The Underpainter (15 page)

I was one of the more active ones at these moments, bringing myself to the attention of the other young artists in the studio by acting the clown, making friendships that otherwise would have required the kind of intimate conversation that had always made me uncomfortable. I was quite agile, and had discovered that I could perform handsprings and cartwheels in a limited space without disturbing the clutter of the easels. For this performance I always received a round of applause.

So it must have been that while George was wading up to his hips in blood and mud and rotting flesh, I was engaged in buffoonery, using the studio as my own private gym. The war, which the Americans would not enter for a year anyway, simply slipped my mind. I never spoke of George to my art-school companions. In fact, I rarely thought of him. I was far too preoccupied with painting, or our classroom antics, cartwheeling safely through rooms filled with marks on paper. No, I rarely thought of George, even when the master returned to the room and began to fill the sudden silence with words concerning the importance of emotion, the importance of life.

One afternoon I was chinning myself on a door frame of the studio, enjoying the laughter of my friends, when a man about thirty-five years old appeared in the doorway on the opposite side of the room and swung himself up to the lintel of the door facing me.

“Rockwell Kent,” he said, introducing himself while bringing his chin up to his fists. “Whoever drops first buys the other a beer.”

“But I’ve been at this for at least five minutes,” I gasped. The laughter in the room had stopped. Everyone’s attention had been diverted.

“Okay, after you stop I’ll do six minutes more.”

I disliked him immediately, this show-off, this braggart, this mirror of myself across the room. Every move he made was a parody of my own pathetic attempts to win the approval of the
crowd. Then, as if to dispel any thoughts I might have entertained about mirrors, about equality, he chinned himself with one arm and performed a mock salute with the other.

“I won’t drop,” I panted.

Rockwell grinned at me from the door frame opposite, then crossed his eyes and allowed his tongue to loll out of the corner of his mouth. My entire audience had turned to watch him. “He’s had it,” he said to them.

“I’m younger,” I managed to croak. This elicited a deep guffaw from my opponent, after which he began to sing a popular song. Some of the students were clapping in time to his movements.

Until that moment I had never experienced the desire for victory as a physical sensation. Sweat was running into my eyes, anger was ringing in my ears. “You’ll drop first,” I said through clenched teeth. I was damned if I was going to be humiliated like this.

Rockwell stuffed one hand into his back pocket while keeping a firm grip on the lintel with the other. He pulled out a large handkerchief and blew his nose loudly and aggressively without missing a beat. My fellow students cheered.

I had heard of him, of course, knew his painting, his reputation, all of which made this nonsensical contest more enraging. I was determined not to be defeated by him. I knew he could read the indignation on my face and I could see he was amused by it.

“Boo hoo,” he said, bringing the cloth up to his eyes.

Besides my teacher and his colleagues, Rockwell Kent was the only real artist I’d ever laid eyes on. I had expected glamour
and dignity to be a part of fame, yet here fame was, taunting me like a child in a schoolyard. I was furious with him for the insight his behaviour — and my own — momentarily brought to me. Too much energy was going to outrage. Exhausted, I dropped to the floor.

“You ass,” I hissed, unsure whether this remark was directed at Rockwell or at myself.

“My sentiments exactly,” said a voice behind me, followed by a barking laugh.

How long my teacher had been watching this farce I had no idea. Rockwell was still pumping away insolently on the other side of the room, effortlessly completing the extra time. “Take him out for a beer,” the master whispered to me. “I could have told you in the beginning you would lose.”

I would have preferred to fight Rockwell Kent, Robert H., and anyone else who happened to be in the room. Sweat was running from my hair, my heart was hammering, my fists were clenched.

Rockwell swung himself from the door frame and loped good-naturedly across the floor towards me. “C’mon kid,” he said, throwing his arm across my shoulders. “Let’s get drunk.”

I felt myself soften in response to the warmth of this gesture. An hour later, like everyone he ever met, I was convinced I would be devoted to him for life.

A disapprover, a ranter, a man whose responses were often unprovoked and always unrehearsed, Rockwell Kent was an entirely different kind of pontificator from my teacher. I believe
he often surprised even himself with his reactions; the only thing predictable about him being the intensity of his passion. That day and on into the night we staggered from bar to bar — arm in arm eventually — singing socialist songs. He was tremendously excited by the developing revolution in Russia. “Want one just like it!” he would shout at me, slamming his fist on the table. “Here —”
thump
, “now —”
thump
. But he could be socially withdrawn as well and would talk about the remote corners of the world with great affection.

“Am going north,” he confided as we swayed into what must have been our fourth bar. “No ridiculous people there. Hardly any people there at all. Some good women is all I need.”

We collapsed into chairs near a corner table. “But you’re married,” I said.

He looked at me in astonishment. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “How young
are
you?”

He had just been banished from Newfoundland for singing German lieder from the porch of his rented house, which was perched on a cliff above the town of Brigus.

“Hounded us out,” he told me. “Wife and kids and everything. The authorities marched up to the house and asked me if I had forgotten the war. They didn’t believe me when I told them that unfortunately I had not forgotten the war, that I was, however, choosing to ignore it. Being authorities and therefore unable to envision how anyone could show a lack of interest in the petty differences of the conflict, they concluded that my singing was an attempt to communicate with German submarines. So they gave us the boot. Bastard imperialists! You’ve
got to go farther north than that to get away from the bastard imperialists.”

“I’ve been to Canada, actually,” I said with pride. “To the north shore of Lake Ontario.”

“Lots of bastard imperialists there,” he announced. “The Royal Imperialist Mounted Cops, the Royal Imperialist Royal Mail, the Royal Imperialist Parliament, His Majesty’s Royal Imperialist Opposition. Lots of imperialists and lots of opposition. You’ve got to head north, into the woods.… No, on to the tundra. None of those Royal assholes can handle the tundra. Freeze their balls off.”

I was having trouble enunciating. “I think I am a landscape painter,” I said slowly, experiencing for the first time the odd sensation of each word working its way out of my mouth.

“You think you’re what?”

“A landscape painter,” I repeated, but with less certainty.

“Jesus Christ!” Rockwell responded. “I have to keep a closer eye on old Robert, make sure he’s not filling you kids up with too much crap. Love the guy, and he loves me too because he could never push me around. I drop by the class every now and then, just to check up on the old man, make sure he’s not dishing it out too liberally.”

I was shocked by this irreverence. “But you were his student,” I said.

“Sure was!” he said, enthusiastically pounding the table. “But you’ll never catch me painting any cherub-faced children.”

I had by now completely lost track of the number of pints of beer we had consumed, and was beginning to feel ill.

“Do you see any landscape around here?” Rockwell was asking me. “How in Sam Hill can you be a landscape painter when you spend all your time in bars or in Robert’s classes, listening to his fancy theories and learning how to cross-hatch?”

I wanted to protest, to say that, in fact, I had spent very little time in bars, but I found I could only articulate the sentence I had been practising a few moments before. “I still think I am a landscape painter,” I slurred.

“So’s your old man,” taunted Rockwell.

This was hilarious. I howled with laughter as the room spun away from me. “No, he’s not,” I gasped. “He’s certainly not a landscape painter. He’s a capitalist!”

Then I leaned over and vomited in the corner behind my chair.

“This is a terrible predicament,” said Rockwell after we had been thrown out of the bar.

“I’m sorry,” I managed to mumble. I seemed to be walking through water. I was surprised that I could still breathe.

“Oh hell, you can throw up on me any time.” He plucked me out of the path of an oncoming taxi. “The terrible predicament is that you’re too drunk to walk and I’m too drunk to go home and face the wife. If this were the Far North, we’d die of exposure.”

I vaguely recall that he guided me towards a park bench in Washington Square, fumbled around in a trash bin for a while until he found enough newspapers to cover both of us, threw some over me, then collapsed on an adjacent bench himself. By
the time the morning sun brought the pain in my head to my attention, Rockwell was gone. I looked down and saw that he had pinned a crudely lettered sign on my jacket. “Do not disturb me,” it read. “I am a landscape painter and my father is a capitalist.”

If I close my eyes now, I can see that drunken boy, stretched like the corpse of a clown on a battered park bench, the words pinned to his jacket making a fitting epitaph. I can see this as clearly as I would have had I been Rockwell and not myself on that October morning. As it was, though, nothing in me that should have died did die, and I was as immune to the experience of the world after I recovered from the hangover as I had been before I met the man and drank the pints that caused it to happen. Yes, I had a new friend. I was impressed and delighted by him, and flattered by the fact that he had spent some time in my company. But I was capable of allowing myself to travel only a short distance with him. I was a pedestrian, after all, and he was driven by the engines of emotion, of desire, towards destinations that I, clinging to safe, rectangular spaces, could scarcely imagine.

Well, what I wanted from life was just a good view, wasn’t it? A paintable view, a perfectly composed view, and, now and then, a perfect figure in a perfect landscape. Decade after decade I spent summers standing on the north shores of huge bodies of water, gazing towards the south with my back turned to a whole country full of forests. Once or twice I allowed Sara to take me into the greenish dark of the woodlands that stood behind Silver Islet and stretched, I imagine, almost all the way to Hudson’s Bay, but the effect on me was a growing sense of
claustrophobia and a desire for open space and light, while she thrust her face into the needles of the pines and inhaled the perfume.

Rockwell himself crashed into the woods in every conceivable way, travelling farther and farther north until he emerged, radiant, beyond the timberline, where everything, he said, was white and clear by day and where stars broke through the black like a shower of diamonds at night.

When he wasn’t in Greenland, or Alaska, or Tierra del Fuego, and while I was still a student, we got drunk regularly, twice a month. He would appear at the door of the studio, say a few words to Robert H., and while they talked I would clean my brushes, reach for my coat. Before we stepped onto the street Rockwell would be in full flight, as if I, some kid, had stumbled into a conversation — an argument really — he was having with himself. There were few certainties. Many of his sentences began with the words “on the other hand” or “let’s play the devils advocate” as he proceeded to take apart one of his own intricately constructed theories. He was Jacob. His mind was the angel. The dance that resulted from this contest formed his character. There were only three issues about which his views never wavered: the hideousness of the war, the immorality of capitalism, and the spiritual superiority of the north.

I loved him unconditionally, even when he ignored me, preferring the conversation of the bartender or the labourer at the next table, even when he humiliated me by telling the bartender and the labourer that my father was a capitalist. On several occasions he abandoned me early on in order to go home with a
woman who had caught his attention. And once he insisted, against my protestations and growing panic, that I go home with a woman to whom he had slipped a five-dollar bill.

When it was over I found Rockwell waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “It’s about time,” he said. “Next time you pay your own way. Now, let’s hit the Lower East Side.”

Later that night, he offered the only piece of advice he ever gave me. “Pay attention to women,” he said.

I couldn’t imagine that this was going to be a problem. I thought about sex constantly and, now that I had experienced the real thing, I feared I was going to be thinking of nothing else.

“I don’t mean sex,” he said. “I mean pay attention to how they move, what they look at, what they think about, what they say.” He lit a cigarette and twisted in his chair, signalling to the waiter who appears in my memory now like a white ghost in a black apron. “I’m perfectly serious,” he continued.
“Faites attention
. They are far superior to us and beautiful besides.”

Four years later, when I was taken to Silver Islet by my capitalist father, I believed that I was following Rockwell’s instructions when I began to paint Sara, a miner’s daughter in a northern setting. I remember thinking how pleased he would be by the fortuitous combination of landscape, class, and gender.

And yet it was my paintings of Sara that caused the final break between Rockwell and me, years later.

But, that night, I still loved him unconditionally, loved him and all his contradictions. “Women are like forests,” he said. “You can’t just enter them, you must let them enter you as well. You must let their fluidity form one-third of your character.”