Paint the Wind

  "You used me, Fancy. And I've loved you damn near forever."

  "This has nothing to do with you, Hart, don't you see? It has to do with the fact that I'm never going to marry anybody. That doesn't mean we can't be friends, does it?"

  "Friends? What do you know of friendship, Fancy? As much as you do of love and commitment? I'm not interested in your friendship. It just isn't worth a damn."

  Fancy watched silently from the doorway as Hart packed his bag; he was too absorbed by hurt even to know she was there. As he straightened from strapping the valise, she saw him wipe his hands across his eyes. She couldn't bear the pain on his face.

  "I came to tell you that I know you didn't mean those things you said about me, Hart... and that I never meant to hurt you."

  He tried to read her face and saw only love there, ingenuous as a child's.

  "No."

  "And to tell you that I love you more than you could ever know, and that I wish with all my heart I could be what you want me to be."

  "Yes."

  "And that... that I think I wouldn't know how to live, if I didn't believe you were my friend." Her voice was a hoarse whisper, utterly devoid of subterfuge. "Please be my friend, Hart. I couldn't bear to lose you."

  Hart sighed and opened his arms to this exasperating woman he loved, with a sigh of inevitability, for he knew it was all true. He wrapped her close, resting his head on the top of hers; they clung together for a while before he spoke.

  "I could no more take back my friendship from you than I could my love, babe... but I just can't wait around for you anymore. I guess I'm just too old for that now. I want a life, Fancy, a real life. I want a wife who'll go with me wherever I go. I need to build something real with my life. I want children to come after me, I want a home. Oh, God, if you knew how much I long for a home of my own, Fancy... a piece of ground I can make bloom... a place I can share with someone who cares about the sharing. I've been in exile, too, babe, and I want to go home. If I can't have those things with you, then maybe, just maybe, mind you, I can find them with someone else, while there's still time. But to do that I'm going to have to escape you, Fancy. And that's about the hardest task I ever looked at. I'm not so fucking noble I can live forever on the crumbs from your table, however well-meaning they are. I don't want to give my heart and soul to someone for whom it isn't enough. If that's selfish, then I'm sorry. But at least it's the bedrock truth. I'm going to do my damnedest to get over being in love with you, babe. But no matter what ever happens in this sorry world, I guess you can count on me to be your friend."

  The room seemed to have grown dim around Fancy. She felt she might be drowning; what was wrong with her that what he offered wasn't enough?

  "When will you go?" she whispered, standing outside his embrace.

  "Today."

  "Stay the night, Hart. Make love to me one last time."

  He laughed, an ugly, bitter sound. "Oh, no, my very dear love. You asked for a week and I stayed a summer, and look at the trouble I've got myself into now."

  "But I need you to stay with me."

  Hart stared at her, searching her face. 'That may be the crudest thing you've ever said to me, Fancy, and you don't even know it." He hoisted the valise onto the floor, a gesture of finality. "There's a price for everything, isn't there, babe? I hope that what you're going after this time gives you enough in return for what you're throwing away."

  He picked up the suitcase and turned toward the door.

  "Hold me, Hart!" she cried out, a frightened child.

  Hart stopped, but didn't turn around. "Not this time, Fancy," he replied with finality. "Not this time."

  Hart left again... reluctant, determined, and for good. His whole life had been no more than a series of escapes from Fancy; from the chaos and the need of her... from Chance's love for her, or his own. She was his obsession, beloved and friend—he knew that now. But she'd been right about their time together; it had been a final closing of the circle of their lives.

  Before boarding the ship bound for London and then Paris, he checked on the money Rut had been investing for him. It would support him admirably while he painted. Not that money had ever really mattered to him all that much—only talent, hard work, and passion dredged from experience, changed what a man was capable of creating. Hart put a large sum in an account for Fancy before he left, and wrote a note saying he'd discovered it there, a stash Chance had obviously forgotten. It would be plenty to get her started again, if she chose to keep the secret of the Rainy Day, as he hoped she would.

  He stood on the quay of the great North River in New York and looked back over the busy waterway, toward what he'd left behind... a brother who'd been part of his soul... a woman who'd been the phantom of his dreams... a beloved Apache wife and children, who seemed to have existed in some separate incarnation. He felt spent, as if there could be little more blood payment that life could ever expect of him.

  PART XI: I WILL MISS THE WIND

  Paris and Pallas

  "No good deed goes unpunished."

  Bandana McBain

  Chapter 113

  Paris was a glorious world in which to start life over; the maddest dream of an American farm boy could not have conjured such magic as awaited Hart McAllister when he arrived there.

  Impressionism was beginning to happen. Truth was too naked, said the artists... la condition humaine was infinitely more interesting than the historical subjects that had excited past generations of painters. The ordinary world was still under scrutiny, but not in the gentled way of Romantics like Renoir and Cezanne. Hart found a world that had abandoned faith in myth or religion, a world that was being challenged by scientific revelation and reinvented by the all-seeing lens of the camera. Art must become new, the artists said among themselves... Hart, who had never before lived in a world of artists, couldn't believe the vitality all around him.

  "The artists are now free to search out the deeper truths," Pallas told him. And what truths there were to be fathomed, and what geniuses to give them life. Hart arrived in a Paris where the urgency of Van Gogh, the intellectual geometry of Cezanne, and the passionate expressionism of Gauguin were showing the way. The farm boy from Kansas had wandered into Wonderland with Pallas Canfield to lead him through the White Queen's maze. She knew everyone: the painters and sculptors starving on the Left Bank, the crowned heads, the industrialists and robber barons who collected their work. Wherever serious art existed in Paris, so did Pallas Canfield.

  She occupied a unique position, for unlike Goupil or Dusseault, she was not merely an art dealer, but rather the confidante of the artists, with whom, Hart soon realized, she did not hesitate to have affairs of the heart. She ran a salon that was frequented by the most illustrious names in Europe—all of whom sought her favor, savored her wit, and many of whom, she told him unabashedly, shared her bed.

  On any given weekend at her villa in the country, one might hobnob with the Prince of Wales or the Grand Due Alexei of the Russias. Hart was awakened one midnight by a wildly played crescendo on the piano and, having made his way sleepily to the conservatory, he'd found Debussy himself entertaining Pallas, who sat, champagne flute in hand, at the foot of the piano bench.

  Not that Pallas had turned frivolous—far from it. She simply recognized genius and attracted it to her, and the geniuses recognized her too. She introduced Hart to everyone of consequence and supplied him with a French tutor.

  Never had he worked harder, not even in the mines... there was so much to learn, such unmitigated brilliance to strive against, that every moment needed to be seized with both hands. The stars had fallen on the generation of painters and sculptors who were gathered together in the City of Light in the 1880s. If you had the barest spark of talent, it could be fanned into flame by the moment, the company, the challenge, and the dreams.

  Pallas Canfield was as complex as she was powerful. Hart tried often, over the years that he knew her, to fathom what a woman must feel who is out of synchrony wi
th her time. Different from the fragile, diffident, manipulative blossoms who decorated the world she'd been born to, she must have recognized early on the force of her own lusts, not merely the sexual ones, but the hunger for power, which was just as demanding. It wasn't that she was selfish—Pallas gave freely to those who needed assistance—but she was singularly self-absorbed. It was as if from childhood on, she'd had a plan of action for herself, one that would brook no interference.

  Pallas and Hart knew each other well, impresario and artist, man and woman; he never intended that they be lovers.

  His first two years in Paris were fertile and purgative. Canvas after canvas lined the walls and floor of his pension to be pronounced on by Pallas' ruthless eye. "Maudlin!" she would say to devastate. "You waste yourself." Or "This one resounds with honesty. Paint what you know best, you great ninny! Do not follow what the others do. Sing your own song." Generally, she was right in her assessments, which made them all the more formidable.

  For nearly two years "The Fancies" were Hart's self-indulgence and self-flagellation. He worked on them in between the other works that ravaged him, the Apache canvases. To live, he must purge himself of Fancy—must expunge her from his dreams and nightmares... root out the memories so inextricably tangled in his heartstrings. Pain into art, the eternal dreadful truth—in order to create, the artist must suffer... only what is painted in blood can satisfy an artist's hungry soul.

  He would paint the bad Fancy first. Use the anger and the, hurt to make her come to life in all her seductive wantonness. Avaricious, greedy, shallow, user of any who came too close for safety... at first he chose black, the sensuous dark of the black widow, able to seduce the male of the species, only to murder him at the height of his giving. But it was too funereal and Fancy feared funerals... so he painted her over in red. The color of passion, of pride, of blood. The color of desperation that clothes itself in crimson—a scarlet glory in a sensual world. He painted her as she might have been, if her lusts had not been bridled by need and she was free to be as she wished to be. It took him nearly a year to put half her soul on canvas, nearly a year to forgive enough to paint the other half.

  Then he painted her in white... the white of sunlight on a snowcapped mountain crest, of moonbeams glistening on the face of the sea. Beautiful, vulnerable, spirited... the innocent child/ woman of each man's most secret fantasies. As she might have been if Beau Rivage had never burned, and life was soft and safe. As she might have been if Fate was forgiving and love was forever. The compositions had lived in his mind so long, it seemed to him he'd been born for no other purpose than to paint them. He worked on "The Fancies" more to force them shrieking from his brain than to sell, he said, but the power of his love was etched on the canvas, as it always is when the passion of the artist is immense.

  "Let me see 'The Fancies,'" Pallas demanded endlessly. "No. They're mine. My purgatory."

  He banned her from his studio for long periods. She suspected he neither ate nor slept when he worked on "The Fancies"; for each time he emerged he had the look of a starving child in his haunted eyes.

  In those moments she could reach him once again for a time, push him into the Apache canvases, make him remember that he needed to support himself. At first, it made no sense to her that he chose to live so simply; he was a rich man who lived like a pauper.

  But when she confronted him, he said, "When I'm no longer hungry, I'll no longer be able to paint." So she would leave him for a while and then return to push or pull him toward the future.

  "This is growing macabre, Hart," she told him once. "You're fucking that woman every time you're alone with those despicable canvases."

  "I'm fucking her out of my system," he replied, and his sardonic expression told her he would not be moved until he'd suffered out the passion.

  "What a waste," she said. "There are women of flesh and blood who would welcome your embrace."

  "Not yet. It isn't over for me, Pallas. I've loved two women in my life, and each one is unfinished for me still. Leave me alone and let me paint."

  And so she had.

  Nearly two years went by before Hart let his mentor see his achievement. He had given her the Indian canvases, a huge body of work, the week before, and she had seen with disappointment that "The Fancies" were not among them.

  "Are they finished?"

  "Yes."

  "Where are they."

  "In my head and in my heart."

  "Are they finished on canvas?" she said with exasperation, and he nodded imperceptibly.

  "As much as they can ever be."

  "I intend to sell those monsters instantaneously, just to free you from their bondage."

  "No. They're not for sale. They'll never be for sale." His passion for the unknown woman turned Pallas mean.

  "Oh, so you've no trouble parting with your Indian wife, but this bitch is sacrosanct?"

  The rage in Hart's eyes was dangerous.

  "I'll sell the Apache canvases because they're meant to teach people the truth! Destarte is part of that truth and, by God, I'd tread lightly on her memory, if I were you. I won't sell 'The Fancies' because they're nobody's business but mine."

  Then, unexpectedly, a week later, he told her to come round to see them.

  Pallas stood poised before the massive portraits, and tried to catch her breath. She said no single word for an interminable while and Hart, watching her, was strangled by his own emotions. Why had he relented and let her see them? Because if no one ever saw them, no one would ever know what he knew of Fancy? Or because they were the best work he would ever do?

  When he could bear her silence no longer, Hart crossed the room and grasped Pallas by the shoulders; he whirled her around to face him and saw that her lower lip was caught between her teeth, like a small child's in distress, and tears were spilling down her cheeks.

  "You're disappointed?" he demanded.

  "I can't bear it," she whispered.

  "What do you see?"

  "That no one will ever love me as you have loved this woman."

  Pallas put her elegant hands up to cover her eyes and began to weep, so pitiably that Hart was undone by her sadness—or perhaps by the emptiness he'd felt in his gut since the paintings were completed. He never knew afterward what made him do so, but he put his arms around the weeping woman to comfort her.

  A shudder ran through Pallas at his touch and she entwined her arms unexpectedly around his neck, catching him off guard. She lifted her handsome head to Hart's and kissed him... intensely, passionately. No man could have mistaken the longing and the need explicit in that kiss.

  And then, for no reason he could ever explain, he was kissing back, confused, stirred by her wildness—needy as she, desperate as she. Wanting to blot out the anguished memories of Fancy with another... to fuck her out of his system, as he had painted her out. Pallas tore at his clothes and at her own; the wantonness of it shocked him, incited him. She ripped at her own clothes as if she hated them, and naked, led him to the paisley-draped mattress on which the models posed; it was she, not Hart, who pushed them down upon it, reaching for his manhood, demanding what she wanted from him with knowing hands.

  Her face was predatory, feral; despite himself, Hart felt the heat rise in his loins. This was not to be the communion of lovers but the mating of jungle beasts. This would not sully the past, for it was nothing like the past.

  She had a powerful body; Hart thought fleetingly of the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre, as she pushed him back upon the bed and climbed on top of him. White marble limbs of perfect proportion to her well-muscled body; wide shoulders, breasts that would have pleased Rodin, and more fire in her loins than any wanton in Montmartre. She took possession of Hart's body as if mounting a stallion that must be taught about authority, and momentarily he was grateful to feel, not think any longer.

  Her hands caressed his body, teasing, pinching, ferreting out. She was a primitive, and a sophisticate beyond his understanding; he was pushed an
d pulled, some savage inspiration dragging her and him in its wake. The tension she projected was so great, he feared the wrong move would push her to frenzy; she bucked like a furious animal and called his name over and over again.... she said things he had heard no woman say before in any language.

  Pallas tightened herself around his manhood at the same moment she somehow opened herself entirely; their bellies ground together and her laughter echoed in his ears. She was insane and that was fine; she would make no demands of him but those of the flesh. Her hands were raised above her head in some arcane ritual of mating, as she arched and plunged and forced Hart to the brink. Then suddenly she wrenched herself free and, sliding to the bed beside him, she pulled him on top of her and Hart, bewildered, aching for release, picked up the rhythm where she'd left it.

  Pallas moaned beneath him, sounding helpless, desperate, somehow, and it evoked in Hart a flood of tenderness, different from the frenzied need that had driven him only a moment before.

  Her moans became sobs... she called out his name... he sensed the breaking within her and he poured himself into her, matching her intensity.

  She laughed again, triumphantly, but there were tears on her cheeks as she lay beneath him. Weary, weary, Hart dropped his body to cover hers, spent of all frenzy but the hammering of his heart. When the pounding subsided, he saw her laughing, and closed his eyes again for she was mad and this moment was mad and there was nothing left to say. She seemed refreshed; Hart felt as if he'd been trampled by a herd of longhorns. Where on earth do we go from here? he wondered, but he needn't have been concerned.

  "Don't worry, Hart," Pallas said, reading him. "I never let pleasure interfere with either business or friendship."

  "Ever kill anybody while you were taking your pleasure?" he asked, not knowing what to feel or think.

  She smiled and sat up, lifting her hands to draw her hair up on top of her head and anchor it, mysteriously, there. There was amorality in her unselfconsciousness; nakedness flaunted was different from nakedness given as a gift, Hart thought, watching her. Yet the slope of her fine alabaster breasts and the grace of neck and arm, in the slanting north light of the studio, was tender and exquisite.