The Painter: A Novel

by Peter Heller

  I lay down on the big bed. Flat on my back. Smelled like starch. The cover was starch white. Like lying down in a snowstorm. Which is another way to give up all choice is what I’ve heard. Once my doctor friend in Taos recommended it to me as a way to kill myself if it ever came to that. He was trying to be helpful. Mitchell Gershwin is a very good ER doctor and probably a better fly fisherman. A devout Buddhist with a good sense of humor and a crazy great poet wife. I met him when I came in late one night with a small knife gash on my forehead. Don’t ask—I used to get a fair share of those. He sewed me up and he bought a bunch of my paintings and we fished together sometimes in the Lower Box. Another friend of ours, a sculptor named Duff, was dying badly of pancreatic cancer and I told Mitchell that I would just shoot myself if it came to that, and he said, “Hey, don’t leave a goddamn mess for your friends, just wait for a fine cold clear winter day and have a few drinks and take a shower and go out and stand wet in the wind or lie down in the snow. You’ll chatter for a few minutes and then you’ll go numb and warm and it’s really peaceful.”

  I thought about that. I said, “What if it’s summer?”

  “Use the gun. Stand in a pond.”

  Never thought of that. Standing in a pond. I loved how he didn’t even hesitate and I chalked it up to that acceptance thing Buddhists do, the way they are supposed to look at everything straight on, but I know he was just a great guy and he would have said that even if he were a Baptist. Funny, but I couldn’t help thinking of the crappies and sunfish in the pond eating my brains.

  I lay on the bed and I wasn’t sleepy. I was exhausted to the bone but not sleepy and didn’t feel a bit like offing myself, so I got up and shrugged on my barn coat and went out onto Don Gaspar Avenue.

  Just then I wished it were winter. Winter nights in the mountain towns of northern New Mexico can have a stillness like nowhere else. I craved that right now. The stars like rivets, the air cold and absolutely motionless, the snowbanks like stone. I would not have it, not tonight.

  Early fall here is full of movement. Everything is shaking off a summer languor. Harvest, tourists, storms, the leaves that never rest, gusts from the southwest that shudder the windows. It was night when I crossed the wide porch of the hotel and stepped onto the sidewalk. And breezy. I breathed it. It felt good and I felt drunk. Not woozy anymore but leery of time: what time was it? Not what it was supposed to be. And: fuck it. I don’t care if it is yesterday or next year. Walk. Tighten your cap down on your head and walk.

  It can be a dangerous place to be, for me. Displaced in time. I am not fully responsible for the now because the now has repudiated me, and one way to get its attention and to nail myself back into the moment is to crash a truck into an embankment or knock some condescending asshole’s head against the bar. Like that.

  So I knew myself well enough not to drive and not to go into a bar. I walked up into the plaza. Music spilled from the balcony of the Marble Brewery. I walked under the covered gallery where the Navajo sat on the ground along the wall in daytime and showed their silver jewelry to the tourists, and now there were two Indians curled up asleep in a pile of quilts on top of their jewelry boxes. Couldn’t tell man or woman, shocks of long black hair and blanket. The cops left certain families alone and were merciless with others. Some ancient feuds. The breeze blew leaves out of the few big cottonwoods and chased them up the street.

  I walked up to the dark cathedral and followed the high adobe wall down to Alameda. At Paseo I turned south into the wind, and at a bronze sculpture of two dancing sheep, I turned left up Canyon Road. Did I just want to get mad? Maybe. Now it would be solid art galleries both sides for the next quarter mile. A half dozen restaurants but otherwise a relentless gauntlet of art. Maybe I thought it would make me mad enough to shake the weird vertigo I was feeling. Because most of this art was made with brazen pander. The sight of one blue coyote howling at a blood moon was enough to arouse my pity. The sight of a dozen made me furious. Same with fall landscapes that include an adobe house with smoke coming out of the chimney and a red 1935 International pickup parked in the drive. Strings of red chilies hanging from the porch. I didn’t get it. Why didn’t these people just deal drugs or something? They could make more money with less work. Once I went into a gallery with one of these nostalgic cartoons in the window and found a young clerk who wouldn’t know who I was and asked about the picture with the house and the truck. She was very excited and tried to sell it to me. Apparently one of the most wildly popular artists in the Southwest. Value increasing by the week. I didn’t know. I went home and researched the artist and found out he was a former stockbroker from Connecticut who had changed his name from Wiggins to Garcia Vega. Well. Wasn’t Gauguin a stockbroker first? Didn’t matter. Once you got to the work it wasn’t supposed to matter, and I guess a painting was a painting and I suppose I might have loved Wiggins/Garcia Vega’s pictures if they had been any good. Or even just a little brave.

  I walked, breathed. Why was I so hung up on anyone being brave? So what if 90 percent of artists, or people for that matter, were meek? Just wanting to get through the day without getting yelled at or run over? Just have a good meal. Most people wanted to do one thing today with a small portion of pleasure like maybe weed the garden and pick tomatoes, or make love to a spouse, or watch a favorite TV show. Maybe they wanted to sell a painting. So what? What did it matter to me?

  In Penstemon’s there were blocks of color bisected by strips and geometries of other hues a la Diebenkorn but without the merciless compression that led somehow to freedom. I dug in my pockets and found an old pouch of cigarillos and, thank God, a lighter. I stepped into a doorway and lit up. Better. The smoke ran into my head and shirred along the veins. In Mariel’s there were eagles made from bone and feather and tin milagros, the little stamped metal devotional charms shaped like trucks, legs, houses, cars. They were ragged, Catholic looking birds, maybe good at praying but not too good at flying. And life size bronzes of mountain lions, lynxes, curled fawns out front. I could imagine the conversations between them in the middle of the night when no one was looking. The gallery was perfect for the ski chalet crowd that needed something indoors and outdoors, something a touch folky but ironic as well as something a little awesome but safe like a bronze cougar who will never tear your throat out.

  In the Stern-Gallietta someone was making hay with massive watercolors of trees in fog. I kind of liked them until I put my face against the door and saw an entire room full of them. I had thought about the art market way too much to be healthy. And why wasn’t my anger clearing up the vaguely seasick feeling of not knowing what time it was or what day or what year? Which of course I knew, just felt like I didn’t.

  At the top of the street I stepped into El Farol, the low ceilinged tapas and music joint. I had told myself I wouldn’t but I wanted a drink badly and knew I could settle for a nonalcoholic beer, it would help. As soon as I opened the door I was hit with the heat of a crowd and food smells and electric flamenco. I almost stepped back out, it was a little sickening. The bar was in the back and I scanned it for a seat and saw a young couple with salted margarita glasses leaning into each other and laughing, and they looked happy and in love and uncomplicated, and for some reason it clenched my heart. The possibility of simple happiness.

  Cristine and I used to come here when we were first dating, and we enjoyed dancing, we were good together, and the nights we didn’t get totally shitfaced, the nights I remembered, we’d had fun.

  Further down the bar a tall honey blonde in a tight skirt and stilettos perched on a stool and I recognized Celia Anson. I moved toward the bar and then stopped. A man was leaning into her, a broad shouldered cleanshaven darkly handsome dude in a polo shirt, he was saying something insinuating it looked to me, and gesturing at the bartender at the same time, and she was waving his offer away, and he leaned in closer, right to her temple and she stiffened and picked up her keys on the bar and made to stand. His hand came down on her shoulder. She shrugged
it off. He straightened tall with an angry half smile, looked down at her once like she was a recalcitrant caged bird who had maybe just struck and drawn blood and he stepped quickly behind her and out the front door. My hackles rose, those ones I never know I have. She didn’t seem to notice. She stood a little wobbly on her heels and took a deep breath, smiled and waved at the bartender and made her way through the tables and sound toward me and the door. Damn. She hadn’t seen me yet and if nothing bad was about to happen, the last thing I wanted right now was to get into a conversation with Celia. Let it play out, I told myself, see what happens. I knew this place well. I had been coming here for twenty years. I stepped quickly to my right into the dining room and made my way fast to where the bathrooms were in the back and out a service door just shy of the kitchen, pushed through it into the gravel alley at the side of the building where I used to go sometimes for a smoke. I could read it all without thought the way a fisherman reads the water. He would be watching the front door. He was. I saw his car, a silver Lexus parked in the back of the dirt lot across the street, under a big cottonwood in the deepest shadow, waiting. That heat in my blood: I had no doubt that wasn’t an accident. Mr. Polo Shirt liked to park in the shadows just in case. Then I heard the jingle of her bracelets and the tap tap of her stilettos on the wood steps and she came into view walking with a mission, a little unsteady, but with a will to get the fuck home, another quiet drink that didn’t work out, get me home. She crossed the narrow street, hardly looked for traffic and tottered down into the dirt lot, her long legs scissoring pale in the streetlight. Her car was toward the back, a new Toyota Highlander, also silver, three spaces to his right. When she got to it, she leaned into the driver door for a second, back to the other cars, and then looked down and sorted her keys with both hands, feeling for the right end of the opener and at the same time he was out of his car and moving fast and closing the distance with a practiced grace. He came around the front of the cars, his eyes locked onto Celia. Then his hand was on her right shoulder, not the touch of a friend but a stealthy grab and his back was to me. Okay, now.

  I came across. Angled to my right to stay at his back and crossed the street in two seconds and came through the cars using them as a screen, fast and pretty quiet and as he pulled her around I was two steps back. She was turning, startled—huh?—and he said Hey, I just wanted to and his other hand came around toward the back of her head. At the same instant she saw me and her eyes widened, he couldn’t have read it, I clenched my right fist in left hand and from full height slam. At the base of his skull. His grunt, his hands released her and he collapsed to the dirt like an ox shot in the head. Even then, even as she cried out, pressed back into her car in horror and her face crumpled into tears and she fell into my arms and sobbed, sobbed violently, even then I knew that it was the same fucking move as with Dell, the same strategy and timing like a practiced signature, parking lot vs. creek, but this time it was clean and right and somehow as I squeezed her tight in both arms and let her cry, somehow something balanced, something bad was balanced and countered with—I can’t say good. With something necessary.

  I made sure he was on his knees, grunting, working his way to standing, and then I drove Celia home, it was only blocks away. On the way her crying subsided and her hand came onto my thigh and she said, “He was an old boyfriend, Jim. You shouldn’t have done that.”

  I turned to ice.

  “He’s an asshole and he gets crazy, you never know what’s going to happen, so I appreciate the gesture, Jim, but.” She had a Kleenex at her eyes and she began to cry again. She leaned and then keeled into my lap and cried. It was hard to drive like that. I went numb. I’d just gone berserk on one of her boyfriends. What the fuck? What the fuck, Jim? You are losing it, buddy. Who are you?

  At her big house on Camino Santander she kissed me hard on the mouth and asked me in and I said I had a big day ahead of me, sorry, sorry for everything, and I was, and then I walked back to the hotel. Miserable. The bone misery like when you hit bottom drinking. It was cold enough to see my breath which was a little reassuring.

  The horse and the crow were having a conversation when I fell into the room. The longest day on record. Weeks and weeks long. I went over to the painting and looked closely. It had changed in my absence, something paintings liked to do.

  The crow was now telling the horse that he, the crow, never had to make a choice about jumping off of any cliffs because he had wings. He never had to worry about leaping off of anything. He told the Indian pony that there was a horse once that had wings, too, and never had to worry about such a choice. And the horse in the picture painted all over with red and blue fish, my horse, was all ears. The crow had his full attention. The crow said the horse with the wings was named Pegasus and that he was the horse of gods and a god himself. The crow began to tell the horse the story and the horse put his ears forward, he was interested, then in thrall, and he forgot to be frightened about the cliff or anything else. He began to be like any horse listening to a great story. That’s what it looked like to me, anyway.

  I lay down on the big plush down pillows and fell asleep, sound and deep, a sleep of the gods, the gods that are always in trouble.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Sisters

  OIL ON LINEN

  50 X 80 INCHES

  PRIVATE COLLECTION

  Two Boats

  OIL ON CANVAS

  20 X 30 INCHES

  COLLECTION OF THE ARTIST

  The phone rang loud in my room at eight, and I woke and took the down pillow from under my head and put about half a goose between my ear and the receiver, and listened to Steve crow. He wasn’t going to let me sleep in.

  Pim’s house was up Double Arrow Road, a twisty washboarded dirt road with a locked gate for the big houses at the very top. There was a Buddhist stupa up there that few people knew about, a tall gold cross-legged Buddha off in the pines. He had serene, all loving eyes, and I admit that after Alce died I drove up there more than once and knelt before the Lord of Compassion and looked into those eyes and wept. I didn’t know what else to do. I would park below at the gate and walk up the last steep mile. Once it was during a snowstorm and I lost myself in the trees and almost froze to death like a polar explorer. I can’t even remember now what color his eyes are, blue agate I think, or green, but I remember feeling that they were without judgment and without the desire even to comfort, and so they were naked in the conviction that everything would unfold as it was supposed to. I took great comfort in that.

  This morning I didn’t have to walk to the top of the road, I had the code for the gate and it slid open. I was on time. I was already breakfasted, I was coffeed, I was a good boy.

  From the road there was a long driveway that climbed to the highest knoll of the ridge. A circular drive pooled before a two story pueblo with latilla fences and stick ladders on the stepped roofs. Here was a massive front door carved with suns and corn. Pim’s wife Julia came to the door. Yoga pants and a ponytail. She was sunny and brisk. She had a French accent, but she was not French, she was Canadian, from Montreal. She had been running a health club and I guess Pim was on business there and went for a workout and presto. She gave me a great big hug and I could tell she wasn’t holding my truancy and the girls’ hairdos against me. She understood the unpredictability of art. Yesterday I told Steve to tell Pim: No more hairdos, I wasn’t Rembrandt. Please have the girls come as they were on a normal day, if there were such a thing.

  Sailor suits, it would turn out. White with blue trim. I guess that was normal.

  Julia ushered me into a great open room with a grand piano that looked straight down on the campus of St. John’s College in the valley below. Church, adobe dorms, soccer fields, almost like looking down from a plane. And the steep wooded ridges behind it. My easel was already set up, the light from the north facing windows was clean and tempered. Perfect.

  Julia asked if I wanted an espresso. I said, Please.

  “Come into the kitch
en. The girls are almost ready.”

  She walked briskly ahead of me down a tiled hall covered in Persian and Indian runners and lined with paintings. I was there, two of the beetle series, as was my friend from Vermont, Eric Aho. Also an early Alex Katz from when he spent a lot of time out West. Good mix. Down two steps and through a dining room with big windows looking out on the same mountain view and featuring a table that must have been sliced from a redwood. One solid slab. One tentacled candelabra in the middle made from handworked black steel, vines that flowed to each corner of the board, flowered with small yellow candles. Pretty nifty. I could imagine having dinner here as long as there were a butler to carry the ketchup. Julia stepped briskly, talked briskly over her shoulder as she went. We pushed through the swinging door into a red saltillo tiled kitchen bright and warm with a round table in a corner cove. The table was backed by tall windows outside of which bloomed the oranges and yellows of fall flowers. The room smelled of toast. On the brushed steel of the double fridge were taped the artistic endeavors of the girls, watercolors of Mom and Dad and dogs and trees and some animals that might have been moose. There was a newspaper spread on the table, and crayons, and there was a tiara on the bench and a plush baby seal and a doll face down on the floor in the attitude of a bomb victim. I understood that this was the heart of the house. It was the only room where anything was out of place and the only place that was alive. I thought of Alce, how she had never felt kinship with dolls, human dolls, and had left them scattered on the floor like this one; her favorites were birds and dogs, which I had taken as an early sign of good values.