The Riverhouse

by G. Norman Lippert

  Christiana finally looked up at him, raising her eyebrows. “Oh,” she said. “Well that’s cool.”

  “You… you like it?”

  She frowned again and looked back at the painting. She nodded slightly. “I guess. It’s well done, at least. I can tell that. There’s a lot of realism in it, and yet it’s not realistic at all, not in the colors and the overlying shapes. It kind of messes with my eyes. It’s just… it’s not what anyone would call ‘nice’. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”

  “No. Art is very subjective. And it’s still a work in progress. It’s just an idea that kind of got stuck in my head.” Shane looked at the painting himself, trying to see it the way she did. It was certainly very different than anything he’d ever painted before. Christiana was right that it wavered between realism and abstraction, and yet where she saw conflict, he saw a dance.

  “I see what you mean about it sticking in your head,” she said, shaking her head and finally turning away. “It’s hard to avoid looking at it. I guess that means it’s a success, at least by somebody’s definition. I just wouldn’t want it hanging in my living room. Are we ready to load?”

  Shane helped her carry the box back down the steps and around the corner to the front door. The heat was rising as the day turned humid, and by the time the box had been lifted into the van and strapped to the inside wall with bungee cords, Shane’s forehead was beaded with sweat. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and noticed that Christiana still looked as cool and fresh as when she’d arrived. She shook his hand again, apparently anxious to leave.

  “Good to meet you Mr. Bellamy. I’m sure I’ll see you again.”

  Shane nodded. “I hope so. I have to admit, you aren’t what I expected.”

  “I take it that’s a compliment?”

  “Well, mainly it’s just that I expected some college guy long on attitude and short on attention span. We used to have interns like that back at T and C.”

  “I’m no one’s idea of an intern, apparently,” Christiana said, fishing the van’s keys out of the pocket of her capris. “And that includes Morrie. I think he keeps me around for the scenery as much as for the work. I don’t really mind. Still.”

  “So why do you do it?” Shane said, following her around to the driver’s side door. “I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”

  Christiana opened the door and looked back at him. She lifted her left shoulder in a quick shrug. “I like art. I can’t make it, but I like working with it. I used to be a legal assistant, and was studying for the bar. I woke up one day and realized something important. I realized I hated law. Worse, I hated lawyers. I was only studying to be one because that’s what my parents were, and that’s what they always expected me to be, too. And I thought, I don’t even like my parents. They’re some of the unhappiest people I know. Why would I want to do what they do? So I quit university, moved out of the apartment my parents had rented for me, and decided to get into art representation. Everyone’s got to start somewhere, right?”

  Shane nodded somberly. “Impressive.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think it takes a lot of willpower to break out of the orbit of other people’s expectations,” he answered, and then added quickly, “Not that I’ve learned that from experience or anything.”

  “Ah,” Christiana nodded, climbing into the driver’s seat. “Well, if you say so. See you around, Mr. Bellamy.”

  Shane backed away as she started the van. “Call me Shane,” he said over the sound of the engine. “Everybody else does.”

  She nodded through the open window, tipped a salute, and began to back up. She performed a neat three-point turn and gunned the van’s engine, propelling it down the broken driveway. Sunlight glinted off its rear windows and then it was gone, hidden behind the encroaching trees.

  Christiana, Shane thought, bemused. What a nice name. He headed back into the house, and had to return a minute later, once he remembered that his coffee was still sitting on the porch railing. It was still warm enough to drink.

  The computer was still humming softly to itself, although the screen saver had popped on; the Microsoft logo appeared and disappeared on the screen, changing position each time like some kind of a corporate Whack-a-mole. Shane approached the desk and shook the mouse back and forth on its pad, waking the computer. The Microsoft logo vanished and a field of type appeared; the biography of Gustav Ferdinand Wilhelm.

  Shane considered finishing the article, and then decided to save it for later. He had plans for today. On a whim, however, he scrolled down to the bottom of the page. There were thumbnail samples of the artist’s work there, mostly portraits. Shane recognized some of them. There was Theodore Roosevelt with his dog, seated on a long, sunlit veranda. Below that was an absurdly young Queen Mary, standing behind her husband, King George the fifth, who was seated, smiling cryptically.

  The paintings were indeed quite good, and very unlike any other portraits Shane had ever seen, especially from that era. They seemed light, whimsical, and even somewhat irreverent, but always in a way that implied the permission of the subjects, as if they were allowing the artist to show a more private and human side of them, a side that was most often hidden by the pomp and circumstance of their offices.

  Looking at them, Shane felt a strange sense of relief. He wondered about it for a moment, and then realized where it came from. Part of him had expected Wilhelm’s works to appear hauntingly familiar; to be bold and daring with color, somehow both representational and abstract at the same time. In short, he’d half expected Wilhelm’s works to look like the painting upstairs, the unusual portrait of Wilhelm’s dead manor house, as if Shane was somehow channeling his artistic spirit.

  It was crazy, of course; so crazy that Shane had not even allowed himself to consider it in the daylight. Only now, as he looked down at Wilhelm’s artwork, was he aware of how much that strange suspicion had taken root in his mind. He felt like a man being told by his Doctor that the tests had come back negative, that he was perfectly healthy, only then accepting what had been, up to that point, the very real possibility that the black spot on his chest X-rays had been cancer.

  He smiled to himself. His imagination had gotten the better of him, that was all. Imagination was a great thing, a profitable thing even, if you could keep it on its leash. Let it run wild, and it could turn cannibal. It had happened to much better artists than him. Shane sighed deeply. The painting upstairs was just a painting; curious and slightly disturbing, perhaps, but no more so than any number of works he’d seen created by the starving artists, the ones who were the slaves of the muse. And compared to some of those, the painting upstairs wasn’t very strange at all; it was even downright quaint.

  That afternoon, after lunch, Shane changed into cargo shorts and an old Long Island University tee-shirt, sprayed himself liberally with Deep Woods Off, and went outside. He collected a spade, the garden shears, and the Black and Decker weed-whacker from the shed, piling them all into the old wheelbarrow that sat in the tall grass in back. Whistling happily, he pushed the wheelbarrow to the front right corner of the yard, to the entrance of the mysterious path he had discovered yesterday. Maybe he wouldn’t clear away the whole thing, but it was something to do, even if he only made a tiny bit of progress each day. And it seemed like a worthwhile job, even if it took him all autumn.

  He had a vague idea that Gus would approve.

  He made more progress than he expected that day. It was, in fact, relatively quick work, simply lopping off the branches that barred the path, digging up the occasional bush, and then using the weed-whacker to mow down the undergrowth, revealing the flagstone footpath. Most of the stones were covered with a thick carpet of moss, but that was all right. The moss softened the path and gave it a sense of whimsy, like something elves might skip down in the moonlight, on their way to the cobblers to put in a night’s charitable work.

  Shane made it all the way to the curve around the gully, where the bench was b
uried in the drift of hydrangeas. The sun had begun to lower, and he guessed it was approaching five o’clock. Had he really been at this for almost four hours? He was hungry and tired, and his back was sore from the digging, and yet none of those things felt especially unpleasant. He’d lived a very sedentary life for the past decade, and the day of hard manual work, much like his unusually long bike ride a few days earlier, was a welcome break. It was good to know that his body was still capable of such exertion. And surely it was good for him, both mentally and physically.

  He had a sneaky feeling that he’d allowed this most recent painting to get hold of him a little too deeply. That wasn’t a bad thing, exactly, as long as he kept it in perspective. The imagination was a great tool, as he’d thought that morning, but give it too much slack and it could turn on you and devour you.

  The idea of the cracked artist was well known, virtually a stereotype. From Van Gogh to Jimmy Hendrix, history was littered with the corpses of creative people who had succumbed to the cannibal impulses of an out-of-control imagination.

  Shane had given it a lot of thought. It was almost as if creativity was too big a current for the human mind to manage particularly well. It required an awful lot of insulation and careful handling. The volts of the imagination, he’d decided, were careless and indiscriminate; they would either power the artistic machine or fry you in your boots, depending on how far you opened the circuit, how carelessly you loosed the creative current.

  Shane recognized this tendency even in himself, the tendency to fall into the art with reckless abandon, to let it into his mind like some sort of impish demon. Thus, he’d set up firewalls in his mind; borders and boundaries, hand-painted mental signs that read, “This far, and no further”. The foreman in his head was an expression of those boundaries, as was his shift and his general rejection of the fabled artist's muse.

  Of course, Shane was working with the muse as of late, perhaps for the first time in his adult life. But he wasn’t her slave. He’d ignored her siren call the entire day, in fact, spending it out on the forgotten footpath, clearing it and exhausting himself so that he probably wouldn’t even paint tonight. He grinned to himself as he finished, tossing the spade into the wheelbarrow behind him and arming sweat from his brow.

  “That’ll show her whose boss,” he muttered to himself, looking back at his work. “Shane Bellamy, that’s who. The man who tamed the muse.”

  He tromped along the path, past what he had cleared, and moved into the sunlit area that curved around the gully. The hydrangeas were very thick, but he kicked through them, clearing his way, and found the hump of the buried bench. Using both hands, secure in garden gloves, he stripped the vines away from the bench, snapping the stems and ripping out the roots wherever he could. He didn’t intend to completely clear the bench; he just wanted a place to sit down for a moment. The wrought iron of the bench was contrived to look like curling vines and leaves. Despite the decades of rust, it seemed solid. Shane finally turned and plopped onto it, sighing. It leaned backwards, but held him easily.

  Even in its state of overgrowth and rusty dereliction, it was extremely pleasant. Shane immediately understood why Wilhelm had placed the bench here. Its position provided a high, clear view of the boulder-strewn gully as it dropped away toward the river, a hundred yards beyond. Trees clustered along the furthest edge of the gully, but they looked relatively young compared to the woods on either side. It seemed possible, even likely, that the view of the river beyond the gully had originally been completely uninterrupted.

  Shane imagined Wilhelm sitting on the bench, perhaps with his wife at his side, watching the huge steamships paddle up the river, splashing and chugging, leaving trails of black smoke in the sapphire sky. Maybe they’d drunk tea from hand-corked bottles, carried in a whicker picnic basket.

  It was certainly a nice image, and yet Shane didn’t think it was exactly accurate. Maybe that kind of thing had happened early in their marriage, before they’d come to Missouri, but by the time they’d built the house, Shane had a strange suspicion that those halcyon days were over.

  He was probably wrong, of course. These were simply more of those idle narratives, concocted when he was working on the painting of the manor house; mere creative daydreams, no more accurate than uninformed guesses.

  He rested there, his arms spread out on the back of the bench on either side, smelling the wild, woodsy smell of the hydrangeas and cut weeds and deepening autumn. The wind blew high in the trees, making them shush and whisper, sending down a snowfall of turning leaves.

  As Shane moved to get up, he saw something glint in the thick growth near his feet. He leaned over, and then squatted in front of the bench, pushing the vines and leaves aside. There didn’t appear to be anything unusual there.

  He was about to climb to his feet again, weary and hungry, when he saw it again; a shimmer of sunlight on dull metal. He reached for it, felt around in the thick undergrowth, and finally touched something hard and smooth. He gripped it and began to pull it out.

  It made a noise, a sort of loose clatter, and for one bright second Shane’s mind provided am image of a rattlesnake; it was coiled in the shade of the bench, waiting for him to leave, and he had just grabbed its tail. It wasn’t a rattlesnake, of course. Were they even native to Missouri? He hadn’t lived there long enough to know, but he doubted it.

  Shane held the small object up, squinting at it curiously. It was small, barely longer than the palm of his hand, and shaped sort of like a fat tongue-depressor. One half—the handle?—appeared to be made of ivory. The other half was tarnished silver, molded into the shape of a placidly smiling cherub’s face, surrounded by curls of hair and blooming flowers. There were three jingle bells attached to the silver end by tiny metal loops. The bells tinkled merrily as Shane shook the object.

  He had no idea what it was, but it was certainly an interesting find. Obviously, someone had dropped it during their walk along this path, perhaps as they sat on this very bench, resting. It had lain there ever since, lost in the vines and undergrowth, waiting for Shane to come along and find it. He wondered if whoever had lost it had missed it. Had they come back to look for it? Were they still alive out there somewhere? He doubted it.

  Not quite sure what to do with it, he stood up and stuffed the tiny object into the pocket of his cargo shorts.

  The hazy brightness of the day was finally beginning to dim as the sun lowered beyond the trees. Shane decided it was time to head back.

  By the time he pushed the wheelbarrow out of the cleared section of the footpath and back into the front corner of the yard, he was sweating again and the sky had grown low and moody. The sun painted long, purple shadows over the yard and up the front of the cottage.

  Shane lowered the wheelbarrow and wiped his brow again, looking up at the cottage. Because this section of yard was relatively remote and unused, his view of the cottage was somewhat unusual. From here, it crowned the bluff, standing stark against the sky beyond, framed on either side by the marching wood. It looked a little like a lone sentry defending the high ground from some Tolkien-esque advancing army.

  This was how Wilhelm and his wife would have seen the cottage every time they’d approached it, coming from the footpath that connected it to the main house. That realization gave him a unique perspective on the small stone and wood structure. He tried to look at it as they would have seen it. It certainly did look different from this angle. In fact…

  Shane frowned. He blinked and walked around to the front of the wheelbarrow, moving out from under the trees at the edge of the yard. From this angle he could see two sides of the cottage: the front, with its small porch and leaning, mossy roof, and the east side, the side that was most rarely seen, since it angled toward the nearby woods and the river. The grass portion of the yard on that side was narrow, dominated by the little shed that jutted from the side of the house.

  A horny old magnolia tree grew up behind the shed, spreading over its roof and obscuring the view
of the east face’s upper half. Just visible through the lattice of branches and leaves, however, was the shape of a small round window. It reflected the descending sun with a bright pin-prick of light, impossible to miss from this angle.

  “What the hell?” Shane muttered to himself, taking a few steps closer, looking up through the branches of the magnolia.

  The upstairs portion of the cottage was divided into two rooms, the attic and the studio, and Shane had been certain that there was only one window between them, the one that stood over the stairs, facing across the river. That window was not round, like this one. The attic, on the other hand, was merely a dark closet-like area connected to the back of the studio, accessible only by a narrow door in the corner. As far as Shane knew, there wasn’t even anything stored there.

  It was possible, he supposed, that the attic branched off behind one of the side walls of the studio, forming a narrow walkway, but why would there be a window there? And wouldn’t he have seen it, at least once, on one of his few trips into the attic?

  Perhaps, strange as it seemed, it was in a section of the attic that had been walled off. After all, the cottage had gone through numerous renovations throughout its long history. Every owner had placed their stamp on it, adding this, subtracting that, maybe even changing the configuration of the floor plan in such a way as to create some odd forgotten space. It was unsettling, though, that Shane could have owned the cottage for almost seven years and never known that it had a second upstairs window. Maybe later he’d peek into the attic and see if he could ascertain where that unexpected window might be.

  For now, he returned to the wheelbarrow and hefted it, pushing it toward the shed.

  As he approached the cottage, that glint of sunlight played across the tiny round upstairs window again. For a moment, it didn’t quite look like sunlight reflecting off the old glass panes; it looked instead like a small interior light source, glowing just inside, like a candle on the windowsill. That was especially impossible, of course.