The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  The farmer that owned the small private lake was stooped and thin, obviously arthritic, but insisted on carrying the wooden oars from a shed out to the lake about a hundred yards behind the barn. The farmer called Clive’s mother “Coochie,” evidently a nickname from over seventy years before. They were young once, Clive thought stupidly. The farmer shooed away a large coiled water snake near the bow of the boat. Clive helped his mother in and they were off across the lake with Clive enjoying the strain of rowing the heavy old boat.

  He thought later that it was the metronomic physicality of rowing that reminded him of the graduality of his collapse, but the collapse was too dramatic a word for the snail’s pace loss of cohesion. There’s a comfort level for mental stability and falling a millimeter below this level could be unnerving indeed. There was a tinge of a vacuum beneath the breastbone and between the ears, and occasional spates of anger over meaningless matters like the horrors of airports that he normally endured stoically by reading Donna Leon or those lugubrious Scandinavian mysteries wherein the hero always has a cold and eats crummy food and drinks bad coffee. Quite abruptly the osso bucco and risotto Milanese he cooked for the food club didn’t taste nearly as good.

  Around the time of his quarrel with Sabrina nearly three years before he had flown to Minneapolis to give his patented speech “The Cost of Creation” at the Walker. According to his travel journal it was the eighth time he had offered this lecture on church and noble patronage as the sole livelihood for artists during the Renascimento, therefore his discourse was becoming tiresome. He had noticed an extremely vexed elderly lady in the second row seated next to her dozing husband. Usually he requested that questions for the necessary Q & A session be delivered to him on three-by-five cards to avoid long-winded people but had forgotten to mention this stricture to his hosts. The elderly woman had become any lecturer’s nightmare. She had gotten up and faced the audience and rattled on about having lived in Italy for five years with her “important businessman” husband. She was clearly deranged and claimed to have visited every museum in Italy and had learned that all of the masterpieces were painted by “holy artists” purely out of love and it was hideous for Clive to put a money tag on their work. There was amused tittering in the audience as Clive ran his hands through his hair preparing an answer. As a New Yorker he wanted to go for the throat but started politely by saying that in Spain Goya had fathered nineteen children and they had required food and diapers so he had needed a paycheck, neglecting to mention that all but one had died.

  “We’re talking about Italy, Mister Bigshot.”

  It had amused him that she had used his mother’s language but wanted very much to rid himself of this noxiousness so he said that just because a person lived in North Dakota didn’t mean that they knew everything about American art. It was a low blow but well deserved. He went on to other questions but felt inexplicably enervated by this nitwit. He noticed the woman was weeping into her hands and afterward in the crowded lobby her husband had hissed at him, “You made my wife cry you New York faggot.” Security had ushered the couple out but at a later dinner for the select he had become a little drunk and irascible. At dawn on the way to the airport he began to see his success in the arts as possibly a form of mental illness.

  On the lake his mother had cooed and chuckled over the heron rookery and Clive had become as calm as the water except for wondering about his FedEx shipment. When he drove them into the driveway he could see the packages stacked against the kitchen door and his heart actually leapt. He spread his booty on the kitchen table, first opening the Zingerman’s package as the contents would need to be refrigerated. He sniffed at the prosciutto, mortadella, soppressata, imported provolone, cream cheese for the dozen true bagels, the five French cheeses, and a full pound of belly lox. His mother tried to grab the enclosed bill for inspection but he beat her to it, an open act of rebellion, and she huffed off for a nap.

  The twenty-four oils were fine though the tubes were smaller than in the old days and the sketch pads were thinner. He spent a full half hour on the deluxe package of 120 Crayolas, a bit expensive but the variety excited him. He was relieved that Raw Sienna and Burnt Umber and Forest Green were still there, but irked that Maize and Violet Blue were gone, the latter the color of a winter twilight. Mulberry was also gone to the grave of dead Crayolas. He was also irritated that in 1993 consumers had been allowed to name new colors such as Razzmatazz, Asparagus, Macaroni and Cheese, and Timberwolf. “Upstarts,” he whispered.

  He ate half a bagel lavishly covered with lox and cream cheese, as good as Barney G.’s he thought. He went upstairs for a snooze with his precious material. Spread out on the bed he decided he would paint his whale skeleton with hardware store paint and save money. He became half tumescent thinking about Kara sitting nude at his desk and more so at the image of Laurette’s vulva pressed against the gray upholstery of his car’s front seat.

  PART III

  Chapter 11

  Clive woke at dawn having lost his self-importance. He didn’t know where it had gone but it wasn’t in him anymore. His first thought was that the arts had gotten along without him for centuries and would continue to do so. In the night he had looked at the distorted moon through each small pane of beveled glass on the door out in the hall. He had also seen a bird his mother called a bullbat or nightjar flying across the moon in search of night-borne insects. One had flown so close to his face the evening before on the patio he could hear the chuff sound of its wings. His thoughts were impacted by the idea that nothing looked like anything else, which gave a painter something to do through any number of lifetimes. He had only drawn until the age of ten but then began with both watercolors, caseins, and a minimal supply of oils. Why not repeat himself? By a decrepit seventy maybe he would do a series of pure abstracts on the phases of the moon, which had been so dominating in his consciousness but which had been barely noticeable in New York City. He had every reason to believe that he had allowed language and thought to betray him, so it would be an immense relief to paint and abandon language and thought. He had been talking about art for twenty years and felt that though someone had to clarify matters he had done his share and it was time to shut his mouth on the matter.

  After eleven days back home he had felt an often painful homesickness for Manhattan, unavoidable after living there for nearly forty years. Of course the old home was familiar but he was definitely insufficient in the arena of sentimentality. He doubted if there were enough intelligent people in this area to maintain the kind of mutual coherence that civilization is said to offer, while in New York there was nothing in the realm of the cultural that wasn’t immediately at hand. He had noted that in the past twenty years there were more articles on what were called “wilderness issues,” but nearly always written from the vantage point of a university. He imagined that few indeed managed to live a solitary life without totally losing their sense of peripheries. When he was eleven he and his father had driven far north into Ontario and it was spooky to camp and fish in an area so remote from others. The fishing was fantastically good but was so easy it nearly became dreary. They filled a big cooler with fillets and dumped the guts down a trail and watched a black bear and her cubs devour the feast. Another boon was the dawn mist on the lakes that reminded Clive of a Japanese art book in the Big Rapids library.

  On a more ordinary level, and certainly an item to reduce self-importance, was the homesickness for real bagels, the stray hot dog with kraut on emerging from the museum in the late afternoon. In order to maintain equilibrium in New York City and to be taken seriously you had to maintain appearances whether you were teaching, giving a lecture, or evaluating a collection. In March he had looked through a grand sheaf of eighteenth-century French drawings for a Park Avenue widow and he could see that he had increased his credibility by wearing a soft, rumpled cashmere sport coat with a beige linen shirt, and a droopy Spanish bow tie he had bought in Cordoba. The widow was in her
late sixties but had become uncomfortably girlish when they had a Ricard pastis at the end of the art chore.

  Back home his dominant duty was to escort Mother to a bird-watching perch at daylight. He wore jeans and rubber boots and a heavy sweatshirt to protect against the clouds of mosquitoes. The dawn was loud with the admittedly pleasant chatter of birds. He then would sit on the patio and drink a pot of coffee waiting for her whistle which he wouldn’t be able to hear in the house away from the mosquitoes. The odor of the insect repellent affected the taste of the coffee and the books by Sebald and Bolaño didn’t quite fit in the current landscape and he fell back on rereading Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, a favorite from his college years.

  Installing a lock on his bedroom door and painting the whale skeleton with a three-inch brush took the same amount of time. While putting a finishing touch on the spine straight above his head he tipped off the rickety ladder and there was a split second of panic before he landed harmlessly on the bed, which he had moved so that his head on the pillow at dawn would be facing out an open window, the better to see the world assume its particular shapes.

  He napped a couple of hours awakening in the late afternoon delighted with the whale skeleton surrounding him. Now he was living in an enclosure worthy of his imagination. He heard lilting female voices and laughter and leaned to take a concealed peek out a side window at the patio. It was mother, Laurette, and Lydia drinking wine. Of course they knew each other as country neighbors but neither his sister Margaret nor his mother would mention Laurette out of respect for his absurd and ancient wounds.

  When he clumped down the stairs to greet them all his heavy steps made him wonder how much self-importance you needed to get by. With too much heaviness he might break through the earth where the crust is thin.

  He made himself a gravely needed martini and was slightly irritated looking up to a shelf where he spotted a blue cookie jar. The problem in his childhood was that when you stuck your hand in the jar you couldn’t get it out with more than one cookie. Life was like that but then he chose not to dwell on a possible metaphor. Just stick to the cookies, bub.

  Out on the patio the three women were watching two female cedar waxwings tugging at opposite ends of a piece of yarn. It was nesting material, his mother said, and she had been observing the quarrel for a solid hour. Laurette was standing and twisting at the hips because her back was sore. Lydia was sitting in a low-slung chair showing a lot of thigh in her short summer skirt. Even more prepossessing was a casserole of lasagna she had brought over which was on a table beside an empty wine bottle. The smell of the garlic and tomato sauce, Lydia’s thighs, and the sunlight dappling through the willow tree overwhelmed him and he drank deeply.

  “You look like a slob. You got paint on your face,” Laurette said. She led him into the back of the garage. “I saw it here when I helped your sister paint her bedroom.”

  He quickly finished his martini in fear that she would dribble some paint remover into the drink. Now she was very close to him as she daubed at his face. Over her shoulder he could see the waxwings still tugging at the yarn, a metaphor of female tenacity but mostly a simple bird tug-of-war. He found himself pressing her against the hood of his mother’s car, trying to kiss her but she averted her face. His hands kneaded her buttocks and he was becoming hard at an amazing speed.

  “Jesus Christ, I have to think about this. I can’t fuck you in a garage with people outside.” She slipped away laughing.

  “Why?” he said glumly. He stood there waiting for his penis to slump. It seemed comic at best that this woman could still bowl him over after forty years. How wonderful it would be to find a ’47 Plymouth and paint her slouched in the corner with her pleated skirt up.

  Chapter 12

  The next morning while escorting his mother back from one of her birding sites he admitted to himself that he felt good. He knew his brain seemed to be melting but then he at least had some solid plans. It was a delight to wake in the near dawn dark and see the whale skeleton take shape and then there was the intended upcoming painting of Laurette in the car seat, and the portrait from memory of Kara of Fort Wayne, plus the 110 small paintings of the world through the small panes of beveled glass. And at first light he had had the additional perception about shape. He had stared through the window at a close-by willow slowly achieving its shape and speculated that humans were more like willows than other mammals, even the vaunted chimpanzee with whom our genome was 98 percent similar. Willows had that basic trunk body but then they were up for grabs with dozens of protruding limbs and heavy foliage. They simply sprawled in their lives like humans.

  At breakfast, oatmeal and a not ripe banana, which made him crave his New York greengrocer, he became dis­tressed because though she denied it his mother wasn’t feeling up to snuff. It was her atrial fibrillation, unsteady heartbeat, which made her weaker and pale. When he managed to get her to try a bagel with cream cheese and lox she perked up a bit but then admitted that he should run her into the cardiologist after she lay down for a while.

  He was disappointed because he wanted to get at his beveled glass painting now that his Masonite rectangles were dry, and then he was embarrassed by his disappointment. After all, he was here to take care of his mother not save what was left of his life, the rock bottom of his intentions. With the situation The Great Doubt began to arise, something that had been with him most poignantly for six decades or so, both philosophically and politically: the conviction that mayhem rules and nothing solidly constructive can be done about anything. This was mostly a mental infirmity borne up under by intellectuals, artists, and writers, but then Clive qualified somewhere in the middle.

  Rather than starting then stopping painting he decided to clean out the culvert under the driveway near the gravel road. His mother had taken to leaving daily notes on this duty which did turn out to lessen The Great Doubt lump in the throat. The water-packed detritus was nearly all weeds, leaves, sticks, and gravel which he was able to pull out with a potato fork. At the beginning a large rabbit burst out of the culvert and in his surprise he yelled and threw himself sideways then felt silly but amused. His mother heard his yell and came out to check and laughed to hear of his rabbit attack.

  The trip to the doctor’s was pleasant. Near the office there was a McDonald’s and he decided to have the first one of his life, an act of courage for a gourmand. The burger couldn’t help but be unsatisfactory but the french fries were passable. As luck would have it he saw the same girl with the lovely rump coming down the street and felt a tickle in his nuts. At sixty the sexual urge comes and goes but is definitely there when called on. There was that old Freudian dictum that art is caused by repressed sexuality, and if so, he was definitely ready to paint. While waiting his mind segued to his mother’s mother who was handsome but born deaf. He speculated about the silence his mother grew up within. She must have grown up talking to the radio which she still did to the NPR station. She came out of the doctor’s office smiling and announced that she might very well live several more years.

  Back home he was thrown off by a large FedEx package from Sabrina. He was hoping for some San Francisco food delicacies but the contents were a contemporary artist’s coffee table book in two volumes, and a single massive book on Caravaggio, both published by Taschen. To Clive, Caravaggio was the single most intimidating artist in history so he put the books on top of the upright piano in the living room, out of range of his immediate notice. Sabrina’s note said: “I remember hearing you talk about this guy when I was little.” Indeed.

  He stood near the door to the upstairs feeling as he often did that his consciousness was rushing past him at a rate that exceeded that of a suitable life. The grand thing about painting was that your mind slowed to the pace of the work at hand or you simply couldn’t paint well. He decided to take a half hour walk like he used to do in the city when he was overexcited and would walk from SoHo up to Washington Squ
are and back.

  He chose the open pasture across the road, drifting this way and that, a little concerned that his thoughts would begin with his daughter, then to his mother, to Margaret in Europe, but then to Susann, a painter friend of his in college who had died from a brain tumor a few years before. Way back when he was the star of his college art department, largely thought to be the most gifted student, tempestuous, full of Sturm und Drang, full of pronouncements, and with a coterie of three girls and a gay student, Robert, following him around and hanging on whatever he wished to say. Clive, however, and an observant art history professor knew a secret: Susann was a better painter. She was shy and deferential and lived out her life in obscurity up near Glen Arbor in Leelanau County. She painted sublimely, mostly landscapes, watercolors, and he had tried without success to get her a New York gallery. They were only in touch every year or so, and on a few of her infrequent trips to New York. She would always say, “Don’t worry about me, I’m fine.” She, in fact, did sell well in her locale but to Clive, Susann represented the grotesque unfairness of the art world, how someone as good as Susann could be totally ignored. He owned three of her paintings and a few watercolors and when she died he had to put her work in a closet for a year to avoid his anger.