Inamorata (12 page)

Everything unraveled. The inspiration she’d brought me that had me sitting up all night, making love to her and writing down the words that flooded me after, was gone. Melting away so swiftly I doubted it had ever been. I was insatiable, unsatisfied and aching even after I came. The only thing to do to start over again, one endless round of lovemaking, as I searched desperately for what she’d brought me so easily before. But the gnawing dissatisfaction that had disappeared for such a short time always returned, worse than ever, and nothing she did could appease it.

She was as compelling as ever, it was only that she no longer quenched my raging thirst. She never complained of it, no matter how I used her. She became for me every whore I’d ever bought, every woman I’d seduced, every one who had seduced me. I was angry, unmoored, wanting to punish. “What happened to it?” I demanded, time after time, pounding against her, aching with frustration. “Why don’t I still feel it?”

She said nothing, but I began to see myself in her eyes, an image that sickened me, a man weak and desperate, spent, a failure. I began to hear my father’s voice in my head.
You’ll never be important, Nicholas. You haven’t the talent.
Desire fled; when before all it had taken was the scent of her to arouse me, now nothing did, no matter how she or I tried. I became nothing, impotent and empty, no words, no will, no sex.

I began to hate her.

And still, I could not leave her. The memory of what she’d been for me was too strong. I could retrieve it, I knew. I could not have lost it forever. I stared down at the papers I’d written, lines upon lines of my handwriting, though they were words I no longer recognized as mine. How had they come to me? I felt weak as a worm. My lungs would not work; my limbs would not carry me. It went on like this for days, weeks. Perhaps longer—even now, I’m not certain how long I was with her. Even now, that time is like a dream.

It was some time before I realized she had left me, that she was not coming back. I didn’t believe it when she told me she was going, you see, because I no longer trusted what I saw in her eyes, or who I was speaking to: her, or my father. It was weeks before my strength returned to me, before I woke one morning to see the sun streaming through curtains I hadn’t had the will to close, before I smelled the rotting oranges on the table, before I saw mold growing like a skin on a cup of half-drunk coffee.

She left me nothing but a small leather sack full of coins, as if I were a whore to be paid. The note she left with it was written on a scrap of paper torn from the corner of a poem I’d written. Five words:
Take this and take care.
I pitched the note in the fireplace, into dead coals. I took the money and the sheaf of poems I’d written. I left the apartment, but I didn’t leave Paris. I should have left. I should have forgotten about her.

But I could not rid myself of the scent of her. I could not just let it go. She had turned me inside out, and I was looking to find myself again, to find the words that eluded me. I was convinced she was the key. If I could find her, I would write again. I had never been so inspired as I was with her, and I wanted that again. With her help, I knew I could be the man I was meant to be.

I went through the motions of my life as it had been before she came into it. I spent time with my friends, I got drunk. But other women left me cold. I wanted only her. And then a group of us went to the exhibition at the Salon. We stumbled into a room where people were gathered reverently around one work. It was large, probably four feet by six, in a gilded frame. I waited my turn to see it, growing impatient at how silently people looked at it, how struck they seemed, the way they tore themselves away as if they’d been under a spell. And then, finally, a group left and my friends and I surged toward it to take their place. When I saw it, I understood what had kept everyone so spellbound, why they stared in unabashed adoration.

It was a portrait of her.

The artist had captured her perfectly, playful and sensuous, captivating, and he’d done it in a way I’d never seen, with brushstrokes and a technique so new and vibrant I knew she’d inspired him as she inspired me in the beginning.

I knew the painting would be famous. I knew it would still be spoken of in a hundred years, two hundred. She had given him what she hadn’t given me: fame, immortality, and I knew—though of course it made no sense at all, it wasn’t the least bit rational—that she’d withheld such things from me deliberately.

I discovered the artist’s name and left the exhibition in a fury. I searched him out, knowing that where he was, she would be too. But when I arrived at his studio, it was only to find him distraught and disheveled. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in days.

“She has left me,” he said to my query. He pointed to the canvases scattered about the room, all of them half finished, all of them bearing her likeness. “Three days ago, God save me! If you find her, please . . . bring her back to me. I need her. I will die without her.”

“You don’t know where she’s gone?”

He shook his head. “She promised to be my inspiration forever. She promised it, if I would give myself to her.”

I had been turning to go, but something about his words caught me; something I remembered. I frowned, searching for the echo. “She said that?” I asked slowly. “She promised to stay?”

The artist dragged his hand through his hair, leaving streaks of paint. In despair, he said, “She told me she could bring me fame. She said my work would be known forever. What else should I have done? I loved her. She was my muse! Should I not have taken the bargain?”

Now I remembered her stories of Keats, of Byron, of the woman who had inspired them, the offer she had made. “What bargain? What bargain did you make with her?”

He pointed again to the canvases. Tears filled his eyes. “How beautiful she is! How could I say no?”

I left him there with his unfinished canvases and his dreams of her, the stories she’d told me ringing in my ears. Byron’s story. The woman in Venice.
She inspired him to immortal genius. And in return? Why, his soul, of course.

It was impossible. It couldn’t be. Byron had died more than forty years ago, Keats before that. She wasn’t old enough to have known either of them. She could not be the woman in the story. It defied all logic.

But the idea plagued me. I haunted the streets of Paris, mulling over every word she’d ever said to me, certain there was something there to find, something to help me make sense of this puzzle. The artist exhibited nothing else; I began to hear stories of his despair, and I thought of his unfinished canvases. I thought of Byron not finishing
Don Juan.
God, what nonsense! Such bargains were only fiction, Faustian tales; there could be nothing real in it.

I lost track of her. It seemed she had simply disappeared, but I was obsessed. I did not forget her. It was two years before I heard of her again. Everyone was talking of Vienna, of a composer there and his new opera that had astounded all who’d heard it. The fever to see it moved through Paris like a storm. It was about a woman of great mystical power, a muse like no other muse. It was said to be based on truth, that there was such a woman, the composer’s inspiration.

I knew who it must be. Who else?

By then, I’d published my second book of poetry, the poems I’d written under her spell. The reviews, again, were good. Better than for my first, though some spoke of a certain weakness in the rhymes. But I had written nothing new since she’d left me, and the months had brought me only frustration. It was her fault, I knew, that the poems I’d written weren’t good enough, that I could not collect my thoughts enough to write again. My anger with her grew. I wanted back the talent she’d taken from me. I wanted answers. But more than that, I wanted her. The publication brought me a little more money, and so I set off for Vienna to hunt down the opera’s composer, to find her.

When I went to his rooms, he was bent over a pianoforte, sheaves of paper strewn across it, the polished wood dotted with ink. His eyes were bleary; as sleepless as the painter’s had been, as mine. He said to me with a despairing hope, “You know her? Ah, then, you know why I must have her back. To bury myself within her again—she did not tell me she would go! It wasn’t part of the bargain! I didn’t know!”

The bargain, again.

“Where did she go?” I asked.

He could not tell me. I left him with his despair.

I stayed in Vienna, waiting to hear of someone else, some new sensation, rumors of another sublime work that would change the way we looked at everything. My obsession with her invaded every hour, my resentment grew like a disease within me. What had she seen in them that she hadn’t seen in me? She had given the painter and the composer a fame that would outlive them; their names would be spoken with reverence throughout time. It was what I’d wanted for myself, what I had always wanted. But she had not offered it to me. I needed to know why.

That such thoughts were absurd escaped me; I was no longer rational. I had no idea then what she truly was, but she began to take on an otherworldly power. I was by then so certain she had been Keats’s and Byron’s muse that I no longer even asked myself how it could be possible for a woman to inspire a poet who’d died before she was born.

Then I began to hear of Florence. Everyone wanted to go there suddenly; they spoke of dreams and visions. It was the sign I had been looking for. I had no doubt she was there. The only question was whether I would once again be too late.

I found myself in Florence in the middle of the summer. As always, I ingratiated myself into a new crowd, and I began to hear the rumors of a beautiful woman who was cutting a swath through the city’s artistic crowd. I met a mediocre musician who’d had her—
you would not believe this one, my friend. I could not stay . . . she exhausted me
—and an immature sculptor—
What breasts! To capture such a thing in marble . . . oh, but her beauty was too much for me.
In the beginning, I was jealous; I could not believe these hacks had touched her. But then I realized that she had made none of them the offer she’d made the artist in Paris or the Viennese composer. They were like me.

I did not want to think about what we had in common. I kept looking for her, and then, one night, in a crowded saloon, I found her. Her beauty stunned, as always. Despite my obsession with tracking her down, I had not thought what I would do if I saw her again, what I would say. I suppose there was a part of me that believed I never would. When she caught sight of me, she turned to leave. I dropped my drink in my haste to get through the crowd and out the door.

I grabbed her arm; her scent came to me in a cloud that knocked me back. My desire for her rose as heedlessly as it ever had. I pulled her into the alley, pressed her to the wall. I was rough and unthinking. I wanted to hurt her. But her expression was unyielding—she gave me nothing, even when I kissed her. The aphrodisiac of her surged through me, but with it came the vision of my impotence when she’d left me. My weakness, my humiliation. My desire withered; I pulled away only to see contempt in her eyes.

“Why?” I heard myself asking, demanding. “Why them? Why not me?”

And she said in words made even more brutal by her gentleness and compassion, “You haven’t enough talent to change the world,
cheri
.”

The words resonated, I heard within them every review I’d ever received, my father’s criticisms. She told a truth I did not want to hear. When she pulled away and left me, I let her go.

I went back to the artists gathered at the table I’d just left, the musician and the sculptor, the club of cast-offs I’d somehow joined without knowing it. Hacks, I’d called them—and here I was, one of them. I drank until the world swam before me. I listened to them talk about her latest conquest—a writer—though I remember little else about that night, or the next two. I only know that when I woke three days later to a just-risen sun, the effects of the drink lingering in a blistering headache and nausea, I was in a courtyard I didn’t know, collapsed near a well. I crawled to it on my knees, ragingly thirsty, and dragged on the rope for the bucket. The rope caught, and I cursed and went to the edge to drag loose whatever held it. I looked down into the dank, dark depths only to see a face looking back at me, pale and wide-eyed and bloated. I thought at first it was my reflection, but then realized with a shock that it was not, that it was a drowned body, and one I thought I knew.

Bits and pieces of the nights before came to me then, but I pushed them away; I didn’t want to see. I staggered to my feet and left that cursed place, stumbling back to my rooms, falling upon the bed and into sleep, into a nightmare where I watched her through a window, listening to her cries of pleasure, seeing her shapely legs grasping the hips of the man driving into her, a vision that melted into dark stairs and a courtyard, a man with his head in his hands, a despair I could not lighten.

I woke sweating and sick. When I heard, later that day, that the man in the well had been found, and that he had been her latest lover—the writer—I was not surprised to realize I already knew.

It had been a suicide. That one, and yes, the sculptor too, who cried into his beer as we talked of her and then jumped from the balcony. I began to haunt the galleries of Florence, searching for something I did not even know. It was there I saw the painting that cast all my gnawing suspicions into illumination. It was by Canaletto, one of his iconic views, this one simpler than the others, a Venetian garden, and a woman sitting on a marble bench. Her gray eyes seemed to leap off the canvas, to follow me wherever I went. Her face was as familiar to me as my own. It was Odilé, unmistakably.

The painting was more than one hundred and fifty years old.

I returned to my rooms and dug through the books I carried with me always, among which was a small volume of Keats that included “Lamia
.”
I searched feverishly through it for the poem, and when I found it I pounced upon the lines I’d quoted to her, the ones about Lamia being a demon’s mistress, or a demon herself. I read what Keats had written of her
gordian shape of dazzling hue
, her serpent’s coils before she’d transformed herself into a woman, her startling beauty.
For so delicious were the words she’d sung, it seem’d he had lov’d them a whole summer long.
I read the code within those words now. I knew what Keats spoke of was what I knew about her myself, her beauty and her lies.