The Night Stages (23 page)

“So time passed. And she and I painted in our separate studios and showed in group exhibitions. Once or twice these events took place in another city and we were able to spend the night together, which only made things worse. Afterwards I could feel myself withdrawing, wanting to ignore her. It could be I was hoping she would leave me because it was clear I wasn’t going to be able to destroy this on my own, though it was also clear that I was trying to do just that. Sometimes she would go cold for a time, not answer her door when I arrived at her studio, stay out of my way when we found ourselves in the same places. But she would turn toward me eventually and there would be this wash of overwhelming relief, and things would be clean between us, for a while.

“I was beside myself nine-tenths of the time and my work reflected this in the best of all possible ways. Now there’s an irony,” he said. There were times when he wondered if the whole thing had been designed to keep him raw and fierce for his work in the studio. Still, he dismissed this as nonsense. “At that point,” he said, “I wanted to believe I would do my best work if I could someday achieve peace of mind.”

“Did you ever?” Kenneth asked.

“Achieve peace of mind? Yes,” he said, wrapping both hands, one atop the other, around the glass. “Yes, and what a featureless, boring landscape
that
is.”

He had begun to take the woman along when he went to visit Gentleman. The old boy really took to her, he said, even allowing her to photograph half a dozen pieces, something that Harding knew would never have happened had he himself been making the request. They brought groceries and sometimes liquor to the reclusive painter. “We had no notion of where he got the little bit of money in his possession and doubted that he was feeding himself in any regular sort of way,” he said. “She would bring along some cheese and bread and would heat a can of soup when we were there. And he would eat it. He took to her, as I said. And she, for her part, was absolutely entranced, as was I, by the pictures.”

“You must have tried to get him a show somewhere.”

“That would have been impossible. There was nothing anyone, even her, could say or do to convince him the work should be shown. He simply refused, sometimes quite impatiently. ‘You two,’ he would say, ‘understand nothing about the personal. You can’t make a circus out of the personal; you can’t make a song and dance out of it. These are my
personal
possessions. This is my
personal
property.’ Eventually she stopped even mentioning it. I would bring it up and she would glance at me with this disapproving look. Still, we enjoyed our visits with him. And it gave us something to talk about
during our times together: a sort of joint project. Care and nurturing. That sort of thing.”

All of this had been a weird sort of comfort to them, he added, providing what seemed like a steadiness of purpose to their relationship, almost as if the old man had been their child, someone valuable and fragile whom they shared and protected. It had almost looked as if they were happy for a while.

Harding’s face darkened. “On our last visit to that basement together, Gentleman mentioned her husband. Where is your man today? he asked. And there was something about his tone that made me realize that she had brought him, had brought her husband, into this world I thought belonged only to us. We had so little, you see. I thought we had so little beyond our own painting and showing, beyond our own uneasy entanglement. And then this. She had so deliberately, so thoughtlessly, allowed her husband into this odd little piece of world I thought I had given to her. Her alone.”

Kenneth was confused. Couldn’t quite see how that would matter. “What did you do?” he asked.

“I was furious, stormed out of the basement. Just left her there. What had been taken from me, I realized, was this peculiar kind of hope, a hope that I had barely acknowledged to myself and never to her.”

“And that ended it.”

“You would think so,” Harding said, but no, it hadn’t been the end. Just the beginning of the end. She had come to his studio a few days later, and had asked why she shouldn’t allow her husband, who was interested, apparently, and wanted to
meet Gentleman, to see the work. He’d looked at the photographs, after all, and he pestered her to see the real thing. This encounter with Gentleman had lifted her husband’s spirits in some way or another. And that, according to her, was a good thing. “There was no reasonable answer to this, of course,” Harding said. “But for ten minutes or so, while she was explaining this to me, I thought – and it is the only time in my life that I have felt this way about a woman – I thought I might strike her. I hated everything about myself at that moment. Everything. There was no generosity in me. None. The truth was, I didn’t want anything about her life without me to be better in any way. I wanted her to be suffering my absence, not worrying about whether or not her husband was happy, or worse trying to make him happy, even though I was busily making my own wife happy as much as I could. But it didn’t end. Not then. Not yet.” He took another mouthful of his drink and touched Kenneth’s glass. “I expect you to drink at least two glasses of beer,” he said.

Kenneth dutifully raised his glass and looked across the table at his teacher. Even in the face of this confession, he was having trouble picturing Harding as a younger man, one filled with conflict, passion.

In the end they had had one more year. “I couldn’t bear it that she was visiting Gentleman with her husband, but I couldn’t stop her either. And I still couldn’t stop us, so I withdrew completely from Gentleman and never, believe me, never said a word about it, or about him – or about his work again.” He began to toy with a salt shaker on the table. “And neither,” he said, “did she. Not a word.”

Kenneth was starting to pay attention to the pint in front of him. He was wondering how a human body managed to absorb such a quantity of liquid.

“And then came the New York show,” Harding said, “the show in which all three of us participated. Her husband, I mean. And her. And me. There were two other painters in this show as well. She hadn’t told me that her husband would be among us and, of course, I resented this. I didn’t want him to be real, you see, wanted him to continue playing the role I had invented for him, that role of the invisible man, the mediocre artist and lacklustre mate. I could cope with the notion that she had two men in her life, but not two painters. I had everyone’s roles so neatly defined. And – have I said this? – I loved, I love my wife, had absolutely no intention of leaving her.”

Everything about his reaction, he admitted, was unfair –his deception concerning his own wife, the way he wanted the other woman’s undivided attention, his cavalier, dismissive attitude toward her husband’s work.

“I had seen her husband’s stuff before, you see, and knew there wasn’t much in it. So I was able to ignore it. Frankly, I didn’t even believe he would be able to see how extraordinary Gentleman was. That’s the story I told myself about all that, about him, when I allowed myself to think about it at all, which was as seldom as possible.”

Kenneth swallowed several mouthfuls of beer while Harding watched. “Good,” the teacher said, “More. No? You sure? Okay.” He leaned over and picked his coat up off the floor. Kenneth wondered if the session were over. But Harding
turned, arranged the garment on the back of the chair, and resumed. “The trip to New York on the bus was hell. They sat together, naturally, but I was alone, hunched in the back of the bus. Strange word,
hunch
, in that it applies to premonition as well as to position, as if you are crouching in the face of some anticipated attack.” He suddenly straightened in his chair and cocked his head toward the bar and the radio that was playing there. “Touchdown for the Steelers,” he said. “My wife is a football fan. I can take it or leave it.”

His wife had given up on openings years before, he said. “It’s not that she isn’t interested in my work – she is – but all the social niceties, the chat and pretension: she finds it intolerable. She’d had enough of that early on.” He paused. “And she wasn’t wrong about that either, just in case you are wondering. She was dead right. But that is another conversation.”

“So you went to New York,” Kenneth said, beginning to feel the alcohol now. It had numbed the embarrassment and opened him to the story.

“Yes. The show was called ‘Five Painters from Pennsylvania.’ It was in some kind of public building, a library or community centre or something. It was curated by one of the bigger museums, but someone had decided that this city museum should move into the community somehow. I suppose bringing in the Pennsylvanians, a bunch of painters from the provinces, had something to do with that. I barely remember what it was all about because of what happened next.”

Kenneth waited, sliding the glass in his hand back and forth on the table.

“I saw his paintings. Her husband’s new paintings is what happened.” Harding was still gazing in the direction of the bar.

“Yes … and?”

“They were brilliant! Stunning! The people there when we arrived, they were all gathered on his side of the room.”

“But you said …”

“I know, I know. But he had changed completely, or at least his work had. Suddenly the paintings were luxuriant and inclusive, though oddly vacant as well. I still think, though, that I may have been – no,
she
and I may have been – the only ones there who could see this odd vacancy.” Harding massaged his forehead with his free hand, then leaned back in his chair. “No matter,” he continued. “The certainty with which the paint was applied, the surface texture, was so galvanizing it was as if no one could turn away from it. That’s the only thing I can say. The pictures were galvanizing! They leapt off the canvas and entered the room! Collectors were swooping down on them. Critics were discussing them – there were only about ten paintings in all – but there would be half a dozen major articles in subsequent weeks.” And six months later the husband had had a one-man show at the Rehn Gallery with, Kenneth assumed, more and more of this extraordinary work. Harding had never looked at anything the husband did again. “Too painful. And the rest was, as they say, history. Everyone who had known him before, and had known his work before, was astonished,” Harding said. “And it
was
astonishing. The trouble was, none of it was his.”

Kenneth was beginning to catch on. “He had stolen Gentleman’s paintings.”

Harding was silent for a bit. Then he shook himself out of that. “No. Nothing that simple. He had stolen the tone – I almost want to say the soul of Gentleman’s paintings. He had stolen his colour scheme, his brushwork, even his ability to portray vulnerability. His subjects, too, though he had changed those subjects just enough that they had become his own subjects. And I knew, I knew, goddammit, he had been spending the previous couple of years absorbing everything he could about Gentleman’s tone and touch, his layering, his use of light and his rendering of the absence of light. And she and I were the only people who would ever know.” During the first few minutes of his triumph, Harding could see the husband change before his eyes from someone who was timid and unsure into an artist fully in control of the work he now allowed himself to believe he had created all on his own. “I could tell that in those few moments everything about Gentleman was being erased from his mind.”

“And you didn’t say anything.”

“What could I do? I was in love with her. And I could see it in her – she was glowing – she wanted this triumph for him as much as he wanted it for himself.”

“But, I thought …”

Harding was not listening. “It’s that overwhelming desire for the spoils of talent that makes things like this possible. You must never, ever want another artist’s vision,” he told Kenneth, “no matter how large or how small that vision might be, no matter where the appropriation takes you. No
matter what rooms it allows you entry into, what kind of fame it garners. Because, even if you are a moral person, if the wanting starts to own you, you will finally succumb to it and, mark my words, you will decide to commit the crime. And no real good can come of it.” Harding crumpled an empty cigarette package in his fist. “The making of art isn’t all that important, you know, in the larger scheme of things.”

Kenneth did not believe this, vowed silently that he would never believe this. Art was everything. There was nothing larger.

Harding, who had been leaning forward, making his point, collapsed back into his chair. “She and I exchanged one long look at the opening, and during that look we acknowledged that I knew how the paintings happened and that I would never say a word about this to anyone. I can’t tell you how shattering …” He was looking away, now, not meeting Kenneth’s gaze. “And, she and I, we never spoke or saw each other privately again.” There had been no final act; they both had known it was over. Harding had seen how much she loved her husband. And he had also seen that this burglary was not the act of a single person, it was an act of love on her part: they were in it together. “Except for one thing,” he said. Harding and the husband had exchanged a look as well. “Maybe this was only my own distorted lens at work,” Harding said to Kenneth, “but it appeared to me that he was sneering, as if these pictures were acts of revenge. As if,” he said, “by completing them he had stolen everyone’s talent and dismissed the whole idea of the
importance of original work. Gentleman’s original work, my original work, and, worst of all, hers. It was a tragedy. For him, she would forget all about us, about Gentleman, all about herself.”

Harding was slowly shaking his head.

“And Gentleman? You must have seen him, talked to him.”

“I went back to see him one more time. But by then he was fully lost, dying. He
did
die not much later. It would have been cruel to tell him, and anyway, I doubted he would believe me – there were times, late at night, when I didn’t even believe myself. And what could anyone have done?” Whatever the case, he, Gentleman, had succeeded in destroying much of his own work by then, though a couple of the smaller paintings had escaped – who knows how, maybe he himself arranged it, though Harding doubted this – to public galleries.