by Larry Watson
Sonja struggled with the urge to push the boy’s hand away every time he fell into one of his tactile trances. She hated to see him let the world slip away while he rubbed his thumbnail along the hem of his sweater, yet he obviously took in such pleasure through his fingertips that it seemed equally wrong to stop him. The dilemma was difficult because her love for her son was so great—yes, greater than the love she felt for her daughter, but June didn’t depend on her mother’s love the way John did—and Sonja wanted what was best for her son. But, paradoxically, this problem caused Sonja to turn away from him at times. When he sat at the kitchen table worrying the frayed corner of the oilcloth with an enraptured but witless look in his eyes, she was so uncertain of what to do that she pretended not to notice him at all. Occasionally she would leave the room altogether, thereby absenting herself voluntarily from the person in this world she cared most about.
That pain could result from being a mother came as no surprise to Sonja. Her own parents, after all, had sent her away from home so that Sonja might have what they believed would be a better life in America. Whether anguish had to be a part of all love, Sonja was not sure, and she did not care to speculate on the matter.
10
There was a knock on Weaver’s studio door, and when he opened it, she said, as if months had not intervened between his proposal and her reply, “I’m here to pose. For money.”
Weaver did not hesitate. “Two dollars an hour. But I’ll seldom need you for the entire day.”
“How many days a week?”
“Perhaps as many as six, depending on what I’m working on. Some weeks perhaps not at all.”
“Daylight hours?”
Weaver had tried different combinations of blinds and shades on his studio’s many windows until he finally found the coverings that allowed in as much or as little light as he desired. “All right. Daylight hours.”
She hesitated, and Weaver could see in her eyes that she was making the final computations. “Yes,” she said. “I agree.”
“And you’ll begin today?”
“Yes.”
Weaver wanted her, to be sure, but he would forgo any physical contact if it was the only way she would pose for him. If he had to choose between her being available to his sight or his touch, he would choose, as always, his eyes and his art. If he were patient, however, if he did nothing to offend, frighten, or anger her, he might one day have her for both. Therefore, on that first day, Weaver would not even allow her inside his studio. He made her wait outside while he gathered his pencils and a sketch pad.
He led her a half mile away to a hollow between two hills, a tree-ringed grassy area not much larger than a small room. The spot was so secluded that Weaver always felt, as he pushed aside the branches of a stunted birch and stepped forward, that a curtain closed behind him. The grass was soft enough to sit or lie in, and a fallen tree gave him a place to arrange his materials. Only at high noon did light flood this space; at every other hour, the sun shone fitfully through the leaves, shadows blinking first from one direction, then another.
It was in this little vale that Weaver fucked the sharp-faced slattern he’d picked up in the Lakeside Tavern. He had scarcely asked her if she would be willing to pose in the nude and she was stripping off her clothes. On that autumn day he had her lie on her back in a pile of fallen leaves. In the painting, he wanted to make it seem as if she had risen up through the earth, but right from the start he had trouble making reality match his vision. He could not find the right arrangement of leaves on her naked body, and her expressions were wrong—either she looked blank, so it seemed as if she were a corpse partially buried, or she looked coy, a stripper working on a new outdoor-themed routine. When Weaver tried to brush the leaves from her small hard breasts, she misinterpreted his action and reached for his fly. Soon Weaver was thrusting into her, and as he did the leaves under her crackled and the smell of tannin and leaf mold rose to his nostrils. She did not model for him again.
Today, however, he asked Sonja House to do nothing more than lean back against a tree and tilt her head up as though she were searching for a bird whose song she heard in the highest branches.
He made two sketches, and when he stepped back, he said, “You can relax. Move around if you like.” Weaver had marked by eye a knot on the tree so he could duplicate the pose exactly.
She knelt in the grass.
“You know, don’t you, that the day will come when I’ll ask you to disrobe?”
“Yes.”
“I have to make certain you understand what you’ve agreed to.”
“I understand.”
When he asked her to resume her pose, Weaver did not have to align her with the knot on the tree. Without direction, she posed precisely as before.
Weaver was accustomed to working quickly, and he had not yet learned of Sonja’s ability to hold a pose, so he sketched rapidly that first day, concentrating on the lines and proportions—the distance between her eyes, the height of her cheekbones, the width of her jaw, the length of her neck, the asymmetry of her lips—that he would have to get right if he was ever going to reveal her character and her beauty and still convey the mystery of both. As soon as he set his pencil down, the question that always troubled him and his art came back to him: Must one understand an enigma in order to portray it to others?
Weeks later they were in his studio, and the thin steady rain made it seem as though a veil had dropped over the building, and Weaver decided that would be the day he would ask her to undress.
First he posed her, fully clothed, in an old wooden office chair that he sometimes worked from when he did not stand at his easel. The chair squeaked when it swiveled and clattered when its heavy casters rolled over the floor’s uneven planks, but of course she sat so still the chair made no noise. Weaver had her turned slightly from him, a partial profile, with one foot on the seat of the chair and the other leg extended. After a very quick watercolor washed with a pale gray that made it seem as though rain had fallen on the paper, Weaver at last said, “If you would please, take off your clothes and then sit again in the chair just as you are now.” Oddly enough, the chair had inspired him as much as she had. He wanted the contrast between the chair and its unyielding wood—a chair that a lawyer or a bookkeeper might once have sat in before his rolltop desk—and her body, as languid as she might be in her bath. For the first nude studies, he would switch to a new medium—charcoal, in keeping with the day’s somber expression.
Weaver was fifteen years old when his father was killed on a Chicago sidewalk. An iceman became enraged because a hotel doorman would not allow him to park in front of the Monroe House. The iceman drove his wagon around the block for no other reason than to pick up speed; he then jumped the curb and careened down the sidewalk with his brace of horses, driving right into Arthur Weaver and the small group of jurists with whom Mr. Weaver dined weekly. Arthur Weaver hit his head on a fireplug and died soon thereafter; the accident also left a district judge paralyzed from the waist down.
Two of his older brothers woke Ned with news of their father’s death, and then told him to come downstairs to join the rest of the grieving family. Weaver, however, remained in his darkened room, too confused at that moment to face another human being, much less his sisters, brothers, mother, or any of the mourners who had come to the house.
The need to draw and paint had already inflamed Weaver, and while he was determined on a career in art, his father, a practical public man and an enormously successful one at that, ceaselessly cross-examined his son on how art would enable him to make his way in the world. The questioning was good-natured, but rigorous all the same, and as frustrated as Weaver became over these interrogations, he knew their purpose: His father wanted to make certain his son did not answer his vocation halfheartedly. If Weaver could not stand up to his father’s questions, how could he overcome the obstacles that stood in the way of anyone who sought a career in the arts?
So, while his siblings’ sorrow no d
oubt centered on the deprivation of happiness that was sure to be the result of a life without their father— no more sailing on Lake Michigan, no more endless summer picnics, no more walks on Lake Shore Drive, in short no more of those occasions made memorable and pleasurable by Arthur Weaver’s humor, wit, and generosity—Ned Weaver lamented that his father would never again say, upon viewing one of his son’s watercolors, “Pretty enough, I imagine, but why that line of green at the water’s edge? Will that put food on the table or clothes on your back?” Weaver loved his father, but he also needed him the way an oyster needs a grain of sand.
Weaver rolled onto his side, but before rising from his bed he stretched to his nightstand, and in a fit of anger, grief, and despair, clamped his fingernails into the table’s varnished soft pine. He squeezed down so hard that the wood forever bore the faint imprint of his nails.
Sonja House rose from the swivel chair and walked to the iron cot that Weaver kept in the studio. With her back to Weaver, she proceeded to undress, spreading out her garments from the top of the mattress to the bottom, as if, without having them thus singly arranged, she might not remember the correct order when it was time to clothe herself again.
When she turned, Weaver did not gasp, though he was unprepared for the plenitude and power that he saw in her when she appeared naked before him for the first time. This was a woman in whom he had seldom seen anything far from sorrow, a woman whose careless beauty brought her no joy, a woman whom he felt he had to capture quickly, so inexorably was her vitality draining away. But all those impressions were the result of seeing too much the spirit that held sway over her being. When her body came into play . . .
Her breasts were round, heavy, her shoulders and hips wide. The shadows of muscles faintly wavered in her arms and legs, and he could see other signs of how a working life had marked her—a V of sunburn at her throat, tanned and freckled limbs—yet when she was naked she looked so eros-charged that any other use of her body—mothering, laboring—any purpose other than the pleasures of love was waste, waste, waste. Reflexively he made a fist, and his nails bit into his palm just as they had gouged his nightstand so many years before.
Once she was seated again, and Weaver’s hand was scuffing charcoal across the paper, he said, “When most people look at one of my drawings or paintings, what they fail to see is the story. They see a scene. Lines and shapes. Something existing in space. A man or a woman. Objects. But everything I draw or paint has its own story. A past. A future. Never only the moment on the canvas.”
Weaver sometimes talked as he drew, using his tongue to occupy his brain and thereby allowing his hand to work free of his mind’s judgments.
“And what”—her speech came slowly, as though the model was concentrating harder than the artist—“is the story you’re telling now?”
Weaver tore off a sheet and began another drawing, experimenting with a change of scale. “This will be the story of a woman who stayed away for a long time, but now that she’s here . . .”
“Yes?”
“Suppose you tell me. You never explained: Why did you finally decide to pose for me?”
“It was as I said. For money. My husband couldn’t work. He had an accident.”
“Is he working now?”
“Some. But not like before.”
“But there are other things you could have done for money.”
“I didn’t wish to wait on people again. And you pay better.”
Weaver ripped away another sheet. Perhaps he would try a series of drawings, all on the same sheet, but in each one she would be turned toward him a bit more. “It’s not that you like posing?”
“I don’t mind.”
“But do you enjoy it?”
“You’ve had such models?”
“Certainly.”
“And what is it they enjoy?”
“Oh, any number of things. Some simply like to be looked at. They might feel that no one has ever taken time to really look at them, to give them the attention that every human being needs and deserves. Some think I’ll make them beautiful, and that I’ll make their beauty available to the world. Some only want their likeness preserved, a record that says nothing more than ‘I was here. This is what I looked like.’ And some pose in order to seduce.”
“Who is it they wish to seduce?”
“Me. The viewer—anyone who looks at their image. It’s a kind of power.” Though her hair hung straight down, Weaver drew strands twining in and out of the slats of the chair back. “And some believe they will become works of art themselves. This has nothing to do with vanity. This is a wish for immortality.”
“And that is not vanity?”
“Could I ask you to turn toward the right a few inches? There. That’s good.” This movement brought the nipple of one breast into view.
“These stories you draw and paint,” she said. “They are yours alone? Is this why you ask me nothing about myself?”
All afternoon the gentle rain had made faint brushing sounds at the window, but now the drops, gathering volume, tapped louder. Weaver’s concentration did not falter. While he drew, her nipple grew erect, and the stiffening did not subside. For the time being, Weaver made no attempt to incorporate this detail into the drawing.
“I could ask you as well,” he said. “Why do you volunteer nothing about yourself?”
For a long time she said nothing. Then Weaver heard what might have been the softest laughter, followed by her voice. “Perhaps I want my story to be only the one you paint.” Then again, the sound may not have been laughter at all but merely rain against the glass.
The father’s lessons were not lost on the son. As soon as his art began to find favor with the buying public, Weaver never let pass an opportunity to make a sale. He placed most of his work with the Lear Gallery in Chicago, and though Edmund Lear could get top prices for Ned Weaver originals, Weaver eventually opened his own small gallery in Door County. Here Weaver sold the miniature watercolors that Edmund did not care for, as well as the work of a few local artists whose landscapes appealed to tourists.
Not a single work of art by Ned Weaver was on display in the Weaver home, and his paintings and drawings stayed in the studio only until they were complete. Once they were signed, they were for sale, and if they weren’t fit for the market, Weaver destroyed them.
Weaver kept for himself only the images of Sonja House, and these he stored in a trunk in the studio. No one else knew of the existence or location of these works, though Weaver always meant to tell Ed Lear about them. He meant to.
11
From the kitchen window she saw him coming out of the barn, and she smiled when he stopped to sneeze twice, because she always did the same thing when she stepped out into the sunlight.
She couldn’t watch him long, however, because her hands were in the soapy water with that sharp paring knife that had once sliced her thumb when she was not paying attention to the task at hand.
Why was he now walking backward, lurching away from the open barn door? Was he gazing back at the site of some mischief? She didn’t like either of the children playing in the barn, but she finally gave up trying to keep them out. Instead, she made these rules: They could bring their playthings into the barn, but they could not play with anything they found there. And they could not enter Buck’s stall.
Spring and early summer had been unusually hot, and the county was overdue for rain. Farmers and orchardists both feared for their crops, and the resort owners worried that tourists would cancel or cut short their vacations—why travel north and pay to stay in cottages that were hotter than city houses?
Sonja disliked the heat, and when she could escape it no other way, she tried to imagine herself in surroundings unlike those pressing in on her. On days as stifling as these, she thought back to the winters of her childhood when icy gales blew down from the Norwegian Sea and snow as fine-grained as salt could pelt you even from a blue sky. John sat down heavily in the path between the house and the barn,
and Sonja recalled how when her father walked back and forth from the house to the boat shed his boots kicked up powdery clouds of snow like the dry puff of dust that rose just now from her son’s rump.
Was it this memory of her father? Was it Sonja’s wish to leave this moment when the morning was already so warm she felt as though she were wrapped in a membrane of her own sweat? Or was it nothing more than her concern for that paring knife hiding in the dishwater that made her miss the exact moment when her son flopped onto his back and began to convulse, thrashing against the ground so violently it seemed as if his intent was to raise a cloud of dust dense enough to conceal him during this embarrassing episode?
The dog arrived at John’s twitching body before Sonja did, but Sandy, usually as placid and even-tempered as a pet could be, was plainly agitated at the sight of the boy and began to bark excitedly. Sonja felt as if she had to quiet Sandy as well as care for her son, but then she stopped herself just as she was about to shush the dog—what if John thought she was telling him he should be quiet, and at that moment she wanted nothing more fiercely than for her son to speak to her. No, he didn’t even have to speak—he could cry out, wail, he could make any sound other than that faint gurgling at the back of his throat that made it seem as though he were drowning, drowning in the dust between the house and the barn.
His spasms stopped abruptly, and Sonja was about to pick him up, but John’s arms were thrust out from his body with a rigidity that seemed to warn away her touch.
She put her hands on his cheeks, and that was when she noticed the bits of chaff in his hair, mingled so well with the reddish-blond strands it looked as if straw were taking root in his scalp. When she brushed these out, John’s eyes blinked open and he spoke his last words, or at least Sonja believed the sounds were shaped into words, but his voice was so faint she couldn’t be sure. She thought he said, “It’s far.”
