The Painter: A Novel

  She stayed for three months. She rescued me. She made me go to AA meetings. She drove me and sat next to me at the open groups. She cooked me food so spicy every meal was some kind of battle. She made love to me again and again until I was sore and gasping like one of those trout, and then she cradled me like a trout and let me catch my breath and then she let me go into sleep.

  This is how I healed. Or didn’t. One evening I took her down to the river. We turned off the highway and rattled slowly up the gravel road and into the heart of the canyon. The walls closed in above us, the high blue of the sky deeper, deep and dark like a river is deep. The highest rock at the rim was a strip of fire, holding the last long sun. The old gorge was a vessel and it was filling with shadow, slowly, and with wind. We drove upstream. We drove with the windows down and the wind came down against us bringing a night’s cold and blowing the last rattling leaves off the cottonwoods. They blew into the river and floated slowly in the pools, pushed by the wrinkles of the wind, singly and in sad fleets. I pulled over when we got to the end of the road, where the creek poured in from above. Now we could see the first few stars above the walls, smell the smoke of some fisherman’s fire, someone who had hiked up into my favorite stretch and was unwilling to leave with the thickening darkness. Got out. Tang of smoke and the sweet decay of leaves. I could smell my past.

  These were the smells of a devotion and of a history and they carried the touch of my daughter. Her voice. The way she was when she came with me here.

  “Did I tell you that she was a better fisherperson than me? Would have been?”

  Irmina smiled at me in the dusk, breathed.

  Alce was curious, down at water’s edge faster than me, turning over smooth stones, looking for bugs, standing in the wind with her long dark hair blowing around her face and squinting at the hatch, the cloud of mayflies backlit like some blizzard, smiling like that, the pride of knowledge, knowing: that is a mayfly, maybe number 18, that is a stone fly, a gnat. Before I had even tied my shoes she would have decided on a strategy, what she would use and how she would fish it.

  Was I speaking this to Irmina or talking to myself or thinking it? Didn’t know.

  Now next to Irmina I stood on the high bank and smelled the dusk and watched the white thresh of the rapid pouring over the rocks that spilled out of the mouth of the creek. The thrashing water, the rush like some pounding prayer. Deliver me, Oh God, deliver me, not out of but into, further into what is here. I felt Irmina’s hand slip into mine and she was beside me, up against me but not leaning. Her hand was warm. We stood there. A pair of ducks angled fast out of a luminous sky, just shadows, veered hard last second and dropped into the long pool below. Their wakes silver on the dark water. Years of getting shot at. They waited until very last light and came in fast and turning.

  “We fished here together, here most of all.”

  “But she stopped fishing?”

  “Yes, the last year. Just after she turned fifteen she didn’t fish at all.”

  “She got angry?”

  “Unh huh. And I don’t know why.”

  I knew. I think I knew it was because her mother and I were angry at each other. Alce wanted peace and she couldn’t make it, tried, couldn’t, got mad and surly. She got sick of hearing doors slam. How I blamed myself. Why she disappeared into that crowd, into the drugs, etc. Because I wasn’t big enough to make peace with her mother.

  Squeeze. Irmina squeezing my hand now, relaxing. Holding it, warm, almost hot in the chilling air.

  She said, “She was a teenager. Every teenager has to do that somehow. It is how you become your own person. And every marriage has those times. You know. Jim?”

  I watched the current, the tailwater rolling out of the bottom of the falls, white and fast and pushing through the little haystacking waves and quieting into the darker water of the pool, the smooth stretch where I could see the pair of ducks drifting, dark against the dark silverblue of the reflected sky. That luminous night that is not yet true night. Why couldn’t we be like ducks? Make the decision to be together and be together forever without argument, flying wing to wing into and out of the seasons year after year. Drifting on some slow night current, muttering each to each.

  “Jim?”

  “Huh.”

  “You know. You have to let her be her own person. Before and now.”

  I stood and breathed. Grateful for the ice in the air. Frost tonight down here, down in the canyon, maybe already forming.

  Her own person. I watched Alce in the dark. As if she were here. I saw her step down to the river and begin to cast. Letting out the line smoothly in longer and longer throws, the loop up high over her head and behind her growing longer, a graceful animal coiling and straightening, lengthening and lancing far downstream, right along the slackwater of the eddy line, fishing a streamer the way I would have. I watched her in the dark, fishing past when we could see as we did so often, the trout able to see the flies on the surface against the lighter sky, I heard us laughing and cursing as we stubbed and stumbled over the rocks of the bank when we had finally given up and were climbing back to the road.

  Pop?

  Huh?

  I got a sixteen incher. A cutbow. I put him back.

  You’re fibbing.

  She clambering behind me, poked me in the butt with the rim of her net.

  Heard rock scrape as she stumbled.

  Ow. I wish I had owl eyes. Or was just an owl. We could fly back to the truck.

  Why would we need the truck then? I said. We would just fly home.

  Carrying all this junk? The rod. We couldn’t fly that far in our waders.

  If we were owls we could, we wouldn’t need rods, we could just—Nah.

  What? What, Pop?

  Owls don’t fish do they? I don’t think they like water much, only snow.

  Miss Pettigrew told us that they can sit in a tree and hear mice in a field under a foot of snow. Those ones that turn white.

  No shit?

  Fifty cents.

  Ouch. Shit.

  A dollar.

  Damn!

  A dollar fifty. Pop, if you keep swearing you’ll go broke.

  Silence.

  If we were osprey, Pop, we could fish and fly back to the truck and fly home because we wouldn’t need any of this crap.

  Climbing slowly. On a smoother trail now. Walking with some rhythm, she and I. The scuff of our wading boots, tick of the swinging nets, loud croak and squawk rising from the river below, a heron complaining.

  Back to a dollar, you said crap.

  Crap is not a bad word.

  Are you the bad word dictionary now?

  Silence. Knew she was nodding her head.

  I painted that. The first and only good picture I made in the year after. She and I over that canyon, ospreys. Carrying our rods, the fish teeming below us.

  I stood with Irmina and watched my daughter Alce fish into real dark. Past when we would have ever fished. Watched her fish until even her imagined shadow was swallowed by the night and the rush of water.

  Good night beautiful. Fish on.

  What got to me was the thought that maybe she did not want to fish on, into the full darkness alone. That she was tired and alone and cold but didn’t know what else to do. That she couldn’t stand for us to leave. That I couldn’t bear.

  Felt Irmina’s hand again squeezing.

  “She can go wherever she wants now. If she is here it is because love holds her here. Because she loves it.”

  “Okay,” I said. The tears were streaming into my beard. We got back in the truck and drove home in silence. The next day Irmina left.

  That was the other lesson Irmina taught. It is okay for people you love to leave. For them to come and go. She taught it to me over and over.

  I stood on the ramada and smelled the rain that hadn’t arrived and thought about the little horse. I prayed she could recover. She would never be the same, certainly. None of us ever are, the same. I lit another cheroot.
Smoking seemed to lessen Dell’s residual stench. I wished it would rain tonight. I felt what? Unmoored. Felt like I was just getting my feet. Like I had a friend, two, in town, had a good spot to fish mostly alone. I was just starting to work again, good work, which was anything I could get lost in. And then Steve called with his stupid commission, which meant climbing back into the truck and driving back to Santa Fe to paint something I didn’t at all want to paint. Two things. Two little girls, I’m sure were nice enough, I mean how bratty and screwed up could they be in six short years? Even in the House of Pim. And then the horse. The horse happened. Dell Siminoe happened, all over the road, all over the creek where I had found a certain refuge, all over me like a scum.

  Nothing ever happens just how you want it to.

  III

  Next morning Sofia came over. I had told her not to come. We’d left it I would call her if I needed a little more Double U O M A N in the picture but thought I had plenty, more than enough. I said I needed maybe a giant halibut to model for a day. I’m not a funny person, have long accepted that. I was just trying to enjoy my first cup of coffee in the Adirondack chair on the ramada, the first little stogie, I felt hungover—I wasn’t—but groggy, edgy, and I heard Tops rumbling and coughing up the drive. Car door slam, counted to ten: front door flew in, could hear it hit the antique school desk where I drop my keys, heard a yell. Hey! Where are you?

  “There you are! Smoking away your breakfast.”

  “How do you know I haven’t already eaten a stack of pancakes? Were you raised in a barn?”

  She pulled over the other chair, just scraped it over the rough rock, plopped down beside me. Tossed her curly hair off her face.

  “You mean not knocking? I’m always hoping I’ll catch you—what’s that Latin—in flagrante delicto.”

  “With whom?”

  “A muse. An angel maybe.”

  “You should knock.” And I thought to myself: If I were in a better mood that would be my next painting. Me in the arms of a muse. A dangerous proposition. I mean getting that close to the one who brings the gifts.

  She turned bodily in the chair and looked at me. Then prodded my calf with the toes of her sandaled foot. “You’re serious today,” she said. “What’s the matter?”

  I let out a breath, stubbed the cheroot on the stone. “I got in a fight. Sort of.”

  “Yeah? Like the Jim of old? The violent felon I’ve heard about?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Sorry. I don’t mean to joke. If you got in a fight you must have been really mad.”

  “I guess. I was blind. The way you get.”

  She shook her head.

  “Everything goes dark at the edges. Kind of tunnels down to the target. A good fighter, a real brawler has to open up that vision. Use the anger but open up the field of view and stay relaxed. My friend Nacho used to tell me that. Don’t just charge in swinging like a crazed bull, Jesus, compa, you are going to get yourself killed. That was never me. I was the one rolling around in the spit on the floor.”

  “Wow.”

  “That’s what happened yesterday.”

  “It did? Jeez.”

  I told her. The whole thing: Dell beating the mare, the rolling wet in the ditch, bloodying Dell’s nose, my talk with Bob. I told her and we watched a harrier, a big hawk fluttering low over the sage, beating its wings over a bush, lift then glide, scaring up the mice, methodically hunting.

  When I was done she was looking at the mountain. A flash of blue and four small birds tore by the edge of the porch and down past the pond. Mountain bluebirds. Early to be here, maybe they just stayed all summer. When I was done I lit another cheroot. She didn’t say anything.

  “Don’t you want to kill the bastard,” she said at last.

  “It had occurred to me. Mostly I just want to get his stench out of my nose.”

  “No kidding. Fuck. I’m not even a violent felon and I want to tie him to a post and shoot him. How do people even get like that? Like a stain.”

  We sat side by side, watched the big hawk. It had a white rump that flashed as it rose. A cool morning, the sky over the mountains washed clean. Something touched my arm below the rolled up sleeve. Her hand. Her small fingers. Brushed the skin lightly and lay over my forearm. Don’t know why it surprised me. I watched them, her fingers, the way I had just been watching the bird, happy to see them there, a little awed.

  Her fingers migrated down toward my hand, rested on a scab of dried green paint, picked at it, moved on, covered my paint spackled knuckles, one finger sliding down over the stub end of my half finger. Resting there a second, pushing on the end.

  Slipping to the side, onto my thigh. I was wearing baggy khaki shorts, enjoying the chill, and her warm fingers wriggled under the hem and her touch on my bare thigh raised instant goosebumps. We were both watching the transit of her hand as if it were another animal. She stopped, let it rest and curl on top of my leg.

  “You see me naked all the time,” she said. “Does that do anything for you?”

  I lay the half cheroot down across a lip of flagstone for later. She was very pretty. Head tipped downward, quarter profile. The length of her eyelashes. Maybe the prettiest angle for a human head, a woman.

  “Yes.”

  “What?”

  Didn’t answer.

  “What?”

  “Sometimes I get— When you were a mermaid. Arching backwards and all.”

  “You get a boner.” She lifted her head and smiled at me, open, guileless, her eyes suddenly as faceted and sparkly as gems.

  I nodded.

  “You have a boyfriend,” I said lamely.

  She pursed and twisted her soft lips, like: That is really stupid.

  “Dugar is a certified airhead. The official documents just arrived. He wants to go live with sea cows or whatever they are. Plus, I have suspected for a while that he’s been banging the hippy girl from the orchard and now I know. I told him we were coasting, just coasting, no more gas. He asked me if he could use that in a poem.”

  Her hand stirred, woke up. Crept stealthily up under the loose leg of the shorts, worked inward, found me. I don’t wear underwear unless it’s like some formal event.

  My dick was as surprised as I was. Kind of embarrassed. She brushed it with the curled backs of her fingers then pounced. Squeezed and tapped. Amazing how fast an embarrassed cock, one with ethics, social sensibilities and all sorts of reasons to just stay home, amazing how fast it can forget everything and lunge for the prize at a hundred miles an hour. Must be how a venerable, canny trout feels when it triggers on an elk hair caddis—somewhere in its pea brain it knows, knows, this is probably not a good idea, but Fuck it. Bang! Also, she was—what? Ten years older than Alce would be, but still, she was young. I shuddered. She— It wasn’t right. Any of it.

  “Uhh,” I said.

  “I want you to see me naked. No painting. A person seeing another person.”

  “Uhh,” I said. “I haven’t had much luck lately.”

  “You don’t need luck, dummy. I just want you to look at me. C’mere.”

  She gave the head one more friendly squeeze and took my hand and led me through the screen door into the bedroom.

  Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps. I had seen Sofia undress probably a dozen times. Had seen her stretch out naked. Had paid attention to the curves and the colors and living heat of her body, the potential for movement there, and rhythm, even when she was very still. She was never still. Even immobile she had the sprung tautness, the restrained leap of a deer, one at dusk who lifts her head from the grass and is—listening. For threat I suppose.

  With Sofia it was as if her body were listening, but it was for some inner laughter. That’s how it seemed when I painted her. That thing where color and form become almost like a music, something rhythmic and flowing, and somewhere in there I los
e myself. When I am really painting, when I am painting well. I lose myself and may not wake up for hours, for most of a day. What I loved was how Sofia understood that and gently took her leave. And in that, when I was really painting and in it, and if she was modeling for me, I would see her and not see her. I would not see her as a young woman, naked, open, waiting for me to make love to her. I would not see her as a nude girl coyly, just barely covering, enticing the next move in the game. It was not a game, ever, it was completely, wonderfully serious, and it was never about sex. The boner thing was when I needed a break, got hungry, snapped out of it.

  As she tugged me into the bedroom the screen door clapped behind me. I thought: Punctuation. A period on the last long paragraph of my life.

  “You look like you are being led to slaughter,” she said.

  She turned and pulled off her thin jersey blouse, unclipped the bra from the front and loosed her generous breasts. Wriggled out of her cutoff shorts, let them fall. Pushed down on the elastic of her little thong and worked it down to her knees where it relinquished itself also to the floor. She smiled up at me, as open and guileless as before. Her eyes about five different colors, blues, grays, greens, warm browns. Then she took my hands as she had before, hers small and warm and assured, and she placed them open on her collarbones, still smiling, and stood straight and still and closed her eyes. Something about that gesture. So simple, so joyful, so trusting. I felt a surge of something simple and clean, something like happiness. Felt myself rouse and reach with a sympathetic attention. I was up against her, my dick was touching her belly and she reached and pushed it down so that it was against her, her crack, sort of sprung against it, and I could feel the brush of her curly hair, the pressure where she clamped me there. And we stood. And we looked at each other and laughed. And my hands moved along her collarbones, the delicate birdlike architecture. And down over her breasts and back up to her slender neck, the perfect ears. Over her strong shoulders. And her hands down over my hips, around to the front, stroking and pressing me into her, up against her. I lost myself again. But this time it was to a euphoria with a different gravity. I think I was laughing. She pulled me toward the bed and fell backward and suddenly all the angles were right and she was moist and open and I was in her and it was that shock. The shock that never dulls. Of being inside another. And her laughter was overtaken by breath and we rocked together in a pure and simple delight. That’s what I remember: the simplicity, the lightness.