Ecstasy Read online

  Then Carl claimed Klimt’s attention, and Alma burst forward on her own, past Mama and Gretl, into the great doors of Saint Mark’s Basilica. Trying to master the storm of sensation exploding inside her, she threw back her head to take in the ancient mosaics filling every cupola. Never had she seen so much gold or magnificence—but even that was not enough to put Klimt out of her mind.

  “This is more beautiful than Saint Peter’s in Rome,” Alma said, when Mama finally caught up with her. She hoped to at least sound like her usual self.

  A few weeks ago, her family had attended Easter High Mass at Saint Peter’s, an experience that Alma viewed as the greatest ecclesiastical swindle of all time—so much empty pomp. After studying the works of Nietzsche, she considered religion a ludicrous throwback from an authoritarian past, irrelevant in this modern world of science and progress. It was up to every intelligent man and woman to make their own moral choices rather than slavishly obeying priests. Yet this basilica moved her to spiritual contemplation.

  She lifted her face to the Dome of the Holy Spirit, where dove’s blood streamed down to anoint the heads of saints, filling them with Pentecostal fire. This mosaic is a revelation, she thought, of what is unfolding inside me. Her soul ignited with sacred love and reverence merging with the profane carnal flame that flickered inside her. When two souls met in love, how could it not be holy? Complete physical union. Alma’s hammering pulse sent her head swimming. Oh, to live, to truly live.

  When Mama and Gretl wandered off, Alma found herself entranced with the mosaics of the life of Saint Mark over the high altar. She swallowed a cry when Klimt appeared beside her, as if stepping out of thin air.

  “I want to paint you dripping in pure gold leaf,” he said, taking her hand. “Like a saint in ecstasy.”

  His face was so close to hers, she wondered if he would kiss her right there in the basilica.

  “You vixen,” he said, kissing her, his tongue parting her lips. “You know I can’t resist you when you look at me like that.”

  This time, after a furtive look around, she kissed him back before drawing away, which only made him step closer.

  “No one can say we didn’t stand together at the altar,” he whispered.

  As they exchanged smiles, laughter rose inside her. To be loved by Gustav Klimt.

  “Come,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Time to join the others.”

  Carl decided they would take refreshment at Caffè Florian, where they shared two bottles of Asti Spumante between the five of them. Then they headed back to the hotel for dinner. Alma, her arm linked with Klimt’s, brought up the rear, close enough to Mama and Carl to appear completely respectable. Her secret tingled inside her like champagne bubbles bursting on her tongue.

  In the soft May twilight, they all stopped on a bridge to view the arch of the Ponte dei Sospiri, the Bridge of Sighs. Gretl, meanwhile, complained of a terrible headache and charged forward, giving Mama and Carl no choice but to follow. Alma prepared to walk on as well, but Klimt stood as if rooted and wouldn’t release her hand. She shivered at the touch of his fingers digging into the high collar of her shirtwaist. When he leaned her back against the stone parapet, she felt her neckline tighten, constricting her throat. She had no clue how to respond, and now the others had disappeared around a corner. His gray-green eyes appeared to her as an ocean of desire as his fingers traced the tender hollow between her collarbones, the delicate flesh covering her breastbone. In Vienna, he would have never dared take such liberties, she thought. But here in Venice, anything could happen. Every rule and even time dissolved in the briny waters of the lapping lagoon.

  “Alma!” Her mother was calling from somewhere beyond a flower cart.

  Klimt let go of Alma’s collar only to pinch her arm and kiss her lips.

  “Silly girl,” he said. “If I’d wanted to, I could have laid my hands on your heart.”

  She flushed when she understood that what he meant by heart was actually her breasts. Then, fighting to regain her composure, she found herself staring not into Klimt’s eyes but Mama’s. Her mother’s mouth was a pale tight line. Behind Mama, Carl looked at Alma and then at Klimt in utter incomprehension. Gretl shook her head at Alma as if to tell her what a fool she was.

  “Alma,” Mama said crisply. “Why don’t you walk on Carl’s arm? I shall walk with Herr Klimt.”

  When her mother was angry, her northern German accent grew more pronounced. Mama hailed from Hamburg. Her father was a failed brewer, so Mama had been forced to make do and earn her own living as an opera singer when she was a girl. Now her mother resembled an avenging Valkyrie. Even Klimt seemed to cower in the face of Mama’s rage.

  “How could you be so naïve, a bright girl like you?” Mama demanded.

  Alma and her mother were alone in the room her mother shared with Carl. Through the thin walls, Alma could hear Gretl pacing in the adjoining room—her sister would hear every word. As for Carl, he would be off somewhere with Klimt, trying to smooth things over. Carl, the eternal sycophant, torn between family honor and his horror of alienating his most important colleague. But Mama was clearly not conflicted in the least. All artistic gradations of gray were lost to her mother, who seemed to view the world in stark black-and-white.

  “Gustav Klimt is a womanizer.” Mama gripped Alma’s shoulders as though to make those words sink in. “He has no business toying with you. I hope you didn’t encourage him.”

  Alma burned and wept, still in the thrall of Klimt’s kiss, of his fingers that had played her breastbone as if it were a flute. How could Mama be such a hypocrite? Had she herself not fallen in love with a great artist, Emil Schindler, and surrendered body and soul to him before they were married? That was how her mother had conceived her, for God’s sake. There were darker rumors—namely that Mama had an affair with Papa’s friend, the artist Julius Victor Berger, and that Gretl, christened Margarethe Julia, was that man’s child.

  How Alma yearned for her dead father. He had given her Goethe’s Faust to read when she was only eight, as if acknowledging her as a prodigy, his equal. If Papa was still alive, her life would be so different. They would probably still be living in Schloss Plankenberg, that run-down rented castle fifty miles west of Vienna where they had lived like true bohemians, far removed from Carl’s world of social climbing and bourgeois pretensions. She imagined Papa giving her and Klimt his blessing.

  “Herr Klimt and I are in love,” Alma heard herself declare in tremulous defiance.

  “Don’t be so stupid,” Mama said, her words as stinging as a slap on the cheek. “The man has syphilis! He always has at least three love affairs running at the same time. Why do you think I never let you visit his studio? Because it’s no better than a brothel with his naked models prancing around. Two of those poor girls are pregnant by him. The man is obsessively in love with his sister-in-law.”

  Klimt is a bohemian freethinker, Alma told herself, and no doubt he’s had love affairs, but surely he can’t be as debauched as Mama claims. Her mother made him sound like a scoundrel from a penny dreadful. Would Carl have invited Klimt to join them on their travels if the man was truly so fiendish?

  “He called me his little wife,” Alma said, desperate to sound reasonable despite the tears running down her face. “You yourself said it was high time he married.”

  “Marry someone rich and experienced perhaps, but not an innocent girl like you.” Mama sighed. “Did you know he’s already supporting his mother and sister, and his sisters-in-law and his niece? Insanity runs in his family! His mother and sister are mentally unbalanced. One day he’ll go mad himself. Just look in his eyes, Alma. There’s something crazy about him.”

  Alma was beginning to feel half-crazed herself as Mama’s disclosures pierced her like flaming arrows. The illustrious Gustav Klimt was merely a degenerate seducer? But that kiss! How could she ever forget his kiss that had transformed her in one shuddering gasp from a girl into a woman who had tasted the ecstasy of desire?

 
; Both she and Mama spun around as Carl strode in, stinking of cigar smoke.

  “Klimt has agreed to return to Vienna tomorrow,” her stepfather announced, rubbing his hands as though washing them of any unpleasantness. He faced Alma squarely. “In the morning, you’ll shake his hand civilly and bid him farewell. He assured me this was just a dalliance, quite regrettable, of course. He apologized profusely and promised to leave you alone.”

  “A dalliance?” Alma thought her shame would set her entire body on fire, immolating her on the spot.

  “I told you as much,” Mama said in a tired voice, as though her tirade had exhausted her.

  “Why must you take it all so seriously?” Carl asked, as Alma collapsed sobbing on her mother’s bed. “Weren’t you just being a flirt?”

  At some stage everyone must die a secret death. Her face raw from weeping, Alma lay awake in the bed she was sharing with Gretl, who snored away, lulled into deepest sleep by the laudanum their house doctor prescribed for her headaches. Klimt’s betrayal, his casual dismissal of what had unfolded between them, plunged Alma into a hell of self-loathing. Smug little demons, as relentless as the mosquitoes whining in her ears, parroted her mother’s exhortations: How could you be so naïve? Her first kiss, the first time she’d ever truly fallen in love—must it end like this?

  Worst of all was the conundrum of the desire Klimt had awakened in her that was coupled with the gaping canyon of her own ignorance. It was as though he had led her to the very threshold of that forbidden paradise, let her taste a single drop of that most exquisite nectar, then slammed the door in her face and left her there. An overwrought and humiliated virgin.

  Any young man of her age and class would have unburdened himself in the brothels by now, but because she was a girl from a prominent family, she was expected to carry her frustration to her marriage bed. Marriage now seemed as nebulous and distant as the Pleiades.

  Back in Vienna there had been the young artists and intellectuals who frequented her stepfather’s salon, those young men who flattered her and vied for her attention across the linen-draped table. But not one of them had dazzled her to her very core the way Klimt had. None had presumed to kiss her. The flirting, the pleasantries, had all seemed a game to her, like dancing with different partners at a ball, everything refreshingly light and frivolous without the pressure of having to choose one and forsake all the others.

  But Mama said it was time Alma learned to be sensible and pick one young man from that glittering circle. Listen, Alma, you’re at the height of your beauty. You’re in demand. Make up your mind! But try not to intimidate them, my dear. You can be so bold and opinionated. Perhaps if she was less ambitious about her music or learned to conceal it the way Gretl hid her sketchbook to better fawn over Wilhelm Legler’s lugubrious oil paintings. But how, Alma wondered, was she to make the right choice of a suitor when she knew so little about the physical realities of love?

  She seethed with a lust that shook her to her fingertips. There’s only one cure, Klimt had told her. If he appeared by her bedside, she would let him do whatever he wanted even in the face of her anguish and his duplicity. She would run her tongue over his salty flesh, bite him, devour him, make him hers. But she must go unsated. As for touching herself, that was too appalling to even consider. Such acts were the province of the insane and morally depraved—and those who didn’t share a bed with their sister.

  If only she could cool her scalded fingers on smooth ivory piano keys. She was tempted to creep down to the parlor and pound out the entire score of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde even if she woke up every soul in the hotel. Let her leave Klimt as sleepless and churned up as she was. She imagined playing the “Liebestod” theme until she was utterly spent. The sole way out of this wretchedness was to channel all her longing into what she could control, her own music.

  Her thoughts wandered back to her recital that afternoon before Klimt’s kiss and her undoing. The English lady’s cornflower eyes meeting hers as though this stranger were a kindly godmother or even a prophetess. Keep on composing, won’t you, dear? Show the men we women can achieve something. Let her show Klimt that she had a gift that no man could take from her.

  2

  Nobody in the world is more spoiled than Gustav Klimt. Alma thought she would choke on the hypocrisy of it all. At Carl’s behest, she, Mama, and Gretl went to the Rialto market to buy Klimt farewell presents. Then her family treated Klimt to a heavy lunch. Her head muddled from Asti Spumante, Alma sat at the far end of the table from Klimt and hardly glanced up from the plate of octopus risotto she couldn’t bring herself to eat. Then, after the bitter, scalding espresso she made herself swallow in one gulp, her family saw Klimt off to the train station.

  Her face rigid from the effort of not letting him see her cry, she and Gretl surrendered their offerings of wine and cheese, chocolates and pastilles, bread rolls and the thick, greasy sausage Alma hoped he would gag on. Aware of Mama and Carl’s eyes on her, Alma shook Klimt’s hand. Her fingers quivered in his too-tight grip as he gazed into her eyes soulfully, as though their abrupt parting devastated him. Could he truly be so two-faced?

  “Keep a place in your heart for me, Alma,” he whispered. “Just a tiny one.”

  Did he think he could string her along with promises he could never keep? Did he think so little of her, as though she had no pride at all?

  “This has to stop,” she said, drawing her spine upright. Remember, you stand as tall as he.

  “Yes,” he said, twisting his face as though she had struck him. “It was stillborn.”

  With a curt nod, she stepped away from him and stood with her family while watching him board the train.

  When the locomotive departed in a belch of black smoke, Carl clapped her shoulder, nearly knocking her sideways. “Well done, Alma. Tonight we’ll toast your prudence and good sense!”

  Parasol clenched in her fist, Alma marched along the lido where listless waves smacked the sandy shore. Ahead of her, Gretl and Carl shared some joke and laughed as though all was well in the world. Mama walked close beside her, as if not trusting her enough to let her out of her sight. Alma poured her entire effort into appearing stoical. If she shed a single tear, she feared Mama would start off on her again. He doesn’t really love you, Alma. Don’t deceive yourself!

  Up and down the beach, Italian families took pleasure in their Sunday promenade, the little girls decked out in their white dresses and lacy veils, having celebrated their first communion. It still wasn’t warm enough for proper swimming—only a few intrepid souls braved the water, their heads bobbing like jetsam. The sea is so vast, Alma thought, and human beings are so terribly small and ineffectual. Why do we even create? What would become of her energy, her dreams, her passions—would they just wither away as she learned to be sensible?

  A young Venetian lady strummed a mandolin and sang in an achingly beautiful voice. Although Alma didn’t understand the lyrics, the mournful melody touched her deepest pain, and she thought she might break down for all the world to see. She had been kissed and then told it meant absolutely nothing. She had been awakened only to be brusquely commanded to go back to sleep. She was of no consequence. Just a naïve, easily led girl.

  “Alma, there’s something I must tell you,” Mama said.

  She braced herself for yet another lecture, but what Mama said next made the horizon dip and fall.

  “I’m expecting a baby in August,” her mother said, as matter-of-factly as if telling her they would board the eight-thirty express train to Trieste in the morning.

  A baby in August—it was already May. Alma’s birthday was in August. Her new sibling would be twenty years younger than she was—it seemed absurd. How is it possible that I was too dim to even notice? Alma’s eyes passed surreptitiously over her mother’s stoutish figure. Mama had always been thick around the waist and corseted herself accordingly, but it was true she seemed a little more cumbersome now, especially in the way she walked.

  “Why d
idn’t you say anything earlier?” Alma asked, her temples pounding.

  Mama’s eyes drifted off over the Adriatic. “I was pregnant twice last year, but I lost those babies. I wanted to make sure this wouldn’t be a miscarriage before I said anything.”

  How unnerving it was to be confronted with this window into Mama’s private female travails. To think an unborn baby was something you could simply lose. Alma imagined a phantom infant flying off into the ether, borne on angel wings like a macabre cherub. Once more she felt throttled by her own ignorance. When will I ever stop feeling like a backward child?

  “Gretl already knows,” Mama said, twisting the blade.

  How long had Gretl been holding this knowledge over her head, Alma wondered wretchedly.

  “Your sister saw me getting sick one morning,” her mother explained, “while you were playing the piano.”

  So it was her music that had kept her ignorant. Alma asked herself, with a guilty start, if this was such a bad thing.

  “But Mama, you’re forty,” she blurted out.

  “Forty-one,” her mother said irritably. “Even women as ancient as I can have babies, you know.”

  “But it’s dangerous.”

  The tears Alma had been holding back all day fell freely. To lose a would-be lover was one thing, but to lose her mother? The older the woman, the riskier the birth. She was seized with hatred for Carl for doing this to Mama. Surely her mother shouldn’t have to endure childbirth at her age. But, you fool, that’s what men do. Men make love to women, who have their babies. Alma was forced to admit that she didn’t care for babies at all. She realized she wanted the impossible—to love the way a man would love, with no fear of betraying her own body in the process.

  Alma enclosed her mother in a tight embrace, as if that could keep her safe.