The Center of the World

by Thomas van Essen

  “I will give you a pose,” he said, “and ask you to hold it for about five minutes by my watch. And then another, and so forth.” He took his watch out of his waistcoat pocket and placed it on the ledge of his easel. I took my shirt off as he bade. Although Turner had taken pains to make the room as warm as possible, I felt goose bumps form on my flesh. I looked down at Turner and was relieved to see that he was not staring at me, but still setting up his materials.

  “Ah, there you are,” he said after a few moments. I felt him look me over critically. “You will do.” He gave me a kind smile. “Are you comfortable? Warm enough? Not sure what I can do to make it warmer, so I hope the heat will suffice.”

  I assured him that I was warm enough, but confessed to being a little uncomfortable.

  “Most natural thing in the world. But you could make a career of this. Not that I would recommend it. As you shall see, it is tedious work. And I am a reasonable man, while many of my brethren are tight-fisted reprobates. Now, turn your back to me and clasp your hands behind your neck. Good. Shift your weight so that you place most of it on your left side. Now keep very still. You may amuse yourself with the thought that you are a pagan youth awaiting a visitation from the gods.”

  I did what I could to banish the incongruity of my position from my thoughts by looking out onto the park. A herd of deer was grazing in the middle distance, bending their heads down to the horse chestnuts. Traces of yellow and red were starting to appear in the trees. Formations of geese wheeled through the sky. I could hear the sound of Turner’s pencil scraping against the paper.

  “Good. Now put your hands down. Rest a moment. You have lovely muscles on your back. Not so bulky as the Horse Guards I used to sketch at the Academy, but nicely articulated. You will not do for a hero, but you will make an excellent Athenian youth. Or perhaps one of those poor blokes the gods are always falling in love with. Doomed, of course. Or, if I was in that line, a first-rate Saint Sebastian.”

  I put my hands in my pockets for warmth. I felt vaguely foolish looking down on him, as if I were going out for a stroll and had simply forgotten my shirt. But I also felt flattered by his remarks. “I don’t fancy being Saint Sebastian,” I said.

  “You would not get the point of it, would you?” Turner asked. He broke into a hearty laugh. I smiled as best I could, more at the sight of his laughter than at the humor of the thing.

  He wiped his eyes. “We must get back to work, although it does a soul good to laugh. Let us try another. Face me, and now turn a bit to the side. Turn your head also to the side. Raise your left hand and point to something outside the window there.” I did as I was told.

  “This will be harder for you, but I’ll try to be quick.” Turner worked steadily for a moment or two, his eyes moving rapidly between me and his work. He muttered to himself as he worked, seeming more and more agitated about something. At last he cried out, “Damn,” and threw a piece of chalk to the ground. “Those trousers,” he said, “do you mind?”

  I broke the pose and looked at him.

  “I cannot leave the nineteenth century. Lord Egremont has asked me to do a classical composition. I wanted to do these sketches of you to help me in my thinking. But those trousers. It is impossible.” He gave me the most pathetic look.

  Knowing that if I thought about it for more than a moment I would be lost, I took the plunge into unknown waters. I sat down on the edge of the platform and quickly divested myself of my trousers, stood up, and resumed the pose.

  Turner went back to his drawing. In the moments that followed, something remarkable occurred. I cannot do justice to it, but I will try.

  I concentrated on the place in the distance at which my finger pointed, trying to see whatever was there with all of my being. Turner and the sound of his pencil disappeared; my sense of my ridiculous position quite faded away. It seemed to me that I had left this world of steam trains and parliamentary debates. I was one of Cortés’s men in Keats’s poem, standing high above some unknown world and about to see something no man had seen before. And then it seemed that I had become the Greek youth in the painting that Turner was creating. I looked out at the far trees of Petworth Park, at the very reach of my vision. I saw what I can only describe as a bright shadow on the physical world, and I knew in the depths of my heart that a goddess was making her appearance. I cannot say now what she looked like. No images remain in my mind. But I still have a sense of a beauty beyond all beauty that I had ever seen or imagined. My heart, I know, began to beat faster, and my body grew moist, as if I had been anointed with precious oils. I felt myself quiver with joy and worship.

  But then I heard Turner gasp and the spell was broken. The goddess or the vision or whatever it was disappeared. It was if I had awakened from a dream and into a nightmare in which I was stark naked and in a most embarrassing state of excitement in front of a queer old painter in his drafty studio. I broke the pose in a panic, and looked about for something to cover my nakedness. Before I could speak Turner tossed me a robe, which I quickly donned. I sat down on the edge of the platform, still breathing hard. Turner handed me another glass of sherry, which I accepted gratefully.

  There was something tender and solicitous about Turner’s aspect that touched my heart. “How long,” I asked, “had I been holding that pose?”

  Turner consulted his watch and then his sketch pad. A look of amazement passed over his face. “Seemed more than five minutes’ work. We were both gone. Seventeen minutes by this watch. Is not your arm sore?”

  I had not thought about my arm, as my mind was full with the wonder of what had just happened and with the vain attempt to capture the vision before it fled. But I realized that it was indeed quite sore and that it hung like a dead thing at my side. I explained to Turner what had happened.

  “Rum,” he said. “From my side it started out plain enough. But then the frenzy came over me. That’s what I call it. Happens rarely enough. The work seems to make itself, as though I’m a mere medium for some other power. Wish it would happen more often. But your body seemed almost to glow with light. Something in my mind, I suppose. Inspiration and so forth. Sweat, most likely. But that is enough for today. Enough. You should get dressed. Perhaps, if you would be so kind, we could try again. You and I, perhaps we can take a ramble in the park now.”

  I gathered up my clothing and went behind the screen to get dressed. I could hear Turner putting away his materials.

  “Funny about the gods. They’re a damn hard business. They are long gone in this miserable nineteenth century of ours. The groves are empty and so forth. Still, I sometimes imagine I catch a glimpse of them. Or see what they might be if they existed, if you follow me. You can walk about the park all you like. See deer. Foxes. Flocks of fowl. Most wonderful songbirds. Marvelous light. Color. Shades between shades never seen before. But no gods. They are gone. Decamped to who knows where. Railways and machines took their place. Who knows? But sometimes, when I look about me, I sense that they were here, that they have just departed. It is hard to explain. They leave behind a scent in the light. As though an attractive woman’s been in the room. Only her scent remains. But in light. The residue of their glory in the world. An odd business.”

  . 24 .

  SUSAN DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING on the ride home, except that she was going to sleep in the guest bedroom and she didn’t want to have a serious conversation with a drunk. It was the first time we’d had this kind of issue in our marriage, and neither of us quite knew what to do. The days following were a miserable round of fruitless arguments. She was hurt and angry; I was abject and embarrassed. I am a weak and inconsiderate person, I said. I’m sorry. There’s nothing between Ruth and me; there never was anything between Ruth and me; I don’t even like her particularly. I had drunk too much wine because all those university people reminded me that I had failed in what I wanted to make of my life; I had kissed her because her willingness to kiss me made me feel special at a moment when I felt like shit. I wouldn’t have given in to t
he temptation if it hadn’t been for the wine.

  All this was true enough, but it didn’t make Susan less angry; nor was it, of course, the real truth. I couldn’t bring myself to tell Susan about the painting, so I couldn’t explain what I had been seeking in Ruth Carpenter’s lips.

  Eight days after the party Susan announced that there was a weekend meeting in Cleveland that she had to attend. She told me that she would be leaving from the office on Friday and coming back on Monday.

  “Cleveland on the weekend?” I said. “That’s sort of odd.”

  She explained that her firm was working on an acquisition for a drug company and that the weekend was the only time they could get everyone involved together. There was a lot of money at stake, she said, so no wasn’t really an option, but I felt that she was still so angry that she would have jumped at any chance to get away from me for a few days.

  As we were having breakfast on Friday, I saw how right I was. She pointed to a slip of paper that was stuck to the refrigerator. “I left Ruth’s number up there, so you don’t have to look it up.”

  There was nothing to say that hadn’t been said already. I tossed the slip of paper into the trash.

  “Look,” I said. “I know I deserve it. I’ve said I’m sorry a hundred times. I’ll say it again, if you want. But I’m going to the mountains while you’re gone; I was happy up there by myself. I made an appointment to talk to Eddy about the repairs.”

  I woke at three on Saturday morning and drove up through the dawn. After all the unpleasantness of the previous week, I took comfort in the way that Helen seemed projected against the sky as I drove. The highway only existed to lead to her.

  Looking back, I suppose I was crazy. When the sun rose over the Berkshires, I saw it was a poor copy of the sun in my painting. I thought of Helen and remembered a night when Susan and I had stopped at a cheap motel on the side of the highway. When I came in from my shower she was lying naked on the bed, opened up like a hundred other women who had slept there before her. But she was mine and I was hers, and we went at each other with a mixture of tenderness and passion that made sense of my life. Only an ass would throw all that away for Ruth Carpenter’s needy kisses.

  But then it occurred to me how odd Susan’s weekend business trip was. I tried to recall if anything like this had ever happened before and couldn’t. In retrospect, I see that I was trying to justify my own bad behavior and, perhaps, pave the way for some that was to come, but I suddenly knew with a horrible clarity that as revenge for those soggy kisses and the humiliation she’d endured in front of her Princeton friends, she had gone to Cleveland to have an affair. Maybe she’d been having one all along, I thought. She wouldn’t let go of Ruth Carpenter because she needed to justify her own cheating.

  At any rate, I decided, there probably was a meeting; it was just that he was going to be there too. It was no doubt some guy from the office. They each had a room at the Marriott, just two colleagues in line to check in. They rode up in the elevator together, and he got off first to drop off his suitcase. She had slipped him the extra key to her room and when he came in, she was naked and waiting, just as she had been for me so many years before.

  I drove on in a fever compounded of my fantasies of what Susan was doing and my fear that the painting might be gone, or that it might be some pale imitation of what it had become in my imagination. By the time I got to the lake my hands were shaking, and it was with great difficulty that I opened the door to the barn.

  The bundle was still where I had left it. I unwrapped it carefully and placed the painting against the wall. The plaque still read The Center of the World, J.M.W. Turner.

  My memories were inadequate to what I saw. That is the paradox of the story I am trying to tell: no words of mine nor even my memories are adequate to the thing itself. Every time I saw the painting I was overwhelmed by the sense that I had not really seen it before. Every time I try to recall it, I am aware that my memory is a poor shadow. Paris, I saw, had the body of a hero, but there was a hint of feminine softness which suggested that his inevitable union with Helen was nothing less than the fated rejoining of flesh that had been sundered. The musculature of his back was so beautifully rendered that I could read his desire in his flesh. But the desire I saw inscribed there was also my own, and I understood that I had never known desire before.

  Waves of yearning and sorrow and beauty washed over me, just as the sea in the painting washed up on the shore. I heard Helen’s music again, strange tunes in an unfamiliar scale that sounded like red and golden leaves falling from the trees. Helen had been playing her lyre as she awaited Paris’s arrival. It was this music, floating through the halls of the tower, that drowned out the clash and roar of combat on the field; it was this music that had called Paris to her chamber. She had leaned the lyre against the side of her table. I could see that the strings were still vibrating.

  Sensation after sensation broke over me. I was possessed and ravaged, mastered, overcome, coaxed, and beaten. It was everything I had ever wanted.

  Not until late afternoon did I finally come back into myself. I walked back to the house, my knees weak. I made some coffee. I went down to the lake with the steaming mug and sat on the dock. The sky had clouded over; it looked like rain. The sky was the same gray as the water; the color was drained out of the trees on the far shore. It was perfectly quiet. My mind was empty. I had no fears and no desires.

  . 25 .

  To: arthur@madisonpartners.com

  From: gbolton@madisonpartners.com

  Subject: Petworth

  I went down to Petworth yesterday to visit Mrs. Spencer. I spent some time in London looking through all the standard material on Turner and Egremont to see if I could find any references to her, but no luck. She seems like a remarkable person—I am half in love with her—but she is a blank as far as history is concerned.

  She’s hanging on the west end of the central corridor in the picture gallery. The only other time I went to Petworth I didn’t pay any particular attention to Jessica, but I was familiar with the image from reproductions. It’s an odd painting. I stood in front of it for an hour, trying to get past the various things I knew about it to get to the moment where I could finally “see the thing itself for what it is,” as you say. It was difficult.

  The inescapable fact about Jessica is that it is the only large-scale oil painting in Turner’s enormous oeuvre whose subject is a human figure. It’s a passive picture in a way, but I could feel his struggle with Rembrandt as I stood before it, and it wasn’t pretty. The great Turners are effortless encounters with the painters he admires. Claude survives, not greater than the Turner, but somehow elevated as well.

  But that isn’t the case with Jessica. She is looking, as you know, out of the window, the extravagance of gold paint behind her. She is decorated with jewels and lace, as if she was in a Rembrandt or a Hals, but Turner can’t or doesn’t care to compete with the Dutchmen the way that he competes with the light, the landscape, and the architectural space in Claude. He is not in love with things. He loves light and nature and the sweep of history. As Jessica leans forward, the lace mantilla she wears hangs over the window frame. We see through it and are meant (or, perhaps, think we are meant) to admire the painterly skill that allows him to represent transparent lace, but Turner doesn’t love lace well enough to paint it perfectly and I half suspect he wanted us to know it.

  The real struggle is with the body. The standard line is that Turner couldn’t do bodies; the human figures in his paintings seem oddly boneless and one-dimensional. In Jessica, for example, her arms are mere tubes of flesh and the hand that reaches out toward the cord on the window is so badly foreshortened that it almost looks like a Thalidomide baby’s flipper. But he was a fine draftsman and we can see from his academic figure studies that he was able to represent the male and the female nude in a competent Old Master style. The bodies in those studies are fleshy, articulated, and expressive.

  There is a sketchbook in the T
ate where Turner lays out the composition for Jessica; on the same page is a quick pencil sketch of a reclining nude; she is not rendered in much detail, but I assume she is Mrs. Spencer. There are at least two questions here: What was the mistress of one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in England doing posing nude for Turner, and Why did he represent her body as he did?

  I think Turner was having an affair with her. Wyndham describes her as a woman who wasn’t bound by conventional notions of morality and who spent more time with Turner than was decent. Egremont was a very old man. And Turner—we know from those stories of his bastard children—was devoted to the flesh.

  I think there is a private joke built into Jessica, which no one has been able to notice because they didn’t know about Mrs. Spencer. The painting was exhibited with the inscription “Shylock—Jessica shut the window, I say.” It’s been pointed out that there is no such line in Shakespeare. “Shylock” equals Egremont, the man of wealth. His command to shut the window is an expression of a rich man’s possessiveness. Jessica/Mrs. Spencer is being shut in and being told to keep her legs together. We can also now make better sense of the famous yellow background. We know the old story of the after-dinner conversation during which someone said that Turner’s yellows were fine enough for landscapes, but they wouldn’t do for portraits. Turner rose (or failed to rise, as many would argue) to the challenge by producing Jessica and was rewarded with the famous line about the “lady climbing out of a large mustard pot.” But it is not mustard that frames the lady—it is gold: gold that symbolizes Egremont’s wealth and, quite literally, the gold paint that is Turner’s signature. Jessica is embraced by Turner’s signature gold/yellow. Jessica is a sly memorial of an affair between the artist and his model.

  This also explains, I think, her body, and the fact that Jessica was not, according to Wyndham, a good likeness. As I tried to see Jessica’s body beneath her dress, I felt that the painting was almost aggressive in refusing that view. The tubelike arms direct the viewer toward the large and illuminated (but oddly flat) expanse of bosom and the pensive face above. The corsetlike dress binds the body in a row of horizontal bands and encrusts it in a vertical row of jeweled buttons. There is some small sense of volume and depth, but mostly the shape of the body is indicated by the cinched waist and the width of her hips and shoulders. As Turner lays out the composition in his sketchbook, Mrs. Spencer is shown with a waist reduced to almost waspish proportions by a tightly laced corset. She is not yet wearing the lace mantilla, and her voluminous bosom is on display. One gets a strong sense of the body beneath the garment, with the flesh almost spilling out at the top of the dress. In the painting Turner has repressed the body in order to hide his carnal knowledge of his patron’s mistress.