The Painter: A Novel

  Julia made us both espresso in a fancy machine, going through the motions with practiced ease, barely looking at the cups, talking all the while in high spirits, about I’m not sure what. I liked her accent. She said that Pim had to go to Detroit on business, he was sorry to miss me, I said I didn’t know Detroit still existed, except for baseball, she laughed, she said You look good, Jim, better than when you were married to that playmate. Bachelorhood is good for you, maybe. I said, maybe. I said that I wanted to paint the girls in the kitchen.

  “Here? You mean in the kitchen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it smells like toast.”

  She laughed. “Well, paaw! Okay! Or if you want we can bring the toaster into the big room and make toast in there!”

  Shook my head.

  She smiled. I could see what she was thinking: Artists! Already the project had taken a delightfully surprising turn.

  “I can help you move the easel.”

  “I can do it.”

  We polished off the little cups and I moved camp. I got everything ready before they came so the twins wouldn’t tire as fast. I set up the brushes and jars and spread a palette of bright oranges, cadmium and transparent, and yellows and blues. I wanted them next to the table with the flowers in the background. She got the girls. They were six, in sailor suits, and nervous. They gripped each other’s hands like a lifeline. Celine and Julie. They were tiny. Seemed smaller maybe than I remembered Alce at six. Julia shuffled them sideways two feet to their left so they were framed in the windows. They stood holding hands by the table and chewed their lips and watched me wide eyed as if I were the polar bear at the zoo. Like there were no bars on the cage, just this moat, and wasn’t this supposed to be safe but maybe the bear would jump?

  I went to my coat which I’d tossed over a chair and dug in the pockets and pulled out three candy necklaces. They took theirs without letting go of hands and without taking their eyes off me.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Maybe let’s try eating all the blue ones first.”

  They couldn’t open the plastic wrapping without letting go of a hand, so this presented a dilemma. Probably couldn’t open them anyway. Here, I said, I’ll open them. The tiny hands holding the candy came up in unison and they relinquished their prizes without protest and without taking their eyes off me. I tore open the cellophane and the hands came up again.

  “I brought one for me, too,” I said. I opened the third one.

  “I eat the blue ones first for good luck.” I began to chew on one blue bead at a time, like a parrot high-grading the seeds of a fruit. “Yum!” I said. “The blue ones taste cool somehow.”

  They were watching me. I thought I saw a growing light of fascination in their brown eyes. They looked down finally at the candy necklaces in their hands and moved their lips around. Quick glance at each other and the hands came up and they began to chew on the candy, the blue beads, still watching me.

  “Good?”

  Nods.

  “Wanna see if the pink ones taste different?”

  Nods.

  “Okay, let’s go.” I sorted through my own beads for the pink ones and bit them off one at a time.

  “Which is better?”

  “Pink!” said Celine. Julie nodded. They let go of each other’s hands and began to eat with gusto.

  “Now green?”

  They nodded. In three minutes nothing was left of any of our necklaces but stained and ragged elastic strings. Their mouths and cheeks were sticky with color, the tunics of their sailor outfits smudged with their own palettes. Their hands fell together again. They continued to watch me with unwavering vigilance, but now it was more anticipation than fear.

  “Want a gum cigar? Can they chew gum?”

  Julia nodded. “Bien sûr.” She was sitting on a stool at the counter and clearly enjoying herself.

  I went to the coat and got out three pink bubble gum cigars. I unwrapped these too and the hands came up and I said, “Let’s chew half.” We did. They were sort of smiling through their chewing.

  “Don’t swallow, right?”

  They nodded, chewed.

  “Okay, maybe we better give the other half to Mom for later.” They chewed, looked to their mom who nodded. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Sautez!”

  They broke ranks, ran to their mother, leading with their half cigars, and all three began chattering happily in French.

  I polished off my own stogie, chewed. Occurred to me that a real one would be pretty good right now.

  “All done,” I said. “That wasn’t too tough, was it?”

  “What?” Julia called happily out of her huddle.

  “Got what I need. That was perfect. They can go do whatever.”

  She straightened. “You what? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m going to paint this at Steve’s. Get out of your hair. That was perfect.”

  Her eyebrows were two perfect high arches. She was poised between disapproval and delight. All of this dealing with an artist was a bit strange and so unpredictable. But fun.

  “I love Celine and Julie. They are perfect,” I said. “Terrific models. Best I ever had.”

  I meant it.

  “Steve brought up this big easel?” I said. “He’ll send someone to get it later. Give me a couple of days.”

  “Well! Paaw. Well, okay. Wow.” She released a long draught of laughter. “I believe I get it,” she said. “Do you want some toast before you go? Another espresso?”

  “Sure.”

  Before I drove back down the mountain we all ate cinnamon toast, and Julia and I drank espresso and talked about fishing, which, it turned out, she used to love to do with her father in Quebec. The girls played girl Legos on the floor. I didn’t know they made girl Legos but they do. I packed up and all three of them waved me off from the front door.

  I drove straight to the hotel. I asked the manager at the desk if there was a room I could paint in, not my room. Still didn’t want to deal with Steve’s place. I said I was planning one rather large canvas, like five by seven. Probably three days. He said, yes, of course. In fact the conservatory room on the roof has just been redone, it would be perfect. I asked for a drop cloth, a small folding table that could be stained. I called Steve and explained that I needed the canvas, the easel from Pim’s. He was used to this from me, he was eager and quick, happy as long as I was working.

  “Julia just called me,” he said. “She was a bit giddy. She said you all just had the most remarkable portrait session. She said you didn’t paint at all, you just sat around and ate candy cigars. The girls adore you, apparently.”

  “Candy necklaces. The cigars we chewed.”

  “Ha! You are not acting like a murderer. You are acting exactly like the old Jim.”

  Silence. The old Jim didn’t feel like the old Jim. The old Jim didn’t even know who the old Jim was. Or the new one.

  “Sorry to bring up a sore subject,” he said.

  “It’s not a sore subject. Can you just bring me the stuff?”

  “Be there in an hour. Miguel is on his way up.”

  “Thanks.” I hung up.

  The thing about old friends is that they never want you to change.

  I knew I couldn’t paint the girls without painting something else first. Not sure what. But something was pressing the way it does sometimes. And I knew I couldn’t paint it in the big sunny room on the top floor. I took another small canvas out of the bundle and put it on the easel in the room. I cut off a piece of fiberboard and made a small palette. I wouldn’t need many colors. I began to paint an ocean. It was a cold sea. There were no swimming women this time, no fish. There was a single boat. It was sailing away, not sailing, drifting. In the center of the boat was a pile of sticks, and the sticks were on fire. A plume of smoke rising into an overcast sky. Inside the pyre was a mass. I painted a second boat. It was much smaller, much further away on its journey, but the smoke rose faintly from
it, too. It was almost to the horizon and around it circled a flock of birds, and others trailed after it, the way they do after a fishing vessel.

  That was it. I signed it. When Miguel came to tell me everything was set up I gave him the picture of the brothers in the valley but I kept the one of the boats, not sure why. I told him to tell Steve to price the brothers however he wanted and to hang it beside the new ones on the west wall. Then I took the elevator to the top floor.

  I spent two whole days with the girls, much longer than I’d planned. I painted the garden outside the window first, and I painted in more detail than I had been used to lately. I painted an emerald hummingbird and a finch. I painted mums and hollyhocks, black-eyed Susans. I painted them framed in the windows and then I stepped back, felt the pressure of the windows in my chest and got rid of them, the frames and glass. I painted some sparse grass and a doll in the grass and a seal. The seal seemed alive and somehow happy to be there. That’s what I painted the first afternoon. For some reason I wanted to make a world first, a safe and good world for the little girls.

  The second morning I woke feeling clean and energized. First time in a while. I had walked once around the plaza the evening before, bought a silver bracelet for Sofia from the Indians in the gallery, fought the impulse to call her, knew I didn’t want any news, turned my phone off, then I’d eaten a bowl of minestrone in the hotel dining room. Back upstairs I watched two hours of a reality show about sheriff’s deputies in the bayous of South Louisiana called Cajun Justice, and fell asleep. I would have watched more had there been more episodes, I could listen to that muddled French accent all night long. Like the Quebecois, like Julia, the Cajuns were full of beans and mischief and humor and even the bad ones, the ones that were stealing copper and poaching gators, they seemed to be having more fun than the rest of us.

  So I ordered room service on Pim, with a double espresso and an extra carafe of coffee, and I took the elevator to the bright room on the roof and I painted the girls. I painted them face on in their sailor suits, holding hands. Their tunics were smeared and streaked with colors. They were a happy mess. On Celine, on the left, on top of her head I put a chicken. A very content chicken roosting in a shaggy nest. On Julie I placed a nest of baby birds and a mommy bird. They were shaped like blackbirds, but they were wildly colored. The girls had forbearance. They were clearly in this together and they were willing to undergo the ruckus on their heads because they thought it was funny and necessary. The nests in their hair did not at all detract from their dignity, they enhanced it.

  I signed the painting. It was late afternoon. It had taken much longer than most of my pictures and it was perfect.

  Now what? What I came here for and it was done. I wanted to take it off the easel and run it right up to Julia and the twins, just to see their faces. But then I thought I better let it sit for a day or two so no one thought I’d blown through my assignment. Nobody, not even artists, understood art. What speed has to do with it. How much work it takes, year after year, building the skills, the trust in the process, more work probably than any Olympic athlete ever puts in because it is twenty-four hours a day, even in dreams, and then when the skills and the trust are in place, the best work usually takes the least effort. Usually. It comes fast, it comes without thought, it comes like a horse running you over at night. But. Even if people understand this, they don’t understand that sometimes it is not like that at all. Because the process has always been: craft, years and years; then faith; then letting go. But now, sometimes the best work is agony. Pieces put together, torn apart, rebuilt. Doubt in everything that has been learned, terrible crisis of faith, the faith that allowed it all to work. Oh God. And even then, through this, if you survive the halting pace and the fever, sometimes you make the best work you have ever made. That is the part none of us understand.

  The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and love, and all the things they don’t know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious? What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that art is life. Well. Cut us some slack. It’s harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person.

  So anyway, best not to tell even your dealer that some masterpiece took you a few hours.

  Fuck it. I couldn’t resist. I hadn’t felt this way about a painting in a long time, that almost bursting urge to show it, why shouldn’t I? The oil was set enough. I’d put the canvas carefully in the truck bed on top of a drop cloth on top of my gear and make sure all the sliding windows of the cap were shut tight to protect it from dust. I’d surprise them.

  That’s what I did. I carried the painting by the stretcher bars in back, down the elevator and through the lobby and out to the truck in the back lot. I loaded it into the bed. I got in and felt under the seat. The .41 magnum was there, wrapped in a rag. I kept thinking about the talk with Wheezy, the cheerful Buddha-like cop. It set me on edge. It was like he was trying to pressure me into a slip about Dell, but also like he wanted to warn me about Grant, warn me to be careful, to maybe even keep a gun at hand. But I also believed he didn’t want any more fights. He was complicated. I couldn’t get a bead on him, as fat and simple as he seemed.

  I drove up Double Arrow, let myself in at the gate, parked in the gravel circle and knocked. In a minute Julia answered. Her face was lit with surprise. She laughed, the high bell-like laugh that must have been one of the reasons Pim married her.

  “You are back? So soon? Do you need another look at the girls or did you just come for some more espresso?”

  She was wearing running shorts and shoes and a St. John’s College t-shirt that must have been Pim’s. No makeup, mother of pearl stud earrings, she was lovely.

  “I have a surprise for you.”

  A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face.

  “What? Another surprise? I don’t know if I can take any more, Jim.” She laughed. “Did you bring more candy?”

  “No, something else.”

  I went to the truck. Her eyes followed me. I unlatched and raised the door in the rear of the topper and lifted the painting out of the bed.

  “Oh, pawww! Jim, you can’t be serious? Come in, come in, I’ll get the girls. You remember the kitchen—”

  She was off. There, then gone like a bird off a limb. I held the canvas by the stretchers and carried it into the bright kitchen and leaned it against the table where the girls had posed. The bomb victim doll was now head first behind a banquette pillow, and the tiara was under the table, but there were new toys, a pink princess convertible on the table edge about to pull a Thelma and Louise, and a large plush dolphin, about a quarter scale, in the middle of the floor. The girls were into sea life. I heard a clatter, an excited clamor of conversation and the swing door pushed open and in tumbled the three of them. The girls were wearing matching lilac capri pants and plaid light cotton hoodie jackets. Like something you’d wear after a session surfing. Everybody seemed ready for action. They saw me and squealed. Couldn’t help themselves. With delight. Ran to me, skidded to a stop a foot away and yammered over each other. I have to say that just then I felt happier than I had in years. Better. I felt good, I mean like a good man in a good world, like the sunlight slanting through the big windows was also warming our spirits. I turned my pockets inside out.

  “No necklaces, no gum.”

  The girls exchanged a quick look as if seeking permission to forgive me. The answer was simultaneous and seemed to be Yes.

  “But. I have something else.”

  I pointed behind them. They turned. They had their mother’s panache with exclamation. They released a high chirr like startled birds, then stood stock still and their mouths fell open in unison. Their hands cam
e unconsciously together and their eyes widened. For a perfect moment they took it in, their delight about to take wing. Then Crack!

  A clay pot shattered off a shelf above us.

  Stung cheek, raining bits, sharp, pottery clattering over the floor, another pot exploding off the shelf, crack, gunshot, unmistakable. The airless hum. My hand to face, bloody, blinking, the girls screaming out of the sudden caesura and two neat holes in the plate glass in front of us, the garden sunlight altered there, swirling, tiny vortexes of shadow. Holy fuck. All this in a flash and I bent and grasped, picked up both girls as I spun and hunched and covered them, covering, on my knees now and pushing all of us back behind the granite island, down onto the floor and sliding backwards, somehow pulling Julia down with us. The girls wailing, Julia making a breathy keening, a stream of questions in French I didn’t understand, her hands everywhere, under us, on the heads of the girls. Everyone shaking, pushed back now into the farthest corner of the room, pushed over the clay tiles with a bunching runner carpet and shards of blue pottery, back behind the counter, one tiny hand clutching my beard, another poking my right eye trying to hug my neck. Okay okay. Above, down the wall I saw a portable phone.

  “Stay, stay!” I breathed. “Stay, just a sec.” Released them all long enough to lunge up for the phone, grabbed it and back, punching in 9-1-1 as I covered them again.

  “Talk to them,” I whispered to Julia. Why was I whispering? I pressed the phone to Julia’s ear, her eyes just focusing.

  “Talk to them. Stay here. I’m going to get this thing away from here.”

  “Non! Non!” She almost hysterical, pleading, gripping my shirt.