The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  He resembled any one of a thousand, no literally tens of thousands, of those tanned Florida retirees one sees on bridges fishing, on golf courses tottering, and on the shuffleboard courts of rest homes and public parks shuffling. He even wore the uniform. Green-billed khaki baseball cap, white denim Bermuda shorts, low-cut Zayre tennis shoes in pale blue canvas, and the standard white open-necked “polo” shirt with short sleeves. The inevitable tiny green alligator was embroidered over the left pocket of the shirt, an emblem so common in Florida that any Miami Beach comedian could get a laugh by saying, “They caught an alligator in the Glades the other day, and he was wearing a shirt with a little man sewn over the pocket . . .”

  But unlike those other thousands of old men who had retired to Florida in anticipation of a warm death, men who had earned their dubious retirement by running shoe stores, managing light-bulb plants in Amarillo, manufacturing condoms in Newark, hustling as harried sales managers in the ten western states, Debierue had served, and was still serving, the strictest master of them all—the self-discipline of the artist.

  Debierue, apparently unperturbed by the arrival of a strange, beat-up convertible in his yard, sat limberly erect in a green-webbed, aluminum patio chair beside the porch door, soaking up late afternoon sun. I was pleased to see that he was allowing his white beard to grow again (for several years he had been clean shaven), but it was not as long and Melvillean as it had been in photos of the old artist taken in the twenties.

  Physically, Debierue was asthenic. Long-limbed, long-bodied, slight, with knobby knees and elbows. Advanced age had caused his thin shoulders to droop, of course, and there was a melony potbelly below his belt. His sun-bronzed skin, although it was wrinkled, gave the old man a healthy, almost robust appearance. His keen blue eyes were alert and unclouded, and the great blade of his beaky French nose did not have those exposed, tiny red veins one usually associates with aged retirees in Florida. His full, sensuous lips formed a fat grape-colored “O”—a dark, plump circle encircled by white hair. His blue stare, with which he returned mine, was incurious, polite, direct, and distant, but during the long uncomfortable moment we sat in silent confrontation, I detected an air of vigilance in his sharp old eyes.

  As a critic I had learned early in the game how unwise it was to give too much weight or credence to first impressions, but under his steady, unwavering gaze I felt—I knew—that I was in the presence of a giant, which, in turn, made me feel like a violator, a criminal. And if, in that first moment, he had pointed to the gate silently—without even saying “Get out!”—I would have departed without uttering a word.

  But such was not the case.

  Berenice, her hands folded in her lap over her chamois drawstring handbag, sat quietly, and there she would sit until I got out of the car, walked around it, and opened the door on her side.

  I was uninvited, an unexpected visitor, and it was up to me to break the frozen sea that divided us. Apprehensively, and dangling the Land camera from its carrying strap on two fingers, I got out of the car and nodded politely.

  “Good afternoon, M. Debierue,” I said in French, trying to keep my voice deep, like Jean Gabin, “at long last we meet!”

  Apparently he hadn’t heard any French (and mine wasn’t so bad) for a long time. Debierue smiled—and what a wonderful, warmhearted smile he had! His smile was so sweet, so sincere, so insinuating that my heart twisted with sudden pain. It was a smile to shatter the world. His age-ruined mouth, purple lips and all, was beautiful when he smiled. Several teeth were missing, both uppers and lowers, and those that remained gave a jack-o’-lantern effect to his generous mouth. But the swift transformation from mournful resignation to rejuvenated, unrestrained happiness changed his entire appearance. The grooved down-pointing lines in his face were twisted into swirling, upswept arabesques. He rose stiffly from his chair as I approached, and shook a long forefinger at me in mock reproach.

  “Ah, M. Figueras! You have shaved your beard. You must grow it back quickly!”

  His greeting me by name that way brought sudden moisture to my eyes. He pumped my hand, the single up-and-down European handshake. His long spatulate fingers were warm and dry.

  “You—you know me?” I said, in unfeigned astonishment.

  He treated me to the first in a series of bona fide Gallic shrugs. “You, or another—” he said mysteriously, “and it is well that it is you. I am familiar with your work, naturally, M. Figueras.”

  I gulped like a tongue-tied teenager, abashed, not knowing what to say, and then noticed that he was looking past my shoulder toward Berenice.

  “Oh!” I said, running around the car, and helping Berenice out the door. “This is my friend, M. Debierue, Mlle Hollis.”

  Berenice glared at me when I pronounced her name “Holee,” and said, “Hollis, Mr. Debierue,” in English, “Berenice Hollis. And it’s a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

  Debierue kissed her hand, and I thought (I was probably oversensitive) he was a little uneasy, or put off by her presence. He didn’t know—and there was no unawkward way for me to enlighten him—whether she was truly just a friend, my mistress, my secretary, or a well-heeled art patron. I decided to say nothing more. He would be able to tell for himself by the way she looked at me and touched my arm from time to time that we were on intimate terms. It was best to let it go at that.

  The old man’s English was adequate, despite a heavy accent, and as we talked in French, that beautiful late April afternoon, he or I occasionally translated or made some comment to Berenice in English.

  “I’m one of those obscure journalists who presume to criticize art,” I said modestly, with a nervous smile, but he stopped me by raising a hand.

  “Non, no, no”—he shook his head—“not obscure, M. Figueras. I know your work well. The article you wrote on the California painter . . . ?” He frowned.

  “Vint? Ray Vint, you mean?”

  “Yes, that’s the name. The little fly. That was so droll.” He chuckled reflectively. “Do not feel guilty, M. Figueras.” He shrugged. “The true artist cannot hide forever, and if not you, another would come. Now, come! Come inside! I will give you cold orange juice, fresh frozen Minute Maid.”

  I was flattered that he knew my work as well as my name, or at least one article—I checked myself—written in English, at that, and not to my knowledge translated into French. But why did he mention this particular article on Vint? Ray Vint was an abstract painter whose paintings sold sparsely—for a dozen good reasons I won’t go into here. Vint was an excellent craftsman, however, and could get all the portrait work he desired—more, in fact, than he wanted to paint. He needed the money he made from portraits to be able to work on the abstracts he preferred to paint. But because he hated to do portraits, he also hated the people who sat for them and provided him with large sums for flattering likenesses. He got “revenge” on the sitters by painting a fly on them.

  In medieval painting, and well into the Renaissance, a fly was painted on Jesus Christ’s crucified body: the fly on Jesus’ body was a symbol of redemption, because a fly represented sin and Jesus was without sin. A fly painted on the person of a layman, however, signified sin without redemption, or translated into “This person is going to Hell!” Ray Vint painted a trompe-l’oeil fly on every portrait.

  Sometimes his patrons didn’t notice the fly for several days, and when they did they were unaware of its significance. They were usually delighted when they discovered it. The fly became a conversational gambit when they showed the portrait to their friends: “Notice anything unusual there about my portrait?”

  Artists, of course, when they saw the fly, laughed inwardly, but said nothing to the patrons about the meaning of the Vintian trademark. I had hesitated about whether to mention Vint’s symbolic revenge when I wrote about him, not wanting to jeopardize his livelihood. But I had decided, in the end, to bring the matter up because it was a facet of Vint’s personality that said something implicit about the emotionless nature of his
abstracts.

  As I guided Berenice into the house in Debierue’s wake, holding her left elbow, I became apprehensive about the old painter’s offhand remark and dry, brief chuckle. A chuckle, unlike a sudden smile or a sincere burst of laughter, is difficult to interpret. Whether a chuckle is friendly or unfriendly, it merely serves as a nervous form of punctuation. But to mention one particular incident, or paragraph, out of the thousands I had written, and the “fly” symbol at that, caused the knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach to throb. The fact that he had read my piece on Vint (not a hack job, because I don’t write hack pieces, but it certainly wasn’t one of my best articles—Vint’s work simply hadn’t been good enough for a serious in-depth treatment) could be a hindrance to me.

  No one knew, because Debierue had never commented, what the old man had thought about Galt’s article, with its fanciful “Chironesque” interpretations, but writers with reputations much greater than mine had been turned down subsequently when they had asked the painter for interviews. After the Galt article, Debierue had every right to distrust critics.

  Damn Galt, anyway, I thought bitterly. Then I saw the gilded baroque frame on the wall and pointed to it.

  “That isn’t the famous No. One, is it?”

  Debierue pursed his lips, and shrugged. “It was,” he answered lightly, and entered the kitchen.

  The moment I examined the picture I knew what he meant, of course. There was no crack on the wall behind the mount. The frame, without the crack, and not hanging in its original environment, was no longer the fabled No. One. My exultation was great nevertheless. It was something I had never expected to see in my lifetime. Berenice, after a quick glance at the empty frame, seated herself in a Sears-Danish chair and asked me for a cigarette.

  I shook my head impatiently. “Not till we ask permission,” I told her.

  There was a narrow bar-counter built into the wall. It separated the kitchen from the living room. There was no dining room, and the living room was furnished Spartanly. The chicken farmer-tenant who had built the house had probably intended, like many Floridians, to use the large screened porch as a dining area. There was a square, confirming pass-through window from the kitchen to the porch.

  There were no other pictures on the walls, and the living room was furnished cheaply and austerely with Sears furniture. Mr. Cassidy had certainly spared expense in furnishing the house for the famous visitor. There wasn’t a hi-fi stereo, a radio, or television set, and there were no drapes to mask the severe horizontal lines of the Venetian blinds covering the windows. Except for two Danish chairs, a Marfak-topped coffee table, a black Naugahyde two-seater couch, and one floor lamp—all grouped in a tight oblong—the huge living room, with its carpetless terrazzo floor, was bare. A Miami Herald and a superslick copy of Réalités were on the coffee table. There were two tall black wrought-iron barstools at the counter. Debierue either had to have his meals at this bar-counter or take his food out to the porch and eat on a Samsonite card table.

  Mr. Cassidy would not, I knew, tip Debierue off that I was coming, but if the old painter asked me how I had found him, what could I say? He didn’t appear surprised by my sudden appearance. If he asked, I would say that my editor had told me and that he sent me down on an assignment. These thoughts nagged at my mind as Debierue prepared the frozen orange juice. He placed an aluminum pitcher on the table, opened the frozen can with an electric can opener, and then made three trips to the sink to fill the empty can with tap water.

  He worked methodically, with great concentration, adding each canful of water to the pitcher like a chemist preparing an experiment. With a long-handled spoon he stirred the mixture, smiled, and beckoned for us to come and sit at the bar. Berenice and I climbed onto the stools, and he filled three plastic glasses to their brims.

  Without touching his glass he looked beyond me to No. One on the wall. “This is the new world, M. Figueras, and there are no cracks in the wall of the new world. Here the concrete, brick, and stucco walls are hurricane-proof. My insurance policy guarantees this.”

  This might be a good opening or closing sentence for my article, I thought. I leaned forward, prepared to explore his thinking on the “new world” in more detail, but he shook his head as a signal for me to remain silent.

  “I will not suggest to you that only M. Cassidy could have directed you here, M. Figueras. It is unimportant now that you are here, and we are both aware that M. Cassidy is, like all collectors, a most peculiar man.”

  Grateful for the easy out, I asked for permission to smoke. Debierue took a saucer from the cabinet, set it between us, and waited until I lighted Berenice’s cigarette and mine before he continued. He refused a cigarette by waving his hand.

  “What can I say to you, M. Figueras, that would dissuade you from writing about me for your magazine?”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid. You make me feel like a complete bastard, but—”

  “I’m sorry for your feelings. But as a favor to me, do you have so much zeal that you must tell my address in your magazine? Much privacy is needed for my work, as it is for all artists. Every day I must work for at least four hours, and to have frequent interruptions—”

  “That’s no concession at all, sir. I’ll dateline my piece ‘Somewhere in Florida.’ I know how you feel, of course. The Galt article was damned unfair to you, I know—”

  “How do you know?” Again the sad, sweet smile.

  “I know Galt’s attitude toward art, that’s how I know. He’s got a one-track mental set. He invariably puts everything he sees into a highly subjective pattern—whether it fits or not.

  “Is not all art subjective?”

  “Yes.” I grinned. “But didn’t Braque say that the subject was not the object?”

  “Perhaps. I don’t know whether Braque said this himself, or whether some clever young man—a man like yourself, M. Figueras—said that he said it.”

  “I—I don’t recall,” I replied lamely, “where the quote originated, not at the moment, but he is supposed to have said it himself. And if not . . . well . . . the play on words has a subtle validity, for . . . the art of our times. Don’t you think . . . ?”

  “The word ‘validity’ cannot be used validly for the art of any time.”

  I hesitated. He was testing me. By going into theoretical entelechy I could have answered him easily, but I didn’t want to argue with him—I shrugged and smiled.

  “By validity,” he smiled back, “do you mean that the eye contains the incipient action?” The corners of his eyes wrinkled with amusement.

  “Not exactly, sir. Cartesian dualism, as an approach to aesthetics, no longer has intrinsic value—and that’s Galt’s fault. He has never been able to transcend his early training. Not to be summational is the hardest task facing the contemporary critic. To see the present alone, blocking out the past and future, calls for optic mediation.” My face grew warm under the force of his steady blue eyes. “I don’t mean to run Galt down, sir, or to give you the impression that I’m a better critic than he is. It’s just that I’m twenty-five years younger than Galt, and I’ve looked at more contemporary art than he has—”

  “Do not be so nervous, M. Figueras. (?)Debemos dar preferencia al hablar del español?”

  “No. I think in Spanish when I speak it, and I prefer to think in English and talk in French—”

  “What are you talking about?” Berenice said, sipping from her glass.

  “The difference between Spanish and English and French,” I said.

  “I hate Spanish,” Berenice said, winking at me. “It’s got too many words for bravery, which makes a person wonder sometimes about the true bravery of the Spanish character.”

  “And French, I think,” Debierue said in English, “has too many words for love.” He reached over and touched my hair. “You have nice curly yellow hair, and she should not tease you. Come now, drink your orange juice.”

  The paternal touch of his hand unknotted my inner tenseness, and I realize
d that the old artist was trying to make things easier for me. At any rate, my guilty feelings had been dissipated by his casual acceptance of both me and my professionalism. My awe of the old painter was also going away. I was still mightily impressed by him, and I felt that our conversation was going well.

  Any writer who is awed in the presence of the great or the near-great cannot function critically. I respected Debierue enough to be wary, however, knowing that he was not an ingenuous man, knowing that he had survived as an individual all of these years by maintaining an aloof, if not an arrogant, silence, and a studied indifference to journalists. Debierue realized, I think, that I was on his side, and that I would always take an artist’s viewpoint before that of the insensitive public’s. He had read my work and he remembered my name. I could therefore give him credit for knowing that I was as unbiased as any art critic can ever be. To see his paintings, which was the major reason for my odyssey, I now had to gain his complete confidence. I had to guard against my tendency to argue. Nor should I bait him merely to obtain a few sensational opinions about art as “news.”

  “I am curious about why you immigrated to Florida, M. Debierue.”

  “I almost didn’t. For my old bones, I wanted the sun. When more than fifty years of my work was burned in the fire—you knew about the fire?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A most fortunate accident. It gave me a chance to begin again. The artist who can begin again at my age is a very fortunate man. So it was to the new world I turned, the new world and a new start. Tahiti, I think at first, would be best, but my name would then be linked somehow to Gauguin.” He shook his head sadly. “Unavoidable. Such comparisons would not be fair, but they would have been made. And on the small island, perhaps the bus would pass my studio every day with American tourists to stare at me. Tahiti, no. Then I think, South America? No, there is always trouble there. And then Florida seems exactly right. But I did not come right away. I knew about the war in Florida, and I have had enough war in my lifetime.”