The Art of Living (28 page)

“If I'm really going to do it,” he told himself, “I should get out my brushes and start painting.” But day after day he did nothing but sit rocking and sighing, weighing the arguments on this side and that. He thought of the picture he'd painted of the barmaid and how it had seemingly changed her life. On the other hand he thought of the incident with the bee, how in his attempt to be helpful he'd done nothing but harm. Though the monk's opinions might offend and annoy him, he couldn't help but see that there was truth in them: what good was it, loving this physical world—gardens and queens, barmaids and poor trembling maniacs? Where would they be in a thousand years? Painting them was one thing—a record for posterity—but throwing away all one's hopes for their sake … “No, no!” thought Vlemk. “Absurd!” Also, there was the matter of the feelings of the picture herself. Had he really any right to deprive his creation of speech? Is all life not sacred? Is not the true work of art a thing greater than its maker? Indeed, wasn't it the case that a work of art, once out of the artist's hands—if not before—belonged to no one, or to all humanity? He began to find it hard to meet the eyes of the picture on the box. He could see that she was worried and suspicious, watching him like a hawk. “How queer it is,” he thought, “that what ought to be the noblest, most selfless act of my life should be made to seem sordid and inhumane!” Vlemk clenched his fists. He should have known, of course, from the moment the picture first opened its mouth. She was unnatural, a piece of Devil's work! Indeed, had she not ensorcelled him? And hadn't she clung to her meanness through good times and bad times, chattering endlessly, refusing to let Vlemk get out a gesture? Well, her days of meanness were ended, thought Vlemk with a terrible scowl.

But no sooner would Vlemk reach this sensible decision than the picture would speak up and charm him again with that seeming childlike innocence, and he would feel she was breaking his heart. The terrible truth was that he loved with all his heart that saucy, incorrigible little picture on the box—and no doubt also the Queen, since the two were identical; but
that
he would not think about. However fine the reason, and even though she stubbornly held out on him, refusing to lift the curse, he would rather be dead than change a line on that complicated face.

“Vlemk?” the picture would say, smiling to hide her fear. “A penny for your thoughts?”

Vlemk would shrug guiltily and would realize that among the many other thoughts was this one, shameful as it might be: that if he played his cards right—since the picture was so happy to be home again—he could get her to cancel the curse of silence and
then
perhaps repaint her. At once, at the thought of such treachery, he would become glum—irritable and irritating so that the picture would look put out and hurt, then gradually become crotchety, and in the end fall silent. This went on for days and days, and he seemed no nearer a decision than he'd been in the beginning.

One night when his anger at himself was intense, Vlemk stood up abruptly and put on his hat and coat and went down to the tavern. All the regulars were there as usual, the barmaid smiling and showing her ring, for she was newly engaged to be married. The axe-murderer, the ex-poet, and the ex-musician were seated together in their usual corner, glaring out at everyone like weasels in a henhouse. Vlemk the box-painter stood pondering with his thumbs in his suspenders, then at last went over to them. As he seated himself he signalled to the barmaid, and said in gestures, when she came to him, “Wine, my dear—the best in the house! I'm paying myself, since now my boxes are selling well, and I can't accept your charity any longer.” When he was sure she'd understood all this and when he'd dismissed her protests that indeed she must pay, she owed it to him, he added, “Also, the best wine you have in the house for my three old friends.”

The barmaid said, “But they already have our best wine—more than they can drink and God knows far more than they deserve. Look!”

Vlemk turned to look and, sure enough, in front of each of them stood a costly bottle of wine not yet half empty. “Well, well,” he said to himself, then glanced at the barmaid and shrugged and signalled for wine for just himself. When he turned to his friends again and asked in gestures what accounted for this good fortune, they looked at one another with baneful grins, trembling like leaves in a strong breeze, until at last the poet said, “You don't fool us, pretending you don't know, you sly old fox! But if you think we're ashamed to say it, you're quite mistaken! We too can debauch our art and make it fill our poor stomachs.”

Vlemk looked from one to another of them, wounded, then opened his hands as a sign that he failed to understand.

“Ah,” said the ex-poet to the ex-violinist, “how we loves to mock, this ex-box-painter!” His cheek muscles twitched and a vein stood out in his temple. The ex-violinist laughed harshly and, from behind his spectacles, threw a wink at the axe-murderer.

The ex-poet pointed one finger at Vlemk, the finger only inches from Vlemk's nose. “You,” he said, “paint foolish pretty pictures, exactly what your idiot customers would paint for themselves, if they had wit enough. You're right, of course. Why should men of genius go hungry while stupid little insects eat potatoes and gravy?” He winked at the ex-violinist, who winked at the murderer. The ex-poet pushed his flaxen-haired face close to Vlemk's, as if daring him to scoff. “I write verses for a cardboard-container corporation: ‘Got troubles? Out-fox 'em! Box 'em!' “

“I write music,” said the ex-violinist. “I take themes from famous symphonies. Soon every time you hear the work of a famous composer, you'll think ‘Cardboard boxes!' ”

Vlemk looked sadly at the murderer.

The murderer smiled. “I chop up wooden boxes to make the phosphor sticks people buy in those little cardboard boxes. They're getting to be all the rage, these phosphor sticks. They're easier than a flint. Also, sometimes children burn down hotels with them. Ha ha!”

Vlemk was so depressed at the thought of the murderer's chopping up wooden boxes that when his wine came he could hardly raise his glass. It was as if an enormous weight of snow lay over him. “So this is what everything comes down to in the end,” he thought, staring at the dirt in the fingernails of the two fingers closed on his wineglass stem. “All our early promise, all our grand ideals!”

Though he felt a little cross, or worse than cross, as if his heart had turned to ice—useless to deny it—it was no good berating his fellow artists. Hunger and poverty are powerful persuaders, and so was the policeman who'd taken to sitting in the tavern nights, smoking his pipe and occasionally glancing at the murderer. Nor could Vlemk deny that he himself had unwittingly contributed to their decline. In his cynical period, he had spoken with pleasure and excitement of his work on the “Reality boxes”—his evil pictures of the Queen. In his mellower period he'd had nothing to say. Indeed, he had nothing to say even now. It was just one more instance, he told himself, of spirit weighed down by matter until it no longer knows itself. He sighed.

“Very well,” thought Vlemk, and leaned forward slowly, bidding his friends good-evening and putting the cork in the bottle, the bottle in his pocket, then walking up the street to his house and up the stairs to his studio, where he opened up his paints.

“What are you doing?” cried the picture as she saw the brush approaching.

He tried to say in gestures, “I'm hoping to make you even finer than you are,” but the picture on the box was in such a wild panic, her little bosom heaving, her eyes opened wide, that in the end he only smiled as reassuringly as possible, sucked in his lower lip between his teeth, and began to paint. He painted for a week without stopping, and when he finished, the painting looked—to Vlemk, at least—exactly like the Queen except with none of her faults. Nearly everyone who looked at it said it was the most beautiful, most angelic face in the world, so true to life—or at least to some barely imaginable possibility—that you could literally hear it breathing. But the picture no longer talked. Not everyone was persuaded, of course, about the picture's perfection. When he showed it to his apprentices they frowned and looked evasive, and at last the fat one said, “It looks sort of the same as before.”

Vlemk gestured wildly, as if to say, “I paint for a week—me! Vlemk!—and the painting looks the same as before?”

The fat one ducked his head. “I just said
sort
of,” he explained.

Little did they know, he thought sorrowfully. Though it watched him as if on a jury, the picture had become, like himself, as mute as a stone.

13

Cowardly or not, he could not bear to take the picture up himself—and no reason he should, he convinced himself; there was no reason the Queen should have anything to say to him. Nevertheless he was secretly puzzled when for a week after sending the repainted picture by the youngest of his apprentices, Vlemk had still heard nothing. Then a message arrived, brought to him in person by the driver with the top hat and the polished boots. It was a small white card on which the Queen had written, in a feeble hand, an urgent invitation to the palace.

Vlemk frowned and studied the face of the driver for some sign. Behind the driver's head there were low, leaden clouds. The driver showed nothing, standing with his hands folded, gazing solemnly—almost tragically, Vlemk would have said—at the floor. In haste, the box-painter hung up his frock, put on his good black Sunday coat, gave instructions to his apprentices on the business of the day, and went to the carriage with the driver.

At the top of the hill, the gates to the palace were open wide, and the dogs lay still beside the road as if someone had put a spell on them. The gatekeeper made no move to interfere with the entrance of the carriage but stood back, with his hat off, crying out as Vlemk peeked through the window, “God be with you, sir!” Vlemk frowned more deeply.

At the high arched door the carriage stopped abruptly and the driver jumped down from his seat in front so quickly, for all his dignity, that the door was opened for Vlemk before the carriage had stopped swaying. The driver's face, as he took Vlemk's arm to help him down, was so abysmally solemn that Vlemk for an instant hesitated, narrowing his eyes and pushing his bearded face close to the driver's for a better look; but the man's expression told him nothing, and so, with an increasing sense of urgency, Vlemk went up the steps into the palace.

Nothing was at all as it had been before. In fact, so transformed was the palace when he entered that he stopped in his tracks and snatched his hat off in order to think more clearly. First, all the walls had been washed till they shone like new-cut marble, and everywhere he looked there were new, fresh flowers—rising stalks and blooms, shimmering and blazing, ferns and white ribbons, climbing in such profusion toward the skylight overhead that one might have thought one had shrunk to the size of a ladybug and were standing at the bottom of a florist's box. Second, and more ominous, the servants moved back and forth as quietly as swallows, or stood in doorways, no more talkative than owls. No one anywhere was smiling even slightly, not even the chief butler's grandchildren over by the fountain. “This is bad,” thought Vlemk, standing with his shoulders hunched, rubbing his palms together, squinting and pursing his lips.

Then suddenly the door to the Queen's room opened, and, to Vlemk's amazement, out rushed the Prince with the moustache.

“You!” cried the Prince, with an expression so twisted and uncertain one couldn't tell whether it was rage or the hope that, now that Vlemk was here, all might at last be well.

Vlemk bowed and nodded, then tipped his head inquiringly.

“Come quickly,” said the Prince, “she's been asking for you since she wakened.” Even now his expression was neither one thing nor another but filled with contradictions. He seized Vlemk's arm, but Vlemk stood rooted, still with his head to one side, his hands opened out like a beggar's. At last the Prince understood. “You haven't heard?” he asked. When Vlemk went on waiting, the Prince explained. “The Queen is ill! No one has the faintest idea what the trouble is. I came over from my neighboring kingdom as soon as I heard.” His face became more stern and his grip on the handle of his ornamented cane somewhat tightened. “I refuse to let it happen! Believe me, I'll move heaven and earth, if I have to ….” Sweat had popped out on his forehead, and he took a swipe at it with his sleeve, then lowered his head and frowned like a goat.

At the news that the Queen was seriously ill, Vlemk's knees turned to rubber, and to keep himself from falling he had to cling to the Prince with both hands.

“In my personal opinion, it's the picture you did of her,” said the Prince, and his hand closed still more tightly on the cane. Anger lit his eyes, but then the next instant his expression was full of doubt, panicky. “Then again, perhaps everything's just the opposite of what it seems,” he said, and quickly looked away. His gaze went running around the room. As if in hopes that Vlemk might resolve his confusion, he tugged abruptly and rather sternly at Vlemk's arm, moving him in the direction of the door, and Vlemk, after a moment's resistance, gave up and followed.

The moment the Prince and the box-painter entered, the servants and doctors who were gathered around the Queen's four-poster bed drew back the curtains and slipped out of the way like shadows. In this room too there were flowers everywhere, especially around the bed. The Queen's head lay as white on its pillow as a pearl in its crimson casque, her arms above the covers, and in her white, white hands she held the box with the picture Vlemk had altered. As if he didn't mean to but couldn't help himself, the Prince pushed past Vlemk and went up to her first, bent quickly, impulsively, to kiss her on the forehead, then turned away, blushing, signalling urgently for Vlemk to come and help. As soon as he thought Vlemk could not see him, the Prince covered his face with his hands like a man stifling a groan and turned his back.