The Center of the World (18 page)
24
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SUSAN DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING
on the ride home, except that she was going to sleep in the guest bedroom and she didn’t want to have a serious conversation with a drunk. It was the first time we’d had this kind of issue in our marriage, and neither of us quite knew what to do. The days following were a miserable round of fruitless arguments. She was hurt and angry; I was abject and embarrassed. I am a weak and inconsiderate person, I said. I’m sorry. There’s nothing between Ruth and me; there never was anything between Ruth and me; I don’t even like her particularly. I had drunk too much wine because all those university people reminded me that I had failed in what I wanted to make of my life; I had kissed her because her willingness to kiss me made me feel special at a moment when I felt like shit. I wouldn’t have given in to the temptation if it hadn’t been for the wine.
All this was true enough, but it didn’t make Susan less angry; nor was it, of course, the real truth. I couldn’t bring
myself to tell Susan about the painting, so I couldn’t explain what I had been seeking in Ruth Carpenter’s lips.
Eight days after the party Susan announced that there was a weekend meeting in Cleveland that she had to attend. She told me that she would be leaving from the office on Friday and coming back on Monday.
“Cleveland on the weekend?” I said. “That’s sort of odd.”
She explained that her firm was working on an acquisition for a drug company and that the weekend was the only time they could get everyone involved together. There was a lot of money at stake, she said, so no wasn’t really an option, but I felt that she was still so angry that she would have jumped at any chance to get away from me for a few days.
As we were having breakfast on Friday, I saw how right I was. She pointed to a slip of paper that was stuck to the refrigerator. “I left Ruth’s number up there, so you don’t have to look it up.”
There was nothing to say that hadn’t been said already. I tossed the slip of paper into the trash.
“Look,” I said. “I know I deserve it. I’ve said I’m sorry a hundred times. I’ll say it again, if you want. But I’m going to the mountains while you’re gone; I was happy up there by myself. I made an appointment to talk to Eddy about the repairs.”
I woke at three on Saturday morning and drove up through the dawn. After all the unpleasantness of the previous week, I took comfort in the way that Helen seemed projected against the sky as I drove. The highway only existed to lead to her.
Looking back, I suppose I was crazy. When the sun rose over the Berkshires, I saw it was a poor copy of the sun in my painting. I thought of Helen and remembered a night when Susan and I had stopped at a cheap motel on the side of the highway. When I came in from my shower she was lying naked on the bed, opened up like a hundred other women who had slept there before her. But she was mine and I was hers, and we went at each other with a mixture of tenderness and passion that made sense of my life. Only an ass would throw all that away for Ruth Carpenter’s needy kisses.
But then it occurred to me how odd Susan’s weekend business trip was. I tried to recall if anything like this had ever happened before and couldn’t. In retrospect, I see that I was trying to justify my own bad behavior and, perhaps, pave the way for some that was to come, but I suddenly knew with a horrible clarity that as revenge for those soggy kisses and the humiliation she’d endured in front of her Princeton friends, she had gone to Cleveland to have an affair. Maybe she’d been having one all along, I thought. She wouldn’t let go of Ruth Carpenter because she needed to justify her own cheating.
At any rate, I decided, there probably was a meeting; it was just that he was going to be there too. It was no doubt some guy from the office. They each had a room at the Marriott, just two colleagues in line to check in. They rode up in the elevator together, and he got off first to drop off his suitcase. She had slipped him the extra key to her room and when he came in, she was naked and waiting, just as she had been for me so many years before.
I drove on in a fever compounded of my fantasies of what Susan was doing and my fear that the painting might be gone, or that it might be some pale imitation of what it had become in my imagination. By the time I got to the lake my hands were shaking, and it was with great difficulty that I opened the door to the barn.
The bundle was still where I had left it. I unwrapped it carefully and placed the painting against the wall. The plaque still read
The Center of the World
, J.M.W. Turner.
My memories were inadequate to what I saw. That is the paradox of the story I am trying to tell: no words of mine nor even my memories are adequate to the thing itself. Every time I saw the painting I was overwhelmed by the sense that I had not really seen it before. Every time I try to recall it, I am aware that my memory is a poor shadow. Paris, I saw, had the body of a hero, but there was a hint of feminine softness which suggested that his inevitable union with Helen was nothing less than the fated rejoining of flesh that had been sundered. The musculature of his back was so beautifully rendered that I could read his desire in his flesh. But the desire I saw inscribed there was also my own, and I understood that I had never known desire before.
Waves of yearning and sorrow and beauty washed over me, just as the sea in the painting washed up on the shore. I heard Helen’s music again, strange tunes in an unfamiliar scale that sounded like red and golden leaves falling from the trees. Helen had been playing her lyre as she awaited Paris’s arrival. It was this music, floating through the halls of the tower, that
drowned out the clash and roar of combat on the field; it was this music that had called Paris to her chamber. She had leaned the lyre against the side of her table. I could see that the strings were still vibrating.
Sensation after sensation broke over me. I was possessed and ravaged, mastered, overcome, coaxed, and beaten. It was everything I had ever wanted.
Not until late afternoon did I finally come back into myself. I walked back to the house, my knees weak. I made some coffee. I went down to the lake with the steaming mug and sat on the dock. The sky had clouded over; it looked like rain. The sky was the same gray as the water; the color was drained out of the trees on the far shore. It was perfectly quiet. My mind was empty. I had no fears and no desires.
25
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To:
[email protected]
From:
[email protected]
Subject: Petworth
I went down to Petworth yesterday to visit Mrs. Spencer. I spent some time in London looking through all the standard material on Turner and Egremont to see if I could find any references to her, but no luck. She seems like a remarkable person—I am half in love with her—but she is a blank as far as history is concerned.
She’s hanging on the west end of the central corridor in the picture gallery. The only other time I went to Petworth I didn’t pay any particular attention to
Jessica
, but I was familiar with the image from reproductions. It’s an odd painting. I stood in front of it for an hour, trying to get past the various things I knew about it to get to the
moment where I could finally “see the thing itself for what it is,” as you say. It was difficult.
The inescapable fact about
Jessica
is that it is the only large-scale oil painting in Turner’s enormous oeuvre whose subject is a human figure. It’s a passive picture in a way, but I could feel his struggle with Rembrandt as I stood before it, and it wasn’t pretty. The great Turners are effortless encounters with the painters he admires. Claude survives, not greater than the Turner, but somehow elevated as well.
But that isn’t the case with
Jessica
. She is looking, as you know, out of the window, the extravagance of gold paint behind her. She is decorated with jewels and lace, as if she was in a Rembrandt or a Hals, but Turner can’t or doesn’t care to compete with the Dutchmen the way that he competes with the light, the landscape, and the architectural space in Claude. He is not in love with things. He loves light and nature and the sweep of history. As Jessica leans forward, the lace mantilla she wears hangs over the window frame. We see through it and are meant (or, perhaps,
think
we are meant) to admire the painterly skill that allows him to represent transparent lace, but Turner doesn’t love lace well enough to paint it perfectly and I half suspect he wanted us to know it.
The real struggle is with the body. The standard line is that Turner couldn’t do bodies; the human figures in his
paintings seem oddly boneless and one-dimensional. In
Jessica
, for example, her arms are mere tubes of flesh and the hand that reaches out toward the cord on the window is so badly foreshortened that it almost looks like a Thalidomide baby’s flipper. But he was a fine draftsman and we can see from his academic figure studies that he was able to represent the male and the female nude in a competent Old Master style. The bodies in those studies are fleshy, articulated, and expressive.
There is a sketchbook in the Tate where Turner lays out the composition for
Jessica
; on the same page is a quick pencil sketch of a reclining nude; she is not rendered in much detail, but I assume she is Mrs. Spencer. There are at least two questions here: What was the mistress of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in England doing posing nude for Turner, and Why did he represent her body as he did?
I think Turner was having an affair with her. Wyndham describes her as a woman who wasn’t bound by conventional notions of morality and who spent more time with Turner than was decent. Egremont was a very old man. And Turner—we know from those stories of his bastard children—was devoted to the flesh.
I think there is a private joke built into
Jessica
, which no one has been able to notice because they didn’t know
about Mrs. Spencer. The painting was exhibited with the inscription “Shylock—Jessica shut the window, I say.” It’s been pointed out that there is no such line in Shakespeare. “Shylock” equals Egremont, the man of wealth. His command to shut the window is an expression of a rich man’s possessiveness. Jessica/Mrs. Spencer is being shut in
and
being told to keep her legs together. We can also now make better sense of the famous yellow background. We know the old story of the after-dinner conversation during which someone said that Turner’s yellows were fine enough for landscapes, but they wouldn’t do for portraits. Turner rose (or failed to rise, as many would argue) to the challenge by producing
Jessica
and was rewarded with the famous line about the “lady climbing out of a large mustard pot.” But it is not mustard that frames the lady—it is gold: gold that symbolizes Egremont’s wealth and, quite literally, the gold paint that is Turner’s signature. Jessica is embraced by Turner’s signature gold/yellow.
Jessica
is a sly memorial of an affair between the artist and his model.
This also explains, I think, her body, and the fact that
Jessica
was not, according to Wyndham, a good likeness. As I tried to see Jessica’s body beneath her dress, I felt that the painting was almost aggressive in refusing that view. The tubelike arms direct the viewer toward the large and illuminated (but oddly flat) expanse of bosom and the pensive face above. The corsetlike dress binds
the body in a row of horizontal bands and encrusts it in a vertical row of jeweled buttons. There is some small sense of volume and depth, but mostly the shape of the body is indicated by the cinched waist and the width of her hips and shoulders. As Turner lays out the composition in his sketchbook, Mrs. Spencer is shown with a waist reduced to almost waspish proportions by a tightly laced corset. She is not yet wearing the lace mantilla, and her voluminous bosom is on display. One gets a strong sense of the body beneath the garment, with the flesh almost spilling out at the top of the dress. In the painting Turner has repressed the body in order to hide his carnal knowledge of his patron’s mistress.
So instead of a body, we have a rack on which Egremont’s wealth is displayed—the heavy earrings, the necklace, the jewel-encrusted dress. One of the early reviews of the painting said that it provided “roundabout proof that Turner was a great man; for it seems to me that none but a great man dare have painted anything so bad.” I think there is a particular way in which this might be true of
Jessica
. Turner was great enough to be able to afford to hide Mrs. Spencer’s looks in order to protect their secret affair.
Having some sense of what the thing we are looking for might be like gives me hope. I can’t quite form an image of Mrs. Spencer/Jessica as Venus bathed in Turner’s
light, but there is something in my mind now that is more than a mere abstraction.
I don’t know if I was just looking at everything through the light of Wyndham’s testimonial, but it struck me that the collection at Petworth, particularly the works added by Egremont, is remarkably sensual. There is, for example, a not very good nude by Hoppner called
Sleeping Nymph with Cupid
. It is also, and this is somewhat suggestive given our current concerns, known as
Sleeping Venus with Cupid
. It is charming in a porno-kitsch way, polite but slightly naughty, although the Petworth House guide tells us that Hoppner considered it his masterpiece (which seems surprising, since I only know of him as a portrait painter). The nymph is an attractive young woman; she is lying on her back with her arms behind her head, wearing nothing but an aggressively coy bit of drapery. A plump winged baby Cupid covers his eyes with his hands as he flies above her. (One fears that he might crash into a tree.) Wonderful brushwork, a murky forest background. Egremont purchased it in 1827 from the estate of his friend Sir John Leicester. It is said that Turner accompanied him to the sale and advised him to make the purchase. Not sure what to make of that.
It was a lovely day, so I took a walk toward the far end of the estate where there is a marvelous structure, half
gazebo, half Greek temple. It sits perched on what I had been told is the highest point on the estate and provides a glorious view of what seems like most of Sussex. The structure itself is charming, classically proportioned but playful as well.
On my way back to the house I climbed the rise behind the building and sat on the bench beneath one of the ancient chestnut trees, looking down on Petworth House and the pond. It occurred to me that Turner and the remarkable Mrs. Spencer had sat on this very spot under this very tree and looked down on the house of their lord and patron. I wondered what Turner saw, what Mrs. Spencer saw, and what they had to say to each other.
Sorry to have gone on for so long—it’s just that my mind is so full. London was colorless and dreary by the time I got back, but I felt energized. I think this thing you are looking for exists. I half believe that we will find it. Thank you for letting me join you in your quest.
I hope Hong Kong is treating you well.