The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  He recalled cutting wood with his father. A neighbor a mile away had timbered his woodlot but there were many huge branches of beech, oak, and maple, all marvelous firewood. They had worked through an afternoon that featured high winds and an ice storm in late October. Passage through the woods and fallen branches was tight so they had brought Jerry dragging the stone boat rather than the tractor and wagon. By the time that they had cut three cords their coats were crunchy with ice. Wheat and corn prices were real low that fall and all of this work was to save buying fifty bucks’ worth of firewood. Besides, it was frowned on to buy wood when you should be cutting it yourself unless you were infirm. They reached home just before dark, fed Jerry and rubbed him down, and finally in the house shedding their wet clothes before the hot bellied stove his father had poured them each a couple of ounces of cheap whiskey to the disapproval of his mother. They ate pot roast and gravy with a mixture of whipped potatoes and rutabaga and boiled cabbage, all with his mother’s tart corn relish. He had gone to bed at eight but it was midnight before he was truly warm. He had neglected his homework but he got straight As and could fake it. He had risen early the next morning and had begun a painting of Jerry’s huge body steaming from exertion on the way home in the ice storm.

  Chapter 8

  Behind the wheel while driving to church he began to nod a bit which his mother noticed and insisted he pull over so she could drive the dozen miles, always harrowing as she drove fast right down the middle of the road. He felt none too well but better than expected. He had stayed out at dawn with Mother at station no. 5 in the thicket. He would never enter the thicket again without Margaret’s map. She had trilled happily at hearing a number of species, especially three new spring warblers, one he thought to be absurdly colored orange and black called Blackburnian. They had had the unvarying Sunday breakfast of thick bacon, eggs, and fried slices of cornmeal mush with local maple syrup. He had once told her that in the outside world cornmeal mush was called polenta. “I call it cornmeal mush,” she had said, plainly not interested. After breakfast he had ordered art supplies on his laptop and was startled when she said that Margaret had told her that even women watched pornography on their computers.

  “That’s what the world has come to,” she said washing the breakfast dishes. She suddenly laughed saying that she knew her father had always had a calendar of naked ladies out in the barn. This was untypical indeed as she never spoke about sex. He wished the barn was still there as he could have set up a studio in the mow. She had sold the barn thirty years before to a company that dealt in barn wood and beams for remodels with a country touch.

  He drove poorly on the way to church because of drowsiness and paying too much attention to herds of milk cows and the burgeoning number of saddle horses boarded on farms by the town dwellers in Reed City and Big Rapids. He had read in the Times that this spike in saddle horse ownership had slowed precipitously but here plain as day in northern Michigan was an imitation Kentucky horse farm with white wooden fences. His mother was in a snit about his wobbly driving and had him stop so she could drive. When he got out of the car and crossed the ditch to get a close look at a group of horses she yelled out, “Come back, son, we’ll be late for church!” He had observed these horses several times on the way to town for groceries since Margaret had left nine days before. On one side of the fence there were two horses, a white and a bay, and on the other side there were seven horses. They were staring at each other from approximately the same positions each time he passed.

  “What’s going on here? Do horses communicate?” he asked getting in the passenger side of the car.

  “Of course,” she said, speeding off. “All creature species talk to each other. Mice do choral singing and many birds use hundreds of different songs. You should try reading something outside of art books.”

  He let this pass. He had recently been trying to read a short volume called The Mapmaker’s Dream about early Renaissance perceptions on how the world is shaped. The narrator was a monk in Venice who never went anyplace and depended on the testimonies of early world travelers who passed through the waterlogged city. Clive had always felt claustrophobic at the Venice Biennale even in the old days in Peggy Guggenheim’s huge apartment. In the book each location tried to exclude the reality of other locations, an agreeable notion as Clive had observed that the Hudson and East River in New York were walls that held out the rest of the world. A very old man aged ninety-two in a neighboring apartment had given Clive the book. The man had been a prominent art history professor from a Midwestern university who had retired to the city to be close to museums. “I’m totally free. Everyone thinks I’m dead,” the man had said merrily. They occasionally cooked lunch for each other and the ancient man was an excellent cook besides being the merriest soul Clive had ever met.

  As they pulled up to the church Clive was still thinking about the shape of the world. Tens of thousands of painters and writers had seen the world differently and here he was, in front of the inscrutable church in an alien territory. Mother had decided he shouldn’t attend because he might fall asleep, start snoring, and embarrass her. He was told to be back in an hour and drove a few blocks down to a small park on a high bank above the Muskegon River. It was a favorite place on trips to town in his childhood when the park seemed hundreds of feet above the river and he judged now that his park bench was perhaps seventy feet up the bank. The world had clearly changed its shape. Nothing could be depended on. Usually his visits home had been three or four days at most and now this extended time made him feel tremulous. It was more than the feeling gotten on a ten-day trip to Paris when you tended to forget all about New York and when you returned the city would look a bit dowdy and strange. The present emotions were far more radical. His dad had always advised him to run a tight ship but this military metaphor was as irrelevant as the battle against cancer. He had always been scornful about the silly psychologisms surrounding the ubiquitous “midlife crisis” which seemed to ignore a late-life crisis. What was the shape of his own personal world? Perhaps time was clay that could be shaped and reshaped. It may have been that the wrong foot he had started on had been the refusal to accept the limits of his talents. His ambition as a teen to be a great painter was unlimited but then who could weigh the talent? Was the ambition to be an artist or to have a meteoric career as an artist, two quite different things? A pretty girl in shorts sped by on a bicycle altogether too fast giving him a fleeting glance at her admirable bottom and offering him the idea that he could paint Laurette nude from the waist down under the dome light of an old car.

  He dozed waking ten minutes after he should have picked up his mother. He didn’t bother rushing knowing that her anger wouldn’t depend on elapsed time but the very fact that he was late at all. He had the happy thought that he had zero percent financing on the rest of his life because no one more than nominally cared except himself. He might be going mad as a hatter but it hadn’t been all that bad so far.

  Chapter 9

  It turned out that his mother was well toward the back of the churchyard under an ash tree and was effusively happy because she had heard her first oriole of the spring. He didn’t want to beep the horn out on the street so he had walked back to where she stood oblivious to everything but the oriole up near the top of the budding ash tree. Margaret had said that mother could identify a couple hundred species by their songs. Was this possible? Why not?

  On the drive home she had babbled on about the fact that a bird called the bar-tailed godwit migrated all the way from the Aleutians to New Zealand in nine days without stopping for a rest. This seemed improbable to him but she had gone on in detail about how the bird gorged on crustaceans until it was obese and could barely fly before it caught a big north wind and headed south on its ten-thousand-mile flight. The immutable specifics of the sciences had always made Clive feel a tad flimsy. He recalled a line of Wallace Stevens from a college American literature course to the effect that the wors
t of all things was not to live in a physical world. This segued to the notion that maybe if he were collapsing mentally it might be better to do it out in the country than in New York where so much of the physical world was comprised of cement. When he and Tessa had split up he had to spend much of the day walking or he was sleepless and these walks had to be along the East or Hudson rivers because there was something consoling about moving water that he couldn’t identify.

  On the outskirts of Big Rapids the girl he had seen near the river whizzed past through a stop sign and he admired again the flex of her fanny. Should he be beyond such voyeurism? If so what was beyond but further desuetude?

  He came back to full consciousness from his butt reverie when his mother gestured at Ralph’s, a small country grocer and gas station.

  “It’s not self-service. Ralph still pumps your gas and he’s two years older than me.”

  She went into the store with an alacrity that surprised him. He was puzzled about her world, wherein a single oriole could cause a positive mood swing. He began thinking about a large can of oil-based white paint that Margaret had left in the garage, which she had used to paint a door in her bedroom. The paint would work fine as an undercoat for a dozen pieces of the humble Masonite. He liked the idea of starting small. The mechanics were easy in that once you learn to ride a bicycle skillfully you don’t forget. Someone had said that “technique is the proof of your seriousness” but then of what worth is it, finally, if you are not engaged in what you are seeing? He knew a stylistically exquisite writer who did well but readily admitted that he had nothing whatsoever to say. Clive had taken pleasure in not really keeping up with the contemporary scene since he himself had quit. Besides, when he was evaluating a collection there was rarely anything new for major spenders, except maybe a stray Ed Ruscha now worth a million bucks. Sitting there in the vacant parking lot of Ralph’s he wondered if Mike Ovitz still owned all of those Schnabels. Of course most art was finally discarded. Where were the millions of dollars Lucille Ball spent on sad-eyed clowns painted by Keane? He recalled a ten-by-twelve-foot abstract he had done that was painfully a derivative of de Kooning. Tessa had put all of his work in storage when he had escaped to Modena in Italy. He thought that the storage bill likely far exceeded the worth of the paintings.

  His mother came out of Ralph’s holding something behind her back with a mischievous smile. She came around to the driver’s seat where he was hanging half out the window smoking a cigarette that was verboten in her car.

  “Smell it. You loved it so as a child.”

  He smelled the brown paper wrapper. It was Ralph’s homemade pickled bologna, scarcely Proust’s madeleine but then he was scarcely Proust. The odor of this childhood treat swept him precipitously back to his childhood, sitting in the rowboat fishing for bluegills with his dad and eating sharp cheddar and pickled bologna with saltines.

  “Thank you,” he said with untypically complete sincerity.

  When they got home his mother noted a phone message and answered a call from Sabrina in California. He didn’t want to overhear the call and went back outside with a lump in his throat. How could he have let things degenerate so long with his only child? Three years before he had said something snide about Tessa’s newest husband because he had imagined them living luxuriously while he, Clive, struggled with rising rent. Well, not quite struggled as that only befits ordinary people in the current economy, while he spent so much time around truly rich collectors that he was susceptible to feeling poor in comparison to their often absurd extravagances. He occasionally wished he were a poet as the poets he knew could babble elegantly on their feet. True, he wrote well but that was sheer hard labor. Most often while talking to people he tended to be brief, sardonic, laconic, as if he were learning to shuffle cards. Painters talked like that partly because they had spent so much time looking at the shape and color of their surroundings. For instance, right now from the patio, a yellow bird seemed trapped and lost within a thickish rosebush and the tininess of its body made him incapable of saying anything lucid.

  “She sends her love to you. It’s shameful you two don’t resolve your quarrel. You’re not going to live forever, Mister Bigshot,” his mother said coming out to the patio.

  Chapter 10

  Early the next morning he painted white a dozen rectangles of Masonite in his room, and not wanting insects to stick to the surface, impatient for them to dry, he set up a floor fan. In the middle of the night he had slipped quietly downstairs for his laptop and, as an afterthought, his pickled bologna from the refrigerator. Mother had made fried chicken, the traditional after-church lunch, but then only a bowl of pea soup for supper. His Manhattan digestive system was geared to a bigger late dinner to put him to sleep until morning. What was in the pea soup? Dried peas. That’s it folks. It cried out for a ham hock or a butt end of prosciutto.

  He composed a long e-mail of apology to Sabrina, then with the aid of a bottle of Absolut vodka he had hidden in the closet, he reduced the verbose apology to a single reasonably lucid short paragraph. Why run on at the mouth?

  Dearest Daughter,

  I want to apologize for my bad behavior a couple of years ago during dinner at Babbo. It was hideous for me to say those things about your mother and her new husband. It was none of my business. I have no excuse except that I was sort of broke at the time, also depressed. Please forgive me. Love, Dad.

  He had sent it because it was only midevening in California what with the time change. He was sitting awkwardly at a school desk that was not nearly big enough. His father had bought the desk for three bucks when the country school down the road had closed. A bigger desk was in order, perhaps from a yard sale. He wished he had brought up some saltines to go with the pickled bologna and vodka. If only his gourmet group, a little club of three women and three men who cooked together once a month in the Village, could see him now. He would have to tell them as a poor farm boy his roots were in baloney and the baloney he had tried in Bologna was inferior to the Ralph’s he was eating now. He reflected that in his twin career in the arts and academia there was a tendency to take everything you said and did far too seriously. Eating baloney after midnight was simply eating baloney after midnight. He recalled that when a friend at Gagosian had sent over a Richard Phillips catalog he had laughed aloud at a painting, a back view of a girl bending over in the nude, what the English would call a “fetching lass.” He hoped his painting of Laurette on the car seat would be as erotic. The important thing was not to take himself too seriously. He had nearly three weeks of looking after his mother to go and painting could be construed as killing time. He would be a sixty-year-old Sunday painter painting every day. An everyday Sunday painter had a nice feeling to it.

  In the morning when he finished the white undercoat he had the nice feeling of a little light being allowed to peek into his beleaguered soul. He recognized this as nonunique and probably shared by gardeners after finishing a row of weeding. In his case the good feeling was aided by Sabrina’s e-mail response.

  Dear Dad,

  All is forgiven. Let’s get together ASAP. I would come out there for a few days. I need a break from writing my dissertation. If you need money I have lots in trust from Grandpa’s death. It started in New England in the 1700s from the spice and slave trade—­amazing. Of course Mom’s fourth marriage went kerplunk, another gold digger. She’s at a Zen retreat, the same monastery Leonard Cohen goes to. She always loved his music. Did you know that song preceded language? See you soon.

  Love, Saab

  Her nickname had always been Saab like the car. He wished that he hadn’t said that he was broke. Between his academic chair and his art sidelines he averaged about two hundred grand, certainly not all that much in Manhattan but nothing to whine about given the state of the national economy. Of course he had spent every cent he had ever made. Being married to Tessa for fifteen years hadn’t been a good training ground. Even
the well-off like to complain subtly to the very rich.

  Suddenly he was preoccupied with the idea that song or music came before language. He had visited Lascaux in Dordogne several times, also Altamira in Spain. He tried to imagine primitive men singing as they painted before they had a defined language. Maybe they sang scatting like the jazz singer Annie Ross, harmonic nonsense syllables. They probably sang because they loved what they were doing.

  His mother called up the stairs reminding him that he had promised her a rowboat ride to look at a heron rookery. That was fine as he couldn’t very well sit there watching paint dry. He was also absurdly restive and eager for FedEx to arrive with his big box of Crayolas, his hundred-dollar kit of oil paints, and his food from Zingerman’s.

  It was a short drive to the small lake with several abrupt stops on the roadside for a look at one bird or another that his mother had heard in transit. She certainly had sharp ears for an oldster though her targets were singular. This made him think of his own intermittent acuity of vision. On his dozens and dozens of trips to the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, the Frick, the Guggenheim and Whitney, his vision depended on the day, in short, his own peculiar state of mind. On the best visits certain paintings and parts of paintings became a permanent fixture in his neural structure so that they could be recalled in a split second at will. He suspected his mother’s bird memories to be similar. Now passing a row of dilapidated fence posts he recalled that this was the location where she had pointed out a group of bluebirds more than forty years before. Memories reside in the landscape and arise when you revisit an area. If he could find his old car Laurette would still be nude on the front seat.