Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  “Van Dorn could have used a few sales.”

  “No question. The poor bastard didn’t live long enough to come into fashion. But orange is for anguish and blue means insanity? Tell that to Stuyvesant and he’ll throw you out of his office.”

  Myers took off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I feel so . . . Maybe you’re right.”

  “There’s no maybe about it. I am right. You need food, a shower, and sleep. A painting’s a combination of color and shape that people either like or they don’t. The artist follows his instincts, uses whatever techniques he can master, and does his best. But if there’s a secret in Van Dorn’s work, it isn’t a color code.”

  Myers finished his second beer and blinked in distress. “You know what I found out yesterday?”

  I shook my head.

  “The critics who devoted themselves to analyzing Van Dorn . . .”

  “What about them?”

  “They went insane, the same as he did.”

  “What? No way. I’ve studied Van Dorn’s critics. They’re as conventional and boring as Stuyvesant.”

  “You mean the mainstream scholars. The safe ones. I’m talking about the truly brilliant ones. The ones who haven’t been recognized for their genius, just as Van Dorn wasn’t recognized.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “They suffered. The same as Van Dorn.”

  “They were put in an asylum?”

  “Worse than that?”

  “Myers, don’t make me ask.”

  “The parallels are amazing. They each tried to paint. In Van Dorn’s style. And just like Van Dorn, they stabbed out their eyes.”

  I guess it’s obvious by now—Myers was what you might call “high-strung.” No negative judgment intended. In fact, his excitability was one of the reasons I liked him. That and his imagination. Hanging around with him was never dull. He loved ideas. Learning was his passion. And he passed his excitement on to me.

  The truth is, I needed all the inspiration I could get. I wasn’t a bad artist. Not at all. On the other hand, I wasn’t a great one either. As I neared the end of grad school, I had painfully come to realize that my work would never be more than “interesting.” I didn’t want to admit it, but I’d probably end up as a commercial artist in an advertising agency.

  That night, however, Myers’s imagination wasn’t inspiring. It was scary. He was always going through phases of enthusiasm. El Greco, Picasso, Pollock. Each had preoccupied him to the point of obsession, only to be abandoned for another favorite and another. When he’d fixated on Van Dorn, I’d assumed it was merely one more infatuation.

  But the chaos of Van Dorn prints in his room made clear he’d reached a greater excess of compulsion. I was skeptical about his insistence that there was a secret in Van Dorn’s work. After all, great art can’t be explained. You can analyze its technique, you can diagram its symmetry, but ultimately there’s a mystery words can’t communicate. Genius can’t be summarized. As far as I could tell, Myers had been using the word secret as a synonym for indescribable brilliance.

  When I realized he literally meant that Van Dorn had a secret, I was appalled. The distress in his eyes was equally appalling. His references to insanity, not only in Van Dorn but in his critics, made me worry that Myers himself was having a breakdown. Stabbed out their eyes, for Christ’s sake?

  I stayed up with Myers till 5:00 A.M., trying to calm him, to convince him he needed a few days’ rest. We finished the six-pack I’d brought, the six-pack in my refrigerator, and another six-pack I bought from an art student down the hall. At dawn, just before Myers dozed off and I staggered back to my room, he murmured that I was right. He needed a break, he said. Tomorrow he’d call his folks. He’d ask if they’d pay his plane fare back to Denver.

  Hungover, I didn’t wake up until late afternoon. Disgusted that I’d missed my classes, I showered and managed to ignore the taste of last night’s pizza. I wasn’t surprised when I phoned Myers and got no answer. He probably felt as shitty as I did. But after sunset, when I called again, then knocked on his door, I started to worry. His door was locked, so I went downstairs to get the landlady’s key. That’s when I saw the note in my mail slot.

  Meant what I said. Need a break. Went home.

  Will be in touch. Stay cool. Paint well.

  I love you, pal. Your friend forever.

  Myers

  My throat ached. He never came back. I saw him only twice after that. Once in New York, and once in . . .

  Let’s talk about New York. I finished my graduate project, a series of landscapes that celebrated Iowa’s big-sky-rolling, dark-earthed, wooded hills. A local patron paid fifty dollars for one of them. I gave three to the university’s hospital. The rest are who knows where.

  Too much has happened.

  As I predicted, the world wasn’t waiting for my good-but-not-great efforts. I ended where I belonged, as a commercial artist for a Madison Avenue advertising agency. My beer cans are the best in the business.

  I met a smart, attractive woman who worked in the marketing department of a cosmetics firm. One of my agency’s clients. Professional conferences led to personal dinners and intimate evenings that lasted all night. I proposed. She agreed.

  We’d live in Connecticut, she said. Of course.

  When the time was right, we might have children, she said.

  Of course.

  Myers phoned me at the office. I don’t know how he knew where I was. I remember his breathless voice.

  “I found it,” he said.

  “Myers?” I grinned. “Is it really—How are you? Where have—”

  “I’m telling you. I found it!”

  “I don’t know what you’re—”

  “Remember? Van Dorn’s secret!”

  In a rush, I did remember—the excitement Myers could generate, the wonderful, expectant conversations of my youth—the days and especially the nights when ideas and the future beckoned. “Van Dorn? Are you still—”

  “Yes! I was right! There was a secret!”

  “You crazy bastard, I don’t care about Van Dorn. But I care about you! Why did you—I never forgave you for disappearing.”

  “I had to. Couldn’t let you hold me back. Couldn’t let you—”

  “For your own good!”

  “So you thought. But I was right!”

  “Where are you?”

  “Exactly where you’d expect me to be.”

  “For the sake of old friendship, Myers, don’t piss me off. Where are you?”

  “The Metropolitan Museum of Art.”

  “Will you stay there, Myers? While I catch a cab? I can’t wait to see you.”

  “I can’t wait for you to see what I see!”

  I postponed a deadline, canceled two appointments, and told my fiancée I couldn’t meet her for dinner. She sounded miffed. But Myers was all that mattered.

  He stood beyond the pillars at the entrance. His face was haggard, but his eyes were like stars. I hugged him. “Myers, it’s so good to—”

  “I want you to see something. Hurry.”

  He tugged at my coat, rushing.

  “But where have you been?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” We entered the Postimpressionist gallery. Bewildered, I followed Myers and let him anxiously sit me on a bench before Van Dorn’s Fir Trees at Sunrise.

  I’d never seen the original. Prints couldn’t compare. After a year of drawing ads for feminine beauty aids, I was devastated. Van Dorn’s power brought me close to . . .

  Tears.

  For my visionless skills.

  For the youth I’d abandoned a year before.

  “Look!” Myers said. He raised his arm and gestured toward the painting.

  I frowned. I looked.

  It took time—an hour, two hours—and the coaxing vision of Myers. I concentrated. And then, at last, I saw.

  Profound admiration changed to . . .

  My heart raced. As Myers traced his hand across
the painting one final time, as a guard who had been watching us with increasing wariness stalked forward to stop him from touching the canvas, I felt as if a cloud had dispersed and a lens had focused.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “You see? The bushes, the trees, the branches?”

  “Yes! Oh God, yes! Why didn’t I—”

  “Notice before? Because it doesn’t show up in the prints,” Myers said. “Only in the originals. And the effect’s so deep, you have to study them—”

  “Forever.”

  “It seems that long. But I knew. I was right.”

  “A secret.”

  When I was a boy, my father—how I loved him—took me mushroom hunting. We drove from town, climbed a barbed-wire fence, walked through a forest, and reached a slope of dead elms. My father told me to search the top of the slope while he checked the bottom.

  An hour later, he came back with two large paper sacks filled with mushrooms. I hadn’t found even one.

  “I guess your spot was lucky,” I said.

  “But they’re all around you,” my father said.

  “All around me? Where?”

  “You didn’t look hard enough.”

  “I crossed this slope five times.”

  “You searched, but you didn’t really see,” my father said. He picked up a long stick and pointed it toward the ground.

  “Focus your eyes toward the end of the stick.”

  I did . . .

  And I’ve never forgotten the hot excitement that surged through my stomach. The mushrooms appeared as if by magic. They’d been there all along, of course, so perfectly adapted to their surroundings, their color so much like dead leaves, their shape so much like bits of wood and chunks of rock that they’d been invisible to ignorant eyes. But once my vision adjusted, once my mind reevaluated the visual impressions it received, I saw mushrooms everywhere, seemingly thousands of them. I’d been standing on them, walking over them, staring at them, and hadn’t realized.

  I felt an infinitely greater shock when I saw the tiny faces Myers made me recognize in Van Dorn’s Fir Trees at Sunrise. Most were smaller than a quarter of an inch, hints and suggestions, dots and curves, blended perfectly with the landscape. They weren’t exactly human, although they did have mouths, noses, and eyes. Each mouth was a black, gaping maw, each nose a jagged gash, the eyes dark sinkholes of despair. The twisted faces seemed to be screaming in total agony. I could almost hear their anguished shrieks, their tortured wails. I thought of damnation. Of hell.

  As soon as I noticed the faces, they emerged from the swirling texture of the painting in such abundance that the landscape became an illusion, the grotesque faces reality. The fir trees turned into an obscene cluster of writhing arms and pain-racked torsos.

  I stepped back in shock an instant before the guard would have pulled me away.

  “Don’t touch the—” the guard said.

  Myers had already rushed to point at another Van Dorn, the original Cypresses in a Hollow. I followed, and now that my eyes knew what to look for, I saw small, tortured faces in every branch and rock. The canvas swarmed with them.

  “Jesus.”

  “And this!”

  Myers hurried to Sunflowers at Harvest Time, and again, as if a lens had changed focus, I no longer saw flowers but anguished faces and twisted limbs. I lurched back, felt a bench against my legs, and sat.

  “You were right,” I said.

  The guard stood nearby, scowling.

  “Van Dorn did have a secret,” I said. I shook my head in astonishment.

  “It explains everything,” Myers said. “These agonized faces give his work depth. They’re hidden, but we sense them. We feel the anguish beneath the beauty.”

  “But why would he—”

  “I don’t think he had a choice. His genius drove him insane. It’s my guess that this is how he literally saw the world. These faces are the demons he wrestled with. The festering products of his insanity. And they’re not just an illustrator’s gimmick. Only a genius could have painted them for all the world to see and yet have so perfectly infused them into the landscape that no one would see. Because he took them for granted in a terrible way.”

  “No one? You saw, Myers.”

  He smiled. “Maybe that means I’m crazy.”

  “I doubt it, friend.” I returned his smile. “It does mean you’re persistent. This’ll make your reputation.”

  “But I’m not through yet,” Myers said.

  I frowned.

  “So far all I’ve got is a fascinating case of optical illusion. Tortured souls writhing beneath, perhaps producing, incomparable beauty. I call them ‘secondary images.’ In your ad work, I guess they’d be called ‘subliminal.’ But this isn’t commercialism. This is a genuine artist who had the brilliance to use his madness as an ingredient in his vision. I need to go deeper.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The paintings here don’t provide enough examples. I’ve seen his work in Paris and Rome, in Zurich and London. I’ve borrowed from my parents to the limits of their patience and my conscience. But I’ve seen, and I know what I have to do. The anguished faces began in 1889, when Van Dorn left Paris in disgrace. His early paintings were abysmal. He settled in La Verge in the South of France. Six months later, his genius suddenly exploded. In a frenzy, he painted. He returned to Paris. He showed his work, but no one appreciated it. He kept painting, kept showing. Still no one appreciated it. He returned to La Verge, reached the peak of his genius, and went totally insane. He had to be committed to an asylum, but not before he stabbed out his eyes. That’s my dissertation. I intend to parallel his course. To match his paintings with his biography, to show how the faces increased and became more severe as his madness worsened. I want to dramatize the turmoil in his soul as he imposed his twisted vision on each landscape.”

  It was typical of Myers to take an excessive attitude and make it even more excessive. Don’t misunderstand. His discovery was important. But he didn’t know when to stop. I’m not an art historian, but I’ve read enough to know that what’s called “psychological criticism,” the attempt to analyze great art as a manifestation of neuroses, is considered off-the-wall. If Myers handed Stuyvesant a psychological dissertation, the pompous bastard would have a fit.

  That was one misgiving I had about what Myers planned to do with his discovery. Another troubled me more. I intend to parallel Van Dorn’s course, he’d said. After we left the museum and walked through Central Park, I realized how literally Myers meant it.

  “I’m going to southern France,” he said.

  I stared in surprise. “You don’t mean—”

  “La Verge? That’s right. I want to write my dissertation there.”

  “But—”

  “What place could be more appropriate? It’s the village where Van Dorn suffered his nervous breakdown and eventually went insane. If it’s possible, I’ll even rent the same room he did.”

  “Myers, this sounds too far out, even for you.”

  “But it makes perfect sense. I need to immerse myself. I need atmosphere, a sense of history. So I can put myself in the mood to write.”

  “The last time you immersed yourself, you crammed your room with Van Dorn prints, didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t bathe. I hope—”

  “I admit I got too involved. But last time I didn’t know what I was looking for. Now that I’ve found it, I’m in good shape.”

  “You look strung out to me.”

  “An optical illusion.” Myers grinned.

  “Come on, I’ll treat you to drinks and dinner.”

  “Sorry. Can’t. I’ve got a plane to catch.”

  “You’re leaving tonight? But I haven’t seen you since—”

  “You can buy me that dinner when I finish the dissertation.”

  I never did. I saw him only one more time. Because of the letter he sent two months later. Or asked his nurse to send. She wrote down what he’d said and added an explanat
ion of her own. He’d blinded himself, of course.

  You were right. Shouldn’t have gone. But when did I ever take advice? Always knew better, didn’t I? Now it’s too late. What I showed you that day at the Met—God help me, there’s so much more. Found the truth. Can’t bear it. Don’t make my mistake. Don’t look ever again, I beg you, at Van Dorn’s paintings. Can’t stand the pain. Need a break. Going home. Stay cool. Paint well. Love you, pal. Your friend forever,

  Myers

  In her postscript, the nurse apologized for her English. She sometimes took care of aged Americans on the Riviera, she said, and had to learn the language. But she understood what she heard better than she could speak it or write it, and hoped that what she’d written made sense. It didn’t, but that wasn’t her fault. Myers had been in great pain, sedated with morphine, not thinking clearly, she said. The miracle was that he’d managed to be coherent at all.

  Your friend was staying at our only hotel. The manager says that he slept little and ate even less. His research was obsessive. He filled his room with reproductions of Van Dorn’s work. He tried to duplicate Van Dorn’s daily schedule. He demanded paints and canvas, refused all meals, and wouldn’t answer his door. Three days ago, a scream woke the manager. The door was blocked. It took three men to break it down. Your friend used the sharp end of a paintbrush to stab out his eyes. The clinic here is excellent. Physically your friend will recover, although he will never see again. But I worry about his mind.

  Myers had said he was going home. It had taken a week for the letter to reach me. I assumed his parents would have been informed immediately by phone or telegram. He was probably back in the States by now. I knew his parents lived in Denver, but I didn’t know their first names or address, so I got in touch with information and phoned every Myers in Denver until I made contact. Not with his parents but with a family friend watching their house. Myers hadn’t been flown to the States. His parents had gone to the South of France. I caught the next available plane. Not that it matters, but I was supposed to be married that weekend.