Arc of the Comet

by Greg Fields

  Finnegan stood still and listened. He heard nothing save an occasional lapping of the river. No traffic, no birds, no other runners. He heard only the rising and falling of his own breathing and his step underfoot as he turned to face the river.

  ’Silence,’ he thought. ’And as much solitude as I could ever want. For what reason have I come here? What has brought me here tonight, to this space? What steps marked my way here, and why did I take them? To stand at the edge of a lazy ancient river, where soldiers almost three centuries ago watered their horses and bathed themselves before going off to their mortality; to feel a cold on my skin; to join my life to others whose histories are not mine.

  ’Am I not the same as every man who ever walked this earth, and do we not seek the same things? It is not the arrival that provides the excitement; it is the process of getting there. For who knows his own potential, how far he can run? And who can tell what a singular step, once taken, irretrievably produces, and what further steps will become necessary, what others will become impossible? Is that not part of our potential—the capacity to take our strides in as many directions as imagination defines, and to make them deep, pounding ones that imprint the soil?

  ’What is it I seek, and what has brought me here? I seek the footprint. I can feel it coming: here tonight, a rolling underfoot, a groundswell, an intoxication borne on the crisp air. My form grows harder, my outlines focus themselves around an amoebic center, this gelatinizing of substance, this settling of character. I have waited for it, tried to find it, as all men before and as all men following me inevitably will. It is as natural, as necessary as drawing air, as filling our stomachs.

  ’I am not the first here, to stand at this river and search through the flotsam, to feel myself congeal, to the feel the promises turn toward me and breathe upon my warm skin. I am not the first to stand here, amid darkness and the water, womblike, to consider my impending birth. I am not the first, and I wish I could have known those who preceded me, and known their times. But it is all for me to be here now. This is all for me, here at this water’s edge.’

  After several minutes, cold pierced Finnegan’s reverie, returning him to the immediate. The perspiration on his brow and up and down his limbs had dried. There were only a few vestiges of light behind him. He had run too far and stayed too long. The run back must be at least six miles, and he would have to make it in almost total darkness. With some relief he recognized that the strength that had pushed him out so far had not been an illusion. He still felt as if he could run forever. But the quiet and the darkness made him nervous. He had never done this before.

  He turned back up the towpath and tried to find a rhythmic stride. He ran even quicker than before so that he might cut his time on the way back. But the total darkness unnerved him. Only the softly sporadic reflections off the river—reflections from houselights, the city and the campus well ahead of him—provided any light at all. He could see the vague rippling of the river now to his left, and the shadows of the trees.

  Within the first mile Finnegan stumbled several times. He realized that, if he wanted to increase his odds of returning safely, he would have to run slower and step lightly. His breathing deepened, and sweat reappeared on his forehead.

  At length he saw the dim outline of the bridge far ahead. His tension ebbed almost at once. A familiar sight, and he knew he could make it now. The traffic would mark the road, and he could see his way through the park, guided by the beacons on the other side. He picked up his pace once again.

  Down George Street he ran, as far to the side as geography allowed, but no cars came close. He turned in to the park. The hill, that downward slope so friendly on his way out, now loomed menacingly ahead. Finnegan realized that he had become very tired, had been so for the past mile or so. The darkness, the solitude and the uncertainty of his return had kept his slow pace regular, but now that the end was in sight his fatigue became very real, moving in from the periphery where his nerves had kept it at bay. He debated stopping altogether and walking up the steep slope.

  ’No, damn it. One last hill. One last push,” and he set his jaw and broke into a sprint. Weight of gravity tied his legs to the ground, the slope pulling his stride so that each gain was small. Yet he drove onward, almost angrily. His muscles tightened with every thrust. The will was a foe, a real one, evil and arrogant. He had to beat it, that was all. He forced his muscles to respond . . . just a few more strides . . . three more . . . two more.

  At the top of the hill, as the slope gave way to level ground, Finnegan opened his throat and yelled at the top of his tired lungs. He raised his arm like a sword. His legs and arms ached, his great heart pounded against his ribs, but it did not matter. He spotted the far end of the park with the house lights beyond. Three-quarters of a mile more, maybe less. A shower and dinner were at the other end.

  Finnegan shot his right fist skyward once again, and sprinted the rest of the way.

  ***

  That winter had been a restless one for Finnegan. He could not have explained it in any logical terms, but that did not disturb him. If there were an underlying disquietude, then so be it. If he felt it only vaguely, and could not define it, then he must give way to it, in any event. Something was coming. He sensed it, but had not the first clue what it might be.

  And so, on those evenings when all concentration left him, when he could not remember what he was reading from one sentence to the next, when he looked out the front window to the parklands and beyond wondering what he might see there and how different it would all be, he yielded willingly. If his wanderlust masked any discontent, it would work itself out. It would have to.

  In his restlessness, the young man would climb behind the wheel of his car with neither plan nor direction. He would take whichever road attracted his fancy, and he would drive, music playing softly, the windows rolled tight against the cold. In this way Finnegan saw the learned, quiet dignity of Princeton and the rolling verdure that surrounded it. He saw the ancient worn mountains to the northwest, the Poconos, and saw the deadened expressions of those who lived there in their rural, rustic, ragged sameness. He saw the smoky grassy industrial suburbs near the city, was repulsed by their grime yet attracted, too, to the broad human pathos, the basic animal struggles that hid behind the smokestacks. He saw the names on the stores and the restaurants—“Dominic’s,” “Santini’s,” “Wojo’s”—and felt the Romantic pull of great distances and new challenges. He skirted into New York State and drove through the nameless burghs scattered along the hills of Orange County, and he marveled that he was an hour’s drive from the great city, for these towns looked like Alabama or South Carolina or Wyoming. In winter’s dusk he could not tell the difference.

  He traveled southward, to Trenton’s dreary stones and pipes, and crossed the Delaware River there, reading the large neon sign on another bridge bragging that “What Trenton Makes, the World Takes,” but still wondering why Trenton existed. He saw the Delaware, crossed the bridge and drove along the Pennsylvania side north to Allentown, then returned on the interstate.

  New England fascinated him, but that was too far for one of his evening’s sojourns. He had read of it—rocky and round, with the cool ridges of the Berkshires, the driftwooded beaches of Connecticut and Rhode Island, the barren pine forests of Maine, and the oldest of all cities, Boston, standing at the water’s edge like a baroness sitting in a bay window, accepting her callers. New England drew him, old, settled, sparse. The people there were different, as stony as their land, and he wanted to know them, to see them in their homes. He wanted to smell their wood smoke, watch their snow fall, and pick up the soil of their earth to weigh it in his hands. He had never been there; it drew him by ignoring him.

  Finnegan took his drives, then, almost maniacally. He loved to see the sun set in a new place, for even the subtlest change in location brought about differences, nuances of lighting and background, that made them unique. He could not explain why this was important to him, this rambling, but he
knew that at this point in his life it was important, and that he could not pass up the rare opportunity he enjoyed now. He drove without a goal, but carrying the goal within him—to paint greater and wider swaths across the land, to know it all by color and scent and feel, to be a part of none of it because he could then truly be a part of all of it.

  And always when he returned from these trips, Finnegan’s head felt clearer and his thoughts gelled more sharply. He could go on again as he was supposed to. But even so, he knew that nothing had been exorcised, that the restless hunger he carried at his core was only partially and temporarily satisfied, that it would reappear in a few days for the rite to be repeated. And he also knew that, if he were lucky and very careful, it would stay with him forever.

  CHAPTER X

  Far out beyond that timeless valley, a train, on the rails for the East, wailed back its ghostly cry: life, like a fume of painted smoke, a broken wrack of cloud, drifted away. Their world was a singing voice again: they were young, and they could never die. This would endure.

  —Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward Angel

  In the mid-nineteenth century a young Frenchman, fairly wealthy by birth, grew bored with his study of the law. Too dry, he thought, and really, what is the point? If I do not practice law, there are hundreds of others who will step into my place and do as well as I. Perhaps, because they would be hungrier, they would do far better. Really, what is the point of it all?

  The young man had always taken to drawing, attracted by the meticulous blend of line and color. The same precision of thought that would have made him an effective lawyer allowed him to capture an exact likeness. He drew portraits of friends and family, and they were quite good, so everyone said. Even so, he came to detest portraiture. If he did not know his subject intimately, his work came out lifeless. What was there to capture, then? He stuck to drawing his friends, drawing them well, but all the while felt his creativity wane.

  The circumstances of his birth had allowed him to grow up in comfortable circles. As a child he had known the best sort of people. His father had been “well placed” and provided well for his family. The boy grew up with more than a passing knowledge of the theater. He knew how to tell a good horse. He could appreciate beautiful women.

  Such things continued to attract him throughout his youth. He had abandoned his destined career to pursue his art. Now, bored with the type of art he was pursuing and looking for a new dimension to his passion, he turned once again to the familiar habits. Yet behind the elegance of Parisian life then the young man perceived a hollow tone, a striking of a cymbal while holding fast to its rim. Behind the grace of the theater, the fine lines of the ballet, the majestic power of the race track, there lay a panoply of human emotions, of a desperation to achieve, not fine lines or grace or power, but simple human dignity, of a quietly frantic search to attain belonging, love and accomplishment, of lifeless resignation on the part of those who have failed and have chosen now to pursue no more ephemeral dreams. The young man had always sensed it. Now he saw that he could articulate it, this well-masked but ancient human condition, with his hands. He could draw it, or as much of it as his own limited experience permitted him to discern, and the realization excited him to his core, even while the pathos he observed made him melancholy. He came alive again; he had a new conviction. He would create, yes, but not the artificial husks of men and women. He would work with the subtle beauty of line and color, he would depict the casual scenes of elegance he had always known, but he would do so with a newly careful eye, and as honestly as he could. The blend of message and medium would have to be delicate, yet it was all he could bring himself to do. And he knew there was immense beauty in the blending.

  Color, not line. That was where it could best be captured. The nuances of light, backdrop, shading hue causing dissolution of line altogether. A radical concept, but one emerging in the late part of that century in the European salons, and in his mind a concept perfect to the task, for was he not truly painting atmosphere rather than form? Pathos was a dusky shadow, a commingling of the dark with the bright, an abandonment of cold and hard outline. Pathos was a texture.

  The young French artist came to meet with a measure of success. As he grew older, people came to know his name, for better or for worse. His paintings were displayed in all the right places, at the best exhibitions of his day. He had acquired a mastery of pastels, a difficult medium but one which permitted him best to blur line, color and shadow in stages of increasing subtlety. He enjoyed what he was doing. He even enjoyed the controversy, for at least it showed that people were paying attention. Times change, he thought. Let the old die with the old.

  But in time, though, he too grew old. His eyesight slowly failed him, the price of years of close scrutiny of small details. He retired to the country as the new century dawned, and painted very little. What he did create did not please him much; his subtleties decreased and hard lines reappeared in the stead of his beloved gentle colorings. He turned to sculpture, but nothing really came of it. He died quietly as a world war poked holes in his land and butchered the unknown artists of a new generation. He did not have as much money as he might have liked, but no matter. He saw his death coming in inches, knew he could not forestall it long, and, not particularly minding at all, gave himself up to it in dignity, respect, and, ultimately, joy. It had been a life well spent. He passed from it as he had sought to create it.

  In death his reputation surpassed what it had been in life. Demand for his drawings grew. High prices were bid and his works subsequently dispersed—to Italy and to Spain, to Russia, purchased by the great impresario Diaghilev, to England of course, and to the United States. Later generations of artists used his style as a jumping-off point to create the bizarre intellectual and psychological modes that marked the twenties, thirties and forties. Scholars accorded him high praise, studied him meticulously, every drawing, every stroke, every tint. He and his cohorts had been pioneers. They had broken the Golden Calf of Line and introduced an entirely new way for esthetic man to view, and hence capture, his world. Their courage had given them an immortality they had not deemed important at the time but which they no doubt would have welcomed.

  Of the young Frenchman’s drawings that had found their way to the United States, most had eventually been secured by the great art museums on the East Coast. A handful sat preserved in Philadelphia, more in Washington, more still in New York. On a Saturday morning in early April, Conor Finnegan, forced to face the reality of a term paper for his class in Nineteenth Century European Painting, headed down the road to Philadelphia, where he could study closely three examples of his topic, “The Equestrian Drawings of Edgar Degas.”

  Finnegan had not chosen this morning for his trip. Rather, the morning had chosen him. The day dawned brightly and Finnegan had risen early when the sun crossed into his room through a window usually shaded. The morning was crisp, barely topping forty degrees, but after the cold and slushy winter it dug into Finnegan’s lungs, slapped his skin and pricked his heart. Life reaffirmed, a Pasch at hand, sweeping through this golden, glorious, spirited morning.

  He did not know precisely why the morning captured him as it did. Perhaps because it seemed so fresh, so un-winterlike; perhaps because he had slept well after a productive week; perhaps merely because the syrups, fluids and elixirs that flow through us to comprise our moods sat in the right positions. It did not matter why. Finnegan felt young, and strong, and handsome, and intelligent, and infinitely blessed. The day, the whole world, was at his command, and he would do something grand with it.

  Finnegan arrived in Philadelphia around 11:00. The tall buildings of downtown stood sharply against the blue. At the end of them Fairmount Park sloped down to the Schuylkill River, a green swath curving downward through shade trees. A handful of rowers sculled along the river. The morning sun reflected off the water in white pockmarks. Finnegan did not park in the Museum of Art’s lot. He drove instead through Fairmount until he found a space there in the par
k, on the side of the road, and walked back through the greenery, the shadows and the spring.

  At the top of the steps to the museum he paused to look behind him at the city spread below. He looked at the gray spire of city hall, William Penn eternally perched atop it. From his position on the steps he felt as if he looked Mr. Penn directly in the eye.

  The museum was not crowded. After roaming through the maze of rooms and chambers at the Metropolitan in New York, Finnegan was a bit disappointed with this museum’s layout. It was wide and open, and in being so did not seem large at all. Degas and the Impressionists hung on the second floor.

  An art museum does not generally attract a variety of types. It is not a menagerie, nor a cross-section of something broad and far-ranging. The people who go to art museums tend to be quiet, studious, serious. They wear muted colors and walk in slow, deliberate steps. There are never many children, and, among the men, facial hair predominates. The women look disheveled, and frequently wear their hair in braids.

  The people at Philadelphia’s art museum this morning fit the mold. Finnegan, as he always did in crowds, scanned them as he passed. Students looking ragged, dilettantes and aesthetes—a predictably colorless and dull group if one were accustomed to them.

  But as Finnegan walked down the hallway to the Impressionists, he saw someone who was not so dull. She was standing before a painting by Thomas Eakins, studying it with the wryest of grins, the corners of her mouth turned upward ever so slightly as to give merely a hint of amusement or interest. She had not dressed in the casual bohemian fashion that typified most of the people there. If anything, she had overdressed in a black top stretching under a dark plaid skirt. She wore stockings and simple black shoes.

  Finnegan tried not to be obvious, but she drew him to her in a quiet trance. She stood before Eakins with her arms folded and her weight shifted to one leg. Finnegan walked slowly behind her and, in order to see more of her face, took a pose at the painting next to the Eakins. He did not recognize the artist, but then, that was not the point. He stole quick glances at the woman until she turned to move past him down the hall. As she did, Finnegan furtively slid his eyes downward from the painting to watch her walk past.