The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  “I’m the one,” she said, “who cleans the room”

  “And I’m the one,” I replied, “who pays your salary. From now on you will clean only the end of the room where the china is not.”

  She looked hurt then, sniffed, and left. But she has stayed away from the shelves ever since.

  Each day I try to spend an hour or so working on the collection, even though the colour and the clutter of it sometimes disturbs me more than I can say. Also I resent enormously having to spend time in shops searching for the correct kind of wire contraption for wall hanging, or for those balsam wood easels used for shelf display. To find these items I must visit the pathetic tableware sections of large department stores because, like so many other things, the China Halls of the past have all but disappeared from the planet. As I pick my way through the merchandise, the salesgirls eye me suspiciously and are only very occasionally able to supply the required object. Robert Henri would have wanted me to paint these young women, to abduct for the canvas their expressions of ennui in the face of materialism. But my own ennui now will not allow their faces to come into focus, and they are lost to me before I reach the escalator that leads to the ground floor and the street.

  This afternoon I placed on the shelf a Tower Blue Willow plate — one only superficially like the common Blue Willow that George showed me all those years ago. As I looked at the tower in its improbable, cerulean landscape, I knew that the lovers had not fled those hills and streams, but rather that they had never been there in the first place. Only the tower — broken, decrepit, uninhabited — has a role to play in that scene. Stark in the daylight hours, its window grimly unlit night after night, it neither protects the territory around it nor sends messages to any other territory. Having no history, it is instead a comment on stasis. Nothing has ever happened to this tower, or because of it, except its own slow, sad decay; that, and the inching up of ivy.

  And yet it is a beautiful piece, a prized addition to any collection. Josiah Spode had perfected this type of blue underglaze painting when the East China Company reduced its imports of dishes to England. George told me this, said that over the centuries thousands of ships had carried china around the world and that many of them had ended up on the bottom of the ocean. Some, he claimed, had been sunk by the storms of our own Great Lakes. As for the Blue Willow, George could draw from memory the design of each of its variations: Chinese Plants, the Lyre pattern, Ruins pattern, Old Peacock, Sunflower, Indian Sporting pattern, and so on. He told me that, at the porcelain museum in Sèvres during the war, he had seen a blue porcelain violin, about which the director of the museum had written a complete novel, a novel George had been trying to get someone, anyone, to translate for him.

  I have never been much moved by music.

  Hills and Streams. Skies and lakes and distances. Each summer I removed myself from cities and travelled north in search of landscapes. Although I loved the look of the vague fog produced by long views and the use of aerial perspective, I nevertheless painted the horizon in a crisp, possessive way, as if, having chosen to render it, I felt I must bring it up close for inspection. That which was not in my line of vision at any one time did not interest me for the simple reason that I was not looking at it. My life was that compartmentalized.

  I will admit now that it is impossible to master skills utterly foreign to one’s character.

  For years George and I would often make day trips along the shore, away from the sands that stretched in front of Davenport to beaches made of round stone. It was here that he found the best shards, their sharp edges dulled not only by water but also by being sifted through pebbles. He always claimed, when he took me to these places, that he wanted to paint seascapes, or the view of Davenport’s lighthouse from a new vantage point. And once we settled ourselves down on a log or a boulder he would begin a couple of half-hearted sketches. But in no time at all he would remove his shoes and socks and begin to walk slowly along the water’s edge, looking for lake-worn fragments of china. Once I tried to search as well, regarding the whole thing as a game, but I never saw anything but stones.

  One early-summer afternoon George put an oval-shaped shard in the palm of my hand. It was well worn; only a bit of the glazing remained and under it two small figures.

  “The lovers,” he said. “They sank to the bottom of the lake.”

  Now that we were adults, I was uncomfortable when George spoke about things of a romantic nature, when his manner became earnest. Often I would try to lighten the atmosphere by making some clever, usually cynical remark. But that afternoon I gave the shard back to him without comment and he dropped it into one of his bulging pockets with the rest of his finds. We began to walk in an easterly direction down the shore, clambering over fallen, water-logged trees and crunching across sloping banks of stones. This was after the war — I would have been on my way to Silver Islet — after the war that George so rarely talked about. I’m quite certain it was the same day that George found the button from an officer’s coat among some seaweed near a group of boulders.

  “Poor bugger probably drowned himself,” he said, laughing. Then he tossed the bright brass circle, like a coin, into the waves.

  “Or threw his uniform into the lake as soon as he got back,” I offered.

  “If he had any arms left to throw with. Or any legs left to get him down to the shore.” Then he paused. “But he was an officer, he probably drowned himself. From guilt.” He smiled.

  “That bad, eh? Real bastards?”

  “No,” said George, “not really. At least they were out there with us. And plenty of them are growing poppies now. My high-school English teacher, for example. Only five years out of the teachers’ college and then off to France. Dead in two weeks.”

  “He should have stuck to books,” I said. I had just found a fossil, a stone snail. I slipped it into my pocket.

  “He had no choice,” said George. “He wasn’t married. He would have had to go.”

  Each piece of china I put on the shelf seems to bring me back to painting. I began to work on a canvas at seven this evening, working for four hours straight until I sat down to write this. Weeks will pass while I paint the stones, the water, the sky, the worn pieces of broken china whose delicate patterns are themselves being erased by the lake — the whole world of a summer afternoon.

  And then, when it’s all there, as bright and clear and clean as I can make it, I will take two weeks more to add the patina, the glazes, the semi-transparent layers.

  The more that admiration is withheld, the more we desire it. And then when it comes, plentiful, unconditional applause, we turn from it in disgust, knowing ultimately that praise is the last thing we deserve. Oh, the fatal quest for the approval of the current authority!

  We were really just children, those of us who began our careers in visual art during the teens of the century under the tutelage of Robert Henri. We were street urchins let loose to run with our crayons into bars and alleys and tenements, as if New York City were one large playground. And Robert H., the father of us all, lecturing about theory, arranging our exhibitions, encouraging our natural inclination to rebel (as long as he was leader, and controller, of the rebellions). There wasn’t a young painter north of the Mason-Dixon line who didn’t wish to be in some way associated with this man. We all wanted the touch of his hand on our shoulders, wanted to rise like butterflies to be collected in the net of his praise. Kent, Luks, Bellows, Sloan, Hopper had all preceded us as his students — we were the second generation — and we wanted our predecessors’ notoriety. The attention, even the condemnation, of the press they received.

  The patriarch, the prophet Robert Henri stood over us all. Theorizing, expounding — manipulating us. More than we knew. Or more than we wanted to admit that we knew.

  There were times when the tension created by trying to please this much-respected master would break. If he left the studio for a few moments, for example, a kind of insurrection would often explode among us, as if we were
primary-school children who all morning had been desperate for contact with each other and who, now that the teacher’s gaze was averted, were going to make the most of the interlude. We would waltz with the model or with each other. From the broom closet someone would remove the skeleton used for anatomy lessons and set it on his lap, feigning a passionate embrace. One or two of us could tap-dance, and did so. Only the few women in the class kept on working after Robert H. had left the room, pausing now and then to give us looks of disapproval mixed with amusement.

  I was one of the more active ones at these moments, bringing myself to the attention of the other young artists in the studio by acting the clown, making friendships that otherwise would have required the kind of intimate conversation that had always made me uncomfortable. I was quite agile, and had discovered that I could perform handsprings and cartwheels in a limited space without disturbing the clutter of the easels. For this performance I always received a round of applause.

  So it must have been that while George was wading up to his hips in blood and mud and rotting flesh, I was engaged in buffoonery, using the studio as my own private gym. The war, which the Americans would not enter for a year anyway, simply slipped my mind. I never spoke of George to my art-school companions. In fact, I rarely thought of him. I was far too preoccupied with painting, or our classroom antics, cartwheeling safely through rooms filled with marks on paper. No, I rarely thought of George, even when the master returned to the room and began to fill the sudden silence with words concerning the importance of emotion, the importance of life.

  One afternoon I was chinning myself on a door frame of the studio, enjoying the laughter of my friends, when a man about thirty-five years old appeared in the doorway on the opposite side of the room and swung himself up to the lintel of the door facing me.

  “Rockwell Kent,” he said, introducing himself while bringing his chin up to his fists. “Whoever drops first buys the other a beer.”

  “But I’ve been at this for at least five minutes,” I gasped. The laughter in the room had stopped. Everyone’s attention had been diverted.

  “Okay, after you stop I’ll do six minutes more.”

  I disliked him immediately, this show-off, this braggart, this mirror of myself across the room. Every move he made was a parody of my own pathetic attempts to win the approval of the crowd. Then, as if to dispel any thoughts I might have entertained about mirrors, about equality, he chinned himself with one arm and performed a mock salute with the other.

  “I won’t drop,” I panted.

  Rockwell grinned at me from the door frame opposite, then crossed his eyes and allowed his tongue to loll out of the corner of his mouth. My entire audience had turned to watch him. “He’s had it,” he said to them.

  “I’m younger,” I managed to croak. This elicited a deep guffaw from my opponent, after which he began to sing a popular song. Some of the students were clapping in time to his movements.

  Until that moment I had never experienced the desire for victory as a physical sensation. Sweat was running into my eyes, anger was ringing in my ears. “You’ll drop first,” I said through clenched teeth. I was damned if I was going to be humiliated like this.

  Rockwell stuffed one hand into his back pocket while keeping a firm grip on the lintel with the other. He pulled out a large handkerchief and blew his nose loudly and aggressively without missing a beat. My fellow students cheered.

  I had heard of him, of course, knew his painting, his reputation, all of which made this nonsensical contest more enraging. I was determined not to be defeated by him. I knew he could read the indignation on my face and I could see he was amused by it.

  “Boo hoo,” he said, bringing the cloth up to his eyes.

  Besides my teacher and his colleagues, Rockwell Kent was the only real artist I’d ever laid eyes on. I had expected glamour and dignity to be a part of fame, yet here fame was, taunting me like a child in a schoolyard. I was furious with him for the insight his behaviour — and my own — momentarily brought to me. Too much energy was going to outrage. Exhausted, I dropped to the floor.

  “You ass,” I hissed, unsure whether this remark was directed at Rockwell or at myself.

  “My sentiments exactly,” said a voice behind me, followed by a barking laugh.

  How long my teacher had been watching this farce I had no idea. Rockwell was still pumping away insolently on the other side of the room, effortlessly completing the extra time. “Take him out for a beer,” the master whispered to me. “I could have told you in the beginning you would lose.”

  I would have preferred to fight Rockwell Kent, Robert H., and anyone else who happened to be in the room. Sweat was running from my hair, my heart was hammering, my fists were clenched.

  Rockwell swung himself from the door frame and loped good-naturedly across the floor towards me. “C’mon kid,” he said, throwing his arm across my shoulders. “Let’s get drunk.”

  I felt myself soften in response to the warmth of this gesture. An hour later, like everyone he ever met, I was convinced I would be devoted to him for life.

  A disapprover, a ranter, a man whose responses were often unprovoked and always unrehearsed, Rockwell Kent was an entirely different kind of pontificator from my teacher. I believe he often surprised even himself with his reactions; the only thing predictable about him being the intensity of his passion. That day and on into the night we staggered from bar to bar — arm in arm eventually — singing socialist songs. He was tremendously excited by the developing revolution in Russia. “Want one just like it!” he would shout at me, slamming his fist on the table. “Here —” thump, “now —” thump. But he could be socially withdrawn as well and would talk about the remote corners of the world with great affection.

  “Am going north,” he confided as we swayed into what must have been our fourth bar. “No ridiculous people there. Hardly any people there at all. Some good women is all I need.”

  We collapsed into chairs near a corner table. “But you’re married,” I said.

  He looked at me in astonishment. “Jesus Christ!” he exclaimed. “How young are you?”

  He had just been banished from Newfoundland for singing German lieder from the porch of his rented house, which was perched on a cliff above the town of Brigus.

  “Hounded us out,” he told me. “Wife and kids and everything. The authorities marched up to the house and asked me if I had forgotten the war. They didn’t believe me when I told them that unfortunately I had not forgotten the war, that I was, however, choosing to ignore it. Being authorities and therefore unable to envision how anyone could show a lack of interest in the petty differences of the conflict, they concluded that my singing was an attempt to communicate with German submarines. So they gave us the boot. Bastard imperialists! You’ve got to go farther north than that to get away from the bastard imperialists.”

  “I’ve been to Canada, actually,” I said with pride. “To the north shore of Lake Ontario.”

  “Lots of bastard imperialists there,” he announced. “The Royal Imperialist Mounted Cops, the Royal Imperialist Royal Mail, the Royal Imperialist Parliament, His Majesty’s Royal Imperialist Opposition. Lots of imperialists and lots of opposition. You’ve got to head north, into the woods.… No, on to the tundra. None of those Royal assholes can handle the tundra. Freeze their balls off.”

  I was having trouble enunciating. “I think I am a landscape painter,” I said slowly, experiencing for the first time the odd sensation of each word working its way out of my mouth.

  “You think you’re what?”

  “A landscape painter,” I repeated, but with less certainty.

  “Jesus Christ!” Rockwell responded. “I have to keep a closer eye on old Robert, make sure he’s not filling you kids up with too much crap. Love the guy, and he loves me too because he could never push me around. I drop by the class every now and then, just to check up on the old man, make sure he’s not dishing it out too liberally.”

  I was sho
cked by this irreverence. “But you were his student,” I said.

  “Sure was!” he said, enthusiastically pounding the table. “But you’ll never catch me painting any cherub-faced children.”

  I had by now completely lost track of the number of pints of beer we had consumed, and was beginning to feel ill.

  “Do you see any landscape around here?” Rockwell was asking me. “How in Sam Hill can you be a landscape painter when you spend all your time in bars or in Robert’s classes, listening to his fancy theories and learning how to cross-hatch?”

  I wanted to protest, to say that, in fact, I had spent very little time in bars, but I found I could only articulate the sentence I had been practising a few moments before. “I still think I am a landscape painter,” I slurred.

  “So’s your old man,” taunted Rockwell.

  This was hilarious. I howled with laughter as the room spun away from me. “No, he’s not,” I gasped. “He’s certainly not a landscape painter. He’s a capitalist!”

  Then I leaned over and vomited in the corner behind my chair.

  “This is a terrible predicament,” said Rockwell after we had been thrown out of the bar.

  “I’m sorry,” I managed to mumble. I seemed to be walking through water. I was surprised that I could still breathe.

  “Oh hell, you can throw up on me any time.” He plucked me out of the path of an oncoming taxi. “The terrible predicament is that you’re too drunk to walk and I’m too drunk to go home and face the wife. If this were the Far North, we’d die of exposure.”

  I vaguely recall that he guided me towards a park bench in Washington Square, fumbled around in a trash bin for a while until he found enough newspapers to cover both of us, threw some over me, then collapsed on an adjacent bench himself. By the time the morning sun brought the pain in my head to my attention, Rockwell was gone. I looked down and saw that he had pinned a crudely lettered sign on my jacket. “Do not disturb me,” it read. “I am a landscape painter and my father is a capitalist.”