The Count somehow—the boy saw no spark or torch nearby—set fire to the sheet, and held it in his hand while it burned.
As if that were a signal to some hidden attendants, tapestries were pulled aside and women padded into the hall. Unseen instruments which the boy couldn’t identify began a throbbing, Oriental song of hypnotic complexity. The women were naked except for various bracelets of gold around their wrists and ankles, and necklaces inlaid with darkly gleaming stones. Some of the jewelry was fashioned with staple loops, as if the jewelry was designed to double as instruments of forcible restraint. Most of the women were anointed and oiled and perfumed so that the hair on their bodies glistened with beaded droplets like delicate flowers or spider webs coated with hot morning dew. Pungent spicey scents from the women curled to the boy’s nostrils like invisible snakes.
The women began to dance.
The boy watched, his body responding. The Count leaned forward with a rusting sound and whispered into the boy’s ear. “What do you see? What do you see?”
He couldn’t answer. The women were exquisite beyond words.
“Man’s confounder?” the Count suggested.
“Luscious sin?
“Mad beast?
“Stinking rose?
“Sweet venom?
“Sad Paradise?”
Black, obtained by burning organic substances to render pure carbon, is not recommended for the painter’s palette. Black effects will better be gained by mixtures of complementary colors.
The form on the canvas stunned Sandra. The painter smiled at her as he looked at her face. “Like it?”
“It’s marvelous. It’s me. It’s like a photograph.”
He grimaced from where he stood straightening up his brushes and palette. “Photography? I always said that won’t last.”
“But I mean it’s me, it’s like looking into a mirror. That’s amazing.”
“Just good draftmanship,” he said, shrugging.
“I have one question,” Sandra said. “Why is it all black and white and gray?”
He looked back at the picture and then to Sandra. He looked into her eyes briefly and she noticed that he could well have been very old. He seemed vital and spry, but he also seemed dignified, and somewhat weathered.
“That’s an underpainting. I do your form in the minutest detail, completely. Then in the next two sittings all of the color will be added, and that’s when it will come alive.”
Sandra couldn’t take her eyes from the canvas. It was her. It was realistic, and showed her every fold and curve and nuance. She had lately started to think of herself as unattractive, but she realized as she looked at the picture that that wasn’t so, that she was beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than she had ever been or had ever hoped to be.
With a start she realized that her robe was open, and that her left breast, her belly, the triangle of hair between her legs and her left leg were all in plain view to the painter. Inexplicably, she felt a wave of shyness, and quickly closed her robe. She immediately chided herself for not being logical since he had just been staring at her fully naked for over three hours.
“You know, since I haven’t seen anything else you’ve painted, I guess I was a little afraid that you might be one of those, uh, abstract-type artists.”
“Afraid that I would reduce you to blobs and squiggles? Don’t be afraid of that. I’d never do that; I’m too interested in capturing things as they really are. Those other people aren’t artists, they’re symptoms. They can’t really draw and they’ve cowed blind and insecure people who are phonier than they are into buying into their charade.”
Emotions started to coalesce within her. This man, this older man, said this in such a confident, quiet way, it reassured her. His face, a mix of youthful wonder and an almost ancient maturity, was so contradictory it fascinated her. If there was anything that could be said for certain about him, it was that he knew how to look at a woman. He knew how to see.
She noticed that he rubbed his hands delicately as if they were sore, as if they might be arthritic, or as if possibly his skin was irritated by exposure to the oils and solvents and binders he worked with every day. She felt an almost uncontrollable urge to take his hands in hers.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said. “I serve the Old Masters.”
Sepia is extracted as an ink from cuttle fish. It is impermanent.
Sandra, in order to accommodate the painter’s wish for her to sit for her portrait over three straight days in the early morning, had to shift her sleep time to the afternoon. With her shades drawn and the door to her bedroom closed, she lay between the sheets and waited for sleep. She found that she was tired, not just because she’d shifted her sleep time back, but the act of sitting for a portrait seemed to take so much more out of her than she had expected.
As she lay there, she had time to reflect on her life. She sensed that she needed direction, that she had to rethink her purpose. She felt, as sleep started to overcome her, that there was some insight to be had, that the key to her problem was just within her grasp.
In a world filled with people who were tremendously unhappy, people who were miserable, Sandra felt a sort of dull hollowness, and she realized why. She had no standard. Her family, her youth in an ugly little factory town, her divorce, the boyfriends, all started to burn into a sort of colorless past. She had her work now, but she didn’t have any goals there, or any ambitions beyond what she was doing. She couldn’t help but think of herself as a reliable but replaceable part in a machine. She couldn’t stop the parade of death she saw every day, and she had, without knowing it, become resigned to it.
With this insight she gave herself up to a sound, restful sleep. The things she had cut out of her life—religion, ambition, desire, intimacy—could be sources of great pain, but they could also be possible keys to becoming involved again.
In her sleep, she occasionally turned. She reached out with her arm as she turned to her side. She drew up one leg to rest bent on the mattress and support her. Her motions and gestures were such as one would expect from a person sleeping with a companion.
Cinnabar has on occasion remained unaltered for five centuries or more, and in other cases has blackened completely in a matter of weeks.
He spoke as he painted, much more so that second sitting than the first.
“The sad thing about paint is that it fails. It inevitably fails. The work and the painters we admire are special because they are the most spectacular and tragic failures.
“You cannot capture the visual effects of the sun, the moon, or the stars. Light is dynamic and living. Fire or electricity can never be captured onto canvas. These phenomena strike and stimulate the eye with a dynamic play of light which can only be feebly suggested on canvas by pigment in binder. A properly spaced white slash, surrounded by darkness of sufficient richness, may strike the viewer as brilliant light, but the effect will only be a pale imitation of life. The medium fails, even in the hands of the most accomplished master.
“And living things? They can’t be captured either, not by mere paint. The luster of the living, seeing eye can only be adequately suggested by daubs of slick white suggesting a wet surface. With the right interplay of underpaint a woman’s body can be suggested in the mass of the forms, in the glisten of the skin, in the warmth and pulsation of blood beneath the surface, but it’s all just a suggestion, an illusion.”
As he spoke, he furiously looked back and forth from Sandra to the palette to the canvas. He was glazing the underpainting and the brush in his hands looked like a criminal knife as he flashed it through cinnabar, carmine, madder lake, alizarin, and chrome. The reds were affirmation; he balanced them with denials of gamboge, sepia, sienna, mango, and lapus lazuli.