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He wasn't out of control; he was drunk but knew what he was seeing. Julia and I staring at him, his eyes moved from her face to the lines on my pad, back to Julia's face, back to the pad. There have been primitive people throughout the world who would not permit a likeness to be made of themselves; they believed it took something of the living person away. And it may be that this man, not realizing or understanding it, had some of that nearly instinctive feeling. Because my sketching of Julia enraged him as though in his mind my eyes on her face, my moving pencil taking her likeness, were a kind of deep intimacy. As it is in a way. In any case, it was somehow unbearable to him; more than rage, it was emotion past thought: berserk. His eyes lifted from the pad to my face. They were very small now, the whites reddened, and they were absolutely implacable. He lifted his arm to full length, and his lips parted to bare his teeth like an animal as he pointed at me wordlessly; I don't think there were words for the fury he felt. Then the arm swung in a short arc to point at Julia. His neck looked swollen and his voice was so thick it was hard to understand. He said, "Wait. Stay here. Wait. And I'll show you." Then almost nimbly — the swaying vanished — he swung round on his heel and was gone, the front door opening and slamming an instant later.
I finished the portrait: why not? After the door slammed I looked at Julia, and my mouth opened to say something but all I did was shrug. Nothing to say, except Well, well, well, or something just as inane, occurred to me. And Julia forced a smile and shrugged, too, but her face was white and stayed so. I'm not sure why: fear, anger, shock; I don't know. But she was defiant too, her chin unconsciously lifted through the rest of the sitting, another ten minutes or so.
She liked the portrait: I could tell that she really did by the way she looked at it again and again; and some color came back to her face. My drawing was fully detailed, very literal; it could have been a Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper woodcut. But this one was also a good portrait. Not only did it look like her; I was a good enough artist to manage that, given the time and incentive, but it also caught something of Julia herself, of the kind of person she was, so far as I knew. Maybe it did capture something of Julia's "soul."
Anyway, it was good. The others had come into the house; Byron Doverman just as I was finishing, and then Maud Torrence, each stopping to admire and praise before going on upstairs. Aunt Ada came in from the kitchen to call upstairs, saying di
I was jerked back into it. We were finishing di
He was standing in the center of the room directly under the multiple flames of the chandelier, staring in at us — confronting us like a bear on his hind legs. Still wearing his unbuttoned overcoat, his top hat still far back on his head and shining dully under the overhead light, he stood with his arms dangling straight down, fingers limp, shoulders deeply bowed, head thrust forward. He just stood there, swaying a little again, and we had time to see that he'd been hurt, apparently; that his tie was gone, his shirt collar open and slightly torn, that the first couple of studs below it were gone too, and that across his chest the soiled white of his shirtfront was speckled with blood. We even had time — sitting there motionless, staring across the tabletop or turned in our chairs — to see that the speckles of blood were growing, small spots enlarging, bigger ones expanding, then joining. He was still bleeding — it took a moment or so to understand and formulate the thought — then Julia cried, "Jake," her voice frightened and concerned, and she stood up so quickly the back of her knees knocked her chair over backward, and I noticed, foolishly, that it made very little sound toppling onto the carpet.
She started around the table toward him; now we were all pushing chairs aside, getting to our feet. But Jake flung both hands up and out, fingers spread like claws, halting us, freezing us where we stood — Julia motionless at a corner of the table, the rest of us half standing or sinking back into our chairs. Through a moment or two he looked at us, his teeth bared, yellow and strong-looking. Then his hands moved to his chest, each hand gripped an edge of his shirtfront, then pulled the bloody shirt apart, exposing his chest. It was hairy at the sides, black and matted, but more sparsely at the center, the skin there very white and visible under the separate hairs. He wasn't wounded or hurt; not accidentally, that is, and not very much. The blood swelling out of his skin in slow drops that, no longer blotted up by the cloth of his shirt, enlarged now and rolled down out of sight came from dozens and dozens and more dozens of needle pricks.
Incredibly, his chest was newly tattooed; with five blue-black letters at least two inches high. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity or protest or squeeze my eyes shut and pretend this wasn't happening; I didn't know what I wanted to do or what I felt — but the tattooed letters on his chest spelled Julia. He said, "All my life now, I will bear this,'' and he tapped his chest, He said, "Nothing can ever remove it. Because all of my life you will belong to me, and nothing can ever change that." He looked at us, his eyes moving across all our faces; then he turned, and with absolute dignity walked toward the hall and the stairs to his room, and I didn't want to laugh. It was an absolutely absurd gesture, an almost inconceivable action in the century I was used to. But not here. Here and now, there was nothing absurd about it. There couldn't be: This man meant it.