A-Splendid-Ruin(50)

“You see?” Dante grinned and lit a cigarette. “The bar is low.” He grabbed a piece of orange chalk from a grimy, powdery box of different colors and rolled it across the table. “What about you? Why aren’t you drawing?”

“I don’t really draw—”

“Of course you do. Rooms, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you said? Go on. Show us what you can do.”

“I’m not an artist.”

“Neither is Wence, but he’s desecrating with the best of them,” Gelett joked.

“The word should be ‘secrating,’ without the ‘de,’” Wence returned, now adding Ars Vincit Omnia above the caricature.

“Is ‘secrating’ even a word?” Dante asked.

“Only in Wence’s mind,” said Edith.

“I’ve invented it, because there is no other word that celebrates the genius that is me.”

“You see, May? You’d best mark your spot before all the space is gone and the world thinks that the only genius here was Wence,” Blythe said. “Otherwise no one will know you existed.”

“Scream to the universe: I was here!” Edith sang out. “For long after we are gone, Coppa’s will live on!”

“God knows it’s the only thing worth saving in this entire city,” Gelett said, pouring more wine.

Ellis threw the piece of chalk back into the box.

“You aren’t going to let her mark her territory?” Dante asked.

“Go on, May, put a big X on Ellis’s forehead,” Edith said.

I could not look at any of them as they all laughed, and I knew I must be red.

“Draw us something,” Dante urged.

“She needn’t prove herself to you,” Ellis snapped.

“This grows wearying between the two of you,” Gelett said with an exaggerated sigh. “Shall we have fisticuffs at dawn instead?”

“I propose a drinking contest.” Wence lifted a mostly empty bottle of wine. “Poppa! More wine!”

“More wine, more wine, more wine,” came Poppa Coppa’s chiding voice from the kitchen.

“We’re increasing your value,” Gelett called back. “Think how many tourists will come just to see the newest splat that Wence Piper put upon these sacred walls.”

Dante dragged on his cigarette and exhaled a thin, steady stream of smoke, picked up his wine, then said to me, “Well? We’ve voted to let you stay. You might as well prove you deserve it.”

It was a challenge.

Ellis said quietly, “Tell him to go to hell. Don’t give him the satisfaction.”

But it felt a test to me, and I suspected there was something more here too, that Dante meant not just to challenge me, and perhaps to punish me for not giving him what he’d wanted at the Anderson ball, but also to embarrass Ellis. I would not let that happen.

I took the box of chalk, and then I picked up my glass of wine and sauntered as casually as I could to a bare spot on the wall, below a satyr toasting a nude maiden with champagne. I confronted the spot as if I were a gladiator in combat—I had no idea what I would draw or what might impress them. I tossed back the rest of my wine in a gesture of bravery, and then, pretending I was brave, I drew the first line.

I was aware of the others talking and joking behind me, the hum of conversation and laughter, and someone refilling my wineglass so it was never empty, but all I saw was the room taking form beneath my fingers, a room of gorgeous decoration, sculpted window and door casings, a floor of colored tiles and narrow mullioned windows, a painted paradise of a domed ceiling, nymphs dancing by a spring as they looked down onto a wall mural of a ball full of glowing lanterns and gilded creatures. All smiling, all celebrating. The color and the light fantastic and strange and beautiful.

I drew and drew, losing myself to time, to talk, to everything, and when it was done, and the vision faded, I stepped back to look at what I’d done.

It was a mockery. Like the bacchante in the Sullivan ballroom, the room I’d drawn was lewd in its overabundance, grotesque, breathless and constricting and empty, and the terror of it had me setting aside my wine, putting my hand to my throat as if that might somehow help me to breathe again. The leering faces of the golden creatures, the lushness with no depth, windows that stared out onto painted walls. All facade, all vacant, enjoyment without sustenance, celebration without boundaries or purpose. It was all terrifyingly close and painfully hollow, the prison that neither I nor my mother had ever seen in the life she’d chosen for me.

Why had I drawn this nightmare?

The room buzzed all about me, but I felt as alone and alien as I had at any ball or dinner in San Francisco. Unnoticed, a ghost of myself, and with this odd sense that I had somehow locked myself inside the room I’d drawn, that I was one of those painted nymphs bending toward the spring, a smile on my face and horror behind my eyes, a lifetime of pretense—Ah, but what have you to complain of? You’ve everything you’ve ever dreamed about.

I had to resist the urge to erase it. I went silently back to the table, and no one said anything. They did not note me as I sat down. I think I might have walked out of Coppa’s without anyone heeding.

Gelett and Blythe argued. Wence had finished his painting and was pulling out the cork of another bottle of wine. Edith sat on the floor against the wall, legs straight out, her turban askew. Ellis, however, had twisted in his chair to watch me. He was dead silent, expressionless. I could not tell if he admired or disliked what I’d done.