The Art of Living

by John Gardner

  He painted all day, finished the second of his Reality boxes, as he jokingly called them, rested for an hour, then went down—his head full of new ideas—to the tavern. As in the days of his innocence (so he thought of them now), his unwinding was like a frenzy. Though he’d meant to remain fairly sober and eat some food, since his heart was full of plans and he was eager to get back to his studio, he’d forgotten his intentions by the second drink. He was painting, after all, as no other box-painter in the world could paint, making discoveries as rare as any scientist’s. He was coming to such a grasp of life’s darkest principles—and at the same time discovering, as he chased his intuitions, such a wealth of technical tricks and devices—that not a dozen fat books could contain what he had learned in one day. He was achieving, in a word, such mastery of his art, and he was filled with such pleasure in what fortune had granted him, that he could not possibly sit quietly for just one drink, then quietly trudge home. He held the barmaid on his lap and patted her knee, made scornful faces at the poet, whose poverty of wit he despised, mocked the ex-musician by pretending, voicelessly, to sing to him, even once recklessly shook his fist at the axe-murderer.

  He awakened the following morning in a cellar—he had no idea how he’d gotten there—his trousers smelling powerfully of duck manure, as if he’d walked through some pond, his head pounding fiercely, his hands so shaky it would be hours, he knew, before he could steady his fingers sufficiently to pick up a paintbrush. Swearing at himself inside his mind, he got up, found his bearings—for he’d wandered to the squalid lower rim of the city—and went home.

  “So you’ve decided to leave me here hidden under a cloth for the rest of my natural days? Is that your intention?” called the picture that could talk.

  Grudgingly, Vlemk went over and lifted the cloth away.

  “Good heavens!” cried the picture, eyes wide. “Are you all right?”

  Vlemk scowled, pulled at his beard, and went to bed.

  Again that night he painted until dawn, made coffee, then worked on yet another box all through the day. Each box was more sinister than the last, more shamelessly debauched, more outrageously unfair in the opinion of the picture that could talk, which she now did rarely, too angry and too deeply hurt to give Vlemk the time of day. When his work was finished he again went to the tavern, where he again got so drunk he had no memory of what happened and staggered home as the milkmen were beginning their rounds.

  For several weeks this frenzy of painting and drinking continued, and then one day in March—standing in his roomful of boxes with pictures of the Princess on them, each picture meaner and uglier than the last, some so deformed by the painter’s rage to tell the truth unvarnished that you could make out no face—Vlemk abruptly stopped. Why he stopped he could hardly have said himself. Partly it was this: whether or not it was true that his work was magnificent, as he sometimes imagined, no one came to see it, and when he carried a box with him to the tavern, no one liked it, not even the axe-murderer.

  “How can you not like it?” Vlemk asked angrily with his hands.

  “Borrrring,” said the axe-murderer, and turned his head away, staring through the wall.

  “Ha,” thought Vlemk, hardly hiding his scorn, “your work is interesting, my work is boring.”

  But Vlemk, being no fool, understood the implications. It was exactly as the half-wit ex-poet had said: we learn nothing from Art, merely recognize it as true when it happens to be true; no law requires that we be thrilled by it. Not that he would have said Science is any better. “What are the grandest proofs of Science,” Vlemk thought, “but amusements, baubles, devices for passing time, like the game of quoits? ‘Science,’ you may say, ‘improves life, even when it makes it longer.’ Yes, that’s true. Let us be grateful to Scientists, then, for their valuable gifts to us, as we are grateful to cows for milk, or pigs for bacon. As the brain’s two lobes work dissimilar problems, Science and Art in dissimilar ways try to work out the truth of the universe. This activity the Scientist or Artist finds comforting to his ego, and it provides him with Truths he can make as gifts to the world as a gentleman gives his lady a locket. And what if the Truth about the universe is that it’s boring?”

  So Vlemk gradually came to the conclusion that his joy in his work, like his earlier vision of extraordinary beauty, was delusion. It was not that he denied having enjoyed himself, learning the techniques by which he nailed down his, so to speak, vision—his perception, that is, of the fragility and ultimate rottenness of things. So one might enjoy learning the technique of the mandolin, but when one finished one was only a mandolin player. One might as well have studied the better and worse ways of sitting on a porch.

  So Vlemk, with bitter little jokes to himself, stopped painting. The talking picture sulked as much as ever, and from time to time it crossed Vlemk’s mind that perhaps if he looked he could find some tourist who might buy it of him; but for one reason or another, he did not sell it. He settled down now to a life of serious, uninterrupted dissolution, never washing his face or changing his clothes, never for a moment so sober that he remembered to feel regret. Days passed, and weeks, and Vlemk became so changed that, for lack of heart, he gave up all his former rowdiness, and often not even regulars at the tavern seemed to know him as he groped his way past them, bent and glum as the Devil in his chains, on his way to the bathroom or to the alley. He forgot about the Princess, or remembered her only as one remembers certain moments from one’s childhood. Sometimes if someone spoke of her—and if it was early in the evening, when Vlemk was still relatively sober—Vlemk would smile like a man who knows more than he’s telling about something, and it would cross people’s minds, especially the barmaid’s, that Vlemk and the Princess were closer than one might think. But since he was a mute and declined to write notes, no one pressed him. Anyway, no one wanted to get close to him; he smelled like an old sick bear.

  Things went from bad to worse for Vlemk the box-painter. He no longer spoke of life as “boxing him in,” not only because the expression bored him but also, and mainly, because the box had become such an intransigeant given of his existence that he no longer noticed.

  Then one May morning as he was lying in a gutter, squinting up bleary-eyed and exploring a newly broken tooth with his tongue, a carriage of black leather with golden studs drew up beside him and, at a command from the person inside, came to a stop.

  “Driver,” said a voice that seemed as near as Vlemk’s heart, “who is that unfortunate creature in the gutter?”

  Vlemk turned his head and tried to focus his eyes, but it was useless. The carriage was like a shadow in a fire too bright to look at, a gleam of sunlight on a brilliantly glazed, painted box-lid.

  “I’m sorry, Princess,” said the driver. “I have no idea.”

  When he heard it was the Princess, Vlemk thought briefly of raising one hand to hide his face, but his will remained inactive and he lay as he was.

  “Throw the poor creature a coin,” said the Princess. “And let us hope he’s not past using it.”

  After a moment something landed, plop, on Vlemk’s belly, and the carriage drove away. Slowly, Vlemk moved one hand toward the cool place—his shirt had lost its buttons, and the coin lay flat on his pale, grimy skin where at last his groping fingers found it and dragged it back down to the ground where it would be safe while he napped. Hours later he sat up abruptly and realized what had happened. He looked down at his hand. There lay the coin, real silver with a picture of the King on it.

  “How strange!” thought Vlemk.

  When he’d gotten to his feet and moved carefully to the street-corner, touching the walls of the buildings with the knuckles of one cupped hand, he found that he had no idea where he was, much less how he’d gotten there, and no idea which direction to take to reach his house. When he waved to hurrying passers-by, looking at them helplessly and silently moving his loose, mute mouth, they ducked their heads, touching their hats, and hurried around him as they would if he were Deat
h. He edged on alone, hunting for some landmark, but it was as if all the streets of the city had been moved to new locations. He shook his head, still moving his mouth like some mechanical thing, not a living man, wholly unaware that he was doing it. An old sick alleycat opened his mouth in a yawn, showing teeth like needles, then closed it again and lowered his head. In his right hand Vlemk clenched—so tightly that the rim of it bit into his flesh—the coin with the picture of the King on it.

  5

  Three days later, having carefully considered from every point of view, having bathed away the filth and trimmed his beard and washed his old black suit in the sink in the studio, and having dried it on the railing of the balcony, Vlemk the box-painter started across the city and up the hill toward the royal palace. Tucked under his arm, he carried the box with the talking picture. In his pocket he had a carefully folded note which he’d meticulously lettered, intending to put it in the Princess’s hand as he gave her the box. “Dear Princess,” the note read, “Here is the gift I said I would try to make for you, a picture so real it can speak. I release you from your promise to talk with me, since misfortune has made me a mute, perhaps for my impertinence. I hope this finds you well. Respectfully, Vlemk the Box-Painter.”

  He arrived at the palace, as he had planned to do, just at the time when the Princess would be coming in from walking her dogs. The last of the sunset was fading from the clouds, exactly as last time; the moon was bright; here and there pockets of fog were taking shape, intruding on the smoothly mown slopes from ponds and woods. He approached exactly as he’d approached before, but to Vlemk’s dismay, first one thing was different and then another, so that in the end the palace seemed changed entirely. The outer gates of iron had been thrown wide open and there were no guards in sight, and he wondered for a moment if the greyhounds, when they saw him, would not tear him to bits; but all around the front of the palace stood carriages and large outdoor lanterns, dozens and dozens of them, flickering merrily, as if vying with the stars, and near the arched front door he had once felt pity toward, aristocrats stood talking and laughing, drinking champagne in their splendid dress. It was unlikely, he thought, that they would stand there and watch the dogs kill him—though on the other hand Vlemk had learned enough from people’s secrets to be aware that in these matters nothing is ever quite certain.

  But the dogs, he thought the next instant, were the least of it. How could he walk in, in the middle of a party of lords and ladies, and give the Princess his present? How would he even find her? As he drew nearer, moving slowly now, he saw that the lords’ and ladies’ clothes were all of the finest material, with clasps and buckles, buttons, epaulettes, and swordhilts of gold and silver. He looked down at his knobby brown shoes, white worksocks, and baggy black trousers, then at his vest, riding like a saddle on his pot-belly. It had only three buttons—two gray ones and a blue one. His coat had no buttons at all. He stood staring, with the box clamped tightly under his elbow, thinking what a fool he’d been, seeing himself as the Princess and her highborn friends would see him: gray-streaked unmanageable hair to his shoulders, a number of veins in his face broken, the slope of his shoulders and the bend of his back the realized potential of a life of disorder and dissolution. “I had better go back home,” he thought. “I’ll catch her sometime when she’s not busy.”

  From under the black velvet cloth the picture called, “What’s the matter? Why are we stopping?”

  Vlemk brought the box out from under his arm, held it in front of him, and, like a waiter unfolding a napkin with the back of his hand, tipped off one corner of the cloth so that the picture could see.

  For a moment the face on the box only stared, abashed. At last, in a piping voice smaller than usual the picture said, “The Princess must be having a party.”

  If he’d been hoping the picture would resolve his dilemma, Vlemk was disappointed. He should hardly have been surprised. She might look like the Princess, might have the very same intelligence and emotional make-up, but all that those painted blue eyes had ever seen before this walk was the box-painter’s studio.

  “What shall we do?” she asked.

  As Vlemk stood irresolute, the answer was thrust upon them. The ground began to tremble and a sound like distant thunder began to rise from behind a dark clump of trees. A moment later six or seven horses came bounding over a hill into the light of the lanterns, on their backs young highborn men and women in capes and riding hats, returning, with the greyhounds at their heels, from a gallop over the grounds. Not far from where the others stood drinking their champagne, the riders reined in and the horses came trotting up, docile as sheepdogs; then, before the first of the horses had stopped, the greyhounds saw Vlemk and, barking like devils, came shooting out, bounding like deer, toward him. Instantly the horsemen wheeled after them, hurrying to the rescue—or so Vlemk prayed.

  The greyhounds came flashing through the darkness like knives, with astonishing speed and clarity of purpose, but the horsemen were close behind, shouting stern orders at the dogs and hurried good advice to Vlemk, if only he could have heard what they were shouting. It was a horseman who reached him first; the dogs held back at the last minute. The rider was a tall young man with a moustache, his cape like midnight except for the gleaming pure white of the lining, thrown back jauntily past his shoulder like a wing. He shouted something which Vlemk could not make out, then shouted it again. Now the others came swerving and slanting up around him—one of them, he saw, the Princess. He was suddenly conscious of the late-June warmth and wetness in the air. She did not look at all as she’d looked before, but even with his heart pounding wildly in his throat from the scare they’d given him, Vlemk knew at once what the changes were—the make-up, the hair, the padded square shoulders, the startling spring paleness of skin and the hollowness of her cheeks. Fasting? he wondered. He tried to recall if some religious holiday was at hand. Two of her friends were on the ground now, quieting the dogs. The tall young man with the moustache bent down from the saddle. “Who are you?” he shouted to Vlemk. “What are you doing here?”

  Vlemk threw a look at the Princess for help, but she kept back, remote and cautious, almost ghostly. Her horse pranced and turned, eager to be gone, and from time to time the Princess glanced back at the people who’d been drinking by the door, now all hurrying in a crowd to find out what was happening. Seeing that there was no other way, Vlemk reached into his pocket and drew out the note, unfolded it with badly shaking fingers, and handed it to the man. The man came close, apparently having difficulty reading it in the moonlight. He half smiled, then wheeled around and trotted his horse to the Princess. “It’s for you,” he said.

  The Princess did not reach for it. “What does it say?”

  “You think I read your mail?” he said, smiling like a lover, and held it nearer, insisting that she take it. Vlemk glanced down, full of gloom and a curious detachment, as if the Princess were an acquaintance from some other life and they had both changed completely. His gaze happened to fall on the box. The face was watching the Princess and the man in the moustache with sharp, almost virulent disapproval.

  The Princess did take the note at last, giving the man a little smile, half cross, half playful. When she had finished reading she glanced sharply at Vlemk. “You are Vlemk the box-painter?” she asked, displeased. He nodded. She seemed to make out, now, the box under his arm. She looked around—the people with the champagne glasses were drawing near—and at last she said, “Bring him where it’s light,” and, without another glance, assuming their obedience, she set off at a trot toward the lanterns. “I don’t like her,” said the picture on the box, emphatically. Vlemk covered the tiny painted mouth with his hand. Now the moustached man was bending down again, reaching to offer Vlemk a lift up and ride. Vlemk stared a moment before he saw what was intended, then shook his head in alarm and hurried on foot after the Princess. When she reached the lanterns she stopped again for a moment and looked back at him, then nodded, as if telling him to follow,
and rode straight on to the enormous, arched front door. There she dismounted, gave the reins to a servant, and stood waiting for Vlemk to catch up with her. As soon as he did, panting from exertion and hastily covering the face with the cloth, the Princess said, “Won’t you come inside?” Without waiting for an answer she started up the wide marble stairs.

  Vlemk was by this time well aware that by bringing the box to the Princess he had made a mistake. There were social implications he hadn’t bothered to think through, implications that now, too late, he recognized as painful to the Princess. Either she must curtly and crudely dismiss him, a poor harmless mute—which was not in her nature—or she must place herself in a position to be laughed at—not a pleasant prospect for a lady so concerned about appearances. Painted boxes were often, in those days, love-gifts, and from the first moment he’d seen her with her friends, Vlemk had known that, even if he had in some sense once loved her, he could not say he loved her now and could hardly imagine recapturing that emotion, though some things about her—the tilt of her head—recalled it, teasingly and faintly, heightening the shock of their mutual change. And so, clearly, he had no business here, certainly no business offering a gift that, given in front of others, had nuances of insult and entrapment, as if one were to offer a lady a dead infant in its coffin, declaring it her own. Even if, as a professional painter of pictures on boxes, he could carry it off—avoid the implications of sentiment that displeased her—there was the matter of the box itself, or, rather, the picture: she, the imitation of the Princess, would not be happy here, God knew. How much responsibility should one have, he wondered, for a feeling creature that was not, strictly speaking, a creature? Whatever the right answer, the fact remained that feel she did, and her pain and indignation were not easy matters to ignore. Even now as he walked up the marble stairway, followed the Princess and her gathering friends down the long, blue-carpeted, chandeliered hallway, and turned in, behind her, to a room filled with mirrors and figures wrought in gold—a room she had chosen, he recognized at once (knowing her as he did) for the irony it imparted, an irony that defused the effect of his coming and put limits of a kind on the scene she feared (he had forgotten, of course, that she was afraid of his art, afraid of the idea of a painting so perfect it could smile or cry or talk, though of course he had known it, had seen, while exploring her with his brush, that fear of what whimsy might lead to, her terror in the face of the unexpected)—even now, as he sat at the low glass table in the center of the room, obedient to her command, the muffled voice under the cloth was complaining, berating him, insulting the Princess.