Breath and Bones (57 page)

Du Garde saw her standing still when she should not be, the white chalk misting off the greasepaint base on her skin. “Ursie Summer!” He grabbed the hood from her hands and gave her a push. He did not bother with the French accent when he was alone with his models. “Don't stand there—prepare for the finale!”

Too dizzy to do anything but obey, Famke ran backstage, shedding the cardboard wings as she went. She seized a fingertip between her teeth and peeled away the long black gloves as well. Once she had thought it was so clever, the way they faded into the darkness when the stage was lit dim, making her disguise as the shattered statue complete. The hood did the same—but, she vowed to herself, she would never wear it again. It was too terrifying when the audience went mad.

“Quickly!” du Garde hissed. The other girls were arranging the few props necessary for the last tableau: some blocks of papier mâché, some
white paste jewels, a cardboard mask or two. “Ursie, that audience won't wait on you all night.”

Hastily she rubbed more paint onto her arms, where the gloves had been, and smeared her face with it, then dusted herself with powdered chalk for the proper sheen. She made herself cough a good long time, so she would not have to cough later. She cast an appraising eye over the papier mâché lumps and made a few adjustments here and there. Then, shaking out her hair, which was startlingly red against the white paint, and pulling the damp chemise away from her body for a more floating effect, she stumbled back onstage and assumed her pose.

When she raised her arms in the air and froze, du Garde ceased complaining. He did have an eye for beauty, and out of all the handsome girls in his employ, Ursie Summer was the master of the trade: She knew just how to engage the onlooker's eye, how much to display, what to conceal in order to keep the audience both titillated and intrigued. It was almost as if she were a painter or sculptor herself. The other girls' tableaux were sometimes called vulgar, sometimes offended San Francisco's churchgoing ladies (who had little appreciation for art anyway); but if Famke's scenes disturbed their viewers, it was because she tapped into a part of their being that felt primal, dangerous. She was the wild part of themselves distilled into one static image.

So accomplished was she that du Garde had allowed her to serve as his collaborator, and this final scene, bringing together all of the girls, had been her inspiration. Thus far it had proved popular both with critics, who admired the technical skill it showcased, and with casual viewers, who enjoyed the spectrum of feminine charms—alabaster, golden, fleshly pink—it displayed. The audience never failed to be astonished to find that on a given evening they had watched only nine women, not half a hundred. Each viewer came away with a new respect for the manipulations of art.

Now the other girls fell in before Famke, and du Garde returned to his megaphone. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said in what he hoped was a commanding—yet soothing—tone, “I give you one final spectacle:
Evening of the Muses, in a Castle of Ice
.”

The stagehand pulled the curtain, and there they were: gleaming here, glittering there, nine females arrayed in poses surprisingly familiar to
certain habitués of the western demimonde. Their like was found in Boulder, in Santa Fé, in towns that even Famke had not yet visited; and tonight there were several men who recognized the picture before du Garde launched into his final description, as written by Famke: “This notable composition, featuring the classical demigoddesses of drama, dance, and so forth, is rapidly gaining a
réputation
throughout America . . .”

Alas for the maestro, his audience did not fall silent; the buzzing that the earlier fracas had started, continued now, drowning out du Garde's speech about the young artist's significance to contemporary culture. The painter's name vanished in the room's apian murmurs; and as to the somewhat rigid composition itself, and the impressive feminine talent it displayed—the finer points of even these wonders melted away, and there was only naked flesh, raw and material.

Then came the moment at which, each night, du Garde moved among the girls and, just when the audience expected the poses to be broken, affirmed their fixity by contrast with his own motion. Tonight he stepped hesitantly, and his trepidation communicated itself to the models.

Famke sensed the place was ready to erupt. So she did what she had never, in all her nights at the Thalia, allowed herself to do: She blinked.

Now the scene came into focus—the eight girls spread before her with the attributes of the Muses, in the positions in which Albert had painted one coop of soiled doves after another: The skinny girl of
The Little Fur
, the golden ones who posed as Bernini's bronzes and Cellini's salt cellar, the pink Renoir and Ingres and Crane girls, all now holding their flutes and pens and masks, both laughing and tragic. All beginning to look a little nervous. The light glowing and sparkling in the paste crystals, the hair blowing in the audience's brisk wind. Famke's shift slapping her legs like a wet wing until the lyre at her feet—for she was Terpsichore, Muse of the dance—toppled over.

This tableau vivant was the most effective advertisement she could think of. It was her W
ANTED
poster, her announcement in the newspapers, the equivalent of a gleaming sign on the side of a building saying,
Albert, I am here. Come quickly
. It was Famke's masterwork, and it was beginning to crumple. She fixed the girls with a stern eye, to freeze them in place.

While du Garde took his bows and the girls remained more or less still, the mood in the room continued to swell. People were speaking out loud
now, and there was a sense of tension drawing them toward the stage. Famke heard them speculate: Which one had been Winged Victory? She heard men getting to their feet and stepping forward. Some few, mostly ladies, took the opportunity to step back, toward the doors and sanctimonious, thick-swathed freedom; but the majority wafted irresistibly up. Nothing would do but that they should make their experience of art physical, feel the warmth of real flesh where they saw cold metal and stone, force the illusory two dimensions of famous pictures to assume the third, most vital, dimension.

Famke blinked again, and her eyes swivelled outward, beyond the foot-lights, where there was nothing she could see but a diffused sparkle from so many diamonds dipping toward her. The glare pricked her eyes and blinded her again. She sneezed. Then she coughed.

At the glass outer doors of the Thalia Festival House, Edouard heard the audience begin to swarm. He was aware that a few souls had followed him out of the auditorium—and for this he was grateful, as they confounded both his accusers and the gentlemen who sprang to defend them—but he did not realize that, simply by leaving his seat, he had broken the artists' enchantment. Neither did he apprehend, as Famke and Charles Martin du Garde were starting to do, that because of him the spectators wanted to handle the painted girls. Edouard merely wanted to leave. He felt ill and in need of a bath; for hygienic reasons, it was also high time to let his juices down.

But Thalia's doors, he discovered, were locked. He shook the handles and rattled the panes in their frames.

Presently, a red-coated usher came running, straightening a bit of braid coming loose from one sleeve. “We have to lock 'em, sir, or the riffraff come in. This program is of a very delicate nature.”

“Open this door,” Edouard demanded with an air of tragedy. He thought he saw the riffraff now, in the darkness beyond the glass—dirty faces, many of them yellow, black, and red—thrusting forward just as the Winged Victory had seemed to do. In the theater, he had thought she might topple into his lap; now he feared the famous San Francisco hoodlums and
jayhawkers would set upon him and cover him with filth. Surreptitiously he adjusted the congestion in his trousers. More men and women assembled behind him, the usher fumbled with a ring of keys, and Edouard stroked his watch fob's silky thickness.

“Sir? I beg pardon?” The voice came from behind him and was exquisitely deferential. Blushing to a shade he could not explain, except to hope that his trouserly manipulation had not been witnessed, Edouard turned halfway round and gave the man his ear.

But the next voice to address him was a woman's.

“We noticed you've a rope of red hair there,” she said in the accent of the American South. “My companion, Mr. Viggo, and I. We were wondering if you know—”

“We wonder,” said the man's voice again, “if you are Mr. Edouard Versailles.”

At that moment, the key turned in the lock, and with a triumphant smile the usher held the door open.

The girls onstage were starting to betray their humanity. They made little movements, minute softenings of their poses that drew them slightly farther from the edge of the stage. After that first cough, Famke tried to remain steadfast, but the scratching in her lungs would not be denied—it was as if a whole flock of butterflies had hatched in there at once and begun to flutter about. At last she dropped her arms and doubled over in a fit of hacking.

When Famke broke her pose, she affected every person in the room. The other girls allowed themselves to uncurl and flee the stage. Du Garde melted away, glad to let his star model crest this wave of public aggression—though he thought he might scold her for it later, if all turned out well; it would not do to give her too heady a sense of her own power. The audience, however, froze solid, too awestruck to budge. They had just realized what a gift it was, this ability to hold still and create illusion. A sudden quiet seized the room, a quiet in which Famke's ticklish breath rasped like a struck match.

And that was call enough for one viewer: One man in all that crowd managed to find his feet again and step forward. He shouldered the others aside and walked to the stage, where he gazed up at Victory. She looked very tall to him. He looked rather short to her. The recognition was complete.

“Famke,” he said simply, holding his arms out. “Darling.”

That night the audience of the Thalia Festival House saw a brilliant light break out over the face of the chief Muse, the Winged Victory, the most perfect example of feminine flesh San Francisco had ever seen. It started with her smile. It grew as she ran a few steps forward, to the lip of the stage, and launched herself into the air.

For several seconds she seemed to float above the footlights, as if she still wore Victory's wings; a trick of the stage set made her appear momentarily to be made of the footlights' gas flames. When she began to fall, she did so slowly. First her chemise unfurled itself, streaming away from her waist and past her ankles; as she fell, she fell into that filmy garment, and it pressed so close to her body as to become invisible. The audience saw that underneath it all, she was very naked indeed.

And then Albert caught her; and he who used to sprint through the streets to relieve tension, now sailed through the amphitheater, with Famke in his arms cleaving the sea of faceless bodies in two to let them pass.

I went half mad with beauty on that day
.

W
ILLIAM
M
ORRIS
,
“T
HE
D
EFENSE OF
G
UINEVERE
”

San Francisco is a mad city—a city inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty
.

R
UDYARD
K
IPLING
,
“H
OW
I
GOT TO
S
AN
F
RANCISCO AND TOOK TEA WITH
THE NATIVES THERE,” IN
T
HE
P
IONEER
, A
LLAHABAD

When they were alone together, in a spendthrift cab, Famke could not wait to begin telling Albert a version of her long journey toward him: the places she had looked, the methods she had used, the marvels she had contrived. She was so eager to do this that she forgot about kissing; but Albert did not forget.