The Art of Living (25 page)

The room was still, the people all pretending not to look at her. She stood, chin lifted, feeling a strange thrill of evil in her veins. What would people say? she wondered, knowing what they'd say, and an image from one of Vlemk's paintings rose before her, what she secretly called “The Queen as Fallen Woman.”

Then the barmaid stood before them, more innocent than the Queen had been even in childhood, or so the Queen imagined, the barmaid companionably nodding and smiling, guiding them to a long table close to the front door, a table with candles on it, alongside it six stolid chairs. Vlemk led the Queen to a chair by the wall, went back around the table to the chair directly opposite, and laid the sack on the table while the barmaid silently moved the other four chairs away. Vlemk made a signal, presumably his order, and the barmaid left. Then, without expression, Vlemk opened the sack and took out the boxes, one by one, and slid them across to her. When he'd removed the last box, he folded the sack and put it on his lap like a napkin. He splashed open his hands and smiled disparagingly, eyes remote. The Queen looked down at them.

It was incredible to her that they'd so shocked her the first time she'd seen them. There they were, her possibilities, each more terrible than the last; but they did not seem to her terrible now. It was like reading history books: this king died in battle, this king of syphilis, this one by a fall from his horse. What she felt, more than anything else, was a sense of new freedom, release. It was true, she thought, as if responding to something the talking picture on the box had said to her; this decorous life she'd pursued all her days was trivial, ludicrous. How strange and wonderful to be able to gaze down from the mountaintop, like a soul at last free of its body, and see life as it was. This king died in battle, this one of syphilis….

One of the pictures showed her face tipped so high it seemed her neck would snap. “The Queen Full of Pride,” she secretly named it. She laughed. Vlemk the box-painter glanced at her, judgmental, and she laughed again, more openly than she'd meant to. A man with yellow-white flaxen hair and sleepy eyes stopped abruptly in the middle of the room to look at her, then after a moment drew up a chair and sat down beside her. At just that moment the barmaid returned with the drinks Vlemk had ordered, two small, crude glasses that contained something thick and vaguely black. The barmaid looked daggers at the man who had come to sit with the Queen, then looked questioningly at Vlemk, who lowered his eyes and shrugged. With a frightened expression, the barmaid glanced at the Queen. “It's no harm,” said the Queen, and mimicked Vlemk's shrug. One casual hand raised to hide her ugly birthmark, the barmaid looked again at Vlemk, who pretended not to notice; then, at last, she reluctantly turned away to go about her business.

“Hello,” said the man with flaxen hair, and grinned one-sidedly. His teeth were discolored and tilted, like headstones in an old, old graveyard.

She nodded and glanced at his patched, ragged elbow, too close to her own.

“I,” said the man, “am a poet.” He tipped his head back, slightly to one side, letting his remark sink in.

“That's nice,” she said, and glanced at Vlemk. He was looking at the boxes. She too looked down at them.

“Poets are much disparaged in this moron age,” said the poet.

She said nothing, but gave him a noncommittal nod and reached for a candle to give the boxes more light. The poet leaned closer, looking too. She lowered her eyebrows and tensed her forehead, straining to ignore him.

It seemed that any one of the paintings might speak if it wished to, even the ones done most carelessly, as if in disgust. What had he been thinking as he painted them? she wondered again. And how was it that he could sit there so calmly now, two fingers around the stem of his glass, hardly looking at her, beginning to show signs of impatience. She drew away from the poet a little, shooting him a look, and then glanced again at Vlemk. Here in the tavern, with the candlelight making his graying hair glow like newly cut iron, he no longer seemed just one more artisan. In comparison to the poet, he might have been made of solid marble. “I have come to beg you to remove the curse,” she thought of saying, and quickly looked down, driving out the image of her father by saying to herself with intense concentration, “It makes no sense.”

The poet said, “Your eyes are like curdled cream. Does that offend you?”

She looked at him as she'd have looked at some curious insect.

Instantly, the poet rolled his eyes up and waggled his hand.

He looked exactly like her father, and the breath went out of her. She threw a wild glance at Vlemk for help, but Vlemk had his eyes closed, infinitely patient, burying both the poet and herself in the rot of time. Suddenly she found herself shaking like a machine, and Vlemk opened his eyes. He looked at the poet, so calmly that the whole world changed for her. Yes, she must learn to be like Vlemk the box-painter. Learn to dismiss with absolute indifference the antics of mere mortals! She must live for the imperishable! She'd been wrong about him, she saw now. He had not mellowed, gone soft. In the end he had dismissed even rage and scorn, even the young artist's hunger for Truth. He had moved beyond silence to a terrible kind of comedy, painting nonsense with unholy skill—landscapes, animals, all that dying humanity foolishly clings to.

That instant Vlemk leaned forward, one finger raised as if in warning, and with a stern expression shook his head. Was he reading her mind? she wondered. He must be, of course. He knew her as no one had ever known her before, every spasm and twitch.

The boxes gleamed in the candlelight, a coolly disinterested catalogue of horrors—wretched grimaces, rolled eyes; ten obscene masks of corruption. And it came to her suddenly that the point was
not
that one of them was fated to come true:
all
of them were true. And it was not that he loved her or hated her. She was a specimen, simply, like the rat the biologist happens to come down on with his glove. He could have done it as well with the poet—she could do it herself, if she had his craft! This is the world, he had said. So much for the world! And he'd gone back to painting pretty gardens, where weeds pushed up, merry as crocuses, and insects chewed and were chewed, like gargoyles on a church. This is the world, my children, my moustached princes, coyly smiling ladies. Again Vlemk's eyes were closed, burying all that lived.
I never heard him mention you
, the picture that could talk had said. Even when he was painting her hour after hour, he'd given her no more thought than the biologist gives to the frog he is cutting to pieces, still alive. That was Art. That was the mountaintop. The boxes blurred together in an image of her father's dying face.

She leaned forward, clutching the table, struggling to clear her sight. Her wits reeled, though she hadn't yet tasted the vaguely black drink. She found herself staring now at one of the boxes in particular—perhaps she'd been staring for some time. “The Queen Envious,” she thought it might be called. It showed her face almost comically narrowed and peaked, her eyes enormous, the tips of her teeth showing.

Vlemk opened his eyes. “Your health,” he said soundlessly, murderously ironic—or so it seemed to the Queen—and raised his glass.

Soon there were two more of them, friends of Vlemk, or so they claimed, and Vlemk accepted it in silence, eyelids sinking again. One maintained he was an ex-violinist. The other maintained nothing at all, staring at her throat a moment, occasionally glancing at the door as if expecting more of these “friends.” The Queen could hardly breathe. All her life she had scorned and avoided vulgarity, ugliness: but here, sunk deep in both, she was revising her opinions. She had wanted gardens without insects. She wanted that no longer. She wanted now only to
see
. But her mind was fuzzy. She strained for concentration. There was no feeling in the tips of her fingers.

The poet said things so foolish one had to think about them.

“Suppose,” he said, floating his head toward her, half-moons of yellow below his irises, “suppose God were a spider!”

She waited. He seemed to have nothing more to say. But when she turned to the ex-violinist for help, the poet broke in quickly, seizing the floor again, violently trembling, “Out of his own
entrails
the spider spins!” He gave a jerk, trying to raise his arm to shake his fist at her, but his elbow struck hard against the edge of the table, making him yelp and bringing tears to his eyes. The ex-violinist shook his head and said, “Listen—” Furiously, wildly, the poet struck out with his narrow left arm, hitting the ex-violinist in the chest. “But also the spider stings!” the poet yelled. The voice, thin and high, reminded her of the voice of the picture that could talk, and abruptly she remembered that the picture was herself. She looked at Vlemk. He was asleep.

The poet, for no reason, was crying. Softly, the ex-violinist said, “He's so full of hate, this man. Who can blame him?”

She looked for help at the man who sat staring at her throat. Something in his look made her blood curdle, and, smiling nervously, lowering her lashes, she asked, “And what do
you
do?” Nothing in his expression changed, but he looked into her eyes, giving her a terrible sensation of endless falling. After a moment he indicated by a shift of his eyes that she should look under the table. She felt herself blushing scarlet; then, biting her lip, she obeyed. In the darkness below, almost touching her shoes, lay the blade of an axe. Instinctively, before she knew she would do it, she touched her throat. The man smiled, then his eyes once again went out of focus. She put both hands over her heart to calm the pounding, like a fire behind her collarbone.

Vlemk the box-painter opened his eyes a little, raised his eyebrows, and looked at his friends. He looked at the Queen, as if to ask what had happened, then down at his lap. He lifted the sack and began to put the boxes in, one by one. She watched them being taken from her with the anguish of a child losing its treasures. Each horror he moved to the sack was like flesh torn from her, but she kept herself from speaking. When he'd put them all inside and had pulled the purse-string that closed the neck, he pushed back his chair and stood up, nodding to her and gesturing. She too pushed back her chair—breathing shallowly, her legs slightly shaking—and stood up. The poet protested. The man who had the axe raised his head as if in distress, looking at her throat. She tried to look away from him but found herself helpless until the box-painter came around the table and offered her his arm. She seized it and clung tightly. Though she looked back, trailing him to the door, still clinging, no one asked for money. She tried to think about it, but her mind was still full of the image of the axe.

Soon they were on the street, where her driver was waiting, the black-and-gold carriage gleaming weirdly in the light of the lamps and the distant moon. The driver held the door of the carriage for her, melting into darkness in the way her father had always liked, and Vlemk the box-painter squeezed her arm, more powerfully than he knew—she would have bruises in the morning—then released her and began to back away. Before she knew she would do it, she reached out, sudden as a snake striking, and seized the bag of boxes. He did not seem surprised but only looked at her, expressionless, as if thinking of another way of painting her.

“Let me take it,” she said. She could not look at him. “Sell them to me!”

He said nothing, showed nothing, but after a long moment shook his head sadly, a little sternly, and opened his thick, strong fingers so that the bag was hers.

She stepped into the carriage, the door closed behind her, and almost at once she heard the tocking of the horses' hooves and felt the swaying of the carriage.

10

It was the beginning of a terrible period for the Queen. Whatever the truth might be, it seemed to her unquestionable that she had glimpsed a world more important than her own, gloomy and malevolent but intrepidly alive. In her sleep she would dream of the dark, smoky tavern and see again the tip of the axe peeking out from the skirt of the silent man's coat. Putting on a necklace or walking in a field, she would suddenly find herself not looking at the emeralds or watching the airy pirouette of starlings but gazing, mystified and perhaps a little frightened, at the calm, sleeping face of Vlemk the box-painter, the sum of the earth all around him—the poet who could not write, the violinist who could not play, the grim man who carried an axe and stared at throats.

Strange to say, the boxes, when she laid them out one after another on her table, had no great interest for her now. She looked at them, studied them, but the magic had evaporated. They were pictures, simply—not even very good ones, she occasionally suspected—and though she knew, intellectually, that they were the story of her life or image of her character, she found that something had gone wrong with her; she had no feeling for them. She looked at them each time with renewed disappointment. They might as well have been sick cartoons. They were not just that, she knew, and she struggled to feel their significance. Sometimes, indeed, she could feel a frail echo of the original thrill of alarm—sense herself decaying, know the horror of death. But when she thought, she knew that the feeling did not come from the pictures, it came from the tavern, the silent man's axe. The pictures were boring. It was because of that, because she had lost all feeling, that sometimes she sat with the terrible pictures spread out before her and silently wept.

“Are you all right?” the picture that could talk would say.

She would sniff, jerk back her head, and nod.

“You certainly are becoming a bore,” the picture that could talk would say. “What ever happened to your fury?”

“ ‘Fury,' ” the Queen would mock, sniffing. There it usually ended. But one night when unaccountably the air smelled of winter, the picture felt cross enough to press the matter. “That's what I mean,” the picture said. “Why are you so quick to
pounce
on things?”