Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  Tommy stepped back, framed by the light of the outside room, and closed the door, plunging them in the darkness. Then they heard Tommy scraping the chair across the floor, sticking it under the doorknob to hold them in.

  Charlie took a deep breath. All he could do was sit on the floor of the closet and tremble. He knew he was in the closet, but he felt he was in the grave.

  Why can’t I move? he thought. Why can’t I do something? I did something then. Why can’t I now?

  Because you know how it could end, for you and Millie and Billy, but you know too it will end that way anyway. You know what you did back then, and if you let yourself loose, you may do what you did before, and that’s not how you want to be. Not like that. Never like that.

  “Dad?” Millie said.

  She touched his arm. He was embarrassed that she would feel it trembling, and that he was already so beaded with sweat his clothes were wet.

  “What do we do, Dad?”

  He thought about that first haircut again, but that still wasn’t working. That worked when he knew he could leave, but now the dirt seemed to press against him, and if he broke from the grave, it would be dark, and there was the woods, the soldier and the rocks, and then there was what he had done.

  Charlie told himself, you got to stop worrying about what you did, think about that thing you did instead, let it come out, let that rage rush to the surface like a missile. He could hear the soldiers talking outside of the shelter. No. Not the shelter. It was the thugs, and they were talking outside of the closet. Just a damn closet, not a shelter, not a grave.

  “I go outside with the girl,” Charlie heard Nice-looking say. “We go cool, and she drives the car around front and we pick you up there.”

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said.

  “You don’t know what?”

  “What if you keep going?”

  “Why would I do that? You got the money in your pocket, right?”

  “Yeah, but what if you just kept going anyway? You and her. You could have some fun with her, dump her somewhere, keep driving. And here I’d be.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you, Tommy.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” Tommy said.

  Then they must have moved across the room, because all of a sudden, they couldn’t hear them anymore.

  Inside the closet, Charlie felt Millie push up against him, grab his arm, and hold it. “Oh, Dad. What if they take me?”

  “It’ll be okay,” Charlie said. A kind of cool had settled over him, and it made the sweat on his body turn cold. He remembered something. The scissors in his barber coat. He reached and took them out.

  And then he let himself remember how it was, how he had crawled and then hid in the rocks. The part he wouldn’t let himself think about before, he thought about now. It was the part about where the soldier who had let him go, came back later, maybe an hour later. Charlie had reached the rocks by then and he could hear the pounding of the surf and through a split in the rocks he could see other rock heaps and the sand on the beach, and it was all bathed silver by the moonlight.

  There was a soldier with a rifle and bayonet walking along the beach, looking left and right, crouched a little. The soldier had a limp like the man who had let him go. He had no doubt it was the same man.

  Charlie didn’t know if the soldier had been sent to look for stragglers, or if he had thought about what he had done, letting a prisoner go, felt bad for it, and had come to finish Charlie off.

  A rage swelled up in Charlie, and though his wound was bad, he felt strong then. The dirt in the wound had lessened the flow of blood and clotted it, and Charlie was touched with madness. It was like a crawling thing inside of him; a den of twisting, poisonous reptiles. He had picked up a rock then. It was heavy and one end was a little sharp, and he could hold it firmly in his hand.

  The soldier worked his way among the rocks, holding his bayonet-tipped rifle at the ready. The moonlight danced on the blade. The soldier passed the split in the rocks where Charlie hid in shadow, and before the soldier could look his way, Charlie sprang.

  Charlie had felt in that moment like a panther. He landed on the soldier, knocked him to the ground. The soldier squeaked like a rat. The rock went up and the rock came down. A wet warmness splashed against Charlie. Some of it splashed into his mouth, and it was hot and coppery, and it tasted like vengeance, and the rock went up and the rock came down, and there was a sound like someone stepping on egg shells after a while, but still the rock went up and the rock came down.

  Straddling that soldier, the one who had let him go, all he could think about then was the months of cruelty, the beatings, the starving, the fires, and bayonets. The rock went up and the rock went down.

  When Charlie paused from exhaustion, the soldier no longer had a head. It was a puddle of blood mixed with sand and bone fragments. The light of the moon had changed, and the shadows were different, and the shadows covered Charlie and the dead soldier. Charlie realized he had been striking the soldier for a long time. He could hardly move, he was so exhausted. In that moment Charlie knew what was inside of him, and it had gone on beyond the need to kill the man. It had turned into the same kind of wicked vengeance as the American soldiers he knew who had cut pieces off dead Japanese soldiers and kept them as souvenirs, or who mutilated bodies, or enjoyed burning men with flamethrowers. The same sort of men he had been captured by. The same kind of man he had become.

  Charlie sprang up and rushed the closet door. There was a jar to his shoulder, and he was bounced back, but he went at it again, and this time he heard the chair scrape and go scuttling along the floor. Charlie let what was inside of him come out in full, the thing he feared and had tamped down after that time with the soldier in the rocks. The door sprang open as the hinges creaked out of the wall. Charlie stumbled out into the light with the scissors clutched in his fist, slamming into something, and that something was Tommy.

  Charlie hit him like an express train. Tommy went back and tripped over the chair Charlie had dislodged, smacked his head hard on the floor, and his gun came loose from his hand and went skittering across the tile floor.

  Nice-looking, standing near the back door, panicked, fired his gun. The shot missed Charlie, slammed into the wall, but Charlie felt the bullet ruffle his hair. Nice-looking was trying to fire again, but the gun was jammed, and he was struggling with it, and Charlie was coming, the scissors raised.

  Nice-looking let out a noise that reminded Charlie of the soldier that night, and then Charlie was on him.

  The scissors flashed (the rock went up, the rock went down) and there was a scream, and at first he thought it was Nice-looking, but then realized it was him, and that what was coming out of him was pure rage. Blood spattered against his face, and for a moment he was in those rocks, and then he heard Millie scream, and he was sure this time it was her, not him.

  “Dad, don’t, please don’t,” she said, and her voice broke through the roar in his ears. He sagged slightly. The haze in front of his eyes faded.

  Looking down at Nice-looking, who he was straddling, his hand raised with the bloody scissors in his fist, he saw that he had stabbed Nice-looking through the cheek and had struck him in the shoulder and chest. He could see the swelling red spots there, leaking through Nice-looking’s shirt and jacket, streaming down his face and onto the floor. Nice-looking was crying like a child.

  When Charlie looked back over his shoulder, he saw that Millie had picked up Tommy’s revolver, and was pointing it at him. Tommy was in a heap on the floor, but he was starting to stir.

  Charlie stood up. He put the scissors in his barber coat pocket, picked up Nice-looking’s gun where it lay next to him on the floor. He saw the problem, worked with it briefly, cleared the chamber. It was the same kind of gun he had carried in the war.

  He pointed the gun at Nice-looking, stepped back where he could see both of the men. “Don’t get up, punk,” he said to Nice-looking. “And you, Tommy, get over here and sit down beside him. You
can hold hands if you like.”

  “I’m hurt,” Nice-looking said, and he whimpered after saying it, like a mistreated dog.

  “Yeah, you are,” Charlie said. “But believe me, if not for Millie, you’d be dead.”

  And he would have, and worse. Charlie would have let what was inside of him keep coming out, like that time with the soldier in the rocks, but Millie’s voice had cut through it all, and even the burning need to kill had been defeated by that small but wonderful thing. His daughter’s voice.

  I didn’t kill because I didn’t need to, Charlie thought. I am human. I am a husband and a father. I gained control. That was war, and that was then and this is now.

  Tommy shuffled over, still looking dazed. He sat on the floor by Nice-looking. He didn’t look up to see that Charlie was smiling at him.

  Charlie took a deep breath. The demons were still there, but they were smaller now, and maybe in time he could defeat them, or at least make them so small as to no longer matter. He wasn’t fixed, and maybe never would be, but he was better and felt as good as he had felt in a long time.

  “Millie, darling,” Charlie said, pointing the gun at the pair on the floor. “Go up and call some law, and tell them to send an ambulance for Billy. Everyone lives today.”

  GAIL LEVIN writes artists' biographies, art history, and fiction; curates exhibitions; and exhibits her own art. A native of Atlanta, Georgia, Levin is now distinguished professor of art history, American studies, and women's studies at the Graduate Center and Baruch College of the City University of New York.

  She is the acknowledged authority on the American realist painter Edward Hopper. In 2007, the Wall Street Journal chose her Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography (1995, second expanded edition, 2007), as one of the five best portrayals of artists' lives, going back in its selections to 1931. Focused on women artists, the subjects of her other biographies include Judy Chicago and Lee Krasner.

  Red Cannas by Georgia O'Keeffe

  AFTER GEORGIA O’KEEFFE’S FLOWER

  BY GAIL LEVIN

  I am so excited that Georgia O’Keeffe has finally agreed to meet with me! Getting her to come around wasn’t easy. At first she wouldn’t even reply to my letters. I kept at it. You know, persisted. Finally, I reached her secretary on the phone. When I did get word from O’Keeffe, she complained that there had been too many interviewers over the years. When I asked, she admitted that most of them were male journalists.

  As far as I could tell from digging through files of old clippings, there’s been a veritable avalanche of requests. I can see why some of the results put her off. Take Henry Tyrrell, of the Christian Science Monitor. Already in 1917, he embroidered: “Miss O’Keeffe looks within herself and draws with unconscious naiveté what purports to be the innermost unfolding of a girl’s being, like the germinating of a flower . . .” She was having none of that. She could have taken offense at being called naive. Does her resentment still fester? Does memory make her so tough: “Why should I do this?” O’Keeffe had asked me when I requested an interview. I said, “Because I am a woman. I don’t see art the way those men do.”

  I wrote to her how the paintings in her retrospective made me see in a whole new way. They moved me from the abstract geometry that I had studied in art school to finding subjects in nature. I started to see the world differently. Everywhere I looked, I began finding metaphors for the feminine.

  As I changed my own work to bring out the feminine in nature, I went on to apply my discoveries to writing about O’Keeffe. I published this piece as a review of her recent show in the magazine Womansplace. Not wanting to alarm her, I haven’t mentioned that I share the journal’s feminist perspective, which some, I suppose, might call “radical.” We want to change the art world and the larger society. We seek to eradicate male patriarchy and supremacy. We women must have our share of power.

  To my mind, O’Keeffe’s art and career embodies that power. When I saw for myself the strength of female forms in her large painted flowers, like Red Canna from the early 1920s, I knew one of these flowers would be perfect for the cover of my book on women artists, soon to go to press. The publisher warned me that O’Keeffe has so far withheld permission to reproduce her copyrighted images in all such contexts—those where the book is not entirely about her. But I am determined to change her mind. I need to get her to lend me a color transparency of one of her flower paintings and to give me permission to reproduce it.

  I suppose you could see me as a revolutionary on a noble mission. I must convince O’Keeffe that her work has been transformative for my whole generation. I intend to get rid of that old saw that sneered at ladies painting flowers. “Lady Flower Painters” were only fit to decorate silk fans, sniffed Charles Dickens. Jo Hopper, married to that unreconstructed Victorian, Edward, used to complain how he disparaged her, O’Keeffe, and women artists in general as “Lady Flower Painters.” Against that stereotype, O’Keeffe’s flowers look epic. They must speak for and to women everywhere. But how am I going to get her to realize that? It’s a small victory that she has at least agreed to meet with me.

  Now that I am about to speak with her face-to-face for the first time, I am feeling a bit anxious. In the course of setting up this meeting, I picked up hints from others that she might not be so agreeable. I suspect that convincing O’Keeffe to give me permission to reproduce one of her flowers in my book will take some effort. But I consider these paintings to be some of the most important by anyone—ever! They prefigure feminist art being done today. I mean my own and my contemporaries’.

  So, mulling over all this in my mind, I finally arrive, after driving for two days alone in the sun, all the way from Venice Beach in Southern California, across the Arizona dessert, to Abiquiu, in northern New Mexico. Here O’Keeffe lives below the spectacular Sangre de Christo mountain range. It does not take much imagination to see that these colorful rocky forms that she paints in her landscapes already look like female forms and contours. Even the rosy tone of the weathered stone cliffs and buttes evokes flesh.

  I can barely contain my excitement. At the door, I meet O’Keeffe’s assistant, who seems a bit too stern. She takes my bag and tersely informs me, “No cameras, no recorders allowed.”

  I try to put aside the assistant’s gruff manners so that I can approach O’Keeffe with the sense of awe that I feel. I see her as a role model for all women artists. I hope that she is a harbinger of my own future success. I see palpable strength both in her pictures and in her career in an art world where men still call the shots. Now eighty-six, O’Keeffe appears confident. More than half a century has passed since she first exhibited her drawings, then her watercolors, and oil paintings in New York. By now, she knows that she has earned the acclaim she has received. As praise builds, it confirms her greatness as the artist of her generation.

  I am thrilled but surprised to see O’Keeffe in person: her skin is lined with fine wrinkles. While her hair is mostly gray, pulled back and pinned up in a severe bun, her brows are still thick and dark. She wraps her fragile thin frame in elegant black. Both her face and her body echo her austere surroundings, plain white adobe walls. She does not even display her own art. O’Keeffe seems to emanate a sense of control over this spartan environment. The effect, perhaps knowingly orchestrated, is intimidating.

  O’Keeffe greets me, asking, “Good afternoon. How was your trip?”

  I respond, “Miss O’Keeffe, thank you so much for seeing me. It is a great honor to meet you. You have so inspired me as an artist that I have brought some photographs of my own paintings to share with you.”

  O’Keeffe’s reply stuns me: “I cannot see them. My sight is too weak now. I am told that I have a specific kind of eye problem, and there is nothing that anyone can do for it. That’s what the people that think they know tell me. So I just decided to get on with it. I am making ceramic sculpture now. It won’t bother you that I cannot see so much, will it?”

  Taken aback, almost embarrassed, I reply: “I did not
know. I am so sorry. I love your art. Your paintings have so inspired me.”

  “Virginia Goldfarb. Where did you get that name?” O’Keeffe changes the subject. “Is it like so many of these other women who have been taking geographic place names for themselves? Wanda Westcoast, Judy Chicago, Lita Albuquerque, or even that man, Robert Indiana?”

  “No. My parents named me Virginia after my mother’s mother, named Virginia. I was actually born and raised in San Francisco.”

  Seeming to relax a bit, O’Keeffe elaborates, “My own given name was bestowed at birth. I wasn’t born anywhere near Georgia, but in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin. I don’t like gimmicky names. If one’s work is strong, such names are unnecessary.”

  The sting of skepticism lingers. I sense that I need to do more to soothe her doubts, but what? Winning her over feels like a struggle. “Miss O’Keeffe, I saw your show at the Whitney Museum and loved it! You are a role model for feminist artists of my generation.”

  “What do you mean by ‘feminist artists’?” O’Keeffe snaps. I sense that she does not want to be reduced to anybody’s feminist. She seems to doubt that I or any other feminists understand what she faced and how she coped.

  “I am referring to women who make art about the experience of being female; women who call attention to the issues of gender and gender inequality.”

  To this, O’Keeffe, replies, “I supported women’s suffrage. I belonged to the National Women’s Party. I believe in women making their own living.”

  “I am also talking about women who have responded to new books like Our Bodies, Ourselves. Feminism encourages women to take pride and full ownership of their bodies. Such awareness informs feminist art.”

  At this O’Keeffe bristles, “I hear from a friend that one of these ‘feminists’ paid a lot of money to take out a full-page ad in a prominent art magazine. She wore only a pair of sunglasses and posed nude, holding a large dildo against her body, trying to attract attention to herself and her art.”