Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  But I’m an artist—or used to hope I was. I had skill without a vision. Now, God help me, I’ve got a vision. At first, I painted the cypresses and their secret. I accomplished what you’d expect. An imitation of Van Dorn’s original. But I refuse to suffer pointlessly. I vividly recall the portraits of midwestern landscapes I produced in graduate school. The dark-earthed Iowa landscape. The attempt to make an observer feel the fecundity of the soil. Second-rate Wyeth. But not anymore. The twenty paintings I’ve so far stored away aren’t versions of Van Dorn either. They’re my own creations. Unique. A combination of the disease and my experience. Aided by powerful memory, I paint the river that flows through Iowa City. Blue. I paint the cornfields that cram the big-sky rolling country outside town. Orange. I paint my innocence. My youth. With my ultimate discovery hidden within them. Ugliness lurks within the beauty. Horror festers in my brain.

  Clarisse at last told me about the local legend. In the Middle Ages, when La Verge was founded, she said, a meteor streaked from the sky. It lit the night. It burst upon the hills north of here. Flames erupted. Trees were consumed. The hour was late. Few villagers saw it. The site of the impact was too far away for those few witnesses to rush that night to see the crater. In the morning, the smoke had dispersed. The embers had died. Although the witnesses tried to find the meteor, the lack of the roads that now exist hampered their search through the tangled hills to the point of discouragement. A few among the few witnesses persisted. The few of the few of the few who had accomplished their quest staggered back to the village, babbling about headaches and tiny gaping mouths. Using sticks, they scraped disturbing images in the dirt and eventually stabbed out their eyes. Over the centuries, legend has it, similar self-mutilations occurred whenever someone returned from seeking the crater in those hills. The unknown had power then. The hills acquired the negative force of taboo. No villager, then or now, intruded on what came to be called the place where God’s wand touched the earth. A poetic description of a blazing meteor’s impact. La Verge.

  I don’t conclude the obvious: that the meteor carried spores that multiplied in the crater, which became a hollow eventually filled with cypresses. No—to me, the meteor was a cause but not an effect. I saw a pit among the cypresses, and from the pit, tiny mouths and writhing bodies resembling insects—how they wailed!—spewed. They clung to the leaves of the cypresses, flailed in anguish as they fell back, and instantly were replaced by other spewing anguished souls.

  Yes. Souls. For the meteor, I insist, was just the cause. To me, the effect was the opening of hell. The tiny wailing months are the damned. As I am damned. Desperate to survive, to escape from the ultimate prison we call hell, a frantic sinner lunged. He caught my eye and stabbed my brain, the gateway to my soul. My soul. It festers. I paint to remove the pus.

  I talk. That helps somehow. Clarisse writes it down while her female lover rubs my shoulders.

  My paintings are brilliant. I’ll be recognized as a genius, the way I had always dreamed.

  At such a cost.

  The headaches grow worse. The orange is more brilliant. The blue more disturbing.

  I try my best. I urge myself to be stronger than Myers, whose endurance lasted only weeks. Van Dorn persisted for a year. Maybe genius is strength.

  My brain swells. How it threatens to split my skull. The gaping mouths blossom.

  The headaches! I tell myself to be strong. Another day. Another rush to complete another painting.

  The sharp end of my paintbrush invites. Anything to lance my seething mental boil, to jab my eyes for the ecstasy of relief. But I have to endure.

  On a table near my left hand, the scissors wait.

  But not today. Or tomorrow.

  I’ll outlast Van Dorn.

  JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of, most recently, A Book of American Martyrs (novel) and The Doll-Master (stories). Her story in In Sunlight and Shadow, titled “The Woman in the Window,” has been selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2017. She is currently Visiting Distinguished Writer in the Graduate Writing Program at New York University.

  Les beaux jours by Balthus

  LES BEAUX JOURS

  BY JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Daddy please come bring me home. Daddy I am so sorry.

  Daddy it is your fault. Daddy I hate you.

  Daddy, no! I love you Daddy whatever you have done.

  Daddy I am under a spell here. I am not myself here.

  This place in which I am a captive—it is in the Alps, I think. It is a great, old house like a castle made of ancient rock. Through high windows you can see moors stretching to the mountainous horizon. All is scrubby gray-green as if undersea. The light is perpetual twilight.

  Dusk is when Master comes. I am in love with Master.

  Daddy, no! I do not love Master at all, I am terrified of Master.

  He is not like you, Daddy. Master laughs at me, taunts me, twines his long thin icy fingers through my fingers and sneers at me when I whimper with pain.

  Why did you come crawling to us, ma chere, if now you are so fearful?

  Daddy please forgive me. Daddy do not abandon me.

  Though it was your fault, Daddy.

  Though I can never forgive you.

  It is called by two names. Le grand chalet is the official name.

  Le grand chalet des ames perdues is the unofficial, whispered name.

  Indeed it is tres grand, Daddy. The oldest part of le chalet dating to 1563 (it is said: such a time is not possible for me to imagine) and the desolate windswept land that surrounds it like a moat so vast that even if I could make myself small as a terrified little cat, if I could squeeze out one of the ill-fitting windows to escape across the moor, Master’s servants would set his wolfhounds after me to hunt me down and tear me to pieces with their sharp ravenous teeth.

  Or, if Master is in a merciful mood, and not a mood of vengeance, the servants might haul me back squirming in a net to throw down onto the stone floor at Master’s feet.

  So I have been warned by the other girl-captives.

  So I have been warned by Master himself not in actual words but in Master’s way of laying a finger against the anxious little artery that beats so hard in my throat, with just enough pressure to communicate—Of all sins, ma chere, betrayal is the unforgiveable.

  I am not sure where Le grand chalet des ames perdues is but I believe it to be somewhere in eastern Europe.

  A faraway place where there is no electricity—only just candles—tall, grand candles of the girth of young trees, so encrypted with melted and hardened wax that they resemble ancient sculptures hacked out of molten stone. What shadows dance from such candles, leaping to the ceiling twelve feet overhead like starved vultures spreading their mammoth wings, you will have to imagine, Daddy—le chalet is nothing like the apartment in which we’d lived on Fifth Avenue at Seventy-Sixth Street, overlooking Central Park from the twentieth-third floor, though (as Mother said) those rooms were haunted too, and the souls that dwelt there wandered lost.

  Here are six-foot fireplaces and great, soot-begrimed chimneys in which (it is whispered) girl-captives shriveled to mummies are trapped in their foolish yearning to escape Master. Which is why Master is furious when smoke backs up into the room and a beautiful stoked fire must be extinguished so that the chimney can be cleared.

  A faraway place, Daddy. Where the automobiles are very old but elegant and stately and shiny-black as hearses.

  There is no TV in le chalet. Unless there is a single TV in Master’s quarters which none of us has ever been allowed to glimpse as none of us has ever been brought into Master’s quarters but this is not likely as Master scorns the effete modern world and even the 20th century is vulgar to Master as a sniffling, snuffling, sneezing girl.

  But there is an old radio—a “floor model.” The servants call it a “wireless”—in Master’s (downstairs) sitting room where we are brought sometimes if we have pleased Master that day in his studio.

  In Master�
�s studio it is often very drafty. Wind like cold mean fingers pries through the edges of the tall windows and strokes and tickles us, and makes us shiver and our teeth chatter for we are made to remove our clothing quickly and without protest and to cover our shivering naked bodies with silken kimonos that are too large for us, and fall open no matter how tightly we tie their sashes.

  In le grand chalet we are often barefoot for Master is an admirer (he has said) of the girl-child-foot.

  Also, the bare girl-child-foot cannot easily run through brambles, thorns, pebbles outside the chalet walls.

  In Master’s studio we are made to pose by sitting very straight and very still for hours or by standing very straight and very still for hours or (some of us, the most favored) lying with naked legs asprawl or aspread on chaises longues and our heads flung back at painful angles. And some of us, rumored to be the most favored, made to pose by lying very still on the freezing-cold marble floor in mimicry (Master says) of le mort.

  It is forbidden to observe Master at his easel. It is forbidden to glance even fleetingly at Master contorting his face in a paroxysm of anguish, yearning, ecstasy as he crouches at the easel only a few feet away from us scant of breath, weak-kneed. For art is a brutal master, even for Master.

  Sometimes, Master, who is the very essence of gentlemanly decorum, curses his brushes in a language most of us do not know. Sometimes, Master throws down a brush, or a tube of paint, like a furious child in the knowledge that someone (an adult, a servant) will pick it up for him, at a later time.

  Fortunately, the marble floor beneath Master’s easel is covered with a stained canvas.

  It is shocking to us to glimpse Master’s many tubes of paint, which appear to be flung haphazardly onto a table beside his easel; myriad tubes of paint, of which most are very messy, some are skeletal and squeezed nearly dry, a few are plump and newly purchased; for elsewhere in Le grand chalet all is chaste and orderly as a geometrical figure.

  Master’s studio with its high ceiling and white walls is one of the most famous artists’ studios in the world, it is said. Long before the oldest of us was born, the studio existed at Le grand chalet des ames perdues, and of course, long after the youngest of us will pass away, Master’s studio will endure for it is enshrined in legend, like Master himself who (it is said) is one of the very few living artists whose work is displayed in the Louvre.

  Master has shunned fame, as Master has shunned commercial success, yet, ironically, Master has become famous, and Master has become one of the most successful painters of what is called the “modern era”; his paintings are unusually large, fastidiously painted and repainted, formal, rather austere, “classic”—even if their subjects are nude or minimally dressed young girls posed in languid postures.

  Master insists upon the impersonality of art. Master has chosen to live far from the clamor of capital cities—Paris, Berlin, Prague, Rome. Master scorns the elite art world even as Master scorns the media that nonetheless pursues him with paparazzi. Master is revered for the severity of his art and for his perfectionism: Master will spend years on a single canvas before releasing it to his (Parisian) gallery. With each of his rare exhibits Master has included this declaration:

  LIFE IS NOT ART

  ART IS THE LIFE OF WHICH NOTHING IS KNOWN

  TURN YOUR EYES TO THE PAINTINGS

  “THE REST IS SILENCE”

  Yet, the media adores Master as a nobleman-artiste living in reclusive exile in a romantic and remote corner of Europe.

  In Master’s studio time ceases to exist. In Master’s studio the spell suffuses me like ether. My arms, my legs, my supine being on the green sofa—so heavy, I cannot move.

  Master has posed my arm in a tight sleeve, Master has tugged open the tight bodice so that my very small, right breast is exposed; Master has positioned my bare legs just so, and Master has placed on my exquisite girl-child-feet thin slippers made of the most fragile satin, one could barely walk in them across a room; Master has fastened a necklace around my neck, of small gems worthy of an adult beauty (as Master has said: the necklace may have belonged to one of Master’s wives).

  And Master has given me a little hand-mirror in which to gaze, mesmerized at what I see: the pretty-doll face, the pert little nose, and pursed lips that are me.

  How did I come to this captivity?—I think of nothing else.

  Daddy, I ran away from you. I ran away from her.

  Yet first it was with Mother, those restless hours in the great museum visible from our Fifth Avenue windows. Mother in dark glasses so that her reddened eyes were not exposed and no one who knew her (and knew you) would recognize her. Mother pulling my sister and me by our arms, urging us up the grand stairs, in seek of something she could not have defined—the consolation of art, the impersonality of art, the escape of art.

  The mystery of art, which confounds us with the power to heal our wounds, or to lacerate our wounds to greater pain.

  Soon then, I slipped away to come alone. A novelty at the museum, a child so young—alone . . .

  But I was mature for my age, and my size. It was not difficult for me to single out visitors whom I would approach in the usually crowded lobby to ask to purchase a ticket for me, and take me inside with them as if I belonged with them. . . . Of course, I gave them money for my ticket. Very cleverly, I even lent them Mother’s membership card (appropriated for the occasion), to facilitate matters.

  Usually it was women whom I approached. Not young, not old, Mother’s age, not glamorous (like Mother) but motherly-seeming. They were surprised by my request at first, but kindly, and cooperative. It was not difficult to deceive these women that you or Mother were waiting for me in the café in the American Wing, and then to slip away from their scrutiny once we were inside.

  Soon then in the great museum I began to linger before a row of paintings by the 20th century European artist whom I would come to know as Master.

  What a spell these paintings cast! I could not know that it was the spell of enchantment and entrapment, of inertia, that would one day suffuse my limbs like an evil sedative. . . .

  These were large dreamlike paintings executed with the formality, stillness, and subdued beauty of the older, classical European art Mother had professed to admire, yet their subjects were not biblical or mythological figures but girls—some of them as young as I was. Though in settings very different from the settings of my life the girls seemed familiar to me, more sisterly than my own sister who was too young and too silly for me and was always interrupting my thoughts with her chatter.

  Especially, I found myself staring at a painting of a girl who resembled me, lying on a small sofa in an old-fashioned drawing room. (I did not yet know the word for such an item of furniture—chaise longue.) The girl was like myself yet older and wiser. Her eyebrows were thin as pencil lines artfully drawn while mine were thicker, yet not so defined. Her eyes were exactly my eyes!—yet wiser, bemused. Her coppery-colored, wavy hair resembled my own, though in an old-fashioned style. Her doll-like features, delicately boned nose and somber pursed lips—like mine, but she was far prettier than me, and more ethereal. And she was gazing at herself in a small hand-mirror with an expression of calm self-absorption—impossible for me, who had come to dislike my face, intensely.

  What was strange about the painting was that the girl on the sofa seemed to be totally oblivious of another presence in the room, only a few feet away from her: a stooped young man stoking a blazing fire in a fireplace, that so pulsated with heat and light you could nearly feel it, standing before the painting.

  In fact, when you approach the painting from a little distance it is the “blazing” you first see that leaps out to strike your eye, before you see the small supine figure on the sofa gazing dreamily at her reflection.

  Isn’t that strange, Daddy? Yet, if the girl on the sofa is a girl in a dream, and the dream of the girl is her pretty-doll face, it is natural that she is unaware of another presence, even close by; the stooped figure is ma
le but it is stooped, a servant surely, and not Master.

  Each day after school I came to the museum. Each day I lingered longer by this painting—Les beaux jours. At first I’d thought that the title might mean The Beautiful Eyes—but jours means “days,” it is yeux that means “eyes.”

  And so the title is—The Beautiful Days.

  Days of enchantment, entrancement. Not yet days of entrapment.

  Beautiful days of perfect calm, peace. Enough just to gaze into the little hand-mirror and to pay no heed to your flimsy satin slippers that will impede your flight if you try to escape and to the hot bright-blazing fire being prepared a few feet away by a stooped and faceless servant.

  Other paintings by the artist whose name I must not speak—(for to speak of Master in such a way is forbidden to us, as to the servants of le grand chalet)—were fascinating to me as well and any one of these might have held me captive: Therese revant—Jeune fille à sa toilette—Nu jouant avec un chat—La victime—La chambre.

  Faintly, I could hear their cries. The captive-girls in the paintings who were (not yet) myself.

  So faintly, I could pretend that I had not heard. Glancing around at others in the museum, casual visitors, uniformed guards who took little notice of me, a child of eleven seemingly alone in the gallery, shivering with apprehension—for what precisely, I could not have guessed.

  (And what is there to say of the museum guards?—did they not hear, either? Had they grown indifferent, bored with beauty as with suffering, as if it were but mere paint on canvas, a veneer and not a depth? Will they not hear me, when I cry for help?)

  Outside the museum, the clamor of New York streets. Tall leafy trees, the enormous green park. On Fifth Avenue taxis queuing up at the curb in front of the museum, at the foot of the great pyramid of stone steps.

  Vendors’ carts, stretching along the block. These are owned exclusively by US veterans, it is decreed. The smell of hot meats is almost overwhelming to us, who are faint from malnutrition.