a sketch to the candlelight.

  “Ferdinand won’t like it if I’m shirtless.”

  I was surprised that I felt protective of my husband. Even then and there, with the fire roaring and my screams still in my throat, I felt quite keenly that I did not want Ferdinand to be shamed by anything I did. I had what I wanted, and I would have much more if I did not make him angry.

  “I’m serious, Gustl.” I used his nickname, just as I’d once heard Serena speak it to him. “You can’t make it look exactly like me.”

  Klimt traced his finger along my hand, and across the scar.

  “It’s you, Adele, but it’s not you,” he said. “You’re the model, but it’s not a portrait. It’s just as I said that night at Berta’s.”

  “I understand,” I said. “But I want Ferdinand to be able to understand, too.”

  Even before I was dressed he was at his canvas, whistling and laying out the measurements for the painting. I didn’t mind. I kissed him good-bye, laced up my boots, and walked home with a new joy in my stride.

  I went back again the following week and lay down on the animal furs in my chemise. I told myself to remember every flicker of his tongue, every charged and swollen desire, because how long could it last? How long would I dare?

  “You could become like opium to me,” Klimt said. “An irresistible drug.”

  We were dressed, and I was looking through the sketches he’d made that morning. I hardly recognized my own face.

  “But I won’t be.”

  I’d brought us two cinnamon buns from breakfast, and we were sharing them with a cup of tea he’d warmed by the fire.

  “Why not?” he asked.

  As he spoke there was a knock at his door, and then a woman’s voice.

  “We’re here,” she called in a Czech accent. I saw her peeking through the window where I’d stood hidden less than a year ago. Her hat was jaunty, her eyes a bright, narrow green.

  Klimt opened the door and two models danced in wearing white dresses and smelling of the bakeries or the pastry shops where they worked.

  “That’s why,” I called over their heads, but Klimt was already taking a white sheet off a canvas, revealing a rough painting of two women curled together in long, flowing robes.

  “Next week,” he said, locking eyes with me as I let myself out. “I need you, Frau Bloch-Bauer.”

  I went to his studio every week that autumn. I was giddy with our secret, and consumed by all that was new in my life. With unbound energy I scoured the Graben for art books and devoured everything I could find about the Symbolists, new architecture, and art history. I learned about Michelangelo’s tormented brilliance, da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, Brunelleschi’s miraculous dome, and Botticelli’s evolution of idealized female beauty.

  “The Italians were great patrons of the arts,” I said to
Ferdinand one evening as I studied a daguerreotype of Michelangelo’s David.

  I’d asked nothing of my husband since the summer. I’d done nothing to indicate that I’d taken a lover of my own, and he’d asked nothing about the progress of Klimt’s painting. But our intimacy had cooled, and I felt it was time for our standoff to end. I felt that he was ready, too.

  When I asked if we could visit Florence—“To study Renaissance art,” I said, “they had their golden age, and now we will have ours in Vienna”—Ferdinand quickly made the arrangements and ordered me a new fur coat in preparation for our excursion.

  We traveled in a luxurious sleeper cabin through the Alps, and arrived at the Grand Hotel in the middle of a snowstorm. Roast pheasant and cheese ravioli filled our bellies the first evening in Florence, and we slept in four-post canopy beds piled high with goose down pillows. The next morning our carriage slogged through the wet streets and deposited us at the Uffizi the moment it opened. In my excitement, I barley glanced at any of the antiquities but went directly upstairs to the Botticelli room.

  It was just as I’d expected, but even more powerful than I could have hoped. Looking from Venus to Primavera—each as naked as Eve in the garden, each full of life and seduction—I felt a kinship with Botticelli’s women that made me blush from neck to knees.

  Our footsteps echoed along the Uffizi’s long hallways, and the Italian’s cheerful chatter was contagious. After Botticelli we found a small crowd was already gathered around Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Venus’s skin was supple and lush, and the white dog at her feet was almost quivering with life. Even hundreds of years hence, I could imagine how she must have felt as she stared at the painter, staring back at her—consuming and consumed, frozen in place like Munch’s girl on the bed but also cunning, also wise: unashamed and in full possession of her own erotic allure. I imagined the young model looking boldly at the painter as he placed her hand between her thighs. I saw it all—the scene in the studio, the life in the drawing, the wet paint, and the full orb of light that illuminated the canvas.

  “In Paris we saw the new art,” I whispered to Ferdinand, struggling to keep my voice calm. “But this is where it all started.”

  “I love visiting museums with you,” he said. He looked at me with so much tenderness, I almost felt sorry for what I had done with Klimt.

  After our Italian sojourn I had new art supplies delivered to the house, and sent a note to Franz Cizek to ask for a private drawing lesson. Herr Cizek was teaching Austrian children to see motion and energy in all things, and in two short lessons he showed me how to draw a candle, a chair, and my own shoe so that each object seemed alive on the paper.

  I wasn’t very good, but the simple act of drawing excited me.

  I stayed up all night smoking and sketching as the city prepared for the Christmas holiday. Klimt’s redheads, the Italians with their goddesses, the French and Dutch Symbolists, the Norwegian with his virgin pinned to the bed—they were all dancing in front of me, their faces mixing with scenes that I’d dreamt, things I’d done, and moments I’d only imagined.

  When Ferdinand pushed open my bedroom door just after dawn, he turned pale at the sight of me.

  “Have you been up all night?” he asked. He grabbed my hand—it was covered in red pastel. “Are you bleeding?”

  I threw back my head and laughed.

  “I’m not hurt,” I said. I felt a bit manic when I saw that I’d been sketching the same red flower over and again: a red flower, bursting out of the place where my hand had been torn open. “I’m drawing my dreams.”

  We’d all begun to speak of our dreams by then. Dr. Freud’s lectures were still quiet affairs on Saturday evenings at the university, but his book had cracked open our imaginations—our unconscious—the way Klimt had opened my body. Everywhere we went, people were talking about the meaning of their dreams: Water is sensual. Fire is desire. Blackness is death. A waterwheel is sexual consummation, and dreaming of milk is the longing to be a child again.

  I wrote it all down, I drew my hand again and again, I visited Klimt in his studio and tracked my dreams in a little diary that I kept hidden in my room.

  I tracked my menses there, too.

  I’d barely pushed my leather diary beneath my pillow one December night when Ferdinand came into my bedroom carrying a blue velvet box tied with a white ribbon.

  “Tomorrow is our anniversary,” he said, as if I’d forgotten.

  He sat on the edge of my bed. His robe, and the scent of his pomade, told me he was there for romance.

  I pulled open the ribbon and found fat gold earrings to match my choker necklace. I put them on and looked at my reflection in the mirror.

  “You should have seen how thrilled Moser was when I told him what I wanted,” Ferdinand said. He touched the nape of my neck. His hair was turning gray, and his face was strained as he fumbled with my dressing gown. I put my arms around him, and murmured his name. He closed his eyes, opened his robe, and climbed on top of me.

  When I woke in the morning, he was still in my bed.

  “Go on,” I said, pushing at him playfully. “Go get dressed.”

  “You come, too,” he said. I could see he wanted to say something more, but he changed his mind and put on his slippers with his usual precision.

  At breakfast, I found him frowning over the newspaper.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  It was a bright day. The sky was blue, and there were clouds fluffing merrily outside our window. The servants were decorating the Christmas tree in our front parlor. I’d ordered dozens of gold and silver baubles for the tree, and red ribbons for the banisters. Our staircase was decorated with nutcrackers and fat red devils dancing on top of sugarplum boxes wrapped in bright foil.

  “There’s a mutiny at the university,” Ferdinand said. “It looks like Gustav Klimt is in trouble.”

  He showed me the declaration against Klimt, and the long list of academics who had denounced and rejected his university murals.

  “He’ll have to give the money back.” I felt sick. “And I doubt he can afford that.”

  Ferdinand studied my face, and I studied his.

  “I’ve given it a lot of thought,” he said. “If you admire Klimt this much, we should commission a piece from him when you’re ready.”

  I more than admired Klimt, and I remembered each afternoon as if it had happened in slow motion. But I’d trusted my fate to Ferdinand. I was his wife and he was my husband, and I owed him at least a fair warning.

  “You know he hasn’t finished the Judith yet,” I said carefully.

  He busied himself stirring sugar into his coffee. My sister had told me that I would grow to love him, and at that moment I did. My tenderness surprised me.

  “There are some things you should know about the painting,” I said.

  Ferdinand narrowed his eyes.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “It’s my hair and features in the picture. But he also imagined things that he hasn’t seen.”

  A deception seemed not only prudent but necessary.

  “Go on.”

  “It’s me, and it’s not me.”

  He put down his spoon, and folded his hands together.

  “Please say what you mean to say, Adele.”

  “It’s a seduction scene, and so the painting is seductive.”

  “Is it indecent?”

  “I’ve only seen the sketches,” I said. “There’s a bare breast. But that’s all I know.”

  By then my husband had half a dozen expressions that I could easily recognize—pride, anger, impatience, desire, happiness, shrewd understanding. But the expression that crossed his face at that moment was a mix of confusion and sadness that I had never seen before.

  “I told you that the whole city watches what you do,” he said.

  “I know, Ferry.” I put my hand on his—I chose the mangled hand, although I knew he wouldn’t notice. “And because we’ve befriended Klimt, it puts both of us at t
he center of Vienna’s new art world. Just like the Medici in Florence.”

  “Don’t use my generosity against me,” he said.

  “If everyone is watching me, it’s only because of you,” I said, knowing how true it was. “You can build a legacy for both of us if you’ll support the best artists and help them grow.”

  It was easy to see Ferdinand remembering how the Medici had built their fortunes with one hand and their legacies with the other.

  “With your resources and power you can influence art more than any other man in Vienna,” I went on. “I hope you will do that, for both of our sakes. And for our children when we have them, too.”

  As a girl I’d been denied the education I’d wanted, and my choices had been keenly limited. That morning I felt those limitations beginning to splinter. If I could strike the right balance between courage and surrender, I might have all that I’d ever desired in the way of books, knowledge, art, freedom, family—and a lover, too.

  MARIA

  1938

  A sharp pain woke me in the dark. The bedroom felt small and close, and the air smelled like rust. Rain was tapping at the window with long, hard fingers and there was thunder in the distance. I’d been dreaming of Landau and Fritz, the two of them singing a terrible, screeching opera. My head was pounding, and my heart was beating too fast.

  I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom. I was dizzy. The tiles felt cool and sticky on my feet, and I started to cry because I was sick and alone. I’d had tomato soup for dinner, and it came up into the sink. The overhead light was blinding: I snapped it on, and quickly off again. In the flash, I saw a dark smear on the floor. My nightgown was wet, and when I put my hand down to feel what it was, my fingers came back covered in thick, clotted menses.

  I sank to the floor and wept in long, gulping sobs: my bleeding was a week late, but it had come.

  When the birds began to sing outside, I crammed my soiled bedsheets and nightgown into the bathtub and watched the water turn pink.

  It rained all day, and all day I bled as if I was turning inside out. But I knew I would survive. Of course I would. Nature was doing what had to be done, ridding my body of every last shred of Landau.