“I’m helping—”
“Helping? You think you’re helping? You’re making me feel helpless is what you’re doing. A man needs—”
Sonja flicked the shovel up so the flat back of the blade clanged against the truck’s door. “A man needs! Don’t say to me what a man needs! I’m trying to take care of this family, to see that we are all fed and dressed and warm and that we have electricity and gasoline. . . . I should care about your man’s pride? You would have us freezing and wearing rags so you can walk around with your pride!”
Both the suddenness and the intensity of her anger surprised him. It must have been there all along, waiting to be detonated.
Her
anger? What about
his
? All right—if all it took was his presence to set her off, then he wouldn’t even give her that. He leaned out the window to look behind him, then pushed the clutch in all the way and let the truck roll slowly back down the drive.
“Yes, go. Go!” Sonja shouted. “Go drink your beers and feel sorry for yourself!”
He hesitated only once and that was to roll up his window. Sonja had charged after him, flinging shovelful after shovelful of snow at the truck. Once the flakes were in the air, however, they turned and flew back at her, as if the wind knew that on this day right was on Henry’s side. Where, after all, was the harm in drinking a few beers, especially set alongside the sin of a wife taking off her clothes for another man?
Henry returned
at an hour when he could be reasonably certain Sonja would be asleep. He plugged in the truck’s head-bolt heater and turned toward the house. From horizon to horizon stars sprinkled the sky. Since the wind had given up its howl hours earlier, nothing competed with the sound of the snow squeaking underfoot. He checked the thermometer nailed to the porch post, but Henry had no doubt Max’s prediction had proved out. Yes, there it was: four below.
Sonja was taking advantage of the cold. She had set the folding clothes rack outside the back door and hung a few items out to dry. The towels and washcloths and pillowcases would freeze stiff and then could be brought inside. They had first used this drying method with diapers. June’s? John’s? To know for certain Henry would have had to recall their birth dates and then work back toward the winter months. But he didn’t know for certain how long each child had been in diapers. The hell with it.
He felt like kicking over the rack. She was so goddamn eager to do every job around here, she could do this one twice. But then he noticed: Those were his socks and T-shirts bent over the middle dowel, so it would be his own clothing he would be knocking onto the porch’s dirt and packed snow. A similar thought had occurred to him earlier when he was staring into one of the many brandy old-fashioneds he drank at the Lakeside Tavern. Then, he had been contemplating ways he could punish Sonja for posing for that artist. When his anger dropped him into the colder, darker zones, he considered beating her, pummeling her until purple rosettes of bruises bloomed all over her pale body. Or maybe there’d be no beating, just a single punch. He’d break her nose. How would that artist like her then, her beauty smudged by Henry’s fist? But wait a minute—exactly whom would Henry be punishing? My God, no one loved Sonja’s body more than he did, and after all these years he still found her as exciting to his sight as to his touch. That body, he thought, wasn’t it as much his as the socks he wore? If he broke or blemished her body it would be like damaging one of his own possessions. Yet if she was his, how could she have slipped so far from his control?
21
Usually when she entered the studio he was busy with something— mixing paint, moving a chair or a table or a prop so it caught the light just so, or, if they would be working
en plein air
—and what if she dusted her speech with Norwegian the way he dusted his with French?—he might be packing the old toolbox that contained all the supplies he would need for their hours outside. But when Sonja came in today, she saw him nowhere. And yet he had called out for her to come in.
“I’m right here,” he said softly. Startled, Sonja turned in the direction of his voice.
He had rolled that old office chair into the darkest corner of the room, and there he sat, one foot up on the seat just as he had once posed her. The smoke from his cigarette rose into a shaft of sunlight, and Sonja found it unsettling that she could see that drifting cloud so clearly when Weaver’s face was not visible at all.
“Am I early?” she asked.
“Have you ever been anything but right on time?” He exhaled a great plume of smoke. “No, the workers of the world should all be as punctual and obedient as you.”
She wasn’t sure—something in his posture or his speech made her think he had been drinking. Although Weaver was never drunk in her presence, this going off to a dark corner to brood and smoke—Henry did that when he had too much to drink.
“Should I make tea?” she asked. On a table by the door was an electric kettle with which Weaver or Sonja made tea when they took a break from the day’s work. Really, she only wanted a reason to move closer to the door, so strong was her foreboding.
And he, as if he knew of her fear, pushed the chair out of the corner and rolled himself across the room. The casters rattling over the floorboards reminded Sonja of chattering teeth.
How could she have had such difficulty seeing him? He was dressed in a white shirt and trousers and his pale little feet were bare.
“We need,” he said, “to discuss our arrangement.”
Here it came. He would no longer need her to pose for him. No more of those white envelopes into which he carelessly folded the bills that mattered so much to her and so little to him. When he held out her pay, it was all she could do not to grab the envelope from him and run for home and there hide the money in the place where she was sure Henry would never find it—tucked inside the pages of her Norwegian Bible, a book she never opened but to make a deposit or a withdrawal.
“How long have we been working together?” Weaver asked.
Sonja knew, but she kept quiet. If he heard spoken the duration of time, he might have exactly the evidence he needed to confirm their partnership had gone on too long.
He waved away his own question. “Doesn’t matter. Long enough. We’ve gone on like this long enough.”
Yes, long enough for her to know what he truly wanted of her. Could she decide, in advance of his offer, what she would accede to in order to keep being paid? This, but not this . . . that, but not that . . .
He rose from the chair, went to the door, opened it, and dropped his cigarette into the soft dirt. When he closed the screen he locked it. He coughed, and when he put his hand to his chest, he discovered that his shirt was halfway undone. He buttoned two of the buttons before he began to speak.
“When our session is over today, I propose”—he coughed again—“I propose that you remain here.”
“Here?”
Weaver stood behind his chair and, leaning down on its arms, swiveled back and forth like a boy who could not stand still. “Well, not
here
literally. On the grounds. In the house. Or here—why not, if that’s what you prefer.”
She glanced at the hook-and-eye latch on the screen door. “I would not go home?”
“Don’t put it that way. Certainly you’d go home if you needed to. I’m not talking about imprisoning you. I’m
asking
you to stay.”
“To live . . . forever?”
He came out from behind his chair and walked toward Sonja. She had been barefoot on these floors, and she knew how uneven the boards were, how you had to be careful of the nails that had raised their heads over the years, but she didn’t warn him. This building, after all, was his.
“Forever? Yes, I suppose that’s what I mean. Look, I know I’m not doing a very good job of this. I decided I’d ask you today, but I didn’t decide how I’d phrase it. And now I’m not sure if I should present it as an argument or a business proposition or as . . . or if I should simply say how important is it to me that you say yes.”
“Tell me,” Sonja said, keeping herself between Weaver and the door, “about business.”
He backed up and then lowered himself into the chair again. When she posed she could stand tirelessly in one place for more than an hour, yet now she was envious that he could sit while she had to remain on her feet.
“That’s not the inducement that I would have hoped you’d most want to hear, but very well.” He lit another cigarette, and when he exhaled Sonja was sure she detected the smell of whiskey mingled with tobacco smoke. “I’d continue to pay you for the actual modeling sessions, whether the rate should change—we can discuss that. Living here, you would have no expenses. I’d see to your needs. Your wishes, for that matter. You’ve never asked me about my finances, but you must know I’m a wealthy man.
Modestly
wealthy, but still. You would be well provided for. Better than at any other time in your life, I’m guessing.”
“I have a daughter,” Sonja said. “And a husband.”
“And I have a wife. Did you think I proposed this in ignorance of the relevant facts? If you feel you can’t live without having your daughter with you, bring her along. I’ve had children under my roof before; I might find it a salutary experience to repeat.”
“But my husband—he would not be welcome?”
Weaver looked up at her as if he were trying to gauge her seriousness. “He would not.”
“So he and your wife—they would be out in the cold, as they say?”
“They’re old enough to know how to keep themselves warm.”
“Just—the hell with those two, eh?”
“The hell with them—exactly. If there was a way to do this without anyone being hurt, I’d be all for it. But that’s not possible, so let’s limit our losses as best we can. The most important consideration here—and I think all parties would agree, no matter how grudgingly—is my art. You, my dear, are essential to that. And that moves you and me to the top rung. If you say it’s not fair that the happiness of a few relatively innocent people be sacrificed, I would agree with you. But there you have it.”
Sonja turned her back to Weaver and walked to a window. The chair’s squeak told her he was swiveling around to watch her.
It was early enough in spring—the trees had not yet fully leafed out—that she could see clear through to the orchard at the top of the hill behind the cabin. Did those apple trees once belong to Henry’s family? She wasn’t sure; she only knew how scornful Henry was of the people who owned them now, how they neither pruned nor picked properly. Worst of all, Henry suspected they didn’t care about or need the apples at all; they wanted the orchard for nothing more than decoration and deer feed.
“I can see you’re giving this serious thought,” Weaver said. “Is there anything else I can say that might help you decide?”
The pale, barely open buds on the trees looked, when Sonja allowed her vision to blur slightly, as though they were not attached to branches but hovering in the air like a hatch of newly warmed, newly winged insects.
Sonja said, “My husband keeps trying to teach me the difference between a
couple
and a
few.
How many is a few?”
“Your husband sounds like a pedant. If you want to be literal about it, I suppose you’d say a couple is two. A few—three. Maybe more, but not many. Why?”
“So when you say the happiness of a few must be sacrificed for this arrangement. . . . If you said a couple you would have meant two, so that would be the happiness of my Henry and your wife. But you said ‘a few,’ so more than two. Am I numbered? Is my happiness of no concern?”
She heard the chair roll across the floor again and knew he had stopped behind her. “What if I answer your question with another question: Are you happy now? Perhaps we should set the matter of happiness aside entirely. My wife, for example, is not happy married to me. Nevertheless, she—Harriet, by the way, is her name—wants to remain married to me. By now she probably can’t imagine another life. When my daughter Emma was a teenager she hated school, and a day didn’t pass but that she left the house in tears. You know what I said to her? ‘Baby, I’m sorry you’re unhappy, but you’ve got to go. Some things are more important than your happiness, and education is one of them.’ ”
“And are you another?”
Weaver’s laugh soon disintegrated into a dry, breathy cough. “My dear, I’m not the least bit important. But art is. It’s supremely important. And as it happens, in this mix I’m the one who makes art. And you are helping me in the process.”
She turned away from the window. Because she stood over him in his chair, he looked even smaller. Older too, and weaker. She had no trouble imagining a future in which he would be hunched down in a wheelchair while a younger woman—Sonja? that daughter who was so unhappy in school?—rolled him from room to room.
“But you want more,” she said. “Already you have me posing for you. So you’re asking for more.”
“Do we need to discuss this? Of course I want something more from you, and I think you know what that something is.”
“You want me to be . . . a wife?”
This time Weaver’s laugh was a single dry bark. “As I said before, I
have
a wife. I’m in no hurry to acquire another. But if that’s what you would require, if that’s what it would take to get you to say yes . . . What the hell. You divorce Henry, I’ll divorce Harriet, and you’ll be my wife. Why not.”
Now it was Sonja’s turn to laugh. “You make it sound as though you’re still talking business.”
This time he came out of his chair quickly, and though he moved toward her as if he meant to put his hands on her, he stopped just beyond arm’s reach. “What if I told you I adored you? Would that make the difference here? I have the feeling it wouldn’t mean a goddamn thing to you. You seem to have no vanity, so I can’t appeal to you by pointing out you’d gain a measure of fame by being my . . . my mate. Better still, my inspiration. You’d be more celebrated for that than for being my wife. Let’s face it—the artist’s wife is never remembered, unless she was his subject as well. You already know that one day your image will adorn the walls of museums, but you’re wise enough to realize that the same hands that hang the paintings might someday take them down. A hell of a lot of art that people once thought was great is now gathering dust in the dark. For that matter, canvas can eventually turn to dust. But while I’m alive I want to make the finest art I can, and I want you near me while I do it.”
She had grown accustomed to standing unclothed before him, but now it was his gaze that was naked and she couldn’t bear it. She whirled around and faced once again the wooded slope behind the studio. At that moment a crow sliced in and out of the trees at a speed so astonishing it didn’t seem possible it could avoid crashing into the trunk of an aspen.
“Would you like to travel?” he asked in a rapid, diminished voice. “Would you like to get away from here, where people would talk? I don’t give a damn myself, but if that’s what you want . . . We could visit Paris. A friend of mine has an apartment in the Latin Quarter overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. He’s seldom there, and he’s told me I’m welcome to the place anytime. Or perhaps you’d prefer a fine hotel—maid service and room service so you don’t have to lift a finger. The Savoy in London? Do you want to go back to your homeland? Do you have family you’d like to see again?”
She interrupted him to ask, “If I say no, will you still hire me to pose for you?”
Weaver said nothing. He retreated to a worktable, where he busied himself with work that didn’t need to be done. Finally, after picking up and putting down five or six paint tubes—he seemed interested only in how neatly crimped the bottoms of the tubes were—Weaver replied, “I won’t ask you again, but my offer—my request, my plea, whatever the hell you want to call it—will remain open. If you should ever change your mind.” He pushed himself back as if something on one of his own paint-clotted palettes had repulsed him. “But that’s not going to happen, is it?”
To Sonja’s surprise,
Weaver still wanted her to pose that day, although he started a new work rather than continue with the previous sitting, in which she was seated on the edge of the bed, naked but for the blanket draped across her lap, looking impassively at the adjacent small table and its water glass.
Now Weaver pulled the bed away from the corner and aligned it with the north window and the meadow beyond. He stripped the blankets and sheets from the bed and bade Sonja undress and lie flat on her back on the bare mattress.
The end of
life has long fascinated the artist—Roman death masks
,
depictions of the crucified Christ, soldiers mutilated on the field of battle. David’s “Death of Marat.” Ruskin’s deathbed drawing of his beloved Rose. Delacroix. Eakins. And at first glance, Ned Weaver’s “An Early Spring” seems as though it might belong to that tradition, for what but death brings that attitude to the human body—eyes closed, hands folded across the chest, legs pressed together? She is naked, but we all will be before the mortician does his job. Or has he already done his work? She’s pale, but wait—she doesn’t have the marmoreal pallor of death. Blood, and not the embalmer’s substitute, looks to be pumping yet through those veins. But she can’t be sleeping; no one sleeps in that position.
Perhaps we’re making the mistake that viewers of representational art so often make when they assume a work is “about” the people, objects, or scenes on the paper or canvas. On the other hand, we know when we look at Marden’s “Cold Mountain” or Arp’s “Mountain, Table, Anchors, Navel” that neither tells us as much about mountains as about the artist.
On that day, she was no more dead than those wildflowers outside the window—rendered in the looser brushstrokes we associate with the Impressionists—were in full bloom. Anyone familiar with Door County knows that a field will not bristle with points of pink, yellow, and lavender until the first weeks of summer.