Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

Claire could not look at herself. She was not allowed. The artist had forbade it, touching the top of Claire’s hand with her own.

“Not until it’s finished.”

And it nearly was. The portrait was on the easel in the corner of the den, covered only in a purple, velvet drape cleverly propped out two inches so as not to touch the wet canvas. Claire stood in the center of the room, facing the back of the easel, tapping her fingers on her leg as if counting the seconds until she could look. The portrait had been Freddie’s idea of a gift for her thirty-fifth birthday. She’d hated him for it, until the painter arrived that first day.

Now the painter was in the kitchen, cleaning her brushes. Most nights the artist concealed the painting by knotting the gold-fringed drape tightly to the bottom of the easel. Tonight it hung loose. It was childish, this great pulse toward the painting. Come look at me, look at me. Not tomorrow or in ten minutes but now. It was a giddy desire. Desire for the forbidden, yes, but it was more than that. There was a secret in it, the way trees held secrets or the rusting fire escapes in the alleyways she rushed passed on Bleeker. The gleaming drape beckoned — just as the young painter always seemed to, though Claire must be mistaken about that: what could the girl possibly want with her? But Claire was a woman of restraint, respect for rules and boundaries. She would not look. She would look.

She circled the easel, circled it twice — a tiger. She glanced out the French doors into the hallway. She whispered the artist’s name to herself once: Nicolette . Something inside her could have pirouetted out of control.

She held the gold fringe of the drape. She lifted.

Nicolette entered with a fistful of brushes. Baby oil dripped from the bristles, greased her fingertips.

Claire dropped the drape, having seen nothing. Was she disappointed? Only, perhaps, at being caught. She wouldn’t want Nicolette to think her disrespectful. She knelt on the blue drop cloth below the easel, straightening it, looking busy. She billowed the pale blue sheet and it swelled with air. Her own private ocean.

“I think I’ll head to the roof for a smoke before I go,” the painter said, smiling down at Claire.

Claire, on all fours in her wool pencil skirt, looked over her shoulder. Nicolette held the light from the hall like a shawl draped across her arms. It was how light should work on a woman. She was beautiful, but she held herself protectively under that smile, as if no one had ever told her so.

Claire, certainly, was not going to be the one to break the news. She rose hurriedly, her wool skirt sticking to her stockings. “I’ll come with you.”

Claire hastened the artist down the hall, past the vintage settee they weren’t allowed to sit on and from which Nicolette grabbed the coat she’d thrown across it. Claire was terribly embarrassed of her wealth under Nicolette’s gaze — the native masks on the wall, from her and Freddie’s brief vacation to Cuba years ago, the glass case in the den full of priceless Italian porcelain clowns. Claire had the urge to throw the whole lot of them out the window. Nicolette, with her tight black pants and cropped dark hair — she could have been one of the Village Beatniks squatting in the next building over who always glowered at Claire as though she didn’t belong a toe below Thirty-Fourth Street. They knew, the all did, that she and Freddie had the means to live anywhere in the city — moving to the West Village had been an experiment to indulge Claire.

On the roof, the water tower hung in the dusk air above them, a suspended animal skeleton. A zebra, Claire decided. She’d only seen a zebra once, in Cuba, in someone’s yard. She sometimes found she missed that zebra. By the time she’d pointed it out to Freddie, it had disappeared — he’d called her crazy and hadn’t believed her. Just as well, she’d thought then, the zebra is mine.

The rusted iron hummed and swayed in the breeze. Claire had the sudden impulse to tell Nicolette about the zebra. Nicolette would believe her.

“To tell the truth, I don’t smoke,” Claire said. “Freddie hates it.”

The artist was busy rolling her own cigarette on the ledge, shaking loose tobacco from a small pouch like a regular dockworker, trying not to lose it in the wind. “What Freddie doesn’t know,” Nicolette said. She licked the paper, handed the finished product to Claire, and lit it for her. Her hand grazed Claire’s cheek. Nicolette smelled dangerous. They stood close together, facing north, peering over to the street nine stories below, sharing the cigarette. Rebellious. But the wind stole her smoke so quickly, it was as if she’d let nothing out.

“I was up there last week. Uptown,” Nicolette said, gesturing north toward the high-rises, “doing a portrait of this blubber-man. I was up on his roof, smoking, when I realized — I was in the view, I didn’t have a view.” Nicolette held Claire’s gaze. “Not here though,” she said. “Here I have the perfect view.”

“I love it up here.” Claire averted her eyes, blushing. “It makes up for everything else.”

“Even Freddie?”

What a question to ask! She should be furious. Why was she not furious? “I wouldn’t have this view without him.”

The wind grew louder than their voices. It hit Claire’s ears rhythmically, beat her clean like a rug.

“I don’t know why,” Nicolette said loudly, “but I used to imagine all the skyscrapers were ladies waiting to go dancing.” She laughed into the wind.

“I like that,” Claire said. “Ladies waiting forever.”

The last of the setting sun charged off the west side of the buildings and they let it blind them.

“Don’t you want children, Claire? Since that whatever disease isn’t hereditary. It’s terrible when the smart ones don’t.”

It was a wonder, the information Nicolette had extracted from her during their sessions. In order to paint Claire, Nicolette had said she had to know her. There were people Claire had known for years who knew nothing about her parents or her childhood. But to this perfect stranger, Claire had found herself describing her grandmother’s operatic voice, the disease Claire once believed she’d inherit, the grounds of the asylum. There was something thrilling about the interrogation. No one had ever demanded Claire talk about herself. And yet the conversation had felt natural, or at least as natural as posing for a portrait; both were made of the same intimacy. She’d let Nicolette crack into her like a crab shell.