The Best American Essays 2014 (35 page)

If he can see no further than the next New York City block, that is fine. The last thing he wants to do is wander and look. He does that inside of himself enough already. Amateur painters make a fetish of looking so intently at this flower and that tree. They don't understand how greedy the eyes are; how they subdue the hand, how they enforce imitation. See: it is a command more than a question. It insinuates authority: see what I see, see what society sees, see what you are told to see. He prefers the question.

The modest amount of space infested by gargantuan buildings that distinguishes New York City pleases him. For him it is best that the rest of the nation remain in novels and histories. Like too much turp in the paint being elsewhere would thin out the feeling. When he sits in a movie theater in Rotterdam and sees the cowboys galloping across the plains, he senses that that may be one of America's dilemmas—the distances are bound to mock any feeling. The hero is always looking into the distance beyond the woman who stands there pleading. When he tells his friends about his plans, they laugh and ask, “Ter Texas?” “Neen Texas,” he replies.

Like everyone in his nation, he has lived his life not far from the sea. Though he loves the sea, when he thinks of the painting he loves it is an interior or a portrait. When a painter renders the sea by itself, there is the difficulty of what is faceless and the difficulty of where to begin. To frame the sea is a joke. The horizon appalls. The depths are unthinkable, the surface ungraspable. Faced with this chthonic indifference, the painter offers his puny industry.

There were ways, of course, to win the game. When Vermeer painted his
View of Delft
, the sea—still as a blanket on a bed—capitulated, yet what was gained? Vermeer's homage was an act of exquisite revenge—enormity economized. There was no conceit in that painting (Vermeer was far beyond that), but the scale of the human—those figures that must be in the foreground pointing at this or expostulating about that—was so modest as to be laughable. Perhaps that was Vermeer's wisdom. The Netherlands was a nation of bustling havens. A viewer might think those painted people could walk on that water behind them.

The ships on the sea are toys. The sailors on the ships are less than toys. A stowaway is less than a sailor, yet a stowaway must emulate the sea's silence. When he tramps around Rotterdam in pursuit of nothing special, he practices that silence. It isn't hard. Though he is gregarious enough, he has cultivated silence. It is the margin of his dignity. And paint is inarticulate. No one expects a painter to say much.

He wants to imagine himself into the world. but it is hard. He doesn't have much to go by—poverty, lovelessness, anger, the callous maxims of realism. Those days and nights can turn a boy who is becoming a man into one more human projectile. To land as any projectile must land is to be impaled by more of the same, to live in another tiny room and smell the cabbage being fried and the raised voices. He has heard more arguments than there are stars in the heavens. He has been in his share of them. He has shut his eyes and raised his own voice. He has shaken his fists. Yet even as he did it, he felt there must be more to being human than this.

Imagination is an imperative and a siren too. The ships in the harbor are not much to look at—floating beasts of burden—but they offer escape. First a person has to escape before anything can happen. He has prospects enough in his homeland. He can make furniture. He can draw. He can design. He can paint anything. None of that adds up to imagination, however. It adds up to one week paying another. It adds up to the beggared love of begetting a child on some young woman desperate with desire. Or she may not even be desperate. She may be calculating. He has heard plenty of those stories. He wants women all the time, but he is wary. Women have their own imaginations. They can turn men into pawns. Imagination must not be naive.

How many days has he stood by the sea and stared, as if waiting for an answer? How many days has he gone to Amsterdam to the Rijksmuseum and stared, as if the paintings could speak to him? They do, of course. That is what great paintings do. They tell him of the impossibility of perfection, the semblance of it and the goad of it, the wanting. They tell him of darkness—so many of the paintings are obscured by shadows and night and a background that dissolves into black vapor. He sketches, the way countless acolytes sketch. He does not feel compromised by those who came before him. The past doesn't frighten or belittle him. If he is experiencing the past as he stands there, then it isn't the past. When one day he tells this to his mother, she says he is conceited. He knows better, though. If the paintings stank of the past, they wouldn't be on the museum walls. They would be in oblivion, where most of the past resided, the detritus of moments and hours and days. Painting and drawing offer a release from that. They are a practical heaven.

On the ship to America there is no time for drawing. At first he hides behind some cargo boxes and then when the ship is at sea he emerges. The sailors laugh, spit at the floor, and tell him they will put him to work. It isn't a luxury cruise; an extra hand is always welcome in the boiler room. None of the higher-ups has to be informed. “Nothing worse than a snitch,” an old sailor observes to the nods of the other men. Whether he has paid for his berth or hasn't makes no difference to their pay. If he helps them, he makes their work easier. If he looks down out of awkwardness and shyness when they make jokes about him, that makes their jokes all the better. If he thanks them for whatever leftovers they bring him from the dining table, that is something out of the ordinary—someone thanking someone for something.

Late at night he is able to get above deck. He feels excited yet sad. What has his life been thus far? If he threw himself overboard, who would mourn him? And the thought of how the sea would devour him frightens him. Still, he lingers for those minutes when he knows the watchman is elsewhere. He tries to stand back from himself and see himself the way someone else might see him, there at the ship's rail. Not much comes of it: the only thought that visits him is his wishing he were taller. It is laughable, but that is what he thinks. When he hears steps, he retreats. No one hails him. If he doesn't officially exist, he is not there.

If a romantic knows that he is a romantic, is he still a romantic?

He has brought nothing with him. Though long planned, his departure has been sudden. Now a friend of his tells him and that is that. On the ship one sailor gives him an old shirt; another gives him a change of underwear. He becomes a mascot to the men in the boiler room. They know this is only a passage. They will never see him again. He understands that too. This is how life works, he thinks. I have nothing and that is good. He wants to make things, but he wants to hold on to nothing. Or he doesn't want the making to ever finish.

The boat docks; the stowaway slips off, averting his face from any faces that might chance to look at him. A few sailors hoot and try to call attention to him. He walks faster down the gangplank. He sets foot in the New World. He exhales. There is nothing to constrain him. That is ignorance but also truth. His shirt and underwear are in a paper bag.

 

He is right about New York. It is his proper home. It is careless in ways Rotterdam never could be careless. Everyone seems to know where they are headed. Everyone is in a rush but everyone is heedless too, busy thinking the next thought, living the next moment, ahead of themselves, in pursuit. He can feel that. He doesn't have to think it; he can feel it on a street corner while he waits for a traffic light to change. If he stands still for too long, people assume something is wrong with him. No one says anything, but they eye him. He must be a foreigner. The eyeing lasts only for a moment. Then they are off to wherever they are going.

New Yorkers need signs to tell them what to do and see and buy. He is good at making those signs, at making displays too for store windows. He is an artisan, though that is not an American word. His bosses appreciate the quality of his work, though some want him to work faster. “Cut corners” is one of the first phrases he learns. “We need to cut some corners, Bill.” He feels not just the hopelessness of trying to adapt to a different rhythm of work but also the hopelessness of idioms. Still, he tries. Will do. Roger. Got you. The phrases spin through his head. People like it when he uses them. They smile. He smiles back. It is a little demeaning, but only a little. He knows that enthusiasm is important. He can be enthusiastic. He can reassure. Got you.

His melancholy would sing to him, but it is hard to hear that voice in the hubbub of the city. That is, as they say, okay. He must be resolute. Yet what he feels inside himself is not so resolute. It is not doubt but longing, not only for a woman—women are attracted to him—but for a life's work. He believes his hands will lead him there. Sometimes when he is washing his hands, after work or when he rises, he pauses and examines them. They are not beautiful but they are perfectly strong. He trusts them. Who else to trust? They are part of the body's persevering sanity, millennia of adaptation. One reason he loves to paint is because he loves to grip the brush. That sensation gets overlooked, but never by him. Before the painting there is this blessed gripping.

Because of the new language he is a child again. His accent is amusing—his
th
tends to be a
t
,
think
is
tink
—but he is definitely not a child. He could allow himself the resentment of humiliation but refuses. To quarrel with good humor is foolish, and the Americans he meets at work are good-humored. Working people are working people the world over. They know what the hour hand is, what a cup of coffee is, and what a boss is. And he delights in their vocabulary. One day someone says, “Hot diggity dog.” The phrase throws him into a paroxysm of confused delight. He doesn't understand it, but he intuits the excitement. It is a ridiculous yet sensible superlative. A few days later he says the phrase. His workmates laugh. They get him.

When he buys a new suit to wear on Sunday outings, he feels as though he is being reborn. He goes to have dinner with a friend he has made at work and the man's family—a wife and two children. They all sit around a table and eat meat and potatoes and talk about nothing special—other people, movie stars, athletic events. Again he realizes this is part of his passage, but he is on dry land now. He is moving forward. He is one among many. At home he felt too close to zero. However overwhelming the American numbers are, the fact of one remains staunch. When he returns to his tiny room, he pauses and admires himself in the cracked mirror on the back of a door. He runs his hands over the jacket. He looks trim. He looks sharp. He can allow himself to smile.

He doesn't worry. He has money. He meets a woman who is good for him. Whether he is good for her never enters his head. He isn't like that. He explains to her that life is like a teeter-totter: the two people are together on it, but one is up and one is down. Both can't be up at the same time. She smiles at him and shakes her head. He is charming; it is a rare woman who does not want to be charmed. He knows that but is not conceited. He is too intent on whatever is in front of him to be conceited.

What is the new nation telling him? What art is possible here? Everything must be useful here—that is the work of the nation—and he agrees but only up to a point. After he has taken the time to commend the cars and record players and elevators, he understands that that is not all there is for him. He must go past that point. Such going can make a person doubt himself. He doesn't come from the privileged classes. No one has handed him fine art on a plate and welcomed him to partake. He has studied at an academy back home, but that was more like the nineteenth century, the assured century, the century before the frame was shattered. In America to speak about art to any casual acquaintance is to invite a large pause in the conversation.

Gradually he does meet people who want to talk about art and who practice it. They often are displaced people too. “Washed up here,” one of them puts it, as if he and others were flotsam and jetsam, what the sailors threw overboard on the ship from Rotterdam. He wants to laugh at that but recognizes the truth. To imagine that other people, the people milling around him on any midtown Manhattan street corner, would be interested in what displaced people do is hard to believe. That, however, is no reason not to start painting and talking with others who paint. He needs to do that. He must do that. The desire is like a fire in his gut. It is stronger even than sex.

These painters believe in modern times but not as something that can be made, advertised, and sold. They believe in modern times as a metaphysical enterprise, a challenge. New times demand new ways of seeing and acting. The challenges are daunting, though. How does one invent a tradition? Tradition is something that is handed down and agreed upon. It isn't individual. And where does one find the authority to move ahead? To be obsessed is fine in its way. He can bear being poor. He can bear going hungry. That is how he grew up. He has fled Europe, but he never would flee from himself. There must be, though, more than obsession. Obsession can limit as much as it can enrich.

The talk among the displaced painters is vivid and affirming. They face the same difficulties; revere the same contemporaries, even if sometimes it feels that everything is contained in the protean name Picasso. Over and over again they come to his door and stand amazed. They also go to the museum on Fifth Avenue and look at the tradition. Other people wander by the paintings talking of where they will eat lunch or shop, but the painters stand for long minutes and observe an Ingres or Chardin. They are not interested in likenesses. They are extracting essences, critiquing forms and geometries and lines and proportions and edges and centers and compositions and brushstrokes and paint and shadows and volumes and foregrounds and backgrounds and space. And that is only a fraction of it. What goes into the making is bottomless. In its way, that is reassuring. They are like swimmers launched upon a vast lake. Reaching the other shore may be a delusion, but that is all right. They belong there with the paintings in the museums. However obscurely, they feel that someday their own paintings may hang there. It is absurd—just look at their clothes and listen to their speech—but it is not absurd. America is an unsettled place where anything can happen. Like Picasso, it must continually reinvent itself. When the painters walk outside of the museum and stand in the late-afternoon light on the great steps leading down to the street, they breathe deeply. The exhaust being spewed from cars, buses, and buildings is good. There is more life here than they ever can get down on canvas. That too is reassuring.