The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque Read online

  Ryder sold his work when there were buyers, but he worked regardless of money, toiling to capture those things in paint that could not be expressed in words. By all accounts he was a strange fellow, somewhat shy and retiring, who used anything at hand on his paintings—alcohol, candle wax, varnish, oil. When his brushes failed him, he supposedly used the palette knife to spread thick gobs of paint. When the knife failed him, he used his hands, and when the varnish did not bring forth the quality he desired, it was said he used his own spit. He would paint a picture and, before it dried, paint another over it. I would not say he was naive, but when I met him I sensed a palpable innocence about him. With his calm demeanor, his large stature and full beard, he struck me as being like a biblical prophet.

  I remembered encountering one of his seascapes when I was a young apprentice to my mentor, M. Sabott. It was of a small boat in a wild ocean, and it radiated the overwhelming power of Nature and the courage of the insignificant sailor in the prow. Sabott, who stood next to me, labeled it a muddle. “This fellow is like a baby painting with his own shit upon the nursery wall. The sign of a master is restraint,” he said, and for some time that assessment stuck with me when I would happen upon one of his canvases at Cottier & Co., his gallery, or at one of the juried shows. Sabott may have had a point, but oh, to be that baby once again and revel in that singular vision, ignoring the Reeds of the world and their wealth.

  An acquaintance of Ryder’s had once quoted to me something the painter had written to him in a letter. It went like this: “Have you ever seen an inchworm crawl up a leaf or twig, and then, clinging to the very end, revolve for a moment in the air, feeling for something, to reach something? That’s like me. I am trying to find something out there beyond the place on which I have a footing.”

  I made a left at Twenty-first Street and headed toward my address, realizing that this was precisely what I needed. The trick was to reach beyond the safety of my present existence and rediscover myself as an artist. My only fear was that in reaching out, I might grasp nothing. I had already surmounted the crest of my years and begun on the denouement. Or let us say, I could feel the quickening wind in my thinning hair. What if I were to fail and on top of it lose my position as one of the most sought after portraitists in New York? I thought again of Ryder’s painting of Death on horseback, and then of the fool who had saved and squandered everything at once. After all my serious contemplation I was more confused than ever. The pursuit of wealth and safety and the pursuit of a kind of moral truth had ingeniously changed horses, so to speak, in midstream. My longing to be other than what I was had risen to the surface, fraught with good intention, and then burst like a bubble in champagne. I shook my head, laughing aloud at my predicament, and that is when I felt something lightly strike my left shin.

  I looked up to see a man leaning against the wall, and it gave me quite a start. I composed myself and said, “Excuse me, sir,” not without an air of irritation. He withdrew the black walking stick with which he had accosted me, and stepped forward. He was quite large but old, with a short white beard and a ring of white hair forming a perimeter to his otherwise bald scalp. His three-piece suit was pale violet, given interesting undertones of green by the glow of the street lamp near the curb. This unusual play of light took my attention for a moment until I looked him in the face and was startled by the discovery that his eyes had lost the distinction of pupil and iris and clouded to a uniform whiteness.

  “I believe you are the one who signs his paintings Piambo,” he said.

  Anything ill to do with the eyes truly upsets me, and it took me a few moments to recover from the sight of his. “Yes,” I said.

  “Watkin is the name,” he said.

  “And?” I asked, expecting him to put the touch on me for some change.

  “My employer would like to commission you to paint her portrait,” he said in a soft voice that held a hint of menace in its precision.

  “I’m afraid I’m engaged for months to come,” I said, wanting to be on my way.

  “It must be now,” he said. “She will have no other but you.”

  “I admire the good woman’s taste, but I’m afraid I have given my word on these other projects.”

  “This is a job like no other,” he said. “You can name your price. Take all the other commissions you have given your word on, tally the amount you would have received, and she will triple it.”

  “Who is your employer?” I asked.

  He reached into the pocket of his jacket and retrieved a rose-colored envelope. The manner in which he proffered it, not so much to me but to the universe at large, assured me now that he was blind.

  I hesitated, sensing that I did not want to become involved with this Mr. Watkin, but there was something in the way he had said “a job like no other” that made me finally reach out and take it.

  “I will consider it,” I said.

  “Good enough, good enough,” he said, smiling.

  “How did you know to find me here?” I asked.

  “Intuition,” he said. With this, he angled the walking stick out in front of him, turned to face west, and brushed past me. He intermittently tapped the tip of the stick against the building facades as he went.

  “How did you know it was me?” I called after him.

  Before he disappeared into the night, I heard him say, “The smell of self-satisfaction; a pervasive aroma of nutmeg and mold.”

  FIRST WIND OF AUTUMN

  ACCORDING TO my pocket watch it was 2:05 A.M. by the time I finally arrived home. The creak of the door closing behind me echoed faintly through the still rooms. I immediately turned on all the lamps in the parlor and the front hallway (electricity had recently come to Gramercy) and set about building a fire in the main fireplace to offset the sudden appearance of autumn. I threw an extra log on as if to cure the chill that had spread through me from the inside out upon hearing that damn Watkin’s closing remarks. The mold part of his assessment I had a vague understanding of, like a ghost creaking floorboards in the attic of my conscience, but nutmeg? “What in hell does nutmeg have to do with anything?” I said aloud, and shook my head.

  I knew that no matter how late the hour, sleep would not readily come. A nervous tension resulting from the incident at Reed’s and my subsequent crackpot ruminations had left me wide awake, with no recourse but another visit with the demon rum. I picked up a glass, the bottle of whisky, and my cigarettes and retired to my studio, where I always did my best thinking. That vast space was also wired for electricity, but I chose to leave the lamps off and instead light a single candle, hoping the shadows might lull me into weariness.

  The studio, which was attached to the back of my house, was nearly as large as the living quarters. Ironically, it was the wealth that resulted from those portraits I had spent all night disparaging that enabled me to design and have the studio built to my exact specifications. I had included a fireplace to allow me to work there in any season. Three large tables topped with expensive teakwood, which was hard enough to resist the insults of pen nibs, razors, and pallet knives, were positioned around the room. One held my painting equipment; another, the materials I sometimes used to make wax models as studies; and the last, which I did not bother with much anymore, the stones and various inks and solutions for lithographs.

  My drafting board, its surface composed of the same hardwood as the tabletops, was an outlandishly ornate piece of furniture with lion paws for feet and alternating cherub and demon faces decorating the legs. During one of his frequent visits, Shenz had said, “I don’t believe I could muster the presumption to create upon that altar.”

  The most remarkable aspect of the studio was the system of pulleys and gears that operated the overhead skylight. By merely turning a crank handle, I could draw back the ceiling and allow the fresh light of morning to flood the room. When lit by the sun, what with all the materials, the paintings lining the walls, the drips and puddles of bright color everywhere, the place appeared to be a kind of
wonderland of art. That night, though, as I sat there sipping my whisky in the dim glow of the single taper, it showed quite another side. If it were possible to peer through the eye of a madman into the chamber of his mind, it might resemble the shadowed, cluttered mess I now beheld.

  The failed and refused portraits that hung on all four walls of the studio made up the family I had only recently so longed for in my midlife loneliness—a dozen or so of kin, framed, suspended by tacks and wire, glazed into stasis, and composed not of flesh but of dried pigment. The blood of my line was linseed oil and turpentine. It had never before struck me with so much force how poor a substitute they were for the real thing. My own dogged pursuit of fortune had brought me many fine things, but now they all seemed less substantial than the trail of smoke rising from my cigarette. My gaze followed its spiraling upward course, while my mind drew me back and back, rummaging through my memories of earlier days. I sought to recall the precise moment when those seeds were planted that would latently germinate and blossom into the present flower of my discontent.

  My family had come to America from Florence sometime back in the early 1830s and settled on the North Fork of Long Island, which at the time was little more than pasture and wood. The name Piambotto, my full surname, was well known as far back as the Renaissance as belonging to a line of artisans and artists. There is mention in Vasari of a certain Piambotto who had been a famous painter. Although my grandfather had been forced to take up farming when arriving in the New World, he had continued to paint gorgeous landscapes every bit as accomplished as those of Cole or Constable. Until but a few years ago, I would still see his work from time to time at auction or hanging in a gallery. He, of course, retained the name Piambotto, as did my father. It was I, now living in this whirlwind age of truncated moments with an emphasis on brevity, who shortened it. I signed my work Piambo, and to one and all I was Piambo. I don’t believe even my intimate friend, Samantha Rying, knew I had spent my early years speaking Italian and that my first name was really Piero.

  My family moved from the wilds of eastern Long Island to Brooklyn during the building boom that prompted some to think that eventually Manhattan would become merely an addendum to its neighboring borough. My father was an interesting fellow, reminiscent of the ancient Greek Daedalus in that he was a supreme artificer. He was a remarkable draftsman and an equally accomplished inventor who had the ability to give physical form to the varied products of his imagination. I was too young at the time to remember exactly how things transpired, but during the Civil War, because of his renown as a machinist and engineer (he was completely self-taught in both fields), he was solicited by the powers in Washington to create weapons of war for the Union army. In addition to making some parts to, of all things, a submarine, he also designed and built a weapon called the Dragon. It was a kind of cannon that used compressed nitrogen to shoot a stream of oil that was ignited as it spewed forth. It could hurl flames at advancing troops from a distance of twenty yards. I remember having seen it tested and can tell you it was aptly named. This strange piece of artillery was used just once, at the battle of Chinochik Creek, and its results were so horrific that the Union commander given responsibility for its first deployment refused to use it again. He returned it to Washington accompanied by a letter describing the ungodly scene of rebel soldiers “running, screaming, consumed in flames. Human beings melted to skeletons before my eyes, and the stink that hung in the air that day still follows me no matter how far I travel from Chinochik.” He confessed that the conflagration had been as demoralizing to his own troops as it had been to those of the enemy.

  As a result of his invention of the Dragon, my father was invited to New York to receive a medal of honor, as well as his payment, from the military. I, his only child, made this trip with him. It was the first time I was ever in the city, and my head swam with the sights and sounds of the exotic metropolis. We went to a huge building with grand Roman arches, which I have never since been able to find again, and he was given a bag of gold and a medal by a group of mustached men in ribbon-bedecked uniforms. Once the ceremony was over and we were again on the street, he lifted me up and hugged me to him.

  “Come with me, Piero,” he said, and set me down. Taking my hand, he led me swiftly down crowded streets to another building. We entered and passed down long marble corridors lined with paintings. I was dizzy from looking up at them. I begged him to stop and let me examine them more closely, but he pulled me along by the hand, saying, “That is nothing. Come, I will show you.”

  We entered an alcove, and at its center was a fountain that by way of some magical plumbing produced a mournful music. With the fine spray at our backs, he pointed up at M. Sabott’s newly painted masterpiece, The Madonna of the Manticores. The figure of the fair Madonna, whose placid outward gaze evoked a sense of utter calm in me, had no equal for beauty, and every single strand of hair, row of ivory teeth, luminous red eye, and fatal stinger of the weird tripartite beasts prowling at her feet was brimming with the energy of aberrant nature held tenuously in check.

  “Here is something,” he said.

  I was enchanted, and while I stood there with my mouth agape and my eyes wide, he whispered urgently into my ear, “I began life wanting to create something as beautiful as this, but all my time and energy, all my talent, has gone to waste. Now I can only build machines of death for money. I have won battles and in the process lost my soul. Create, Piero,” he told me, clutching me by the shoulders. “Create something beautiful, or life is meaningless.”

  He was to die the following year, when I was eight, cut to ribbons by a weapon he was developing called the Way Down, a self-propelled tornado of shining blades. I had been helping him in his shop that day and was unable to save him. I have erased the horrible imagery of that moment from my mind. Soon after he was buried, I began to draw, trying to capture his likeness so as not to forget it. As a result, I discovered I had inherited my father’s creative ability. My mother encouraged me in this direction as a tribute to the husband she had loved.

  I believe his spirit has somehow followed me through life, because years later, by a strange coincidence, I was to become the apprentice of M. Sabott, artist of The Madonna of the Manticores, as I am sure my father would have wished. Perhaps it was not the Reeds and their pitiful situation or the champagne or chandelier or even Watkin that had set me on this course of thought, but my father, from the night’s plutonian shore, sending me a message imbued with such importance that it succeeded in leaping the chasm between life and death and traveling to me on the first wind of autumn.

  My evening finally ended with the bottle half empty. I was bleary-eyed and my head hurt, but I remembered to blow out the guttering candle. I went to my bedroom, undressed, and lay down. The birds had begun to sing across the street in the park, and for a few moments I studied an interesting pattern on the wall projected by the moon shining through lace curtains.

  In my sleep I had a most disturbing dream of watching my father being rent to pieces by M. Sabott’s manticores. It was so vivid, so immediate, I woke with a scream to the light of the sun now streaming through the lace. My mouth was dry and my head thick from the alcohol and cigarettes. I felt nauseated, but it did not stop me from scrabbling out of bed. I went directly into the parlor and found the jacket I had worn the previous night. Digging into the pocket, I retrieved the rose-colored envelope Watkin had handed me. I tore it open and pulled out a sheet of paper of the same rose color. On it, written in a looping style, was an address. I recalled the old man telling me “a job like no other” and in that instant decided I would take it.

  MY PATRON

  IF I had gone about things intelligently, I would have waited to meet my mysterious new patron before severing the agreements I had made with those already in line for my services. This was a bold move on my part; bolder than I had at first given myself credit for. With each missive I penned, gracefully disengaging myself from my promises, a new and stronger wave of doubt passed thr
ough me, and my hand quaked slightly as I signed the last of them. All I could picture was that hapless hotel waiter at the betting window, placing all his money on an oat-burning nag incapable of winning any race but the one to the glue factory. Still, there was a certain thrill that also came along with the act, and although I felt disaster hard upon my heels, the future swept open like a door before me. As I stepped through into a nebulous world of light, that which had a moment before been an entrance suddenly became the solitary exit. It slammed shut behind me, and all my nervous agitation was instantly replaced by a sense of calm, as though I were now floating among the clouds like a kite.

  My tether, as it were, was my plan, if you could call it that. I would take Mr. Watkin’s employer’s commission, do the work to the best of my ability, craft any portrait the sitter required, and then collect the promised enormous payment. With the promised amount—triple what I had expected to receive over the next year—I would be free to pursue my muse without want for quite a long time. The prospect of overthrowing the tyranny of vanity, of actually painting something other than a face trembling with the exertion of proving itself worthy to future centuries, buoyed me up. I tell you, it even reduced the effects of my hangover. I daydreamed of traveling to an exotic location and taking my easel outdoors to capture the ageless visage of Nature or, more important, journeying within myself to find and release those images I had so long ignored.

  After washing, shaving, and dressing in my best gray suit, I put on my topcoat and set out toward Seventh Avenue to catch the streetcar uptown. The address on the sheet of rose-colored paper undoubtedly belonged to one of those new monstrosities constructed in the last decade way up past where the city’s sprawl had by then extended. Designed and raised by the architectural firm of McKim, Mead, and White, the residences of the upper reaches of Manhattan were a hodgepodge of classical styles melded with the novelty of a contemporary New York look—Byzantine meets Broadway, so to speak. Constructed with the finest imported marble and limestone, they were some of the most opulent monoliths in the country. I had visited quite a few by way of attending parties and in fulfillment of commissions. The address was a comfort in that it indicated my patron would certainly have the means to back up the outlandish deal Watkin had set before me.