The Painter: A Novel

by Peter Heller

  I said, “Paintings can take on a life of their own. It’s like stuff happens in them when you’re not looking. The crow and the horse started out as adversaries—I mean the crow would love to eat the horse, if he ever, say, jumped off the cliff and became a carcass. But instead they began to talk. I think maybe the crow cursed the horse. I told you that I thought the crow was telling the horse that he had a choice, that he didn’t have to jump after all. Well, I think that’s sort of like Eve biting the apple. You were talking about Genesis. I think it’s like that, the crow is like the serpent. He is giving the horse the awareness of choice. And with a full knowledge of choice comes a foreknowledge of death.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, when we have no choice, everything just happens. Everything is compelled by instinct or by some shit from outside us, some imperative, and then, well, we never have to think about where it’s all headed. We react and it’s headed where it’s headed, that’s all, and we are where we are. Just being. There is nothing but the fullness of being, the moment we are in. What the animals have, why they are blessed.”

  “Huh. Why Dugar wants to have sex with sea elephants or beavers maybe.”

  I laughed. I dug in the pocket of my barn coat and pulled out the slim volume of Rilke.

  “Listen to this.”

  I flipped through the Duino Elegies until I found the page I’d turned down—it was at the beginning of the Eighth Elegy. I started to read it out loud, but the words were beaten around by a loud Venezuelan merengue, so I just handed it to her. Her eyes weren’t that great. She squinted and shifted around in her chair so she could hold it up to the patterned light from a stamped metal wall sconce.

  The creature gazes into openness with all its eyes.…

  Free from death.

  We alone see that: the free creature

  has its progress always behind it,

  and God before it, and when it moves, it moves

  in eternity, as streams do.

  She rocked her head as she read, not with the rhythm of the salsa but with the poem. She read it again, came around and put the book face down on the table.

  “I always thought you were more like an animal, the way you worked. The way you don’t think, the way you are just in it.”

  “And?”

  “Turns out you are thinking all the time. Fuckin A.” She laughed.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “I don’t think the crow is doing the horse a favor, and I wonder if painting isn’t a way just to be like an animal for a few hours. To be in the stream of eternity or whatever. To feel like that. Same as fishing.”

  “It’s not the same as fishing! You were on a roll and now I realize you’re the same old retard. Phew.”

  And then she didn’t say anything. She frowned and she was very thoughtful. I wondered if she was thinking about what did that for her, put her in the stream, I wondered if she missed working on her own art.

  On the fourth day after Sofia’s arrival I did a big portrait. I guess it’s a portrait. I asked Steve to send up another fifty by eighty stretched canvas, same size as the one I’d done of the girls. I’d enjoyed working on the larger size, and I wanted to be ready in case the mood struck me again. Steve loved it, because the bigger pieces commanded quite a lot more money. So he had Miguel deliver it to the sun room. But first he asked me if I’d called a lawyer yet, and when I said no he had a small fit and then had a prominent local defense attorney’s card hand-delivered to me on the roof, with Steve’s scrawl in red marker right across it: Call him you idiot! I put it in my shirt pocket and forgot about it.

  The management, meanwhile, was getting into the swing of having a famous New Mexican artist working in their penthouse. They began to make hay with it. A young reporter ambushed me twice at the main entrance after the St. Francis leaked to the Santa Fe New Mexican that the famously reclusive Jim Stegner, celebrity artist, was staying in the Artist Suite and actually painting major new work in the rooftop conservatory, the same “colorful” artist that had recently been in the news as a person of interest in the killing of a notorious animal poaching kingpin and horse abuser in Colorado. And a POI in the curious death of the kingpin’s horse abuser brother. I refused to talk to the journalist, I hurried by, but a few days later I picked a copy of the paper off the front desk to take with me out on the gallery with a large cup of coffee, and I settled into one of the big chairs, thinking, Life doesn’t really get better than this—when I flipped to regional news and there on the second page of the section was a photo of me, bearded, in my spattered cap, smoking a little stogie and fishing. I spilled the coffee into my lap. The impulse was to cover the picture. The story told about my stature in the art world and the killings, and said I was accompanied by my comely young model. At least they didn’t put model in quotes. For a moment I was blind, literally, with rage. I felt ill. Two men were dead, a sickening fact, more sickening if you knew them, way worse if you had spattered the last jets of their blood on the ground. I recognized the picture as coming from Steve, it was one we had used for some promotional stuff in the last couple of years. I went straight through the lobby and took the elevator and called him up from the room phone.

  “I haven’t seen so much buzz about your work in a decade—” He started right in, didn’t let me get a toehold.

  “It’s super duper, Jim. I’m jacking up prices so often my arm’s getting tired.”

  He went on to say that the Albuquerque paper, the Journal, had picked up the story from the New Mexican. Now the local news show, Albuquerque Channel 9, wanted to do a segment, as did Art-Speak, the New Mexico PBS weekly art show.

  Steve was so excited he was talking over himself. He said, “So 9News called this morning, they want to do a piece next week for the morning show. Vigilante artist or something. They are just beside themselves that you are one of our most famous artists and that you had this rough past and are now maybe a killer. Of course they can’t say vigilante because, after all, you are innocent until. But they can hint at it. And they just flipped over the clip from that radio interview in San Francisco. You scare the crap out of them I can tell. Maybe they want to skewer you but they won’t. Listen, this is your moment. You won’t believe how much Horse and Crow has gotten to. Kind of a grudge match between Pim and Sidell with a few others piping in. I’ve put in a call to the Harwood Museum—”

  “Stop.”

  “What?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  I couldn’t begin to tell him how it really felt, how awful, so I said, “Do you realize what that picture in the newspaper is going to do to my privacy? I’m going to have to leave town.”

  Indraw of breath I could hear through the phone, then a long moan. “Aoooouuww!”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do that, Jim. You have no idea. Have you been online? Of course not, you’re so damn antique! A blogger who does a lot with the New Museum just wrote about you: ‘Art and Blood in the Wild West.’ The blog has gotten a storm of comments. The comparisons to Van Gogh again, some mention of mental illness, but I wouldn’t worry about it—”

  That slugged me like a punch. Not the antique thing but the blogger thing.

  “I’ve even been talking to the hotel, they want to give you like a month free! To keep painting on the roof. They are calling it the Artist’s Residency. They’re thinking of continuing it after you.”

  I was now speechless. So officially steamed and disgusted I could not speak.

  Out of the silence, timidly, Steve proffered: “You know, you need to take advantage of the hotel’s offer, stay. If you go back to Paonia it will follow you, the story, and I won’t be there to protect you.”

  “Ouaaoauuw—”

  “Jim? Jim?”

  “You’re a goddamn psychopath. I’m convinced now.”

  “Who’s talking, Vigilante Man?”

  “I want to throttle you. Seriously. No gun, no rock.”

  “Don’t say that! Jesus.” Pause. “You don’
t mean that?”

  “Steve.”

  “What?”

  “Is this what you want? Seriously. To drive me at last over the edge?”

  “What edge? One you haven’t been over already? Do you know what it’s like trying to keep track of you and your edges?”

  “I mean it. Do you want me in living hell?”

  “Is that how you think of me?”

  “I don’t know how to think of you.”

  “You aren’t miserable, Jim. I’ve known you practically since you were a baby. Trust me. I’m being serious now. You are happier now than you’ve ever been. We’ll get through this patch, this little media frenzy, we’ll try to make you rich, we’ll get you a museum show, some of the national attention that has been eluding you lately, and then you can slip quietly back home, wherever that is, and go fishing. Meanwhile we’ll pray that our friend Detective Hinchman—what do you call him, Wheezy?—and what’s his name who just called from Colorado, Detective Gaskill, pray they don’t find any eyewitnesses or guns or anything. We’ll keep you out of the pen and you can paint and fish and entertain. Sofia is a dish by the way.”

  It was monstrous. Steve was going to take the killing of two living breathing brothers and make hay. I was going to make hay, if he had his druthers, if things went according to plan. I didn’t say a word, for what seemed like a long time. I was out of words.

  “Jim? Jim?”

  “I hate your guts,” I said. I meant it. Right then.

  “Me, too. My guts. I hate myself so much sometimes I just want to give myself a big kiss.”

  “It’s all I know how to do,” I said. I think I was starting to choke up. “Don’t you get it? I couldn’t stop if I tried. Painting. Do you want to kill it? Me?”

  “Jim? You’re really upset!”

  “Oh, fuck, Steve. Fuck. I am of a mind to stop painting altogether. Have Miguel send over the fifty by eighty ASAP.”

  I hung up.

  The painting I made was a reprise of the little girls except that it was two little boys. I made it for no other reason than it was building inside like an overstretched balloon and would burst. I put the boys standing in the bright kitchen with flowers behind them but not the same ones as for the girls. I put sage and Indian paintbrush, yellow alfalfa, clover, goldenrod, the scrappy stuff you’d find along the shoulder of any road. A thorny black limbed mesquite with a line of ants climbing the trunk. The energy of the girls had been like two chicks breaking out of the same egg, hungry, ready to be skeptical, and surprise! a candy necklace. They held hands, the habit of protection, but seemed to be saying, Hey this is fun, give us something else ridiculously delicious. The boys were holding hands, but they were turned slightly askew, as if ready to stand back to back. And they looked scared. On the smaller, on the left, call him Dellwood, I put a model ship in a bottle, in a wooden stand right on top of his head. Don’t know why. On the other I put three crosses and from the center one I hung a pale bird, ocean gray, hung from the neck and drooping dead like the pheasant by Lucas Cranach. An albatross maybe, which must have occurred to me because of the ship. I painted fast, not seeing anything, hard to describe but I mean I don’t think I was seeing in any conscious way anything I was painting, and for the first time in a long time I painted scared. The picture scared me. The boys scared me, their predicament, whatever it was. No one should have to carry around a ship in a bottle. In fact as I made the ship I found the whole project of bottling up a little ship to be so monstrous I was actually painting in a kind of spiritual pain that was not at all the pain of labor as I imagine it, of birthing forth, but the pain of killing someone.

  I was shaking. I finished the picture maybe faster than I’ve ever finished anything of that size before. I was shaking all over. I stood back and I thought, Is that what you are trying to do? Put the brothers in some bottle and cork it? Is that what the painting is? The ship you are carrying around on your own head, your albatross and the spiky crosses too? What they say about dreams: you are every character? Is that the brothers and also you?

  The thought that we were somehow the same made me gasp. When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?

  I sat in the folding chair they’d brought for me. Only one end of the conservatory was glass. The easel and I were out of the sun in an end of the big room shaded by a wall and by a curtain. I put my head in my hands and shook. When Alce came to visit me she spoke to me softly. The brothers had never spoken and I suspected now it was because they were burrowed too deep inside, inside of me, they were becoming me, and you can’t speak to yourself except by speaking to yourself, which was a circular kind of conversation and what I suspected now I was doing with these paintings. I wanted a drink. I tasted bourbon and I wanted one badly and didn’t want to fight the easy ride down to the hotel bar. What time was it?

  Sofia was out somewhere thank God, maybe at the gallery, maybe in the plaza shopping for a necklace, I told her to get one. I left the painting on the easel, I had my coat, the keys were in the pocket, I hustled down to the lobby and fetched the truck and drove up the Paseo to the Old Santa Fe Trail and drove straight south under the long ridge and turned up it at Double Arrow, the same road to Pim’s, climbing the washboarded dirt too fast and rattling my teeth. It was a bright clear cold morning. At the gate across the road I punched in the four numbers I remembered and pulled over in a shallow pullout under some tall pines. As soon as the engine cut and I heard the wind feathering in the needles and smelled the sunwarmed bark I felt better. I crunched over fallen needles into the woods. The juniper trees were a blue-green and they riffled in the stronger currents of wind. Their dusty berries littered the ground. A squirrel squealed and chattered. Squawk of distant crows, echoing the empty spaces, ridge to ridge. I walked uphill breathing hard and came to a small clearing. The Buddha was there cross-legged on his stupa, a little bigger than a normal man. The dirt had been cleared around him and laid with polished stone flags. I had heard that Buddhists walk clockwise around the Buddha with their hands at their chests in gratitude and prayer, it was about the only thing I knew about Buddhism and right now I needed all the help I could get. I got on the flagstone path and pressed my hands in prayer and I walked. I walked around three times. I prayed.

  Forgive me.

  Forgive me everything.

  I want to love all things. I don’t know how. I don’t know how.

  Please help me.

  I walked and prayed harder. I heard the wind in the trees like water, like a creek.

  Please give the brothers peace. Wherever they are, some measure of peace. I wish that for them. Please please please God whoever you are. Please let Alce be joyful, let her spirit fly in joy. Please oh please God. Buddha, forgive me, grant me some peace. Please. Alce, sweet girl, forgive me. Forgive me. I wish you were here I wish I wish we could go fishing this afternoon.

  Oh please. Let me live somehow in peace. In truth. Thank you for not killing me before I could ask.

  It was all a jumble. Like that and repeated and jumbled. I knelt on the rock in front of the statue and lifted my eyes to his eyes. How I remembered them: the color of a calm sea, without judgment, seeing things exactly how they are, seeing me. Like Irmina but without concern or worry. Conveying a deep and cool peace.

  I sat on the knoll with the pines whispering and the Buddha looking down on me. I sat all afternoon, sat as the air turned frosty in the dusk and I was shivering with cold but not shaking with fear anymore, and I got up stiffly and walked back down the hill. I drove back barely seeing the gravel ahead, but just before the stop sign at Zia Road I saw the El Camino parked against the trees. I went through the intersection digesting the image, then pulled over and began to back up fast, half turned backward in the seat, two wheels on the soft shoulder. Fuck him, haunting me like a hit man. What was he trying to do? Why didn’t he just plug me? But his
headlights flared and he peeled out and turned down Zia and was lost to sight at the first curve.

  CHAPTER SIX

  When I got back to the hotel there was a TV camera, a news girl, and three print reporters holding out little recorders. They told me their papers as I walked by: the Albuquerque Journal, the Inrock alternative weekly, and the magazine Art in America. The news girl was wearing a red knit rolltop sweater, tight black pants and stilettos, and her lipstick matched her top. Definitely local. Her hair was sprayed into stiff curls at the edges of her cheeks. She looked Navajo and a little tense, like she was on her first big assignment. The print reporters started right in.

  Mr. Stegner Mr. Stegner can you confirm that you are a suspect in two murders?

  Do you have a lawyer? Who is it? Why isn’t your lawyer making any statements?

  Are you working on any paintings now?

  The hotel says you like to go fishing in the afternoon. Where did you go?

  Well. Steve had clearly not gotten the hint. I shrank away from them. I knew that if I waved my hand and said Sorry, that would suit their purposes as well as an interview. Reclusive fisherman-artist-maybe-turned-vigilante refuses comment. We caught him returning from an afternoon fishing.

  I needed a smoke. I couldn’t smoke anywhere in the hotel except the roof and I didn’t want to lead the wolf pack up there. The anger, the hatred of this spectacle boiled up. The girl had advanced uncertainly and held out her mic and said, almost pleading, Mr. Stegner, can I have a few words?

  Something about her diffidence struck me, and that she hadn’t hit the right note yet with her dress and makeup. She was probably from one of the pueblos. She needed a break. I felt for her. What the hell.

  I pivoted like a bullfighter. The extended digital recorders recoiled. Having a rep as a suspected violent killer has its advantages. The reporters clammed up in unison. I walked right up to the newscaster. She stiffened, blinked, realized she probably had her story and unleashed a guileless and grateful smile. Okay, I was ready. She cleared her throat, looked down at a folded page of notes in her left hand, and spoke into the mic: “Here, just getting back from the river, we think, is our famous Taos artist Jim Stegner. He is a dedicated outdoorsman and a fanatic fly fisherman and tonight he has perhaps just returned from a long afternoon on the Rio Grande. Were you fishing?”