The plot had eerie similarities to my own life. A blind hero and a lover willing to sacrifice his happiness for the sake of his beloved. I cried reading it.
The job required that I deliver concepts first. Over the next two days and nights, with great effort and fortified by a few too many glasses of wine, I managed to sketch out some ideas. If I hadn’t needed to pay my rent, I would have given up in the first hour. My concentration was off. My imagination was impaired. Even my lines were less assured than usual.
I showed Clifford my work. Inspecting my drawings, he suggested which two ideas were worth submitting.
I knew how lackluster my work was compared with what I usually did, but as it turned out, it was still better than what the theater manager usually got for the price.
In the background, I’d drawn a battlefield. In the foreground, Gerald held a wounded Alan in his arms. Looking down on both of them, like an angel above, was Kitty’s lovely face.
In the second sketch, against the same background, Alan holds Kitty in his arms, saying good-bye to her before he goes off to war, and Gerald watches them. That second one was accepted, and I was commissioned to create the final poster.
I’d never struggled harder to accomplish anything. My fingers revolted at holding brushes. I could only stand at the easel for a half hour at a time without feeling fatigued. I didn’t have a fever, a cold or cough, or a stomach problem, but I was ill. My soul was sick.
The first day yielded nothing worthwhile. Neither did the second. By the end of the week, I thought about resigning. But that would have meant disappointing Clifford, who’d gotten me the job. And I needed the money. My only alternative was wiring home to borrow some, which would worry my brother and bring up questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. No one in my family knew of my broken engagement, and I wasn’t ready to discuss that, either. It was all tied to my shame.
“Your visibility is an important part of your success, Delphine,” my brother had explained more than once. “There’s a cachet to your work. People whisper about it and about you. Who is she? How does she do it? We need to always keep them wondering about your mystique. Like Houdini, like Mina Crandon, hold them in awe.”
No, I couldn’t alert Sebastian. I needed not only to finish the illustration but also to do a good enough job to get more poster work. Enough, at least, for rent. Even if I couldn’t assuage my guilt, I had to function.
After a lost third day, I hired a model. Maybe that would inspire me. Gordon Belling was about my age, with long mahogany hair and high cheekbones. I had him pose first as Alan and then as Gerald, and while I sipped brandy, I filled pages with quick sketches of his form in various postures and attitudes. But when it came to the romantic stance, I was at a loss.
“Do you mind posing without your outer clothes?” I asked.
“No problem at all,” Gordon said, as he took off his jacket and then his shirt and stood bare-chested, with just his slacks on. He smiled at me. “Is this all right?”
Was he flirting?
“Yes, better,” I said, in what I hoped was a neutral tone.
As I drew him, I thought again about the instincts that drove us, our urges and yearnings and our passions. Where did they stem from? What was the purpose of our coming together? In school, they had taught us that sexual needs were nature’s way of ensuring procreation. But was that all there was to men and women sharing one another’s bodies? Was the pleasure simply there to tempt us so that we would continue to breed? If the story of La Lune had taught me anything, surely it was that sex wasn’t just about procreation. But what was it about, exactly?
The following morning, I spread all my sketches out on the floor and chose the ones that best fit the characters. Then I blocked out the scene. I had the poses I needed for both men but not for Kitty. I had two choices: spend more money I couldn’t afford on a female model or use myself. It would mean hours of looking into the mirror. But did I really have any choice?
That evening, I removed the chiffon from the entryway mirror, turned on the foyer light, took my sketchbook in hand, and looked.
It was just as I’d dreaded. The room was dimly lit behind me, and in the shadows were frightening shapes, swimming by, caught in a vortex. I felt nauseated but had no other choice than to bear it and work quickly, getting the angles right and then covering up the mirror again as quickly as I could. Within minutes, I was enveloped in freezing-cold air, causing my teeth to chatter and my fingers to tremble.
Once I finished the sketch, I drank more brandy, choking on it in my haste to warm up.
Later that night, I’d painted myself into the poster, in the handsome model’s arms. It wasn’t up to my usual quality. The painting lacked a certain clarity and crispness. If only I could have called on magick to improve this undistinguished work. But it didn’t work that way. It was the same with my mother. Whatever magick we possessed was finite. Like everyone else, we relied on hard work. But this painting looked average. Would it do? It was certainly competent. And better than what most would produce. But that didn’t mean I had to be satisfied with it.
I turned the easel to the wall so I wouldn’t have to look at the painting. Then I poured myself a glass of wine and settled down with a book. I read only a few pages but was distracted and nervous. Not even a second glass of wine helped.
Sometimes drawing soothed me. I gathered some pencils and a pad and began to sketch a man, similar in form to Gordon but in a very different pose. Lying down, naked, he had a tiger’s head instead of his handsome face, and beneath him, crushed by his body, I drew myself with the head of a swan.
Searching for answers in the lines and shading, I drew us over and over. On each page, exploring different positions—most I’d never known myself but could imagine. My hunger to learn more about the impulses I’d drawn in that horrible sketch of Clara and Monty consumed me.
What kind of animals were we that our sexual dances led to such tragedy? What was the point of so much passion? Mathieu was the only person I’d shared my body with. He was all I knew of that kind of fervor. When I was with him, it was silk and fire, wild colors, intensity and tenderness all at the same time. Transcendent and glorious, it felt anything but animalistic. Rather, it seemed as if our souls were meeting and joining. And yet our attraction to each other was dangerous, too, fated to end. The choice of just how tragically was left up to me.