Belinda by Anne Rice Read Free Book Online Page B

the reporters often asked about but which no one ever saw in any book or any gallery.
    They had nothing to do with my published work or images. Yet I'd done them for years-pictures of my old house in New Orleans and the Garden District around it, mansions rotting, forlorn beings in rooms of peeling wallpaper and broken plaster, landscapes prowled by giant rats and roaches. They all produced in me a kind of giddiness. I mean, I rather enjoyed it when friends came in here and gasped. Childish.
    Of course, the lushness of New Orleans is in everything I do. The wrought iron fences are always there, the flowers in threatening profusion, the violet skies of New Orleans seen through webs of leafy limbs.
    But in these secret pictures the gardens are true jungles, and the rats and insects are gigantic. They peer through windows. They hover over vine-covered chimneys. They roam the narrow tunnel4ike streets beneath the oaks.
    These pictures are damp and dark, and the red used in them is always blood red. A stain almost. The secret trick of them is never to use pure black in them because they are already so black.
    I paint these pictures when I am in certain moods, and it feels like driving my car at a hundred miles an hour to paint them. My usual breakneck speed is doubled.
    My friends tease me a lot about them.
    "Jeremy's gone home to paint rats."
    "Jeremy's new book is going to be Angelica's Rats."
    "No, no, no, it's going to be Bettina's Rats."
    "Saturday Morning Rat."
    My West Coast agent, Clair Clarke, came up into the studio once, saw the rats, and said, "My God! I don't think we'll sell the movie rights to that, do you?" and went downstairs immediately.
    Rhinegold, my dealer, had looked them all over one afternoon and said that he wanted at least five for immediate exhibit. He wanted three for New York and two for Berlin. He'd been excited. But he didn't argue when I said no.
    "I don't think they mean enough," I said.
    There was a long silence and then he nodded.
    "When you make them start meaning enough, you call me."
    They have never started meaning enough. They have remained fragments, which I paint with a vengeful hilarity. Yet I have always known that these pictures have a disconcerting beauty. Yet the lack of meaning in them feels immoral. Rather horribly immoral.
    Whatever the limitations of my books, they have meaning and are moral. They have a complete theme.
    So much for the roach and rat paintings.
    I didn't bother to turn them around when I started painting Belinda naked on the carousel horse. But that wasn't because I thought painting her naked was immoral, either.
    No, I had no such idea of that. I could still smell her sweet feminine smell on my fingertips. She was all things naked and good and sweet to me in this moment. She was not immoral and this was not immoral. Far from it.
    And it had nothing to do with those rat and roach paintings. But something was happening, something confusing, something dangerous, dangerous to Angelica somehow.
    I stopped, thought about it for a moment. The craziest feeling had come over me, and, boy, how I liked it. How I liked feeling this, this sense of danger. If I thought about it long enough-but no matter. Don't analyze.
    For now, I wanted to capture a highly specific characteristic of Belinda-the ease with which she'd gone to bed with me, the frankness with which she had enjoyed it. That was the point of the nudity. And it gave her power, that frankness and ease.
    But she mustn't worry, ever, about these pictures because nobody would see any of this. I'd be sure to tell her that. What a laugh to think of what it would do to my career if someone did see this, oh, too funny that, but no, it would never happen.
    I got her face effortlessly again from the photographic map of lines and proportion. And I was working double fast, as I always did when I did the dark pictures. Everything felt wonderful. I was piling on the paints, creamy and thick and gleaming, and the likeness of her