Breath and Bones (45 page)

She assumed her most professional air, the one she had used to such good effect with the madams and prostitutes of Colorado. “What would you like to see different here, Mr. Versailles?”

Edouard considered the two women before him: the recovering patient and the painted Hygeia. Beauty and a feminine beast, or a princess and one ugly stepsister.

“It is really the central figure,” he said at last. “Her colors, her—” His hands made vague shapes in the air, and Famke understood these were criticisms of Hygeia's form.

“I can change those things,” she assured Edouard. It would be a pleasure to do so.

While they stood gazing, the light shifted suddenly as the sun popped over the mountainside. When the glass walls magnified the winter rays, the
colors of the painting began to glow—all except for those that made up Hygeia herself, for they were curiously dull, as if Albert had mixed them much more hastily and cheaply than he had done with the tints for the background, then laid them on more thinly. In the background, among the familiar jags and lumps of ice, Famke recognized Albert's old attention to detail, and that same painstaking work was found in the castle signature. It was only Hygeia herself—big-nosed, straw-haired, and somehow vague and unformed—who suffered in this composition. And that was easily remedied. Then too, as tribute to Edouard and the living waters that brought health, she might add a series of springs among the ice crystals . . . Surely Albert would not mind . . .

Edouard coughed delicately, to get her attention. “Miss Summerfield, do you think”—he tried to ask as if the idea had just occurred to him, though it was first in his mind—“she might have hair of your color?”

Famke rewarded him with a shimmering sapphire stare. “It will be easy,” she said.

It was as if a figure from a painting had dropped from the wall into his arms. But the girl Viggo held was indisputably alive: warm to the touch, with skin smoother than the most finely finished canvas, and—he sniffed—a most definite odor as well. Tobacco, perspiration, the omnipresent whiskey; a faint scent of something sweet. Perhaps it was lemons. Her likeness hung on a wall in the parlor of her boardinghouse, but this was the real thing. Her hair was pale orange rather than brown, and her lips were thinner, but still she was recognizably the same woman, and in his drunken state Viggo found this simple fact to be fascinating.

She squirmed out of his embrace and struck a pose where he could see her. It was the same pose in which she had been painted as a woman of music; only now her arms held no lyre but curved instead around empty space, and behind her flopped a set of spangled wings. Most of the girls were wearing them tonight, for once a week they played at being fairies. The wings had given the parlor a dreamy atmosphere, and after one glass of whiskey Viggo almost believed the girls could have flown away if they chose.

After holding the position a few seconds, she lifted her hands slowly to
her head and untied the ribbon that held her pale red locks in place. The hair was dry and coarse, once curled and now limply straight; but it fell nearly to her waist, and when she shook her head the scent of lemons grew stronger.

She began to undress. Off came the lace-and-spangle wings and the green basque and skirt; she hung them carefully over the back of the room's one chair. Then the ruffly white corset cover, and her breasts were exposed.

Propped up by a dingy white corset, they were small and firm and pink, with a network of blue veins that reminded him of a corpse and the most startling nipples he had ever seen—so puckered and dark they looked almost brown.

“Should I take the corset off, too?” she asked, twisting the ribbon tie around one finger and fluttering her lashes at him coyly.

Unable to speak, he nodded. Any resistance he might have made was lost in a haze of whiskey and curiosity.

“It's two dollars extra, on account of how long it takes to lace up again.”

Once more, helpless, he nodded.

So she removed the corset, and her waist expanded as it met the air. Her middle was covered in red wrinkles and welts left by the corset. Then, moving swiftly because the air in the room was chilly, she stepped out of her pantaloons, posed briefly again, and jumped into bed.

Viggo had never seen a live woman naked, and because the madams dressed the expired girls before he painted them, it had been months since he'd seen a dead one. It came as a shock to see the flesh of this one move: the undulations of her breasts, the jiggle under her arms, the dimples that formed in her buttocks and thighs when she lay down. The greatest surprise of all was the tuft of hair that fronted her sexual parts—not just because it was brown rather than orange, like the hair on her head, but because it was there at all. Viggo was so used to looking at the artist's cloudy rendering of that area that to see it now as coarsely covered as his own gave him a lurch in the stomach, as if he were looking at something unnatural.

“What's the matter, lover?” she asked in a low voice, propping herself up on one elbow and holding out the other hand to him. “Aren't you coming?”

Viggo shifted awkwardly, and he felt Famke's money rub against his foot.

In a way, this pregnant pause was Famke's fault, and the Catholic in Viggo blamed her, for his present situation was the direct result of that scrap of canvas that he had bought in Leadville. At first it seemed to have
brought him luck; or maybe he had simply scoured Colorado so thoroughly that he was bound to have made some progress by now. Town by town, the various stages of Famke's journey had fallen into place, and he felt he knew exactly where she had been and when. He took the junk dealer's scrap out of his boot every night before going to bed, and in his dreams the hair waved and the arms beckoned him forward.

Now those arms had guided him to the capital of New Mexico Territory, where suddenly he found spring had begun. Very little snow lingered in the muddy streets when he stepped out of the stage coach and inquired, with his beautiful manners and confident new English, where he might find “the district of the whores.”

So it was that he found himself in the gleaming salon of a Mrs. Opal Cinque, surrounded by winged girls and gazing at the enormous
Evening of the Ladies
, in which Famke was all but unrecognizable, fatter and paler of hair—in fact resembling Mrs. Cinque more than the Famke he had come to know. In his surprise he found himself accepting a glass of unusually strong drink from a man in a money-green suit, and feeling so awkward and out of place that he actually drank from it. One glass followed another; in short order he was drunk, and was swept dizzily away to a room occupied by a girl whose name he did not know, except that it was painted on her door and had something to do with springtime.

“Well?” She hopped from the bed and took both his hands in hers. Shyly—or with the pretense of shyness—her brown eyes looked up into his blue ones. “This your first visit to a woman, dearie?”

Feeling as if he were in the confessional, Viggo nodded a third time. If he had had control of his feet, he would have run; but he was discovering that whiskey had a number of strange effects. Only one part of him could move now, and it was not a part to aid in general locomotion.

“Well!” she said again, her cheeks dimpling to match her stippled bottom. She put her arms around him and drew him close, so the chill in her body penetrated his clothing, even where his trousers were most warm. “Isn't
that
a treat! Oh, there's nothing to be afraid of. We'll go very slowly . . .”

Before he knew what had happened, he was in this earthly fairy's bed, and his trousers were undone, and her thin red lips were—of all things—down below his stomach, drawing more heat from him than he'd ever imagined.

For the first time in his life, Viggo swore. “
Fanden!”

The bee has a full year's work in South California: from March to August inexhaustible forage, and in all the other months plenty to do,—no month without some blossoms to be found
.

H
ELEN
H
UNT
J
ACKSON
, “C
ALIFORNIA,” IN
G
LIMPSES OF
T
HREE
C
OASTS

Ophelia—Miss Summerfield, Edouard reminded himself yet again—took an immediate turn for the better when he let her into the studio. With each stroke that she made in her effort to improve upon
Hygeia
, her own health improved as well, and far more rapidly than ever before: Her stride became firmer, her voice more steady; breasts began to push against the warm wool of her gowns. She even seemed to grow taller. It was as if she were painting health into her own body while she made Hygeia more like her.

At least, such were the changes Edouard hoped she was making to the figure in the painting. Famke had forbidden anyone to enter her studio, other than the maids who cleaned her brushes, and Edouard considered it a point of honor not to ask them about her activities. Alone all day, she worked with a dedication verging on dangerous zeal. Very quickly, Edouard realized he would have to limit her hours in the studio or risk seeing her exhausted again. Thenceforth she was allowed only two hours in the morning and, after an enforced nap, one in the afternoon.

“But it is impossible to accomplish anything in such a time!” she protested, angry tears hovering. “I need at least an hour to achieve my inspiration—I mean to feel I am one with the painting. It is,” she said with a true burst of inspiration, “as if something inside is telling me what to paint, and I am obeying. You must give me more time.”

This argument was virtually the only one that might have swayed
Edouard, and indeed he did waver a moment; it was entirely possible that her newfound health was taking on a palpable life of its own and expressing itself in pictorial form. She might have prevailed if he had had any faith in her teacher. But: “No,” he said firmly, “your recovery is more important than a painting. Become fully healthy first, and then you can dedicate yourself entirely to your work.” He did not mention that he hoped she would eventually find some worthier occupation. To smother further protest, he ordered her to take an extra galvanic treatment. At least she never refused those, and he was so used to giving them now that he hardly blushed at all. In fact, the treatments were calming to his nerves as well.

Thereafter, Edouard watched the clock carefully during Famke's time in the studio. Each morning, he had a manservant bring a watch up from the village, where the more conventional living conditions made time run more smoothly, and he kept one eye on the slow black hands as he addressed himself to business.

He found much to do around the house. Now that Famke was moving about more, she had complained about the heavy odor of jasmine; so Edouard directed the Chinese gardeners to remove the vines his father had planted and to replace them with frangipani, which Famke liked better. He loved to see her bury her face in the fragrant blooms and come up radiant with scent. He hired another indoor gardener and ordered gardenias, hyacinths, and orange trees; the smells warred with one another and triumphed individually according to the time of day.

In the evenings, Edouard and Famke sat on the mildewed parlor sofa, surrounded by pots of whichever flower she favored that day. Together they read agreeable poetry by the likes of Alfred Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, and he began to postpone his walks and visits to the Taj in favor of the more immediately soothing pleasures of literature.

Famke, however, remained dissatisfied with their reading. She continued to ask for magazines and newspapers, although Edouard had banned them from the house as well as the township.

“They excite the wrong feelings,” he explained patiently, “with their sensationalized stories. Such reading is as dangerous to lung sufferers as novels are.”

“According to your opinion, even the Bible is sensational. How can it hurt me to read the
New York Times
? It is only facts.”

Edouard gave her a tight smile and turned to Patmore again. Thereafter Miss Pym's already mutilated Bible made a swift trip downmountain, never to be seen again, and Edouard was careful to read only from the least religious domestic poets.

During the day, he had time at last to pay old bills and to hear reports of progress on the Institute. The triple hexagons were finished and the exteriors quickly painted honey gold, for his original conceit had been to found a sanatorium on the model of a beehive: The workers, doctors and nurses, would come and go with quiet efficiency, flying in and out of the individual rooms in which ailing kings and queens occupied themselves with nothing other than the effort to get well. At last this dream was taking shape, and the Institute would open its doors to patients in May or June. And yet Edouard found his passion for it had faded, replaced by a burgeoning interest in one particular patient who would never be immured in the Institute herself.