Beautiful Days Read online

  The first time the husband had voluntarily touched the wife in weeks. The first time he’d companionably slipped his arm around her, in months.

  “But Max, if—”

  “I said no.”

  The husband was furious with the wife—was he? His face flamed with heat like the face of one who has been exposed not in a lie but in a truth.

  Yet, the wife dared to press the back of her hand against the husband’s hot forehead. He did not fling the hand away but caught it in his and pressed it harder against his forehead for indeed, he was running a fever.

  “Becca, just sit here. Sit still. We’re here together—it’s the last night—enjoy the ocean. It’s only for now—but it is for now. Don’t say another word.”

  Unaccountably, the husband laughed. His teeth chattered with cold.

  She was aware of his arm, his heavy arm, around her shoulders. She was aware that he was gripping her hand, tight. She winced with pain, for her hand had been bitten, she hadn’t realized that the skin had been broken in the fleshy crook between thumb and forefinger, already there was a dull throb of pain, and she could not tell the husband, of all sordid truths she could not tell the husband how she had come to be bitten and by whom and how reckless she’d been, to be so bitten, for the husband would be astonished and revolted, the husband would cease loving the wife again, in an instant; and the wife had not the strength to revive the husband’s love another time; her soul swooned in utter weariness at the prospect of such renewed effort.

  A long distance away the sun had vanished beneath the horizon. Most of the ocean was dark now, invisible. Waves lashed against the ship’s sides. There was a chill, penetrating wind. Overhead the sky was fading-red, tattered like torn canvas. They were gripping hands, tight. Like swimmers drowning together, but gripping hands. Tight.

  II

  Les beaux jours

  Daddy please come bring me home. Daddy I am so sorry.

  Daddy it is your fault. Daddy I hate you.

  Daddy, no! I love you Daddy whatever you have done.

  Daddy I am under a spell here. I am not myself here.

  This place in which I am a captive—it is in the Alps, I think. It is a great, old house like a castle made of ancient rock. Through high windows you can see moors stretching to the mountainous horizon. All is scrubby gray-green as if undersea. The light is perpetual twilight.

  Dusk is when Master comes. I am in love with Master.

  Daddy, no! I do not love Master at all, I am terrified of Master.

  He is not like you, Daddy. Master laughs at me, taunts me, twines his long thin icy fingers through my fingers and sneers at me when I whimper with pain.

  Why did you come crawling to us, ma chère, if now you are so fearful?

  Daddy please forgive me. Daddy do not abandon me.

  Though it was your fault, Daddy.

  Though I can never forgive you.

  IT IS CALLED BY TWO NAMES. Le grand chalet is the official name.

  Le grand chalet des âmes perdues is the unofficial, whispered name.

  Indeed it is très grand, Daddy. The oldest part of le chalet dating to 1563 (it is said: such a time is not possible for me to imagine) and the desolate windswept land that surrounds it like a moat so vast that even if I could make myself small as a terrified little cat, if I could squeeze out one of the ill-fitting windows to escape across the moor, Master’s servants would set his wolf-hounds after me to hunt me down and tear me to pieces with their sharp ravenous teeth.

  Or, if Master is in a merciful mood, and not a mood of vengeance, the servants might haul me back squirming in a net to throw down onto the stone floor at Master’s feet.

  So I have been warned by the other girl-captives.

  So I have been warned by Master himself not in actual words but in Master’s way of laying a finger against the anxious little artery that beats so hard in my throat, with just enough pressure to communicate—Of all sins, ma chère, betrayal is the unforgivable.

  I am not sure where Le grand chalet des âmes perdues is but I believe it to be somewhere in eastern Europe.

  A faraway place where there is no electricity—only just candles—tall, grand candles of the girth of young trees, so encrypted with melted and hardened wax that they resemble ancient sculptures hacked out of molten stone. What shadows dance from such candles, leaping to the ceiling twelve feet overhead like starved vultures spreading their mammoth wings, you will have to imagine, Daddy—le chalet is nothing like the apartment in which we’d lived on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-Sixth Street, overlooking Central Park from the twenty-third floor though (as Mother said) those rooms were haunted too, and the souls that dwelt there wandered lost.

  Here are six-foot fireplaces and great, soot-begrimed chimneys in which (it is whispered) girl-captives shriveled to mummies are trapped in their foolish yearning to escape Master. Which is why Master is furious when smoke backs up into the room and a beautiful stoked fire must be extinguished so that the chimney can be cleared.

  A faraway place, Daddy. Where the automobiles are very old but elegant and stately and shiny-black as hearses.

  There is no TV in le chalet. Unless there is a single TV in Master’s quarters which none of us has ever been allowed to glimpse as none of us has ever been brought into Master’s quarters but this is not likely as Master scorns the effete modern world and even the twentieth century is vulgar to Master as a sniffling, snuffling, sneezing girl.

  But there is an old radio—a “floor model.” The servants call it a “wireless”—in Master’s (downstairs) sitting room where we are brought sometimes if we have pleased Master that day in his studio.

  In Master’s studio it is often very drafty. Wind like cold mean fingers pries through the edges of the tall windows and strokes and tickles us, and makes us shiver and our teeth chatter for we are made to remove our clothing quickly and without protest and to cover our shivering naked bodies with silken kimonos that are too large for us, and fall open no matter how tightly we tie their sashes.

  In le grand chalet we are often barefoot for Master is an admirer (he has said) of the girl-child-foot.

  Also, the bare girl-child-foot cannot easily run through brambles, thorns, pebbles outside the chalet walls.

  In Master’s studio we are made to pose by sitting very straight and very still for hours or by standing very straight and very still for hours or (some of us, the most favored) lying with naked legs asprawl or aspread on chaises longues and our heads flung back at painful angles. And some of us, rumored to be the most favored, made to pose by lying very still on the freezing-cold marble floor in mimicry (Master says) of le mort.

  It is forbidden to observe Master at his easel. It is forbidden to glance even fleetingly at Master contorting his face in a paroxysm of anguish, yearning, ecstasy as he crouches at the easel only a few feet away from us scant of breath, weak-kneed. For art is a brutal master, even for Master.

  Sometimes, Master who is the very essence of gentlemanly decorum curses his brushes in a language most of us do not know. Sometimes, Master throws down a brush, or a tube of paint, like a furious child in the knowledge that someone (an adult, a servant) will pick it up for him, at a later time.

  Fortunately, the marble floor beneath Master’s easel is covered with a stained canvas.

  It is shocking to us to glimpse Master’s many tubes of paint, that appear to be flung haphazardly onto a table beside his easel; myriad tubes of paint of which most are very messy, some are skeletal and squeezed nearly dry, a few are plump and newly purchased; for elsewhere in le grand chalet all is chaste and orderly as a geometrical figure.

  Master’s studio with its high ceiling and white walls is one of the most famous artists’ studios in the world, it is said. Long before the oldest of us was born, the studio existed at Le grand chalet des âmes perdues, and of course, long after the youngest of us will pass away, Master’s studio will endure for it is enshrined in legend, like Master himself who (it is said) is one of the
very few living artists whose work is displayed in the Louvre.

  Master has shunned fame, as Master has shunned commercial success, yet, ironically, Master has become famous, and Master has become one of the most successful painters of what is called the “modern era”; his paintings are unusually large, fastidiously painted and repainted, formal, rather austere, “classic”—even if their subjects are nude or minimally dressed young girls posed in languid postures.

  Master insists upon the impersonality of art. Master has chosen to live far from the clamor of capital cities—Paris, Berlin, Prague, Rome. Master scorns the elite art world even as Master scorns the media that nonetheless pursues him with paparazzi. Master is revered for the severity of his art and for his perfectionism: Master will spend years on a single canvas before releasing it to his (Parisian) gallery. With each of his rare exhibits Master has included this declaration:

  LIFE IS NOT ART

  ART IS THE LIFE OF WHICH NOTHING IS KNOWN

  TURN YOUR EYES TO THE PAINTINGS

  “THE REST IS SILENCE”

  Yet, the media adores Master as a nobleman-artiste living in reclusive exile in a romantic and remote corner of Europe.

  In Master’s studio time ceases to exist. In Master’s studio the spell suffuses me like ether. My arms, my legs, my supine being on the green sofa—so heavy, I cannot move.

  Master has posed my arm in a tight sleeve, Master has tugged open the tight bodice so that my very small, right breast is exposed; Master has positioned my bare legs just so, and Master has placed on my exquisite girl-child-feet thin slippers made of the most fragile satin, one could barely walk in them across a room; Master has fastened a necklace around my neck, of small gems worthy of an adult beauty (as Master has said: the necklace may have belonged to one of Master’s wives).

  And Master has given me a little hand-mirror in which to gaze, mesmerized at what I see: the pretty doll-face, the pert little nose and pursed lips that are me.

  HOW DID I COME TO this captivity?—I think of nothing else.

  Daddy, I ran away from you. I ran away from her.

  Yet first it was with Mother, those restless hours in the great Museum visible from our Fifth Avenue windows. Mother in dark glasses so that her reddened eyes were not exposed and no one who knew her (and knew you) would recognize her. Mother pulling my sister and me by our arms, urging us up the grand stairs, in seek of something she could not have defined—the consolation of art, the impersonality of art, the escape of art.

  The mystery of art, which confounds us with the power to heal our wounds, or to lacerate our wounds to greater pain.

  Soon then, I slipped away to come alone. A novelty at the Museum, a child so young—alone . . .

  But I was mature for my age, and my size. It was not difficult for me to single out visitors whom I would approach in the usually crowded lobby to ask to purchase a ticket for me, and take me inside with them as if I belonged with them . . . Of course, I gave them money for my ticket. Very cleverly, I even lent them Mother’s membership card (appropriated for the occasion), to facilitate matters.

  Usually it was women whom I approached. Not young, not old, Mother’s age, not glamorous (like Mother) but motherly-seeming. They were surprised by my request at first, but kindly, and cooperative. It was not difficult to deceive these women that you or Mother were waiting for me in the café in the American Wing, and then to slip away from their scrutiny once we were inside.

  Soon then in the great Museum I began to linger before a row of paintings by the twentieth-century European artist whom I would come to know as Master.

  What a spell these paintings cast! I could not know that it was the spell of enchantment and entrapment, of inertia, that would one day suffuse my limbs like an evil sedative . . .

  These were large dreamlike paintings executed with the formality, stillness, and subdued beauty of the older, classical European art Mother had professed to admire, yet their subjects were not biblical or mythological figures but girls—some of them as young as I was. Though in settings very different from the settings of my life the girls seemed familiar to me, more sisterly than my own sister who was too young and too silly for me and was always interrupting my thoughts with her chatter.

  Especially, I found myself staring at a painting of a girl who resembled me, lying on a small sofa in an old-fashioned drawing room. (I did not yet know the word for such an item of furniture—chaise longue.) The girl was like myself yet older and wiser. Her eyebrows were thin as pencil lines artfully drawn while mine were thicker, yet not so defined. Her eyes were exactly my eyes!—yet wiser, bemused. Her coppery-colored, wavy hair resembled my own, though in an old-fashioned style. Her doll-like features, delicately boned nose and somber pursed lips—like mine, but she was far prettier than me, and more ethereal. And she was gazing at herself in a small hand-mirror with an expression of calm self-absorption—impossible for me, who had come to dislike my face, intensely.

  What was strange about the painting was that the girl on the sofa seemed to be totally oblivious of another presence in the room, only a few feet away from her: a stooped young man stoking a blazing fire in a fireplace, that so pulsated with heat and light you could nearly feel it, standing before the painting.

  In fact, when you approach the painting from a little distance it is the “blazing” you first see that leaps out to strike your eye, before you see the small supine figure on the sofa gazing dreamily at her reflection.

  Isn’t that strange, Daddy? Yet, if the girl on the sofa is a girl in a dream, and the dream of the girl is her pretty doll-face, it is natural that she is unaware of another presence, even close by; the stooped figure is male but it is stooped, a servant surely, and not Master.

  Each day after school I came to the Museum. Each day I lingered longer by this painting—Les beaux jours. At first I’d thought that the title might mean The Beautiful Eyes—but jours means “days,” it is yeux that means “eyes.”

  And so the title is—The Beautiful Days.

  Days of enchantment, entrancement. Not yet days of entrapment.

  Beautiful days of perfect calm, peace. Enough just to gaze into the little hand-mirror and to pay no heed to your flimsy satin slippers that will impede your flight if you try to escape and to the hot bright-blazing fire being prepared a few feet away by a stooped and faceless servant.

  Other paintings by the artist whose name I must not speak—(for to speak of Master in such a way is forbidden to us, as to the servants of le grand chalet)—were fascinating to me as well and any one of these might have held me captive: Thérèse rêvant—Jeune fille à sa toilette—Nu jouant avec un chat—La victime—La chambre.

  Faintly, I could hear their cries. The captive-girls in the paintings who were (not yet) myself.

  So faintly, I could pretend that I had not heard. Glancing around at others in the Museum, casual visitors, uniformed guards who took little notice of me, a child of eleven seemingly alone in the gallery, shivering with apprehension for what precisely, I could not have guessed.

  (And what is there to say of the Museum guards?—did they not hear, either? Had they grown indifferent, bored with beauty as with suffering, as if it were but mere paint on canvas, a veneer and not a depth? Will they not hear me, when I cry for help?)

  OUTSIDE THE MUSEUM, the clamor of New York streets. Tall leafy trees, the enormous green park. On Fifth Avenue taxis queuing up at the curb in front of the Museum, at the foot of the great pyramid of stone steps.

  Vendors’ carts, stretching along the block. These are owned exclusively by U.S. veterans, it is decreed. The smell of hot meats is almost overwhelming to us, who are faint from malnutrition.

  Our apartment at Fifth Avenue and Seventy-Sixth Street. Overlooking the park from the twenty-third floor. So high, we heard nothing. No sounds lifted to our ears from the street. When I pressed my hands over my ears, I did not hear sobbing. I did not hear even my own sobbing, or the wild beat of my heart.

  ELEVEN ON MY LAS
T BIRTHDAY. When you were still living with us, Daddy, though often you stayed away overnight. And your promise was—Darling of course I am not leaving you and your sister and your mother; and even if I left—temporarily!—your mother, that would not mean that I was leaving you and your sister. No.

  But when you left we were made to move to another apartment on a lesser street, on a lower floor. You left us for another life, Mother said. She wept bitterly. She inhabited her (sheer) nightgown for days in succession.

  Men came to stay with Mother but never for long. We heard their loud barking laughter. We hear the clatter of glasses, bottles. We heard our mother’s screams.

  We heard the men depart hurriedly in the early hours of the morning: stumbling, cursing, threats. Laughter.

  Jenny whispered wide-eyed—One of them will murder her. Strangle her.

  (You are thinking that is not likely, a child of eight or nine would say such a thing? Even in a whisper, to her eleven-year-old sister? Do you think so, Daddy? Is that what you have wished to think?)

  (A daddy is someone who wishes to think what protects him. Not what protects his children.)

  We knew nothing of adult lives. Yet, we knew everything of adult lives.

  We watched TV. Late-night when we were supposed to be in bed, the volume turned low. We were thrilled that women with disheveled hair and mascara-streaked faces wearing sheer nightgowns were raped, strangled, murdered in their beds. NYPD detectives stared rudely at their naked bodies. Photographers crouched over them, bending at the knees so that their groins were prominent.

  But Mother did not die, as you know. Mother’s screams prevailed. Even here, in le grand chalet, I hear those screams at a distance. Unless they are the screams of my sister-captives, muffled with cushions or the palm of Master’s hand.

  The men brought whiskey, bourbon. Cocaine.