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Imagine the first time Irene Adler, the girl from New Jersey whose mouth and mind hold a flawless accent from the British Isles (even for the word “citizen,” that one had taken practice and thus earned a slow roll of respect when it left her tongue), sees this in a museum. It’s just what she didn’t realize she was looking for until she found it. This will complete the circuit, the one that’s sought the ground since the day she realized what people found off-putting about her. It wasn’t the money she could now trade for perfumes to match her every mood and mask. And her measurements were the key to her safe, not her power over others.
What was off-putting about Irene Adler—and therefore powerful if you had eyes and could seize it—was the way her gaze met and outlasted everyone else’s. She offered the same open, knowing, sustained look always, no matter if she was in gym sweats and other person wore exquisitely tailored Westwood. No matter, because it didn’t matter. Custom fit your mind to the moment you found yourself in and your body would follow suit. So to speak.
Maybe Irene Adler saw this work by Rodin and ganglions inside her skull woke up, woke her up. Brought back to life: the night she was 11 and finally understood that the constellations in the sky she’d been straining to see were infinite. Sudden knowledge that the beat up Girl Scout guide she’d inherited was worse than out of date—it was incomplete. The absence spanned more than the discoveries in the intervening years since its publication. The whole paradigm was as off as a burned-out bulb. The manual lacked imagination and she did not. The breathing of impossible beasts and gods in the dark behind the dead starlight was obvious to her now and would be audible forever. Even at noon. Especially at dusk. And just like when she was 11, the moment of recognition would earn her a precious adornment—one sometimes visible only to her and granted by no higher authority.
If Irene wrapped a finger around a long, brown piece of hair, never taking her eyes off of her reflection in the glass over Rodin’s painting, she could immediately work out how many pins it would take to reproduce that hairstyle for herself, the chemical interactions of the products she could use with the exact degree of heat her hair could take. Living femme takes brains and vision; brains she had in lush abundance. Her eyes sought out inspiration with a grown woman’s appetite.
Running a finger over Rodin’s name on the plaque she’d thank him. Walking out of the museum she’d thank the unknown name of the anonymous model he’d looked at. Reminded herself that every anonymous woman had a name, had many names. As Rodin captured her profile with his brush he was also, unknowingly, capturing the mind that animated that profile, that bent that waist, that knew the way to pin that head of hair. The model’s name was written in the artist’s paint as surely as the tilt of her chin. Unreadable, yes, but present.
(Rumor was Rodin could sculpt without ever looking at the clay in his hands. Irene thought she could do that too—would’ve laid good money on it in fact—but she’d decided long ago that every mirror was her kingdom and believed she ruled whatever any reflection showed her. So she looked all she liked.) The model for the drawing was not Isadora Duncan. Maybe it was one of the woman Rodin used to get over Duncan after his failed seduction. She could have been a ballerina recommended by Wilde or Browning, maybe Stevenson. Irene could imagine Rilke, between time spent playing secretary for Rodin, releasing a wishful sigh as the brunette’s profile came into view and she extended an elegant arm over the dropcloth. Rilke, smart man and young poet, would relish the slow, liquid heat that welled up inside him when he looked over the artist’s shoulder.
Irene feels that same heat as her skilled hands pin her hair, giving shape and life to the memory of the watercolor image. She delights in the warmth and then she imagines the ladder she could build for herself in the wake of all those future sighs (for her, for Isadora, for the not-nameless dancer); every sigh a daughter of Rilke’s, a son of Rodin’s. They will flow past her ears with her hair set. Just. So.
An up-do this elaborate invites you to raise your chin to the horizon as you stride down the High Street. And if a woman (man, creature of style) of London (Islamabad, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, a mansion, a council estate) softly touches her shoulder, her elbow, her wrist, to ask her—after a polite excuse, after an exclamation of envy—who did her hair?, she will lean in closely (even closer if she reads the hot, quiet want in their eyes and body language) and whisper:
“His name is Auguste. You should find him.”
“I call her Isadora. She lives nearby.”
“I never got her name. Something tells me it’s the same as yours.”
Then she’ll hold their questioning gaze and, seizing the opportunity, go. Let them observe how easily she slipped through a city crowd (maybe after slipping between their sheets, maybe not) and leave them to their own devices. Every queen solders her own crown out of the materials she (he, they, every impossible beast behind the known constellations) found at hand. If they had the head to bear their crown’s weight, she’d cross their paths again someday. Everyone who saw her and found the voice to ask her their question was already better than royalty. They’d understand why she left. Endless territory surrounds each of us, waiting to be invented and seized. •