All the Days and Nights

by Niven Govinden

  – We’re all simple creatures, when you think about it. What our needs are. I was told once that this is what good painting captures: the simplicity that is buried under all the other complications.

  – I like that. You’ve had good teachers. Knowledge, the sharing of it, is what keeps the old man going. He thrives on the idea that somewhere there will be a kid for whom this jumble makes sense. That they’ll find a painting or statue to inspire. Use those blessed cards to form a pathway out of here.

  – Genius comes from unexpected places.

  – Picasso came from the back streets of Spain.

  – There you are.

  – The poor bastard is waiting for Christ, or at least his equivalent in Art. Someone to show that his work hasn’t been in vain. Or mine, for that matter.

  – It can happen. It can happen anyplace. I’ve seen it.

  – Seeing you so concentrated as you sat in front of that painting, I wondered whether it was you. Something in your face went beyond that of a spectator, even those rare ones who know something about Art. What’s good and what isn’t. You’re in that painting somehow, aren’t you? Your blood is there.

  She speaks softly now and under her breath. Her brow, knotted in the manner of the great theorists, as an equation is formulated and then picked apart. It is for her own sake that she stands there and continues to debate with herself, aware that two cups of hot milk have done their work, allowing you to soften into the leather chair and sleep.

  I CONTINUE TO LOOK at a partially formed canvas; fragile and imprecise. Just one untruth will ruin it: if I lie to myself, the painting will dissolve. The temptation to destroy clings to my skin, densely packed and impermeable. What painting is, is the temperance and determination to avoid these urges. I am only as strong as my will allows, only measuring my worth in the oil slicks I swim around; the fires I put out.

  I sleep in the studio over three nights, as the creature slowly becomes a thing that cannot be left. Its presence in my head has fast-set. The puzzle of its ever-shifting mass governs with an iron rule. A dictatorship of my making; something that both pleasures and sickens. If the creature is to remain with me, standing before my bed as I pitifully attempt sleep, his face behind the mist on my bathroom mirror, my commitment needs to be demonstrated beyond pure thought. It demands a night vigil from my studio chair. With the presence of a desk light, rust eating through its enamel insides, it makes itself known to me. Without the light, he becomes clearer still: your eyes piercing through the black.

  The reveal can be archeological in its time frame. I am certain of what I see, but to be sure of what lies beyond, I must wait. Painting requires the hard and physical strength of a master craftsman, coupled with the openness of a diviner. Also, someone who has an understanding of prayer, whether it is reviled or adhered to. I am all of these things before I am myself. It is what the creature demands before he is willing to step completely from the dark.

  IN A HOUSE not unlike the one you have run from, they feed you and launder your clothes. You pay your keep by sweeping leaves from the driveway, clearing cobwebs and detritus from the gate. Trading upkeep for upkeep is all that you know. Chuck sleeps for most of the morning – a pill – giving you the run of the house. Only when you see the rows of photographs lining the top of the piano in what he calls the parlor, do you realize how old he is, that he matches your father’s age. Fighting in the same wars. What he offers is paternity rather than mere benevolence. It gives you the feeling of safety as you sleep; the tapping of a previously cherished comfort that has been left to run dry for years.

  Your breakfast is served by Laurel, who chose to sleep in a guestroom rather than return home. Her familiarity with the kitchen suggests she is more than a passing visitor: cupboards arranged to her liking; food stocked as expected.

  – You were expecting servants? So was I. The old man’s too mean for that. He’d rather spend his money on a statue with half the plaster cracked off than on a maid’s wages. He has me, anyway. I’m the all-in-one. There’s a girl who comes three times a week – or would do, if he didn’t keep sending her away.

  Once it is clear that Chuck is awake, protracted coughing, footsteps above going back and forth over themselves, Laurel disappears to see to the museum.

  – His master’s voice! Look after yourself.

  Her brevity reflects the self-consciousness that a fresh pair of eyes brings, studying their relationship anew; taking stock of the stories she has told: late-night phone calls not being entirely that at all, but tears shed over his bed; shouting dissatisfaction from the bottom of the stairwell. Later you discover that the second guestroom is never used.

  Chuck himself is refreshed and energized, forcing your steps a beat faster as you follow him into the cellar. You walk along pathways flanked by banks of sealed crates, pallets double your height that brush the floors above. The greater space is not above the house, you realize, but below it.

  Oscar, friendly but unobtrusive, is there to meet you when you reach your destination, along the far reaches of the grounds. As he did when he held open the car door at the steps of the museum last night, he asks after your health, and whether you have everything you need. He stands behind the pair of you patiently as you walk along, well versed in the mechanics of age. Ready to compensate in strength for whatever your bodies lack.

  The look that passes between the men suggests that everything has been planned ahead.

  – It’s where I said it was?

  – More or less.

  – And you’ve opened it?

  – Taken the sheeting off. The chippings need to be replaced if we have any in the store.

  – You can do that afterwards. I’m anxious to show our guest here the beauty we’ve hoarded.

  Before you fell asleep in your unfamiliar bed, you momentarily fooled yourself that you were here for Chuck’s hospitality; a reward for being locked in the museum while Laurel went to fetch him. At breakfast you similarly stuck to this delusion: that all you had been looking for was bed and board, and a ride to the train station once an up-to-date timetable could be found. That you had seen all you needed to see in Kentucky. Now, in the cool of the cellar, insulated from damp and wired with rows of spotlights, you feel an anticipatory twist in your guts that makes light work of your previous excuses.

  You breathe the same air as in the studio, when we are all at the lumbering turn that leads to finish, fast and shallow. Your palms are wet with the torture of the unknown, weighted with responsibility by a work that has not come from your hand. You feel ready to become my representative in Kentucky, and if need be my defender. You are ready to fight your way out. But what you want most of all is to see it.

  The painting is smaller than the others, no more than two feet high and half that in width. It is unframed, though you remember it being held with cream mortise-work – austere Tudor roses in each corner – when you last saw it at a group show of American painters in Washington soon after it was completed. Other than that it is intact.

  What strikes you even before you take in how much of your far younger self it depicts – so much so that it feels in many ways closer to youth than manhood – is the vividness of color; a warmer, brighter palate that was long since abandoned, disturbed as I was by criticism which included the words homespun, nostalgic and all-American. So your first glimpse as Oscar pulls it from the box with some care and ceremony reminds you of my weakness, proof that there was a time when the judgment of others could bring me to my knees. To see those colors again is to be reminded of warm blood and impetuousness; a temper that cursed nay-sayers to high heaven. Under the spotlights, where the unremitting glare heats your face, you relive them again.

  You are sitting upright in the studio chair wearing a pair of denim overalls they gave you for working in the fields. The denim is lightly washed but not worn in any particular place. Its overall hue remains deep, its yellow cinched double stitching luminous against the blue, contrasting with your hair and eyes, both
youthful in their luster. Though your face is clean, mud smears your chest and knees, and there is redness to your fingers, indicating foraging of some kind. Your face itself is tilted at an angle so that your gaze does not meet mine. Your hair is smoothed down and parted; that, along with the pose, suggests a conventional vanity portrait or studio photograph, for in spite of your clothes you look at your best: twenty-two and on the cusp of what would follow; as if all that was holding you back from an adulthood of promise was the skein from drying oil paints. Except, in your left hand you hold a furred animal paw of some kind, and your expression is sorrowful. More than that, the act of sitting looks painful, as if every moment in the chair holds an unseen discomfort. Depending on the various ways that a spectator may look here, the fresh face does something to hide it. They can lose themselves in the ruddy cheeks and the wave in your hair parting, and see a celebration of physicality fulfilled; of the primacy of men’s toil in the fields. Or they could look harder for the glaze in the eyes and the slight twist to the mouth; the fullness of the lips pulled taut, as something unspoken is swallowed or held back. All that cannot be explained by paint.

  – This has been in two sets of hands, this baby. But it’s had some bad luck attached, which is why I’ve never been inclined to show it. I’m not superstitious, per se; more that I wouldn’t unknowingly want to hex any folks who happened to see it and feel something for it. There’s a responsibility to owning these pieces. You have to decide what is and isn’t appropriate. Not in terms of morality, you understand, because I don’t judge in that way. But the history of what happens to a painting after it’s been sold; that, I pay attention to. One owner killed himself in the same room it was hung in. Another’s wife pretended it had been burned rather than lose it in a divorce settlement. I keep it because I love it. Beauty and an awareness of civic duty are not incompatible. What I see before me speaks greatly.

  He sees how redness has flooded your face.

  – You understand that I can talk about your beauty, son, without it having to mean anything? I’m not one of those types you need to run away from. This is how things are if you’re in the game. I appreciate you no differently than I do my cattle that they try to under-price at the county fair. You’re both meat. You move with the dollar.

  The skin that is visible goes no lower than the base of your neck. The sleeves on the overalls have been rolled up to the elbows, showing the field of hair on your forearms. Everything else about physicality is implied: the fullness in your buttoned chest, the fit of the cloth across your shoulders and thighs. It explains how field work is shaping your body; that this is only one stage of a work in progress. This is what it means to show promise when the end is too distant to be fathomed. It is what this painting is called: A Promise.

  – You know what this painting is? Un-ob-tain-able. There are museums and dealers all over the country, in Europe and Japan also, who can’t get their hands on this and it drives them crazy. Five or six letters come every year. I keep them all. ‘We kindly request permission to borrow …’ ‘My client is extremely keen to locate one of the key earlier works by …’ They scour cellars to look for these babies; read the death notices and news of disasters on the stock exchange. They find what they need, too. Persistence, rugged persistence until it becomes bullying gets these people what they want. I know, because I too can have sly ways. You don’t get raised country without learning something. But when they look at their treasure, there’s an absence. The piece they really need is missing. Without this painting to explain the others, all that’s left to display is greed. Clearly, this isn’t the piece that’s going to get the paying visitors through the door. It’s not the showstopper: the girl with the pert breasts and high derrière at the Moulin Rouge. But to the people who know about these things, it’s the clasp that sets the diamond. And the fact that it’s not in their club, that they have to travel all the way to a two-horse town in Kentucky to beg for it, kills them. It kills them!

  – Something you enjoy, I take it?

  – I’m an understanding man. I champion the arts. I champion knowledge. This is what I’ve given my life to. But, heck, the patronizing tone they stoop to address me in – as if I’m a farmer who just got lucky, who found a stash of paintings in the cow shed that turned out to be good. It takes a lifetime to build a collection. It becomes a message you wish to send. Something bigger than your life. They seem to think that we shuck corn and handle the art in the style of a traveling fair. Canvases smelling of over-boiled hot dogs and burnt cotton candy that sticks in your throat. Lady in the front booth pushing root beer as hard as she’s selling tickets.

  – That’d be Laurel.

  – Well, Laurel’s had her fair share of gimmickry, I’ll grant you that. Costumes and pageants, and schooling in funny voices to keep the elementary kids hooked. We can’t be icy like the Guggenheim or the Tate in London, where you take your chances in those drafty rooms and fend for yourself. We work hard to engage. Laurel busts her balls to get those kids through the door.

  Everything you turn against is in those gimmicks. You would run for miles on seeing merchandising in museum shops; less about those institutions making money from your face, more that there were so many versions of yourself to see. Did each sale diminish something of you, like a photograph taken multiple times, or was it just the sheer scale of them: face after face racked along the wall in the postcard display? Similarly you had a low opinion of the base caricatures that could sometimes be found in the weekend editions.

  – If they don’t like pictures, they shouldn’t make a mockery of them. That’s too easy, to make fun of those who choose not to defend themselves; who see nothing to defend. If they can take shots at people just for working hard, then we should be able to do the same.

  This was after another incident in the village store, where a sulfurous egg was cracked against the side of my neck. You were facing in another direction and missed it; simply out of your range. Your anger at doing so, failing so publicly, turned you into a defender. You had spent your first few years at the house bathing in its peacefulness, unaware of how what we did affected the environment beyond. Once the rotten egg ran down my back, you were ready to restore the tenets of your Hudson upbringing: fight those who needed to be fought.

  – Your Anna’s work is validated by museums and collectors, and rightly so. Greatness should be venerated during a person’s lifetime. We should appreciate what we have.

  – It will change when she dies. They’ll forget so much about how those paintings came about. The contributions that were made. It’ll boil down to the work that sold for the most money. The Nudes that hang in respectable homes. It’s something I need to see for myself before then. Not validation so much, not from those people, at least. I just want to see the paintings and understand whether it was all worthwhile.

  – For that we’ll need to swap eyes. You’re not an outsider, son. You can never know the true value of what you’ve done.

  – I can try.

  – Now, indulge me. The rabbit’s paw you’re holding. That’s a novelty of sorts. She steers clear of props usually. It’s another reason why this one is such a talisman, because no one can quite understand it.

  – A dog’s paw. If it was a rabbit, it would be half that size. Maybe even smaller.

  Chuck steps closer and then back from the canvas several times, adjusting his gaze. In repose his face loses much of its earlier form and vigor, showing his true age in the slack jaw and lowered eyes. He is conserving the energy to speak again, but it feels as if the room is suddenly awash with tiredness, that little else will come now that he has shared his ideas.

  – We had dogs at the farm, but I never had them in the house. Can you believe that? Too much shit on the carpet. I’d have picked up on that if I had been around them more. Spent less time with these crates and my obsession to buy. I know what it is. I don’t hide from that word. I’ve had enough people tell me to my face as well as behind it. ‘Chuck, you need to stop spend
ing your money this way and act serious. If you can’t find a woman healthy enough to bear your children in this town, go someplace where you will. Bring a family back here. Raise them in your house.’ By which they mean, spend the money their way, on whatever nonsense preoccupies them: car ports and motor homes, holidays in Baton Rouge. You put your energies elsewhere after a time. But here, we have a mystery solved. A dog’s paw. Why did I never think of that?

  Color returns to his face as he talks about painting; always when he talks about painting. Away from it, a hollowness to his features returns. The crates feed his curiosity, restoring his vitality to a level you did not predict. He pats you hard on the back now, laughing; a shake or two of the shoulders as if to wake you up.

  – This tickles me. It truly does. To think that those educated folks from the big institutions, with their wire-frame glasses and their fingers up their asses; that the studious buyers for the private collectors more wealthy than I, the ones who would sell their grandmothers still sleeping in their beds if it meant acquiring a rare painting; their clients who would die without seeing absolutely their entire range of acquisitions in full, people for whom the notion of owning could be more important than actually seeing, none of those people picked up that it was a dog’s foot. Not one! That every single condescending letter sent to me on the subject mentioned a rabbit’s foot. I’ll be smiling about this all day. All week! Those bastards. I have the painting and the secret. They’ll need to triple their price to get through the door.

  He pulls his arm tightly around yours; comrades against the greedy and untrue. You are under no further pressure to speak, both of you studying the painting while reaching for your respective rewards. You understand that he will not ask you more because this is secret enough: a vindication of his beliefs, something that will keep him active for another year. You look at the paw flat in your palm as if an offering: stout and tawny, its fur flecked with black and gold. You think of the afternoon the painting was started, when Vishni shouting in the kitchen pulled me away from the sketch I was working on. You standing over the kitchen table with a dead dog in your arms, hit by a farm cart on the back road.