I read the card beneath the painting: “In this work, entitled ‘Landscape, Inner View,’ I explored the imbalance between symmetry and the actual chaos underlying the most basic forms. What is a square but four lines? What is a cube but twelve lines? What is a circle but one line connected to itself? These principles, applied to nature and given color, make up the world we see. But when stripped bare, we see the world as it actually is, lineless, vague, and transient. Sale Price, $1,975.”
I was chuckling to myself when my elbow was bumped. I looked beside me to see a young woman with a canvas backpack under her arms, taking notes in a pocket composition book. She studied the painting as if there were actually something to see, then wrote in the notebook, her jaw clenched in concentration.
She wore a too-round brown felt hat with a floppy brim, and her hair stuck out underneath like straws of toasted amber. She had thick, earnest eyelashes and her eyebrows were poised on her forehead as if they were frozen in a constant inquisitive stare. Her mouth was a red primrose, dewy and delicate. Her cream-colored wool sweater was rolled up at the sleeves, setting off the healthy tan of her skin. Loverboy twitched but I battened down his hatches.
She spoke without looking at me. “What’s so funny?”
There were other people in the gallery, but we were alone in this corner, twin victims of the garish painting. Its ugliness shone like a painful light.
“Just admiring the coming wave of great art in America,” I said. Or maybe I was mouthing a mix of Bookworm’s intellectual aloofness and Loverboy’s smart-assed seduction.
“And you find it funny?” She bent over her notes.
“Well, I must give it points for sheer brass.”
“Brass? I don’t see that color.” Her nose wrinkled prettily as she looked at the painting. Little Hitler wanted to slap her, Loverboy wanted to…do that thing Loverboy did.
“‘Color is mere absence of non-color,’“ I said with mock gravity, perhaps quoting some great painter. It should have been a famous quote, if it wasn’t. I’d have to ask Mister Milktoast later.
“If it’s non-color, then you can see it even when it’s not there,” she said mock-seriously, then looked into my eyes. I drank greedily of the dark rings of her irises, green rings flecked with gold that glittered like sapphires in a seedbed. My face, our face, must have been too hard, too stern and uninviting, because she looked down.
Her bright lips curved into a tiny moue, the primrose folding up as if touched by winter’s first snow. Her cheekbones were high and finely sculpted by fingers far more feathery than those of Michelangelo. Her eyelashes fluttered like dark quick moths as she gazed at the floor.
“You’re not the artist, are you?” I asked, suddenly too much aware again of my own brutal insensitivity. And of those inside my head, who might burst out at any moment like lunatic extras from an old Bette Davis movie.
“No, but I’m a friend of the artist. I’m taking notes for a class. I’m going to write a paper on her work.”
I looked at the canvas, saw a black “x” scrawled in one corner. “She’s a minimalist when it comes to signatures,” I said, pointing.
“That’s short for Xandria, which is short for Alexandria. Pretty cool, isn’t it?”
“She’s an American original, even down to leaving the price tag on the canvas and painting right over it.”
“That’s her statement that materialism ultimately pervades all artistic endeavors.” She smiled, perhaps playing me like a sport fish that had a barbed hook in its mouth. I liked what the smile did to her face. I hadn’t known many smiles. Loverboy leaped from the dark waters like a trout on a line but I reeled him back into the Bone House.
“So, what do you see in this thing? I mean, between the lines, of course,” I said. I was enjoying playing the critic, even if I didn’t own a black turtleneck or rakishly cocked beret, or even a blog for that matter. I had stewed in my own soiled juices too long, wearing isolation as insulation. I had been on a few dates since I’d been in Shady Valley, and had a few casual acquaintances sprinkled among the bookstore regulars whom I sometimes joined for lunch. But not enough contact to feel connected to the human race. Going to the movies or library or art shows were my sole escapes from my own unpleasant company.
But you know what they say: wherever you go, there you are. And there they are.
Just being close enough to smell the faint soap on her skin was as invigorating as standing under a silver waterfall. Sally’s bubble-gum breath, Hope Hill’s hair, Virginia’s leather jacket, Mother’s bourbon, all the feminine scents I’d come to know where subsumed by this new Bethness. I tried to think of mindless banter, to dredge up thoughts from some pool of wit, anything to keep the music of her voice filling my ears. Or maybe it was Loverboy, now jittering in my chest like a slam dancer on amphetamines.
Her voice played on. “See how these stick figures cower in insignificance against the sweeping vista of nature? That portrays the futility of human endeavor as well as the artist’s own realization of the futility of her own work. The artist’s failings are displayed proudly, almost flagrantly, yet not without a certain humility.”
“Ah, self-flagellation is flaunting the obvious. And these color schemes that look like they were lifted from the interior of a 1950’s diner?” I asked.
“Reality as fabrication, an artificially colored environment, nature as plastic plants and wax fruit.”
“Did the artist tell you all of this?”
She hugged her notebook to the attractive curve of her chest and looked from the painting to me. “I’m working on a Masters in Art Theory. I can do this kind of stuff in my sleep.”
With thoughts like that, who could ever sleep? “So you take this stuff seriously.”
“Everybody’s a critic. Most do it for free, but I’m going to do it for a living. Or else teach paste-eating first graders how to cut construction paper.”
“Are you an artist yourself?”
“I’ve done my time, a few miles of charcoal scrawls and a dozen pounds of zinc-plate etching, but you know the saying about ‘Those who can’t, teach’?” She smiled again, forming cute lines at the corners of her mouth. Real lines, not Xandria’s invisible ones. “What about you?”
“Me? An artist?”
My art was casting myself in misery as if it were bronze. Looking in the mirror as a self-portrait of the artist as satire, the artist as mud-eyed madman, the artist as inside joke. My life’s work was a study in flesh, its cravings and pains, splashed in crimson on the canvas of the past. My masterpiece to date was a Father-carving, done in material so much more unforgiving of error than granite or wood.
“No, I’m no artist. Just another unpaid critic, I guess.”
“So, do you want to meet the artist?”
“The mind behind the masterpiece? Certainly.”
“The mouth behind the mind is now in the house.”
The artist and her entourage entered through the gallery’s double doors. The artist was a tall umber-skinned woman with a wide forehead and dark, piercing eyes. Her hair was corn-rowed tightly against her head, and a half-dozen earrings jutted from her left ear. She wore white coveralls, the better to show the multicolored stains that proclaimed her an artist: watery turquoises, weak lavenders, and poignant grays. She walked with an air of regal arrogance, an African empress.
At her sides, crowding her like cryptic bookends, were two teenaged twin boys dressed entirely in black. They both were gaunt and wore too much makeup. The one on the left had a bright red scarf tightened around his scrawny neck and his eye shadow made him look like a malnourished raccoon. The right bookend had a bad complexion that was threatening to erupt under his mask of whiteface. I could almost hear their bones rattle as they walked.
“Hi, Beth,” the artist said, stepping toward us. The twins hung in the shadows, as if the spotlights over the paintings might turn them to dust. Xandria didn’t seem overjoyed to see either Beth or me. She acted as if she was rarely overjoyed
about anything. “Come to the show, I see.”
“I said I would. Looks like you’ve got an audience,” Beth said, nodding at the people at the other end of the gallery. “And groupies,” she added, lowering her voice and glancing toward the twins.
“Them boys don’t know much about grouping. Most of their action is with each other,” Xandria said. “And who are you, white boy?”
“I’m Richard,” I said, extending my hand. She looked at it as if it were a drop of blood. Beth looked away, back at the painting, the hideous “Landscape, Inner View.”
“You a critic?” Xandria asked.
“No, just an art admirer.”
“Well, what you think?”
“The truth?”
“Hey, man, this ain’t no wine-and-cheese affair here. I hang these pieces of shit on the wall and put whatever ridiculous price on ‘em that I feel like at the time. Last year, some blue-haired bitch from Charlotte came up for an exhibit, and the next thing I knew I was a ‘discovery,’ what she called in the newspaper ‘a contemporary genius, a master of Zulu urban angst.’ Before that, I was just a painter, now I got to have attitude. I got to be a nigger. I got to be an oppressed bitch. Plus I got to put up with your cookie-dunkin’ horseshit, too?”
Beth was laughing behind her hand.
“Hey, girl. Is this here your friend?” Xandria said, pointing at me.
She shrugged. “I just met him myself. He really likes your work.”
I was caught off guard, but Mister Milktoast worked the pulleys and wires so that I nodded in response.
“Well, get in line, home fry, and ketchup. You’re going to write me up nice in that paper of yours, ain’t you, Beth? Say I cussed and shit?”
“Yeah. Richard’s helping me. He’s already given me some fresh insight. What was it you were saying, Richard? Something about ‘an American original’? And something about pretension?” Just hearing Beth say my name was a sweet note, even with the sarcasm.
“Oh, Lord, do I got pretension?” Xandria drew back in mock horror. She dropped her street accent, which apparently had belonged to a stage character—something to which I could relate. “Put that in the paper, Beth. Your supercilious friend just might get you an ‘A’ if you listen to him. Now, pardon moi, because I see some suits down there at the other end who look like trust-fund liberals who just can’t go home without ‘a street-wise rendering by an African-American visionary.’ Politically correct guilt keeps me in mineral spirits and Chardonnay and Virginia Slims.”
“Xandria, you’re nuts,” Beth said.
“‘Nuts’ sells, girl. And Richard—it’s a real pleasure to meet you. And you’re in the game. Maybe I’ll get you to write the little placards for my next show. And I might even lay off the asshole artist persona next time.” She shrugged. “Maybe not. Ciao, mon amie.”
Xandria brought her hand up near her chin and fluttered a wave of good-bye. Then she adjusted her “artist’s face,” stuck out her lower lip and narrowed her eyes, and slouched over to meet the adoring masses. Her bookends followed ten feet behind, as if searching for crumbs she might drop.
Beth put away her notebook. “I could say some bullshit about life imitating art, but that’s been done to death. I suppose this is where I say ‘So long, it was nice to meet you.’“
“And we turn and walk away, and maybe you look back and maybe you don’t,” I said. “And maybe we run into each other somewhere along the line, at the next great art show. Maybe one of us will be a nude model.”
She looked at me, her face clear and wide and fearless. “You talk crazy. Like you’re writing a book. And maybe you’ll remember my name.”
“Beth.”
“Except maybe we never meet again, and someday you’ll take your wife and kids to the park, and you’ll look out over the landscape, inner view, or maybe up at a cloud and see some invisible lines. Then you’ll remember me, maybe even see my face in your mind, the features fuzzy and out of place, in the wrong proportions but close enough. And you’ll think to yourself, ‘I wonder whatever happened to what’s-her-name.’“
“Beth.” I laughed, strange music in my head.
“Or maybe you go on the rest of your life and never think of me again.”
“Or maybe I do think of you. Or maybe we don’t meet until the next life or two.”
The crowd at the end of the gallery may as well have been a thousand miles away. I felt as if I were on an island with no one else but Beth. I don’t know why I felt so comfortable with her. Maybe it was Mister Milktoast oozing his harmless charm. Or maybe it was that black thing that flickered sometimes in my head like a serpent’s tongue. Maybe somebody in the Bone House kitchen was playing with the chemicals again.
“I don’t play ‘what if.’ Would you like to join me for a cup of coffee?” she asked.
My heart froze and my breath stalled in my lungs. The Bone House shook with the jumping of my inmates. No, this wasn’t Virginia or Sally Bakken or Mother. Did every woman have to measure up or down to such stained ideals? Did every woman have to be either an angel bitch or virgin whore or a way to get a dollar’s worth of candy or make the bedsprings squeak? And this was just an afternoon cup of coffee, not a commingling of souls or a remake of “Romeo and Juliet” or another chapter in my autobiography.
“Sure,” I said, flashing a smile that felt so brittle I thought my face might break. I wondered who would wear my boots into this new territory. More importantly, who would wear my face?
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
We talked away the September afternoon, drinking organic Sumatran at a round concrete table outside the Student Union. The surrounding brick buildings housed enough knowledge to ensure no second-guessing or doubts. Leaves skittered and scratched across the concrete patio, whisked by the autumn wind into piles that served as mass graves. The wind also carried Styrofoam cups and half-finished homework assignments across the university compound, where the worn grass had given way to mud. The black bones of tree branches lay on the ground, broken by the frosty nights.
Beth’s cheeks were pinked by the wind. She put her hat in her lap to keep it from flying away. Strands of her golden-brown hair kept blowing across her face, and she brushed them back with an impatient hand. She told me of her family back in Philadelphia, how she had come to the mountains as an escape, to get away from the crime and traffic and the press of skyscrapers and the crush of crowds.
“But I’m worried that my career as a critic will force me back to the city,” she said.
“If you want to study fish, you have to go underwater. If you want to study artists, you have to go underground,” I said. Of course, all my exposure to art came from books or the occasional small show. But I was good at pretending, and a little generosity never killed anyone.
“Where the wild things are. That’s where it’s happening. But it’s the critics who make the art, not vice versa. We’re like the remoras who hook themselves onto the shark and suck until we’re fatter than what we’re feeding on.”
A wisp of steam rose from her cup, curled in on itself for a moment, then climbed the wind and disappeared.
“You don’t have a very optimistic view of your future career.”
“I inflate illusions. I play the art game, but I play to win.”
I had to hold my nearly empty cup to keep it from blowing away. Classes were changing, and students swarmed from the brick buildings like disturbed ants from an overturned log, except ants didn’t carry books. Beth stood up and took a final gulp of her coffee.
“I have a class. Nice talking to you, Richard. See you around, huh? For real.”
“What if?”
“If I don’t?”
She threw her backpack over her shoulder, her body swimming with grace at the movement. I swallowed the stone in my throat that must have been my heart. Not that I knew what a heart felt like, but I’d eaten many stones.
“Say, have you read Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word?” I asked, trying to steal another moment o
f her attention, one more gaze from those jeweled eyes. In retrospect, maybe it was all Bookworm’s doing. All he had was words.
“No, but I’ve heard of it.”
“It’s a must read for critics, even amateurs like me. You can borrow my copy if you’d like.”
She smiled, flashing the neat, white fencerows of her teeth. “Does that mean I have to give you my phone number?”
“I suppose so. Though, again, my intentions are purely honorable.”
“Boring. Remember, no ‘what ifs.’“
“Okay, how about this one? You know how a preying mantis eats the head off the male after mating?”
Her eyes narrowed. Cute. “Yeah?”
“What happens when she masturbates?”
“Hmm. Wakes up to find she’s slept with Franz Kafka?”
Good enough. She’d passed the audition.
She gave me her number and I watched her walk away until I could only see the top of her hat, held down by one slim hand, the brim flapping in the wind. Then she disappeared into the crowd.
Mister Milktoast approved.
“She has a nice hat, for a female,” he said, from his fussily neat closet in the Bone House. “I don’t think she’ll hurt you. Not like Sally and those others.”
“You never can tell, though,” I thought, in answer. By then, I was usually smart enough to keep my mouth shut when talking to the voices in my head.
“Ah, but better to have loved and lost than to lose without getting a game piece.” Mister Milktoast was fond of his distorted little aphorisms, but he would have failed miserably as a romance columnist.
“It’s not love, only a chance meeting.”
“Don’t give me that. I can feel your heart pounding like a rain of frogs on a tin roof. It’s my heart, too, remember?”
“I can fool myself, but I can never fool you, can I?”
Scott Nicholson Library Vol 1 Page 74
