“Jeffrey, for goodness sake,” Marsha said.
“I’m only joking.”
“Does Lewis know that?”
The bathroom door opened and Lewis stepped into the hall with them. “I’m sure of it. He hardly has a serious bone in his body.”
Jeff put his arm around Lew’s shoulder. “I’m glad you two found each other. And we know love when we see it. Don’t we, Hon?”
“You’ve said that about two other women just this year,” Marsha said.
“But Marie’s different, remember?” Jeff said.
“She is,” Lew agreed.
“So, what’s the pointing Indian say?” Jeffrey joked.
“He loves her.” Lewis didn’t always like the way Jeffrey just blurted out about his inner life, particularly in front of Marsha, but he got used to it. He knew how married couples kept no secrets, but still, it was his private life, his way of coping. “Try not to say anything about that around Marie.”
“Oh,” Jeff looked at the floor. “I am a little loud sometimes. Don’t get it wrong, I’m only joking. I know how seriously you take it. I just can’t.”
“Just not in front of her.”
“I know, I know. Don’t worry.”
“I don’t blame him for worrying,” Marsha said, “the way you blurt things out.”
“I said I wouldn’t,” Jeff protested.
“I believe you.”
“I’ll just make sure he remembers,” Marsha said.
Lew winked at her in response.
“Hey, that’s my wife you’re winking at.”
“Sorry, didn’t mean for you to see that.”
“Yeah, didn’t you know we had a secret life together?” Marsha said, putting her arm through Lewis’ elbow.
“I should have guessed.”
“Okay, enough fun,” Lewis said, separating himself from Marsha. “I’ve got to go.”
“Work?” Jeff asked.
“What do you think?”
“I’ll come by tomorrow. Don’t stay up too late.”
“All right, Dr. Jeff.”
“You look good, Lew. Really, I think she’s okay for you,” he said.
“Not back to that.”
“I’m done.” Jeff raised his hands into the air, stopping himself from going on any longer about Marie. He followed Lew to the front door, Marsha right behind him. Shaking Lew’s hand, he said, “Good-bye,” then out of concern, added, “everything else going okay?”
Lewis knew what he meant. It was Jeff’s way of asking about his mental health. Lew almost told him about his most recent incident, the one that happened before his first date with Marie, but seeing Marsha behind Jeff, her head on his shoulder and her arms around his waist, Lew held back. He’d wait until Jeff came to visit, or he’d just forget it. Nothing had happened since. He had promised to tell Jeff if anything suspicious happened, but it may have been only a flash in the pan. Nothing to worry about. “Everything’s fine,” he said. “Have a good night, you two. Tell, Robert I said good-bye.”
“Will do, see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll be there.” Lew stepped into the moist evening. It was about to rain. The signatures were everywhere, turned up leaves on the trees, cool breeze, humid night air. He looked up. Clouds were thickening overhead. An hour or two, he figured, or perhaps he knew, he had become so attuned to nature.
During the short drive home, he thought about Marie, her beautiful black hair and wondrously wide brown eyes that seemed to widen even more, engulfing everything, even swallowing him, when she had an orgasm. The look on her face was enough to make him come with her. It was great, yet he was still trying to figure out how to paint it, explain it to the world in color: burgundy and beige, a thread of pink, sky pink, almost orange, working its way down through the painting from the left top corner, stretching thinner and thinner to the top center of the canvas, but not thinning to a smooth end, but blunt, a very thin, blunt end, indicating a peak, then an explosion of blood reds, thunder cloud blues, ocean greens. As his mind worked away, he almost ran off the road. He stopped the car and got into the trunk for a large sketch pad he kept there, and began to work by dash light. He was quick, using his own form of shorthand to express the shapes and colors he imagined. Inside his head, the work was almost complete, he would work on the painting itself to find the missing elements. As he sketched, he felt what he portrayed. The excitement of the piece, the erotic conclusion. He ran his pencil over the pad with perfect coordination between mind and muscle. When he was through, he drove the rest of the way home with the radio blasting.
Lewis went straight to the loft. The room had been closed up most of the day and smelled musty, paint-musty, with a touch of paint thinner and linseed oil. He opened some windows to allow a cross breeze to air the place out, then rummaged through his paints and brushes for what he needed. He was rushing and clumsy and kept dropping things, bending down to pick them up. At one point he thought his back went out. His hand flew back to put pressure where the pain rushed, like lightning, through his side and back. Bent at the waist, Lewis made it over to the couch to sit down. He breathed heavily and massaged with his fingers. The pain felt deep inside, unreachable even when he pressed very hard. He tried to twist, crack his back into position, but the pain intensified with movement. Then, as should have been expected, he focused on the pain and tried to translate it. He twisted slightly to the right, then to the left, to see if the piercing changed to pinching, or vice versa. He wondered if the right side of his body translated the same pain differently than the left side. He pushed back then, after he felt he understood the left and right pain.
The whole procedure, like scientific experimentation, made me uncomfortable. I wanted him to crawl downstairs to a phone and get help. I didn’t understand the aches and pains of humans, how it felt during movement. Even with all the years inside Lewis, it was still difficult to understand. We acted as buffers for each other. He never touched all of common thought at once and I never felt all of movement at once. Our contact was limited to concentrated areas or movements.
Inside his head, I saw him constructing an image half made of flesh and blood and bone, and half mechanical ball and slide joints, as he tried to see inside himself for the problem. Then, miraculously, he transferred all his pain, his biology and science, into shape and color. His own body had become, in its misery, another tool, another faucet to turn on.
I tried, at that time, to push inside him. He didn’t recognize that the pain was increasing, yet I could feel his face grimace reactively, even as he focused inward, towards that canvas in his mind. His meditation away from the pain, did not reduce its intensity or its effect on his body. I wanted him to snap out of his little experiment and get help, fast. I tried to create the image of the Indian. If that’s what he recognized as a sort of guardian, I no longer cared. I just wanted him to get help.
Lewis rolled onto the couch. The pain had pushed through. He tried to relax. Without movement, the pain subsided. He let his back slip into the cushions and tried to get the rest of his body to relax. He closed his eyes and tried to forget about his back. The painting he was about to do flashed through his mind, the urgency of its movement made Lewis try to get up. The pain slapped him back down. His face became the image of a tortured man.
Lewis gave in to the pain and lay there as still as he could. It was getting late and Jeffrey would be by the next day, but he didn’t know when. Late morning, he thought. Lewis tried to lie still and sleep, but as soon as he became unconscious enough to recognize he was uncomfortable, he tried to move. His eyes would jerk open and he would cringe. Then, near dawn, terrible things began to happen. He felt the couch move across the floor, saw his easel dance, the loft ceiling ripple and churn. He knew, consciously this time, what was happening to him and tried to ignore it, tried to tell himself it wasn’t happening. At one point, he focused on his pain just to extinguish the other thoughts, but it didn’t work. Dust from the ceiling came down to suffocate him whene
ver he moved. The couch cushions massaged his back, then suddenly threw him onto the floor. He tumbled to the hardwood and screamed in agony.
I only saw and felt what he imagined. When I pulled out and confronted common thought, I saw him roll over onto the floor by what appeared as his own volition. Inside his head things became confused. He lost control of his own movement, attaching it to objects outside himself.
I asked common thought for help, to push, with me, the image of the Indian, into his contorted mind. Both animal and plant, from his childhood home to the enchanted forest, together, we concocted the Indian. Lewis’ own salvation image, and we ground it, along with all the insanity his own mind was creating, into his head. As a sole light in a black cavern, the Indian appeared. Only now it was our image, not his alone. “The phone,” it said, pointing to the stairs. “Jeffrey.”
His mind fought to distort our image also, but we held tight, adjusting to his inner shifts in consciousness. “The phone!” the Indian said.
Then, from deep inside common thought, another image crept up the long dark stairs of the cottage. Along with common thought focusing on helping me keep the Indian whole, a warning of Jeffrey’s arrival flashed through. I did, along with the help of the trees, what I thought I had to do. The Indian motioned for Lewis to roll over, as though warning him of immediate danger. When he rolled, he screamed in pain. Suddenly, Jeffrey ran to the top of the stairs and burst into the room. In a moment, he was at Lewis’ side.
“Don’t let it happen,” Lew said as we pulled back the image.
“Nothing will happen.” Jeff held Lew’s head between his hands. He tried to lift him up.
“My back!
“I’ll call an ambulance.”
Lewis closed his eyes. His mind told him that there was movement all around him when there wasn’t. He closed his eyes tighter. Somehow, the knowledge of Jeffrey being near helped him to reject the horrible sights he had imagined. Then the Indian appeared, this time through Lewis, not common thought. “Thank you,” he said aloud.
“They’re coming,” Jeff said. “So who are you thanking, me?”
“The Indian.” He opened his eyes and saw himself looking down at him, as though he were dead and hovering above his own body, except that the central consciousness was in the dead body, not the hovering one. It was only Jeffrey.
“Good God, Lew. I don’t care, just be all right.”
The ambulance came in fifteen long minutes. Jeffrey listened as Lewis told him how he was thrown from the couch, how he hurt his back in the first place. Lewis was positive that brushes had been pulled from his hands or leapt from them, so he’d have to bend to pick them up. “And the couch cushions threw me to the floor,” he repeated for the third or fourth time.
“I know, you told me,” Jeff said. He kept his face turned. There were tears in his eyes. One hand pet Lewis’ forehead. He listened for the ambulance’s arrival.
Lewis rambled about nature and his paintings, about the rippling ceiling and how much better he felt now that Jeffrey was there. “You are me,” he said to Jeffrey, “the outward half, just like we always thought. You’re the balance, the other end of the see-saw. Did the Indian call you?”
“No. I told you I’d be by today,”
Jeffrey was right in not lying, but I felt doubt in Lewis’ mind when Jeffrey insinuated I had nothing to do with his arrival. I didn’t, but I didn’t want to lose Lewis’ faith in me either, even as the Indian spirit.
“Oh,” Lewis said. “He was here, though.”
“I bet he was.”
“You don’t believe it?”
But before Jeff responded he heard the ambulance pull next to the house. “I’ll be right back. They’re here.”
“Can’t move,” Lewis smiled.
The ambulance crew was careful with Lewis, not to shift his body too much. Back injuries were sensitive things.
Again, I waited for his return. There was nothing for me to do except watch dust accumulate onto his canvases and easels, crud accumulate in the sink’s dripping drain. Jeffrey had not returned to close the windows for a long while, and papers scattered throughout the room. Cans of soaking brushes were pushed over by wind. Even the easel he used most often fell over. It was eerie to watch the empty room as it was molested by wind and rain. It seemed to degenerate, become something new, not a room, but an empty box left open to the elements.
CHAPTER 18
LEWIS WAS GONE NEARLY A YEAR and a half, during which time a maid was hired to clean the cottage. Eventually, the windows were closed upstairs and Lewis’ equipment cleaned up and arranged in a mechanical, squared, even manner. Everything was kept ‘in place’ and dusted daily until no sense of Lewis remained. Jeffrey cleaned out all the paintings and sold them, put them on display, whatever, it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Brittany visited the cottage on several occasions, once with Jeffrey, never with Christopher. During one visit, they talked briefly about Lewis, how he held things in, how he loved nature. They looked through the remainder of his paintings.
“This painting,” Brittany held one up, I remember Lewis being afraid that it didn’t work the way he wanted it to. I loved it.”
“His use of color is extraordinary,” Jeff said.
“You talk like a salesman.”
“But I mean it. Besides, everyone says it. It’s like there’s some sort of life blood in his work. He puts colors together that should wash out, cancel each other, but they don’t. Instead they curve around, caress each other until you feel good about it, about how they don’t belong, but fit anyway.”
“Jeff.”
“Yeah, Brit.”
“Do you think this is what has to happen?”
“What?”
“If you have genius, it’s only as a trade-off with sanity? Like somewhere there’s this universal law?”
Jeff continued to rummage through the paintings.
“Do you? Or do you think he drove himself crazy?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I can’t answer any of those questions.”
“Does he still insist on being one with nature? Do you suppose that’s why the cottage attacked him?”
“No, not now. He’s a lot better. You should know,” Jeff said.
“But he doesn’t talk to me when I visit, not like the two of you talk.”
“He doesn’t say much to me either. It’s been rough on him. The back operation, pneumonia, all while he’s hallucinating wildly, calling out for the Indian. For God’s sake, I’ll never understand that.” Jeffrey lowered his head and brushed back his hair with his right hand. “Another couple of months, they say.”
“So you said earlier. What about him, though? What’s he think? Will he want to come back here?”
“He doesn’t think there’s anywhere else to go. He just wants to come back to where he belongs, he says. The doctors say it’s okay. This is where he feels secure, regardless of what’s happened in the past.”
“And his painting?”
“You saw the stuff he’s doing in the hospital. I can’t sell that.”
“I like it. It’s nice.”
“Nice,” Jeffrey let the canvases he was going through fall back against the wall. “Nice isn’t art. There’s no tension in that stuff, no mystery.” He waved his hand at the canvases they were just going through, as though to dismiss them all. “There’s nothing left here that I’d want anyone to see, nothing he’d be proud of. I refuse to embarrass him by selling inferior work.”
“I like some of it,” Brittany said.
“There you go again, you like it, but that’s not good enough. Not for me, and definitely not for Lewis. It has to fill you up, that’s what his paintings do when they work.” He took her hand, “Sorry, you can have what you want, Lewis said so, just, for everyone’s sake, don’t sell any of these.”
“I understand.”
“I knew you would.” He kissed her on the cheek.
Several months later, Lewis returned home. Jeffrey drove wh
ile Marsha and Robert and Christopher sat in the back. Brittany waited at the cottage where she had prepared a big welcome home cake and large lunch. Marie had faded quickly and quietly from the picture once Lewis ended up in the psychiatric ward of the hospital. She had visited him there only once, which was very uncomfortable for them both. At the meeting, according to his memory, Lewis had felt embarrassed about his condition. But, on his way home, that first day back, he had no regrets. He couldn’t blame Marie for leaving, and he felt only admiration towards Brittany for the way she weathered through everything. There was more to her than he had ever imagined, and he wondered if perhaps he just hadn’t looked deeply enough.
He got out of the car and breathed in the sweet, cold November air. Jeffrey was quickly at his side, Christopher had his hand inside his father’s. “I had to return after the leaves had fallen,” Lewis said, sorry he had missed all the colors of autumn.
“It’s a nice day, anyway,” Marsha put in.
“It’s gorgeous. It’s perfect just to be back. I’ll look forward to the first snow, then spring.” Lewis looked around, feeling a little too much like he was still being watched, like his whole family had taken on the doctors’ roles. His smile, to him, seemed too broad, too childlike, and he imagined that they thought him childish after his stay at the ward. But he was just happy, very happy. Extraordinarily happy! Euphoric! He could hardly believe his good fortune. Furthermore, he was in total control. He remained in human thought purposely, so that he could deal with his family. Yet, during lapses in conversation, he slipped in and out of common thought, just, it seemed to me, to test himself and his home.
Brittany stood at the front door with her arms out. Lewis hugged her. “It’s so good to have you home again, Lewis,” she said.
“Thank you. You really didn’t have to go to the trouble.”
“I wanted to.”
“Well, I appreciate your being here, Brit, and for bringing Christopher.” Chris had let go of Lew’s hand and was helping Jeff collect his dad’s things from the car. “He’s grown into a fine young man,” Lew said.
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