by Larry Watson
He didn’t try to unbutton the four imitation pearl buttons at the top of her housedress. Instead, he plucked at them as if they were tight little blossoms that would somehow open in his fingers.
Sonja knew they should not go on, yet for another moment she let him continue, all the while keeping her eyes open to make sure June didn’t appear in the doorway.
When Henry tried to lift the hem of her dress, however, she had to push him away. “Hsst! What are you doing—with your daughter in the next room!”
Henry still said nothing but simply came toward her again. She knew she could not allow him to corner her in the kitchen, and when she slipped past him this time, she kept right on going, out the back door and to the porch.
The night air felt as steamy as the kitchen had hours earlier when she stood over a sink of close-to-scalding dishwater. There was no wind, yet she grabbed hold of the porch post as if the house could pitch like the ship that brought her to this country.
Henry tried to tug her loose, and when he couldn’t he too grabbed the post, encircling Sonja with his arms and pressing himself hard against her.
After John died, Sonja wanted no one to speak to her. She did not want anyone to try to make things better for her with words when it was plain no language contained such words. Yet now she wanted speech from Henry—say anything, she thought, and I’m yours, even here, now, clinging to this post.
The literal terms of her wish were granted. “Come with me,” he said, and she let him take her by the hand, keeping herself ready to yank free if he tried to pull her toward the barn.
He did not. Only grief could have kept them away when every impulse of the blood wanted them to move toward one of those piles of straw.
Between the barn and a small shed that had once been a chicken coop was a tree stump almost three feet high and with a top the size of a small table. The farm’s previous owners had used the stump as a chopping block—the blood of chickens who there lost their heads still stained the wood—but Henry used the surface to split logs and cut up kindling.
It was to the stump that Henry brought Sonja. He sat down and pulled her onto his lap, arranging her dress in such a way as to cover them and conceal what Henry hoped to do.
Not only did Sonja raise no objection, she rearranged her undergarments so Henry could enter her. The only concession she made to propriety was to move them around on the stump so she could watch the house over Henry’s shoulder.
When they finished, it was Sonja who led them back to the house, one hand holding her skirt up between her legs like a diaper.
13
“Now, I’m not going to touch you,” Weaver said, as he unbuttoned his shirt, “but I’m going to undress and lie down beside you.”
He took off his shirt and held it up against the sky. The chambray was so worn that it barely filtered the light, yet it was also dotted and smeared with paint, and these splotches blocked the sun completely. Weaver’s art had always been representational, but lately it seemed as though he had been seeing more and more possibilities for abstract works. And what would Weaver do for a shirt-inspired painting—try to approximate on canvas the sun-whitened blue of his shirt dotted with a palette of colors? Or would the shirt itself be the work, gallery-hung and brightly backlit to simulate sunlight?
Weaver unbuckled his trousers. “I’m doing this because I not only need to know what you look like lying in the sun, I need to know what it feels like.”
Weaver and his model were alone on the beach, but Sonja still moved her naked body over a foot or two as though she were making room for him on the sand. Or was she trying to tell him not to lie too close? She lay on her stomach, as Weaver had instructed her to do, but she turned her head away from him as though she did not want to see him naked.
“If I just stand back and draw and paint you from a distance,” Weaver continued, “I’m working only with my eyes. I have to find ways to involve the other senses. Otherwise the work’s dead. A goddamn pretty picture. Nothing more. I tried something like this once before. Someone sat for me, and the entire time I worked on her portrait, we were both naked.” He was aware that he was rambling, but he feared that if he stopped or slowed down, she might object to what he was doing.
Only someone in a boat, cruising the bay and veering dangerously close to shore, or—even more improbable—someone in an airplane, flying too low, would be able to see Weaver and his model. They lay on a private beach, a stretch of sand so fine it seemed sifted, on property owned by Edith Shurman, art collector and heiress to the Shur-Fit Auto Parts fortune. She and Weaver were friends, and she had given him permission to wander as he pleased on her grounds, fenced off so the public had no access to the beach or the acres of woods surrounding her home.
When Weaver lowered himself facedown, the hot sand molded itself to his body and yet gave slightly under his weight. He imagined he was lying in the depression Sonja’s body made, and his cock stirred at the thought.
“As a child,” Sonja said, “I used to confuse sand and the sea.”
He was unaccustomed to her starting a conversation, and her willingness to speak, even though her voice traveled out toward the water, almost made him rush the moment and reach out to touch her. He remembered, however, the vow of patience he had taken months before; he could screw himself into the sand and wait a little longer.
“You confused the words?” he asked. “Or was the confusion in your eye? I remember the first time I visited the ocean. I couldn’t get used to what seemed to be the sight of the sand rushing out to sea.”
“No, no. I thought—I knew the sea was salt. I tasted it. And when my father came home from his day out on his fishing boat, in his—what do you call them? In his face? Folds? Wrinkles? In the wrinkles on his face and in his hair would be lines and grains of white—salt from the sea and the wind. So then when I walked on the beach I thought the sand was salt, tossed up by the ocean. This was when I was very young, but I still get them a little mixed up in my mind. Like when I hear the expression ‘salt of the earth’—I think ‘sea of the earth’? That makes no sense.”
“The sand of your beaches must have been very white.”
“I think maybe our salt was not so white.”
Weaver laughed and then realized she may not have been joking. “Where did you grow up?”
“Takla. A small fishing village on the northwest coast of Norway. When fishing was poor, life there was very hard.”
“And life here?” Weaver asked. “With the lake all around—does it remind you of your childhood home?”
She said nothing for a long time, and Weaver wondered if she had fallen asleep. A gull hovered then landed on a flat rock nearby. It picked up its feet a few times, as if it had to adjust to the stone’s hot surface. When it swiveled its head in Sonja’s direction, she began to speak again.
“In our village there was a man whose son begged to fish with his father’s fleet. The father finally gave in, though everyone knew this boy was too young to do a man’s work. On his first day on the ocean, a great storm rose and the boy—who was not on his father’s boat because the father did not want to favor his child—was washed overboard.
“The father never fished again, but he kept going out to sea. He rowed out alone in a small boat, and then pulled in the oars and sat there, drifting and bouncing on the waves. From the shore we watched him. Everyone said he was looking for his son, and each day he searched farther and farther out. Soon he was beyond the rocks, and people whispered that someday he would not return in the evening with the other boats. When that day came, my mother, who wanted every story to end happily, said to my brothers and me so we would not be frightened by too much death in our little village, ‘Einar has found his boy. . . .’ ”
Sonja fell silent, and the gull, as if it knew there was nothing more to the story, blinked its black oily eye and then jumped into flight. The lake made small sipping sounds among the rocks, and under the heat of the sun Weaver felt the skin along his backside ti
ghten like a drumhead. He was burning, he knew, but he did not change his position or speak. He wondered if there was anything he could do but wait with this woman.
Since she began posing for him, Weaver felt as though he had produced some of his finest work, yet his frustration had also increased, as if he were incapable of reaching a new, higher standard that this model set for him.
Sonja raised up on her elbows and turned to look at Weaver. Sand stuck to her breast, and while he watched, the grains began to drop away, but slowly, as if she and nature had concocted a little striptease. “Have you lay here long enough?” she asked. “Do you know now what it feels like to be me?”
The following day, Weaver returned to the beach alone, and he brought with him the necessary materials for working on either an oil or a watercolor. His idea was this: He would take a pinch of sand from the spot where Sonja had lain, and he would mix the grains into the swirled paint on his palette. If he were moved to work on a watercolor, he would use lake water as a wash and as a rinse for his brushes.
The night before, as Weaver lay in a cool bath drinking gin and trying to soothe his sunburn, he decided that Sonja had somehow crossed a boundary. Without either of them willing it to be so, the model had passed from inspiration to control, and Weaver would not be controlled—not in society, not in his marriage, and certainly not in his art.
Therefore, the work that Weaver began that day—an oil, as it happened—was of a stretch of sand without a human being on it.
And yet as empty as that beach was, the completed painting is full of—is there any other word for it?—presence. Those wide, flat, sun-bleached and waterworn stones seem to be waiting for the next bird to land or for the next foot to step down to the lake’s edge. The sand is as rippled and scalloped as water on a windy day. But look again—wouldn’t some of those dents and impressions in the sand conform themselves exactly to the concavity of a woman’s breasts or thighs? The brushstrokes themselves seem to shimmer, a perfect joining of subject—the sun scorches almost all the blue from the cloudless sky—with emotion; certainly the artist as he painted blazed with more than the sun’s heat.
The only tranquillity in the painting comes from the lake itself, so calm that any boat that might once have stirred the surface has drifted far from sight.
The work is titled “Absence and Desire.”
14
Harriet Weaver was not allowed to enter her husband’s studio unless he brought her there, and that he was likely to do only when he had new work he needed her help with. Harriet had learned over the years that when he showed her a painting it meant it wasn’t finished, not quite, and it would not leave the studio until Weaver was certain he could do nothing to make it better. A completed work he might bring to the house before shipping it out, but by then he was generally indifferent to her opinion.
Harriet, however, had reached the point where she no longer trusted her ability to see a painting for the first time and instantly offer an assessment, at least one that might truly aid her husband and not enrage or disappoint him. That was why for years now she had been sneaking into the studio, not only so she could prepare her critical response but also so she might see into the life he walled off from her. She always waited until she could be absolutely certain he would not return for hours or perhaps even days—a business trip (or so Ned termed it) to Chicago usually, but also to London, Paris, New York, Santa Fe, Minneapolis. Ned enjoyed attending any new exhibition of his work, if for no other reason than to needle the critics and charm the patrons, and he used the same rough-edged, plainspoken, prickly persona for both purposes.
On this sunny afternoon in late September, Harriet decided to visit the studio as soon as her husband climbed into the station wagon to drive into Fox Harbor. She knew she had at least two hours. At the end of a workday, Ned liked to drink, and he preferred to do his drinking in the company of other men, talking about baseball or fishing, mocking the tourists, complaining about the weather. He had a few favorite taverns, though Harriet doubted it was known in any of them that Ned Weaver was an artist of international reputation. At the Lakeside Tavern they probably thought that the short man standing at the end of the bar drinking gin was a housepainter or a carpenter, and that suited Ned just fine.
Ned’s studio was forty yards from the main house, up a slope lined with lilac and spirea bushes, their white and lavender petals in spring strewing the artist’s stony path as he walked to his work. The studio itself, a century-old, rough-hewn, chinked log cabin, was snugged up against a steep hill overhung by an apple orchard.
The cabin, built by one of the county’s first white settlers, was the only building on the property when Ned and Harriet bought it, and for two summers that was where they lived while the main house was being built. Then they sold their town house in Chicago and moved to Wisconsin to live year-round. Harriet had a sentimental impulse that made her want to say she and her family were never happier than when they lived in the cabin’s small rooms, but she knew it wasn’t true. A hundred years of dust clung to the splinters of the open beams and unfinished timbers. Insects found their way in through every open crevice. The plumbing and cookstove were primitive, and the stone fireplace did not draw properly. The girls lamented the lack of privacy in the cabin, and they liked even less that they had to leave for hours if Ned decided to work indoors. They were all happier when the big house was ready for them, though in that brief period when they lived in the cabin’s cramped quarters, both Ned’s life and work were open to Harriet in a way they had not been before or since.
Ned converted the cabin to a studio. He knocked down an interior wall. He increased the size and number of the windows. He put a padlock on the door. After Harriet found the key, hidden in a mustache cup that belonged to Ned’s father, she still waited almost a year before going into the studio. Even then, she might have continued to obey his command to stay out if she had not been certain that Ned took to England with him the woman who wrote the catalog for his show at the Sand Gallery in St. Louis.
Now Harriet stepped inside, feeling as always a mixture of both fear and anticipation. She never knew what she might find. Last year she walked in and gasped, sure she had stepped into a booby trap. A rifle, its barrel pointing at the door, lay on a table. But there were no trip wires attached to the trigger; the rifle was simply another of Ned’s props. Six months later it appeared in a painting. She could as easily discover that Ned had begun an exciting new phase—the watercolor series of weather over the lake, for example, each painting representing the storm of a different season. Or she might happen upon the evidence that Ned had found a new model, as when Harriet saw the painting of a familiar-looking woman seated naked on Ned’s footlocker. Harriet finally placed her as Dr. Van Voort’s nurse. Ned had cut his ankle scrambling around the rocks below the Egg Island lighthouse, and his leg became infected, necessitating frequent visits to Dr. Van Voort’s office. Obviously those trips had also provided Ned the opportunity to persuade the dark-haired nurse to pose, not that women usually needed much persuading. Either they knew of his stature as an artist or they succumbed to his charm, which he knew how to wield almost as well as a drawing pencil. Harriet had long ago reconciled herself to the fact that when Ned’s models were females and attractive, the chances were excellent that he fucked them. How did she know this? She knew her husband, and how his art—the act of making it rather than the made object—stimulated him almost beyond release. She remembered well the demonstration he had once given. He picked up a red sable brush, spread its hairs, then wet them between his lips so they came together in a stiletto point. He held up his forearm, and while she and others watched, he somehow made the hairs on his arm stand up, though there was no chill in the room. “See,” Ned said to those assembled around the Weavers’ dining room table—Harriet, the novelist Jake Bram and his wife, Caroline, along with the writer from Art and Artists there to do the article on Ned—“that’s what painting does to me. It’s as if my whole body is trying to tu
rn into a brush, and if I could figure out a way to paint with these hairs, I’d do it.” The entire episode (none of which made it into the printed article unless one counted the sentence “Weaver brings his entire being to every work”) seemed to Harriet akin to a parlor trick, but it expressed, no matter how crudely, a truth about Ned and his attitude toward his art.
She also knew, from those long-ago years of posing for him herself, of how in Ned the wires connecting art and sex were hopelessly crossed. In her memory, it seemed as if most sessions ended with Ned saying, “That’s it. You can relax. We’re done for the day,” followed by the sound of his belt unbuckling. Some days she had been posing for only minutes before Ned made his way out from behind the easel.
But it wasn’t only Harriet’s insight into Ned’s artistic soul that provided her with proof of his infidelity. She needn’t be so lofty. Ned seldom cleaned the studio, and on more than one occasion she found his discarded condoms under the iron cot next to the window. She had long since given up trying to gather evidence to convict her husband of cheating on her. She had never made use of what she already found—why would she wish to gather more? No, on that day, it was art she was looking for, not adultery.
She stepped carefully through the usual detritus of the studio—the coffee cans filled with brushes, the piles of rags, the empty paint tubes, the palettes so clotted with paint they were no longer usable, the paper balled up and tossed aside, the ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts, the empty coffee cups and Coca-Cola bottles. If Ned were to die, Harriet would immediately run to this place, where his presence was so strong it felt as if it could ward off death. Then, when it seemed at last as though his spirit had left even the studio, when she could walk through these rooms without feeling she might at any moment hear his voice—his basso profundo voice demanding to know what the hell she was doing in here—she would leave the building and perhaps Door County forever.
