by Peter Heller
I felt as if the ghost of my father were standing next to me, and he was laughing. Pop, I said out loud. Fuck the fuckers. Let’s go get drunk. And I bounded down the steps.
Why I remembered that now, driving through Española and onto the last stretch of highway into Santa Fe, I don’t know. Maybe it was because I was about to see Steve. For the first time in more than six months. I had been painting pretty well, through the move to Paonia, and had been shipping the canvases from Delta, a few a week, mostly small, so he had been mollified, then happy, then thrilled, and he stayed off my back. The pictures were selling. I painted, sent off the canvases, didn’t think of Steve much. But now I did. Driving into the outskirts of Santa Fe and onto St. Francis Drive and down the long hill with the view of the town spreading its pink adobes under the piñon hills, driving like an arrow straight toward the gallery—now I did. Think of him and remember that fucked up and wonderful scene on the pier after which he called me and screamed into my ear, You crazy motherfucker. You total embarrassment to the Taos School, whatever the hell that is, you blight on the community of artists of the American Southwest, you—you—you—stammering, spitting I’m sure all over his phone—you goddamn loose cannon, you—you—can dress him up but better not take him out—goddamn it, you basically redneck fucking freak—I LOVE YOU!
He loved me because all of San Francisco sat up and took notice. All of California. All of the Internet and the news channels and then the networks and CNN. They YouTubed and Twittered and the interviewer’s howl went viral. They replayed the scene on nightly news and I was a sensation and suddenly you couldn’t find a Jim Stegner painting anywhere, couldn’t touch one for less than five figures. I was a hero. Apparently it wasn’t only me who had been offended by the condescending, snotty tone of the man’s questions. It was class warfare, it was authentic, hardscrabble, bootstrap Truth vs. entitled, pedigreed, monopolizing bullshit. It was everything wrong with the art world, with the whole goddamn society for that matter, exposed in a raw scream. People loved it. They loved me. They bought my paintings. Steve was putty. It was right before I met Cristine and when she listened to the interview later she laughed out loud, and I could see that she was impressed: it was something she would do.
I pulled right up to the gallery two blocks off the plaza in Santa Fe. Didn’t bother to drive through the alley to the parking lot behind, just backed into a meter space in front and walked in. Because it was one p.m. on a weekday and the meter people take their lunch at one. They are mostly Jimenezes and their cousins and I know two of them. The Stephen Lily Gallery squeezed between a J.Crew and the Fazil, a very high end gallery that focuses on Edgy Contemporary, which mostly means erotic and cruel. One whole wall of the Fazil is always taken up with Ransteen’s painstakingly detailed engravings of torture. They are in the de Fereal School of naked and splayed girls being flayed alive by Inquisition machines and are rendered in the most fawning detail. The pictures are smallish, because they can accomplish what they are after in a small space and there is something alluring and creepy about the implied discretion of such scenes in small frames. My private collection, come this way. They must be very popular because they go for shameful prices. Also, boasted Ignatius Fazil with a little ruffle of his feathers, each one takes at least a hundred hours. Wow! I said. No shit. He knew he was talking to the slapdash king.
I walked into the front room of the Stephen Lily Gallery. Carla was hanging my Ducks in Heat. Carla stood on a small stool and she half turned from the wall and her mouth rounded into a hollow O, and her eyebrows hit the roof, and I couldn’t tell if she wanted to laugh with joy or scream in terror. She probably didn’t know herself. This seemed to be my present effect. But anyway she was mute. She bent down and I kissed her on the cheek and told her that there were two new paintings in the back of the truck. Steve was standing in front of a Max Ramirez, one of his series of Demolition Derbies, a folky Mora County scene of partying Chicanos under the summer lights—a fiesta in bullfight style but instead of bulls there were colorful-cars-destroying-each-other kind of thing. I liked them. He, Steve, was interpreting the painting for a well heeled older man in a navy blazer and a bow tie. Very Ivy League maybe, but the man wore lizard cowboy boots which were disconcerting. Steve glanced over his shoulder at the sound of the door, the electronic chime, the sound of maybe money, and the color rose instantly into his boyish cleanshaven face, he looked apoplectic and relieved at the same time. This was fun. I had never ignited such powerful opposing emotions.
Steve’s whole head was beefsteak red. Beefsteak tomato red. He gulped like a fish in air. He excused himself from Boots. He must have been beside himself because he almost shouted as he left the man, “I actually adore that painting. I actually won’t sell it unless I get a written guarantee that it will hang where lots and lots of people will see it!” It was an asinine thing to say, kind of a violation of Gallery Salesman 101 First Rule: “Remember you are not a car salesman. You are an arbiter of popular culture, a High Priest, your value and the value of your work depends upon an unassailable disregard as to whether anyone ever actually buys the work or not.” Gallery owners, the good ones, seem to float magically above the trenches of commerce, and if they are among the best they are also authentic in their absolute love of the work and of their artists, and their clients grow to trust that love. Steve was one of the great ones, which is the only way I could have stuck with him all these years, and I never doubted his true and real passion, his love for me, but he had just shown a breakdown in his bedside manner and I thought it was hilarious.
He was not in a hilarious frame of mind. He grabbed my arm and refused to meet my eyes and ushered me briskly into his back office. I felt like a bridegroom who had shown up late at the church.
“My God!” he whispered when the door had clicked shut. “Jesus, Jim, the police were here!”
He was right next to me. He stepped back. He wanted to hug me, I could tell. He didn’t know where to be. I fought off a moment of panic: the police were already here. Why? Did they come to arrest me?
“Apparently you are a suspect in a murder!” Steve continued breathlessly. “And the Pantelas thought you would be here yesterday! The girls had their hair done!”
Amazing with Steve, how the two things, the more universal and the purely self-interested, could be thrown onto the same level of importance. I found myself very glad to see him.
He finally looked at me, but wincing, glancing, as if he were looking into the sun.
“It’s good to see you,” I said.
“It is?” he stammered. He seemed surprised.
“Yup. Despite all my best instincts. I’m not a suspect in a murder. I am a person of interest.”
“I see, these are fine distinctions. I’m just an art dealer not a lawyer. A very nice fat detective came in two hours ago and asked where you were. He said you were supposed to be here and where were you? How should I know? I said, I’m his dealer not his mother. It seems that this morning I am not many things. I am not the artist’s manager who feels wonderful about calling Pim and telling him that his homely daughters can take out the bobby pins in their hair. What the hell Jim, what have you gotten your hairy self into? I just know you didn’t kill anyone, I mean we both agreed you’d gotten past that part.”
He let out a long breath, sucked in another. Apparently he was not finished.
I thought: Why are the cops looking for me here? Now? Did they find something damning and new? Bits of brain?
“If you did,” Steve went on. “I mean kill some sad sonofabitch, it could destroy you. The art I mean. The prices. Many examples. The establishment washes its hands of you in disgust with a We told you so. We tolerated Jim Stegner because he was brilliant and dangerous but now he’s over the top, now he’s just repulsive. It’s fickle fickle fickle, Jim, like a pickle.”
He loved to say that. I had no idea what it meant. Except that in his mind I was sure the pickle was a big fickle penis. Jesus, Steve was a trip. I would let him
yammer all morning if he wanted to. Except that I wasn’t sure what to do about the cop. What could I do? Running was out of the question. I’d be like one of those hangdog idiots who always got caught just over whatever state line, buying a six of beer in a convenience store with his Wanted poster plastered all over the wall. I shivered.
He heaved, collapsed in his bright teal ergonomic swivel chair. Steve’s desk was a bean shaped spaceship sort of console made from materials not of this earth. The phone was the only thing on it aside from a razor-slim screen and keyboard, and it, the phone, was titanium gray and shaped, come to think of it, like a pickle. One afternoon I came in with my kit and I painted blackbirds all over it, the desk, New Mexican kitsch—which I started, by the way. Now you can’t buy a stick of furniture between Santa Fe and Taos that doesn’t have a magpie or a coyote painted on it. Steve threw a fit. He was so mad he couldn’t get the words out, a real feat for him. But an hour later Severin Ricefield came in to settle a purchase and just about screamed at how delightful. The mix of Danish space futurism and manito folk, it just about stretched the universe out taut between its two poles, didn’t it, Steve? How marvelous. Severin was a woman, an extremely erudite, also rich socialite who was one of the few in town, it seemed to me, who had more money than God and also had read and thought deeply about more than, say, landscaping. And had great taste in clothes, and cheese. I knew, I had been to many receptions and parties at her institutional sized adobe on Ravens Ridge. I mean the house was the size of a regional art museum, which I guess in its way is what it was. I was always very honored when she bought one of my paintings, and honored again when I saw it hung in a coveted and prominent spot on her wall.
Still, Steve hired a specialist to strip the blackbirds off his desk.
“Did you murder someone?” He looked up at me, very serious, face exhausted and wiped clean of expression, a very rare moment for him. A desert landscape washed after storm.
I thought about that. I couldn’t really answer him. His honesty of expression seemed to require an honest answer. Which I wasn’t sure how to give. The more I waited the more an idea seemed to intrude on the wonderful clean country of his face, like the shadow of the next storm.
“You—You didn’t murder anyone, did you?” A little desperate.
“No, Steve no, I didn’t murder anyone.”
It was the compassionate thing to say. After all, he had just had to let the father of two little girls know that they had had their hair done in vain.
Not sure if he believed me. He looked relieved if still uncertain.
“Well, good. Good good good. Great. Three goods make a great.”
I knew he was going to say that. I mouthed the whole sentence along with him.
“So I can call Pim and tell him that one of your always unreliable cars broke down in the desert but you are safe now, thank God, and here and ready to paint his beautiful spawn tomorrow.” He reached for the phone which was his way of saying, Right? Daring me to challenge him.
“Right,” I said.
“Okay, good. I’ve put you up at the St. Francis. Pim has. He’s being extraordinarily generous about this whole thing. And anyway, we’d love to have you with us, but our guesthouse is being renovated.”
That was a lie. He said it every time I came to town and my behavior for one reason or another frightened him. Which was more than half the time.
“Don’t even think about killing anyone while you’re here,” he demanded as he turned his attention to the voice that was now answering the phone. He offered me one last wispy wave, like a passenger fluttering a handkerchief at the rail of an ocean liner.
I like the St. Francis. I have stayed here often and I am known. I walked across the broad streetside porch and the door was pulled open by a smiling young man in green tails with brass buttons. I hitched my tattered self to the front desk and the pretty Chicana behind the desk lit up—“Mr. Stegner! How wonderful to see you again”—and I thought she truly meant it. Well, the whole experience of the St. Francis is scented with memory. Steve always gets me the same room when someone else is paying for it. It’s called the Artist Suite, has a little brass plaque by the door proclaiming it. Two rooms about as big as my cabin in Paonia. Distinguished by prints of Georgia O’Keeffe’s least suggestive flowers, and by a slew of Rauschenbergs, go figure, I suppose because they are bright and active and only faintly suggestive of the end of the world as we know it. Seems like a half crazy curatorial choice, but I have to admit I like it. Makes me want to paint, if only to help rectify the tippy imbalance. And I have to think that in a cage fight between these two almost perfectly opposing artists there would be some parity of energy and weight. I had left almost everything in the back of my truck, had never had a single problem with theft in the hotel’s back lot, and now threw the one small duffel on the big Mexican four-poster.
Mexican furniture must be built for earthquakes, or civil wars. A stray bullet would not even traumatize this ten ton ship of sleep. Stray bullet. I shivered. I needed a bath. I went straight to the oversize bathroom, to the whirlpool tub. There were scented candles in screwed down sconces at the head of the tub, little lighthouses, I mean they were made to look like lighthouses, set in a blue tile sea where even a pyromaniac child couldn’t light anything on fire. Smart, I thought, in a world full of arsonists. I turned the hot tap, tossed my cap in the corner, began to strip off my shirt, stopped, pulled it back down. Fuck it. I needed more than a bath. I needed Ten Thousand Waves spa and hot spring.
Susurant pines. Susssss. Dirt parking lot, half empty on a hot early September weekday afternoon.
I dug a twenty out of the wallet under my seat and slipped the .41 magnum under there alongside it. Don’t know why I was being so paranoid. Was I? Who was going to come after me here? Jason? Grant? Maybe.
Ten Thousand Waves. Cristine and I used to call it Ten Thousand Steps. The treads were stone and wood, the path winding up through the trees. In the evening simple lamps marked the trail. The gate was Japanese, heavy red fir, the top crossbar longer than the one beneath it, like a kanji character. It probably is a kanji character for something concise like Peace and godliness to the one who enters here after a hard journey, hot bath and naked people up ahead. That’s what it always felt like to me anyway, whatever mood I was in when I parked at the bottom. Maybe it was the wind in the long needles of the pines. Maybe it was the rhythm of the path, the steps, the winding contours, the simple wood bench placed beside a lichen covered rock just off the trail. It felt a little like you were climbing the mountain like the wandering poets of old. One of the two books of Pete’s I had tossed in the bag before I left and was becoming my favorite was a slim thing called Two Hundred More Poems from the Chinese, translated by a poet named Kenneth Minton. There was one I loved, made by a guy named Chen Bo in like the eighth century:
On the snowy mountain
even the crows are silent.
My horse shakes his bridle.
Where are the songs
you and I used to sing
in the hillside garden?
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.