Decadent Bloom

The painting was finished on a Tuesday, which is always the worst day for a painting to be finished — because Tuesday is the day when the week has settled into its bones and you realize that there is no escape from the ordinary, and a painting, like a life, demands to be extraordinary or not at all.

Isolde Ashworth stood before the canvas and did not recognize herself. The woman in the painting was pale — paler than Isolde remembered herself being — with eyes that seemed to look through the viewer rather than at them, and a mouth that was slightly open, as if the woman were about to speak and had not yet decided whether what she was about to say was worth saying. The colors were dark, almost grotesque in their intensity — deep crimsons and blacks and a gold so yellow it looked like sickness.

"That's not me," Isolde said.

Vivien Cross, who had been standing beside her in silence for the three minutes it had taken the painting to reveal itself fully, said: "That's who you are. You just don't want to see it."

They stood in silence. The painting watched them. It was, Isolde thought, a terrible thing to be seen so clearly by someone else — to have your reflection captured not in a mirror, which shows you what your eyes see, but in paint, which shows you what someone else's eyes see, and what their eyes see is not the surface but the architecture beneath it, the structure of bone and intention and desire that holds the face together.

Vivien had been painting Isolde for three years. Three years of afternoons in the Chelsea townhouse, Isolde sitting by the window reading Baudelaire and pretending not to understand German even though she understood Nietzsche with a clarity that frightened her, Vivien sitting across from her with a sketchbook and a charcoal stick and an expression that Isolde had learned, over time, to recognize as something between worship and hunger.

The paintings had evolved — from tender portraits of a cousin by the window to increasingly grotesque mythology, Isolde as Persephone in the underworld, Isolde as Salome with the head of John the Baptist, Isolde as Circe transforming men into beasts. Each painting was more beautiful and more terrible than the last, and Isolde had loved them and hated them and loved the hatred and hated the love and lived inside the contradiction like a room she had never left.

Then Lady Rosamund Peacock entered the studio, and the contradiction became a wound.

Rosamund was everything Isolde was not — conventionally beautiful, where Isolde was unusual; confident, where Isolde was uncertain; wealthy, where Isolde was impoverished. She was forty, a widow with a reputation for taking what she wanted, and she had come to Vivien's studio with the casual arrogance of a person who has never been told no.

"May I?" she said, looking at the paintings on the wall.

Vivien nodded. Rosamund studied them with the intensity of a collector who has found something she wants to own. She stopped at the last painting — the one that Isolde did not recognize — and she stood there for a long time, her expression unreadable.

"When you paint someone," Rosamund said finally, "what are you painting? Their face, or their hunger?"

Vivien did not answer. Isolde answered for her: "The hunger."

Rosamund turned to Isolde. She looked at her the way Vivien looked at her in paintings — not with desire, exactly, but with the desire to understand, which is a form of desire in itself. "You are very beautiful," Rosamund said. "Not in the way that society calls beautiful. In the way that art calls beautiful. And art is more dangerous."

She invited Vivien to paint her portrait the following week. Vivien agreed, and Isolde said nothing, because she had learned that speaking her feelings made them real, and reality was too dangerous to invite into a room where the only furniture was paintings and the only light came through a window that looked out onto a street that led nowhere.

The portrait of Rosamund was completed in three weeks. It was magnificent and hollow — everything Vivien's paintings of Isolde had not been. Rosamund was painted with technical perfection, every feature rendered with the precision of a surgeon, every color placed with the deliberation of a mathematician. But there was no hunger in it. No darkness. No truth. Rosamund was beautiful, and the painting was beautiful, and they were both utterly empty.

Isolde confronted Vivien in the studio on the day the portrait was finished. She stood in front of the three years of her own images — the Persephone, the Salome, the Circe, the last painting with its sickly gold and its impossible eyes — and she said: "Why does hers look alive and mine look like a corpse?"

Vivien could not answer. Her hands were shaking. Isolde saw the shaking and understood that Vivien's talent had always been secondary to her obsession, and obsession, unlike talent, cannot be divided between subjects. Vivien had not painted Isolde as a person. She had painted her as a possession. And when Rosamund had entered the room, Vivien had chosen the person she could possess over the person she had already possessed, and the paintings were the evidence.

Isolde took a knife from Vivien's palette. She did not hesitate. She brought it down on the canvas of the last painting — the one she did not recognize — and the paint cracked and split like skin, and beneath it was another layer of paint, and beneath that another, and Isolde slashed through them all, three years of shared language, three years of afternoon light and whispered readings and the quiet, unnameable love that had existed in the space between a painter and her subject, reduced to shreds on the floor.

Vivien watched. She did not stop her. Perhaps she could not have stopped her even if she had wanted to. Perhaps, in some dark and shameful corner of her heart, she had wanted Isolde to do exactly this — to destroy the evidence, to burn the bridge, to make the loss irreversible, because loss, for Vivien, had always been more beautiful than possession.

Vivien left with Rosamund that evening. She did not look back. Isolde stood in the doorway and watched them walk down the Chelsea street, Vivien's hand in Rosamund's, and she felt something break inside her — not the dramatic, cinematic break of melodrama, but the quiet, practical break of a person who has lost something she cannot replace and knows it and accepts it and will carry the knowledge for the rest of her life like a stone in her pocket.

She sat in front of the window, as she always did, and read a book she was not reading. On the table beside her: a single fragment of a canvas, torn from the painting she had destroyed. It showed one eye — Isolde's eye, Vivien's eye, both of them together, the eye that had seen everything and said nothing and would see everything and say nothing for the rest of her life.

Isolde held the fragment to the light and saw, in the cracks and scratches and layers of paint, the face of someone she had loved and never named. She placed it in a drawer and closed it. She did not lock the drawer.

She did not lock the drawer because she wanted Vivien to find it, if she ever came back. She did not lock the drawer because she wanted to be found, if someone ever came looking. She did not lock the drawer because, at the end of three years of silence, she was tired of locking things. She was tired of closing things. She was tired of being the kind of person who keeps her treasures locked away, where they can be seen only through a keyhole, where they can be admired but never held.

She closed the drawer. She sat in the window. She read her book. She waited.

And in the waiting, she felt, for the first time in three years, the sharp, clean, unbearable pleasure of being honest about her own hunger.

Not the hunger for possession. The hunger for truth. The hunger that had driven Vivien to paint her and Isolde to be painted and both of them to live inside the painting as if it were a room they could not leave.

The hunger was still there. It always would be. It was the only thing she had left that was real.

Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.
Objective Code (OTMES-v2): M1=10.0 M2=2.0 M3=3.0 M4=9.0 M9=9.0 N1=0.60 N2=0.40 K1=0.30 K2=0.90 TI=92.1 Theta=45.0 Style=DecadentGothic



Such grant is exclusive and irrevocable. The term of such rights shall be 49 years from the date of publication.