by Weldon, Fay
‘Keep it for your agent,’ he said. ‘Couldn’t you talk a little less? This is a very tense moment for me.’
Through the wide-open glass doors at the far end of the lounge bar of the brand-new Van Gogh hotel, past the central twelve-foot-high flower display, and the palms, and the silk screens, was the Leonardo Gallery, and here, in some half an hour, her husband’s show would open.
‘Night of the Private View,’ she said. ‘Always tense.’ Disagreements had budded, blossomed, flourished and more or less faded. The paintings were finally unpacked and hung, the wall prices at last decided – $160,000 top price for a landscape fifteen feet by ten, $26,000 for a small flower piece and $15,000 – a snip – for a pencilled nude of fifteen, pregnant, which Aileen would rather he didn’t sell, for fear of what the future might make of it, but hadn’t ventured to say so. Mira Kaplan, who ran the gallery for Van Gogh International, had retired to her suite temporarily, to calm herself, and put on her new Armani suit, bought across the road in Rodeo Drive that very morning. Van Gogh International would no doubt foot the bill – a chain, recently developed, of ‘Great Hotels of World Culture’, anxious to launch themselves as just that, and lavishly scattering PR largesse. Rix, his paintings, and Aileen, his wife, as nursemaid, had been flown over from London six days earlier. Aileen was a screenwriter, as it happened. She had her own contacts in Los Angeles. Rix and Aileen seldom left home together.
‘Hello,’ greeted the white-haired waiter, returning. ‘How are you today?’ and he took out his notepad and held his pen between his thin, delicate brown fingers, because if these guys did not start focusing soon he would go off duty without bringing them their drink, or their coffee, or the cream cake of their fancy. He had sweet brown eyes. Aileen’s eyes were blue; Rix’s were grey. The waiter went away.
‘Now you’ve missed your drink,’ said Rix. ‘It comes from talking too much.’ He did not like the bland red wine of California, or the secret sweetness of its dry white Chardonnay. He seldom drank spirits. He liked to arrive at his Private Views sober, so as not to stumble or fall flat on his face in public, though he knew art buyers were not averse to a drunken, dissolute and ill-mannered artist. It made their connection with the churning heart of the universe the more poignant. He suspected the Van Gogh chain was part of an enormous world-wide conspiracy: its hotels mere clearing houses for Company Art, that is to say the big-scale, big-name, big-budget contemporary paintings which these days hung over board tables; from which the dealers profited so much, and the painters so little. It was gratifying to become one of the big names. It was also humiliating. To be successful, as a painter, was to have failed, to have been corrupted; the thin priest turning into the fat abbot. The trip to California was a mistake. He was not interested in establishing a reputation on the West Coast: he felt vulgar, and exposed. He didn’t need the money. Aileen made enough money for them both anyway, writing rubbishy TV scripts.
He noticed that tears were rolling down Aileen’s cheek. ‘For God’s sake,’ he said, ‘don’t make an exhibition of yourself. Not here. I should have brought Frances, not you.’ Frances was his sister. She too was a painter. She seldom spoke and never cried.
Aileen turned to look at him, and the cartwheel hat caught in her collar. She tugged it free.
‘Somebody has asked me how I am today,’ she said, ‘and it has made me feel sorry for myself. Since there’s no one else to tell and I finally have fifteen minutes to spare in which there is nothing I have to do, I shall tell you how I am. Why do I have fifteen minutes to spare? Because the Latinos are doing all the work for me. I am grateful to them. They are doing the cooking, the cleaning, the laundry, the taking of messages, the looking up of maps to tell us where to go, the calling of cabs; a steady flow of reminder notes creeps under the door of our room upstairs, so I can empty my head of memory, and there is no justice in it, but in the three days I have been here I have had a little rest and I have seen how other women live, and how they live is good. Even the lonely ones who come and sit here at the Van Gogh in the afternoon on their own, with their expensive horrid clothes, and listen to the piano-player, who is young and romantic-looking, playing melancholy tunes which remind them of love past, and look so sad, so sad, are better off than I am.’
‘You’re wearing such expensive horrid clothes today,’ he said. ‘You know I hate spots and stripes.’
‘That is why I went out this morning and bought this spotted dress,’ she said. ‘I went with Rowena.’
‘You ought to go back to your therapist,’ he said, ‘in that case.’
‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she said. ‘I am telling you how I am. Hello, the waiter said. How are you today? And I know he is paid to say it, and trained to say it, but it got to my heart. Hello. How are you today?’
‘You are drawing attention to yourself,’ he said. ‘Please don’t.’
‘I’ll tell you something about yourself,’ she said, ‘that you don’t know. You don’t know nothing from nix. You are a painter. You don’t understand words. If you use them at all you use them as weapons. That to you is their only use. You and your sister are the same. You have a hereditary defect. You inherited it from your father because he was a painter too.’
‘He was a bad painter.’
‘You only remember the last sentence of any paragraph I speak because you are a painter, a visual person. Language flows through your brain; you don’t pay it any attention, it is so unimportant: if there’s any hanging about in your head when I’ve finished speaking you might just pay attention to it and respond. It does not matter whether your father was a bad painter or a good painter; indeed, it is because you are a painter, a visual artist, that you throw these concepts about so crudely. Good, bad. I see a whole world in between: of goodish and baddish and sometimes a little bit of both; you describe the painter, I describe the painting. I think you are childish.’
‘You are doing your best’, he said, ‘to destroy this show for me. You are so envious and jealous of my gift you want to attack me. You wait until now to do it.’
‘You can always get up and walk away,’ she said. ‘But you won’t because you’d rather people were talking about you than not talking about you and at this moment I am talking about you.’
‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘You know nothing about me and you know nothing about painting and you make a fool of yourself pretending you do.’
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘How are you today? Today I am speaking to my husband, that’s how I am. I have been married to him for twenty-two years and I have never spoken to him properly, in case I spoke all this. I have had rows with him, and been unfaithful to him, and felt guilty, and he has left me and returned and had models for mistresses and mistresses for models and felt not at all guilty, and all these things have been overcome but I don’t think this can be overcome now it has raised its head. You are a painter and a painter is a monster, no woman should marry an artist, because all artists are monsters, and very few men, you notice, marry women artists, being sensible, and if they do they do not survive. Or only as shells. They too serve art, whether they want to or not. All those who have sexual relations with artists serve art. The artist is the high priest, the spouse the acolyte, and acolytes, like the waiters who serve the priest which is money, who serves the god which is success, are sweet guys but have had the stuffing knocked out of them. A low self-image and a feeble sex drive. The wives of male artists pad round with ladders in their stockings; the husbands of female artists left long ago, or if they haven’t, should have. It is a terrible thing for a man to have to revere art through his wife the artist: to thus funnel his soul through a woman is a humiliation. I am talking about your sister Frances and her husband Rex. She chose him for a husband because his name is Rex and yours is Rix, and it was the nearest she could get.’
‘That old incest stuff again,’ he said. ‘Please keep your voice down.’
‘And now Rex drinks and his face falls in folds, and
he stumbles and trips and his eyes are bloodshot: and she, she is firm and determined and melancholy, and cold. She loves her art, she loves her painting: she could not ever love her children. She despises them. They disappoint her. They are not like a canvas she can work upon and work upon; they burst from her loins fully formed; no touch of cobalt blue, or stroke of titanium white, is going to make a difference. That’s it, that’s them: children are a puny creation compared to a painting. No woman artist truly loves her child. The child of the painter is the orphan of art. “Where is Mummy, Daddy?” “Mummy is in the studio, communing with her muse. Mummy has had a vision, darling. Mummy must communicate that vision to a world which doesn’t know or care, and believes real is real, and knows that if you don’t change a nappy the baby gets a nappy rash, but Mummy doesn’t know that, or care, and the baby cries but all Mummy knows about is a vase of flowers which seem to her to have been sent as a message, to illuminate the world. As Jesus is to some, so is a landscape to a landscape artist; and God help the lambs who stumble round the real world because the artist sure as hell won’t help them.’
‘You don’t know anything about these things,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you stick to writing? Why don’t you leave my unfortunate sister alone? Bad enough her losing the child without you capitalizing on it.’
‘I am not capitalizing. I am observing. She was too busy painting to take the baby to the doctor. It was dreadful. I am not blaming her. I am trying to explain your own nature to you, using your sister, because you can see your sister just a little more clearly than you see yourself.’
‘If I wanted to see myself clearly I would do a self-portrait.’
‘You see, you see!’ she cried in triumph, and finally took off her cartwheel hat, and her hair fell skewwhiff and she looked much more herself, he thought.
‘It is a great blessing to be a painter and a great misfortune too. It is a blessing because you have a glimpse of a world behind this one, and a curse because you must try to seize it with tweezers, which are your brushes, like a splinter beneath flesh, and drag it into the day; if you do, it bruises and if you don’t, it pains you if you press there by mistake, and if the pain doesn’t stop, you know it’s because the splinter is working its way, working its way inwards towards the heart and it will pierce the heart and you will die.’
‘You know nothing about it, nothing.’
‘And there is no one to talk to because your family and friends look at you as if you were mad, and your paintings are to them a mystery, a nuisance, and if they like them you despise them for having no taste, and if they don’t you hate them, and you can’t win: nor can you make up your mind if you are the worst painter in the world or the best, and all painters are the same in this; because painters are visual people and see good and bad, as kind of magnetic poles. They don’t have any notion of the string hung like a washing line from pole to pole, on which paintings are pegged, ranged, at all stages between good and bad.’
‘What are you talking about now? Washing lines?’
‘And you want to talk to other painters but you daren’t, in case they’re laughing at you, despising your efforts: you share a secret with them but when you admit it you diminish that secret, because you acknowledge it as shared. So you get drunk with other painters, obliterate the mind, pick quarrels with them, say dreadful things about them behind their backs. They’re your other family. But who wants to talk to family? You are intolerably lonely.’
‘I wish I was alone, I can say that. I should never have asked you along.’
‘You had to ask me along. You can’t endure change. Only barely can you sit here in a foreign country. I am familiar, so you bring me with you. Here you are without your props. You exist in a visual world: even your peripheral vision is important. You know exactly how the light passes through the window at different times of day, and different seasons: when it’s cloudy, when it’s fine; as the sun rises, sinks. You have that degree of change taken into account. Only when it’s black black thunderclouds are you thrown into disarray. You can’t make sense of them. You haven’t bargained for that natural blackness, in whatever pact you and your kind once made with the devil. You will come downstairs and pick a quarrel with me. I used to think it was electricity in the air that made you so bad-tempered and restless when there was thunder about: one day I understood it was just too sudden a change in the quality of light that affected your peripheral vision. It annoyed you. How can non-artists be expected to understand, let alone live with, artists? It is only because I love you that I have learned to do so, that I put up with it.’
‘Now she starts all that!’ But his head was turned towards her.
‘You are interested if I speak of my feelings for you,’ she said, ‘which is why I mention them. I hope you are picking up at least ten per cent of this.’
‘Why do you always talk in percentages?’ he asked. ‘Figures are such cold and meaningless things.’
‘I have to understand the world through my reason,’ she said. ‘I have to look beyond the evidence of my own eyes. You need only the evidence of yours: it is more than enough. So rich, it gives you indigestion.’
‘In other words,’ he said with satisfaction, ‘you’re blind. It has been a great handicap in my life, having to live with a blind woman. I should have married another artist.’
‘Like your sister,’ she said, but he replied, ‘She was a lousy cook,’ and even he could see this was outrageous, and he laughed, and so did she. For a moment they looked quite happy.
A waiter from the second shift approached them. He was of broader build than the one with the cropped white hair but his eyes were just as brown, soft and sweet.
‘Hello,’ he greeted them. ‘And how are you today?’
‘I’m very well,’ she said brightly. ‘I will have a spritzer and my husband will have a glass of water.’ She liked to claim him, for all he was an artist.
‘I hate it here,’ he said. ‘The glass, the perspex, the wealth, that ridiculous flowerpiece; it must be at least twelve feet high. Are the flowers real?’
‘I think they grew,’ she said, ‘though possibly as the result of bioengineering.’
‘Here even nature is perverted. Don’t you notice that? How am I to do a flower painting ever again,’ he said, averting his eyes, ‘since the flowers themselves are man-made? This Private View is going to be a disaster. Nobody will come to it. Why should they? Californians aren’t interested in painting.’
‘Hello,’ said a really smart Afro-Asian girl, with perfect skin, perfect features, and black hair briskly and firmly swept back from a wide clear brow. ‘How are you today?’ She seemed to be a manageress of some kind. She left behind her florets of raw cauliflower and long slivers of courgette prettily arranged in a glazed pottery dish, and went away without waiting for an answer.
‘How I am today,’ said Aileen to her husband, ‘is how you are. When Jacob finally returned to the valley where his brother Esau lived, having made so many enemies that there was nowhere else to go, and remember how he had cheated and betrayed his brother and stolen his birthright, he made his wives walk before him, fearing Esau’s attack. I feel like one of Jacob’s wives, forever walking before you into danger, testing the water.’
‘If I painted the girl who brought the vegetables,’ was all Rix said, ‘would it come out like Tretchikoff, who must be the richest painter in the world? You know the one – the girl with the green face and the flower behind her ear?’
‘I know the one,’ said Aileen, and waited for him to make some reference to Bill, her first husband years and years ago, an insurance agent, who in Rix’s mind stood for everyone in the ordinary world, both philistine and fascist, but he didn’t. He just said, ‘I’m sure you do.’
‘How I am is how you are,’ she said. ‘And, another thing, you are superstitious, and both our lives are narrowed by that superstition. You are superstitious about how you work, where you work. You must have certain brushes, laid out in a certain order, a cert
ain number of tubes of titanium white in reserve; and each must be just so, the leaf-fringed window of the studio to the left, the old yellow sofa to the right. I understand you. You hate me to understand you but I do. You stopped painting altogether for many years; on the day you started again the brushes were laid out just so; the window was there, the sofa was here; and lo, it worked. The muse descended. The magic returned. It seemed to you such a miracle, such a heavenly coming together of events and circumstances, that ever since you’ve been frightened to alter any of the ingredients in case the whole thing falls apart again, in case the magic stops working. You have, alas, included the window and the sofa in the jigsaw, so now we hardly ever go away, or you hate it when we do, and we can’t have the sofa cleaned and it is filthy beyond belief, but part of the gestalt you depend upon. The sofa has become a sacred object. You can just about tolerate the way the creeper loses its leaves in winter, that being according to nature not man, but if you could prevent it you would – intercede with God to alter the seasons just so you could paint your vision out.
‘But you are stronger than you think; or rather your art is. You could paint anywhere and it would work; even in our hotel room upstairs, but no, you would rather brood upon your own fragility: build up your own self-importance, see yourself as the message, and not what you are, merely a messenger. The instrument, not the music itself. You and your dirty old sofa. Throw it out the window: chop the creeper down at its mouldy old root. It would make no difference.’
‘I know you can write anywhere,’ he said. ‘But painting is not writing.’
‘Not so different as you think,’ she said. A waiter, unnoticed, had brought them their drinks. In hers stood a glass spike, for mixing. When she drank, it all but pierced her eye.
