Deathbird Stories

The Face of Helene Bournouw

These are the sounds in the night: First, the sound of darkness, lapping at the edges of a sea of movement, itself called silence. Then, second, the fingertip-sensed sound of the cyclical movement of the universe as it gnaws its way through the dust-film called Time. And last, the animal sounds of two people making love. The moist sounds of two bodies in concert. Always the same sound, and only set apart from itself by the meters and stop-pauses of generators phasing down, of equipment being hauled into new positions for use.

Weltered, foundering, going down in this downdropping clogature of sound, Helene Bournouw’s mouth opened to receive a charcoal-scented passion as brief as the life of a leaf. Wind rushed silently past, deafening as it sucked the breath from both Helene Bournouw and her lover.

In the perfect minds of Gods too perfect even to have been conjured by mortals, there never existed a love as drenched in empathy as the love between Helene Bournouw and the man she accepted gratefully. Under the sun that burned bright and blue-white there was never a passion such as this: straight as steel ties to an indecipherable horizon, gleaming rhodium silver-white in perfection, filled to the top and to its own surface tension with amiability and laughter and random turnings in the dark that signified two merging into one, being taken in completely, warm and forever.

This was the way she made love, Helene Bournouw, the most beautiful woman who had ever seen man through eyes of wonder.

Richard Strike, the only one of the cilia-wafting Broadway columnists with a valid claim to literacy, once referred to her as the most memorable succubus he had ever encountered. The Times Square sharpers, of course, equated the phrase with oral pornography and let it pass; they knew what Helene Bournouw was: she was too beautiful.

Yet there was truth in what Strike had said, and the label was a fair one. There was something about Helene Bournouw that drained those who came into her life, within her reach. Of beauty there was no doubt; she was almost too beautiful. Abington was the only photographer she would allow to pose her, and together their model-photographer relationship brought forth portraits of Helene Bournouw that became testimonies to her unearthly loveliness, hers alone. (Whether those portraits sold sanitary napkins or compact cars, the viewer saw first Helene Bournouw, and when her image finally released him…then the product.)

From these two elements—beauty that could not be denied and a nature that left others spent and empty—elements met and altered subtly by the catalyst that was Helene Bournouw, the legend grew. Her private life was her own, something peculiar and rare for a mover in that circle where publicity has monetary value. Other than superficialities concerning what young executive or visiting film star she was dating, little was known of her.

As Abington once remarked to a curious article writer from one of the women’s slicks, “When she leaves the studio, I don’t know where she goes. She lives on Sutton Place, but she’s seldom there; Helene could be making her home in the fog, and we wouldn’t know it. All I care about is that she’s the loveliest woman I’ve ever photographed.”

And that, from the man who discovered Suzy Parker, who did the first adult portraits of Elizabeth Taylor, who was commissioned to photograph the fifty most beautiful women in the world for Life, is perhaps the most telling argument for those who swear there has never been born a more fascinating, gorgeous creature than Helene Bournouw.

Seated early in the day in a corner booth at Lindy’s, Helene Bournouw turned a veritable Niagara among smiles on her companion. Her deep gray eyes, subtly changing and compelling, were half drawn closed in a glance both unsettling and intoxicating.

“Jimmy, we’re finished,” she said with unarguable simplicity.

The clean, strong lines of her companion’s face eroded. His glance wavered from hers, and his tongue broke from the cover of his mouth to moisten his lips inarticulately. It had been a week such as he had never known, this James P. Knoll, head of a multi-billion-dollar shipping and cartage chain. A week in which he had known danger, love, excitement, challenge—a range of emotions that had left him spent. He had spent a full week with Helene Bournouw.

Now she had ended it, with three words.

Without preamble, without provocation, after a night so diamond-perfect in its wholeness that he had decided to break away to buy the ring, she had shattered it all.

James P. Knoll rose from the booth in Lindy’s and knowing without question by the tone she had used, a tone he had thought incapable of coming from her, that they were indeed finished, dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the table to pay for the lunch that had not yet been served, and walked out onto Broadway.

Later that day he would remove the little German .22-caliber short revolver from his wall safe and put a neat, almost bloodless hole in his right temple.

Helene Bournouw ate sparingly of the lunch when it was served. A model with her qualities could not risk overweight.

Later that day, due to the untimely death of its sole driving force, its President, Knoll Transit Incorporated suffered heavily on the market, causing a stock run that quickly spread like plague to the other rolling cartage firms, causing a major disruption in shipping and trucking throughout the country. All very sudden.

Helene Bournouw moved to her second appointment of the day….

Quentin Dean was not his real name, but whatever unpronounceable Polish or Latvian origin it had been, it in no way detracted from the quality of his painting. Quentin Dean, though living off day-old bread and canned cream of tomato soup in a Fourteenth Street loft, was perhaps the finest new artist of his generation. He had not yet been discovered by the critics; that might come in a year, perhaps eight months if he could find the right sort of patron, the right sort of interested party who would keep him eating, keep him working, show his efforts around till the break and the recognition came.

The critics had not yet found Quentin Dean, but Helene Bournouw had.

She cabbed over from Lindy’s and climbed the four flights to Quentin Dean’s airy, very clean, very light studio. Though barren—save for the lumber leaning and stacked against the walls, preparatory to becoming easels and frames; save for the hundreds of paintings resting with their faces against the other walls; save for the huge mattress thrown carelessly into the center of the room—Dean’s studio was quite cheery.

Helene Bournouw came into it and the sunlight, so cold and demanding on this too-cold-for-May afternoon, grew warm and golden. She stood behind him, watching him spread the glow of yellow ocher across a city scene.

She laughed lightly. Almost gaily.

Quentin Dean, lost in his work to the exclusion of all sound, spun, brush held like a sword. He smiled as he saw her. “Helene…honey, why didn’t you call the drug store?…They’d have told me you were coming….”

She laughed again, a faint elfin tinkle in the empty studio. “What do you call that. Quentin dear?” She pointed one slim white-gloved hand at the painting.

He tried to match her smile with a boyish, uncertain smile of his own, but it would not come. He turned to look at the painting, fearing he might have done something he had not seen, standing so close. But no, it was just the way he wanted to say it, in just the proper tone and with just the right amount of strength. It was his city, the city that had welcomed him, had let him work, that had sent him Helene Bournouw to lift and succor him.

“It’s Third Avenue. I’ve tried to incorporate a dream image—magic realism, actually—of the el, before they tore it down, as it might be seen by someone who had lived under the el’s shadow all those years and suddenly began to get the sunlight. You see, it’s…”

She interrupted, very friendly, very concerned. “It’s ludicrous, Quentin, dear. I mean, surely you must be doing it for a lark. You aren’t considering it for part of your sequence on Manhattan, are you?”

He could not speak.

Weak as he had found he was, his strength, his sustenance came from his work, and there he was a whole man. No longer the emotional cripple who had fled Chillicothe, Ohio, to find a place for himself, he had grown strong and sure in front of his canvases. But, she was saying…

“Quentin, if this is the sort of drivel you’re contemplating, I’m afraid I’ll have to put my foot down. You can’t expect me to take this over to Alexei for exhibit. He would laugh me out of the gallery, darling. Now, I have faith in you…even if you’ve fallen back again…”

Helene Bournouw stayed a long while, talking to Quentin Dean. She reassured him, she directed him, she slept with him and gave him the strength he needed to:

Slash most of the paintings with a bread knife.

Ruin the remainder of them with turpentine.

Break his brushes and turn over his easel.

Pack his three shirts in the reinforced cardboard container he had used to mail home dirty laundry from college, and return to Chillicothe, Ohio, where a year later he had submerged himself sufficiently in his family’s tile-and-linoleum business to forget any foolishness about art.

Helene Bournouw moved to her third appointment of the day….

When his social secretary told him Miss Bournouw was waiting in the refectory, the Right Reverend Monsignor Della’Buono casually replied he would go in immediately he had signed the papers before him. As the social secretary moved to the door, the Monsignor added, almost as an afterthought, that Miss Bournouw had something of the utmost seriousness to discuss—a personal problem, as he understood it—and they were not to be disturbed in the refectory. The woman nodded her understanding, passing a vagrant thought that the good Monsignor could not much longer support the tremors and terrors of his confidants, that he was certainly due for a rest before his hegira to the Vatican in November.

But when the door had closed behind her, the priest signed the papers without reading them and shoved back his ornate chair so quickly it banged against the wall. He gathered his cassock and went out of his office through the connecting door that led onto a short hallway ending at the refectory. He opened the dining room door and stepped inside.

Helene Bournouw was leaning against the long oak refectory table, her arms rigid behind her, supporting her angled weight. The trench coat was open at the knee, exposing one slim leg, bent slightly and exposed. The priest closed the door tightly, softly, and locked it.

“I told you never to come here again,” he said.

His voice belonged to another man than the one who had spoken to the social secretary. This man had the voice of helplessness through hopelessness.

“Joseph…” she whispered. The barest fluting of moisture gathering in the bell of a flower anxiously awaiting the bagman bee, rasping down out of the sun. “I know what you need….”

He went back against the door, the door he had locked without realizing he was locking it, not to keep others out, but to keep himself in. She unbuckled the belt of the trench coat, threw it wide, and let it slide down off her naked arms.

Helene Bournouw was silk and fulfillment, waiting in her nakedness for his body.

He swallowed nothing and plunged into her, smothering his face between her breasts. She took him to her with an air of Christian charity, and he took her, there, openly, on the refectory table. And when his first time was over, and she was readying him for a second, he begged her to put on the little girl clothes he knew she had brought in the wide-mouthed model’s handbag. The short pinafore, the white hose, the patent leather buckled shoes, the soft ribbon for the hair, the childish charm bracelet. She promised she would. Helene Bournouw knew what he needed, what was beyond the realities but not the wildest fever-dreams of the Monsignor, who was not allowed to molest small children in the basement of the cathedral. Not even in the Cathedral of his Soul, and certainly not in the Cathedral of his God.

Later that day, he would write his paper, his long-awaited theological treatise. It would serve to sever the jugular of the Judeo-Christian ethic. His God would smirk at him, but not at Helene Bournouw.

Even God does not take lightly a creature of a kind called Helene Bournouw.

But that day was a busy day for Helene Bournouw, for possibly the most beautiful woman in New York, and she moved from appointment to appointment, being the delicious, scented unbelievable Helene Bournouw that she was. A busy day. But hardly over.

She stood before the mirror, admiring herself. It was trite, and she knew it, but the admiration of such a beautiful animal as herself could, by the nature of the narcissistic object, transcend the cliché. She studied her body. It was a beautifully constructed body, tapered that infinitely unnamable bit dividing mere perfection from beauty that burns out the eyes.

It had not quite burned out the eyes of that U.N. delegate from a great Eastern power {who had flashed like a silver fish in still waters when he had seen whom he had been fixed up with by his attaché), but it had unsettled and angered him sufficiently when her favors were not forthcoming so that there would be no mercy or reason in him during the conferences beginning the next day.

Yes, a fine and maddening body.

The apartment on Sutton Place was four-in-the-morning quiet, barely carrying the sound of Helene Bournouw hanging up her evening gown (its work on U.N. delegates done) and showering. The apartment took no notice as Helene Bournouw donned slacks and sweater, flats and trench coat. It made only a small sound as she closed the door.

In the lobby, the doorman created his own mental gossip concerning Helene Bournouw and her need for a cab this late in the day…or early in the morning, depending on whether you were a famous model or a night-working doorman.

The cabbie raised an eyebrow when Helene Bournouw gave him their destination. What sort of woman was it who wanted to be let out on a street corner of the Bowery at five in the morning? What sort of woman, indeed, with a face that held him stunned, even in a rear-view mirror.

And when the cab had disappeared into the darkness, its angry red taillight smaller, then gone, Helene Bournouw turned with purpose and direction, and strode off down the Bowery. What sort of woman, indeed.

Her flats made soft, shuffling noises in the still, moist, Manhattan night. She walked four blocks into a section of deserted warehouses, condemned loft buildings and wetbrain saucehounds sleeping halfway to death in their doorways. She turned down a sudden alley, a mouth open where there had been darkness a moment before.

Down the alley and she stopped before the fourth door; door perhaps, more boards and filth and bricked up than door, but door nevertheless.

Her knock was a strangely cadenced thing.

Her wait was a self-contained, restful thing.

When the door opened, she stood silently for a moment, staring at the man. He was perhaps four feet tall, his legs thick and truncated-looking. His body was a shapeless protoplasmic thing, erupting in two corded arms deeply tanned and powerful. His head rested without neck on his shoulders, matched as though with another head by the grotesque and obscene hump on his back. His face was a nightmare fancy. Two eyes, small and beaded and crimson, like those of a white rat, cornered and ferocious. The mouth was a gnome’s gash without teeth, without lips. The skin a dark-bock-beer tan, even more wooden across the tight cheekbones and in the pitted hollows under the fanatic eyes.

A mass of black hair, unkempt, filthy, spreading down across the cheekbones like devouring fire ants. A rag of clothing, no shoes, long and black-rimmed fingernails. The magnificent, lovely face of Helene Bournouw stared at this man and found nothing peculiar, found nothing wanting.

Without a word she marched past him across the empty warehouse floor, up the winding staircase high into the deserted building. At the top of the staircase a door stood partially open.

Helene Bournouw pushed it wider and walked into the room. Amid empty packing crates and piles of rubbish, a table with nine chairs dominated the shadowy room. In eight of the nine chairs sat eight dwarfed creatures, uglier by comparison than the one who had opened the door far below.

The door behind Helene Bournouw closed as the grotesquerie who had followed her moved to his vacated seat. The woman stood silently, shifting from foot to foot as the little men talked. She seemed to pay them no heed and, in fact, seemed bored. From time to time she looked around, seeing nothing.

The little men talked:

“You’ve gone too far!” the one with warts on his eyelids rasped. “Too far! All this involvement. The old ways were good enough, I say. The expenditures, the outlay, and the results…”

“The results,” interrupted another, with running sores on his cheeks and forehead, “have been fantastic. In a time of public relations, automation, advertising, the only way we can hope to carry on our work is to use the tools of the era.”

“But…” The warty one tried to interrupt.

Extending a leprous-fleshed finger, a third man cut him off. “We can’t afford to be backward. We must deal with matters on their own terms. You’ve seen how badly we did when we held to the old ways. People just will not accept ideas if they aren’t couched in terms they are familiar with. Now, we’ve gone over this a thousand times; let’s get on to planning the directions for the next quarter!”

The warty one subsided angrily, reluctantly.

Helene Bournouw, bored, began to hum. Too loud. The nine faces turned. One of them said snappishly, “Ba’al, turn her off.”

The diseased and foul creature who had opened the door for Helene Bournouw rose and, dragging an empty packing crate behind him, stopped very close to her. He climbed up onto it, and his fingers left grease marks across her white flesh as they strayed toward her hairline.

Streaks of dirt on the white, lovely face of Helene Bournouw as the little man reached up under the hair line and massaged a soft spot on the front of the cranium. A sigh escaped Helene Bournouw’s lips, and the face that could lead men astray, make them do evil, destroy their purposes, went very blank, very empty, very dead.

The little man climbed down and began to turn. A voice from the table stopped him. “Ba’al, wipe her off; you know we’ve got to keep the rolling “tock in good condition.”

As the little man pulled the strip of chamois from his shirt the conversation began anew, with the warty one taking this opportunity to reassert himself: “I still say the old ways are best.”

The murmuring rose around the table, and the argument waxed anew while the incarnation of evil itself wiped filth stains off the too, too beautiful face of Helene Bournouw.

Later, when they wearied of formulating their new image, when they sighed with the responsibility of market trends and saturation levels and optimum penetration campaigns, they would suck on their long teeth and use her, all of them, at the same time.