SWAN

Long neck with dead space. Can hiss like a snake, speaking fragments, unforeseen.

WALKING OUT INTO THE FILTHY daylight knocks me awake. Day is harder than night. My eye sockets burning. They sharpen when out in the cool air. I should feel brazen with matted hair in the morning and the same clothes from the black moonless night. I see shoals of knee-socked shins of schoolgirls in the cold streets, kilts with knife-sharp pleats. Lev has been drawing all night and my head pounds, my shoulders ache from sleeplessness. My body still in disbelief, replaying itself like the way you are tricked to feel waves after you’ve reached solid ground. A bruise near my collarbone contains the violence of nights before. Blackvioletblueyellow. Each day I carry it, the only thing that links him and these acts to the days between. I lose track of street names, how long I have been walking, which way the light is coming from. Has winter yet passed? I think suddenly in a panic. A striped awning clicks forward. The boulanger can tell. I do not see the scorn on the faces of the women gathered in front of shops. Women who are eager to pass judgment on the authenticity of a woman’s honour. Though they misinterpret where exactly this is located. Still, in France, however far from admirable infidelity is, if conducted properly it is as acceptable as a standard piece of furniture.

I try to send my mind somewhere else. The things to hold on to. I have been meaning to visit the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle. I have been wondering about the hyena. I haven’t gone to her in a few days and worry that I’ve mythologized her too quickly. Tacita is set to paint her portrait. There has been some shuffling of animals at the menagerie and I am convinced that the monkeys are no longer there. I even inquired directly of the mid-sized mammals guard, but if he knows anything he’s not saying.

My pace quickens and I am soon in the familiar courtyard. I’ve come straight to the academy, without washing or changing my clothes. Without eating. I find the capped cardboard tube stowed in my desk in the studio. Inside my drawings are furled leaves that I will remove and flatten to show M. Marant, though this does not happen. There is no doubt about the intelligence he possesses but there is something that feels anti-democratic about it. He has a reverence for callow religious painters and for coldly impassioned painters with immense technical skill. He is not convinced by my paintings nor by those of the artists in the group, but he accepts my meticulousness as a kind of mutual consent. I can tell that he has found my deportment at odds with the increasing horror and bestial fictions of my work.

The last painting I submitted was not received well. I had the usual animals, birds, horses, but the main subject was a ritualistic meal. A banquet of cannibals that Tacita thought to be a blasphemous take on the Eucharist. There is a group of gluttonous grotesque women, with heads that she described as phallic though I had thought of them as equine. They sit at a table, abundant with extravagant dishes. It is all writhing and moving and somewhat alive. There is a woman alone, with a neutral expression on her face. She is off in the corner of the painting, and appears to be unaware that her fork has dug into a plump, live baby. It was part of a series of banquets I had begun sketches for. The last being one that depicts forest animals who turn against the humans they encounter hunting boar—the prey eat the predators.

The instructor was silent. All he said was, The assignment was for a still-life rendering.

But doesn’t a banquet constitute a still life?

I’m not certain one could call something this—he pauses—perverse a still life.

I look at M. Marant and tell him that I am withdrawing from the academy.

When he registers my determination, we walk through the high halls to a small office, his heavy oak desk under a pile of papers with tidy paragraphs and aligned paperclips. After some rustling, he produces a document that I sign with the slim pen he holds out for me.

Thank you, I say.

I am swaying back and forth from lack of food.

Remember the rigour with which you have learned to draw, Mlle. Frame, and keep it with you. An artist must have dedication, ideas, and technical ability. But ultimately, they must be better than the sum of these parts.

The absoluteness with which the instructors speak about painting feels like learning without belief. It seems they explain everything without explaining anything. Being preoccupied with the sound notebook, and contemplating how to make this into something, I showed it to one of my instructors tentatively, after my life drawing class. The students filed out. The air was dense with cigarette smoke. But what is this? he said. His broad hands leafing through my writing dismissively. I felt my neck grow hot. He shut the notebook. Spend your time working on paintings, he said with the long dramatic pause of a man who is used to being listened to, or you’ll not improve.

M. Marant finds a key threaded with a white ribbon and fits it into the lock on a wooden filing cabinet. His soft small hands flit through the files and for a moment I think of the Larva and that she may stand to inherit these soft hands. But then I realize that for a girl, this is desirable. He touches his necktie as it swings forward while he bends over the files. He produces my tuition deposit, which oddly bears my father’s signature, and looking over his eyeglasses, hands it to me. I will be able to live on this money for months.

Bon courage, Mlle. Frame, he says, with no trace of irony. He extends his hand and I shake it. It is limp and warm. It is the first time I have chosen to leave a school without the involvement of my parents. I am sure of my decision.

Je vous remercie. He has allowed me the dignity of uncontested escape. How lightened. How free. With every step away from the academy.

Tacita and I sip kir royale. She is supportive of my decision. The unlikelier of the two of us, she will remain at the academy.

I like the rows of seats, the wooden lecterns, the professors who have studied every corner of an Ingres, Tacita says. I prefer practising my art within a structure. I’ve had so little of it. It seems something to push off from. But you, I, you come from that controlled world. You are right to rebel. Besides, no one can teach you to be an artist.

The same applies to you.

But I didn’t come to the academy out of escape. It was pure practical desire. I never really learned how to draw. What I want is technique, not ideas. We all have those.

Our tangents have crossed and are headed in opposing directions. I have begun to consider alternative semi-abstractions that may not involve putting pen to paper at all. Tacita is increasingly interested in the mystical immanence in portraits, in landscapes, that she was once dismissive of.

But, I, in the end it doesn’t matter. It isn’t the ways in which these things meet the eye, but the ways they take form in the mind that count.

The door opens like a blade.

A tall, fine-boned woman who formerly danced with the Ballet Russes brushes past us. A woman whom I have been told Lev has been with. A welter of jealousy. A slow flush crawls up my neck, my face. She has an exacting part down the centre of her head. A swan neck. She sees herself in the mirror above the bar. Glued to her own reflection, as swans are. She wears her long pale hair drawn into a low bun that means her ears are covered. Sharp Slavic cheekbones, glacial eyes. A sensual mouth, long dancer thighs. A calm but unmistakably predatory way of turning her head.

Despite my own will, I am decentred and seeing how Lev would see her. Does she know who I am? Does she call me l’Anglaise and make jokes with the other dancers? Do they speak Russian and laugh at our alphabet with all its childish roundness? The consonants of tin? Does she offer her body to Lev the way she does with her art? I envy their shared native language, which I imagine to be far more nuanced than English, where everything has to be pinned down. Because to feel connected with someone is to have the kind of dialogue where you don’t have to think, however imperfect. And in this they conspire together.

Ivory, don’t, Tacita says, in characteristic telepathy. She’s a fish. Remember that jealousy is more a matter of self-love than love.

What’s wrong with self-love? I say. Besides, who is speaking about love?

Oh I forgot. Your northernness comes out when you’re mad.

I’m not mad. I’m, for the first time, scared. I’ve given up the academy, the one steady thing, and my life now hangs like a question mark. And with Lev, I have rendered myself helpless by succumbing to something that is outside of me. Though I say nothing.

We will finish this champagne and then drown ourselves in red, Tacita says. We will join everyone at Le Dôme later.

The only thing I can think of is the dancer. Her small high head and drawn-out neck make her seem ethereal, longer-limbed, taller than she really is. Do our eyes meet? They are beautiful, vacant eyes, though she is not unintelligent. She walks straight up to me and says my name the way Lev does, her r’s deep and palatialized.

She looks at Tacita and then to me. The silent language of the eyes. I think she is not speaking because she is preparing what to say, but she is merely taking time to see who I am. I can see from her eyes that for her, everything is absolute. She has the look of someone who is bad at life, though somehow without losing her advantage. She wears a long scarf wound tightly around her neck and has filigreed earrings that swing and flash when they catch the light. The immense bag on her shoulder is cream leather like the underbelly of a snake. Its size makes her seem even narrower, as though she might have one less rib. What does she carry? I imagine it to be filled with all her portable possessions that she brings with her, never trusting them to anyone. When she speaks I cannot believe this is what she intended to say, but there is no mistaking it.

You should not open your legs for him, he is not for a little girl like you. In his head, there is always something more beautiful. Go home, English, if you know what’s good for you.

My hand burns. I am shocked by her vulgar words, her brazenness. I grew up with emotions kept in line by the notion of proper appearances, even in the absence of witnesses.

I rage inwardly for my lack of control. But I am raw, a vulnerable version of myself. I feel bonier and stiffer in her presence. She has a tensile strength enough to break me in two, but I can see that she is frailer than I am, in a different way. I observe that jealousy spoils her face.

She touches her hand to her cheek and then laughs and says what someone says later means virgin bride in Russian. It is a ridiculous laugh, but one with warning. She turns away.

It is then that it occurs to me that this woman could actually be Lev’s wife.

Well, she knows that Lev has chosen you, Tacita attempts to say jokingly, so naturally she wants to kill you.

Neither of us laughs.

She is not a happy person, Tacita says, lowering her voice. People who are happy are harmless.