What happens when a gender-queer romance meets with the author's lifelong obsession with D. G. Rossetti, his stunning models, and the great poets of the 19th century?
Hopefully, good things.
The "Victorian Story" was at first called Paint Me True, and it originated from a curiously vivid and "well narrated" dream I had pretty exactly a year ago. I filed it under "future short stories" and left it at that, because I was writing Spice & Vanilla and I was completely taken up by it.
And it was to be a short story (of course) and very straight(forward) (of course). Easy peasy.
Well, unfortunately (?) I am crap at anything easy-peasy, so when I actually started to tinker with it last February, the tale immediately grew in the telling, especially when it appeared that it could be connected to Spice & Vanilla, however tenuously, so that it became the third installment of my "transgender trilogy". After that there was no chance of keeping it simple. Ahem.
Despite the gender queer aspect however, the core of the story is the artist's experience, his inspiration, and the obsession, passion and depression that go with it, a topic that is very very deeply rooted in my own soul and experience.
Sometimes the story became a strange almost supernatural experience. The more I read and wrote about Rossetti the more eerie coincidences I found.
It is also a very, very heartfelt love story. I love it passionately, and I think that together with Woman as a Foreign Language it is my favorite piece of writing ever.
I made many character sketches for this story, mostly of Gabriel/le, not surprisingly, but also of Nathaniel, although he is very much my alter-ego and didn't like to have his picture taken.
London, 1884.
An artist lives to create. When Nathaniel’s
urge to paint died, so did his will to live.
Until the night he meets Gabrielle.
Gabrielle may be a just a poor prostitute,
but she has the beauty of a Pre-Raphaelite stunner, and the otherworldly aura
of a fallen angel. She also has a secret. Gabrielle is Gabriel, and when
Gabriel’s dark past comes knocking and Gabrielle must abandon her new career as
an artist’s model, Nathaniel’s whole
world comes crashing down again.
Better to die than living without her love,
and the breath-taking creative drive she brought him.
But it’s dead easy to die for love. Any
fool can die for love. To live for it, that takes altogether more courage,
doggedness and imagination.
#transgenderromance #queerromance
#crossdresser
Model for Nathaniel is Henry Ian Cusick. Model for Gabriel/le, Danila Kovalev... as always. I am struck by how much Danila K. resembles Rossetti's models, and often, when describing Gabriel/le in the story I found myself using contemporary descriptions of Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris.And once, I discovered, which was both beautiful and rather unsettling that Rossetti and I had picked exactly the same words, independently, because I am sure I had not read that before, to describe the agonizing separation from our muse and love... Writing this story has been indeed a strange experience...
Here's a few pages from the beginning of the story, just to get in the mood of it...
(unedited)
A Muse to Live For
Chapter One
London, November
1884
Nathaniel
A mirror is an
awful thing to have about one’s home.
One can, with
care, go about life lightly, without knowing of one’s own existence, which is
not a bad state of affairs, considering. Invisible and insensible, one can live
on. In a manner of speaking. I, of course, have been a dead man for five years.
But one can go on, in a way. In a sort of muffled darkness. Careful not to make
a sound, or raise any dust.
Until one has to
shave. The mirror stares back at me haggardly, telling the whole tale over
again.
Dead. Dead to
the world, and buried in these two darkened rooms.
It is fairly
poor taste to disturb the dead, and I resent the intrusion as much as any dear
departed would. If only Henry would let me lie in peace.
This mania for
the music hall has become a perpetual nuisance. Hardly a month passes that I
don’t have to go through this torment. It’s Henry’s way of doing me a kindness,
or so he says. Says it will cheer me up. It doesn’t. It’s sickening. But I go
anyway, because Henry’s ruckus if I don’t go is worse. Not in the amount of
noise and exertion perhaps, but it’s more personal.
At the music hall, I just float away. It’s just noise.
It might be
easier to go and spend one and a half penny at the barber shop; but I dislike
the man’s hands on me; he chatters without pause; his suspiciously pliant and
universal political views annoy me; and besides, I’d have to walk the length of
the road in my current state of unkempt overgrown shagginess. Worst of all, I
would have to pass Mrs. Crabwood’s parlor downstairs. She thinks unshaved men
should come and go through the traders’ door, which I would not mind, as such,
but her reproving look would be unbearable.
I wish people were
not so ready and eager to look me in the eye. If eyes are windows in the soul,
should we not grace them with some privacy? There’s not one person on this
earth whom I’d want to know my soul, and me theirs.
No, better to
face the soulless mirror, and my own darkness. Marginally better, at least. I
find scissors and snip unevenly away, before taking up the razor. The scissors are
blunt like everything in here, and each cut pulls the skin, as if niggling at
the puckered proud flesh over a half healed scab.
The scab being me.
It’s a twenty
minutes-walk to Henry’s, most of it along the river. In summer it would be a pleasant
walk, under the spreading plane trees, with the boats plying on the sunny water.
Now my boots plash softly into sodden fallen leaves, and slick horse muck.
Still, the bare trees looming in the mist have a gaunt beauty, and for a
moment, the briefest moment, I wish I had a pencil and a sketching pad with me,
to jot down the twisting, muscular forms of their outstretched limbs.
Time was when I
never went anywhere without paper and pencils. But that man is long gone.
I am just in
sight of number 16, Rossetti’s house—he’s gone these last two years, poor
tormented soul, with all his women and his menagerie, may he rest in peace—when
a gentleman in a dark coat steps out of a cab not two yards from me and hands
out an elegant lady, who turns around to shake out the folds of her gown and
unwittingly looks me right in the eye. I shudder, hurrying on.
Really. I mean
it. If it’s true that eyes are windows in our soul, why do we look people in
the eyes? How many people have you ever known that you’d want to share your
soul with? One? Two? Twenty? Fifteen thousand? Or maybe none at all?
****
Gabriel
There is this to
be said for my profession.
I can sleep in.
That unspeakable
time of day, the early hours of the morning, when the whole world trudges along
the streets with dead eyes and heavy feet, on to another day of toil, is spared
to me.
I see the tiredness
of the world at the other end of the day. But by then it’s dark, and there is
not much to see, and the tiredness has a different flavor. To me, that’s mostly
the flavor of a man’s spendings, which I mostly spit on the pavement. You get
used to it. You get used to almost anything, given time.
Darkness or no, I must be seen of course. I am the one
in the stolen foggy spotlight of the lamppost’s golden halo. But the darkness
outside stares back blankly, and mostly I like it that way. I have seen enough
of the world to last me a lifetime. My business needs the night, in any case.
I wish I could
say my bed is warm and comfortable, but mostly it’s lumpy, damp and cold. But
it’s mine and quiet, here at the top of the silent house. Mrs. Gride doesn’t
like noise. She says it makes her temples ache, which is all stuff of course,
but still, we all creep about as quiet as mice. No, much more quiet than mice. They do not listen to Mrs. Gride’s
injunctions about walking along the drugget, talking in a low voice and making
no sounds. I can hear them chewing and scrabbling behind panels and wainscots
at night, when the house sleeps, and I come home to my lonely room. Usually
they are the only ones to welcome me back. I’m always the last one to return. I
feel a bond of likeness with them. We all live at the edge, behind screens. It
doesn’t stop me from throwing shoes at them when they cross the room too
boldly, or go close to my wardrobe. I have little enough as it is. The mice
will have to nest elsewhere. I am not a charity institution after all.
In the morning
the bed has a narrow strip of warmth in the middle, a stripe exactly as wide as
my body, and I must not move, lest I stray on the flabby cold linen outside,
but still, eventually I find the nerve to reach out and fetch my cigarettes,
and light the first of the day. I smoke it in bed, my one and only indulgence. I
have become adept at smoking in bed without shedding ashes on the sheets or
setting myself on fire.
I watch the thin,
ghostly, white smoke curling and floating towards the pale grey skylight,
swirling into a puff of breath. It’s likely to be the most beautiful thing I’ll
see all day.
I have a small
pile of work to do for the girls downstairs, so I finally heave myself out of
bed. I don’t ask money for these small jobs. By tacit agreement, I help out and
the girls close an eye on my strangeness. It works very well for all involved.
Later, much
later, in the light of a single candle, I shave at my little mirror (an evening
ritual, for those like me). As usual I give fervent thanks that nature hardly
gave me any beard to shave. Then I shed my trousers and my waistcoat and my
shirt and wear my other things.
The stockings,
which need mending again, but will do for one more night, in the dark, a small
chemise. Then I put on my boots, with small heels and about a thousand fucking
tiny buttons. They are old, second hand or third, like everything I own, but
well-greased and waxed and buffed to a sheen. It’s cold out there, and wet.
And then my
tight, tight corset. It needs some fancy bending to lace it up by myself, but I
am limber. I pull the laces as tight as I can around my waist, feeling the
shape of me change, like some creatures are said to change in the light of a
full moon. The core of the corset is whalebone and steel, stiff like armor. It
knows my true shape better than my body does. It hardly needs padding at the
chest, hard as it is, but it suits me to pad it anyway, for the weight of it,
with two silk cravats I keep for the purpose, so old, worn so soft by use, so
waxy with the damp of my skin, that they almost melt to my chest. My skin is
all tingling now, and it’s not the cold. Silk and steel hug me so close, so
much tighter than my day clothes. I am almost naked, and yet every bit of me is
more defined and clear, like I have come into sharper, truer focus in the searching
eye of a telescope.
I paint my
lashes and my eyelids, black and black, to make my eyes shine. I paint my lips
red. That marks me as the whore I am, and I don’t mind.
I am what I am.
My wig hangs
from the corner of the wardrobe. Freshly brushed, the blonde hair shines in the
candlelight and waves like a ghost in the faint breeze as I open the wardrobe
door. Maybe the ghost of the woman whose hair it is, who knows. She might well
be dead. I don’t know what would be creepier, to wear the hair of a dead woman
or the hair of a live one. Still, I’m stuck with the wig for now. I am not
pleased with the color, which does not mix with my dark hair. But I got it
almost cheap in Middlesex Street. It was the sort of bargain where nobody asks
too many questions.
I wear my violet
skirt over a small horse-hair bustle and a blouse and tight bodice. I don’t
button this all the way up, but I put on a shawl, for the cold. The wig, which
in summer would hitch and sweat, is almost a comfort now. I look at my mirror
one last time as I tie my hair in a loose chignon at the nape of my neck, and
stab it through with a horn comb. No pins.
I learnt the hard way not to trust a man around a hairpin. The mirror is
too small to see much. My pale face, the dark circles of my eyes, the red lips,
the ghostly locks. All the rest I can only imagine.
But that is my
life. Imagining myself, conjuring myself into existence … especially the parts
that don’t fit in the narrow, narrow picture.
A MUSE TO LIVE FOR
Coming
2019
