The Art of Living (24 page)

“A touch!” said Vlemk inside his mind, taking her hand and kissing it. “A touch! I felt it right here, just under my heart!”

8

However, the Princess was not yet rid of those evil-hearted pictures her friend the box-painter had made. Studying the picture that could talk, in her room, she was more and more convinced that her father had been right. It was indeed her true likeness, much as she hoped it might not be. Might not the others, still less pleasing, be equally true to what she was? She tried to summon them up in her mind, but her memory was fuzzy, or if not, some mechanism distorted the image as soon as it came to her, burned it as an image is burned out of clarity when one looks at it in too much light.

“Why did he paint them, I wonder?” she asked aloud one day, standing at her window, talking to herself.

“I'm sure he meant no harm,” said the picture on the box, its voice no louder than the buzzing of a bee.

The Princess tipped her head, not quite turning to the box. After a moment she asked, “Does he hate me, do you think? Is that it?”

“He never spoke of you unkindly, so far as I remember,” said the picture on the box.

“You're lying,” said the Princess, though in fact she was not sure. For some queer reason she found it harder and harder to know what the image on the box was thinking, even when the tone of voice was most distinctly her own.

“I'm not!” said the picture with a touch of indignation. “The fact is, I never heard him mention you!”

“Well, he certainly must have given me some
thought
,” said the Princess. “I mean, my face seems to be an obsession with him!”

“Ah!” said the picture. “So you admit that there is indeed some slight resemblance!”

“I admit nothing!” snapped the Princess. “Stop quizzing me!” Quickly, to avoid further argument, she left the room.

But her doubts would not leave her a moment's peace. Sitting at supper, with the Prince across from her, looking gloomy because he no longer understood her and the time of his visit was nearing its end, the matter between them still entirely unresolved, the Princess, taking a small bite of her roll, would suddenly see Vlemk the box-painter's image of her eating a piece of chicken with a look of insatiable gluttony, her eyes like a weasel's. Or walking in the woods, wringing her hands and tossing her hair back again and again, as if to drive away fierce thoughts or deny unfounded charges made by people she had trusted implicitly, she would suddenly see in her mind's eye, more real than the ferns and trees around her, Vlemk the box-painter's image of her tearing at her cheeks with her fingernails, gone mad.

One night her father the King came into her room, something he had never done before. When the door was closed behind him and his servants had stepped back in the way he required of them, seeming to disappear like September mist into the curtains and walls, the King, clutching at his clothes with a kind of unconscious desperation, as if anything that touched him, any slightest physicality, gave him a scalding pain, almost more than he could bear, raised his head with great difficulty and said: “Daughter, what's the matter with you? I'm told on good authority you're like a woman that's out of her wits.”

The Princess went white with fear, for like everyone in the palace she had experience of her father's rages.

“Don't lie!” snapped her father.

“I wasn't going to!” she snapped back, indignant.

His eyebrows lifted, and he studied her, his tiny claws pulling more fiercely at his clothes. “Good,” he said. His head snapped back suddenly, as if something invisible had struck him on the chin. And he shook all over, his hands flying out over the wheelchair arms, fluttering like wings, until the fit was over. The servants stood like monkeys, bent forward, prepared to rush to him. When he could raise his head again, sweat streaming down onto his nose and beard, he said, “Tell me what's the matter, then. I haven't much time left—as any damn fool can see.” When she said nothing, he said, “Well?”

“I haven't been myself,” said the Princess, feebly. She noticed, in horror, that she was picking at the front of her dress, exactly as her father did, though not so wildly.

His head fell toward her, tilted sideways, the lips stretched wide with agony. “Don't waste time!” he cried. “Have mercy!” Again, more violently than before, the old King's head shot back and the trembling came over him. The servants moved toward him, and—with such strength of will that the Princess was thrown into awe of him—his fluttering hands waved them back. “No time for niceties!” he gasped. His nose began to bleed and he tried to take an angry swipe at it.

It was the box that cried out in an agony of love and sorrow, “Tell him! For the love of God tell him and be done with it!”

The King rolled his eyes toward the box, then let them fall upward again.

“Very well!” the Princess said, clutching at her dress, twisting and wrinkling it, then straightening it again. In a rush, she told him all. When she was finished, she sat staring at her knees, weeping and occasionally sniffing, jerking back her head.

The King let his head and shoulders fall forward, his eyelids sinking over his eyes as if by their weight. With what seemed his last breath, he said, “Go to the box-painter. Beg him to remove the curse. Otherwise we're doomed.”

“Princess!” cried the picture on the box in a voice unlike any the Princess had ever heard from it, “he's dying! Run to him!”

Without thinking, the Princess obeyed. “Father!” she cried, “Father, for the love of God!” Now the servants were all around her, and it seemed to the Princess in her madness that the walls of the room had caught fire.

“Don't die!” she whispered, but she knew now, flames all around her, that that was why he'd come to her. In the ravening heat, it was as if her mind had flown open and she knew everything everyone in the room was thinking. Then, the next instant, in the blinding whiteness, her mind went blank.

“Princess,” one of the servants said softly, lifting her as if she weighed nothing, “we'll take care of him. Rest yourself.”

Slowly, the illusion of fire sank away, and she was standing, supported by servants, gazing at something too still, too full of peace to be her father. Now his strange words came back to her: “Beg him to remove the curse.”

The day after the King was buried, she went to the box-painter.

9

She could not believe, at first, the change that had come over him. He seemed much older, much sadder, so gentle that the Princess—or, rather, the Queen, since she now ruled the kingdom—could almost have believed she had dreamed their last meeting, when he'd charged those mad prices for the worthless pictures she and her friends had bought, carelessly scrawled landscapes of cows crossing streams, sickly, drab asphodels and forget-me-nots, day-lilies and primroses, or those maudlin little animals, cats, dogs, teddy-bears—not so much box-paintings as angry parodies, at best, of the box-painter's art. He was busy at the same kinds of subjects now, but with such a difference that they seemed not the work of the same hand. His paintings of gardens were so accurate in each detail, even to the occasional weed or insect, so alive with the spirit of whoever it was that had planted them—some old woman, she imagined, or some old man in suspenders, once a farmer or a lawyer, who'd settled down in his final days to make the life he was leaving more comfortable for someone he knew, or perhaps did not know, for the world in general, with all its sorrows—so accurate in their depiction of both the beauty and the sadness of the world as it is, that one believed, if one closed one's eyes, that one could smell the autumn leaves.

Nor was the studio he worked in the same at all. What had seemed a kind of crypt never visited except by the artist's ghost, a bleak place of weariness, misery, and failure, had now become a hive of activity. There were customers who greedily sorted through the boxes, pretending to find fault with them to get an easier price, children and old people, a lean, smiling banker with a terrible worried look flickering around his eyes—he was looking for a box for his wife, he said, and had no idea what might appeal to her (“Bring her in!” said the box-painter with gestures. “Bring her in!”)—an angry old woman, a laborer, a midget. … Vlemk the box-painter had taken on three young apprentices, two dull, lanky ones and one who was fat and near-sighted—“A master!” Vlemk told the Queen with gestures, “a genius!” She looked at the young man with distaste: plump, pink-cheeked, working with his tongue between his teeth, bending down to watch, almost cross-eyed, as his mallet ticked brads into the eight-sided box he was at work on. When he saw that she was watching he smiled and gave her a wink that seemed vaguely obscene. Quickly, she looked away. How Vlemk had done it all in less than a month was a mystery to her, for the Queen had no idea that she herself was at the heart of the change. Her friends who'd bought boxes had made Vlemk the social
dernier cri
, and they had done so just at the moment when, as chance would have it, he was in a mood to revise his life. That too was of course her influence, though she could not know it. She could know only that he was a changed man, an artist again, though not at all the artist she had come to seek out—and in fact not an artist she approved of. There had been in him, before, something scornful and majestic, the dignity and barely contained rage of a fallen Lucifer, a haughty detachment, unbending pride, even in his abject poverty, that transformed his afflictions, even his muteness, to bends of nobility. Now overnight he had become just another peasant artisan—indeed, a man at ease with peasant artisans: over by the window, timidly peering down with tiny pig's eyes through his thick, thick spectacles, stood a famous stained-glass-window maker called Lefs—her father had often been his patron—and on a stool, half asleep, sat Borm the bell-maker, a thick-nosed, doltish-looking fellow with hair in his ears.

She stood erect, her face half hidden in the cave of her hood, her gloved hand closed on the doorknob. She was half inclined to flee, sick at heart. It was at that moment, looking around her at the tedious goodness that rolled like granulating honey through the box-painter's shop (such was her word for it; she was no longer comfortable calling it a studio), that the Queen understood that the terrible paintings of her were true. She might not like it, she might—knees trembling—feel shocked toward despair by the frightening fact, but she knew that those paintings she had seen were serious, as none of this was, that the mind that had seared through her flesh to the bones, the mind that with the icy indifference of a god had layer after layer torn the sham away, the childish eagerness, the ridiculous pretenses—the mind that had stripped her and used her and dismissed her—was the mind, sublime and coldblooded, of an artist. Tears sprang to her eyes as she considered the ruin he had become: a man worth, at his best, all the gold in the kingdom, a thousand kingdoms, now reduced, without even knowing it, to this. She remembered with incredulity how once she had refused to let a coin be tossed to him, imagining in her madness that it might lead him to “further debauchery!” Unconsciously she raised her hand to her eyes. The movement was enough to draw the attention of Vlemk the box-painter.

Quickly he came toward her, moving his lips in some remark of dismay, as if he'd forgotten that he'd lost the gift of speech.

“I must go,” she said, and opened the door. A warm breath presaging rain came in.

Grotesquely, as solicitous as her moustached Prince, he caught the edge of the door, half closed it, and held it. He gestured and rolled his eyes. Heaven knew what he was saying. His gaze was fixed on her black band of mourning.

“I must go,” she said again, this time more sternly.

A calm came over him. A coldness, rather; faintly reminiscent of his greater days. With the look of a man killing an insect while holding a conversation—a brief wince, then no change in his expression—he closed the door. She stared, a little frightened, trying to read his eyes. He simply stood there, queerly smiling, the hum of sweetness filling the room behind him, customers chattering, his apprentices hurrying, now painting, now talking, no one noticing the two of them, herself and Vlemk, as removed as two stars. She jerked at the doorknob. She might as well have jerked at a knob on a wall of stone. She focused on the doorknob, studying the wild leap of feeling inside her. She was angry enough to scream at him, but at the center of her rage lay the mad question: am I in love with this pot-bellied old man?

“I'll come back when you're less busy,” she said.

“You've come to see the pictures,” he said. Though she knew it was impossible, he seemed to say it with his voice.

“Yes, I have,” she said.

Vlemk the box-painter nodded, polite, then took his hand from the door and turned away. He stopped to speak in gestures to one of his apprentices—the young man looked over at the Queen, then quickly back at Vlemk—then, half smiling, nodding to his customers, stepping carefully past his table of boxes, the box-painter went to a covered stack in the corner of the room, lifted off the cover, took a folded sack from the floor beside them, and indifferently dropped the boxes, one by one, into the sack. When he returned to her, the box-painter took her hand as he would a child's, hardly looking at her, opened the door, led her from the room, and softly pulled the door closed behind them. Then, letting go of her hand, he started down the stairway. The Queen followed.

Strange as it may seem, the Queen had never before seen the inside of a tavern. She walked with the false assurance of a blind man pretending he needs no help, pressing forward, stiff and erect, waiting as if impatiently for Vlemk to choose a table, though in fact she had no idea whether or not it was accepted practice for a man and a woman to be seated together in a tavern. She was assaulted by such sensations, such newness and mystery, that she could hardly think, could only see and see, drinking in vision with the wide eyes of a child—indeed, she thought instantly of the way she had seen things at four or five, every surface alive, unnaturally sharp-edged: she remembered when she'd gone to the Fair with her father, servants all around them, looking out with sharp, fearful eyes for anarchists, her father still strong and tall, almost fat, crying “Ho, ho, ho” and shaking hands with his people when he could reach past the circle of guards.