The Painter: A Novel (22 page)

You might shed a little of the dusty earth on the way up. Between the grit of everyday life and the cold silence of death are jingling
bit rings and singing and love. I loved that. Maybe where Frost got the notion for his own snow and horse poem.

The lodge was weathered dark wood and shoji screens, built in the style of a Japanese lake house. A German girl sold me my robe and key. She had a finely boned face and red rimmed blue eyes. She asked me if I wanted a tour and when I said No thanks, I’d been here before, she seemed crestfallen. She said, “You are an artist?”

I said, “How do you know?”

She smiled. “For one, we get many artists, so the odds are especially good.” She laughed sadly. “For second, you have green paint on your cheek.”

“Ahh. Ach. I always miss a spot.”

“Well,” she said, “let me at least show you the new meditation room.” She wouldn’t take no for an answer, she led me to a glass walled house with tatami mats, told me she was a conceptual artist from New York City reassessing her life. I thought she maybe wanted to be asked out, and when I didn’t oblige she became sullen. She was very formal at the end and looked like she wanted to cry. Maybe she was just having a bad day. I shook her hand and thanked her warmly and realized that I could not save everyone. I could not, it seemed, save anyone, except maybe a small strawberry roan.

The coed pool was clothing optional, a round bath cut into a cedar deck out under the full sun. A few big pines leaned over it and the sparse shade was in high demand, crowded with supine nudes, mostly men. The rest soaked and lay out on the hot fragrant boards heedless of melanoma. I liked the bodies, both men and
women. Some reclined in poses of flagrant exhibitionism, others looked as natural as a stump.

I hung up my robe and eased my scarred self into the hot pool. I sighed and leaned my head back and watched a long needled limb brush a scratchless sky. What could be better than this? The Japanese and Chinese poems back at the house shared an appreciation for the simplicity of nature. I thought the collections of ancient Chinese poetry were the most beautiful in my whole new library, and the most accessible. The government official who was steeped in politics and the luxuries of the court renounced it all and rode his horse, or walked, into the mountains. Or maybe he was exiled. He endured swollen river crossings and rain and snow and nights caught out alone without shelter. The relentless and steepening path. He was rewarded with: leaves falling. Blossoms blowing. Cranes and redwings croaking out of the rushes, flapping off down the valley. Mornings of frost and mist coiling on the river. The rustic hut of an old friend, nights of wine and song in the bamboo. Dawn parting, a poem left at the gate. Whenever I read them, I wanted my own life to be like that—simple, wandering the mountains from friend to friend, painting.

Well, many of the great Chinese poets like Wang Wei were painters as well.

“Jim!”

Knocked out of reverie. A toe prodding my shin. Who—?

It was Celia Anson, wife of the renowned gallery owner.

“Prodigal Jim, wow!”

Her husband, Happy Anson, had famously died a couple of years ago and left the store and his entire collection to this twenty-seven year old massage therapist who cared most about White Russians, not the men, the drink. Well, I knew about massage therapists and clearly had nothing against them, until they came after me with a kitchen knife. Celia was naked, of course, and when my eyes came down out of the trees and registered probably surprise, she slid over on the underwater bench and leaned in and kissed me hard somewhere between my cheek and the corner of my mouth and let her ample breasts float like happy ducks against my shoulder and collarbone.

She pushed herself off me, and her left hand slipped into my lap, which, in the buff, and the way things float around, was not just a lap but something more.

“Oh,” she said, a little surprised. “
Sorry
. Maybe not!”

She smiled, goofy. I always liked her. I always felt a little sorry for her when I saw her at openings and parties, the way the art society treated her, the snotty razors of nuance she never seemed to understand but always felt, I was sure. She was very pretty, and she always dressed as a stunner, and she was much younger than the patrons, so of course many of the women hated her. But she tried. She was a sunny open soul from Half Moon Bay, a part of the north-central coast I knew well, from a hippy family as she described it, that ran an organic orchard and farm right along the bluffs south of El Granada. She tried hard to be forthright and friendly and she wore her hurt in a bewildered half smile. Where she came from, if you planted seeds and watered them, they grew. If you rubbed and kneaded a cramped muscle it uncramped. Cause and effect. Why, now that she was Happy Anson’s wife, did kindness and offerings of friendship produce wilted plants year after year?

I think there should be tribunals for social cruelty as there are for physical assault. Calculated cuts in the first degree. Snobicide or its reverse. I always talked to her in those crowded rooms, took her on my arm from painting to painting when I could, and discovered she had a sensitivity and intelligence toward the works that might have surprised even her husband. Clearly she had been listening. And she was always so relieved at this attention, she split open like a milkweed and her laughter floated into my eyelashes.

Celia cheated on him of course, after a while. He had one of the best eyes for new work in the country and he was very busy promoting his artists. So not much consoling there. The rumor was that discovering her with one of his painters triggered the stroke that brought on his demise. He managed for more than a year, on a quad cane, and slurring out of one side of his mouth, but he had been a tall, upright, vain man, the kind of gallery owner that talked with a cultivated vaguely British accent he must have learned by replaying Alistair Cooke specials over and over. A real asshole. He didn’t give his new condition time enough to teach him anything like real humility or gratitude, he shot himself with an engraved Italian sixteen gauge worth forty thousand dollars. Messy. Made a Jackson Pollock of his brains on his study wall.

Well. He left her the store, anyway. Must have, in his reptilian way, forgiven her and understood how much he had asked of the guileless, very young girl he had married, and how much he had damaged her.

“So damn good to see you,” she said, smiling into the sun.

She was genuinely glad, and she grabbed a fingerful of my beard and kissed the side of my face again and let her breast swell against my shoulder.

“Are you back?” she said. “Please say yes.”

“A week or two.”

“Will you call me?”

“Sure.”

“You’re not married again are you?”

“Nah.”

“Steve told me you threatened the last one with a chain saw.”

I laughed.

“Word gets around,” I said. “I told him I felt like it.”

“We all have those feelings, Jim. You don’t know how many times I wanted to shave off Happy’s eyebrows while he was sleeping off one of his binges. That would’ve been tantamount to murder wouldn’t it? He was such a peacock.”

“Ha.”

She was such a sweetheart. I thought she was going to say she wanted to cut his nuts off or put an ice pick through his ear.

“You know,” she said, “you are the best artist in the whole joint. Happy always talked about stealing you away from Steve. He said you were a modern-day Van Gogh, how you are self-taught and all, and kind of have two left hands when you draw, and are
such a wild hair half the time, and are a plain old, old fashioned genius.”

She grinned. “So there.”

She blinked at me, at me and the sun. She looked as pleased with herself as a kid who has just tied a bonnet onto her cat’s head. Oh man, I loved her. Right then she had to be the cutest sweetest girl on the planet. What was wrong with me? An ocean of women. Is that what murder does? Some endocrine reaction?

“Call me,” she said, and gave my ear a heartfelt squeeze. She rose out of the water. It poured off of her breasts. It ran its watery hands to her waist and down over the spreading round of her hips and the smooth flat of her lower belly and. Venus on the Half Shell. Celia rose out of the sea of Ten Thousand Waves a glistening magnificent thing, slowly, slowly turned, stepped one long tapered naked leg onto the bench and the deck, did not look back. Grabbed her robe off the peg and shrugged it on as she went. Good God.

“She did that on purpose,” murmured an awed shaved-headed man to my left. “If I weren’t unreconstructed one hundred percent all American gay I would go for that.”

“Whew. Me too. I mean—”

We looked at each other and grinned. He had a bone in his right ear and a snake tattoo running down the side of his neck. “You’re Jim Stegner. Couldn’t help overhearing. Anyway I recognized you. Philippe Sando.” He put out a fist to bump.

“Rocks right? You paint rocks hanging from strings,” I said.

“You got it. You might wanna put that thing away.”

He glanced down through the water. The bath was not sudsy or murky, it was very clear.

“Around here,” he said smiling, “it might get you in trouble.”

We surveyed the deck littered with muscular tanned oiled bodies and we both burst out laughing.

I felt oddly exuberant now and I needed to paint. I did not want to use the usual studio up at Steve’s, the one he kept for me. I did not want to tangle with Steve or the cops. I took an ice cold shower and drove up the mountain past the state park lodge, up away from the creek into the aspen on the backside of Lake Peak and parked at the overlook. I put the straps of the easel over my back and carried the wooden box and a small canvas and a can of turpentine and walked up the old logging road a few hundred yards until the path toward Hobbitville forked off to the southeast. That’s what I called it. They were crude tipi-shaped shelters of dead wood spaced down through the forest like a tribal ruin. They were artfully hidden from the trail. Most were wrecks, skeletons of once proud lodges, but others had been freshly woven with boughs and stuffed with leaves and looked like they might shed water, and they were all haunted with the inaudible vibrations of questionable practice, ceremony and ritual of God knows what. They were creepy. The hills of northern New Mexico are riddled with sects, orders, communes, religious cults of every stripe, so who knew. I liked them. I set up next to the one that felt most dangerous, a tall tightly woven lodge that reeked of recent embers. I stuck the .41 magnum in its cup holder on the easel, unscrewed a can of turps and poured a jar full of spirits for the brushes and began to paint.

I painted mountains. Blue. A disappearing powdery cobalt blue—mixed with alizarin crimson and lightened up with a bit of titanium white—like those I could see through the opening of the trees ahead of me. I painted a dry valley and along it the one river, in some spots just an arroyo riven in the rocks, I painted a trail and two figures toiling. One led on the narrow trail, hunched against the burden he carried in a sack. He turned, reached a hand back for the larger figure who was also having a hard time navigating the rocks. A harder time. The men were in league, the gesture was familiar, familial. They were brothers. It was clear. Clear to the silent woods on the slopes, clear to the clouds that massed and were not friendly. Clear to me. They were close in age and they had been traveling like this their whole lives. They were Dellwood and Grant for certain. Twisted and hunched and making their way together in a hostile country.

I painted like my own life depended on it. Can’t remember when I painted in such a frenzy. The shadows of the big mountains. Where was the sun? Who knew. Where were the birds? There, hidden in the trees, not inclined to show even a little beauty. There was zero compassion in the valley, none anywhere. Traveling like that, season to season. What was it like to lose a brother? A little like losing a daughter.

I had. I had killed a man, someone’s little brother. I stared at the picture coming alive in front of me. How could that be true? I had killed both him and my daughter in some sense. What I felt. Not what Irmina told me, but what it felt like, the certainty I could never talk myself out of. Who the fuck was I?

I stuck the brush in the jar, lay the palette across the open travel box on the ground and walked twenty feet to a lichen covered rock with a view down the valley. Up here the aspen were already starting
to go tender with the pale greens that presaged the yellows of death. Some leaves had already fallen.

Sat on the rock. Up here not desert. Up here it was cool. When the wind came through it spun the leaves like a million chimes, they ticked and turned their pale undersides back, so that the wind swept through with a brightening of the canopy, a wave of light that carried the sweet smell of dying leaves. Already some blown down, littering the ground. This time of year. He had beaten a horse nearly to death. The horse. Focus on the horse. The little bleating terrified roan. He was a drunk, who wasn’t. He bluffed and blustered. Who didn’t? His older brother was his partner. Likely his only ally on earth. He loved him somehow. Who knew what tribulations growing up, the two of them, what threats Grant had protected him from. What vicious fights. Maybe Grant’s only true project on earth, to protect his little brother. Well. He had failed. We knew about that.