The Artist's Wife

A woman, slightly past her prime, drapes herself in a cardinal red wingback. Her Slavic features, or at least those details which constitute a recognisable face, are inscrutable. Only the eyes, dancing with malice, betray her hauteur. She wears a long string of pearls, which form a seeded rope between her sagging breasts. They are the only notable detail of the pose, for the woman, dark-haired and dark-eyed, is otherwise naked. 

At her left shoulder the sun forms a square of light on her already pale flesh. It lends an angularity to her - that cavity where her heart resides set apart by a whimsy of sunbeam, to the rest of her softening body. In the street below, teeming with Parisian decorum, the low murmur of human activity, roaming with either great purpose or with no broad intention, can be heard beneath the louder susurration of motor cars and slow hoof beat. 

Earlier, when office girls click-clacked and cafe owners raised their faces to the pavement sun, scratching their aproned bellies, she had gone to Printemps for lipstick. A specific shade to match the chair she now sat upon. Such variety the world has to offer, she mused. So much to choose from when one has the financial means to browse, and not to beg or steal. 

The lipstick was placed in a pale yellow box and although she demurred at the wastefulness, the girl insisted - the box being proof of purchase - the implication being that a vast number of small cosmetic items found their way into side pockets. It must be difficult, she thought, to strike the balance between the provision of good service and watchfulness. 

It is difficult to be a good wife whilst striving for the same. 

*****

He stands some five feet away, the bulk of his naked upper torso hidden by easel and canvas. The studio is unkempt and suffused with the smell of paint, like snubbed tallow. He absent-mindedly, occasionally, wipes the wet bristles onto his flesh. She tries to discern the nature of his painting by the colours he has bedaubed himself with, but whenever she looks at him too hard, he gazes back, and what fills the brown eyes, deeply creased at their corners, beckon a warning. She stares defiantly back.

His father had also been an artist, although more a teacher than an enfant terrible. Thus his passage had been facilitated, as it so often is, by that early assistance. She often wonders where he would have been without it, (if his father had been a customs official or a lamplighter), but that is an impossible question, like asking how she would feel if she were a man, or what would have happened to Russia without the revolution. When things happen, there is no more room for reflection. The course had been re-set. Destiny required, indeed demanded, that his father should be just who he was. 

When they first met, he had told her, cryptically, that ‘In art, you must first kill your father.’ 

Men like her husband must always outdo their male parent. It is not a compelling force within women, for it is not hard to outdo your mother’s embroidery skills, or cooking arts, or typing speed per minute. It is not a thought which occurs to women at all, whereas she recalls an early love, when just fifteen: a handsome, blue-eyed boy in the Russian Imperial Army, a subordinate of her father’s, who came courting. When she asked him why he had joined the army, (because other options had been available), he told her that he would leave once his rank rose above that of his own father’s. And so the dye is set. Now, naked in the wingback, she allows her mind to wonder what might have happened had she married him instead. 

He died fighting for the White Army in the revolutionary war, so she would have been a widow, but she would not, she suspected, have been a humiliated relict. 

*****

Aside from the cardinal red lipstick and the pearls, she wore ballet pumps on her feet. He could be brutal with feet and she protected them from his gaze. The feel of them, the ribbons around her ankles, take her back to the Ballets Russe and Diaghilev’s disturbing works. Such uproar, at first, at the dystopian, bizarre sets designed by the man stood before her now. And then quickly subsumed when the public were told to believe that the emperor, was indeed, wearing the finest clothing. And then? Cut to applause! 

She was not a prima ballerina. Although beautiful and statuesque, she was never more than a trouper. But she had been drawn to him; the force of his nature, the territorial ambition of his gaze. The broad, generous nose, the thick shock of hair, the agile, virile body. Sandalwood and cigarette smoke. An effete artiste would not have been to her taste. This man was sun-soaked matador, and she was not immune to such charms. 

She wrote to her mother in Ukraine, just as the first shots of the revolution were fired. Amid the anxiety of future shock, her mother strongly advised her to play the Ann Boleyn to Henry VIII. Do not let your mask slip, nor your foolish, giddy heart betray you. I have never heard of this man, but you say he is wealthy and rising. There have been times when I would advise against a man of such temperament, but now I would urge the contrary. Lord knows where money will come from now, Dochen’ka, so look to yourself and your material comforts. Russia is all but gone. 

Diaghilev, who had noticed the rising ardour between them, pulled him to one side and gave some sage advice of his own: ‘You must marry Russian girls,’ he said. 

And so he did. 

At the Russian Orthodox cathedral in Paris, she walked up the aisle leaning heavily on a cane, having landed badly during her final performance. His face, so proud and loving when she stood by his side, her elation at being this man’s wife, the anticipation of the night ahead, his wealth, his position, his manliness. It would be impossible for a woman to desire a man more than she did on that day. 

They honeymooned in Biarritz, where he painted her in neo-classicist shades of melancholy, at her sore leg, and from the increasingly disturbing news from home. It was a beautiful painting. 

And she still loves him, even as, (or perhaps because) her mind slowly fragments in the face of his crudities. And now she glares at him as he glares at her. They have not spoken since this morning, when she walked into his studio and said, 

‘I demand that you paint me. I am your muse. I am your wife. I am the mother of your son.’

And he scoffed, but then, later, finding her in the kitchen, he said, ‘Of course I shall paint you, cherie. Present yourself tomorrow at ten.’ (They converse in French, the language of privilege, but not that of her heart). 

She believes in the sanctity of love. She believes in her place in his life, his first and only wife. She believes that he loves their son, Paul, and that he still loves her, with less immediacy, perhaps, but surely with more depth? She recalls the glorious days in Biarritz, Dinard, Juan-le-Pins, London, the social whirl where she, a woman of aristocratic upbringing, sought to drag him away from the bohemians and into the bosom of the bourgeoisie. 

For several years he was happy with this, but you can’t seem to take the fight out of the dog. He drifts, he hankers for other women. There have been many of them. He is a man who must always be in the first throes of love. He does not understand the incremental layers of long romance, the different, more elevated experience which that patience and constancy can procure. 

And so for many years, she has played her part, applied the face paint and the latest fashions, graced the salons and the grand openings, closing her ears (although not entirely) to the bohemians who viewed her as a spirited horse might view a plough: who find her cold and haughty, and laugh at her ponderous French. 

He puffs away on a cigarillo, moving his head this way and that, seeing her without looking at her. He often tells a story about the day he was born. He was blue and lethargic and it was thought he was stillborn. An uncle, leaning over in concern, blew cigar smoke upon the newborn, who promptly coughed and roused himself sufficiently. He is fond of telling that story. 

‘I am taking a break,’ he announces. ‘Put your robe on. Be back here at two.’

She acquiesced, without speaking, and he locks the door before going to his latest mistress, who he keeps upstairs as his yellow-haired muse. She is still a teenager and he is middle-aged. 

Just before he took the stairs upwards, he grabbed at his wife, held her face between his painted hands, and kissed her passionately on her cardinal red lips. 

‘You are too jealous,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘It is an ugly sentiment, cherie.’

As he disappears towards the yellow-haired girl, she wonders how ugly his own sentiments might be if she were to take a lover of her own. 

Lying naked on the bed, she traces her body with her fingers. The silhouette of the thirty-six year old is similar to her dancing days. She has not changed her hair of her dressing habits, and yet there is a gravity at work, as it works upon us all, and she wonders if she will ever be made love to again. If they will slip into their older years and find a companionship compatible with fond and loving feeling. Or will he continue to take his women on holiday with them? 

Will she go mad in the waiting? 

She drifts off to sleep in the muffled house in the Parisian street and dreams of Russia. She is awoken by an impatient rapping on her bedroom door, and then there he stands, with evidence of his priapic interlude still quite evident. She sees her looking down at him, and smiles. 

‘Come along, girl. You demand a portrait - let’s give you what you want.’ 

There is silence in the studio as she slips off her robe and assumes her earlier pose. He had covered the canvas with tarp, which has not hitherto been a quirk of his, and for a long while there is no sound from either inside the studio or outside in the streets. It begins to oppress her, and she blurts out that she wants a divorce. 

‘In an ideal world,’ he said, ‘yes, you could divorce me. You could return to what is left of your family, to your dacha and dumplings, and live under the tender rule of Stalin. But I will not let you divorce me, Olga.’

‘Why?’ She asks, ashamed for asking it. Ashamed that she holds in her heart all that she desperately wants him to say …. because I love you, cherie. 

But that is not what he says. He says, ‘Because if I grant you a divorce, you get half of my fortune. Half of my unsold work, half of the clothes off my back, (although he was wearing none), half of everything I have worked for. So no, I will not allow you to divorce me. I won’t sign the papers. Be happy with what you have, or go mad.’ He shrugged, as if it was of no importance to him each or either way. 

The first time he kissed her was the evening she agreed to marry him. She had just come off the stage, sweated but still immaculate in that immutable way of ballerinas everywhere. He waited in the wings, eager, and held her face in much the same way, and with the same fervour, he had recently held it on the landing between their separated lives. 

His lips were soft and searching. His body, pressing against hers, was solid. He smelt of absinthe and tobacco, of snubbed tallow. And he cried with happiness when she finally reciprocated, after months of froidure, and his tears tasted of Mediterranean brine and salted olives. 

And she looks at him now, through drowsy eyes, as he hums an Andalusian folk song - stepping back, assessing, nodding, happy with himself. And there is savagery in it. 

Yesterday she had received a letter from a childhood friend, a Russian emigré now living in London. She was complaining about the impossibility of love, especially in these turbulent times. How all was damage, everywhere. She wrote …. ‘I firmly believe that the luckiest thing that can happen to a woman is to fall in love and to stay in love forever, and he with her. I think it is as rare as cranberries in February, Olga. I am already mourning the lack of it, and wish to scream at those who don’t appreciate what they have ….’ 

The spring sun is sliding to the west. A clock chimes on the landing. She can hear her son’s piping voice, home from a picnic in the Bois de Boulogne with friends. He won’t come in here and see his mother naked. He is never allowed in the studio rooms, but her husband, perhaps eager to see the boy, declares himself finished and leaves her abruptly.

At the door he says, ‘That was the last time I shall ever kiss you. The last time I shall ever paint you. You will not like it, cherie. But I paint what I see.’ 

For a few moments, she remains seated. And her shoulders, held so proudly all day, sag. She views herself as a sparrow on the ledge might view her. An exposed woman, goose-fleshed and powerless, in ridiculously garish lipstick and ballet pumps. 

She slipped on her robe and approached the easel. To the sound of hubbub downstairs, of admonitions to wash hands and go to the kitchen for cake, she looks at the work and gasps. It is the ugliest work of his career. She is depicted, open-legged, breasts askew, wreathed in blood with the head and teeth of a lamprey eel trapped in a net. 

And it will sell for a fortune. 

In a state of shock, she dresses carefully and wipes away the cardinal red lipstick. Straightening her skirts, she walks downstairs to her son, who embraces her excitedly and regales her of his adventures in the woods. And although it has occurred to her a hundred times, it becomes more and more lucidly important to remind herself that the love of a mother for a child is the most powerful of them all. Those feelings for his father are of desire and jealously and complicated retribution - mais ce n’est pas de l’amour. 

She resolves that, in the morning, her and little Paul will have a grand day out. She will buy new outfits, the latest shoes, the most expensive scents. And if her husband’s brutal kiss will be the last one she receives from any quarter, then so be it. 

In the meantime, she will spend his money like water. Like a good Cubist, he had somewhat boxed himself into a corner on that particular matter.