If I Told You Once: A Novel (9 page)

I thought I could even see the red of their mouths, but it must have been the first red light of the rising sun.

I knew I would not catch up to them. Yet I walked after the shrinking shape, black against the sun. They veered, and now they were driving directly toward it as if the sun were a tunnel they could enter.

I came to the top of a rise of earth and looked down, and there in a hollow on the other side of the hill I found all the proof I could have wanted.

They were stacked in a mound, piled high as a haystack, all of them, and frozen in a way that was familiar. Some were in pieces, most were not; all had the whitest skin. They were cold and hard as statues, fuzzed with frost, saliva frozen in the corners of their mouths. The blood on them was beaded red and smeared purple and crusted, clotted black.

I saw the mass of backflung heads, angled this way and that as if in conversation, and the feet laid together, some shod, some bare.

I could not have moved any of the bodies even if I had wanted to, they were all frozen together in one solid mass.

How can I explain how peaceful they looked, their eyes unblinking, perfectly silent as the sun rose and the soft light touched their faces.

Too silent.

My mother, my father. Lying side by side.

I don’t want to hear a sound out of you, I ordered them. Not a peep.

No one stirred.

Don’t move, don’t even breathe, I told them. Play dead.

I crouched near them and said: They’ll never find you now. They’re stupid that way. As long as you all stay quiet like this, they’ll never find you.

They obliged.

You’re safe here, I said, as long as you stay here and don’t ever move and don’t ever breathe, you’ll always be safe, do you understand?

They did.

I turned my back then and started walking and did not look back. I had the proof I needed, there was no more reason to stay. Solid proof that you can touch, that you can see—that’s all the proof you need to believe in something. Sometimes it is too much.

*   *   *

I came to a town ten times larger than the village where I grew up. The streets were paved with stones and lit by lamps at night. The people spoke differently here. I saw women with stuffed birds and fruit on their hats, and children dressed in white like angels.

I found work here with a woman who lived in a house on a cliff high above the town.

She was very tall, with red hair in crinkly waves and a white immobile face like a mask. Her eyebrows were arched so high they must have been painted on; there was a beauty mark, like brown velvet, absolutely round, perfectly centered on one cheek.

She said she liked me because I did not talk much.

When I first came to her she showed me around the vast drafty house.

Come meet my husbands, she said and led me down a long gallery.

Aren’t they beautiful? she said with a wave of her hand. All of them dead so young. Sad, isn’t it?

A row of framed portraits hung on the wall; I counted seven. Heads and shoulders, nearly life-size. They all had puffed-out chests and a kind of barnyard cockiness, in spite of their elaborate clothes and carefully manicured hair and beards. They all had eyes that met yours, that seemed to follow you as you moved.

I never wanted to marry so often, she was saying, but what could I do? They kept dying. Unlucky in love, I am.

I spent my days lighting candles, cutting the pages of books. I mended her shoes, dozens and dozens of them, high heeled and jewel toed, and I went to the roof to feed the pigeons, but most of my work revolved around hers, for she was a painter. Her hands were always smeared with colors; the portraits of her husbands she had painted herself.

She taught me to mix her paints and clean the brushes and to cut wood into frames, though she stretched the canvas on them herself.

She sometimes spent hours looking at a stone or a piece of cloth with the sun shining on it.

I learned that she was a well-respected artist, much in demand to paint portraits of the aristocracy. She traveled to far places for commissions.

I liked to watch her work, the way she could give a picture such depth that the canvas seemed merely a portal to a deep and distant world. Yet I didn’t trust it, it was all trickery, wasn’t it? It fooled the eyes. And the paintings were lies, they showed you a moment that was gone. Those husbands, who looked so hearty and red cheeked in their portraits, were all dead. It seemed a cruel deception.

Of course I did not say so.

One day she told me she wanted to paint me.

Just for practice, she said, just to keep my hand in tune.

No, I said. I pointed to a blank canvas and said: I don’t want to be caught there.

Are you afraid I’ll capture your soul? she laughed. Is that another one of your superstitions? When are you people going to come out of the dark?

She said: I’ll give you a dress, you can pretend to be someone else, you won’t even recognize yourself when it’s finished.

So I agreed, and she brought out a dress and for a moment I was thrilled. I pictured myself all sweeping skirts and dancing grace and icy grandeur. Like her.

She held it against me and I saw that it was all a sham, it was not a dress, only the front of a dress, to be draped conveniently across any posing sitter. It was unlined, unfinished inside, embroidery unraveling, threads 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 in his eye, or the way he shouted and spit in my face and called me a country cow.

I did not think he would do anything foolish, but the very next night I was awakened by a metallic snap, followed by the most unbearable screams I had ever heard. I ran to the tower room, pounded on the door but it had locked behind him. I could hear him gasping, I shouted to him to throw the keys underneath the door, but there was no room for them to slip through even if he had.

This is unpleasant to hear, I know. It sounds like the kind of story people tell children to frighten them into good behavior.

But that’s not why I am telling it to you.

I am telling you because it is what happened. It is the truth. No other reason.

Dawn broke and pink light seeped into the studio where I stood, and then I heard a horse’s footsteps far away but coming closer. It was the painter, returning as if she had known all that had happened.

She strode in, still in her man’s clothes, looking windswept and happy. She gave me a list of errands as long as her arm and sent me to town. She had forgotten that I did not know how to read, but I knew enough to stay away from the house until nightfall.

When I returned all was quiet. She greeted me serenely, and in answer to my look she said: He failed the test, you see. It’s a pity, it’s impossible to find a man who can remain faithful these days.

She touched my shoulder with a hand that was sticky, smeared as usual. You should not feel responsible, she said. It was his own fault, he should not have gone poking into forbidden places.

He broke my trust, she said, and then she hung his portrait on the wall beside the others. I could not look at it.

I stayed with her a while longer. I loved to watch her paint but could not look her in the face. She went away again and returned with her ninth husband. When I saw him I knew I would have to leave because he was a soft mild man who walked with a limp. He looked at her with worshipful eyes and touched her gently and he helped me light the lamps in the evenings. I could not bear the thought of him ending up with his head hung on the wall with all the others.