The Secret Book of Paradys (84 page)

He stayed for the last act. As he watched her on the stage, he wondered if it would be possible to strike a bargain with her. She was, he thought, primarily a woman of business. She had no heart, only some dainty, strong silver clockwork that ticked away in its place. Her own talents would gain her whatever it was she desired. But she would presumably like money, provided it were coated with delicacy, offered via a placid etiquette, to match her own.

He grasped exactly the spirit of Valmé’s past from the very little she had told him. She had had to work for everything she found valuable. She had never had to work for the attentions of Michael Zwarian.

The affair of Yshtar with Michael Zwarian was somewhat talked of, as was inevitable. (Valmé’s attachment to him had scarcely been noticed.) Meanwhile, he did not see Valmé, although he sent her a very courteous letter, explaining that although he would not be intruding on her time, he was, should she want his assistance, always her servant and her friend. With the letter he sent no form of money or expensive present, which she would have disliked, only a basket of fruit and flowers. This the artist painted. In reply she sent him a letter even more courteous than his own. If he had tried to frighten her with the loud whiff of desertion, she seemed not to mind it. She thought of him most warmly, she said, and with gratitude for his many generosities. She did not think she would need to call upon his assistance,
but as a friend she would always remember him, and wished him well as such.

Zwarian was not yet daunted. He had expected nothing else. Nevertheless, even expecting nothing else, perhaps he had
hoped
for something else. Would Valmé, hearing of his attentions to the actress, fastidiously brush him off the cuff of her life? He did not actually enjoy the sense of manipulating her. He became impatient, and sequentially, a few hours after, the lover of Yshtar.

There was a summer storm of great force. The sky cracked and roared and pieces of it seemed to fall dazzling in the canal. Seen through the casement wavered by the downpour, the water boiled in the rain, while on the skylight of the artist’s studio a herd of crystal beasts galloped ceaselessly by.

She had lit the lamps, it grew so dark. And yet the energy of the tempest, penetrating like a germ, sizzled in the air. Restlessly she paced from the fluttering dimness of the studio to the angle of the bedroom, longing perhaps to run out into the cauldron of wet and galvanism. But some veneer of decorum did not let her now, when three years before, probably, she would have had no scruple.

How strange. Surely she had avoided convention. What had changed her? Could it be her short time with Zwarian had done this? Insidious, then, maybe to be feared. It was as well he had, after all, grown tired of her and taken up with his actress.

The rain stabbed down. It wounded the canal over and over.

Valmé conceded that she was becoming absorbed by the idea of the woman called Yshtar. She found she thought of her often, and never having seen her, formulated idle pictures, both mental and on paper, of her appearance from description. There was, it seemed to Valmé, a momentary intimacy between them. For Zwarian had known the flesh of Valmé, and now embraced the flesh of Yshtar, and this provided an infallible, if curious, link, as though indeed the two women had lain together face to face and breast to breast, naked on a bed. There was to this nothing either sensual or homosexual. Yet it was immediate, and constant. How can a man take the impress of a lover and not carry away some of it, like the mark a shell will leave in sand, which the new consort must sense stroke against her, as they couple?

Perhaps she should visit the theater, and watch Yshtar at her trade. That would be difficult, however, without an escort – and of course now she had none. Besides the vapid sugar of the plays in which Yshtar practiced did not appeal to Valmé.

The rain continued through the night. It washed the heat from Paradys,
down her towers, along her roofs and walls, and through her gutters, Unseasonably cool, the morning.

Five weeks after Zwarian had left her, held in that season of cool and filmy weather, another letter was brought to Valmé. It was not vulgar, not scented, and yet a reflex in the handwriting gave it away. Before she opened it, the artist knew she had hold of something of Yshtar’s.

“Mademoiselle, it has been suggested to me that it would be useful to my career at this time to have painted a portrait of myself. Your name in turn was recommended, the freshness of your work, its faithful yet unflattering likenesses, which I have myself seen and been moved by. Your fee is yours to state. My agent will attend to that. I hope most sincerely that you will be able to undertake the commission, and trust that you will not find it inconvenient if I call on you tomorrow at the hour of eleven in the morning. I am, mademoiselle, very truly yours.
Yshtar
.”

There was no question or offer of evasion. Like an empress, the actress presented herself, inescapable, and sensitively tactful as only such authority demanded.

Then again, Valmé had no wish to evade. To her slight surprise, her pulse had quickened. She was to meet, here in her “cave,” her lover’s lover. She was to see her, hear her voice, was to be given indeed the ultimate power over her, that of painting her picture.

Could it be Yshtar knew nothing of her connection to Valmé? Or had she too been drawn to see the ghost of the shell?

Rain was falling, and the City was a wet slate where nothing could be written, when Yshtar’s carriage entered the yard below the apartment. Shielded by a manservant’s white umbrella, Yshtar entered the building. Five minutes later she stood in the L-shaped room.

“It’s very kind that you should allow me to call.”

“You gave me little choice,” said Valmé quietly.

“My God, is that how it struck you? I’m sorry. If you prefer, I’ll return another day.” Yshtar too was quiet and composed. Naturally, she said without a word, I must remain.

“Naturally, you must remain,” said Valmé. “Do sit down. Will you take coffee or tea?”

“A small glass of kirschvasser, if you have it.”

“I do,” said Valmé. She kept the liqueur on her sideboard in the corner opposite the bed. Had Zwarian told?

Yshtar wore a pale-gray dress, white gloves, a hat with a smoke of feathers. In her ears were silver chains of pearls. That was all. Her skin and hair,
her garments, were in accordance with the weather.
How does she garb herself in the heat of summer? In winter
?

After they had sat in silence a long while, the actress sipping her drink, Valmé coiled in her chair, studying her, Yshtar finally spoke. “Will you be able to grant my request?”

“Probably. I must discuss the fee with your agent.”

“I have his card here with me.” The white glove laid the small card on a table, where it might be picked up or not as the artist chose.

“Why,” said Valmé, ignoring the card, “are you disposed to favor me? My name’s scarcely well known.”

“Perhaps,” said Yshtar, with total un-bad taste, “I can make your name for you.”

“Yes, that’s a chance. You’re very beautiful and your bones would be a challenge to anyone, and your pallor. One of the oldest exercises, mademoiselle, is to paint a still-life, lilies, and clear glass on a plain table napkin. White on white. Who,” said Valmé, “is the portrait for?”

“For myself. But obviously the theatrical management is interested in it. A classical play, something in the Greek mode. Will that be possible?”

“You would make,” said Valmé, as if hypnotized, “a sensational Antigone. But could there be songs in such a play?” she added to insult.

“They would be written especially,” said Yshtar, implacable. “But you must be a reader of minds, mademoiselle. That’s the very part.”

Valmé said, “You’ll hang at the end.”

“Off stage,” said Yshtar.

Valmé thought her a worthy opponent. She gestured to the bottle of kirschvasser, the bowl of almonds. Disappointing her, Yshtar shook her head. She said, like a princess, “I may come to you, then?”

Valmé felt a deep masculine surge. Again, it was not sexual, but it caught her, was not deniable.

“I’ll look forward to it, mademoiselle. Whenever you wish.”

“Tomorrow,” said Yshtar.

“Tomorrow.”

She sat for her portrait for two hours almost every day, between noon and two o’clock. If she was unable to attend the studio, a message was brought around at about ten. Valmé became apprehensive until this hour was passed. Then she would begin her preparations. At twelve, Yshtar would manifest in the doorway. Her clothes were never the same, but for the sitting she would put on, behind the ebony screen (while Valmé prepared coffee), the Antigone costume, with its clusters of unreal but creamy pearls, its darted pleats. Her flax hair was already in the Grecian mode.

They spoke very occasionally throughout the sessions. Yshtar might eat a candied fruit, sip coffee or water – never again the social kirschvasser.

Valmé wore always the same dark smock, striped with tines of chalk, clay, oils.

They never mentioned Zwarian.

The painting, beginning like a scatter of pastel seeds, the faint outlines of the map of a garden, gradually blossomed out in tones and contours, colors and form.

Valmé was excited by the canvas. It seemed to her the finest thing she had fashioned. She would not let her sitter see the work; Yshtar obeyed this stricture without a hint of unease. When the actress was gone, punctually always at two, Valmé would labor on at the picture, perfecting, exacting from memory every iota she had missed in present time. In the night, wakened by rain upon the skylight, she would get up, light a lamp, prowl about the picture, the brush in her hand.

She has known all along that he and I were lovers. Didn’t she place before me the clue of the liqueur? And how else had she heard of me?

At three in the morning, under her lamplit parasol of roof and rain, Valmé stood considering the portrait she made of Yshtar. Soon – four more sittings? – it would be done. The task would be over. And what then?

As the artist worked, the actress sat, each woman had maintained her trance, with only those occasional movements, words. Now and then, Valmé had crossed the room to rearrange a pleat of the Antigone dress, to draw a highlight onto a coil of hair or jewel. The body of the actress she never touched. She was not afraid of the firm muscles and damask effect of Yshtar’s skin. But it was as if she knew Yshtar through. It was as if Yshtar were her own self, a reflection: altered, new, the same. And Michael Zwarian the pane of glass that separated yet made each one accessible to the other.

Shall I confront her? What shall I ask?

How beautiful she was, there was no need to be beautiful oneself if such stars rose from the mass of humanity.

Valmé studied the lines of the painting. As she had studied the face. As if in a magical spell. Surely, surely she had captured the soul of Yshtar.

Standing before the conjuration of her own sorcery, Valmé felt start up in her a winding wave, emotion, thought, part unidentifiable. She had never felt it, its like, before. She clenched her fists, and in the right of these the sturdy paintbrush, pointed forward like a weapon, snapped and splintered. Valmé gazed after it, amazed.

Jealousy. It had come to her at last. The eternal beast, the creature of the shade by the glim of whose eyes all things are made freshly visible. Could it be?

Why ask her anything? I have her here
.

Valmé remembered a story she had illustrated, in which a cheated lover, a great portraitist, had thrust into the painting of his mistress the knife for grating colors.

The women of Valmé’s world were real. Through the truth of Yshtar, Valmé had found the way, by night, onto the shining terrible path of actual feeling.

Suddenly she let out a cry. Through the mirror of Yshtar, she saw what she had lost. The tears ran down her face, as the natural rain poured in the water of the canal.

Four, five further sittings arrived, were. And had ended.

“And may I see my painting now, mademoiselle?”

“No … Not yet. If you’ll be patient just a little longer. Some further details that are best worked on alone. And then,” said Valmé.

“But, mademoiselle,” said Yshtar, the first time that Valmé had known her arch – perhaps a method kept for inferior opponents – “I shall start to wonder what you’re hiding.”

Valmé said, with pain, “You’re too beautiful, mademoiselle, to have any qualms. The only danger would be that I’d paint only your beauty and not yourself. But I don’t think I’ve failed you there. You’ll be able to judge quite soon. Let me get all as perfect as I can before you look. If you’d be kind enough to return tomorrow, say –”

“Alas, not feasible. Rehearsals begin for the new play. You will have to send the portrait to the theater. Tomorrow? My agent can arrange the means. What hour would be suitable?”

“But then,” said Valmé, “I shan’t know if you’re pleased with what I’ve done –”

“You’re too modest. I have no doubts,” said Yshtar, dusting off the weeks of their duality so it scattered in tiny motes about the room.

Valmé must say, “Four o’clock would suit me.”

A minute more and the actress was gone. Her carriage was gone. The rain filled up the spaces.

Valmé knew a feverish tension. The last vestige of Michael had been drawn out like a thread from a needle. She had let it go, could not have held on to it. For Yshtar had long since become Michael. She had brought him to the studio tinted on her fresh skin, smoothly tangled in her hair and breath. Yshtar’s lips had caressed him. Her arms had held him. Now everything was gone.

What shall I do?

Valmé stared at the painting, which needed no further work – to work further upon it would be to mar, to unmake.

Taking up paper and a crayon, she began to draw the face of Michael
Zwarian, to sketch with now unsure lines his body. She blushed as she did so.

What would follow? Enormities of time, and she adrift in them. There were two commercial commissions. She glanced at them in a sort of scorn, for what could they be to her now?