If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

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СКАЧАТЬ dangling. She made me sit on a small gilt chair, and turned my face, and pinned up my hair with ornaments that even to my untrained eye looked false, with the greasy iridescence of oil on water.

      But she was satisfied, she went to her easel and ordered me not to move and to fix my eyes on the distant doorway.

      She was many days at it and when she was finished she showed it to me. I took one long look and did not look again.

      I can see from your face that I’ve done well, she laughed. You look exactly like the portrait right now.

      Looking at the portrait was not like looking in a mirror, for a mirror was only surface. The portrait showed me from the inside: she had captured the tension in my jaw from clenching my teeth, and that shameful pink drool—the birthmark at the corner of my mouth, and the hairs of my eyebrows all in disarray, and the eyes. The eyes were both fearful and calculating, the eyes of an animal deciding whether to flee or attack.

      I had not known I looked like that.

      My face made the fine clothes look all the more ridiculous.

      Soon after she told me she had been commissioned to paint a countess. She asked me to look after her house while she was gone.

      Don’t think I’m getting fond of you, she said. We understand each other, that’s all.

      She looked at me shrewdly, then sent me down to the stables to summon a coachman I had not known existed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but as I entered the stalls I thought I saw the coachman with his head in the manger, licking up oats alongside the horses.

      Back in the studio I packed up her brushes. I heard her step and turned. She stood in the doorway in trousers and boots and a greatcoat that fell to her knees. Her face, which had always seemed painted on, now looked to be sketched in with rougher charcoal strokes. How broad her shoulders looked. Perhaps the coat was padded. She had a mustache and beard painted on.

      Don’t look so disturbed, she said. I get many more commissions this way.

      She took the box from me and left. I heard her boots echoing a long time. I watched from the window as the carriage rolled down the long winding road to the town, and then beyond.

      I wondered which of her clothes were the charade.

      The house was even larger than I’d thought. There were many locked doors.

      I went down to the town, to the marketplace. I heard people gossiping about her: her wealth, her isolation, the husbands who went with her to the dark house on the hill and never returned. She loves them to death, wears them out, they said, her body is unnatural. Bluebeard, the men called her, and made obscene gestures.

      The men never come out alive, people said.

      She eats them up, they said.

      Cuts off their things and eats them with a vodka cream sauce.

      They pointed to the house, whispered as if she would overhear them.

      I kept the fires burning to keep the chill out.

      She was gone many weeks and returned with a new husband.

      He was young and fresh and gallant, with pale hair like flax and gaudy clothes. He held himself proudly, though he was slightly shorter than her. He rubbed his hands together and looked about at rugs and lamps and the rooms so long you could not see the end of them, and there was a bit of greed in him, you could see it in his mouth.

      She was dressed in her long clinging gowns again, her hair loose, her face perfect. He put his arm around her waist, caressed her neck. Over his head she gave me her shrewd look.

      That night they were loud and vigorous in her bedroom.

      The next day when I was alone with her in her studio I asked how she had found him, when she’d been dressed as a man.

      She said: Some men like an adventurous woman. Besides, she said, nodding toward the bedroom, he is a third son and will inherit nothing.

      She painted his portrait but kept it in her studio.

      In a short time she announced she had been offered another commission. She could not take her husband with her. I have to preserve my reputation, she told him.

      She handed him a ring of keys and told him he could enter any room in the house but one.

      I trust you completely, she told him. Please honor my request.

      He nodded but he was not paying attention; he had his hands on her breasts.

      Then she left and we were alone in the house, he and I. We seldom spoke and he spent his days riding a black horse through the fields, hacking at the bushes with his sword and shouting like a child.

      There was a night when he fell asleep in a chair in the library, a book open across his lap, and I slipped the keys from his jacket pocket.

      She had never forbidden me from entering the room.

      I found it, high in one of the towers at the top of a spiraling staircase. I had only a candle, it threw my shadow wild-haired on the walls. I fit the key to the lock; the door swung open. I stepped inside, cringing, expecting to spring some hideous trap but too curious to stop. All was silent, the room was empty save a bed, and on the bed lay a woman. It was a young woman, pale and beautiful and stretched out on her back, arms extended as if awaiting an embrace.

      I thought suddenly of Baba’s house, and wondered if all unusual women kept young girls hidden away in secret rooms. As if they were trying to cling to a younger version of themselves.

      I breathed on the woman’s face, I touched her arm. She was cool, didn’t move. I jostled her. She was not real at all; she was made of soft wax or clay and her skin, I saw now, had a hard waxy sheen. I could see that her mouth led nowhere, there was nothing beneath her eyelids. I punched her stomach, my fist drove right through her.

      From a distance, though, she had been convincing. Lifelike. A work of art.

      I pulled the sheets away to see more. I saw a flash of steel and quickly jumped away. There, set between the legs, were jagged metal jaws, like a monstrous bear trap.

      I snatched my candle, raced away from the strange thing. Locked the door, crept down the stairs.

      I considered keeping the keys, to avoid any possible accidents.

      But when the husband cornered me the next day, asked me if I’d seen the keys, accused me of stealing them in his loud pompous voice, I handed them over.

      There was no need to worry, I reasoned. If he kept his promise to my painter, and stayed away from the room, then there was nothing to fear. And even if he did break her trust, and make his way to the secret room, I was sure he would not be so foolish to mistake a waxen girl for a real one.

      And even if he did, I thought, he would not be so unfaithful to his wife as to do the thing that men seemed always intent on doing.

      This was my reasoning. I did not think he would come to any harm.

      Although it was true I did not like the gleam of ownership СКАЧАТЬ