Famished Lover (19 page)

“I'm not David,” I said.

“No, clearly you're not.”

Elizabeth had gone by this time. Miss Dorsett and I were standing in the deserted studio looking at my work, still wet on the easel. I'd lost track of the time and felt quite hungry and weak all of a sudden. I'd had no lunch. I was aware too that my throat was burning and I'd soon be coughing if I didn't get something warm to drink.

Miss Dorsett didn't take her eyes off the painting. “What is she about to say?”

“Does there have to be a caption?”

“Usually. She looks either as though she's about to slap you or invite you to bed. Or maybe one after the other?” Miss Dorsett took her eyes off the painting then and looked at me. “You didn't find that expression on Elizabeth's face, did you?” Miss Dorsett looked back at the work. “And that isn't quite her face. Which is fine. You've done more with it. You do love women.” She turned her glasses on me again. So many men don't. They think they do, but they haven't the slightest idea.”

The statement hung in the air between us. Obviously a reply was expected. But the wrong word might ruin everything. For a moment I felt as if I wouldn't be able to breathe if I didn't get this job.

I stayed quiet and returned her gaze.

“I can pay you ninety-five dollars a month, Mr. Crome,” she said. “I'm sorry it's not more. All the paintings become the property of the agency. There is a little more studio space here in the office. You aren't a drinker, are you? I'd hate to think I'd brought in another David. One is all I can handle. There is one other thing.”

“Yes?” The air felt pushed out of the room, but I didn't want to let on.

“The models come through me, and if you touch one of them, if you behave in any way that is ungentlemanly or unprofessional — ”

“I'm a married man, Miss Dorsett!”

“Many married men have fallen from grace, Mr. Crome. How is your wife going to react when you tell her you're working for a pin-up agency?”

A cough threatened to take me over. I turned away and gave into it for a time before willing my body back under control.

“Ninety-five dollars a month is a little low,” I managed to say.

“We'll see how your work sells.” Her eyes narrowed. “You don't look like the kind of man who has dozens of other options at the moment.”

I stiffened at the remark and she caught it. “I'm sorry,” she said without hesitation, and her face softened. “I can't pay
you more for now, but you're very skilled and it really would be an honour if you could join us. May I call you Ramsay?”

“Certainly,” I said. “And you are — ?”

“Miss Dorsett,” she said, then her smile returned. “Dorothy, to you.”

Alone in the crowded barracks, trying to live off the meager body heat of thirty-three of us packed together, I open Margaret's letter. According to Napier's faulty wristwatch it's three minutes to nine, which means three minutes till the one pitiful electric light is shut off for the night.

And this is her first letter in ages. My eyes begin to leak even before I can extract the page.

Dearest Ramsay
,

I hope and trust that this letter finds you well. I am sorry I have been such an inconstant correspondent. I have no excuses — I was not ill or suddenly pressed into consuming war work. What I can say I suppose is that

I lost my way for a time and blundered about in a sort of self-induced darkness, as many people have I suspect in this war. It's the unrelenting nature of it: we are pressed in on all sides by the poverty of our food and the awful jingoism of our news — framed forever in the appalling lists of the dead which assault us daily — and the dreadfully frantic way the young men strut and career about the town like fruit flies set to expire within the hour. I'm sorry, but years of this, and perhaps of paying too particular attention, smothered me like a black curtain. It is nothing, I know, compared to the gas and
bombs and bullets and the hard cruelty of capture, all of which you have faced.

Yet it very nearly defeated me. I feel so dreadfully ashamed and unworthy
.

But I can tell you that I have been comforted and am more myself, like the old self you knew (back when you knew me). One might even say I have been brought back to life. And of course it was Boulton — my dear Henry — who knows me better than any man and whose gentle nature and steadfastness have buoyed me no end
.

There is no easy way to say this now, but to simply write it: Henry and I were married last month. It was a small and sober affair, in keeping with wartime. But joyful — so very joyful for me and for Henry — and I know you will wish us well. We are living here with Mother and Father until Henry has secured a promotion in his office
.

Thank you, dearest Ramsay, for your understanding and friendship, I dare say for your love. If you had seen me in my darkest days you would be happy for me now, for I really was in a kind of prison (and how unworthy I feel writing such words to you, of all people), a strange melancholy that pressed me until I could hardly catch a solid breath
.

Be well, Ramsay, and come home safe. Please know that you are in our constant thoughts and prayers
.

Deepest regards,
Margaret
           

I look up just as the light goes out. I hear the barking of dogs in the distance, the hard wind of winter. Someone shits in the pail by the door. I cannot even tear the paper. The words are from Margaret. Evidence of life beyond this purgatory.

Sometime later the door swings open, and a wind riffles the pages in my hands. Agony stands in his frozen greatcoat, like some dark snowman who has blundered in. Among the jangle of his harangue I understand just two words:
Crome
and
Münster
.

Then he is dragging me out. I leave clutching my coat and my letters wrapped in a small bundle, including these words from Margaret I'd trade the world for her not to have written.

No one else is being shipped out. I look around at Napier, Wilkens, Fines, at the shocked face of Collins. He straightens up by the pail, it seems to me to look Agony in the eye. There is only time for the briefest grasp of hands. He is an old man trying to look away from the grave.

“Keep your nut low!” he calls out just as the door is closing.

“Delores,” I said, “if you could ease this way a little. Yes, and raise your knee — left knee, there, is that comfortable? I'll make a quick sketch like that. I'm just roughing out ideas. Are you from Montreal, Delores?”

I liked to repeat the girls' names a couple of times at the beginning so I could remember them later on. Delores had full, bouncy auburn hair and a more pointy chin than I was going to give her on canvas, and her teeth were a little grey, which I could certainly fix. Her legs were the prizewinners, and standing the way she was, stretching to reach something on a top shelf — I wasn't sure what it was going to be yet — her bottom was perfectly formed.

“Yes, I grew up in Westmount,” she said.

“That's a nice neighbourhood. Now could you turn towards me? Just a bit. Very good. You have a lovely neck, Delores.”

A fine blush coloured her face. She was perhaps twenty and unconsciously beautiful, if that can be said of anyone posing in such a way in a studio like ours.

“We were hit pretty hard,” she said, “in the crash and
everything,” and I began to realize that Delores was not one of those Westmount girls who keeps everything to herself. “My dad has had to find work at Morgan's. He was lucky to get anything, actually. He's in the shoe department. And we're taking in boarders, who've been very nice so far. None of the servants could stay, of course. So I help out any way I can. I just heard about this because of Nancy —”

“Oh, you're Nancy's friend.”

“We used to summer together at Georgeville. You've heard of what her family has gone through. They lost
everything
. The house wasn't sold so much as taken, and Nancy's father used to work at the bank. You'd think they would've shown some leniency, but the men who are left would jail their grandmothers if a payment was missed. What's the world coming to?”

“Just a little more stretch with the right hand. It's awkward, I know.”

The serious topic was bringing out the beauty in her face.

“The banks are showing their true colours,” she said. “A few years ago they'd loan money for any hare-brained scheme, and now if you don't already have money of your own then you certainly can't expect a bank to loan you any. Another friend of mine actually works in a bank. One day her till was short — twenty-five cents perhaps — and they nearly fired her on the spot. Twenty-five cents!”

“You can rest now, thank you. Just have a seat on the stool. I'll probably ask you to take the position again in a while. Have you a young man, Delores?”

A much deeper blush spread down her neck as she told me about him — Jimmy or Teddy or something like that. “A lot of my friends who still have money,” she said suddenly, “seem
completely oblivious of what's happening. I was with some of them last week, wandering back home after the theatre — one of them had extra tickets — and we came upon some homeless men begging for nickels. And Janet, whose father practically runs Sun Life, almost spat on them. She said to us — and she was wearing a fur coat as she said it, and the one man could still hear us, he had an open sore running down the side of his face — she said, ‘They just don't want to work.' I was furious with her. The others had no idea why I got upset.”

“It's not been a bad depression for those who still have money.”

“That's it! If you have any money at all these days the world's your oyster.”

I paused to just look at her — her kind eyes, the roundness of her shoulders, the clean femininity of her face, the unspoiled completeness of her youth and beauty. I thought: I am getting paid to do this work. For ninety-five dollars a month I sit and chat with Delores and her attractive friend Nancy, and Elizabeth and the other models that Miss Dorsett finds. I gaze at them and sketch, and some of these old wounds of mine, which they cannot even see — a girl like Delores was barely born when the war broke out — heal slightly, without fuss, a little at a time.

Something about her reminded me of Lillian. Or perhaps what I wanted Lillian to be. As far as my wife knew, I was doing the same sort of advertising work as with Frame. I hadn't lied directly but had simply failed to correct her mistaken impression in the small moment of triumph when I told her the news. But how would she ever understand or approve? I would have to find the right time, the right way to tell her.

“If I could just get you to stretch again the way you were before — yes, good! A little higher,” I said, and watched as Delores turned back to her duties.

At the new camp in Münster many of the men have boils and burns on their skin from working in the salt mines. In the bleak barracks at night they rest their bodies and stare blankly at nothing. Their hands, especially, are lacerated with running sores from handling the hard, sharp salt that burns into the skin.

But my luck holds. I am too weak to work in the mines and instead am assigned to a shoe factory, where I sweep the floor, clean up piles of cuttings and other garbage, and shuffle about looking busy. The instant someone takes notice of me I might be returned to Raumen or sent to the salt mines.

How to stay invisible? For hours each day I think of Margaret in her dark moods and how Boulton is comforting her. And how this change of camps means several more months before any mail makes its way to me. And anyway she is married. Hope was slim and now is gone, and yet thoughts churn away regardless.

And I am not invisible to everyone. A young, wan, wraithlike girl runs messages up and down the winding wrought-iron staircase between the shop floor and the manager's office perched above us like a watchtower. It's my own fault, I suppose. But anything female is a rarity, and so I gape at her. She has lank brown hair, matchstick arms and grey eyes that pop out as if being pressed from behind.