cleaving the space in two. Albert bought a ladder from a bankrupt apothecary, a vast tarpaulin from a French painter who had married a Dane, and then his workspace was complete: windows, paints, and platform on one side of the canvas; bed, door, and clothes cupboard on the other.
“Subdividing, are ye?” asked the landlady, Fru Strand, when she came to retrieve her hammer. Never having caught on to the niceties of Albert’s profession, she thought he was tiring of Famke and had erected a partition so he wouldn’t have to look at her all day.
When Famke dutifully translated, Albert laughed and offered to buy Fru Strand a pint of frothy Danish beer, which she loved as much as her seafaring tenants did. The two of them stomped downstairs merrily, leaving Famke behind to sweep up the sawdust and bits of canvas thread.
“Subdividing,” she muttered, having taken on Albert’s habit of repetition. She put away the broom and sat down in a chair by the window, to watch the sailors staggering up and down the street like drunken elves in their double-pointed winter hoods. Albert and Fru Strand were nowhere in sight.
That night, and for several nights thereafter, before he would so much as touch Famke, Albert wetted the canvas; every morning he tightened it, until it was so taut it sang like a bell when she tapped it.
Meanwhile, Albert sketched more Nimues. “She must be perfect,” he insisted, shading in a sketch he had allowed to progress rather further than the others.
“Perfect,” Famke echoed. Then she giggled, noticing what Albert habitually omitted. “But no hair,” she said. To her, perfection meant an exact likeness. When Albert blinked at her, she touched the picture and explained, “Down There, she has no hair . . . She hasn’t even a sex. It be as if a cloud passes over.”
“Sexual hair is not a subject for art,” Albert said on a note of reproof. “It is not for ladies to see, even if they know it must be there.”
Famke subsided with, “That is not like nature.” She thought of Albert’s Pik, so surprisingly rosy in its dark-gold nest. She wondered if she should be shyer about looking at it—if perhaps he didn’t like her to look . . . It was the artist’s job to look, and to have opinions, never the model’s.
When she wasn’t posing, there was little for Famke to do. She’d washed all the bedding and every garment the two of them owned, and she’d had a long wash herself. There was nothing left to clean, and no stove on which to cook (for which she, with her dislike of fire, had always been grateful). She had even grown tired of looking at sketches of herself. So when Albert took out his tubes of paint at last, Famke breathed a sigh of relief. But he explained that before he would need her again, he had to lay down a white ground. Layer by infinitesimal layer he built it up, and the seams in the canvas disappeared.
“Let me help you,” Famke begged, eager to hurry the process along. She churned the brush through the thick gesso, and Albert lifted her hand away.
“It must be absolutely even,” he said. “It’s really best that I do this myself.” He explained that only against a smooth, hard whiteness would his colors glow—“and I want you to glow, darling,” he finished. She almost didn’t need him to look at her then; these words were enough to keep her warm for the rest of the day.
The time it took for the white coat to set, they spent in bed. The sun’s hours were getting ever shorter, and despite her boredom during daylight, Famke was quite happy in the dark, keeping Albert gladly distracted.
On the morning that they woke to find the canvas’s final white ground was perfectly smooth, dry, and hard, Albert gulped. He lingered in bed much longer than was his wont, and Famke practically pushed him out of it. “You said today you should start,” she said. “So start!” When still he dallied, looking at the vast blankness with something akin to despair, she got up and led him to the chamberpot; she saw him finish, then put a morsel of dark bread between his lips and bade him chew. She fed him cheese and sausage in this way as well, and then she—still naked herself—helped him don his layers of clothing.
Only once Albert was fed and dressed did Famke pull Nimue’s bloodied chemise over her head. She tugged Albert toward the canvas and put a stick of charcoal in his hand, climbed onto her pillowed platform, and struck the pose. “Now draw me,” she ordered him.
After a moment, Albert began. Hesitant at first, then more sure, he marked the canvas with the line of her nose, then a bit of her shoulders, and her breasts, belly, and legs, through the cobwebby cloth. He consulted his sketches and made a few refinements to the piles of pillows. Last he did her arms and the cascade of hair. Then, having outlined his magnum opus, he threw away his pencil and with a cry raced out into the street.
Famke, shivering, quietly picked up the pencil and put it with his other painting things. She wrapped herself in a blanket and stood before the canvas, trying to see, in the rough lines of black against stark white, the image of herself that would eventually live there.
To her, the space looked nearly empty.
Once the real work got under way, Albert could scarcely tear himself away from his Nimue. He swore that she would hang in the English Royal Academy’s annual exhibition, win him respect and commissions, and convince his father to continue the financial support—if Albert even needed it after his success-to-be. He congratulated himself on having chosen such a quintessentially English subject as Merlin, believing that the familiarity of the myth would help his cause.
He divided the canvas into small spaces a few inches square and took one as each day’s assignment; sometimes he exhausted daylight trying to cover his allotment. Famke thought he was slow because his brushes were so fine that some used only a single hair, but these were part of his way of working and she said nothing about them.
Painting, Albert started at Famke’s fingertips and worked his way slowly downward, spending as much time on the background portion of each square as he did on Famke’s body. No matter what he was rendering, she stood there locked in her dramatic pose, her stillness and exposure reassuring him that he was indeed at work. If he wanted to talk, she listened.
He liked to tell her stories: of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their ladies, of the Nordic myths she’d never heard, and of unusual events all over the world. Famke’s interest in Nimue’s lack of hair Down There suggested the tale of John Ruskin, the Brotherhood’s father-figure, who had been divorced because of unexpected difficulty with that unaesthetic region. “He had never seen a real woman without clothes—he had only seen painted ones—and he was ill prepared for it! On his wedding night, he ran from the room in a fit, and they lived together chastely until she sought annulment.” Famke laughed until she fell off her platform.
That story reminded Albert of the Norse myth in which the trickster Loki had stolen Thor’s hammer and cut off the hair of his wife, leaving the thunder god powerless and his wife both lightheaded and angry with her husband. And then he remembered that, just a few years ago, a French matron had received a life sentence for murdering her husband, based largely on the fact that, like any good housewife, she had entered the prices of her murder weapons (shovel, hammer, boar trap) into her account book. Around the same time, an American circus master had marched twenty-one elephants across a New York bridge to test the strength of the steel. Albert dreamed aloud of pictures he might paint from these tales, collected from newspapers and pot shops in his native land. Famke listened hard, though she couldn’t visualize the pictures he described and sometimes the blood puddled so in her limbs that she could barely think, much less translate the stories in her head. She concluded that she would never know much of the world; and so she let her mind go blank and simply posed.
Albert’s conscience was pricked one day when she fainted clear off the platform, disturbing the careful arrangement of pillows and giving herself a large red welt on one leg. After that, he told her to listen for the church bells and to make sure she had a pause every hour. Then, while she stretched, he could