The River Swimmer

by Jim Harrison

  He walked the circumference of the twenty-acre pasture fence line across the road. There were about a dozen Angus mothers and their calves in the pasture and one of the calves chose to follow along behind him like a dog. He enjoyed the company.

  “I am not your leader,” he turned and said to the calf, which reminded him of another friend, a childhood calf who with his father’s permission he took along on walks in the ten-acre woodlot on the southwest corner of the farm, part of a forty his mother had sold early on to pay for her college degree.

  Now he was speculating whether or not Laurette would pose half-nude on the car seat. The whole idea was preposterously silly but why not? It was no more cheeky than the idea of his resuming painting. Part of the grace of losing self-importance was the simple question “Who cares?” More importantly, he didn’t want to be a painter, he only wanted to paint, two utterly different impulses. He had known many writers and painters who apparently disliked writing and painting but just wanted to be writers and painters. They were what Buckminster Fuller might have called “low-energy constructs.” Clive didn’t want to be anything any longer that called for a title. He knew how to paint so why not paint. Everybody had to do something while awake.

  When he got back to his whale room he e-mailed Laurette asking if she would pose then hastily did a seven-by-nine of a particularly dense clump of pale green willow branches, more than vaguely abstract as you would have to be a willow fan to have any idea what you were seeing. Before bedtime he did the same clump of willow branches through a pane of beveled glass with the moon behind it that was even more inscrutable. As he dropped off to sleep he was as delighted with the smell of his oil paints as a dog would have been with a freshly butchered shin bone.

  Chapter 13

  In the morning after his bird-watching duties he checked his laptop and Laurette had answered with her consent to posing but adding that the entire painting must be done in her presence so that he couldn’t “Skype” it and put it on the Internet in which case she might lose her job. Of course this startled him what with his possible motives being “impugned” as people say. He made himself busy concocting a fib to his mother saying how nice it would be if they could drive around in the countryside in an old Plymouth like the one Dad had bought in the late fifties. A ’47 Plymouth seemed unlikely in 2010, but then the idea of compromise was scarcely estranged from art. His mother was happy at the idea and said that finding an old car was no problem in a county full of her farmer acquaintances who hated to dispose of anything, thus the term “car gardens” for the barnyards full of disused cars and farm equipment.

  The plot was clearly hatched and Laurette came up earlier on Friday than usual. In the three-day interim he painted seven of the beveled glass images, none of them quite satisfying which didn’t disturb him. On impulse he also painted a portrait of the bullbat crossing the moon which he gave to Mother. Since a bird was involved she was touched. She said during the fall migrations she would sit outside on still nights and listen to the birds fly south, and on especially moonlit nights she did so for hours.

  The ride in Frank McWhirter’s ’58 Chrysler was a bit much for Clive to handle. First of all they had gone early in the morning right after his mother’s bird-watching. The weather was quite chilly and she insisted that he keep the front windows open so she could hear the birds. She was well bundled up and he wasn’t. The fan on the car heater couldn’t be on high which would interfere with her hearing so consequently he was warm from the waist down while shivering above with a cold chest and ears. It was not lost on him that this morning ride was a hoax organized to paint half-nude Laurette, a karmic payback as his ex-wife called it.

  They drove slowly on gravel roads with his mother as delighted as he was morose. His bad move among others was eating too much of the Sloppy Joe mixture the evening before, which was made of burger, undiluted tomato soup, cheddar cheese, and a dash of Worcestershire sauce. When she went in the toilet just before supper he had mischievously added another dash of Worcestershire, and she caught his indiscretion by sniffing the air.

  “How could you, son? You know I can’t handle spicy food.”

  “I’m sorry. In New York I eat spicy food and I miss it.”

  “I can’t accept your apology. We’ll have to cook separate meals.”

  This was good news indeed. She ate a full portion anyway with a tinge of the martyr. He added to his rebellion by using Tabasco he had found in his luggage, but then after going to bed at ten awoke at midnight sweating with indigestion. He tiptoed downstairs to pee and found his Gas-X in his Dopp kit. He foresaw insomnia and took the heavy Caravaggio back upstairs with him.

  It had been ten years or so since he’d had a look at Caravaggio other than en passant at European museums. Now sitting cross-legged on his bed under the weak overhead light hanging between enormous rib bones he was immediately incredulous. He studied the boy embracing the goat for several minutes and then a horrifying detail of Medusa with its palpable black and gray snakes. His breath was short and there were goose bumps sweeping up his arms and shoulders and back and tears began to arise. What was happening to him, for Christ’s sake? He was certainly staring at Caravaggio as a painter and not as a professor. He hadn’t felt tears since a summer afternoon in New York so many years ago, when he had received a registered letter of his final notice of divorce. He had been ignoring Mozart’s Jupiter on the radio but his sudden raw and vulnerable emotions allowed the music to truly enter his being so that he delaminated, the layers of him falling from each other.

  It took an hour for him to calm down and lift the book from his sweating lap. It made a peeling sound and he wondered what a bright young writer struggling with his first work would feel on first reading Hamlet or Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. An explosion that would blow him through the window of his garret. He speculated on what might have happened if Caravaggio had been completely liberated from his Catholic subject matter and had been allowed to paint life herself, which he somehow managed to do without the high net of theological stricture. It occurred to him that only purity of intent would save his own sorry soul. If he were to continue to paint he had to do so without the trace of the slumming intellectual toting around his heavy knapsack of ironies. He was well into his own third act and further delay would be infamous.

  Chapter 14

  The crotch painting experience with Laurette was ponderously comic, though it took a while for Clive to gradually accept it as such. The first farcical conclusion was that you shouldn’t try to paint with a hard-on. Painting was relatively nonmental but not that nonmental. What could he have been thinking? Nothing. Of course he was scarcely the first artist to try to make love to a model, but probably not a model who had been the first and most overwhelming love of his life. The fact that this love was only minimally requited made it even more painful and devoutly irrational. He flipped over in his mind dozens of novels he had read with their uniformly miserable stories of first love, the most harrowing being Knut Hamsun’s Victoria, the ultimate in high-grade tearjerkers.

  Laurette beeped her yellow Jeep when she passed and Clive drove over midway on a cloudy afternoon with his sketchbook, easel, and oils in the antique blue Chrysler. He had told Laurette he wouldn’t be finished until late Saturday but she had insisted that the painting would never leave her house. He was mulling over the idea of a Duchamp effect where he would possibly paint her front and bare bottom layered on the same patch of two-by-three-foot canvas.

  She was giddy as a girl when he arrived, puffing on a joint and sipping at a largish glass of nasty Californian chardonnay. He would have to wait for his own alcohol until the sketch was just so. The props were correct: green skirt, sandals, white sleeveless blouse with a circle pin. She was pissed when he asked her to remove her makeup and dampen her hair because she had been night swimming forty-two years before. Ideally he would have worked after dark but the dome light of the Chrysler was burned ou
t and the idea of finding a replacement was unlikely.

  Laurette disappeared to redo her face and hair and Lydia looked at him coldly from the sofa, her legs akimbo as usual.

  “You shouldn’t try to screw her. She had a hysterectomy this winter. I mean even if she wants to it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “Oh really?” Clive said. He was unsure what a hysterectomy was. He suddenly felt fragile and his skin tingled with absurdity. There was a sense of jet lag here with all emotions being unstablized. Where was the poetry in the experience? On dozens of trips to Europe after landing at dawn and the cattle drive at customs he’d walk a great deal to readjust his inner clock. If he was in Modena it was simply sitting for a coffee at a café in the village square and then buying some fruit for his room at the grand market. In London it was walking on the Thames along Cheyne Walk, and in Paris at the Luxembourg Gardens where he would recheck the topiary fruit trees. At the moment he was high and dry with his motives of redeeming his preposterous early love for Laurette. He had the idle thought that he could construct a university course to be called “Retarded Romanticism.”

  He had drawn up the Chrysler near the broken barn door and the sketching went well. The clouds were dark enough to be helpful and he had to turn on the car and heater to keep half-nude Laurette warm. He reflected again how some women maintain their bodies so well while men become beefy sluggards. When she had pulled up her skirt and removed her panties he stopped breathing and then hyperventilated. He got out of the car and wandered around for a few minutes to calm himself. What was sillier he thought than a sixty-year-old man standing in a barnyard with a hard-on? He would have preferred that Laurette remain silent but allowed her to chatter, which was giving him a headache.

  “When Keith and I decided to call it quits I went to Grand Valley and took a business degree. I guess you could say I got overactive with college boys and instructors and suchlike and then one day I said, ‘Slow down girl.’ Why am I screwing younger men with me in my thirties? Then I had this affair with a high school football coach who kept telling me he was going to leave his wife for me when she got well. But then he never did. It’s an old story. Then I see a photo of her in the Grand Rapids Press for winning a 10K race. That’s sick? I was so hurt I tried to stay away from all men. I mean I didn’t stop on the proverbial dime as they say. I even had a short run with a black piano player then I read that a lot of musicians get AIDS which naturally scared me. So I finally went on the sexual wagon for a few years. I worked hard and went up the ladder in the company. I was a tough girl. I needed affection so I had a few affairs with other career women. Does this shock you?”

  “No. A lot of people try everything.” He was struggling with her knees and the way she crooked the toes in her sandals inward. He was relieved that he was now only semitumescent, which she also seemed to notice.

  “I suppose so. I mean finally the whole sex thing wore me out mentally. Once you get in the company you travel a lot and work long hours. I mean Lydia is mostly just a friend and companion. She’s bisexual but she has liberated herself from everything to help her poetry. Do you still want me? It sure seemed like you did in the garage. I mean I have some problems but we could fool around.”

  “Of course I do. I couldn’t tell you why. I feel like a seventh grader and we’re going to practice kissing.” His hands were trembling and he pushed his sketchbook aside. She crouched over him on the big seat and they kissed. She took out his penis and rubbed it briskly against herself. He was off in a very short minute and he felt his heart and mind slump within himself.

  “You must have saved up too long.” She laughed.

  He stared straight ahead as she patted herself with Kleenex, and then she grabbed the sketchbook and whistled. “You’re the real thing,” she said kissing his cheek.

  Chapter 15

  At a restorative dinner with Mother of meat loaf, baked potatoes, and stewed tomatoes he announced that he was painting a “sort of portrait” of Laurette.

  “I can’t wait to see it,” she said.

  “That’s unlikely. I mean it’s a very private painting. She was half-nude.”

  “I’d bet a dollar it wasn’t her idea. Isn’t it time you got over the sex thing? But I’m glad you’re painting again. Way back when you were an artist you were happier. You’d come out for a summer visit with Tessa and Sabrina and we’d have picnics and we drove up to Mackinac Island and stayed in a fancy hotel. Remember? When you became a big shot professor you always acted like you were at a funeral.”

  He couldn’t answer. He was lost in the thought of when he first met Laurette. She was ten and had just moved in down the road. They were riding their bicycles toward each other on the gravel road. Clive had seen the moving van and was curious. Laurette had veered her bike toward his with a smile and he had gone over in the ditch scraping his arm. She hadn’t stopped. He kept his wound hidden from his mother because he didn’t want it doused with stinging methylate but his dad saw it when they were fishing. Clive explained and his dad had simply said, “The female can be a problem.” Now staring down at his dinner with a rather bleak smile, but a smile nevertheless, he thought how his infatuation with Laurette had truly begun in her early teens when he was becoming a biological furnace. The mystery of it all was permanent in human behavior. A lesbian couple who were close friends had met at camp at fourteen and were still together fifty years later. What they call “puppy love” was still love and when the other didn’t feel it the punishment was severe.

  In the morning he waited until nine to be polite and then went over to Laurette’s eager for work. They were still in bed but Lydia let him in grumpily and he set up his easel near a large south window for the light he needed. He began painting and let the world of his life disappear wherever. Lydia had been in a scanty nightie when she let him in and he appreciated that she was wearing a robe when she brought a muffin. When he was younger he actually enjoyed Sabrina riding her tricycle naked around his big SoHo studio but Lydia was another matter.

  He finished as best he could by five in the afternoon. He had only eaten half a sandwich, and when Lydia made him a drink he was wary of his empty stomach but she also brought some fine cheese, olives, and bread, pronouncing the work as “truly sexy.” Laurette was nonplussed and blushing while she studied it at different angles as if looking for hidden meaning. Then she tearfully said the painting was “fine.” He said that he would touch it up the next morning. He found his work unbearably close to home. At that moment his angry mother called saying that Margaret called from Florence wondering why they hadn’t responded to the e-mails she sent from her laptop every morning for more than two weeks.

  He rushed home and showed his mother twenty pages of Margaret’s cranky rundown of her trip that was overall wonderful. She had now decided to spend a month a year in Europe splitting her time among France, Italy, and Barcelona. Mother was pleased to see occasional references to indigestion. “That doesn’t happen in my house,” she would repeat. Despite her anger over not getting Margaret’s e-mails due to his neglect Mother vowed the whole computer age was satanic. “What’s wrong with writing letters?” she would ask plaintively.

  At dinner Clive took his share of her spaghetti sauce and added garlic, onions, and hot chiles. Mother once again said that he was “ruining his stomach and taste buds,” then she heard an oriole through the open window which immediately changed her point of view on life. She cocked an ear toward the open kitchen window, her face slackened and became introspective. He was, frankly, envious. Until she passed eighty she and a couple bird-watching friends would take several trips a summer camping out in remote places. He and Margaret had been naturally concerned about the old ladies camping but when he questioned her on the phone she had said, “Don’t be stupid, son. You have to be on-site when they wake up at daylight.” It occurred to him during his generic spaghetti that the only similar thing he had was the act of painting
.

  The next morning he waited until ten to go over to Laurette’s to touch up the painting. It was still too early. They were terribly hungover and Lydia said that they got drunk and “made out” while staring at the painting. Laurette blushed and hissed, “Sshhhh.” They were pleasant but subdued, with Laurette packing up because it was Sunday. He finished the touching up in an hour, reflecting that if he continued to want to paint a portrait of Kara, his old girlfriend from Fort Wayne, it would be far better to travel there and paint her from life. A private detective who catered to the art business once told him, “Everyone can be found if you know how.”

  On the way home he pulled off on the farm lane that was the inception of the painting so long ago. He was thinking about his apartment in the city and how a woman, a wealthy collector and museum addict from Atlanta, had offered him an extravagant price to sublet his apartment if he ever traveled for an extended period. He had cooked her lunch or dinner several times with her picking up the goodies from Balducci’s or Dean & DeLuca. It wouldn’t hurt to sublet half a year and go to a place where he could paint comfortably and live cheap. When he felt courageous in the near future he’d also call his accountant and see what he would receive if he retired early on his TIAA-CREF, the professors’ retirement fund. It would be heartbreaking to give up his apartment, his true home, and he refused to imagine life without it. If he got desperate he could get money from Sabrina but the idea knotted up his pride.

  Chapter 16

  Clive wound down tightly into his painting not himself. Mother was checking off the kitchen calendar and announced every breakfast the number of days before Margaret came home. Now it was nine. He had no particular interest in the so-called natural world but checked out willows on the Web, noting that the Ainu, the primitive people of Japan, considered willows to be of religious and magical significance. This meant nothing to Clive who felt he had not a shred of religion or superstition in his being. The writers he knew could be goofy on this score but rarely the painters who tended toward the matter-of-fact. He could, however, understand how the Ainu might be taken by willows plus the Web said that willow shoots could be made into an herbal tea for killing pain. Deer devoured them after a long winter partly to relieve themselves of arthritic discomfort.