All those summers run together in my memory now, become one long summer. But because, one year, I stayed on into the autumn, because I altered the pattern, I recall the time with striking clarity, as if Sara were some other woman altogether and Silver Islet Landing some other place.
At the end of August, boatload after boatload of seasonal people departed, scarcely looking back at the summer shore, their faces turned towards the grain elevators of Port Arthur, towards schools and industries, brick houses and winter. This exodus was followed by several days of gale-force winds, rain, and crashing breakers. At one point the waves were so high and so energetic they hurled themselves over the lane I walked each day to Sara’s house. I was unnerved by this, as unnerved as I had been by the brief, fierce storms of earlier in the summer that had swung in from the centre of the lake. But even they didn’t have the insistency of this kind of equinoctial front that pounded the land and refused to pass on.
Still, it moved me, this wildness, and so I drew Sara standing by windows, looking out towards the frantic lake, the hectic sky. I drew her stillness in the face of torn clouds and rain — I wanted that contrast. Also, I was attracted by the muted light that comes into a room when the sun is buried under blankets of heavy clouds, the soft-blue tinge it lends to the skin. Two of my best canvases developed from my drawings of this period.
In the first, Sara’s shoulders are draped with a light shawl and her face is turned away from the window, the furious lake. One hand reaches towards the opposite shoulder, and the other clutches the shawl over her breasts. In the second painting, she stands naked in the centre of the window that occupies the full canvas. Her arms are outstretched and her hands grasp the edges of the window frame. She is viewed from the back, her hair is twisted into a bun; each small knot of vertebra in her neck is visible. The backs of her knees shine, the muscles of her calves are clenched and firm so that she looks as if she were about to leap from the window into the angry lake.
It was not an easy pose for Sara — for anyone — to hold. She had to stand on her toes to make the muscles in her legs tighten and her arms were raised above the level of her heart, so we rested at twenty-minute intervals. The whole process, my drawing, the breaks in between, took us through the several days of the storm.
Sara brought food upstairs at noon on the second day, and we picnicked like gypsies on her father’s iron cot. When we had finished I lifted the flannel nightgown she had hastily thrown over her and began to caress the legs, the body I had been so carefully rendering, pulling first one, then the other ankle towards me so that the limbs would straighten. I removed my own clothes and lay on top of her, stretching her arms out from her sides by grasping her wrists and finally, because my arms were longer, pushing the heels of my hands into her palms. After I had entered her, I clamped her legs shut with my knees, making sure every inch of her body was covered with my own, making sure she was immobile. I held her head still with the pressure of my mouth on hers, the weight of my torso making it impossible for her to arch her back. I couldn’t see her at all. The only part of her body that was moving was her heart, hammering against her ribcage.
I had never before made love to her in September.
Later in the day she stood behind me and looked over my shoulder at the drawing I had been working on all afternoon. She pointed to the straight lines with which I had formed the intersecting mullions of the window and which were, at that stage, still visible through the body despite the tension of the pose.
“A cross,” she murmured. “You’ve crucified me.”
She wasn’t touching me, yet I could feel the heat of her body on my back. I laughed out loud but did not turn to look at her. “That wasn’t what I intended,” I said. I wasn’t even looking at the window by then. Instead, I was attempting to capture, as I might have with one of Mr. Eastman’s Brownie cameras, the frenetic patterns of the water beyond the window as it was defined by the wind.
The next day the storm had finally worn itself out. The sky was a piercing shade of blue, and not a tree, not a leaf was moving. But the upheaval in the lake, the thunderous noise, was worse than ever; the water inkier, the whitecaps whiter. Spray shot up from the edges of offshore islands, including the one whose rumoured silver had brought my father and, indirectly, me to this spot. My rooms at the back of the hotel, rooms that faced the lake, were moist and uncomfortable. All night long the roar of the water and the dampness of my surroundings had me believe that the frame building might be cast adrift, and shipwrecks had figured in my dreams.
In the middle of the morning — there was sunlight now, coaxing an impression of pastel colours from under her skin — Sara leaned her forehead against the glass of the window and said, “I can’t do this.… I can’t stand here any more.”
I put my brush down on the ledge of the easel. “All right, we’ll take a break then,” I said, though nothing in me wanted to stop.
“No, it’s not that ….” she said. “I can’t look at the lake any more. I can’t bear it.”
I stared silently at her familiar back. I never thought about what Sara would be doing while she was posing. I was interested in anything that belonged to her in the immediate vicinity, felt that knowledge of the objects around her would enrich my drawings and paintings. But while I was working I believed that the gesture I had prescribed was absolute; her pose, my line, the contour of her shoulder working its way into the composition on the page. I believed that I was drawing — deliberately drawing — everything out of her, that this act of making art filled the space around me so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the impressions I controlled.
Three full days of staring at a seething lake, larger and wilder than some oceans, a man seated behind you concentrating on the seventh vertebra of your spine or the blue veins at the back of your knees, the dispassionate scratch of the pencil reproducing the creases in your flesh. What did I know of that? It would be years before I could admit that although I wanted every detail of her in my painting — her body, her ancestry, her landscape, her house — wanted the kind of intimacy that involved not just the rendering of her physical being but also the smell of her skin and hair, the way she moved around her kitchen, the sounds at the back of her throat when she made love, I would have preferred not to have been known by her at all.
But, at that stage, my motives were pure, uncomplicated. I was interested in anything that would enhance the quality of my work and oblivious to all manner of things that I felt didn’t or couldn’t.
“What is it about the lake you can’t bear?” I asked her quite gently, careful not to let the irritation I felt at the disruption enter the tone of my voice. I needed at least two more hours.
“I’ve looked at it for too long,” she said, still not turning towards me, still not turning away from the window. “I’m beginning to despise it.”
I said nothing. I waited.
“I used to love it… but all these hours of looking at it. I’ve turned against it.” Her forehead touched the glass again, the back of her neck gleamed. She had crossed her arms over her breasts. By concentrating on these things I was able to pass over the terrible sadness in her voice. “I think of you,” she whispered, “looking at me, hour after hour, day after day, coming to despise me.”
“No,” I said.
“Coming to despise me more than you know.”
“That’s nonsense,” I said.
“You are always on the other side of the room. There is always this gap between us.”
The light had already begun to change. I squinted at the oil sketch in front of me. There might be enough there for me to work with in the studio once I returned to New York. But, perhaps not.
Sara’s reaction to the lake might have interested me if she had not brought it directly to my attention, had I been able to discern it without her knowledge. Otherwise, it was simply an imposition. In my vanity, I wanted to choose my own subjects. I remember Robert H. had quoted Corot as saying that art wa
s nature seen through a temperament. I believed him, I believed that. I had my own temperament. I didn’t want it interfered with. I was at times interested in other views of the world, but only when they satisfied my own artistic curiosity.
“You need a rest,” I announced. “We’ll go for a walk.”
She was dressing in a corner of the room. I walked over to the window and stared at the lake that had so disturbed her. I always turned my back whenever she dressed or undressed. I had been carefully taught, you see, to respect the model’s privacy.
We walked that day away from the lake, taking paths Sara had known since childhood, into the woods of The Sleeping Giant, the man mountain, the Sibley Peninsula. We followed swift-moving shining streams that Sara referred to, poetically, as the veins of the slumbering Gargantua. She had read more books than I had. Her father had loved poetry: there were, and probably still are, old editions of Byron and Shelley in the log house. And then there was the public library in Port Arthur. Requested volumes could be sent over by steamer in the summer, dog team in the winter.
“There is more than one way to visit the body of a man,” she said.
I thought the allusion was sexual, until she told me of the Ojibway legend that claimed that the whole twenty miles of the human-shaped peninsula was the warrior Nanibijou, whose body had been turned to stone after he revealed to the European acquisitors the location of the sacred silver.
She told me the names of the various trees, laying her hand flat against the bark as she spoke. She identified plants. She said that her Cornish father had taught her how to do this. Denied access to it for much of his life, because of his work in the mine, he had developed a passion for the surface of the earth and had taken his daughter walking far into the woods on Sundays, even when the snow was deep. Sara could not remember a time when she had not known how to walk through the woods on snow-shoes or how to glide over the frozen lake on skis.
The pines were straight and tall and thick. Sara wanted me to look up to admire their great height, but, captured by my own temperament, I barely raised my eyes. I preferred the visual to be a private experience.
I tramped along sullenly behind her. At one point she spun around and faced me on the path, real anger in her eyes. “Why don’t you ever say anything?” she demanded. “Tell me what you’re looking at, what you’re listening to.”
“It’s not in my nature to say anything,” I replied testily. A battalion of mosquitoes was circling my head. I wanted to be back inside the stillness of the room, shading the curve of her hip with my pencil.
“Is it in your nature to feel anything, I sometimes wonder?”
“What is this all about?” I asked. “Of course I can feel things. I get angry. I get hurt. I’m an artist, for Christ’s sake, I feel things all the time, and I’m beginning to feel angry now.”
“You feel things privately.”
“Yes, privately. What’s the matter with that? I’m not going to spend my life burdening other people with my emotions.”
“I am talking about feelings … not some fit of anger, some temper tantrum.”
“Anger is a feeling.”
“You know very well there’s a difference.”
Yes, I knew very well there was a difference. Sara was searching the map of my character for the place where my heart was hidden, but I was so busy guarding the site I failed to notice there were no weapons in the hands of the woman who approached it.
We returned to the Landing in silence and then we parted at the wharf. I stood facing the water for a full hour, watching the lake gradually calm and playing my teacher’s final statement on the character of the artist over and over in my mind.
“The wise draughtsman brings forward only that which he can use most effectively to present his case,” Robert H. had said. And isolates whatever he brings forward, I thought, as I turned away from the view for just a moment to watch Sara’s lone figure move down the edge of the shore towards her house.
That night the temperature fell dramatically. The next day the whole world had changed colour.
The north-shore birch is a discreet tree in most seasons. In winter, Sara told me, it practically disappears, having lost its leaves and exposed its branches, which are almost as pale as the surrounding snow. In summer its soft-green foliage blends easily into the darker greens of the pines. But in the fall, as I discovered that year, it dominates whatever region it occupies.
I awoke the morning after our walk in the forest to thousands of bright golden leaves, a season quite unlike the multicoloured autumns I was familiar with in upstate New York. It caught me off guard. I was not in any way prepared for it. There were several birches in the vicinity of Sara’s house, and I wondered how this radical change of tone would affect the indoor light. Walking down the shore road the water was darker — almost vine black — the sky cerulean blue, the pines cobalt green in the face of this brilliance. Beside the log wall of Sara’s house the red berries of a mountain ash looked exotic, tropical, out of place.
She was reading on the sofa near the open parlour window. At her feet lay an orange mass I couldn’t at first identify. Then a small, intense face looked directly into mine for a fraction of a second before the animal leapt over the window sill and disappeared into the trees.
“A fox,” I said, stunned.
She looked up from her book calmly. “Yes,” she said.
“A fox in your house,” I said stupidly. There was something shocking to me about the wild having come inside these walls, walls that I believed were meant to keep the wild out.
“He always comes,” she said, “when the trees turn”
I kept looking out the window through which the fox had disappeared.
“Well, for the last five years or so,” Sara continued. “He comes when the trees turn and after the summer people leave. You’ve never been here to see him before. He waits until the summer people are gone, then he comes in the morning for something to eat. Sometimes he stays all morning. Often we’ll go for a walk.”
“A walk. You and the fox go for a walk.”
“Yes, like the one you and I took yesterday. He probably saw us, but he wouldn’t have come near because of you. Sometimes in the winter he comes at night, particularly if there is a moon. Occasionally he sleeps at the end of my bed.”
“You never told me.” I had known this woman for years at this point, and yet I had not sensed in her the ability to tame something wild.
I realized I had never really pictured this place in the winter. I had never even thought about the lake, a birch tree, this log house, with ice and snow surrounding it, a fox in the moonlight trotting silently towards Sara’s lit windows. “How is it possible that you tamed a fox?” I asked.
“He is not tame.” Sara closed the book, placed it on the table beside the sofa. Then she sat up and regarded me with that steady, frank look that so often preceded something significant that she wanted to say. Something she wanted me to pay particular attention to. I did not meet her gaze for longer than a split second, looked instead at the table, the book she held on her lap. She was reading Anthony Trollope. “It is not necessary to tame a creature to love it,” she said. “To have it love you.”
I took Sara that morning to her father’s room and posed her near the east window, where both the yellow birch trees and the scarlet berries of the mountain ash were visible through the glass. There was no noise at all from the lake now. Golden light shone through the quivering leaves, entered the room, warmed her skin.
She watched as I mixed together some cadmium orange and cadmium yellow, two of the most intense colours on earth. I was working on a small canvas. Watercolour would never have been able to mirror the heat of those colours, the gold of her skin.
“Don’t put the fox in the painting,” she said.
“I’ve never painted animals. You know that.”
“He doesn’t belong to you.” She shifted in the chair, changing the pose slightly. “You never would have seen him at all
if you hadn’t stayed.”
Unlike Rockwell, who was always trying to shed the city — in spite of his love for it — always trying to shed it so that he could disappear into weather and open country, Robert Henri spoke infrequently about landscape.
But when he did, he talked about its “motive,” how it arranged itself in the visual imagination of the artist. He wanted everything on the picture plane to be expression or idea: the impenetrability of rock, the flexibility of wood and leaf. He told us never to paint informationally, as if we were saying, “There is a hill; here is a sunset.” He wanted to get past the hill, the sky, to be rid of them, to leave an atmosphere or an idea, or both, in the scene’s place, wanted all the freight carried in the mind of the artist exposed.
In the end, we painted ourselves over and over.
How we loved him, loved the way he led us to believe in the brilliance of our own singular eye, as if we were the models and the subject were painting us. He was honestly convinced, I think, that the whole purpose of daylight was to reveal a world capable of calling forth an acceptable response from his pupils. This relationship, this sense that the artist owns, controls, and is therefore free to manipulate any subject — animate or inanimate — any subject that has, however casually, caught his attention, was the centrepiece of his philosophy.
And yet he demanded an utterly detailed knowledge of the subject. He said he loathed the fact that landscape lent itself so easily to the sentimental, the picturesque, but, essentially, it was too large for the cold intimacy he required. “I would rather see a wonderful little child than the Grand Canyon,” he would often announce. The truth is — it has taken me all these years to see it — the truth is that neither Robert nor any of the rest of us could manipulate the Grand Canyon. It refused to become intimate with us, to mirror our souls, to encourage our vanity.
The Underpainter Page 14
