The Underpainter (11 page)

S
ometime during August of 1935, the last month of the last summer that I spent at Silver Islet, Sara told me what it was like to wait. She said there were two kinds of waiting: the waiting that consumes the mind and that which occurs somewhere below the surface of awareness. The latter is more bearable, but also more dangerous because it manifests itself in ways that are not at first definable as such. She then told me that over the period of the last winter she had finally realized that everything that she did or said — every activity — was either a variant of, or a substitute for, waiting and therefore had no relevance of its own.

There were no telephones at Silver Islet — there still are none, as far as I know — and very erratic mail delivery. Telegrams were considered important enough to be pushed through, regardless of the weather, by boat in the summer or by dog team over the ice in the winter, but I always let Sara know the date of my
arrival in June by dropping her a card early in the month. Over the course of the year I occasionally sent her a note to let her know I was fine, and now and then an announcement of one of my exhibitions. Winter was the time when I worked intensely in the studio on the large landscapes, figurative pieces, and interiors for which I had done oil, charcoal, and pencil sketches the previous summer. It was also a very social period. I went to parties and the art openings of friends. I performed duties attached to the various clubs and organizations to which I belonged. For me, winter was always a busy season, one I enjoyed immensely, especially as my reputation grew and my sales increased. Wealthy New Yorkers, it turned out, loved wilderness landscapes. They wanted rocks and water, twisted trees and muskeg on their smooth plastered walls. And some of them wanted Sara’s fair skin and dark-blonde hair; some of them wanted that as well.

When I was in New York, Sara became a series of forms on a flat surface, her body a composition adapting to a rectangle, her skin and hair gradients of tone. She became my work, and then, when the work was finished, I lost sight of her completely, turned towards ambition. Very occasionally, even when we were together, it was like that — the bed a large white canvas and me manipulating the positive, the negative space, a finished, saleable picture dominant, fixed in my mind. But most often she would not allow it, would refuse to pose, or even to remain in the room if she sensed this other side of me surfacing. “There’s someone in you,” she once said, snatching her robe from a chair. “Someone I don’t want looking at me.”

She intuited, you see, the entrepreneur.

It had not been easy to get her to pose for me in the first place, this waitress, this miner’s daughter whose only experiences had taken place on the sparsely populated shore of a northern Great Lake. It wasn’t until after we’d been lovers for over a month that she agreed to do so, and even then she would ask me, before each session, if I were certain that I wanted to paint her. She couldn’t understand why I would be interested enough in her to want to put her in a picture. Her knowledge of men was necessarily limited, so, at first, she was physically quite shy. There had been a boy during her late teenage years, a boy she had been fond of, but he left the settlement to find work.

“My father was sick by then,” she told me. “Otherwise I’d likely have gone with him. He said he’d come back, but … When your own father came and there was talk of the mine reopening, it crossed my mind that he might return then. You’ll think I’m crazy, it was years later. He was the only one, you see, and I never knew what became of him.” She smiled. “He was probably in some place like Timmins with a wife and four children.”

As it turned out, there wouldn’t have been work anyway. My father’s speculations had been a complete bust.

“But,” Sara said when I pointed this out to her, “your father brought you here.” She looked at me, her expression clear and frank. “The mine closed,” she said, “but you came back.”

Sara visited me in the city once, tracing the route that I so often took when I was leaving her, stepping on board
The Canadian
in Port Arthur, waking in Union Station in Toronto, then changing
trains, continuing on to New York. What was in her mind, I wonder now, on that journey, and what long agony of conscious and unconscious waiting caused her to make the decision to take it? Port Arthur would have been all she knew of cities; she had never bought a railway ticket. Did she feel terror or joy, or excitement? Was she able to sleep while the train rocked through the night? And did she come carrying a message, a message I refused to receive?

She surprised me and I responded with my own crazy form of panic. I took her to a series of pointless parties and heartlessly ignored her, talked to everyone else in the room, especially women, while she sat tense in a corner, her spine straight, her hands folded in her lap, her forced smile gradually fading. When we were alone together in the studio, I made love to her over and over again, coldly, suggesting by my actions that I believed this was the reason she had come to me, that I was doing my duty. I didn’t want her there and she knew it; I made certain that she knew it. She had no place, no relevance at all, in this part of my life. She belonged in a light-filled room in the north, a room with a view of landscapes J could frame and sell, her body frozen into poses I could also frame and sell. Her presence in my city life, my winter life, was unacceptable. I let it be known that I thought being seen with her was vaguely scandalous, as if one of us had a partner who might object.

She left quietly one cold, early winter morning, having groped for her clothes in the darkness while I pretended to sleep. I was angry at her decision to travel to see me and was glad at her departure. I didn’t communicate with her again for four months, then I sent a note to tell her the date of my arrival in the north.

But, ultimately, it took much longer than four months to finally erase the pictures in my mind of Sara walking awkwardly beside me on city streets, struggling to keep up, or of her lying emotionally wounded on my rumpled bed while radiators banged and voices on the telephone announced invitations to more and more parties. Two decades later, after I withdrew to this house in the city of my birth, I completed five paintings entitled
Night Journey from the North, The Surprise Appearance, Five Parties, The Used Bed
, and
Departure at Dawn, or Winter Morning
. The series occupied me for the better part of two years.

What I was able to accomplish during those four months of silence between Sara and me back in the late 1920s or early 1930s, however, was to reconstruct the woman I knew waited for me on the northern edge of the largest of lakes, to separate her completely from the woman who had, against my wishes, visited me in the city.

But nothing successfully removed that episode from my mind. It bruised my memory in some way. I felt invaded by it. Sitting here, an old man, I can recall it graphically.

Between the artist and the model, you see, there must always be a distance.

By the third or fourth summer she had given me complete run of the house — total access. There were days when I wanted to work very early in the morning so that I could watch one of the downstairs rooms fill with quiet, liquid light. Often I remained in the kitchen during the dawn hours, but sometimes I would move
into the front sitting room, which had an eastern window through which I could see the pink and yellow sky. I never painted the horizon, wanted only to capture the effect of it, the way it changed the appearance of the objects in the rooms. There is something pure, almost virginal, about rarely witnessed light; northern light that appears in what would be, in other seasons and latitudes, the middle of the night. Light that does not often waken sleepers. I felt covetous of it, wanted to share it only with my art.

I would let myself in with the key she had given me and sit quietly in the kitchen or the front room until a particular object was touched by this light. At the time, I believed that an intimate knowledge of the interior of Sara’s house would enrich my paintings, not only with its spaces but also with the regions of her body, and so I would make pencil drawings of her handbag resting on a chair, or of her jacket hanging on a hook behind the door. This was a lesson in portraiture given to me by Robert Henri. In class he would often have us turn our backs on the posing model and tell us to draw instead her robe where she had left it on the floor beside the podium, the whole time keeping in mind what we had learned from our previous drawings of her. When I told Rockwell about this later, he remembered loathing such activities, and said that the discarded robe on the floor had no more resonance than a simple still life. “Never forget,” he told me, “that the French call still life
nature morte
. There has to be a reason for that.” But I was excited by the idea of keeping one picture fixed in my inner eye while allowing my outer eye to focus on something connected but physically separate. It seemed an exercise designed for me and my eidetic facility.

I was perfectly happy in these early-morning moments at Silver Islet and felt, in some ways, closer to the model — closer to Sara — than I did when she was naked and in my presence. I even began to develop certain theories of association. All of the objects in her house had, to my mind, the potential to be transformed by Sara’s recent handling of them, so I looked specifically for those things she had touched or relocated since I’d last seen them.

Then, one morning, when I had been drawing a collection of pots Sara had left on the draining board to dry, I became so involved with their shapes, the geometric angles the handles made in relation to each other, that I let her face drift out of my mind. Most of the time, when my eidetic memory was functioning perfectly, this split vision had been easy for me to achieve; I never wanted to lose sight of the fact that it was
her
coffee cup,
her
crochet hook. I was insisting that the sketches should be theoretical exercises in intimacy, not anonymity. But that morning anonymity crept up on me before I recognized it. When I realized what had happened and tried to bring Sara’s face back into my mind, I found I couldn’t recall it. It wasn’t that I had forgotten her hair or eyes, or even her strong mouth and the curve of her cheekbone, it was just that I could no longer picture these things with my inner eye, and this frightened me a little. But if I could picture them, I could only see the way I had painted them; the ice-white dot in the middle of the pupil, how this alone makes the eye live, various pale flesh tones, rose and beige, and the yellow ochre of her hair.

It had been a cold spring, Sara had told me that; though spring is always cold in that country. She had taken me out to see
the patch of snow that remained at the bottom of the tall cliff at the end of the settlement track, as if its tenacity proved a point she had been trying to make. It was the middle of June then — I had just arrived — and we were still awkward with each other after my nine-month absence. For a few days I had painted both the cold and the awkwardness into her skin, her gleaming shoulders. Then, finally, I walked across the room and thrust my hands into the warmth of her hair.

Now, on an early morning in mid-July, I found I couldn’t call up her face. I began to hone my pencil with her paring knife, wanting as always to make the instrument weapon-sharp. Then I left everything — the shavings, the pencil, the sketchbook, the knife — on the table and ascended the dark, enclosed staircase carefully, because I knew Sara would not rise for another hour and I didn’t want to wake her. Her father’s room was full of the kind of shimmering light that was always reflected at this hour from the lake. By nine o’clock a rippling, luminous stream would trickle down the hall to Sara’s room, where it would cross her bed, climb her wall, pulsate on her ceiling. But now, in the early hours, her room was dark, then suddenly lighter, then dark again. As I came to her doorway, I could see that the breeze was pushing through the open window, lifting the shade she had drawn the night before, then slowly letting it drop before beginning the process again. She was lying on her back, her head turned slightly towards the window so that her face caught the light when it entered, then darkened again as it withdrew.