The Portrait of Mrs Charbuque by Jeffrey Ford

low voice, "Remember, Piambo, the less we know, the better."
    "My memory is a blank canvas," I said.
    "Thank you," he said, and walked away up the street.
    Once inside my home, I went immediately to the bed-room and shrugged off my coat and clothes, letting them lie in a pile where they fell. I felt as if I could have fallen asleep standing up, but there was one more thing I had to do. There was the matter of the notebook, and an assess-ment of the sketches I had made at Mrs. Charbuque's. I took the tablet to bed with me, and when I was comfort-able, with my head propped up on the pillows, I set about reviewing what I had done.
    I flipped the pages, past sketches of a neighborhood cat, Samantha in a kimono, one of a telephone pole on East Broadway, outside the Children's Aid Society, Reed's gold-fish, a portrait of a young writer
    sitting at a corner table at Billy Mould's Delicatessen. Then I came to the first of the sketches done in
    Mrs. Charbuque's drawing room. Staring for a moment, I then turned the sketchbook to see if I had not had it positioned differently while drawing. What I saw before me was an amorphous Page 30

    blob made up of scratchy lines. Hard as I tried, I couldn't make out the fig-ure of a woman at all.
    To tell the truth, I
    couldn't even make out the figure of a person.
    Irritated, I turned to the next. Again I beheld the mere shadow of a cloud. The next, another charcoal puddle. None of them exhibited any recognizable trace. I lay there wondering what it was I
    thought I had witnessed projected on that screen. At one point, I remembered thinking I had actually captured the outline of a facial pro-file, but what was transmitted to the sketchbook now made me wonder if I was not, weakened by my sleepless condition, doing a bit of projecting myself. While Mrs.
    Charbuque was relating to me her tale of allowing fancy to infect reality, I had been going her one better and putting it into practice. An indistinct movement of shadow had become a woman.
    I cursed and threw the sketchbook across the room. It slammed against the top corner of the dresser, twirled in the air, bounced off the arm of a chair, and landed, no lie, directly in a trash can I kept in the corner. As Mrs. Charbuque had said, there was no such thing as an acci-dent.
    My eyes closed, and I fell into a dream of snow.
    Dream Woman
    Saturday brought with it the urge to paint. I rose early, well refreshed, and went out for breakfast to
    Crenshaw's on Seventh Avenue. After a greasy repast of steak and eggs, two cups of coffee, three cigarettes, and the perusal of a story in the
    Times concerning a land grab ensuing in Cherokee Creek, Oklahoma, where people were shooting one another over parcels of dirt, I returned home to my ethereal pursuit of the ineffable Mrs. Charbuque.
    I had a canvas stretched and prepared in my studio, waiting for me to attack it with color. What with all my recent dithering about—the unveiling of Mrs. Reed's por-trait, sessions before the screen, Samantha's play, and my visit to Shenz—I had not lifted a brush in over a week. That demon inside me, the one that can only be placated through the application of pigment to canvas, was chafing at the bit. I
    prepared my palette and, dipping my brush into ochre, moved forward to claim my own parcel of territory. Then the specter of absence that was Mrs. Charbuque rose up in my mind in all her negative glory, the folds of her nonexistent dress spreading outward, the voluminous emptiness of her hair burgeoning. The exquisite lack of her crowded out all else, extinguishing the insistence of the paint demon and stultifying my intention to create. The brush seized an inch from the canvas, and my hand slowly carried it back to my side. I placed the palette and brush on the table and sat down in utter defeat.
    For the longest time I simply stared at that expectant rectangle on the easel before me. As usually happened when I turned my attention toward trying to envision her, she