by John Muncie
“Better keep your Pratt job, gramps,” Joel said. “By the way, have you told Margaux yet?”
“Sure. She knows I’ll be gone this summer.”
“No. I mean the other thing. The ‘Let’s take a few steps back’ thing.”
“Not exactly.”
Joel repeated the flapping motion with his arms. “Cluck-cluck-cluck!”
The road ended in a sunny clearing and a large sign that declared, in plain black script, “Limespring Art Center, Markham, Virginia.” Tug pulled up and got out. Ahead of him, forty yards away, was a long, low wooden building with a wide covered porch neatly punctuated by four green Adirondack chairs. To his left was a gravel path that led to an area of lawn, big maple trees, and some aging cabins. Behind him was New York City and a life he wasn’t sure of anymore.
He walked up the steps of the porch and knocked on a door marked “Office.”
CHAPTER 2
Tug ran his hand down the neck of the horse. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine the muscle, bone, and tendons under the skin. He tried to feel what Leonardo da Vinci must have felt, to know what he had known before he transformed the shapes of a fifteenth-century horse into contour lines and crosshatchings and revealed the living engine underneath.
Tug stroked the animal’s chest. All he felt was horsehide.
He opened his eyes. His drawing pad was covered in pencil sketches of horses and horse parts, mostly heads and legs. They were recognizably equine—in the way that a bottle of Boone’s Farm is recognizably wine.
The horse stood behind a board fence. Except for white patches on its forehead and back legs, it was the rich brown color of a polished mahogany desk. Tug hadn’t thought of horses as so big, with such massive necks and curves. This one seemed practically prehistoric, like some kind of extinct creature that shared the Ice Age with mastodons. He couldn’t imagine having something this big for a pet.
Still, it seemed friendly enough. Yesterday the horse had wandered up to the fence, sniffed a couple of times, and then wandered off. Today Tug had brought a handful of carrots that he’d liberated from the relish plate at last night’s dinner, thinking it might make the horse hang around the fence longer. It had worked, and now the horse nuzzled his empty hand looking for more.
After six days at Limespring, he’d established a routine. In the mornings he was outside sketching; he spent middays in his studio reworking the sketches and roughing out scenes; in the late afternoon he was back outside with the sketchpad. After dinner he’d return, at least briefly, to the studio.
His first subjects were close by: torn cabin screens, tree roots in Limespring Creek, the broken wing of a cicada. Then he explored the surrounding countryside, adding wooden barns, tractors, rock walls, and horses to his portfolio.
As a kid, Tug had drawn constantly—spaceships, cartoon characters, portraits, but mostly comic books. He’d come up with his own series starring Poundo Man, a superhero who could turn his arms into giant sledgehammers and batter the bad guys. He’d based Poundo Man on his father, Alvin Sr., who worked at the Mack factory, pounding metal into trucks.
But as a student at the Pratt Institute he became captivated by the movement and energy of kinetic sculpture. They were like comic books come to life. He studied ready-mades and collage and was inspired by the works of Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Ed Kienholz. For the past fifteen years he had confined his drawing to schematics for installations or to sketch out suggestions at the sculpture classes he taught at the institute.
He wanted to start over at Limespring, so he began like an art school freshman. First he practiced gestural drawings with charcoal, the roughest of techniques. Without even looking at the sketchpad, he would try with just a few quick strokes and scribbles to make his hand capture the essence of what he was seeing. After a couple of days he began using pencils for more detailed renderings.
It was frustrating at times. He was out of shape, a couch potato training for a marathon. But he liked the straightforward challenge of representational art: find the fundamental geometry in nature, turn three dimensions into two, make it live again.
He also liked the easy pace of things at Limespring, though at first the nights made him restless. He had to go cold turkey in a cabin with no phone, no TV, and no computer. The constant chirping of crickets made him jittery. But by the fourth evening he began to enjoy the calm. The streetlightless dark nights felt cool and soothing to his eyes; the air seemed thicker and softer here, cushioning him against his doubts, absorbing his worries. Maybe it was a Zen acceptance—not that he knew much about Zen—or maybe a synchronization with country rhythms. Whatever it was, the drawing came more easily and he was asleep by ten.
What extra time he had, he spent with Abbi Bondi, a longtime friend from the City and a Limespring veteran. She’d been encouraging him to apply to Limespring for years, but he’d never felt the need for it until the previous fall, when Leonardo da Vinci came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibit, called “Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman,” was huge, nearly two hundred drawings—the biggest ever assembled in the United States. There were scores of faces and figures, studies of light falling on drapery, fantastic machines, buildings, and riders on rearing horses.
Tug had gone to the show on a Tuesday morning. It was late in the run and the blockbuster crowds had diminished. For years he’d praised da Vinci’s compositions to students and recommended they copy them as drawing exercises. In his own student days he’d aped the master’s Head of the Virgin in Three-Quarter View using five different mediums.
But when he met the drawings face-to-face, his world changed. Some of them seemed to spring from the parchment with photographic realism; some swirled with suggestive pen strokes. All were filled with motion and life. More motion and life and breath than all the paintings in all the Chelsea galleries put together. More than anything he’d ever produced himself. He stood for ten minutes before a sketch of the head of a soldier, simply studying the vitality of his mouth.
His favorite drawing was the least significant. It appeared on a page covered with studies for a heroic statue. All of the figures depicted knights atop charging stallions, except for one. At the bottom of the parchment was the sketch of a little horse looking down at a barking dog. It was little more than a doodle, but in sixty-three lines—Tug counted them—da Vinci had completely captured the horse’s dignity and befuddlement.
That drawing reached out over five hundred years and grabbed Tug by the throat. It was utterly simple and charming. It was funny. It was genius.
He stared at the little horse and wished his father were there.
Alvin Dwight Palifax Sr. had died the year before at age fifty-seven from liver cancer. He had taken his illness as he took other misfortunes life had dealt him: with a shrug, a homily, and a joke. “Well, Tug, the Lord works in mysterious ways,” he said when he got the diagnosis. “But I wish he’d let me in on the secret.”
The cancer took six months to run its course. A horrible time in every way except that it gave the two of them time to say good-bye. Tug spent more time with his father in that half year than he had in the previous fifteen, and his father treated each of Tug’s visits like a special occasion, as if he’d been blessed with a month of Thanksgivings.
He would pump Tug for details of his latest art project, then shake his head in mock bewilderment. “People in New York have more money than brains,” he’d say. Or, “You know, Tug, if you put a tuxedo on a pig, it’s still a pig.” But he was proud of his son. He’d lined the back wall of the den in corkboard and covered it with newspaper clippings and magazine articles about Tug—along with pages and pages of Poundo Man.
Alvin Dwight Palifax Sr. took hard work for granted. Before he could drive, he was working weekends and after school at a nearby dairy farm. Through high school he worked the loading docks at Mack Trucks, and two weeks after graduation he started on the line, making body parts. Twenty-three years later, when the factory closed down, he became
a tool-and-die man. He filled his weekends with chores and projects. When he could no longer punch a clock or putter around in his garage workshop, the end came quickly.
On Tug’s next-to-last visit, his father was propped up on the living room couch. A college football game played on the TV with the sound off. Alvin Dwight Palifax Sr. tried to act as if he were just fighting a bad flu.
“You know, son,” he said, “I’ve gotten really smart in the last few months.”
“It’s about time, Pop,” said Tug.
“No. I’m serious,” he said. “I know that I don’t know a damn thing about your crazy art. Truth be told, I understood your comic books a whole lot better than those sculpture things you make. But I know they’re important to you.”
Tug’s father looked toward the hall to make sure they were alone.
“I never thought I’d be saying this—and I don’t want to say it too loud, because your mother’ll kill me. She’s already mad because I got this cancer. But you were right to go to art school. I’m glad you didn’t listen to us. You wouldn’t have been happy at that college in Pennsylvania. I know that now. Cancer has a way of smartening you up. I also know I couldn’t be any happier about how you turned out.”
Two weeks after Alvin Dwight Palifax Sr. died, Tug placed a sculpture on his father’s grave. It was a figure of a man made from old machine parts. The inscription on it read: “Poundo Man, 1944-2001.”
Tug looked at da Vinci’s horse in the bottom corner of the page. This is what it’s all about, Pop. Reaching out and touching someone with something you’ve created. Making them laugh or see things in a different way. I wish I could’ve shown you this exhibition. It might have helped you understand what I’m trying to do. But even if it hadn’t, you sure would have liked this little horse.
After spending nearly four hours at the exhibit, Tug went back to the studio he shared with two other Pratt teachers. Even before he walked inside he knew what he’d find—a room full of three-dimensional projects looking far flatter and more lifeless than what he’d seen earlier that day. He picked up one of his conglomerations. It was the beginning of a torso made out of Slinkies. Twenty-four hours before it had seemed clever and mildly subversive. Now it just seemed phony. There was no technique, no essence, and there sure as hell wasn’t any genius.
For a moment, he considered smashing it up. But the gesture seemed as phony as the art. He put it down and called Abbi. “Hey, sweets,” he said when she answered. “Can I come over? I want to know more about that arts colony you’ve been trying to get me to go to.”
In his fellowship application, he’d written that he wanted to “burn everything away until only the stroke of the pencil was left.” It was more than a phrase to catch the selection committee’s eye. He needed simplicity, he needed to start from the beginning. He needed sixty-three great lines.
The mahogany horse, bored with the carrotless artist, walked away, stopping now and then to crop tufts of grass. Tug leaned on the fence trying to capture the ovals that defined the horse’s haunches. Later, on the same page, he drew the curves of the meadow and the shadows that bounded it.
He sketched until the shadows took over, then closed up the pad and walked hurriedly back to Limespring. Dinner was at seven and Jackie Burke, the director, had told everyone not to be late because they had a special guest.
CHAPTER 3
“Who’s the blond?” Tug elbowed Abbi and nodded toward the dining room table where Jackie was sitting. Across from her was a woman with chin-length hair the color of butter. She was wearing blue shorts and a red T-shirt imprinted with the image of a windmill and the word “Oklahoma!” swooshing across in dramatic black letters.
“Down, boy,” said Abbi. “That blond’s married. Besides, you have a girlfriend, remember?”
Tug leaned back in his chair and held up his hands in surrender. “Just wondering who the new face is, that’s all.”
Abbi rolled her eyes. “Right. And I believe in the tooth fairy.”
The butter blond was telling a story to the six others at Jackie’s table. Her hands cut through the air as she talked, in a swooping, slicing language of their own, her face a gallery of expressions.
With his renewed sensitivity to shapes, Tug noted her combination of hard angles and soft curves. She had a short, sharp nose but rounded cheeks and full lips. Her jawline curved smoothly, while her chin was punctuated by a crooked dimple. Her thick, wavy hair bounced as she moved around.
As Tug watched, she got up halfway out of her chair, plopped back down, and made an extravagant wave with both arms. Her audience exploded with laughter.
“So, who did you say she was?” asked Tug. “And how do you know she’s married?”
“Her name’s Alyssa Brown,” said Abbi. “She lives right down the road. I’ve known her for years. She’s a drama teacher and every—”
Abbi stopped as Jackie rose from her chair and began clinking a fork against her glass to get the room’s attention. It wasn’t easy. The group was a rowdy one, full of noise. Almost half of the “Limeys,” as the fellows were called, were returning veterans, and three of them, Abbi included, had been coming each June for years. As a result, mealtimes seemed more like summer camp than arts colony, stopping just short of food fights. When the twenty-seven painters, sculptors, writers, composers, fabric artists, and lone filmmaker realized what Jackie was trying to do they started chanting, “Jack-ee, Jack-ee, Jack-ee . . .”
Since the first day of the summer session, they’d chanted her name every time she stood to make an announcement during the dinner hour. As usual, she turned red, which contrasted sharply with the cloud of white hair that fluffed around her face and made her look like a peppermint candy stick. She coughed, cleared her throat, and waited for them to settle down.
The spring session Limeys had been completely different. They’d stuck to their cabins and studios, emerging only for meals—if that. They had been loners with little camaraderie. Even the nightly after-dinner get-togethers that Limespring was known for—where fellows read from that day’s work or showed paintings in progress—were awkward sessions that ended quickly.
Not this group. And for that, Jackie was thankful. She looked forward to the summer Limeys all year. The central core was like a family, though they were generous enough to invite first-timers into the clan.
The social director of the little subset was thirty-eight-year-old Abbi, a writing teacher at City College in New York. She’d first come to Limespring nine years ago with twenty pages of a new novel that was a modernization of the Arabian Nights. Abbi had transformed poor fishermen into street vendors; her genies were Armenian rug sellers; Scheherazade was a high-class prostitute in the thrall of a drug lord. She’d written 679 pages since her first summer at Limespring yet had hardly put a dent into the thousand and one nights.
Abbi was slender, with wispy brown hair, an assertive nose she’d inherited from the Levinsky side of her family, and eyes as dark as Kalamata olives. Her left eyebrow always seemed arched in a perpetual parenthesis of irony. That night, sitting next to Tug, she wore her usual outfit—a long skirt in the purple family, black tank top, flip-flops, and earrings with dangling stars and moons.
If Abbi was the social director, then Marius Rheiner was the group’s court jester and mad scientist. In 1964, the twenty-year-old Marius had left his native Bohemia, in western Czechoslovakia, crossed the Iron Curtain, and eventually emigrated to the United States. He had Falstaffian dimensions and a voice that filled the room. “I’m the only real Bohemian artist in Limespring,” he’d say to newcomers. Unruly tufts of faded blond hair stuck out from his temples like handles; a perpetual three-day stubble of coarse white hairs made his face seem dipped in sand.
Marius had studied engineering in East Germany but for thirty years had been a sculptor of kinetics, a molder of motion. The previous summer, he’d installed Cohesive Particles of the Meanderer, No. 37 in the grassy field next to Limespring’s dairy barn/art studio. For No. 37
, he’d welded a motorized mixing blade inside a huge oil drum, then filled the tank with a concoction of liquid and metal flakes. When the mixing blade was turned on, it churned and spun everything so that it looked like a vat of molten fairy dust.
Marius was sitting at the table with Jackie Burke and the woman with the butter-colored hair. Next to him sat Nattie Gold, the third member of the summer regulars. Marius and Nattie were best friends, though some said there was more to it than that. Limespring’s longtime housekeeper Cora Beeson told Abbi—and anyone else who’d listen—that she’d seen Nattie and Marius walk hand in hand into the maze of giant boxwoods the previous summer and not come out for forty-five minutes.
Regardless of the nature of their relationship—Marius was married, Nattie divorced—they looked like Mutt and Jeff walking around together. She was as short as he was tall, and as wiry as he was stout. At fifty-three, her long red hair had whitened at the temples, and the sprays of freckles across her arms, legs, and cheeks had fused into faint amber planes.
She’d been a newspaper reporter in North Carolina, but a weekend art project—laying a mosaic in the entryway of a friend’s mountain cabin—had turned into a calling. Seven years before, she had given up ink for shattered tiles and become a professional mosaic artist. At first she filled in the financial gaps with her savings account. But in less than two years she’d laid so many floors that she was adding to rather than subtracting from her passbook.
“Okay, everybody,” Jackie said as the chanting subsided. “I have a couple of announcements and then I want to introduce you to a very special guest. First, Limespring is proud to announce that Jeremy Ring, our very own photographer/choreographer, who was a fellow two years ago, has been awarded one of those MacArthur genius grants.”
There was a brief swell of applause, during which Marius whispered to Nattie, “Ring’s a genius for appearing to be a genius.”