He glanced at George as if to gauge his response. If George had learned anything from working with Warren Shelby, it was to keep his opinions to himself. He was well rehearsed in maintaining a completely blank expression.
It answered a lot of my questions, DeBeers continued. My life started to have more purpose, more direction. Then, a few months later, she came to me as a spirit.
Your wife?
DeBeers took out a handkerchief and wiped his face and blew his nose, then folded it up and put it back in his pocket, looking at George carefully. She was so real. I reached out as if I could touch her. She was so vivid, so light—so full of love….His voice trailed off as he fumbled for a cigarette. I know what you’re thinking. And believe me, I understand it. Because, before this happened, I was a different man. I was…He stopped himself, shaking his head. Very bitter.
George shifted in his chair, more than a little uncomfortable. The conversation was taking an unfortunate direction, but he couldn’t just stand up and walk out. This man was his boss. He crossed his arms over his chest.
Are you bitter, George?
Bitter? No, I wouldn’t say so. He felt a little offended. He had a beautiful wife, a daughter, a promising academic future. What should he be bitter about?
I was like you back then, DeBeers said. I was bitter, cynical. A person who didn’t believe.
Now, this sounded like a condemnation.
She came to me, George. I saw her just as plainly as I see you now. He shook his head with renewed amazement. I haven’t been the same since.
What could he say to that? In George’s mind, the occult—stories about heaven, ghosts, aliens, you name it—fell into the same category as religion, an enduring litany of bullshit concerning the things in life that were not easily explained. Judging from DeBeers’s complexion, the vision of his dead wife might have been an alcohol-induced delusion.
George cleared his throat. I guess I believe that an explanation can be found for almost anything.
Yes, yes, I know this. He reached behind him and grabbed a book, a rumpled, sprawling thing, its binding cracked from overuse. Here, this might help. This was Swedenborg’s Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell: From Things Heard and Seen. Its worn cover, with its faded blue sky and fluffy clouds, was marked with coffee rings and cigarette burns. You can keep that.
Thanks, George said, but he had no intention of reading it.
We can talk about it at some point.
Sure. He could dread nothing more.
The thing about death, DeBeers went on, it scares people. People can’t accept the fact that in death we pay for our sins.
I’m not sure we do, actually, George said. Pay, I mean.
Oh, we pay all right.
George shook his head, unwilling to believe it. Dead was dead, and you rotted in the ground. Speculation about the afterlife was the stuff of supermarket newspapers and talk shows. Death was absolute, final, and to someone like him those particular qualities were its greatest attraction. I guess we won’t know till we get there.
DeBeers flashed an impatient smile, as if George was too shallow to keep up. It’s not surprising about Inness, he said. There’s something in the work that goes beyond pure observation. Some spiritual connection.
Beauty depends on the unseen, George quoted the artist, the visible upon the invisible.
The soul sees what the eye cannot, DeBeers affirmed.
That’s the idea, George said, although he still didn’t actually have a firm grasp of it; nevertheless, he elaborated: Inness painted from memory, which is to say that he didn’t paint what he saw, but what he remembered. There’s a difference. He believed memory was a lens to the soul. It’s not the details that matter—the veins on a leaf, say—so much as the implied detail, such as the changing light, the wind, the lone peasant in the distance, the sense that something else is going on, some deeper possibility….
God, of course.
Yes, George allowed. God.
They sat for a moment in silence.
He painted not the experience, George explained, but the essence of experience. The nuances of place. Revelation as it exists in a single moment, on a particular afternoon. Ordinary disturbances in nature—the gathering storm, the wind in the grass, a sunrise—take on poetic dimensions. You look at his paintings; in turn, they draw you in. Inevitably, there’s an emotional response. That was Inness’s genius.
Indeed, DeBeers said, apparently pleased with George’s impassioned speech. The essence of experience, that sounds about right. Thoughtfully, he took up his package of tobacco and pinched some of it between his fingers and loaded his pipe and lit it, puffing his cheeks like a trombone player, expelling a rich cloud of smoke.
He lived in Montclair, DeBeers said. I grew up a town over, in East Orange. Of course, by the time I lived there my backyard was a parking lot, and he’d had a field and a stone fence. I lived on a street of row houses. The row houses of East Orange, he said, as if introducing an important new subject. They were the colors of ice cream: pistachio, coffee, chocolate. Again, he shook his head. My mother used to make soup from a can. Cream of mushroom, of celery—she always liked to serve soup before the main course. I guess she thought it was classy. I’ll never forget the taste of that soup, that stringy texture, and when I think of it I instantly see her standing there in her apron, built like a tree trunk, the cigarettes, the Entenmann’s cake she’d tell everyone she made from scratch, the plastic on the couch. He thought for a moment. That soup, it’s the essence of my childhood. It’s no surprise I’m a Warhol fan.
George smiled but couldn’t reciprocate a childhood memory of his own. Frankly, the essence of his childhood escaped him. Loss was the word that came to mind, though nothing dramatic had ever happened. He remembered only uncertainty, angst. His parents weren’t big on communicating and rarely explained anything to George. As a result, as an only child, he’d felt left out. Unwelcome, even. He could recall their door closing, the muffled voices behind it. And often, when he entered a room, interrupting their conversation, they looked at him as if at a stranger, their eyes imploring. What is he doing here?
What about you, George?
Sorry?
What’s your essence?
George smiled. Hell if I know.
Well, you’re in Inness territory now, so no doubt you’ll find out. The older man looked at him meaningfully, then stood up. The inauguration was over.
With her heels clacking on the shiny floors, Edith Hodge showed him to his office, at the very end of a remote hallway lined with large plate-glass windows, keeping a few steps ahead of him, her stockinged thighs producing a rustling not dissimilar, for George, to a fingernail on a blackboard. She held a ring of keys in her fist like a jailer. The office had a view of the courtyard and a desk with an IBM Selectric and a small brass lamp with a green glass shade—it suited him just fine. At her request, he fished copies of his syllabi out of his briefcase and handed them to her. She sniffed—officiously, he thought—and considered them with disinterest, clarifying, should there be any doubt, his meager departmental status. These will suffice, she said, and left.
He sat for a moment, looking out at the trees in the courtyard, coming to terms with the fact that he’d already invested a decade in a career that was just now starting. And he found it intensely ironic that a Swedenborgian had gotten hold of his dissertation. He felt a little embarrassed, recalling their discussion, and ultimately their meeting had left him ambivalent, the long pauses, how DeBeers had worn an expression of magnanimity, as if he knew something about George, some damaging truth, but had the grace not to bring it up.
—
IN THE CITY, keeping his car in a garage in Harlem had cost almost as much as his rent, but he liked the Jamaican attendant, Rupert, who sold him pot. He often went to Rupert’s to get high. Catherine didn’t know. Rupert’s wife was from Louisiana and spoke Creole; he had a hard time following it.
On the day of his scheduled defense, clearly marked
on his wife’s calendar for months with a big red X, he’d gone to Rupert’s place. Catherine didn’t know, because he hadn’t told her, that his reckoning had been postponed. Upon review, his adviser, Warren Shelby, had declared the latest draft of his dissertation insufficient. Admittedly, George had ignored the suggestions he’d given him, particularly to elaborate on how Swedenborg had influenced the painter with his contention that we live at all times in a spiritual realm, that there’s a relationship between the spiritual and the corporeal levels of existence, and whether Inness had in fact revealed, through paint—in specific colors that corresponded to celestial characteristics such as wisdom, truth, love—the love of God and the deeper meaning of life.
For George, the discovery that Inness relied on this divine rubric, that God was indeed his muse, was difficult to accept. So he refused to revise the chapter to Shelby’s specifications, and just shoved the manuscript into a drawer and tried to forget about it.
Obviously, DeBeers was under the impression that his dissertation had passed scrutiny; George hadn’t bothered to illuminate him, or anyone else for that matter. Of course, he had intended to have his doctorate in hand before the start of the semester. This had been his sincere hope, though it had yet to happen.
He hadn’t gone home that night. Instead, he hung out with Rupert and his wife and their beautiful neighbor, whom he made love to on the couch, under the bright flash of window light, as cold rain splattered on the fire escape, Lou Rawls barely audible on the turntable. You’ll never find…as long as you live…someone who loves you tender like I do. The rain woke him before dawn. The woman had gone. Before leaving the apartment, he looked in on Rupert and his wife, asleep, entwined, and was struck by the true love they had found in each other.
He got soaked walking home on the empty sidewalks. In the windows of dark storefronts he saw a man walking beside him. It was only when he stopped to tie his shoe that he realized the anonymous figure was his own ragged reflection.
At home, his wife cried in his arms. Why didn’t you call? I’m stuck here, waiting for you all night. I can’t do this myself.
He told her he’d gone out to celebrate with people from the department. She believed him and got up to make him breakfast.
He’d lied. He lied to her all the time. He didn’t know why. Maybe he thought she deserved it.
Theirs was such an awful and predictable story that he tried not to think about it. He tried to pretend he actually loved Catherine, and he imagined that she tried, too. They were honorable people. So now they were honorable and miserable, much like their parents.
We’re a family of doers, not complainers, her mother had told him when they’d first met. They’d planted him on the sofa in the living room while his pregnant fiancée choreographed a tray of Triscuits and Cheez Whiz. After two apricot sours, her mother took his hand and gave him a tour of the place, trotting ahead like a miniature pony. There was something so tender and humiliating about a middle-aged woman stuffed into a girdle showing off the rooms of her house, the tulip bedspreads and shag carpeting, as if he were a game-show contestant and had to pick. Her husband, Keith, just sat there on the ottoman. A red-faced laborer, he would look at George with a confused expression on his face, as if he required a translator. He was like a can of jiggled soda, George thought: the minute you popped his top he would explode. They were, Mrs. Sloan assured him, of dignified Scottish heritage. A feisty homemaker, loyal, penurious, she clearly kept house like nobody’s business. Compensation for her toil was a meal out once a month and a new car every ten years. He could remember wondering if Catherine would eventually transform into a younger version of her, and assumed she would. At the time, this had filled him with a lurid sense of dread. Her sister, Agnes, with her dull state-employed husband and aggressive sisterly rivalry, was their mother’s homemaking protégée. They’d even bought a tract house near the parents, in an unfinished development. When George first saw it, standing in the sloppy front yard with water seeping into his shoes, he thought: Put a fucking gun to my head. But he said, Beautiful place, Agnes. Congratulations. I’m sure you’ll be very happy here.
To George, happiness was an obscure emotion. True joy, as it was imagined in great books, was more incomprehensible still. He could recall, as a boy, wandering around his father’s showrooms, trying out all the different couches and chairs, putting his feet up on the coffee tables. Each living room had a fancy name: French Provincial, Urban Oasis, Classic Country, Rustic Comfort. One day, he asked his mother why they didn’t have the same furniture at home. Their store, she told him, didn’t carry that sort of furniture. When he asked why not, she said, Our stores cater to ordinary people, not people like us.
If he was a liar, then Catherine was the perfect match. She chose to deny his true nature just as his own mother did, contriving logical excuses for illogical acts, or reasonable grounds for unreasonable behavior, sometimes even blaming themselves for his failures. Poor George! He was overtired, overworked, overpressured—he just needs rest, to be left alone! And George never failed to exploit their misunderstanding.
His wife had married some imaginary version of himself, a better-mannered, more affable fellow, a devoted husband and father. So, too, did their marriage satisfy an unspoken contract with their parents. For Catherine, the pregnancy and subsequent wedding had elevated her from the bottom ranks of the middle class, with its rage and energy, to a status of complacency so often misconstrued as comfort. For him, he’d taken a wife, as all men should, who had the good looks that attracted polite attention, who was smart enough to make dinner conversation, who kept an orderly house.
They had done what was expected. Both of them had.
—
HE DROVE HOME on desolate back roads. He couldn’t resist the exhilaration of speed, the wind in his hair, the sense of freedom—in these parts cops being rare. The usual obstacles were heavy trucks or dawdling pickups, the men easing home slowly from work, tossing empty beer cans out the windows. But just now there wasn’t a soul in sight. It was late in the afternoon, an indecisive hour that painted the road with trickery. Driving recklessly, well over the limit, he stared as if defying his own destiny into the horizon, where at the moment light and dark and land and sky were perfectly balanced, what Inness would call an ideal composition, a vague and conniving frontier where all things cease to appear.
2
THE FIRST TIME he saw her was at the sheep farm, jumping off the back of somebody’s pickup truck. This was in September. He’d gone out for a run. His wife had asked him to stop by the farm on his way home to buy yogurt and cheese, which they sold to neighbors and tourists out of a cooler in a wood hut, using the honor system and a cigar box where you were supposed to put your money. The girl apparently worked there. George watched as they unloaded some sheep and herded them into the pasture. She was just a girl, really. Dark hair like his mother and pale skin and a mean grin that curled up out of her like a charmed snake, and he knew even before she said anything that he would come to know her and that the knowing would be ruinous.
Hey, she said. I’m Willis.
She lived with the other hands behind the inn in a boardinghouse, a long, barnlike structure with a plank porch along the front and a line of windows up top. When the sunlight was full on the yellow window shades it resembled something Hopper would have painted in his early career—the setting with an almost nostalgic appeal, a rustic simplicity. Later that week, out for a run at dusk, he saw her again, crossing the field from the farm to the house with her colt legs, slump-shouldered, looking down with intensity, her hands in her pockets, the sun a warm glow as it began to sink behind the trees. He could hear a radio playing in somebody’s window. He watched her disappear inside and moments later saw curtains sliding across a window on the second floor, a light coming on. It was getting cool. He walked down the road, great fields spread out on either side. Dark pines swished in the wind like women in hoop skirts. A passing pickup had its headlights pulled on.
The house was bright. His wife baking a pie. Yellow apples quartered in a bowl, browning. Borrowed cookbooks on the table. Catherine in an apron with her hair up in a knot. No longer a city girl, she’d suddenly become domestic. She rolled out the dough, her arms bare, thin, in a sleeveless white blouse. Looking at her now, he felt warmth, even desire. He wondered why he didn’t love her more.
He kissed her and she brushed him off. You’re cold.
It smells like fall, he said. I’ll make a fire.
He left her alone and went out to the barn to get the ax. Someone had felled a tree and the trunk lay in pieces scattered on the ground. There were wood chips all through the dirt, and he knew that this spot had been used before for the same purpose. He set one of the logs upright and brought the ax down into it, splitting it right in half. Using the ax reinvigorated some primal urge, and he liked the exertion, the weight of the tool in his hands. When he had split enough wood he stacked it against the porch. He could feel the muscles in his arms. He had an awareness of his body, his strength. The air smelled of the earth. It was nearly dark when he was done.
The barn was two hundred years old, full of creatures and relics of the past—toilets and sinks and a broken-down tractor and wobbly metal chairs speckled with bat shit. As he placed the ax on its perch, a disruption in the rafters startled him—a barn owl making its escape.
Inside, he built a fire. The windows in the room had gone black. He stood in the dark, watching the fire, thinking about the girl. Already he wanted her; he sensed a connection.
Behind him, he heard Catherine coming up. She took his hand and they surrendered, briefly, to some fragile notion of harmony as the flames devoured the hundred-year-old wood.