Alive in Shape and Color

by Lawrence Block

  La Verge is fifty kilometers inland from Nice. I hired a driver. The road curved through olive-tree orchards and farmland, crested cypress-covered hills, and often skirted cliffs. Passing one of the orchards, I had the eerie conviction that I’d seen it before. Entering La Verge, my déjà vu strengthened. The village seemed trapped in the 19th century. Except for phone poles and power lines, it looked exactly as Van Dorn had painted it. I recognized the narrow cobbled streets and rustic shops that Van Dorn had made famous. I asked directions. It wasn’t hard to find Myers and his parents.

  The final time I saw my friend, the undertaker was putting the lid on his coffin. I had trouble sorting out the details, but despite my burning tears, I gradually came to understand that the local clinic was as good as the nurse had assured me in her note. All things being equal, he would have lived.

  But the damage to his mind had been another matter. He’d complained of headaches. He’d also become increasingly distressed. Even morphine hadn’t helped. He’d been left alone only for a minute, appearing to be asleep. In that brief interval, he had managed to stagger from his bed, grope across the room, and find a pair of scissors. Yanking off his bandages, he’d jabbed the scissors into an empty eye socket and tried to ream out his brain. He’d collapsed before accomplishing his purpose, but the damage had been sufficient. Death had taken two days.

  His parents were pale, incoherent with shock. I somehow controlled my own shock enough to try to comfort them. Despite the blur of those terrible hours, I remember noticing the kind of irrelevance that signals the mind’s attempt to reassert normality. Myers’s father wore Gucci loafers and a gold Rolex watch. In grad school, Myers had lived on a strict budget. I had no idea he came from wealthy parents.

  I helped them make arrangements to fly his body back to the States. I went to Nice with them and stayed by their side as they watched the crate that contained his coffin being loaded into the baggage compartment of the plane. I shook their hands and hugged them. I waited as they sobbed and trudged down the boarding tunnel. An hour later, I was back in La Verge.

  I returned because of a promise. I wanted to ease his parents’ suffering—and my own. Because I’d been his friend. “You’ve got too much to take care of,” I had said to his parents. “The long trip home. The arrangements for the funeral.” My throat had felt choked. “Let me help. I’ll settle things here, pay whatever bills he owes, pack up his clothes and . . .” I had taken a deep breath. “And his books and whatever else he had and send them home to you. Let me do that. I’d consider it a kindness. Please. I need to do something.”

  True to his ambition, Myers had managed to rent the same room taken by Van Dorn at the village’s only hotel. Don’t be surprised that it was available. The management used it to promote the hotel. A plaque announced the historic value of the room. The furnishings were the same style as when Van Dorn had stayed there. Tourists paid to peer in and sniff the residue of genius. But business had been slow this season, and Myers had wealthy parents. For a generous sum, coupled with his typical enthusiasm, he had convinced the hotel’s owner to let him have that room.

  I rented a different room—more like a closet—two doors down the hall and, my eyes still burning from tears, went into Van Dorn’s musty sanctuary to pack my dear friend’s possessions. Prints of Van Dorn paintings were everywhere, several splattered with dried blood. Heartsick, I made a stack of them.

  That’s when I found the diary.

  During grad school, I had taken a course in Postimpressionism that emphasized Van Dorn, and I’d read a facsimile edition of his diary. The publisher had photocopied the handwritten pages and bound them, adding an introduction, translation, and footnotes. The diary had been cryptic from the start, but as Van Dorn became more feverish about his work, as his nervous breakdown became more severe, his statements deteriorated into riddles. His handwriting—hardly neat, even when he was sane—went quickly out of control and finally turned into almost indecipherable slashes and curves as he rushed to unloose his frantic thoughts.

  I sat at a small wooden desk and paged through the diary, recognizing phrases I had read years before. With each passage, my stomach turned colder. Because this diary wasn’t the published photocopy. Instead, it was a notebook, and although I wanted to believe that Myers had somehow, impossibly, gotten his hands on the original diary, I knew I was fooling myself. The pages in this ledger weren’t yellow and brittle with age. The ink hadn’t faded until it was brown more than blue. The notebook had been purchased and written in recently. It wasn’t Van Dorn’s diary. It belonged to Myers. The ice in my stomach turned to lava.

  Glancing sharply away from the ledger, I saw a shelf beyond the desk and a stack of other notebooks. Apprehensive, I grabbed them and in a fearful rush flipped through them. My stomach threatened to erupt. Each notebook was the same, the words identical.

  My hands shook as I looked again to the shelf, found the facsimile edition of the original, and compared it with the notebooks. I moaned, imagining Myers at this desk, his expression intense and insane as he reproduced the diary word for word, slash for slash, curve for curve. Eight times.

  Myers had indeed immersed himself, straining to put himself into Van Dorn’s disintegrating frame of mind. And in the end he’d succeeded. The weapon Van Dorn had used to stab out his eyes had been the sharp end of a paintbrush. In the mental hospital, Van Dorn had finished the job by skewering his brain with a pair of scissors. Like Myers. Or vice versa. When Myers had finally broken, had he and Van Dorn been horribly indistinguishable?

  I pressed my hands to my face. Whimpers squeezed from my convulsing throat. It seemed forever before I stopped sobbing. My consciousness strained to control my anguish. (“Orange is for anguish,” Myers had said.) Rationality fought to subdue my distress. (“The critics who devoted themselves to analyzing Van Dorn,” Myers had said. “The ones who haven’t been recognized for their genius, just as Van Dorn wasn’t recognized. They suffered . . . And just like Van Dorn, they stabbed out their eyes.”) Had they done it with a paintbrush? I wondered. Were the parallels that exact? And in the end, had they, too, used scissors to skewer their brains?

  I scowled at the prints I’d been stacking. Many still surrounded me on the walls, the floor, the bed, the windows, even the ceiling. A swirl of colors. A vortex of brilliance.

  Or at least I once had thought of them as brilliant. But now, with the insight Myers had given me, with the vision I’d gained in the Metropolitan Museum, I saw behind the sun-drenched cypresses and hayfields, the orchards and meadows, toward their secret darkness, toward the minuscule twisted arms and gaping mouths, the black dots of tortured eyes, the blue knots of writhing bodies. (“Blue is for insanity,” Myers had said.)

  All it took was a slight shift of perception, and there weren’t any orchards and hayfields, only a terrifying gestalt of souls in hell. Van Dorn had indeed invented a new stage of Impressionism. He’d impressed upon the splendor of God’s creation the teeming images of his own disgust. His paintings didn’t glorify. They abhorred. Everywhere Van Dorn had looked, he’d seen his own private nightmare. Blue was for insanity, indeed, and if you fixated on Van Dorn’s insanity long enough, you, too, became insane. (“Don’t look ever again, I beg you, at Van Dorn’s paintings,” Myers had said in his letter.) In the last stages of his breakdown, had Myers somehow become lucid enough to try to warn me? (“Can’t stand the pain. Need a break. Going home.”) In a way I’d never expected, he had indeed gone home.

  Another startling thought occurred to me. (“The critics who devoted themselves to analyzing Van Dorn. They each tried to paint in Van Dorn’s style,” Myers had said a year ago.) As if attracted by a magnet, my gaze swung across the welter of prints and focused on the corner across from me, where two canvas originals leaned against the wall. I shivered, stood, and haltingly approached them.

  They’d been painted by an amateur. Myers was an art historian, after all. The colors were clumsily applied, especially the splotches of or
ange and blue. The cypresses were crude. At their bases, the rocks looked like cartoons. The sky needed texture. But I knew what the black dots among them were meant to suggest. I understood the purpose of the tiny blue gashes. The miniature anguished faces and twisted limbs were implied, even if Myers had lacked the talent to depict them. He’d contracted Van Dorn’s madness. All that had remained were the terminal stages.

  I sighed from the pit of my soul. As the village’s church bell rang, I prayed that my friend had found peace.

  It was dark when I left the hotel. I needed to walk, to escape the greater darkness of that room, to feel at liberty, to think. But my footsteps and inquiries led me down a narrow cobbled street toward the village’s clinic, where Myers had finished what he had started in Van Dorn’s room. I asked at the desk and five minutes later introduced myself to an attractive, dark-haired, thirtyish woman.

  The nurse’s English was more than adequate. She said her name was Clarisse.

  “You took care of my friend,” I said. “You sent me the letter he dictated and added a note of your own.”

  She nodded. “He worried me. He was so distressed.”

  The fluorescent lights in the vestibule hummed. We sat on a bench.

  “I’m trying to understand why he killed himself,” I said. “I think I know, but I’d like your opinion.”

  Her eyes, a bright, intelligent hazel, suddenly were guarded. “He stayed too long in his room. He studied too much.” She shook her head and stared toward the floor. “The mind can be a trap. It can be a torture.”

  “But he was excited when he came here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Despite his studies, he behaved as if he’d come on vacation?”

  “Very much.”

  “Then what made him change? My friend was unusual, I agree. What we call high-strung. But he enjoyed doing research. He might have looked sick from too much work, but he thrived on learning. His body was nothing, but his mind was brilliant. What tipped the balance, Clarisse?”

  “Tipped the . . . ?”

  “Made him depressed instead of excited. What did he learn that made him—”

  She stood and looked at her watch. “Forgive me. I stopped work twenty minutes ago. I’m expected at a friend’s.”

  My voice hardened. “Of course. I wouldn’t want to keep you.”

  Outside the clinic, beneath the light at its entrance, I stared at my own watch, surprised to see that it was almost eleven thirty. Fatigue made my knees ache. The trauma of the day had taken away my appetite, but I knew I should try to eat, and after walking back to the hotel’s dining room, I ordered a chicken sandwich and a glass of Chablis. I meant to eat in my room but never got that far. Van Dorn’s room and the diary beckoned.

  The sandwich and wine went untasted. Sitting at the desk, surrounded by the swirling colors and hidden horrors of Van Dorn prints, I opened a notebook and tried to understand.

  A knock at the door made me turn.

  Again I glanced at my watch, astonished to find that hours had passed like minutes. It was almost 2:00 A.M.

  The knock was repeated, gentle but insistent. The manager?

  “Come in,” I said in French. “The door isn’t locked.”

  The knob turned. The door swung open.

  Clarisse stepped in. Instead of her nurse’s uniform, she now wore sneakers, jeans, and a sweater whose tight-fitting yellow accentuated the hazel in her eyes.

  “I apologize,” she said in English. “I must have seemed rude at the clinic.”

  “Not at all. You had an appointment. I was keeping you.”

  She shrugged self-consciously. “I sometimes leave the clinic so late, I don’t have a chance to see my friend.”

  “I understand perfectly.”

  She drew a hand through her lush long hair. “My friend got tired. As I walked home, passing the hotel, I saw a light up here. On the chance it might be you . . .”

  I nodded, waiting.

  I had the sense that she’d been avoiding it, but now she turned toward the room. Toward where I’d found the dried blood on the prints. “The doctor and I came as fast as we could when the manager phoned us that afternoon.” Clarisse stared at the prints. “How could so much beauty cause so much pain?”

  “Beauty?” I glanced toward the tiny gaping mouths.

  “You mustn’t stay here. Don’t make the mistake your friend did.”

  “Mistake?”

  “You’ve had a long journey. You’ve suffered a shock. You need to rest. You’ll wear yourself out as your friend did.”

  “I was just looking through some things of his. I’ll be packing them to send them back to America.”

  “Do it quickly. You mustn’t torture yourself by thinking about what happened here. It isn’t good to surround yourself with the things that disturbed your friend. Don’t intensify your grief.”

  “Surround myself? My friend would have said ‘immerse.’”

  “You look exhausted. Come.” She held out her hand. “I’ll take you to your room. Sleep will ease your pain. If you need some pills to help you . . .”

  “Thanks. But a sedative won’t be necessary.”

  Clarisse continued to offer her hand. I took it and went to the hallway.

  For a moment I stared back toward the prints and the horror within the beauty. I said a silent prayer for Myers, shut off the lights, and locked the door.

  We went down the hall. In my room, I sat on the bed.

  “Sleep long and well,” Clarisse said.

  “I hope.”

  “You have my sympathy.” She kissed my cheek.

  I touched her shoulder. Her lips shifted toward my own. She leaned against me.

  We sank toward the bed. In silence, we made love.

  Sleep came like her kisses, softly smothering.

  But in my nightmares, there were tiny gaping mouths.

  Sunlight glowed through my window. With aching eyes, I looked at my watch. Half past ten. My head hurt.

  Clarisse had left a note on my bureau.

  Last night was sympathy. To share and ease your grief. Do what you intended. Pack your friend’s belongings. Send them to America. Go with them. Don’t make your friend’s mistake. Don’t, as you said he said, “immerse” yourself. Don’t let beauty give you pain.

  I meant to leave. I truly believe that. I phoned the front desk and asked the concierge to send up some boxes. After I showered and shaved, I went to Myers’s room, where I finished stacking the prints. I made another stack of books and another of clothes. I packed everything into the boxes and looked around to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.

  The two canvases that Myers had painted still leaned against a corner. I decided not to take them. No one needed to be reminded of the delusions that had overcome him.

  All that remained was to seal the boxes, to address and mail them. But as I started to close the flap on a box, I saw the notebooks inside.

  So much suffering, I thought. So much waste.

  Once more I leafed through a notebook. Myers had translated various passages. Van Dorn’s discouragement about his failed career. His reasons for leaving Paris to come to La Verge—the stifling, backbiting artists’ community, the snobbish critics and their sneering responses to his early efforts. Need to free myself of convention. Need to void myself of aesthete politics, to shit it out of me. To find what’s never been painted. To feel instead of being told what to feel. To see instead of imitating what others have seen.

  I knew from the biographies how impoverished Van Dorn’s ambition had made him. In Paris, he’d literally eaten slops thrown into alleys behind restaurants. He’d been able to afford his quest to La Verge only because a successful but very conventional (and now ridiculed) painter friend had loaned him a small sum of money. Eager to conserve his endowment, Van Dorn had walked all the way from Paris to the South of France.

  In those days, you have to remember, this valley was an unfashionable area of hills, rocks, farms, and villages. L
imping into La Verge, Van Dorn must have been a pathetic sight. He’d chosen this provincial town precisely because it was unconventional, because it offered mundane scenes so in contrast with the salons of Paris that no other artist would dare to paint them.

  Need to create what’s never been imagined, he’d written. For six despairing months, he tried and failed. He finally quit in self-doubt, then suddenly reversed himself and, in a year of unbelievably brilliant productivity, gave the world thirty-eight masterpieces. At the time, of course, he couldn’t trade any canvas for a meal. But the world knows better now.

  He must have painted in a frenzy. His suddenly found energy must have been enormous. To me, a would-be artist with technical facility but only conventional eyes, he achieved the ultimate. Despite his suffering, I envied him. When I compared my maudlin, Wyeth-like depictions of Iowa landscapes to Van Dorn’s trendsetting genius, I despaired. The task awaiting me back in the States was to imitate beer cans and deodorant packages for magazine ads.

  I continued flipping through the notebook, tracing the course of Van Dorn’s despair and epiphany. His victory had a price, to be sure. Insanity. Self-blinding. Suicide. But I had to wonder if perhaps, as he died, he’d have chosen to reverse his life if he’d been able. He must have known how remarkable, how truly astonishing, his work had become.

  Or perhaps he didn’t. The last canvas he’d painted before stabbing his eyes had been of himself. A lean-faced, brooding man with short, thinning hair, sunken features, pallid skin, and a scraggly beard. The famous portrait reminded me of how I always thought Christ would have looked just before he was crucified. All that was missing was the crown of thorns. But Van Dorn had a different crown of thorns. Not around but within him. Disguised among his scraggly beard and sunken features, the tiny gaping mouths and writhing bodies told it all. His suddenly acquired vision had stung him too much.

  As I read the notebook, again distressed by Myers’s effort to reproduce Van Dorn’s agonized words and handwriting exactly, I reached the section where Van Dorn described his epiphany: La Verge! I walked! I saw! I feel! Canvas! Paint! Creation and damnation!