by Luke, Jason
She was sitting disconcertingly close to him, Blake could feel their thighs touching and the press of her through the stuff of her dress and the denim of his jeans seemed to burn like fire. He was unnerved. He leaped to his feet and went to the kitchen, called over his shoulder to her as he went.
“How do you like your coffee?”
“Just like before, thanks,” Connie said. There was a reedy waver in her voice, for she too had felt the same tremors of heat from the innocent contact.
When Blake came back, he was carrying two mugs. He handed one to Connie and then chose the seat across from her to sit. He sipped at the coffee, watching Connie’s face over the rim of the mug.
“Why are you here?” he asked at last.
Connie set down her mug. She clasped her hands in her lap and seemed to lean forward as she spoke, as if to give her words greater sincerity.
“I found a small painting in a Hoyt Harbor gallery,” she began softly, holding his gaze, her eyes never wavering from Blake’s. “And when I saw it… I wept, because it was one of the most beautiful paintings I had ever seen in my life.”
She sat back, took a deep breath, and then went on to explain how she had purchased the two paintings from Warren Ryan and realized that the name Bill Mason was a veil for Blake McGrath.
Blake listened, his features seemed to be carved in granite. He was unmoving, watching Connie’s face, her eyes, and her expression with wariness.
When she had finished retelling her story, Connie lapsed into empty silence. Her lips were parted, glossy and soft. “I fell in love with your art,” Connie added in a whisper, “and I wanted to know if my heart was right – if my instincts could be trusted. I wanted to find out who the man behind the work was, and what drove you to create the most beautiful paintings the modern world has seen… and why you suddenly disappeared.”
Blake raised an eyebrow. The woman seemed sincere, yet he had learned to be miserly with his trust. The fact was that she had come from a gallery, and every commercial gallery survived by making a profit.
“How much did you pay for the paintings?” he asked.
“Three thousand dollars,” Connie said softly.
Blake smiled wryly. He remembered the works. He had given them to the grocery store owner. “Well I imagine you will be able to turn a tidy income,” he said in understatement. “Together, they’re worth probably half a million, maybe even a little more.”
Connie nodded, but then her eyes widened and she began to slowly shake her head. “They’re not for me,” she explained. “And I didn’t buy them to gain from directly.”
He was surprised, but he tried to conceal it. “You said that you were good at your job,” he challenged her.
“I am,” Connie said earnestly, “But I am a lover of art, not a lover of money, Mr. McGrath.”
Blake winced. Coming from this woman the formality of a name he hadn’t heard uttered in five years sounded too impersonal, too distant.
“I called you Connie, back at the car,” he said tactfully. “Please call me Blake.”
She smiled then, and her whole face seemed to light with a sparkling glow of unaffected beauty. Blake felt something tight squeeze in his chest and it took an effort for him to raise his wary guard again. Sometimes, he reminded himself, nature’s most beautiful creatures can be her most dangerous.
“So now you have found me,” he said and lowered his chin onto his chest gravely. There was a moment of heavy silence in the room. He tried to smile but his lips would not hold the shape. “So what more do you want?”
For a moment Connie’s face was blank with innocence. “I would love to see any other paintings you have made,” she admitted shyly… “and I would like to ask you why?”
“Why what?”
“Why you disappeared. Why you have never exhibited again.”
Blake stared hard at Connie. There was shadowy movement behind her eyes and he could not tell if it was deceit or sincerity, for her voice and body language betrayed nothing that he could match to her expression.
“I don’t paint any more,” he said.
Connie looked appalled. Her expression became stricken with shock. She felt something squeeze painfully inside her. She could accept that this man had hidden his work, accept that he chose no longer to share his gift with the world, but to stop painting seemed too tragic, too cruel.
“Why?” the word escaped her in a scandalized breath.
Blake shrugged, but said nothing. His expression darkened as though he could deflect the needle of the question with an inscrutable scowl. He stared into his coffee mug for a long time and then gave her a sideways glance. She looked pale, and he instinctively knew at last that she was genuine. He sighed. He could see a private pain like hurt in her solemn enigmatic eyes and he suddenly wanted to make that look go away – to offer something gracious that might retrieve the situation.
“I’ll show you some paintings,” he compromised. “Works that I did when I first moved here, seven years ago. But I won’t answer the personal questions,” his voice took on an edge of warning. “Can you accept that?”
Connie nodded, but kept her expression veiled. Someone had hurt this man, she realized intuitively. At some time in the past, someone… or something… had left Blake McGrath broken, and altered the course of his life.
11.
Connie followed Blake down a long passageway that ran past the kitchen, and then into a large cluttered room at the far end of the house.
His art studio.
Connie stood in the doorway, her eyes taking in everything in an instant. In front of a large window on the opposite side of the room she saw his easel, a high triangular frame that stood at least six feet tall. In front of the easel was a backless chair on casters, and beside the chair was a small kind of bookcase, perhaps a couple of feet high and wide. The bookcase was on the same kind of casters as the chair. The shelves of the box were crammed with tubes of paint and rags, and atop the box was an old-fashioned wooden palette and several paintbrushes. Everything was layered in a thick coat of grey dust.
“I don’t come in here any more,” Blake seemed to sense the direction of Connie’s eyes, and offered the explanation. Connie nodded, said nothing. She took several steps into the room, and her eyes swept from the ceiling to the floor.
“It’s color-corrected light,” Blake explained the complex grid of tracks and globes that hung in clusters overhead. “I had a team of consultants and electricians create the system, so that the light in the room would be natural and constant. That’s why it looks like daylight in here – even in the middle of the night. The globes don’t give off the typical yellow hue that could affect the colors while I was working.”
Connie nodded again. She still had not spoken. Her eyes went to the furthest wall from where she was standing and settled on a timber rack of high vertical shelves. Stored upright, like library books, were over three-dozen canvases, each one wrapped within cloth, each a different size and shape.
Connie went towards the rack in a kind of reverent trance. She carefully caressed the edges of each bundle, needing to touch them, as if she could pick up some other sensory vibration of the marvels they might contain. She turned back to Blake who was watching her from the doorway. Ned was standing by his side, tongue lolling from his slack jaws.
“How many paintings do you have stored here?” she asked in a softened awe.
“Thirty one,” Blake said. “What you are looking at is everything I created for an exhibition.”
“The one you canceled?”
“Yes.”
She frowned. “But, you had the paintings.”
“Yes. But that’s not the reason I canceled the show, and it’s not the reason I stopped exhibiting and painting.”
He came into the room, Ned at his side like a silent shadow. The big dog found a piece of rug-covered floor in a corner and dropped to the ground with a weary sigh.
Blake went to the easel, turned it so that it faced into the r
oom, and ran the palm of his hand over the frame to wipe away the dust. Then he slid the first canvas from the vast timber storage rack, and set it on the crossbar of the easel, still covered by its dust cloth.
“You need to stand back near the door,” he said to Connie.
Connie took several steps away. Blake stood beside the painting and took hold of one corner of the cloth.
“Remember,” he said, “these are over five years old. You might not like them – they might not live up to your expectations…”
Connie gave him a murderous glare of impatience and urged him to reveal the canvas. Suddenly the world seemed quiet to her. The sounds of the rain and wind seemed to fade, for all her attention was focused on the easel and what it held.
Blake sighed, and then drew away the dust cover.
Connie felt herself go cold with an unnatural chill. She took a step towards the painting, and then stopped herself. She stood, trembling, her eyes huge and dark in the paleness of her face, her lips parted as though the moment was somehow breathtaking and sensual.
The canvas was a couple of feet wide and perhaps eighteen inches high – not a large piece by modern standards, and yet the work seemed to explode at her in a clamor of surging sensations. It was a Blake McGrath seascape, painted with the master’s unique touch of drama and pathos.
The painting showed a rugged stretch of distant coastline, greyed and blurred by a sullen sky, yet in the midst of the clouds was a shaft of golden light, breaking through the overcast and spilling its color onto the sandy foreground. On the beach was the tragic figure of an elderly man, his head bowed, standing amidst the broken ruins of an old boat while the ice green swells of an angry ocean burst upon mid-distant rocks in explosions of white spray. There was something haunting about the work, and in the way the man and boat had been rendered, so that Connie felt inexplicably saddened. She covered her mouth with her hand and stared at Blake with a gaze of bewildered awe.
“How do you do that?” she whispered hoarsely. “How do you capture such powerful emotion on canvas?”
Blake frowned, bemused. He leaned over the painting and glanced at it. He remembered the work, recalled the difficulty depicting the shaft of sunlight. He had been pleased with the finished painting, but now Connie’s profound reaction forced him to take another look at the work. Technically it was good.
“It’s just a painting,” he said.
She looked appalled. She shook her head. “No,” she said dramatically. “It’s not. It’s a gift, Blake. It’s something in the way you work the paint, some part of you that’s infused into the image. It’s as if you can create intense emotion through paint.”
Blake felt a rush of relieved delight. For some reason he didn’t understand, this woman’s approval of his art was important to him.
Connie came to the easel and bent close to the painting, her eyes alight, her expression rapt as she gasped at the intricate little details that combined to give the work dimension. Blake watched her with secret pleasure. Her hair was drying and he could see delicate little whorls around her ear, like fine and silky breaths of perfection. He inhaled the fresh scent of her and was mesmerized by the interlace of her long lashes when she blinked. He had the sudden reckless urge to reach out and caress the flawless skin of her cheek with the tips of his fingers, and the insane shock of it made his senses tilt.
Connie turned her head then, looked deep into his eyes for a solemn moment that seemed to stretch like the soulful caress of a lover’s fingers, until at last Blake flinched and glanced away.
“Do you want to see more?” he asked brusquely, his voice too loud in his own ears. He strode across to the storage rack and fetched one of the bigger paintings. His fingers were trembling.
Connie hooded her eyes but there was an enigmatic Mona Lisa smile on her lips. She nodded her head without speaking.
Blake scooped up the first seascape, wrapped it with perfunctory tosses of his hands, and set it on the studio floor. He stood the new canvas on the crossbar of the easel and at last cast his eyes back to where Connie waited.
“This one is called ‘Daybreak’,” he said. “It was my favorite piece. I was going to make it the feature painting for the exhibition, and use the image for the gallery catalogue and marketing launch,” he explained. “It’s the closest I ever came to being satisfied with one of my own works.”
He took a step back and unveiled the painting with a little flourish.
Connie felt a rush of blood flush across her cheeks and her heart slammed hard against her chest.
The painting was three feet wide and two feet high, a view from a high cliff top that depicted a panoramic scene of the ocean in all its furious majesty. Under a pale dawn sky, shot through with the colors of sunrise, was a heaving swell exploding upon craggy sentinels of rock. The moment had been captured when the wave was sweeping towards the shore, the green boiling surf just beginning to curl and break.
“It’s a masterpiece,” Connie breathed. She felt overwhelmed. There was vibrancy in the colors and a hulking energy in the wave that was utterly stunning.
Blake shook his head. “There is no such thing as a masterpiece any more,” he said, and Connie flashed him a withering glare, as though, surely, there was no painting quite so perfect as this.
“That’s just a hackneyed term people use,” Blake went on. “It has no relevance nor significance.” He tossed the dust cloth down on the chair and went to stand beside Connie, staring back at the painting as he spoke.
She felt the casual brush of his shoulder against hers and she did not move away. “I think you’re being very humble,” she said softly, as though she was gazing at some revered religious artifact.
“No, I’m serious,” he said, and turned to look at her. “Masterpieces were exactly what paintings once were,” he explained. “They were works of art painted by a master. Back in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, in particular, an artist was a qualified tradesman, just like builders are now, for example. Artists served an apprenticeship of several years during which they actually learned every facet of the craft, from canvas preparation to mixing paint. At the end of their time they were masters. A painting made by a master was a master piece.” He saw in Connie’s eyes that she was listening with fascination, though he suspected this was something she would already have known. “These days, anyone can paint – anyone can buy brushes and a canvas and then sell their work. There are no great masters anymore, and with their demise went the right to claim any modern painting as a master piece.”
Blake fell silent. Connie turned her eyes back to the beautiful painting. Beside this man, she felt like she was standing in the protective shelter of some great stone pillar. At last the temptation of the art became too much. She crept quietly towards the easel and began to pour over the intricate way the wave and white cascades of water had been replicated.
“Your brushwork intrigues me,” Connie said when she was only inches away from the painting. “Most artists who work in oils are always so thick with the paint, as though they use it to help create textures and dimensions. Even a lot of the great past masters did that,” she turned and glanced over her shoulder. “But in your paintings, it’s like the paint just melts into the canvas. It’s very unique.”
Blake twisted the corner of his mouth into a little smile, as though this was a comment he had heard about his work countless times in the past. “I guess I could have done the same kind of thing,” he admitted. “Like most painters, I was certainly influenced by the old masters… but I suppose I just have a different way of working. It’s not something I ever really set out to do. What you see in that painting is just a style thing.”
From somewhere else in the house a clock chimed several times. It was a dull sound, muted through closed doors. Ned suddenly raised his head, the dog’s expression a sad eyed question. Blake nodded, and the Great Dane lifted himself slowly to his feet on arthritic legs and crept quietly from the room.
Connie turned from the ca
nvas and smiled up into Blake’s face curiously. “Where is he going?”
“The beach.”
“Why?”
“Because he goes down to the beach every night at this time,” Blake said. His voice had become hollow, and his brow had corrugated into a deep frown.
“Why?”
“To sit,” there was a strain creeping into his tone like a warning.
“For how long?” Connie softened her voice and tried to take the edge off her question.
“Until sunrise.”
Connie wanted to know more, but Blake’s eyes had become flinty and there was a rigid defiant set to his shoulders.
“How old is Ned?” she asked instead.
“Six,” he said.
Connie sensed she had brushed against a part of Blake’s life that was still like a tender wound, raw and painful. She had stirred memories and regrets within him and she wished vainly for some way to retrieve the intimacy – to be able to turn time back to when they had been discussing his art. It seemed suddenly that the small distance between them had become an icy crevasse.
“Do you want me to go?” she asked timidly. She rose then, facing him across the space.
“No,” he said. His mouth was drawn into a thin pale line, and Connie could sense some inner struggle behind his eyes.
“Can you tell me about your technique?” she offered. “Did you paint from photographs?”
It was an olive branch extended; an invitation for him to rejoin her and reach across the void. Blake nodded his head stiffly, and began to speak again. At first his words were stilted, his posture still reserved, but gradually the color came back into his voice and Connie silently rejoiced in the passion that rose from within him as they talked deep into the night.
“I used photographs for reference,” Blake showed her a drawer of images that had been the foundation of some of his best-known earlier paintings. “Nature is too fluid – a beautiful woman with an ever changing countenance – so that to try to capture an instant of her glory is impossible for a plein air painter,” he said. “So I would take photographs, and from those I would choose the moment I thought she was at her most glorious, or her most terrifying. Then I would paint live.”