Mildred

A young woman with upturned brown hair sat in a throne chair in a gloomy windowless study, her pale face set with darkly brilliant eyes, stained with the faint remnants of tears. Her gaze pierced forward into an unseen distance, as if, having descended into the depths of some hell, she had returned bearing a look of defiance to an unseen captor. She sat upright, hands folded prettily in her lap, as though awaiting her verdict with the graceful nobility of a woman who concedes that her body must comply, but whose soul never will.

Edwin studied the painting carefully, at times closing his eyes, and beholding the visual echo of the woman, wondering who she was and what she was like. His eyes would soon hunger to see her, and would again roam over each line and form of her portrait with a careful passion. He traced the long brushstroke defining a line of her exposed neck, a dancer’s perfect column of support, which bore a striking face. She was far from a Platonic ideal, and many would hesitate to call her lovely. Her nose was slightly off-center, though not inelegant; her eyes were set slightly wide, yet were large and brilliant, crowned with long eyelashes, and alive with intelligence; her ears were somewhat too large, but beautifully sculpted, their helix forming a long, elegant arc toward her small lobe; her chin was slightly rounded and unassertive, yet balanced. Her most striking features were her milky, almost translucent cheeks, high and soft, carved, but without angularity; and her full lips, resting in quiet self-possession. He felt his gaze guided as if by some music of her face, directed across each line and melody, each feature answering the next in some silent counterpoint, revealing a harmony much deeper than that of the superficial symmetry of a conventional beauty. Edwin felt that he could hear the music of her heart, which she had carefully hidden.

Edwin stood captivated like a neighboring statue exhibit, while inwardly his heart stormed. At last, he was stirred from his long spell by a guard tapping him on the shoulder. His head rushed back to his body. “End of the tour, time to head out.” Stealing a last glance, Edwin let himself be escorted by the guard to the front of the manor’s exhibit hall.

That night, he lay in bed thinking of the woman in the portrait. The painting bore no clues about her identity and had been simply titled “Portrait, 1836”. Unbidden, a name pressed itself upon him, as if planted from without: Mildred. “Mildred,” he whispered to himself. It fit. Not far from the threshold of sleep, Mildred stirred in his memory, and Edwin imagined her life. She looked at him for a moment and looked away with uncertainty; now she floated over daffodil fields, leaping over flowers, holding up her long apricot-colored dress, her face lit with a simple happiness; now she lay crumpled before a fireplace, tears streaming as she quietly convulsed, mourning the death of her father. He imagined the arc of her life, and being a part of it, finding her, courting her, professing his love for her, marrying her, dying for her. As he dwelled on these images, he fell into a deep, clear sleep, all his dreams revolving around her as their central theme and purpose.

Edwin returned to the manor gate the next day to inquire when he might be allowed to go inside again. He was confronted by the same guard who had escorted him out the day before, who told him that public events were rare, occurring at the owner's whim, and that he could not say when it might be open, if ever. As Edwin began to leave, the guard added in a dark tone that he would no longer be welcome unannounced.

Edwin began visiting a coffee shop that overlooked the estate. He sat in the corner window, with a view of the estate lands, though not the manor itself, and sat in a listless stupor. How absurd this was, he thought. He knew the trope of unrequited love, of men who fall in love with some foolish girl and are reduced to desperate yearning in the face of rejection. But Edwin was more pathetic than even those poor souls, for he had fallen in love with a painter's model, or perhaps some artistically re-imagined subject, or even a woman made up whole cloth by a hungry artist. The woman he loved had either long ago taken her last breath or had perhaps never lived at all. He couldn't decide which was worse.

Edwin tried to forget her. He sat in the city park and watched the women go by. He studied each one and inwardly held out his heart, but none of them stirred it in the least, none of them held any power to release the claim that Mildred now had on it; all of them were dull and superficial compared to her. He tried going to the movies but couldn’t focus and was continually reminded of her. He considered drinking alcohol to obliterate her memory, and his agony with it, but in the end, he could not bring himself to desecrate her memory with such crudeness. For only in him did Mildred live, and to obliterate her memory in such a way felt like a crime.

Weeks passed in this state of torment, all his thoughts bent toward her. One day, he could no longer bear it and returned, again, to the manor, begged the pardon of the familiar guard, and entreated him to let him look in one more time, for one more glimpse at Mildred. "Look at what?" the guard asked in an exasperated tone, emphasizing the last word. "The paintings," Edwin said. "What paintings?" the guard boomed. As Edwin explained, the guard regarded him with raised brows. The guard then claimed that there were no paintings and suggested that Edwin leave now, offering profane encouragement. Edwin matched the guard’s voice, and after some argument, found himself being escorted by newly arrived policemen. He was told at the station that they could lock him up, or worse, have him committed to the state hospital. The policeman confided in him, "Look. I've been to the manor many times for the annual policeman's ball, the owner is a benefactor. There ain't no paintings, ok? He's a businessman and a car nut, not the art type. Never saw a bit of art in the whole place."

Edwin found a way in, eventually. He quit his job at the insurance company, since work had become impossible. Having obtained some intelligence, he took a temporary job on a catering team and with it an assignment at a fundraising function held at the manor. After dinner, as the speeches began, he snuck out and headed for the gallery hall. He felt a dizzy sensation of deja vu as he recognized the hallway passage. Edwin found the regal oak walls, which he remembered well. But no paintings. The walls contained only photos of race cars and other automotive monstrosities. He sped through the rest of the house, looking for evidence of his sanity, but found nothing. He abandoned the job and left.

It was not possible that he merely imagined Mildred, he reasoned. Even a god could not create a goddess; how much more so a man cannot create the woman he loves. Edwin was a romantic, but he was not so untethered from sense as to discount the possibility that he could be insane. So, he was open to the possibility, but he also knew that he could never adopt a view of the world that claimed he had invented her. This did not put him in a very fruitful state of mind, believing that he might at once be insane and that he loved a real woman in a painting, but perhaps it would keep him from getting locked up.

Edwin had always had a terrible memory, unable to visualize anything clearly for more than a moment. But the more he grappled with the memory of Mildred, the more vivid she became. Whereas in the portrait her wren-brown hair had been braided up in a chignon, in his inward eye she would let out her long hair, where it might stream as if in a breeze. Her deep brown eyes were no longer streaked with tears, and would often twinkle, as if by look indicating some private joke. He indulged in long reveries on her face or her figure. He tried to hear her voice, but it was unclear to him. But he somehow knew that she had golden laughter, because he could see it in moments when she overflowed with mirth and her frame pulsed in that joyful staccato, how lovely it was.

Edwin began to eat less, only taking what he needed to avoid the most severe pangs of hunger, finding that eating dulled the vividness of Mildred. He had always had a weakness for food before, but the only weakness he now had was for her. He found that her presence was strongest in the evening, as if she slept through the day and would awaken with the onset of the traditional morning, when the sun went down. Edwin would await her with a kind of vesperal vigil, even lighting candles, his tobacco supplying the incense. Over that first hour, her frame would grow in vitality. Whereas in his first days with her, he would be driving their encounters, at least to an extent, she had now begun to take on a life of her own. He would no longer imagine her in fantastic settings or the course of her past life; rather, she would sit with him in his life. There was no speech, for somehow, speech seemed to break the spell. But they sat and spoke with their eyes, and sometimes with gestures. One evening, she had even enchanted him by telling a kind of story in pantomime, and at some point, she walked in place making funny eyes, prat-falled backwards and laughed, and he laughed.

Eventually, he could hear her laughter, which was indeed golden, and he could sometimes hear her hum a soft song. At times, they would simply sit with each other: she absorbed in needlework, or a book; he in a book, or playing his guitar. And he would study her, and sometimes she would look at him, particularly when he played a melody, which he often did for her. But he could not speak or touch her, and the spell would weaken in the late evening. Edwin learned that it could only be prolonged if he slept and followed her into some unseen realm. As he lay in bed, he sensed her ahead of him, walking. And soon he would sleep, Mildred gradually slipping away from his dreams.

Morning would come, and he would wake up late and alone. His mornings and days were rather humdrum, particularly in contrast with the magic of the evening. He had been living off his savings since he quit his job and had nowhere to be. He often spent his days trying to render her beauty in some medium, to make something he could hold onto while he awaited her. His small apartment was littered with literary scratchings, odes and sonnets about Mildred, sketches of her figure, of her face, of just her mouth, or her eyes, or her ears, or her neck. But try as he might, he could not capture even a hint of the song of her soul. At best, he captured aspects of her shell, perhaps an isolated part of her, but never her symphony. He would always see some other woman in his efforts, not Mildred as he saw and knew her. His attempts reminded Edwin only of his failure to provide the world with any objective evidence that she existed, to bring forth even a shadow of her. Ultimately, she was imprisoned in him, and he with her. Only in each other did they live. His days were torment. He longed to breathe her scent, to feel her warmth, and to trace her skin; sight alone was granted to him. But that sight was no mere glimpse: her visible presence possessed him, eclipsing the rest of his life.

Edwin became increasingly emaciated and frail. The few friends and family he had were effectively banished from his life. He had nothing he could say to them. It was all impossible to explain, and it hurt him to try. And in his haunted condition, he did not have much room for them in his heart. Edwin's diet of water, bread, and tobacco barely anchored him to the world. It was only natural that when winter came, the flu found Edwin and brought him to his bed, frail and burning with fever.

He sensed her beside his bed. It was her smell, at first, a sweet, earthy, yet otherworldly fragrance, like the spring meadows of his childhood and something of the sea. He had not smelled her before, yet knew it was her; it could only be her. He felt her hand holding a cold compress to his forehead. At length, he managed to open his eyes and gaze upon her. Mildred looked at him with soft, worried eyes and smiled gently. She gestured that he should lie down, pushing him back with a soft touch. Despite his attempt to stay awake, he sank into a dreamless sleep.

Edwin woke again, and Mildred brought him a bowl of warm broth. She propped him up on a pillow and fed him a few spoonfuls, as he studied her in awe. Edwin tried calling out to her, speaking her name and saying everything that was in his heart to her all at once, but he found himself speaking nonsense, and she pressed his hand with concern and assured him, by some inward means, that everything was ok and that he must rest. The night was spent in a delirium, with Mildred by his side, attentive to his every need. The last thing he remembered was trying to speak again, to say, “I love you, Mildred.” Yet only a confusion of syllables emerged. She nodded and seemed almost to blush, though it could have been a trick of the light. Again, she bid him to rest, and as he lay back, deep sleep took him utterly.

He awoke to a bright morning, his sheets drenched in sweat. He sat up and felt his damp brow, cool to the touch. His fever had left, and with it, so had Mildred. There only remained the same sweet, subtle scent that had hung on her as she nursed him. He became aware of intense hunger pangs and soon rang up the local deli to deliver food, which he ate with a strange passion. After feeding at the trough, for so it felt, and finally sated, he reclined on his sofa, closed his eyes, and napped, still dwelling on her newly discovered scent. He awoke after a short spell, the sun so bright it was pouring into even his small-windowed apartment, and he felt an urge to go outside. He walked about, breathing in the fresh air and taking in the city. After a quick dinner, he returned for his vesperal appointment with Mildred. As the hour arrived, he took out his guitar and tinkered with a simple melody, keeping an eye out for her entrance. But he saw and felt nothing. As more time passed, he decided to be more active. He tried to recall Mildred when she had nursed him. He could remember her scent, which still lingered in his apartment, and her touching his head, but he could not picture her. He felt a curious lack of sensation around her, as if he was groping in the dark for her face and could feel only empty air. He stood up with a start, his heart beating in fear. His legs were shaky under him, and he was forced to support himself back onto the sofa. He repeated Mildred’s name, trying to grasp anything about her. But his noetic eyes had been pecked out. He was blind, and all was oblivion.

He spent the next day in repeated attempts to summon her memory. He could not even clearly remember which way she was facing in the portrait, whether she had been looking out at the viewer or off into some middle distance. He looked over all his attempts to capture her, his drawings in particular, but they were all of some other woman, not his Mildred. If he had been lovesick before, tormented by a woman he could not touch, his new affliction was much worse. He had forgotten the woman he loved, the woman whom he had dedicated every waking moment to, the woman who had just nursed him to health and saved him. He knew that he loved her still. But beyond the most generic description, he no longer knew her face or what she looked like. Young woman. Brown hair. Teary-eyed. Perhaps defiant. That was only the bare, crude outline of Mildred's portrait, but not Mildred the singular, the one whom he loved above all else in the world. Not only was she dead, or not-even-dead, as before, but she was now lost to memory.

In the days that followed, Edwin remained in his apartment, stumbling on either side of the line between waking and sleep like a man drunk. The hours were filled with pain and tears. At times, the urge would come over Edwin to scream into his pillow, to cry out her name across the void. But he did not give in. It had been a year since he had first seen Mildred; a full year of constant immersion in her presence. On the third day, an intense vertigo came over him. It was as if they had been with locked hands, eyes fixed on each other, spinning like children all this time, with no sensation of a world around them. Now that she had let go (or had he, somehow?), the world was all dizziness and nausea.

On the fifth day, the world had settled. He was utterly out of his head, emptied. He looked around the apartment as if he were looking upon his dull emptiness, projected onto the world. What was the difference? Mildred was neither in the world around him nor the world within.

Though his vertigo had subsided, any movement required a tremendous expenditure of will, and Edwin was incapable of it. After another listless day, he drifted to sleep. His dreams were a kaleidoscope of prosaic fragments, with no coherent thread to join them. When he woke, he could only recall being in a boat's cabin, peering out its small window at a moonlit night, trying to make out the stars beyond scrollwork wisps of cloud.

Edwin awoke with the sensation that his apartment was a coffin. After a rushed breakfast, he escaped. The day was spent walking in a trance, looking at nothing. The varied cityscapes and lively noises were one droning dissonant chord to Edwin, which washed over him as he trudged on.

The next day he did the same, and the day after that. Those who noticed him passing each day saw a disheveled young man with a pale ghostly face, chain smoking and walking in some tunnel of his mind, acknowledging the world only as needed to overcome the various obstacles it put in his way. Many souls are cursed to wander the Earth with a nameless void in their heart; Edwin was not so unique. But unlike those other poor souls, Edwin's void had a name.

His thoughts ran in mad circles. If the portrait did not exist in the first place, how had he come to know Mildred? If the exhibit was not real, where had he gone? Had he stepped into some other world when he found Mildred, and had his connection to it now been severed? Was he completely insane, confusing a fevered dream with reality, and falling in love with some specter of his unconscious mind? Or was Edwin the subject of some evil contrivance of some cruel god, who tormented him for a perverse pleasure? And whatever the truth, why had God, the One and Almighty, allowed this to happen? All these thoughts would spiral around Mildred, the named longing at the center of his soul, and he would again try to grasp at her, for anything of her. But there was only mist.

Each day was more or less like the one before. But gradually, with the passing months, the pain diminished in strength, and the chasm in his soul narrowed to a fissure, though one he continued to search into with aching devotion. His daily wanderings had given him renewed strength, nourished by his appetite, which had been awakened the day Mildred left. He paid his mother and father a visit in his newfound strength and apologized for his absence, though telling them little. At least in his body, he felt that his life now had a continuity with who he was before Mildred, though even in his physical strength, he still preferred to be alone and to spend his days walking.

One spring afternoon, he strolled down a quaint boulevard, a quiet part of the city that retained a bit of the old-world air, with brick walls and sidewalks, gas lamps, and narrow alleyways, situated on a hill overlooking the rest of the city. He was wondering, as he often did in his mind’s still-unsettled orbit, whether he had ever known Mildred, that is, as she truly was, when his thoughts were interrupted by the sight of sky overhead, a bright blue dome with luminous clouds of elaborate blooming billows, the perfect sky for divination and children’s fancies. Pareidolia, he thought. That is what the mood mechanics call it, finding meaning in the chaos. He had often considered the possibility that he was like the Pygmalion of myth, who carved a statue of his ideal woman out of ivory and fell in love with it. Indeed, this is what a quack would have probably told him, that as a child finds a ship in the clouds, Edwin had constructed a mere fantasy from the portrait of some unknown woman.

Though he would have given anything for an ending like the tale, he rejected that interpretation. He knew she was real, though the world might tell him otherwise. She had visited him and touched him in the flesh during his illness. And even if that had been some flu-induced fantasy, which he knew it was not, she had been with him for a magical year; they had been in each other’s presence, they had beheld one another. He knew that she knew that he loved her.

But had she loved him? Was Mildred perhaps some lost spirit whom he had awakened from some enchanted slumber, who looked upon Edwin with favor as the author of her resurrection, but who, in the wake of his convalescence, was liberated, her debt paid? Had she perhaps returned to her sleep, no longer tethered to this world by Edwin because of some spell broken by his illness, or some subtle act of faithlessness on his part? These thoughts tormented him, and he meandered through them and other well-traveled tributaries of painful doubt and wonder.

A man with a briefcase, in a tunnel of his own, crashed into Edwin, and with a quick backward arm of acknowledgment, shouted in his wake, “Excuse me!” Worlds colliding, Edwin mused. He looked around at the various passersby, each traveling on their lines of thought and space. He felt the beauty of the scene before him, of the sea of people, and the sense of some vantage point that might allow him to see the hidden strands of meaning connecting these mutual strangers.

He obtained a seat at the corner cafe. Edwin sipped his coffee and smoked, simply sitting in the scene before him, beholding it without clinging to it. Perhaps it was he who was now in a painting, Edwin continued musing. And then, suddenly, as if his life had begun to have its page turned, he felt distinctly two songs within himself. The song of Mildred, the soft, sweet, now sad song of Mildred that his soul had been singing for so long. And the song of the world around him, of the bustling crowd, and its beauty. He felt in that moment a strange potential to direct the course of his life and thoughts: to let the page be turned, to let his soul be led down a new current, and let Mildred go.

Again, he wondered, as if perhaps for the last time: “Did she even love you?” His soul answered softly, but clearly in the stillness, “I do not know, I hope so.” Then decisively, “I love Mildred. She is everything.” The moment passed, and Edwin felt a silent peace come over him and sat in it for a moment. A gust of wind fluttered about him, knocking napkins and hats off their platforms. Edwin looked back up into the sky, at the cumulus clouds now towering over the city, and saw Mildred, smiling at him with beaming eyes. Then the contours of her face softened, her outline frayed into wisps, and there was only vapor.