– Is there a place you be looking to stay? The town has a motel. It isn’t nothing special, but they have color TV and pool in the downstairs bar.
– Close to the amenities. Grocery, drugstore, doctor.
– Or the train station, if you have somewhere urgent to be.
A call is made to St John from the post office – credit cards are not the only credentials they disapprove of. Arrangements, your care, is taken from their hands, immediately lightening the mood in the house; misgiving returning to generosity. It has been several days of indecision and worry for your hosts; careful to nourish you, but arguing among themselves who was best qualified to oversee the more intimate ablutions.
– St John asked Peg if you were any weaker.
– He ain’t looking like Hercules, but he’s better, I told him. The soup’s bringing back some color to his cheeks. The apple pie’s giving him energy. If he wants to help us milking cows, he’d be in a position to by the weekend.
– The heifers are old now and we can’t afford no bulls. We’ll milk ’em until they’re gone and that’s it.
But there is no evidence of the cows being milked; their moans growing blunter and more distant as you slowly begin to block out their sound. Haley and Peg remain close, seldom leaving the house, making you wonder whether it is still the means of your arrival that concerns them, or that you are sicker than you realize. Your care is administered like parents to an infant: round the clock, with the same tone used on calves rejected by their mother. No child had been born in this house. Yours is the first helplessness to emanate from the brittle wooden cot; the human kind; cries that do not come from a bovine mouth. They grow attached and will find it a wrench when you leave.
It is wrong to say that the cows called you, more that you were a frustrated patient who needed to escape confinement. The urge to use your hands, to solve something that could so easily be solved, was too great for you to remain prostrate in a cot built for a child who never arrived. Good intentions thwarted were as much a part of the farm’s make-up as the beetle-infested wood and the stench. Unspoken disappointment was the history of this place, from the cartoon-inscribed glassware on the top shelf of the dresser to the furrows that so deeply lined their faces. You felt your body being nourished by the soup as much as by their sadness; how similar furrows would mark your own brow the longer you stayed an invalid. Your footsteps away from the fire were weak ones, tentative, not only from a lack of strength, an inability to move across the kitchen floor with any command (each shuffle and tread informed by a sensation of vertigo), but of being unaware how soon your hosts would return from town. This exercise could not be accomplished under their guidance; its basic nature demands secrecy. At the door you feel the solidity of your legs, a mastery of the sea. The fear of gravity’s inevitability – that sooner or later you will lose your footing and fall to the ground – leaves you once you step outside; your senses flooded with too much else: flat, even sunlight; cold air; the dampness of the meadow and the intensely sweet bovine smell coming from the shed.
Something in the heat and filth intoxicates; elements that make your pulse quicken on any farm: surrounded by life, which must be grown, exploited, harvested. Your eyes in the studio, when there is electricity between us, is similar; understanding when your every heartbeat is recorded by my hand. You are weak, and know that, but still you push hard against the barn door; urgency in your movements; greedy to see. Both the animals and yourself take a few moments to adapt to the changing light, theirs to the brightness, yours to the dust and gloom. There are eight of them, all heifers, several seasons past calving. On a city farm they would have more value as meat; sparing three years of milking by driving them to the abattoir on a late autumn morning, and then their carcasses to the butcher. Beef joints for Christmas and Thanksgiving; steaks to see in the New Year. The milk and butter that passes through Haley and Peg’s hand is hardly as lucrative. They can churn butter long after the meat has been cooked and eaten, but the logic escapes you, unless they are kept out of sentiment: cattle as much their companions as their livelihood. Other farms would carry argument: younger men, nourished by the same agricultural disappointments as his hosts, but still with fire and fight; wives who toil just as hard as their husbands in fields and milking sheds; an army of skinny children growing around them and learning to do the same. But romance has no place in the countryside of your experience, only an interest in what is right. Pleasure comes from the small rewards gleaned from a job done well: cream in your coffee skimmed off the top of the milk pail; a glut of squash from a weekend harvest; washing your face in the creek before you return to the house. You must work now for your reward, albeit the face of St John and his driver through the darkened glass of the town car as they arrive to take you away.
The shuffling increases once the door is opened; your presence disturbing them more than the light. You feel as if you are inside a wave, pushing yourself upward to find the rip curl, as you walk the gangway that flanks two rows of stalls. I’ve told you more than once that you are free to leave at any time. If you can be happier elsewhere, find another occupation to fill your heart and mind, then that is where you should be. (Using less thoughtful words than I am here. Calling you lazy, non-committed, stupid, sub-normal; whatever was needed at the time to bring back your fire.) Sitting is neither comfortable nor welcome, but you should still feel the need to do it. The compulsion should be as strong as my will to paint; at times, stronger. You should want to let me speak what you are unable to say. Mostly it has been this way. You are a man of sound mind. You would not stand on the studio floor if you felt it was not worthwhile. What you have long posed for is what you have now become: a man who knows himself and his place in the world. How you have been hewn from the studio chair and from the fields; what you have learned, and what you carry. But you see none of those things as you crouch in the cow shit and start milking, guided by instinct and the memory of your hands; the repeated pattern that thumb and forefinger must follow; the weight applied from the fleshy pad of your palm. You lose yourself to ritual and labor; thoughts of your father unloading sacks of grain at the docks; of late summers shucking corn and cutting cucumbers from tangled vines. The satisfaction of physical work producing something that can be seen. Tangible results from using your hands: a pallet cleared; a cart piled high with trays of apples. This is how they find you, Haley, Peg and St John: ankle-deep in shit with two full pails by your side, refusing to leave until the last cow has been attended to and the final churn filled.
SOMETHING WENT WRONG. I saw it in your eyes. You have lost your borrowed tackle, or let the fish swim away. Edwin was drunker than usual, making the afternoon an unpleasant one. Possibly you took against each other and fought in front of the boy. The limited nature of my thinking only allows these possibilities. The news when you are able to tell it shocks me in two ways: how light-headed I suddenly feel by listening to you and finding the words through the crack in your voice. That a mischievous boy, too scared to set foot inside the house, will never again stand shyly on the porch with his father. Secondly, the realization that everything I know is meaningless in the shadow of the death of a child. The words I speak are trivial to your ears. I cannot hold you the way you wish to be held, with the fierceness of a mother’s protective love. It’s a failing I have.
– His pallor when we pulled him out. I knew he was gone just from that. All the color drained from him. Transparent. As if he belonged in the river rather than on land.
– You need to keep this blanket around you; otherwise you’ll make yourself sick.
– You have to feel something to be sick. I can’t feel anything.
– That’s shock. Your body’s protecting itself.
– The worst has already happened. It can’t protect me from that. What I’ve had to do.
– I know.
– The sounds Edwin was making as I pumped Wendell’s chest. When I knew we’d tried for long enough. Punishing his body unnecessarily when i
t had already been punished enough.
– You did everything you could.
– Having to drag a father away from his boy. Hostility in his eyes. Pure animal instinct. Determined not to leave him. To protect his son, even though there was no life left within him.
I have nothing to offer, bar the shelter of the couch and the bottle of rye on the window shelf. He is not ready for either, but still too shattered to be herded upstairs. His posture is one of a broken man, uncertain what use he can fulfill after failing what was asked of him. Save my boy. Bring him round.
– CONCENTRATE, BEN. I can see that you’re losing focus.
– I am focusing, just not on what you want. If I daydream, I forget that my leg has fallen asleep and the spasm running up the side of my neck.
– Unless it’s agony, you’ll have to stay like that a while longer. I’m not ready for a break yet.
– You never are. Every ten minutes you give me is hard won. During your break you barely sit. Too busy thinking about what comes next. It’s endless.
– I’m not sure whether that’s praise or criticism. This is what painting is. Or how I work, at least. You know all this.
– This is the complaining part of the program. I’m worn out. I’ve been thinking about matchsticks all morning; how, if I were to build this house from matchsticks, inside and out, furniture and all, it would still be completed before your painting.
– You’ve sat for paintings before. You understand that it can be frustrating.
– Sitting would be easy. It’s lying on the floor that’s hard.
– Ha!
– I posed for you in the early days, before you became a master. This is what I’m realizing. What you ask for. What you expect. There’s less precision in other paintings I’ve sat for. Disciplined, but not with the same rigor.
– And how does that make you feel?
– Like being at the bottom of a mine, with the lift being pulled up inch by inch.
– You think that’s never happened to John? To Vishni?
– I’m not describing a particularly exclusive feeling. It’s frustration that’s at the heart of it. And solidarity with those two. Feeling like I’ve joined the club. I once asked John what he thought about when he was sitting here. ‘Everything and nothing,’ he said. ‘My whole life passes before me when I stand in front of her. Yet at the same time, I’m blank. A space for her to fill.’
– He brings what he brings. Same as you. The rest comes from my hand and eye. What the light gives.
– There’s a prison warden hiding inside you, isn’t there? Fiddling with those paint tubes rather than jangling keys.
– An open prison. Turn the latch. Walk down the path and push the gate.
– The meadow is their boundary. No one shall pass.
– Not so medieval.
– Well, the house isn’t overrun with visitors. Not like it used to be. You have a capsule here where everyone knows their place; how to pull their weight; how the hardest work will be rewarded. You’re the captain of a submarine that spends nine months at the bottom of the sea, putting out fires in the belly of your vessel. You curtail willfulness as well as draw it.
– You’re testing out your theories on me. Making your mind up how you’ll talk about it afterwards.
– Am I getting close?
– Those nights we used to play poker up in Provincetown. Does my face look any different to how it did at your card table?
– I’m sticking to the submarine idea. Something tells me it’s a winner.
– They’ll want words to go with the pictures, the newspapers.
– In their eyes, paintings cannot be printed with explanation.
– Demystification.
– One and the same. They’ll want to know why their readers should look at so many paintings of John and Vishni.
– And why it ends with you.
– That too. First and last.
– There are things we should discuss. Those not possible to sign in New York.
– It doesn’t have to be today. If at all.
– Invisible documents. Understandings.
– This you don’t have to say. Something you spell out to strangers.
– Like I said. Understandings. That you will speak for me afterwards. Explain but not demystify. Vishni will find her own way to document things. It will come through in her painting. The commentary, all that they demand, will have to come from you.
– And John?
– We don’t know where John will be. Wherever he goes, he’ll need your explanation too.
– I know.
– The photographs, letters. Use whatever you need. Something similar has been put in writing, but I can’t word a document the way I can arrange a contract with you when we’re both sitting in the same room.
– I’m lying, not sitting.
– Attention to detail. It’s why you’re right for the job. Why you’re here.
THEY THINK THAT they’re the first to get angry; to belittle the process by making faces, or defiantly moving out of position; breaking the furniture that sits within frame when the strength of my reaction is not the one they desire. They believe their sudden exit from the studio will destroy months of work; that my motivation, too, will be decimated by their loss; that I am hostage to their will and tantrums. How I must feed the animal and placate the delusions they hold: their importance within Art; that it is their face which is seen, not my hand; the hand becoming irrelevant in the gallery or auction room. How the face will always take precedence.
Ben’s distaste is nothing I haven’t seen from you or Vishni. His lapse of manners appearing once frustration takes hold; goodwill evaporating in the heat of the oil fire; the purity of his intentions strangled by the smell of turps that floats heavily in the room, thick like rope. You once carried a ewe into the studio, refusing to take her away; the challenge being that if I was so set on painting life, I should be working with a creature that would not stay still; how I must be afraid of life if I was unable to accurately capture an animal that was bigger than the painting. You were still angry about the dog. This was one of the revenges you waged. There was no gentleness as you pulled her across the studio and dropped her into the chair, not until you registered her distress; understood that nothing was being achieved. You learned that I could not be punished that way; to wound could only come from the pose, that ability to stay perfectly in position while giving nothing of yourself. Relishing the effort it would take on my part to draw you out.
Vishni has tested me in other ways, changing parts of her appearance mid-painting; a forehead suddenly muddy with henna; eyebrows threaded to a series of dashes; her pubis shaved between an evening sitting and one that followed the next morning. Her displeasure at these times no longer remained internalized, choosing instead to physically mark her powerlessness, forcing me to decide whether to include her message in the work, knowing that I could only comply; how it was my duty to record. Twice I have changed the direction of a painting because of her actions; caught in the tension between following a false line and a true one. What I push them to is not play-acting: the limits of where their bodies can stretch physically, the truth of what sits on their face. At the first feeling of a lie, work is abandoned and started again. Some years after her rebellion, in the softness of middle age, you shaved your head, but only after a painting had been finished. The boys in one of the apple barns were marking each other with a set of electric shears in preparation for the grueling month of harvest – hair being one less thing to worry about; how their hands could not be distracted from the task of picking apples; that every second wasted sweeping damp hair from their forehead was an apple not picked, and two cents lost – and you had joined in. Your eyes were wild on your return; sunburnt face, arms and chest flecked with dirt from the shed. Your smile came from a place of successful initiation; of community membership renewed. The shyness that overtook you then, as you approached me, was the constant; proud yet still un
sure. Everything else belonged to another man.
– You look like a convict.
– A laborer. One of many.
– Men, forty years of age, with shaved heads are those recovering from an illness. They’re the only ones to go near clippers that brutal.
– I see it as more of a cure.
– You look odd.
– I thought you liked me to look odd. ‘Not Everyman, but one particular man.’ That’s one of yours, isn’t it?
– Now you’re making fun of me.
– Only because I want to raise a smile from you. The sun’s shining. I’ve drunk a beer and shot the breeze with some sound fellows. It’s been a good day.
– And what a souvenir you have.
– It’s ridden me of something unwanted. Don’t you ever want to shed your skin when you’ve finished a painting? Start afresh?
– I start afresh every day. I’ve learned not to carry anything other than what I see.
– Even if you paint the same person. People.
– But it’s not the same person. That’s the point. You could paint the same tree every day for fifty years and it would be different each time. A similar object may be before you, but the speed of life alters it.
On this scale, Ben is a mere pilgrim, early down his path. Circumstances dictate that boredom floats under an ever-rising threshold. Irritations are swallowed; expletives thought but not spoken. He knows that he is the last. His next sitting will be with another painter in another studio. They will talk differently. If the artist is younger, Ben will be revered.
– I was thinking earlier of my grandmother, Anna. Granny Frances. My mother’s side. When she was dying, the family was gathered from between the coasts. This was something like twenty years ago. We sat at her bedside for several days. Twelve of us, in all. Aunts and uncles. Cousins who were barely speaking to us because they already knew what was happening to Granny’s estate and were angry about it. The tension was palpable.
All the Days and Nights Page 13