The Man in the Tree

by Damon Knight

  His experiments in painting on canvas were not turning out well. No one had told him about using a medium; he was putting the paint on as it came from the tube, and his paintings seemed thick and lifeless.

  On a side street, tucked in between two grimy office buildings, one day he found an art school: it was called the Porgorny Institute of Fine Arts, and a sign in the window said, "Register for Fall Classes." He opened the double doors and found himself in a wide hall. The office was on the right. "Fill out this application," said the mousy-blonde woman behind the counter. Gene wrote down "Stephen Miller," and his address. Under "Age" he put "15," and under "Education" he wrote "High school."

  "Now you've checked four classes," said the woman, "and there's only three periods a day, so we'll have to work out a schedule for you. The best thing would be to take two of these classes every day, and then, the third period, you would go back and forth between the other two."

  "I don't understand," Gene said.

  "Well, for instance, suppose you want to take Figure Drawing and Oil Painting every day. That's your first two periods. Then; you could take Sculpture on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays -- "

  A large, heavy woman came in from the hall carrying a sheaf of papers. She had an imposing bosom under a purple blouse, and a black ribbon hung from her eyeglasses; her dark hair, streaked with gray, was piled on her head in a haphazard fashion. "What is it?" she asked in a deep voice. "What is the matter?"

  "This young man is applying for classes -- "

  "So." She looked him over. "You are how old?"

  Her accent was so strange that he could hardly understand her. "Fifteen," he said.

  "Perhaps." She was thinking. No pimples. Tall, but not more than twelve. "And you think you can become artist?"

  "I like to draw," Gene said.

  "He likes to draw. So many like to draw. But why not? It is better than murdering people in the streets." She turned to the woman behind the counter. "Well, then, Miss Olney, what is problem?"

  "It's just his schedule, Madame Porgorny -- he wants to take four classes -- "

  "Work it out! Work it out! Do not bother me with these details." Madame Porgorny swept around the counter and into the inner office, where, presently, they could hear her shouting on the telephone.

  "Does she teach any of the classes?" Gene asked.

  "Only China Painting, Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Did you want to -- ?"

  "Oh, no," Gene said hastily. He paid the application fee and got his schedule. "When do the classes start?"

  "September fourth."

  The Porgorny Institute was not like any other school he had known. Down behind the reception room and office was a row of large studios whose individual smells were at first strange, then loved and familiar: smells of oil and turpentine, charcoal dust, plaster dust.

  Madame Porgorny's booming voice could be heard at intervals all day long in the corridors. She seemed to live in a state of constant exasperation; Gene heard her shouting at the instructors, at Miss Olney the receptionist, at electricians and plumbers.

  In the figure-drawing class the model was a dark-haired young man with broad shoulders and narrow hips; he wore a thing like a black jockstrap, but much skimpier -- the side part was only a narrow ribbon. He never spoke; between posing sessions he smoked in the little courtyard, and when he was through for the day he left, sometimes with a woman student.

  In this class the students were given hard black crayons and large sheets of paper torn off a roll. They were instructed to hold the crayon like a knife and use the arm and wrist in drawing, but Gene could not do this; he sharpened his crayon to a fine point, held it like a pencil, and made careful, minute drawings that occupied only a small part of the sheet. He drew the head, then the shoulders .and chest, the arms and hands, then the hips, thighs, calves, and feet. His drawings were careful and accurate in outline, but there was always something wrong with them; they were off balance, or out of proportion, and he tore them up.

  When he looked at the other students' work, he could see that they were doing something entirely different. They seemed not to care about accuracy of detail; their drawings were large, cloudy sketches of bodies in the same posture as the model's but otherwise having no resemblance to it, and they were all different: some fat and shapeless, some angular and thin.

  The instructor, an auburn-haired young woman called Miss Williams, pointed out that everybody tended to draw bodies like their own: wide, muscular people drew wide, muscular bodies, and so on. Gene held up one of his tiny sketches, and she laughed. "Well, Stephen is an exception to everything," she said.

  With the other students, he felt the continual embarrassment of being the wrong age; he was sure they all knew he was too young to be there, and he sensed in them the unspoken conspiracy of being grown up. When they spoke to him kindly, he felt they were being condescending, and when they ignored him he felt excluded. The very shapes of their bodies, their hairiness, their smells (unsuccessfully disguised by perfume) proclaimed them a different kind of humanity; the hints they gave of their pleasures outside the classroom were alien to him; they laughed at different things, and with a different laughter. He felt himself an intruder, in constant danger of being found out.

  He took the ceramics class and tried to throw pots on the wheel, but he could never center the lump of clay properly, and his pots came out lopsided; they wobbled on the wheel, and no matter what he did he could never make them straight. He liked them anyhow because of their magical transformation in the kiln ("the kill," Miss Jacoby called it): from dried, leathery clay the color of lead they had turned pale and hard as stone, scritching under his fingernails. The glazes were equally magical: you painted them on like pale mud, and when they came out they were clear, brilliant orange or blue or purple. He experimented with his most ambitious piece, a tall vase that was only a little lopsided: he painted it first with green glaze, then with blue. When he saw it after the weekend firing, it was covered with luminous streaks of blue melting into peacock green, and all the other students admired it. "You took a chance, but it worked," said Miss Jacoby.

  In Mr. Berthelot's class he learned the mysteries of armatures and plaster casting. The hollow shape inside the mold was tantalizingly strange; its was recognizable -- there was the arm, here the head -- and yet absolutely unfamiliar. When they lubricated the mold and poured plaster into it, then chipped the mold away, the result was again a magical transformation: the clay model had been turned first into a mere vacancy, an absence, and then into hard, chalky plaster. In a way it seemed to him that the change was for the worse: the clay model, now destroyed, had been alive, and the plaster cast was dead.

  The school did not teach wood carving. "Old Lady says it's too dangerous," Mr. Berthelot told him. "Some student cuts his finger off, the insurance wouldn't cover it. I don't know too much about it myself, tell you the truth, and the students we got here, they just want to play with clay."

  In an an store he saw a beautiful set of wood carving tools with wooden handles all alike, shaped to fit the palm. He bought them, and some blocks of hardwood, and took them home. He bungled his first attempts, but then he got the hang of the tools, how the mallet drove the sweet cutting edge through the surface of the wood, curling off a precise shaving. He smoothed his sculptures with a broad blade, then with sandpaper, until the wood was as round and slick as stone, but later he began to like the texture of the worked surface, the trace of the tools, as if patient worms had gone around and around the wood eating it away to leave a beautiful shape.

  Mr. Velton, the painting instructor, sent him out with a sketchbook, and when he came back with simple drawings of tombstones in the cemetery, sent him away again. It was clear enough to Gene what Mr. Velton wanted: he wanted landscapes crowded with trees, stones, houses, a sky full of clouds; but when Gene looked at landscapes he saw only a meaningless jumble. At last, in despair, he sketched a pile of junk on a vacant lot: barrel hoops, old tires, tin cans. Velton looked at
this with pleased surprise, and pointed out various dynamic relationships of which Gene had been unaware.

  In his frustration he dropped the oil painting class and signed up for Madame Porgorny's china painting class on Wednesday and Saturday evenings. The other students, gray-haired women in smocks, were already painting on dishes, but Madame Porgorny gave him glazed tiles to practice on: first to learn the strokes, and then to draw simple patterns of stems and leaves. There was something wrong with her hands; the knuckles and fingers were swollen, and she could not straighten them entirely, but it never seemed to interfere with her painting.

  When she came to Gene's table, she said, "No, it is not good. See here, the lines are broken, that is ugly. In nature are no broken lines. Every line must be one line, not three." She took his brush from him and fitted it into a leather strap she was wearing on her hand, so that the brush stood out beyond her swollen knuckles. She took a blank tile, dipped the brush, and drew in one motion a long delicate curve that became a curled leaf; then another. "Do you see now?"

  "Yes, but why are you doing it with that?"

  She looked at him. "Sometimes my fingers will not hold the brush," she said. "It does not matter. Painting is with the wrist, so, not with the fingers. Now make for me a yellow flower like this one." She showed him a design in the book.

  He dipped a brush in yellow and painstakingly drew each of the five petals; he mixed a little white with the yellow and tipped each petal, then a little orange and darkened their stems. Madame Porgorny came back while he was finishing.

  "No, again it is wrong. Look here." She sat beside him in a cloud of perfume. She took his brush, fitted it into the strap of her hand, dipped up paint, and with one stroke made a perfect petal, then another, and another, until there were five. "Now do you see?"

  "I'll never do that," Gene said.

  "You can learn if you wish, but why should you? This is not what you want. Tell me, why did you take this class?"

  "It was the figure drawing. I can't do it big the way Miss Williams wants me to."

  "And so you thought you would do china painting because it is small? But you see it is the same. Big, small, it does not matter, you must learn to use wrist, not fingers. Do you understand?"

  "Yes."

  "Figure drawing you must have, if you want to be artist. I will speak to Miss Williams."

  "Let's try something different," Miss Williams said to him the next day. She took the paper off his easel and handed him another sheet. It was torn off a roll like the other, but it was white and faintly glossy. When he had pinned it up, she gave him a cup of black paint and a soft round brush.

  Almost from the first, he discovered a new freedom with the brush and paint. He was not tempted to use the brush like a pen; he could stand away from the easel and let the brush move by itself. His drawings were no longer cramped and tight; they were not so accurately detailed, either, but he liked them better because there was a sense of volume in them. When he was interested in something, the hands, for instance, he allowed himself to make them bigger, out of proportion, and yet they seemed right. "Now that's a lot better," said Miss Williams, and he was filled with a gratitude and love that choked him.

  Every other month he measured himself against the wall with a book, not the way most people do, balancing the book on the top of the head, but in the proper way, using the book as a carpenter's square pressed firmly against the head and the wall. He marked his height each time, and dated the marks. Each one was a little more than three-eighths of an inch higher than the last; he was growing at the rate of two and a half inches a year.

  He was sprouting hair in unexpected places, and he discovered that he had to wash oftener than before, especially his armpits, or he would smell. One morning when he lay naked on his bed after a shower, his penis stiffened, rose, and began twitching in a slow rhythm. He watched this phenomenon with interest until it stopped. The third or fourth time it happened, a few weeks later, he touched his penis curiously, feeling how the thin skin slid up and down as if it were not attached at all. After a few moments, to his utter astonishment, his penis stiffened convulsively and a spurt of milky fluid came out. The pleasure he felt at the same moment was so intense that he knew instinctively it must be wrong.

  He bought a book about sex and discovered that masturbation, or "self-abuse," would weaken your system or even drive you insane; but he kept on doing it anyhow.

  One afternoon Madame Porgorny stopped him in the hall. "You are thin," she said critically, holding him at arm's length. "You do not eat enough. Come to my house for dinner, tomorrow at eight o'clock." She took a pad from the pocket of her smock, scrawled an address.

  Gene was alarmed .by this invitation but dared not refuse. After school the next day, he washed and put on clean clothes. The address she had given him was an apartment house on Nob Hill. By the time he got there he was already very hungry; ordinarily he would have eaten dinner an hour ago. In the lobby he found her name ornately lettered on a card, with another name under it:

  Mine. Evgenia Porgorny Mlle. Vasilisa Tershchova

  Above, the door was opened by a heavy gray-haired woman in an apron; her face was very wide, her eyes narrow and shrewd. She smiled when she saw him. "Come in." Her accent was even thicker than Madame Porgorny's.

  She urged him through a narrow hall cluttered with dark furniture into a living room where Madame Porgorny sat in a blue dress, her hair done up tidily for once. "Ah, Stephen," she said. "Sit down. This is Vasilisa, she does not speak English very well."

  "No English," the woman agreed, with a broad smile. "Welcome. Sit down."

  "I'm glad to know you," Gene said.

  "Welcome," she repeated. "Good." She patted him once on the shoulder, then turned and left the room.

  "You are hungry?" Madame Porgorny demanded.

  "Yes, a little."

  "Good. Dinner will be very soon. Do you like our apartment?"

  Gene looked around him politely. All the furniture was heavy, dark, and old; there were many pictures in gold frames, lamps with tasseled shades, china figurines. "It's very nice. Have you lived here long?"

  "Sixteen years. We came from Paris in nineteen thirty-nine. Now any longer you could not find such an apartment." She picked up a fluted glass and drank the last few drops of something pale as water, then called through the doorway. The other woman's voice answered.

  "Come," said Madame Porgorny, "now you will see how Russians eat." She led him into a dining room where a table was set for three. Vasilisa came in carrying a soup tureen; when she lifted the domed cover, fragrant steam came out. She ladled the soup into their bowls; it was dark red, almost the color of blood, with things floating in it.

  "What kind of soup is this?" Gene asked. "It's very good," he added, although it tasted like beets.

  "It is 'borshch,' made from beets and other things," She exchanged a few rapid words with Vasilisa. "This kind is from the Ukraine. It is with vegetables and 'kolbasa' --that is the sausage. I myself know nothing about it," she added. "My mother would never let me enter the kitchen, but Vasilisa knows all. Everything."

  The other woman beamed. "You like?"

  "It's very good." And, in fact, he thought he was getting used to it.

  Vasilisa took away the bowls and brought in a huge pastry, then three other dishes. The pastry turned out to be filled with salmon and mushrooms; it was meltingly delicious. With it they ate little carrot patties covered with a pale sauce; golden poppy-seed rolls; and some green vegetable cooked so thoroughly that it was like a pudding. Gene had a tall glass of milk, but the other two drank wine. For dessert they had triangular pastries filled with fruit and nuts.

  "Now we will have coffee in the living room," Madame Porgorny announced. Gene's coffee was in a cup, but Madame Porgorny had hers in a glass. "So, did you have enough to eat?" she asked him. Gene smiled; he was stuffed so full that he felt he could barely move. "Good. You are still growing; you must eat, eat, to grow strong. Come into the light."
She led him to a little table and sat down opposite him.

  "You are a very strange young man," she said, and took his arm. "See here, not a blemish. For everyone is something, a mole, freckle, but for you, nothing. Show me your teeth." Feeling like a fool, Gene opened his mouth wide. "So," she said, peering in. "Perfect. Even if I looked at you all over, I believe I would find nothing. Don't worry, I am not going to do it. Sit down."

  She took a worn deck of cards out of the drawer in the table and began to shuffle them in her swollen fingers. The cards had designs Gene had never seen before: men and women in antique costumes, castles, lions, flowers.

  "Have you ever had your fortune told? No?" She spread the cards, picked out one and laid it by itself on the table. "This is you." It was a young man in tights with a feather in his cap. She shuffled the cards again, handed them to him. "Cut. No, with your left hand, toward me, in three piles."