I ran my fingers around the lion’s nose and mouth and up its muzzle to its mane, smooth and knobbled. His eyes followed my fingers.
“You know,” he murmured, “that the painting needs it, the light that the pearl reflects. It won’t be complete otherwise.”
I did know. I had not looked at the painting long—it was too strange seeing myself—but I had known immediately that it needed the pearl earring. Without it there were only my eyes, my mouth, the band of my chemise, the dark space behind my ear, all separate. The earring would bring them together. It would complete the painting.
It would also put me on the street. I knew that he would not borrow an earring from van Ruijven or van Leeuwenhoek or anyone else. He had seen Catharina’s pearl and that was what he would make me wear. He used what he wanted for his paintings, without considering the result. It was as van Leeuwenhoek had warned me.
When Catharina saw her earring in the painting she would explode.
I should have begged him not to ruin me.
“You are painting it for van Ruijven,” I argued instead, “not for yourself. Does it matter so much? You said yourself that he would be satisfied with it.”
His face hardened and I knew I had said the wrong thing.
“I would never stop working on a painting if I knew it was not complete, no matter who was to get it,” he muttered. “That is not how I work.”
“No, sir.” I swallowed and gazed at the tiled floor. Stupid girl, I thought, my jaw tightening.
“Go and prepare yourself.”
Bowing my head, I hurried to the storeroom where I kept the blue and yellow cloths. I had never felt his disapproval so strongly. I did not think I could bear it. I removed my cap and, feeling the ribbon that tied up my hair was coming undone, I pulled it off. I was reaching back to gather up my hair again when I heard one of the loose floor tiles in the studio clink. I froze. He had never come into the storeroom while I was changing. He had never asked that of me.
I turned round, my hands still in my hair. He stood on the threshold, gazing at me.
I lowered my hands. My hair fell in waves over my shoulders, brown like fields in the autumn. No one ever saw it but me.
“Your hair,” he said. He was no longer angry.
At last he let me go with his eyes.
Now that he had seen my hair, now that he had seen me revealed, I no longer felt I had something precious to hide and keep to myself. I could be freer, if not with him, then with someone else. It no longer mattered what I did and did not do.
That evening I slipped from the house and found Pieter the son at one of the taverns where the butchers drank, near the Meat Hall. Ignoring the whistles and remarks, I went up to him and asked him to come with me. He set down his beer, his eyes wide, and followed me outside, where I took his hand and led him to a nearby alley. There I pulled up my skirt and let him do as he liked. Clasping my hands around his neck, I held on while he found his way into me and began to push rhythmically. He gave me pain, but when I remembered my hair loose around my shoulders in the studio, I felt something like pleasure too.
Afterwards, back at Papists’ Corner, I washed myself with vinegar.
When I next looked at the painting he had added a wisp of hair peeking out from the blue cloth above my left eye.
The next time I sat for him he did not mention the earring. He did not hand it to me, as I had feared, or change how I sat, or stop painting.
He did not come into the storeroom again to see my hair either.
He sat for a long time, mixing colors on his palette with his palette knife. There was red and ocher there, but the paint he was mixing was mostly white, to which he added daubs of black, working them together slowly and carefully, the silver diamond of the knife flashing in the grey paint.
“Sir?” I began.
He looked up at me, his knife stilled.
“I have seen you paint sometimes without the model being here. Could you not paint the earring without me wearing it?”
The palette knife remained still. “You would like me to imagine you wearing the pearl, and paint what I imagine?”
“Yes, sir.”
He looked down at the paint, the palette knife moving again. I think he smiled a little. “I want to see you wear the earring.”
“But you know what will happen then, sir.”
“I know the painting will be complete.”
You will ruin me, I thought. Again I could not bring myself to say it. “What will your wife say when she sees the finished painting?” I asked instead, as boldly as I dared.
“She will not see it. I will give it directly to van Ruijven.” It was the first time he had admitted he was painting me secretly, that Catharina would disapprove.
“You need only wear it once,” he added, as if to placate me. “The next time I paint you I will bring it. Next week. Catharina will not miss it for an afternoon.”
“But, sir,” I said, “my ear is not pierced.”
He frowned slightly. “Well, then, you will need to take care of that.” This was clearly a woman’s detail, not something he felt he need concern himself with. He tapped the knife and wiped it with a rag. “Now, let us begin. Chin down a bit.” He gazed at me. “Lick your lips, Griet.”
I licked my lips.
“Leave your mouth open.”
I was so surprised by this request that my mouth remained open of its own will. I blinked back tears. Virtuous women did not open their mouths in paintings.
It was as if he had been in the alley with Pieter and me.
You have ruined me, I thought. I licked my lips again.
“Good,” he said.
I did not want to do it to myself. I was not afraid of pain, but I did not want to take a needle to my own ear.
If I could have chosen someone to do it for me, it would have been my mother. But she would never have understood, nor agreed to it without knowing why. And if she had been told why, she would have been horrified.
I could not ask Tanneke, or Maertge.
I considered asking Maria Thins. She may not yet have known about the earring, but she would find out soon enough. I could not bring myself to ask her, though, to have her take part in my humiliation.
The only person who might do it and understand was Frans. I slipped out the next afternoon, carrying a needlecase Maria Thins had given me. The woman with the sour face at the factory gate smirked when I asked to see him.
“He’s long gone and good riddance,” she answered, relishing the words.
“Gone? Gone where?”
The woman shrugged. “Towards Rotterdam, they say. And then, who knows? Perhaps he’ll make his fortune on the seas, if he doesn’t die between the legs of some Rotterdam whore.” These last bitter words made me look at her more closely. She was with child.
Cornelia had not known when she broke the tile of Frans and me that she would come to be right—that he would split from me and from the family. Will I ever see him again? I thought. And what will our parents say? I felt more alone than ever.
The next day I stopped at the apothecary’s on my way back from the fish stalls. The apothecary knew me
