Psyche (25 page)

Seeing the brilliance of her smile, Nick knew a fleeting compunction. Then, with a mental shrug, he decided that if she needed a fiction of this sort to sustain her, there was no harm in her having one. That he had given her, instead of a temporary reassurance, something of lasting consequence, he did not know then, and never did know.

“Well,” he said, “are you ready to pose again?”

Psyche nodded. “I'm not at all tired now.”

“Good. On two counts. You said that like a lady who wouldn't recognize an ‘ain't' if she tripped over one.”

“I know it,” Psyche said demurely. She knew too, as she again took up the pose that was becoming almost second nature to her, that she now really liked this man. Without moving her head even a fraction of an inch, her glance slid sideways to watch him as he set to work again, and she thought, “I would go on liking him even if I didn't like him”—and knew exactly what she meant by the apparent contradiction.

Later, when the day's work was ended, when the mellow light of sunset muted the gaudy fresco of colours on Nick's palette, she turned from the model's stand toward the great north window. Her elbows resting on the edge of an open section, her chin cupped in her hands, she knew that she was happier, more at peace with herself, than she had ever been.

Watching the summer evening close in over a scene that, though now familiar, still seemed scarcely believable, she knew that she would remember it oftenest as it was just then, with the first star glowing above the dark lace of tree-tops sharply outlined against a cloudless, slowly darkening sky.

“Venus.”

Psyche did not turn her head. “Yes, Nick?”

“Have we any more rags anywhere?”

Laughter threaded itself through her reply. “Plenty. In a drawer in the kitchen.”

“What the devil's so amusing?”

Looking around, seeing his frowning face, she said, still laughing, “Sunset. Rags. Nothin' at all.”

Contemplating her, he said slowly, “You've changed since you came here. How long is it? Three weeks—four?”

“I'll get your rags for you,” Psyche told him, no longer even smiling.

Every other day Nick left the studio to go into a neighbouring village to buy food. Psyche, while he was gone, would wash dishes and prepare the meals for the day.

The first time he left her alone, he paused at the top of the staircase, and said, “You won't run away while I'm gone, Venus?”

“Where would I run to?”

The hazel eyes smiled. “You have a point there. I won't be gone long.”

On these occasions he never was away long, but later on he quite often left her alone in the evenings, and twice he was away all night. He offered neither excuse nor explanation for these absences, and Psyche asked for none. She missed him, but not acutely, and the studio was a place in which she never felt lonely, where she had no cause to be uneasy, and where she could occupy herself for any given length of time.

She would clean house, enjoying the texture as well as the sight of objects that all had quality. She would study and restudy an art gallery of which she never tired. And she would carefully press and sponge any article in her wardrobe that she had worn even once. That she had as many clothes as she did was due not to over-generosity on Nick's part, but to the fact that on rainy days—when the light was not right for work on what he now called
The American Venus
—he did sketches of her to be incorporated later in magazine illustrations. He never asked her to pose in the nude because he considered nude paintings to be as
devoid of personality as they were of clothing, and it was the individuality of her beauty that made her so valuable to him.

On the evenings when he stayed at the studio, and this was of tener than not, he insisted that they each turn into their respective beds as soon as it was fully dark.

“A Venus with blue circles under her eyes is not—although there are those who would undoubtedly find this pleasantly suggestive—what I have in mind at the moment,” he told her.

In the twilit hours between dinner and dusk, more content in each other's company than either of them realized, they rarely did anything at all constructive. Sometimes they merely sat in chairs pushed back from the gate-leg table at which they had eaten, smoking and making desultory conversation; a way of putting in time for Nick; a further exploration of the English language for Psyche. Sometimes they strolled around the perimeter of the big field, the twin glow of their cigarettes not dissimilar to the fireflies that haunted the long, dew-soaked grass. Very often these walks would bring them eventually to the car, where Nick would turn on the radio. Then, he lounging in the front seat and Psyche stretched on a rug on the ground so that she might look up at the stars, they would listen to music that, no matter what its tempo, seemed to her to emanate from some heavenly rather than earthly source; music that, though fuller and clearer in tone, yet seemed in many ways as remote as the long-lost melodies of an ancient gramophone whose loss she still, on occasion, regretted.

In this way a warm June drifted into a warmer July, and Nick and Psyche drifted closer to a moment that neither of them anticipated.

The rich green of the field became yellowed by the summer suns; daisies and buttercups gave way to goldenrod and everlasting; and “The American Venus” emerged, an almost living perfection, from a once dead canvas.

Cynic and unbeliever though he was, Nick felt, as he worked, something very like reverence, for he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that what he was doing with eye and hand, brush and palette, was destined to become immortal.

Psyche realized that he was satisfied with the painting, but she had no conception of the depth of that satisfaction; for, although he often talked while he painted, a running monologue more colourful than the colours on his palette, he never at any time touched on anything personal to himself.

“Now you take Van Gogh——” he would begin, and a well-informed commentary on the times, works, and idiosyncrasies of the painter would consume anything from ten minutes to an hour.

Or it might be artists in general who were the subject of his dissertation. “Free Souls we're called by a proletariat wallowing in its own abysmal ignorance. Free! My God, an artist's body and soul are in fetters from the day he is bom until the day he dies. He lives for his work, nothing else ever counts. Not wine, women, or song. Look at
us
, Venus. How many of the damn fools would believe that I am interested only in painting you? None of them. Your head is down a quarter of an inch. Because they're fleshly nincompoops themselves, they believe everyone else is. They have no comprehension of art for art's sake. They credit us with all the sins in the decalogue, with orgies that would make your beautiful hair stand on end.”

“What are orgies, Nick?”

“Don't ask me. I'm just a hard-working artist who wouldn't have the slightest idea. How many times do I have to tell you not to talk while you're posing?”

“It ain't easy when you——”

“Look, Venus, I'll throw something at you if you don't keep quiet. And, for the love of God, don't ever say ‘ain't' again in my hearing. I thought you had learned better by now.”

A day arrived when Psyche judged her position strong enough to rebel against the injustice of being eternally on the receiving end of a one-sided conversation.

A not sufficiently silent audience to an uninhibited lecture on the private life of Toulouse-Lautrec, she had been told twice, and in no uncertain terms, to hold her tongue, when, to Nick's utter astonishment, she simply stepped down from the stand and walked away from it.

“You're damned unfair,” she said coolly. Then, without another word, she took her old, dismembered Bible from the bookcase where she kept it, sank with unconscious grace onto a low hassock, and calmly began to read.

For once rendered speechless, Nick looked at her partially averted face, and seeing no more emotion than he had read in her voice, realized that he had received a reproof requiring more than a temporary apology. Suppressing an impulse to swear at her, he felt in his pockets for cigarettes, while an at first unwilling smile erased the dark frown that had preceded it.

“Well—well,” he murmured.

Psyche paid no attention to him. Her soft white draperies, falling from bare shoulders, remained unstirred by any movement. She was reading Joshua. When “the sun stood still” she never failed to find it a credible phenomenon. There had been times, with midsummer heat trapped in the slag hills, when she had almost believed the sun stood still again, so gradually had it moved beyond the heavy copper haze.

“Can't you find something more topical to read than that?”

Psyche, wise enough to recognize an olive branch when offered, looked up. “1 have nothing else.”

Nick's reply was a sweeping gesture that encompassed three well-filled bookcases. “You are fasting in the midst of plenty.”

“But they're yours.”

“I don't glue them to the shelves. Help yourself.”

Unwilling to ask him for anything he did not offer, Psyche, much as she had wanted to, had never at any time touched his books. Now, laying aside her Bible, she began to examine the contents of the bookcase within her reach at the moment.

Without further comment, Nick waited for her reaction.

The sixth book into which she had looked open on her lap, she said with obvious disappointment. “But they're all artists and pictures. Nothing else.”

“That doesn't mean they'll poison you, does it?”

“They just don't mean anything to me, that's all. For instance, who's this Rubbins? Do you like his stuff? Is it any good?”

Running his hands through his hair, Nick looked down at the
top of her blonde head with amused exasperation. “Rubbins— Rubbins! What in hell are you blithering about, my impossibly ignorant young Venus?”

“It says Rubbins right here. Look for yourself, if you don't believe me.”

Leaning over, Nick said, “Ah—yes, Rubens.
Susannah and the Elders
. A masterpiece.”

“You mean it's good? All I see is a nasty old guy peering through some leaves at a fat girl with nothin' on.”

“Heaven help me! I suppose it would be too much to expect you to refer to him as a lecherous old gentleman, but surely, surely you can manage to say nothing.”

Psyche smiled. “You're teasing me.”

“Never.”

“Honestly—do you really like this picture?”

“Since you specifically ask for honesty, I am compelled to say that I do not. But I admire it. Enormously.”

“Why?”

“You ask a devil of a lot of questions, Venus. Must I have a stated reason?”

“There's a reason for everything, isn't there?”

“Oh wise young judge! The technique is flawless, and the skin tones reminiscent of the work of the incomparable Titian.”

“Tech-nique,” Psyche repeated faithfully. “What does that mean? And who is Titian?”

Nick looked at his painted Venus, and then back to the living counterpart who was causing him so much more trouble. Forcing continued patience upon himself, he said mildly, “It will be noon in another half-hour, Venus. Don't you think you could call a halt, to your barrage of questions until after lunch?”

Psyche's sceptical eyes, and the tilt of her head, told him before she spoke that she recognized the evasion for what it was. “You mean that you will be ready to answer questions after lunch?”

Nick's nod was a promise, but an ungracious one.

Inwardly Psyche knew an intense satisfaction. To have allowed this to become apparent would have been a mistake. “Please—
Nick. I have to learn something sometime. You know so much, and I—well, I have to know things, too.”

“Do you? Perhaps you do. Though I can assure you that with what you've got you won't find advanced education essential to your success in life.”

Psyche did something then that she had never done before in her life. Of her own initiative, she put her hand on someone. “Please. I'm serious.”

The slender hand resting lightly on his bare forearm, and the wistful, husky voice, together made an appeal that he suddenly found it impossible to resist. “All right, Venus,” he said gently, “we'll make a gentleman's agreement, you and I. In future I will devote one precious, irreplacable hour of every mortal day to answering all questions, suitable or unsuitable, on or pertaining to my own particular field. In return you will contract to keep your lovely trap shut while you are posing.”

Her hand increased its pressure for an instant before its warmth was withdrawn. “Thank you, Nick.”

For the rest of the morning Psyche stood in the exact position that she had held for four or five hours a day for what was now more than six weeks, and Nick concentrated with his customary fervour on the work that he loved more than anything else the world could offer him. Outwardly nothing had changed. Nevertheless, their battle of wills, and the manner in which Psyche had won it, marked a subtle but very definite change in their relationship. Nick continued to treat her for the most part with an amused tolerance, but it was no longer the kind of tolerance he might have shown to a child. Psyche, on her part, made an even greater effort than before to conform to the standards of speech and manners which he represented, without realizing, however, that she was now doing it to please him as well as herself.

The siesta hour, as Nick ironically called it, became a part of the day to which she looked forward from the moment she got up in the morning. Receptive to fresh knowledge of any kind, she became for the time being almost as interested as Nick himself in the subject that he never really tired of talking about.

Velasquez, Goya, Frans Hals, Tintoretto, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
Titian, Rembrandt—at one time and another he talked to her at length about all of them, gave her demonstrations of their various brush strokes, and explained and analyzed colour plates of their works. To Psyche, these painters and many others became personalities never to be forgotten, their individual styles usually recognizable at a glance.