Part 8 (1/2)

Vlemk the box-painter whirled around, furious, intending to shout obscenities at the picture on the box, though of course he could shout nothing. His face became red as a brick and his eyes bulged, and his breathing was so violent that it seemed he would surely have a heart attack. But at once he changed his mind and put his hands over his face, for he'd seen again, staring at the picture, that the Princess was too beautiful for words.

”What is it?” asked the picture. ”What is it that so upsets you?” She spoke with great kindness and what seemed to Vlemk sincere concern, so that he could only a.s.sume that she'd forgotten she'd put the curse on him. (In this he was mistaken.) He tried mouthing words at her, but the picture only stared at him as if in puzzlement, and at last Vlemk gave up in despair and turned sadly away. Tears began to brim up in his eyes and drip down his cheeks.

”It's nothing strange,” thought Vlemk, clenching and unclenching his fists. ”She fills me with sorrow for what I might have had but lost, this vision of extraordinary beauty I've painted on the box.” He ground his teeth and wiped away the tears, but at once his eyes were filled again. ”Vision,” he thought woefully, and began to shake his head like a child. ”Vision, yes, nothing but a vision-a romantic illusion!” Suddenly he bent over, sobbing.

”Poor Vlemk!” cried the box in its piping little voice. ”Oh poor, poor Vlemk!” If he'd turned around to look, he might have seen to his astonishment that the box was crying too. But he did not turn. He sobbed for a long time, deaf to the peeping sobs behind him; then at last, with a great, broad shudder and a grinding of his teeth, he got hold of himself. What a fool he was being! There was no way on earth she could have forgotten that it was she who'd put the curse on him. She was a charmer, his pretty little picture, but mean as a snake! And if the picture had no heart, what of the Princess?

”I've been a dolt,” he thought. ”The murderer's quite right. I must rid myself of idiotic visions!”

With eyes like a maniac's he went over to the hook where his artist's frock hung, carefully took it down, and poked his arms in. He went back to the table where his brushes lay, uncapped a bottle of thinner, poured just a little into a dish, unb.u.t.toned and rolled up his sleeves, then, more meticulous than a surgeon over his knives, began the exceedingly delicate business of cleaning and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g his brushes. Then he squeezed paint onto his palette and poured oil and glaze into their containers. When all this was ready, he chose a box-a beautiful one of rosewood-and began to paint.

The picture of the Princess watched with interest. ”Another picture of me?” she asked after a time.

”Every painter,” thought Vlemk, in lieu of giving answer, ”has his own proper subject. Some are best at cliffs, some at trees and flowers, some at boats, some at cows crossing a stream, some at churches, some at babies. My proper subject-the subject which for some reason engages me heart and soul-is the Princess's face.”

For several hours, Vlemk painted with such intensity that it seemed he might explode.

Suddenly the picture said, ”I don't look like that!”

Vlemk turned, nodded with a mysterious dark smile at the picture on the box, then coolly turned away again, back to his work.

He was painting as he'd never before painted in his life, gazing, unflinching, into the abyss. Every hint his memory of her face provided him, or his increasingly sure knowledge of her perfect twin, the picture he'd earlier painted on the box-the face now watching him in dismay and indignation-he pursued relentlessly, as a surgeon edges into a cortex, following a cancer with the tip of his knife. He softened nothing, gave in nowhere, but set down the Princess's flaws in bold relief. Nothing escaped him: the fullness of the lower lip which only now, as it helplessly submitted to his brush, did he recognize for what it was, a latent sensualism that, if pushed as he pushed it now in paint, fulfilling its dark potential, might be the Princess's ruin; the infinitesimal weakness of one eyelid, its barely perceptible inclination to droop; the even less perceptible but nevertheless real inclination toward hairiness on her upper lip and chin, should her diet fall into disorder, her hormones lose balance. It was a terrible experience, painful and alarming, yet at the same time morbidly thrilling. Both about seeing and about finding new ways to give expression to what he saw, he was discovering more in a single night, it seemed to him, than he'd discovered up to now in all his life.

”That's stupid,” said the picture on the box behind him, crossly. ”You've missed the likeness. I'm not like that at all!”

”Well, you know, it's just Art,” Vlemk answered inside his mind, ironically joking, playing fool in the ancient way of angry artists. Deny it as she might, he thought-and heaven knew she was stupid enough; it was visible in the eyes-she would perhaps not miss it entirely, but feel, at some animal level, rebuked. Behind and to the left of the lady he was painting, he fas.h.i.+oned a small monkey at a pulpit, reading a Bible and shaking his finger, a blazing arched window behind him, obscuring his outlines. Her case, the image was meant to say, was not quite hopeless. If she turned, she might yet receive instruction, if only from a monkey.

The painting that could speak was saying nothing. She had closed her eyes and put on, to punish him, a bored look, or worse than bored: a bored person frozen alive. He felt a brief flash of anger and impatience, then suddenly a kind of joy, though dark and subterranean: she'd given him inspiration for another painting. This time, he decided, he would work more purely, in absolute isolation; that is, outside the influence of her judging eyes. Carefully, as if fondly, he lifted the box with the painting that could speak and carried it to the darkest corner of his studio, where he set it down on a chair and covered it with a black velvet cloth.

”What are you doing?” the picture protested. ”Take me back where I was! I don't like it here!”

Vlemk, of course, said nothing but returned to his paints.

It was morning now. Light was streaming in, and chickens and dogs in the city below were calling from street to street like peddlers, their voices bouncing over the ice. Vlemk made coffee, thought briefly of getting a little rest, then settled down on his stool, at his slanted table-methodically, neatly, with controlled but white-hot concentration-to begin on his new work, ”The Princess Looking Bored.” The lines seemed almost to fall from his brush, the idea taking shape with the naturalness and ease of a flower's opening-though a terrible flower, needless to say: a bloom almost certainly poisonous. As with the painting he'd worked on through the night, he pursued the Princess's worst potential with the reckless abandon of a lover in a fury, a husband betrayed. It was an eye-opener. Who would have guessed (who did not know her as Vlemk knew her) what depths of deceit and self-deception she was capable of, how pitiful and self-destructive her stratagem, or the measure of panic and self-doubt behind the mask of disdain? No wonder she held out on him, refused to lift the curse! He could understand now the dream of the axe-murderer, standing in the midst of his butchery, and he at the same moment recognized with immense satisfaction that his art was as much above that of the murderer as was the murderer's above that of the man who carved b.e.s.t.i.a.l fantasies in pious stone. Vlemk painted quickly, fanatically, yet precisely, like a virtuoso violinist scattering notes like leaves in a wind. Not that he worked, like his friend the ex-violinist, to get even. Nothing could have been farther from the box-painter's mind. His work was absolutely pure; it had no object but knowledge-and Ah! thought Vlemk, what knowledge he was getting! ”Princess, how well I know you,” he said inside his mind; ”you have no idea!” From the chair in the corner came occasional peeps of distress. He ignored them.

He painted all day, finished the second of his Reality boxes, as he jokingly called them, rested for an hour, then went down-his head full of new ideas-to the tavern. As in the days of his innocence (so he thought of them now), his unwinding was like a frenzy. Though he'd meant to remain fairly sober and eat some food, since his heart was full of plans and he was eager to get back to his studio, he'd forgotten his intentions by the second drink. He was painting, after all, as no other box-painter in the world could paint, making discoveries as rare as any scientist's. He was coming to such a grasp of life's darkest principles-and at the same time discovering, as he chased his intuitions, such a wealth of technical tricks and devices-that not a dozen fat books could contain what he had learned in one day. He was achieving, in a word, such mastery of his art, and he was filled with such pleasure in what fortune had granted him, that he could not possibly sit quietly for just one drink, then quietly trudge home. He held the barmaid on his lap and patted her knee, made scornful faces at the poet, whose poverty of wit he despised, mocked the ex-musician by pretending, voicelessly, to sing to him, even once recklessly shook his fist at the axe-murderer.

He awakened the following morning in a cellar-he had no idea how he'd gotten there-his trousers smelling powerfully of duck manure, as if he'd walked through some pond, his head pounding fiercely, his hands so shaky it would be hours, he knew, before he could steady his fingers sufficiently to pick up a paintbrush. Swearing at himself inside his mind, he got up, found his bearings-for he'd wandered to the squalid lower rim of the city-and went home.

”So you've decided to leave me here hidden under a cloth for the rest of my natural days? Is that your intention?” called the picture that could talk.

Grudgingly, Vlemk went over and lifted the cloth away.

”Good heavens!” cried the picture, eyes wide. ”Are you all right?”

Vlemk scowled, pulled at his beard, and went to bed.

Again that night he painted until dawn, made coffee, then worked on yet another box all through the day. Each box was more sinister than the last, more shamelessly debauched, more outrageously unfair in the opinion of the picture that could talk, which she now did rarely, too angry and too deeply hurt to give Vlemk the time of day. When his work was finished he again went to the tavern, where he again got so drunk he had no memory of what happened and staggered home as the milkmen were beginning their rounds.

For several weeks this frenzy of painting and drinking continued, and then one day in March-standing in his roomful of boxes with pictures of the Princess on them, each picture meaner and uglier than the last, some so deformed by the painter's rage to tell the truth unvarnished that you could make out no face-Vlemk abruptly stopped. Why he stopped he could hardly have said himself. Partly it was this: whether or not it was true that his work was magnificent, as he sometimes imagined, no one came to see it, and when he carried a box with him to the tavern, no one liked it, not even the axe-murderer.

”How can you not like it?” Vlemk asked angrily with his hands.

”Borrrring,” said the axe-murderer, and turned his head away, staring through the wall.

”Ha,” thought Vlemk, hardly hiding his scorn, ”your work is interesting, my work is boring.”

But Vlemk, being no fool, understood the implications. It was exactly as the half-wit ex-poet had said: we learn nothing from Art, merely recognize it as true when it happens to be true; no law requires that we be thrilled by it. Not that he would have said Science is any better. ”What are the grandest proofs of Science,” Vlemk thought, ”but amus.e.m.e.nts, baubles, devices for pa.s.sing time, like the game of quoits? 'Science,' you may say, 'improves life, even when it makes it longer.' Yes, that's true. Let us be grateful to Scientists, then, for their valuable gifts to us, as we are grateful to cows for milk, or pigs for bacon. As the brain's two lobes work dissimilar problems, Science and Art in dissimilar ways try to work out the truth of the universe. This activity the Scientist or Artist finds comforting to his ego, and it provides him with Truths he can make as gifts to the world as a gentleman gives his lady a locket. And what if the Truth about the universe is that it's boring?”

So Vlemk gradually came to the conclusion that his joy in his work, like his earlier vision of extraordinary beauty, was delusion. It was not that he denied having enjoyed himself, learning the techniques by which he nailed down his, so to speak, vision-his perception, that is, of the fragility and ultimate rottenness of things. So one might enjoy learning the technique of the mandolin, but when one finished one was only a mandolin player. One might as well have studied the better and worse ways of sitting on a porch.

So Vlemk, with bitter little jokes to himself, stopped painting. The talking picture sulked as much as ever, and from time to time it crossed Vlemk's mind that perhaps if he looked he could find some tourist who might buy it of him; but for one reason or another, he did not sell it. He settled down now to a life of serious, uninterrupted dissolution, never was.h.i.+ng his face or changing his clothes, never for a moment so sober that he remembered to feel regret. Days pa.s.sed, and weeks, and Vlemk became so changed that, for lack of heart, he gave up all his former rowdiness, and often not even regulars at the tavern seemed to know him as he groped his way past them, bent and glum as the Devil in his chains, on his way to the bathroom or to the alley. He forgot about the Princess, or remembered her only as one remembers certain moments from one's childhood. Sometimes if someone spoke of her-and if it was early in the evening, when Vlemk was still relatively sober-Vlemk would smile like a man who knows more than he's telling about something, and it would cross people's minds, especially the barmaid's, that Vlemk and the Princess were closer than one might think. But since he was a mute and declined to write notes, no one pressed him. Anyway, no one wanted to get close to him; he smelled like an old sick bear.

Things went from bad to worse for Vlemk the box-painter. He no longer spoke of life as ”boxing him in,” not only because the expression bored him but also, and mainly, because the box had become such an intransigeant given of his existence that he no longer noticed.

Then one May morning as he was lying in a gutter, squinting up bleary-eyed and exploring a newly broken tooth with his tongue, a carriage of black leather with golden studs drew up beside him and, at a command from the person inside, came to a stop.

”Driver,” said a voice that seemed as near as Vlemk's heart, ”who is that unfortunate creature in the gutter?”

Vlemk turned his head and tried to focus his eyes, but it was useless. The carriage was like a shadow in a fire too bright to look at, a gleam of sunlight on a brilliantly glazed, painted box-lid.

”I'm sorry, Princess,” said the driver. ”I have no idea.”

When he heard it was the Princess, Vlemk thought briefly of raising one hand to hide his face, but his will remained inactive and he lay as he was.

”Throw the poor creature a coin,” said the Princess. ”And let us hope he's not past using it.”

After a moment something landed, plop, on Vlemk's belly, and the carriage drove away. Slowly, Vlemk moved one hand toward the cool place-his s.h.i.+rt had lost its b.u.t.tons, and the coin lay flat on his pale, grimy skin where at last his groping fingers found it and dragged it back down to the ground where it would be safe while he napped. Hours later he sat up abruptly and realized what had happened. He looked down at his hand. There lay the coin, real silver with a picture of the King on it.

”How strange!” thought Vlemk.

When he'd gotten to his feet and moved carefully to the street-corner, touching the walls of the buildings with the knuckles of one cupped hand, he found that he had no idea where he was, much less how he'd gotten there, and no idea which direction to take to reach his house. When he waved to hurrying pa.s.sers-by, looking at them helplessly and silently moving his loose, mute mouth, they ducked their heads, touching their hats, and hurried around him as they would if he were Death. He edged on alone, hunting for some landmark, but it was as if all the streets of the city had been moved to new locations. He shook his head, still moving his mouth like some mechanical thing, not a living man, wholly unaware that he was doing it. An old sick alleycat opened his mouth in a yawn, showing teeth like needles, then closed it again and lowered his head. In his right hand Vlemk clenched-so tightly that the rim of it bit into his flesh-the coin with the picture of the King on it.

5.

Three days later, having carefully considered from every point of view, having bathed away the filth and trimmed his beard and washed his old black suit in the sink in the studio, and having dried it on the railing of the balcony, Vlemk the box-painter started across the city and up the hill toward the royal palace. Tucked under his arm, he carried the box with the talking picture. In his pocket he had a carefully folded note which he'd meticulously lettered, intending to put it in the Princess's hand as he gave her the box. ”Dear Princess,” the note read, ”Here is the gift I said I would try to make for you, a picture so real it can speak. I release you from your promise to talk with me, since misfortune has made me a mute, perhaps for my impertinence. I hope this finds you well. Respectfully, Vlemk the Box-Painter.”

He arrived at the palace, as he had planned to do, just at the time when the Princess would be coming in from walking her dogs. The last of the sunset was fading from the clouds, exactly as last time; the moon was bright; here and there pockets of fog were taking shape, intruding on the smoothly mown slopes from ponds and woods. He approached exactly as he'd approached before, but to Vlemk's dismay, first one thing was different and then another, so that in the end the palace seemed changed entirely. The outer gates of iron had been thrown wide open and there were no guards in sight, and he wondered for a moment if the greyhounds, when they saw him, would not tear him to bits; but all around the front of the palace stood carriages and large outdoor lanterns, dozens and dozens of them, flickering merrily, as if vying with the stars, and near the arched front door he had once felt pity toward, aristocrats stood talking and laughing, drinking champagne in their splendid dress. It was unlikely, he thought, that they would stand there and watch the dogs kill him-though on the other hand Vlemk had learned enough from people's secrets to be aware that in these matters nothing is ever quite certain.

But the dogs, he thought the next instant, were the least of it. How could he walk in, in the middle of a party of lords and ladies, and give the Princess his present? How would he even find her? As he drew nearer, moving slowly now, he saw that the lords' and ladies' clothes were all of the finest material, with clasps and buckles, b.u.t.tons, epaulettes, and swordhilts of gold and silver. He looked down at his k.n.o.bby brown shoes, white worksocks, and baggy black trousers, then at his vest, riding like a saddle on his pot-belly. It had only three b.u.t.tons-two gray ones and a blue one. His coat had no b.u.t.tons at all. He stood staring, with the box clamped tightly under his elbow, thinking what a fool he'd been, seeing himself as the Princess and her highborn friends would see him: gray-streaked unmanageable hair to his shoulders, a number of veins in his face broken, the slope of his shoulders and the bend of his back the realized potential of a life of disorder and dissolution. ”I had better go back home,” he thought. ”I'll catch her sometime when she's not busy.”

From under the black velvet cloth the picture called, ”What's the matter? Why are we stopping?”

Vlemk brought the box out from under his arm, held it in front of him, and, like a waiter unfolding a napkin with the back of his hand, tipped off one corner of the cloth so that the picture could see.