The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque (20 page)

We stepped inside and were met with a scene that could easily have been an illustration from a pulp

story. The crowd had backed away to the perimeter of the large room, and in the middle, next to the table that held the cham-pagne, stood Mrs. Reed, a small gun, perhaps a derringer, in her hand. Her arm was trembling as she aimed across a space of twelve yards at her husband, who was backed up against young Edward's

Beheading of Saint John the Baptist.

I should have been more surprised, but with the man-ner in which my life had recently been swamped with synchronistic happenstance, I wondered why I hadn't seen it coming. "Did I really have to

call for blood on that canvas?" I asked myself.

It probably wasn't that long, but it seemed as if whole plump minutes passed in silence as everyone waited for the shot to sound. Reed was pale, slumped forward slightly, covering his face with one hand and—this would have been amusing if the man's life were not at stake—his groin with the other. "It's really you I love," he said, but his usually ingratiating voice now sounded more like a piece of rusty mill machinery on its last job.

That is when Shenz, as nonchalantly as if he were crossing the street, stepped out of the crowd and stood between Mrs. Reed and her husband. "Madam," he said, "it would be a shame to waste that bullet." He smiled and began slowly walking toward her.

"Get out of the way," she screamed, her face turning bright red.

Shenz continued to advance. "I have a feeling your children will be waiting up for you this evening,"

he said. "And what's this?" He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled forth a small paper bag.

"I have brought some candy for them."

Mrs. Reed groaned, hesitated for another second, and then lowered the gun to her side. Shenz stepped up and put his arm around her. With his free hand, he relieved her of the weapon. She put her face down on his shoulder and wept.

John had already moved into action and was at Shenz's side, confiscating the gun. The crowd broke out in a round of applause for my friend's heroism, while the reporters, who were plentiful, wasted no time in descending upon Reed like a flock of vultures. Many of his business associ-ates were present that evening, and between their eyewit-ness accounts and what would appear in the papers the following day, he would be altogether finished.

Sills ushered Mrs. Reed out of the gallery, no doubt taking her uptown to police headquarters.

As he passed me he said, "Let me know if I get a ribbon." Meanwhile, Samantha had poured Shenz a glass of champagne. There were a few moments in which the crowd, en masse, tried to decide if what had happened was tragic enough to halt the opening or if they felt resilient enough to continue with the merriment. A confused half minute passed, and then there was a collective shrug, a sign that as much as said "Oh, the hell with it," and the patrons and artists moved in from the perimeter of the gallery, the conversa-tion resuming as if someone had flipped an electric switch.

When I saw Shenz dodge his new admirers and make his way out the door, I followed. I did not have to go far to catch up to him. He was sitting on the steps outside, smoking a cigarette in the cold night air. I sat down and lit one of my own.

"Well, she did have a derringer after all, but it wasn't meant for you," he said to me, shaking his
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head.

"Was that a derringer?" I asked. "You have become as prescient as Mrs. Charbuque."

He smiled. "I think it was the bag of candy that made her reconsider," he said. "I've been carrying that candy around with me for the past two weeks."

"A very foolish stunt," I said.

"I know. It's a sin. I should have let her shoot him. I'll never forgive myself."

"Please," I said, "another Reed would pop up as soon as they buried that one. They turn them out ready-made these days. Besides, you probably saved her from going to prison or worse.

Women who shoot men do not fare as well as the reverse."

"True enough," he said.

"What made you do it, though?" I asked.

"Well," he said, and puffed on his cigarette, "I looked around that room and thought to myself,

'Who of every-one present has the least to lose?' I won hands down."

"That drug is warping your mind."

"No," he said, staring across the street into the dark-ness. "All those fresh-faced youths with their brilliant works. All the established artists with their careers. I am like a snowman sitting in the sun. My talent drips off me and streams away in rivulets, my desire to paint evapo-rates more with each hour, my heart is cold to the whole endeavor."

"You've got to pull yourself together and work your way back to your old form," I said.

"Easier said than done," he told me.

"You are giving up?"

"Not quite yet. I have to help you flush Mrs. Charbuque from her blind. After that, we shall see."

Claws of Obsession

After the opening, Samantha and I walked back to my place. Even though the episode with the Reeds was the spectacle of the evening, and my dialogue with Shenz on the steps had been somewhat upsetting, being the un-relenting egotist that I am, all I could think about were Ryder's words of praise for my preportrait work. How I longed to relate the entire conversation to Samantha, but propriety would not allow it. She would smile and say, "How wonderful," but it was impossible for me not to come off sounding like a self-absorbed novice. Mrs. Charbuque had not cornered the market on lurking behind screens.

Instead, as we strolled along the sidewalk, we spoke about poor Mrs. Reed. Samantha seemed particularly hor-rified at the woman's situation.

"You would never force me to shoot you, would you, Piambo?" she asked.

"There are moments when I'm surprised you haven't already," I said.

"What does that mean?" she asked, turning to stare at me.

"Good Lord," I said, "I'm not talking about philander-ing.-I simply mean for being such a boor at times."

"Oh, that," she said. "That I can forgive, but if I were to catch you making a fool of me with another woman, I would not be so helpless as Mrs. Reed. I can't tell you how many times I am propositioned, either subtly or outright, in the course of a year. I fend off the advances of other fellows because I have chosen you."

"I'm glad to hear it," I said.

"This is where you are supposed to say that you have also chosen me," she said.

"I thought that was obvious," I told her. "Need I say it?"

"It wouldn't kill you," she said.

"Don't shoot," I said. "Yes, I have chosen you. Are you really that uncertain?"

"Well, you seemed so very pleased by those flowers from your Mrs. Charbuque last night," she said.

"Come, come," I said, "the woman is insane."

"It wasn't so much the flowers," she said. "It was more the look in your face, as if you were hiding some-thing."

"I was astonished that she would do such a thing. I can't believe that after all the women whose portraits I have painted, you are now becoming jealous. For heaven's sake, I painted Mrs. Reed.

I didn't hear a word about her from you."

"This commission is not the same," she said. "You are completely preoccupied with it."

"It is rather unusual," I said.

"She has some hold on you, I can tell."

"Nonsense," I said.

"You have not seen her?" she asked.

"I go to her house and communicate with a talking screen," I said.

"Then why, in your conception of her, that sketch you made, is she both stunningly beautiful and naked?"

I stopped walking. Samantha went on and then turned to look at me. "I don't know," I said.

"Perhaps she is like a myth to me, being invisible and so forth. In the classical style, nudity was part of depicting the gods and goddesses of antiquity."

"Goddesses?" she said.

"You know what I mean," I said. "Think of Sabott's paintings."

She cocked her head for a moment, as if reviewing in her memory a catalog of his works. "I can't think of one nude," she said.

"What?" I said, but in quickly reviewing them myself, I realized she was right. I started walking again, since standing still seemed to be making me stupid.

"I tell you, that woman has your mind, Piambo. If you are not careful the rest will follow," she said.

"She has nothing," I said, shaking my head. "Except my money."

Silence reigned for the remainder of the walk to my house and still had not relinquished its rule as we undressed in the bedroom. Finally I could stand it no more and, in an attempt to change the subject, asked, "What did you think of Shenz tonight?"

Samantha sat on the bed, removing her stockings. "His actions were very gallant, but Shenz himself appears old to me suddenly, as if he has aged years in recent months."

I was thankful she had taken my bait and was willing to forget the earlier matter. "The opium has its claws in him, I fear," I said. "It is taking control of him. Insidious."

"There's something you two have in common, losing control to an insubstantial entity," she said.

I turned to her as I removed my jacket. "Please, Samantha," I said. "I swear it is you I love. I have been devoted to you for fifteen years now."

"Twelve," she said.

"Don't doubt me," I said.

She stared at me for some time and then smiled. "I'm sorry, Piambo," she said. "I trust you."

"We've got to trust each other," I said as I hung my jacket in the closet. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I saw, hanging to the right of the jacket I had just put away, the one that held hidden in its sleeve my sketch of Mrs. Charbuque. Before I could even consider the folly of the act, my hand reached for it. Luckily, I stopped myself short, pulled back my arm, and closed the closet door.

The lights were turned off, the nutmeg candle, whose scent I had come to loathe, was lit, and we lay there beneath the covers. My mind was filled with the image of the sketch, and it alternated with my own complete vision of Mrs. Charbuque in the moonlight behind her screen. I did not want to disturb these thoughts and prayed that Samantha would quickly fall asleep.

My prayers, alas, went unanswered, as Samantha turned to me and I launched into it with a pervasive sense of doom. My implement of desire was as useless to me that night as it turned out
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Mrs.

Reed's derringer was to her. I did not need the Twins to foretell that there was a lot riding on this misadventure. The pressure was intense, and out of it was born true American ingenuity.

It was not long afterward that Samantha's breathing regulated to the slow, steady rhythm of sleep. I

lay still and waited for a few minutes, and when I was certain she was truly out, I waited yet another few minutes. Then, with stealth and grace combined, I slowly pulled back the covers on my side of the bed.

Exerting great control over the musculature of my body, which, believe me, was not easy, I more levitated than sat up. I remained there on the edge of the bed for a moment or two, waiting to see if I had roused Samantha. When I could finally hear her steady breathing over the beating of my heart, I

contin-ued, carefully getting to my feet.

I literally tiptoed around the bed and across the room, like one of Mr. Wolfe's compatriots slinking through a darkened warehouse. I knew the hinges on the closet door were going to be murder and they were, but I opened it quickly so as to not draw out their whine. I turned and looked back at the bed. She lay facing me, but her eyes were closed. Reaching down the row of hanging garments, I found the smoking jacket and dug down into the arm. The sketch was there.

That was a major relief, as I'd half expected it to be missing. With one quick pull I retrieved the tube of paper from its hiding place.

Common sense prevailed, and I left the closet door ajar, not wanting to risk worrying the hinges again, and turned to leave the bedroom.

Before I stepped out into the hallway, I realized I should extinguish the candle. Leaning over the dresser, I gave a quiet puff and then stood in utter darkness.

I nearly jumped when I heard her speak. "She has you, Piambo," Samantha said.

I hoped against all odds that she was dreaming, that she had spoken in her sleep, but I wasn't going to stay to find out. Without so much as looking back once, I went directly to my studio.

There, I turned on the lights and built a blaze in the fireplace. Then I sat down and unrolled the sketch. I perused every inch of it carefully until it reignited the original vision in my mind, and that part of me that had but an hour or so earlier proved despondent in the physical fray now stirred to attention.

Hands

By the time I finally pulled myself away from the sketch, the fireplace had gone cold and daylight was trickling in through the skylight above. I returned the sketch to its hiding place and crept back to bed. Later, when Samantha rose, I pretended to be asleep. She left, but I remember that she kissed my cheek before going. Then I did fall asleep and dreamed of my conception of Mrs.

Charbuque in a hundred sordid scenes, rendered in paint and hung on the walls of the main gallery of the Academy of

Design.

When I woke later in the day, her image followed me out of sleep, and I saw her projected, like one of Edison's moving pictures, upon the day—a miasmatic phantom looking over my shoulder in the shaving mirror, drifting through my parlor, hovering above the crowds on Madison Avenue. I speak neither metaphorically nor liter-ally here, but somewhere between the two. Samantha had never been so right. Mrs. Charbuque had my mind the way the Sun has the Earth and the Earth, the Moon. For my part, haunted as I was, I was certain that my vision of her was correct, and on my journey uptown that after-noon I verily beamed with self-satisfaction.

I even had a kind word for Watkin, complimenting him on his violet suit. It seemed to fluster him more than when I was rude. On our usual jaunt through the house, he actually missed a corner and lightly hit his shoulder on a doorjamb. And then I was in the room, before the
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