The Painter: A Novel (32 page)

There was a spot just south of the Ojo Caliente hot springs, a long quiet shady run under ancient cottonwoods that looked cool and dark from the road. But when I got there it was Indian summer hot and midday and I knew the trout would be in a trance, so I drove on.

There are two paintings in the Tate Modern in London that I saw years ago and that together made a deep impression on me. One is by Paul Delvaux and it depicts a milky nude stretched on her back on a divan in a courtyard surrounded by classical stone buildings. The light is sepulchral and ominous. The palest things in the picture are the girl’s skin and the cold columns of the mute buildings. Around and above the square are the bulwarks and cliffs of a severe mountain scape, a scape of the dead. Nothing is living up there in the gloam, no bird or bush or forest, nothing but a waxing sliver of crescent moon that can barely sustain the weak light it breathes down on this silent scene. Around the girl on the divan are: an erect skeleton who seems to be walking toward her, in no hurry—why would he hurry?—a pretty young lady in a red hat, expressionless, who is walking at the viewer and seems to be about to walk out of the frame without noticing, and another imploring nude, who is at the head of the divan and raising one arm emphatically and about to step into it as if she were calling a rescuer. Our heroine by the way is perfect. Every time I look at the thing in the big catalogue book I bought at the gift store I get the
stirrings of desire. Her skin is flawless, her hips round, her waist small, her full breasts lifted and spread by her arms which are folded up behind her head. And her exposed armpit is shadowed, cupped by her breast and the lovely smooth muscles of her shoulder and upper arm. Whatever light there is must be coming from the skinny wan moon, but it must be magnified on the way down. There has been no attempt to hide her pubis. The hair there is the same color as in her armpit. One leg is stretched straight, the other hanging off the near side of the bed, half bent. It’s a sexy pose.

Is she dreaming? Doesn’t seem so. The deathlike quiet seems to extend to her spirit, her mind. She could be dead. The first time I saw it I had just galumphed through three galleries of paintings with barely a pause and I was suddenly transfixed. Was she? Dead? Or sleeping? I needed to know. Her skin, as I said, was flawless,
seemed
alive, did not have the waxy sheen or grainy gray of a corpse. Was it ruddy? No, that was the gloom. Okay, if she was not dead she was deathlike, she suggested death, as did the night, and whatever death was not yet here it certainly was on its way.

Standing before the painting I realized that I had been holding my breath, and that I was attracting stares. Well. I was right in front of it, and it was a graphic nude and I was an imposing man with a beard with flecks of gray. Dirty old man is what they must have been thinking, though why in this age of Internet and cheap nudie bars a dirty old man would go anywhere near a museum is a sensible question. I was not. I was not even old, I was maybe thirty-four. I had been asked to come to London to join an arts festival, I was staying in a four star hotel in Bloomsbury, and I felt like a king.

The painting disturbed me profoundly. I got the sense that the scene was taking place during a terrible war, a war that had left
little in the world alive, but I couldn’t be sure of that, either. I couldn’t be sure of anything. What it made me feel in the end was something that was not fully realized until I saw the second painting.

This one was more famous, I think, the way the curator’s card spoke about it, and I was surprised that I’d never seen it. It was Picasso’s
Nude Woman in a Red Armchair
. The card said it was Marie-Thérèse, Pablo’s seventeen year old lover. Apparently he was head over heels in love with her. I could see why, even through the stylized geometry of her round and semi-reclining form. She was all round. She was in a red chair as advertised and she was frankly uncovered. Her tilted face was round. The sweep of the hair framing her face was round. Her head was leaning into her right hand, her other hand up to her chin in reflection, and her hands and her arms were round round round, and her ear, her hips, her thighs, and whatever thought she pondered was light and pleasant and round. Her pearls or beads. Everything about her, especially her breasts, which were circles, it all rounded and came back to her simple fresh beauty, as if the lines and the light could not bear to be anywhere else, everything was round but her lovely cat eyes and the V and crease of her vagina. Well. She made me instantly happy. Her contained exuberance was contained, barely, in the simple circle of her being. She also aroused me. She was not perfect like the other, not in a classical sense, her limbs were short, she was pudgy, she might even waddle a little as she walked. But. She was devastatingly sexy. That was it, maybe. The painting was so simple. Simple joy, simple sensual heat, simple love in her presence. I felt what Picasso must have felt. She was clearly an uncomplicated soul and I imagined that she reduced all the world before her to its simplest and most fiercely living elements. I imagined that the world talked back to her in the clearest colors, the cleanest music. How else to live in love?

Now back to the other, the dead or sleeping woman. I wended my way back to her through several large rooms. As soon as I caught sight of that pale form, the very realistic length of her limbs, her shadowed armpit, the closed but beautiful eyes, I was aroused. A much different arousal—dark, tinged with what? Guilt maybe. At the voyeurism of studying this woman who could not know I was watching. At the shame of being stimulated by a body that might be a corpse. It was a dark and groaning and maybe violent feeling, violent in the sense of being drawn, exquisitely, toward death and what it does to all things in its proximity. The way it both chills and sanctifies them. The way death is both near and infinitely remote, the way it freezes and somehow kindles the heat of something grotesque and maybe irresistible and sexy, which is life at its most desperate. Phew. What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead. The spiritual impulse becomes religion. And dead. To my mind.

That is when I decided that whatever I did as an artist, I would try to go toward the living and not away from it. Even, especially, in the most abstract paintings.

A funny memory to have as I drove that morning toward Santa Fe, me, the recent purveyor of death. I kept checking my mirror for a black El Camino, but the road behind me was empty.

I wasn’t ready to go back to—what? Everything. Not right away. I checked into a Super 8 on the strip in Española and spent two days watching TV and napping and soaking in the hot springs,
which weren’t that hot, and eating Chinese food. I let the phone run out of juice and didn’t recharge it. I didn’t drink. I wanted to. I kept an eye out for Jason and his car and never saw him. On the third day I drove at dawn into Santa Fe. Went straight up to the room, took the cell phone out of my coat pocket and left it on the charger. I went back downstairs and got in my truck. Fishing gear was still in back just in case and I drove out Washington past the pink church and north into the country toward Tesuque.

The road skirted the base of the mountain and dropped off the mesa. It narrowed and followed the creek. Along the stream the big old willows and elms, the cottonwoods grew over the road and their leaves were already starting to turn and some had already fallen. I could follow a road like this forever: narrow and winding, tunneled with old trees and littered with yellow leaves. Dappled sunlight slid up the hood and over the windshield. The morning was cool. Clouds massed in the west over the mountains, but here it was sunny. At the church I took a right and wound up into the juniper. Sad to leave the big twisted poplars and the stream, but. Pretty up here, too. The sky opened and I saw two hawks floating in it, big raptors. The road turned to dirt and leveled out and I downshifted and slowed. The washboards could loosen your teeth. The driveways along here led to double-wides, leaning barns, yards with rusted horse trailers, dirt corrals. At a mailbox painted with a leaping fish, my fish, I turned in to a sage field and wound toward a grove of piñons and a small adobe.

She was standing on the step, waiting. Smoke threaded from the chimney. The sun was behind me, rising into the morning, everything was full lit with a warm russet light. That time of day. Her long black hair was loose, hanging to her waist, the silver flashed at her ears, her eyes were sharp with concern. The sight of her. She was not tall but she looked tall. She stood with her arms crossed over her stomach, comfortable, waiting. She knew. She probably
knew hours ago, days, that I would be here. She never claimed to be psychic, but she was. She knew things people shouldn’t know, like that a good friend would show up today.

Where have I been?
That’s what I thought. For weeks, months now? Where the fuck have I been? On some journey. I can’t say for what. Just the sight of Irmina cracked me open. The simple love, my oldest friend.

She reached out a hand as I came up the steps and took mine and turned and led me inside. The house smelled warm of woodsmoke and stew maybe. At the kitchen table, she let go of my hand and faced me. We were inches apart. For a moment I felt fully occupied by another soul, and then released. She trembled all along her length, like a tree struck at its base by an axe.

“Sit down,” she said. “I made coffee.”

I sat. She swayed in her long skirt to the counter. There were two cups already on the red Formica of the table. She brought the pot and poured them full. She sat across from me. My hands cupped the heat of the mug and my eyes lifted to hers. She shivered.

“Jim,” she said. Just that, the simple utterance of my name. A confirmation. I existed. Here I existed, just as I was. Then: “What in the world have you been up to? Wow.”

She drank her coffee and never took her eyes off me. It was odd, I did not feel pinned and wriggling on the wall, scrutinized, never with her. I felt held and fully seen. There’s a big difference.

“It won’t bring her back,” she said.

I nodded.

“You are burning up.”

I nodded.

She smiled at me, her eyes worried.

“Do you remember when we all went to the zoo?”

“Of course.”

I wouldn’t forget it. I had a show opening in Denver, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and a patron who had a pied-à-terre right on Cherry Creek offered us her condo for the weekend. We invited Irmina and all piled into my cranky, loud four door GMC pickup and drove over La Veta Pass and up the interstate to Denver. The condo was on the second floor of a fancy new four story building sided with corrugated sheet metal and accented with blocks of primary colors. We pushed open the door, and I remember that it smelled rich—smelled like wool Persians and fur throws and glove leather. Smelled like freedom, the freedom from financial worry I knew I would never have, the freedom to buy a twenty thousand dollar calfskin couch.

Cherry Creek, the actual creek, was a clear gravel-bottom stream that ran between two bike paths and which we could hear rushing over its ledges below, along with the deeper thrum of traffic and jingle of bicycle bells, and the tatters of conversation from people walking on the path just below us. I remember pulling the sliding balcony door wide and being carried by the sounds. It brought me back I guess to San Francisco, to the last time I had spent much time in a big city. The lostness of myself back then, the first stirrings of enchantment with art. I stood on the balcony and I thought, Here you are, not lost now. You have a show at a top
museum, sonofabitch. I looked down at my Little One, clinging to the balusters of the railing and pointing down to a pair of mallards in the creek. I looked over at my dear friend who was blinking in the bright early afternoon and taking in the almost musical flows of traffic, and I looked over my shoulder like Orpheus, back to my beloved, to count Cristine among the bounty, reckoning her among the other gifts like an object of gold. Never do that. Never say: I am so frigging lucky.