If I Told You Once. Judy Budnitz

was very tall, with red hair in crinkly waves and a white immobile face like a mask. Her eyebrows were arched so high they must have been painted on; there was a beauty mark, like brown velvet, absolutely round, perfectly centered on one cheek.

      She said she liked me because I did not talk much.

      When I first came to her she showed me around the vast drafty house.

      Come meet my husbands, she said and led me down a long gallery.

      Aren’t they beautiful? she said with a wave of her hand. All of them dead so young. Sad, isn’t it?

      A row of framed portraits hung on the wall; I counted seven. Heads and shoulders, nearly life-size. They all had puffed-out chests and a kind of barnyard cockiness, in spite of their elaborate clothes and carefully manicured hair and beards. They all had eyes that met yours, that seemed to follow you as you moved.

      I never wanted to marry so often, she was saying, but what could I do? They kept dying. Unlucky in love, I am.

      I spent my days lighting candles, cutting the pages of books. I mended her shoes, dozens and dozens of them, high heeled and jewel toed, and I went to the roof to feed the pigeons, but most of my work revolved around hers, for she was a painter. Her hands were always smeared with colors; the portraits of her husbands she had painted herself.

      She taught me to mix her paints and clean the brushes and to cut wood into frames, though she stretched the canvas on them herself.

      She sometimes spent hours looking at a stone or a piece of cloth with the sun shining on it.

      I learned that she was a well-respected artist, much in demand to paint portraits of the aristocracy. She traveled to far places for commissions.

      I liked to watch her work, the way she could give a picture such depth that the canvas seemed merely a portal to a deep and distant world. Yet I didn’t trust it, it was all trickery, wasn’t it? It fooled the eyes. And the paintings were lies, they showed you a moment that was gone. Those husbands, who looked so hearty and red cheeked in their portraits, were all dead. It seemed a cruel deception.

      Of course I did not say so.

      One day she told me she wanted to paint me.

      Just for practice, she said, just to keep my hand in tune.

      No, I said. I pointed to a blank canvas and said: I don’t want to be caught there.

      Are you afraid I’ll capture your soul? she laughed. Is that another one of your superstitions? When are you people going to come out of the dark?

      She said: I’ll give you a dress, you can pretend to be someone else, you won’t even recognize yourself when it’s finished.

      So I agreed, and she brought out a dress and for a moment I was thrilled. I pictured myself all sweeping skirts and dancing grace and icy grandeur. Like her.

      She held it against me and I saw that it was all a sham, it was not a dress, only the front of a dress, to be draped conveniently across any posing sitter. It was unlined, unfinished inside, embroidery unraveling, threads dangling. She made me sit on a small gilt chair, and turned my face, and pinned up my hair with ornaments that even to my untrained eye looked false, with the greasy iridescence of oil on water.

      But she was satisfied, she went to her easel and ordered me not to move and to fix my eyes on the distant doorway.

      She was many days at it and when she was finished she showed it to me. I took one long look and did not look again.

      I can see from your face that I’ve done well, she laughed. You look exactly like the portrait right now.

      Looking at the portrait was not like looking in a mirror, for a mirror was only surface. The portrait showed me from the inside: she had captured the tension in my jaw from clenching my teeth, and that shameful pink drool—the birthmark at the corner of my mouth, and the hairs of my eyebrows all in disarray, and the eyes. The eyes were both fearful and calculating, the eyes of an animal deciding whether to flee or attack.

      I had not known I looked like that.

      My face made the fine clothes look all the more ridiculous.

      Soon after she told me she had been commissioned to paint a countess. She asked me to look after her house while she was gone.

      Don’t think I’m getting fond of you, she said. We understand each other, that’s all.

      She looked at me shrewdly, then sent me down to the stables to summon a coachman I had not known existed. Perhaps it was a trick of the light, but as I entered the stalls I thought I saw the coachman with his head in the manger, licking up oats alongside the horses.

      Back in the studio I packed up her brushes. I heard her step and turned. She stood in the doorway in trousers and boots and a greatcoat that fell to her knees. Her face, which had always seemed painted on, now looked to be sketched in with rougher charcoal strokes. How broad her shoulders looked. Perhaps the coat was padded. She had a mustache and beard painted on.

      Don’t look so disturbed, she said. I get many more commissions this way.

      She took the box from me and left. I heard her boots echoing a long time. I watched from the window as the carriage rolled down the long winding road to the town, and then beyond.

      I wondered which of her clothes were the charade.

      The house was even larger than I’d thought. There were many locked doors.

      I went down to the town, to the marketplace. I heard people gossiping about her: her wealth, her isolation, the husbands who went with her to the dark house on the hill and never returned. She loves them to death, wears them out, they said, her body is unnatural. Bluebeard, the men called her, and made obscene gestures.

      The men never come out alive, people said.

      She eats them up, they said.

      Cuts off their things and eats them with a vodka cream sauce.

      They pointed to the house, whispered as if she would overhear them.

      I kept the fires burning to keep the chill out.

      She was gone many weeks and returned with a new husband.

      He was young and fresh and gallant, with pale hair like flax and gaudy clothes. He held himself proudly, though he was slightly shorter than her. He rubbed his hands together and looked about at rugs and lamps and the rooms so long you could not see the end of them, and there was a bit of greed in him, you could see it in his mouth.

      She was dressed in her long clinging gowns again, her hair loose, her face perfect. He put his arm around her waist, caressed her neck. Over his head she gave me her shrewd look.

      That night they were loud and vigorous in her bedroom.

      The next day when I was alone with her in her studio I asked how she had found him, when she’d been dressed as a man.

      She said: Some men like an adventurous woman. Besides, she said, nodding toward the bedroom, he is a third son and will inherit nothing.

      She painted his portrait but kept it in her studio.

      In a short time she announced she had been offered another commission. She could not take her husband with her. I have to preserve my reputation, she told him.

      She handed him a ring of keys and told him he could enter any room in the house but one.

      I trust you completely, she told him. Please honor my request.

      He nodded but he was not paying attention; he had his hands on her breasts.

      Then she left and we were alone in the house, he and I. We seldom spoke and he spent his days riding a black horse through the fields, hacking at the bushes with his sword and shouting like a child.

      There was a night when he fell asleep in a chair in the library, a book open across his lap, and I slipped the keys from his jacket pocket.

      She