Breath and Bones (9 page)

“While
Nimue
dries,” he proposed, “I should do some smaller pictures. Maybe the Amazon Queen Calafia. Or perhaps Flora, goddess of springtime, as we still have those silk flowers; or Salome, if we can borrow Mrs. Strand's brass platter. What do you think, darling—are you prepared to surrender the brush and pose for me again?”

Famke dared a sly suggestion: “Perhaps,” she said, “you could paint John Ruskin on his wedding night, seeing the whole truth of a woman.”

Albert smiled at that but said, “We have no one to pose for the male figure. No, I think we shall try Salome.”

So she stood before Albert again, draped in filmy veils torn from Nimue's nightdress, with the brass platter reflecting back her own face instead of John the Baptist's. She smiled and smiled, gazing at that honeyed image.

If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.

W
ILLIAM
M
ORRIS
,
T
HE
B
EAUTY OF
L
IFE

Finally, the great day came: Nimue was ready to descend to earth. It was the middle of March, the ice in the harbors had all but vanished, and Albert's father expected him in England. The paint and the sealing layer of varnish had dried to his satisfaction, so there was no reason to delay. Thus, despite what he'd come to think of as an artistic idyll with Famke, he had bought a ticket that would bring him home on time.

“I did not know it would be so soon,” Famke repeated, day after day, until Albert asked her to stop.

Her lover had larger concerns. Exactly how was it possible to remove a six-by-eight-foot assemblage from an attic with a winding stair? He refused to break down the frame and roll up the canvas; that might crack
Nimue
's paint and would surely ruin the harmonious whole. He finally decided to remove the glass from two windows, cut away the wood between them, and lower the painting in the manner of a piano. He engaged the finest box-maker in Copenhagen to prepare a crate and deliver it below on the day of departure. Meanwhile, Famke, bereft and occasionally indulging in a sob, sewed a wrapping of fine linen over the whole piece.

On the day itself, Albert hired a team of the soberest sailors he could find to handle both the demolition and the lowering. He stood down in the street with an umbrella to ward off the splinters of glass and wood, and he
shouted instructions, which Famke translated into Danish as an amused crowd started to assemble. Several of the neighbors were already drunk and ready to laugh at ten in the morning. The landlady, Fru Strand, was drunk, too, and in a stupor; so it wasn't until all the windows were broken and the wood supports gaping like a toothless mouth that she came boiling into the street to give Albert a what-for. As she raged, he nodded politely, most of his mind on the work above: The sailors had roped up his linened
Nimue
and were pushing her over the jagged edge. Albert still didn't speak a word of Danish.

“Lay some blankets on the sills!” he screeched, and Famke had to translate. For good measure, she also offered Albert's apologies to Fru Strand, but the woman's protests didn't halt until Albert shoved enough
Kroner
at her to buy new glass for every window in the building, and for a good long soak in her favorite beer-hall. At that, she stood back and watched with the rest of the crowd as the well-cushioned canvas slid stiffly toward them, then lurched over the edge and caught with a jolt on the ropes. The linen covering billowed like a sail. Famke's stitches were loose, and they had torn on the broken glass; so as the picture descended the linen peeled away, until around the building's second floor it blew off entirely and Famke was exposed in her near-naked, seven-foot-tall glory.

The sailors whistled and threw their elfin hoods in the air. The prostitutes stamped. A passing housewife looked scandalized, despite Famke's cobweb of ice Down There.

Famke knew she should blush, but she was much too pleased with the effect—she'd never seen the picture from far enough away to appreciate it fully, and she realized again in this moment that it was splendid, very like her and yet far more beautiful than she could ever be. She whirled and flung her arms around Albert, her lips on his lips.

It was the last kiss they would exchange. Albert put her firmly from him and shouted more instructions to the sailors, and Famke had to translate again. “To the right!” he called; and “
Til højre!”
she echoed.

“Careful!”

“
Pas pÃ¥!”

“She's not some clunking sea chest!”

Famke thought for a moment and told the sailors, “
Elsk hende som en Kvinde . . . ”
Love her like a woman.

Albert's ship was sailing from the old harbor in less than an hour. He pulled out his watch and glared at it with bulging eyes, a gesture that worked in any language. Famke shivered as the wind grew colder.

“I'll have to have the linen resewn on board,” he muttered, tossing the loops and strips up over the frame as it slid into its slender crate.

Up until the last moment, Famke hoped Albert would ask her to come with him. But even in their happiest time together, he had said nothing about doing so; and why should he? She was just a model, and he had important things to accomplish in London; things that required not a model but a sharp, clear head for business. She would only be a burden.

Famke had reasoned all of this out in the last days, but even as she accepted a generous purse as a parting gift, and even as she watched the nails driven into the picture's box, watched Albert climb with his bag onto the hearse that was the only carriage big enough to transport
Nimue
, and watched him drive off with a casual wave of his hat—well, she kept hoping.

“Tell me how it goes with the Academy exhibition!” she called after him, and she thought she heard him shout back in assent.

It took a long time for Albert to disappear. The traffic was thick, and everyone wanted to get a look at the foreigner escorting the long, flat coffin. A couple of serving-girls even gave him a flirtatious titter, and he flicked his hat again in grudging pleasure. Famke pulled her shawl over her mouth. And at last the crowds and other carriages swallowed him up.

When he was well and truly gone, Famke trudged up the stairs she'd so often flown up with a fragrant dinner or some other little token for her lover. Fru Strand's wrath had renewed as Albert disappeared, and she dogged Famke's steps.

“Good window glass, to say nothing of the wall, and now I'm left to find workers to replace it all in dead of winter!

“Coming and going all hours of the day and night, and banging the doors each time . . .

“You told me he was gentry, but I never saw it . . .”

At last they reached the studio, now open to elements that included the stiff breeze that would soon bear Albert away. They found the cheap clothes closet in fragments, Famke's few garments scattered over the floor.

Fru Strand crossed her arms over her beer-stained bosom. “I'll never rent to artists again,” she said.

Albert had meant to leave Famke enough money to get through the spring, but he hadn't bargained on Fru Strand. She was not used to lodging single females, and though she didn't mind the sailors' occasional cohabitation, she very much minded the suspicion of housing a prostitute. Famke protested that she was no such thing, and that she and Albert were married; indeed, as Fru Strand grudgingly admitted, Famke never received a single visitor, man or woman. Nonetheless, guessing that Famke had some means and wasn't going anywhere while they lasted, Fru Strand began to chip away at the girl's modest hoard.

“Your . . . husband,” she said one day, hesitating over the word just long enough to make her point, “
nå
, he didn't leave enough for the windows.”

It was useless for Famke to argue; there was no one to back her up, and Fru Strand could, with little trouble to herself, have had her thrown into the street. So Famke handed over the sum demanded. Of course the glass did not materialize; Famke dwelt in the darkness of boards nailed over the huge hole Albert had left, and she paid through the nose for candles.

Another time, Fru Strand announced that Famke had fallen behind in the rent.

“I'm certain Albert paid up till summer,” Famke protested.

But Fru Strand shook her head. “I've seen this sort of thing before,” she said with crafty kindness—the girl was young, she thought, and a little sympathy goes a long way with those who have recently left their parents. “Do not think you are the first girl to have been used and left in the lurch. Just be grateful it's only a few
Kroner
you lack—thank God he didn't leave you missing your monthlies.”

Silently, Famke laid the money in the beer-stained palm.

“I am right, am I not?” Fru Strand asked, hovering on the threshold. “He didn't leave a bit behind, did he?”

“No,” Famke snapped, her hand on the doorknob. “He did not!”

It was a pleasure to slam the rickety thing in Strand's disappointed face. And to know she now had every right to stay until mid-May, if she wanted to.

No, Albert had left precious little of himself behind. She had done his packing and knew very well that, except for the tinderbox he'd given her and the sketch he'd used to woo her, she'd been scrupulous about returning everything he'd ever touched or used. She had even returned the bits of costume he'd assembled for her to wear in some of his tableaux: Nimue's filmy shift, Calafia's tin sword and the shield she'd used to hide her missing breast, the shiny tears shed by the love goddess Freya when her husband lost himself among the nine Norse worlds. Freya had wept liquid gold; all Famke had had were a handful of spangles she'd stuck on with Albert's pomade, and even those were now rattling in one of his trouser pockets.

For the most part she avoided intercourse with the outside world. While she wasn't with Albert, she would be alone; she would wait. But one day, drawn by curiosity as much as by the idea of making some money, Famke roused herself to visit the Royal Academy of Art. Her pulse fluttering with nervous excitement, she presented herself as a professional model, and as it happened one of the life-drawing classes needed a girl that very day. Famke disrobed and sat as the instructor told her to do, with her knees pulled to her chest and head bowed, her neck and spine exposed. It was a relatively easy pose. When the students filed in she peeked around a kneecap and searched their faces eagerly: Perhaps, she thought, there would be another Albert among them—not a replacement, for no one could replace him, but someone with the same sort of vision. Maybe several such someones.

But it was not to be. The boys, a few of them younger than herself, darted quick, dispassionate glances at her, saving their true focus for their sketchpads. Of course, she thought as she shifted her pose after the first fifteen minutes, Albert had parceled out their time together in much the same way. But even when one of his artistic fevers took him, he had reflected her back at herself in that form she found so appealing.

She had expected that Albert must have been that way as a student as well. But he was nothing like these pimply-faced boys with their noses to the drawing boards, their bodies slouching almost as if the task at hand bored them. Albert must always have been different.

When she strolled among these students at break time, Famke realized
the difference was that he
wanted
more than these boys—more detail, more beauty, more of the world. She felt less exposed now than she ever had been with him, and she was the one getting bored. All she saw on the students' sheets was a collection of body parts, arms and legs and ribs and, occasionally, a cloudy rendering of her area Down There. In these sketches she was just a woman.

The
Kroner
she was given for posing were as negligible as the artworks; she spent them on the way home, buying an orphan's treasure of licorice and chocolate, most of which went stale before she had a chance to taste it.