The Underpainter

by Jane Urquhart

  I have neither the strength nor the shallowness …

  I stopped pacing and leaned against the wall. “It has nothing to do with you, Sara. I’m not talking about character.”

  “Fifteen years,” she said.

  “Fifteen summers,” I corrected.

  She stared hard at me then. The sunbursts in her eyes had been swallowed by her pupils. I was angered by the shame I felt under her scrutiny.

  We were both silent.

  “I’m sorry,” I finally said, though I wasn’t at all at the time. “I’m sorry, but this is an aesthetic not an emotional decision.”

  Sara stood at the south window, blocking the view of the sun-drenched lake.

  “I’m sorry,” I said again, with all of the coldness I had in me then. “I’ve painted you enough.”

  I left Davenport on the King’s Highway Number Two. I made a right turn at Highway 28. I drove north.

  As I manoeuvred the Packard over icy highways, past frozen rivers, I concentrated on the wire I had sent, imagining its strange route across the ice of Thunder Bay to Silver Islet Landing — the place to which no roads led. I could see the telegraph office in Port Arthur, the yapping dogs of the mail sled, the arrival of the message, Sara opening the envelope, reading the words. Otherwise I focused on the weather. Sometimes the snow was so heavy I was completely disoriented. Had it not been for the white banks the plough had left on either side of the road I might have lost my way altogether, the way one loses the thread of a conversation late at night, or an idea that has come to one shortly after waking. I don’t remember where I slept at night, one northern town or another. Parry Sound or North Bay. Sudbury, perhaps. Wherever it was, I sent another telegram from there.

  I checked into the Prince Arthur Hotel in Port Arthur on Wednesday evening, collapsed fully clothed onto the bed in a room on the fifth floor, and slept for fourteen hours. The next morning I rose, opened the curtains, and was confronted by the piercing light of the sun on the snow-covered ice of Lake Superior. The cloudless sky. The blinding view. The huge man made of rock slumbered now on a smooth white sheet, not on the textured dark bed of glimmering water I remembered from my summer arrivals. A thin mist covered his body. Everything else was clear, precise, and painful to look at under that light that revealed, then blinded. Even when I turned my back to the bay the brilliance persisted, breaking through the large window and into the room. Nothing in my experience of the north shore had prepared me for this season’s lucidity. My age was written all over my face in a ruthless hotel mirror. I barely recognized my own hands.

  After breakfast I walked on squeaking snow up and down Cumberland Street, in and out of stores until I came across a pair of binoculars in a junk shop. They were well worn, had belonged to a soldier of the Great War, and still housed in their leather case the original instructions for their use in that nightmare. But they were in perfect repair.

  The shopkeeper told me that the temperature was thirty below zero. But the sun, the white blaze, was everywhere and so the chill seemed irrelevant. I wanted to believe in a new, clean light, wanted to believe that it would banish forever the dark rooms behind George’s China Hall. The examined past.

  I returned to my room with the binoculars in a brown paper bag and began to wait.

  Almost immediately I pulled the desk chair towards the window. I was determined to face that which was coming towards me. My eyes watered constantly for the first hour, until finally I was able to look at the radiant bay without wincing or weeping, my face tightening under dried salt. I would gaze through the binoculars, bring the stone giant closer to me for four or five minutes, then let him recede again into the distance. I knew that when Sara appeared — I was certain she had received at least one of my telegrams and that she would appear — she would come into view from around the head of The Sleeping Giant.

  Sometimes I read the Bible I had found in the desk drawer. I read the instructions in case of fire on the hotel door. I read the admonitions on the yellowed piece of paper in the binocular case. Every line seemed portentous, charged with meaning. “Try to avoid the reflection of enemy flares in the lenses.” “Proceed in an orderly fashion to the stairwell or the fire escape.” “How sweet are thy words unto my taste, yea, sweeter than honey to my mouth.” The rest of the time I looked out over Thunder Bay — either with the binoculars, or without.

  Because I had spent only the summer months at Silver Islet, and had taken the steamer there as soon as I could after stepping from the train, I had come to know this bay only superficially during my trips back and forth over the water. Sara had taken me to the top of the stone giant I could now see from the window. She had forced me to look over its edge, thirteen hundred feet down to dark water, but I had resented the effort and rejected the view, though I had allowed some of the surrounding rocks and trees to leak into a painting I completed a few months later. My father, I recalled, had been impressed by the cliffs, the heights, the legend of the native warrior turned to stone for revealing the secret location of silver to the invading Europeans. Drawn in his more reflective moments to the romantic side of this particular brand of capitalism, he was charmed in the end by the conviction that some extraordinary power had prevented his success. And this belief protected him, at least in his own eyes, from the banality of a lost fortune, a pointless endeavour. It was the shape of The Sleeping Giant I wanted to fit into one of my paintings; neither its natural nor its supernatural history interested me. My father and I both had exploited this landscape — differently, its true — but we had exploited it nevertheless.

  By late afternoon I had stared out into the bay for such a long time I was beginning to suffer from snow blindness. I had seen clouds shaped like peninsulas float across the sky, blue shadows move under these across the white plain of the frozen lake. I had seen light unfurl like sheets of delicate yellow paper behind the slumbering stone man. But nothing in me wanted to reach for a pencil, a brush, a tube of colour. My hands held only the binoculars, the distances and intimacies they were creating. The long white surface. The reclining granite figure.

  At 5:30, I left the hotel for the streets, where I bought a quart of whisky. I ate in the hotel dining room with my back to the bay. I returned to my room. The white had vanished, was replaced by a deep shade of blue. A star appeared over the ribcage of the stone man, then another near his foot. And another. My face, the bed, the dresser were reflected in the window. I closed the curtains and poured myself a drink.

  I ask myself: What has your life been? You have used everything around you. And for what? An arrangement of colours on a flat surface. “At least I could have taken nourishment from this,” George had shouted, holding a teacup at the end of the arm he thrust towards my face. “At least I could have filled it again and again with warmth.”

  Shards all around him and both of them gone.

  With the white hope out the window shadowed by night and the curtains closed, scenes from the previous Sunday presented themselves like photographs in a grim family album, everything fixed and still, terrible and permanent — the whisky cranking open the part of my brain where these tableaux were printed. Augusta’s pale face, George’s hand on her dark sleeve, the sound of breaking china, the inexplicable carefulness with which I swept the room the following morning. Vivian’s head thrown back in laughter, the dull eyes of the fox she wore around her neck, her black mink flung over the counter. And now the woody taste of the same scotch I drank that night present on my tongue.

  I’d heard of men who had locked themselves into hotel rooms, drinking quart after quart of whisky, and were found by the house detective days later having choked to death on their own vomit. Now it came to mind that there would have been windows in the rooms where these tragedies took place, and beyond the windows a view. What had these desperate men looked at before the event they were courting overtook them? I wondered if men had died drunk in this hotel, whether their last registered image was that of the stone man sleeping or whether they were on t
he other side, the city side, where the colourful mass of clapboard buildings climbed up the hill. Brilliancy is moving towards colour, not towards white.

  I’d heard of men who shot themselves in hotel rooms. I poured myself another drink.

  I awoke with the buzz in my head of a mild hangover. I washed, ordered breakfast, and ate without opening the curtains. Then I placed the chair in the correct position, reached for the binoculars, and took up my post. Again the dazzle, the watering eyes, the ice and sky and sun. No misty bedspread for the giant. No clouds at all.

  She would come today.

  There were three or four ice fishermen a hundred yards or so off the ends of the piers. One had miraculously built a hut early in the morning while I was still sleeping. The others were unsheltered. I tried to compare their patience to my own but knew I had failed when the chambermaid knocked and I was forced to stand in the dark hall while she moved a carpet sweeper back and forth across the room. I wanted her out of there. I wanted to be at the window, alone, when Sara rounded Thunder Cape. I wanted to see her sixteen miles away, then twelve, then eight…. She would come today and I would come to love her. My atonement would be in that love. Augusta, George, would be vindicated. Every broken piece of porcelain would be mended, the China Hall swept clean. I would see Sara’s eyes when I closed my own, not George’s, not Augusta’s.

  “Feel the dignity of a child,” Robert H. had once said. “It is a dignity of innocence.” Sara was the only innocent person I knew. There had never been, would never be, children in my life. She, her clarity and lightness, would be a kind of childhood, would allow the atmosphere of childhood, at least, to enter my rock heart. In that wild, uncultivated place she would be like a bush garden.

  In the end, I was, of course, unable to see her from sixteen miles away. Not even the binoculars could accomplish that. She would have been ten miles from Port Arthur, I suppose, when she appeared in the centre of the circle the lens made — a black dot on that vast white sheet. She had to be far enough out on the bay to become visible. She had to be completely surrounded by white. Otherwise she simply disappeared against the landscape of The Sleeping Giant. Now she was like a fugitive cell that had broken loose from the stone architecture of his body. A grain of sand. I was relieved by my belief in her.

  An hour later I could see her with the naked eye. “The naked eye,” I said aloud, testing the phrase. The eye unassisted, uncovered. But it made no difference; she was a tiny spot on the retina. It would still be hours until her arrival. How small and insignificant she looked. How unprotected, exposed.

  I watched her inch towards me for the next hour. The wind had picked up and often she would vanish into white. But always she re-emerged unchanged; small and far away. I knew the limbs that crossed the ice so well I could have painted them blindfolded. I had seen, and recorded, the changes time had made from year to year. No one, I was certain, had ever scrutinized Sara with such voracious intimacy or, I could admit now, with such coldness.

  I had been examining distance for two days. Sara’s moving body could have been misinterpreted as a flaw on the white skin of the bay, the white skin of distance. I knew this vista was beautiful now, more beautiful, perhaps, than it had been in the summer when it was all dancing and stars. The clean sheet, the new leaf, unscarred by experience. The clarity of the north that Rockwell raved about. Brigus Harbour. Greenland. Boreal. How he would have loved this bay. And how he would have loved the man mountain with all of winter spread out around him.

  I could see that everything that had passed between Sara and me until this moment had been an approximation. Mere subsistence. I, who had previously been so restrained, would now engage in such blatant exposure that when I was finished she would have the entirety of my life in her possession: the Rochester ravines of my childhood, the nonsense of The Art Students’ League, Rockwell, Robert H., the self-conscious salons and soirées that had been my winter life since. I would place the facts of George, Vivian, Augusta, the China Hall at her feet, tell her how everything had smashed up. She would look at it all with the opalescent view of an innocent. She would forgive me and I would be exonerated.

  All this was very clear and very real to me. I sat in a room blade-bright with sun. Prisms angled towards me from the bevelled edges of mirrors, and anything made of metal — the lamp base, a caster on the foot of the bed, my Zippo lighter — glared. Things could not have been more transparent than they were in that light. Each thought that entered my mind was sharp, well defined. And out on the ice, the woman I had decided to want, moving slowly towards me.

  How to explain what I did?

  There are certain moments in a mans life that demand and deny response at the same time. I spotted her through the binoculars at eleven o’clock in the morning, this woman I had not communicated with for two and a half years. I might have seen her earlier, but I had begun to play those games one engages in when waiting — setting limits, making rules. I wouldn’t let myself pick up the binoculars except on the hour and the half-hour. Earlier in the morning, I had taken the mirror from the wall and had stood with my back to the window, superimposing my own head on the giant’s prone body in the glass. None of these games were games of skill, but they probably caused me to miss the exact moment of her materialization.

  Watching the small approaching figure, I recalled that when I was younger and studying art history I had realized that medieval pilgrims would still have had a full day of walking ahead of them after they had glimpsed in the distance the spires of Chartres or Compostela; they who had already come so far. After that there could only have been anti-climax. I had always wondered what it was that continued to drive them forward. I had assumed, you see, that the perfection of the destination they had built in their minds during the journey could only fade or tarnish as they drew nearer. And then there would be the beggars on the steps, the hawkers, the pickpockets, the corrupt clergy.

  Yes, I remembered this as I sat in the radiant room.

  I imagine you will judge what I did to be an act of cowardice — and perhaps you are right. I had come to the very edge of a moment, the moment when it might have been possible to remove the cloak of fear that had protected me all those years. But after all was said and done, the flesh beneath was too white and weak to be exposed. Is there really any one among you who in the face of such grief would not panic at the approach of happiness? If Augusta had waited, George would have returned to her whole, his emotional history utterly exposed, his love for her intensified. Could it have been something as banal as a wedding certificate that killed her? They had made their own marriage, after all, a pact based on sorrow, conceived in the halls of an asylum. And now that pact had been destroyed. The partnership might have cast off the mud of Flanders, the knives of the surgeons, the hoarded passion of a betrayed heart. Had Augusta glimpsed happiness, the banality of that?

  As Sara moved closer I was able to see that she was wearing her father’s old overalls. She was coming steadily towards me across a pristine whiteness where everything shone. Behind her the stone man slept on, unmoved by her journey, his body hard and rigid and unchanging.

  Heart of granite. Bed of ice.

  She must have been less than a mile from the shore when I decided to leave Port Arthur, remove myself finally and permanently from Sara’s life. How could I break into her innocence with my own corruption? In all fairness, ultimately, I could not bear to pollute her strength with my own damaging weaknesses. I panicked in the face of the possibility of happiness.

  As I followed the highway along the curving shore of Lake Superior, I watched the hotel where we were to have met diminish in size in the rearview mirror. I imagined Sara asking for me at the desk.

  Over one hundred and fifty years ago in England, a Staffordshire potter was thinking of Upper Canada, a huge tract of land stolen for the Empire from a continent he had never seen, would never see, except in his imagination. Perhaps he was bored with repetitive calls for views of Niagara Falls and its attendant Te
rrapin Tower and Table Rock, wanted to explore instead the Great Lake towards which the waterfall hurled itself. Or perhaps he had read the journals of Samuel Champlain, where the foliage of the north shore of the gleaming ocean of fresh water is described as being almost ornamental in its beauty. Whatever the case, the title he gave to the landscape he composed — Ontario Lake Scenery — is so ambiguous that I spent the better part of the morning trying to determine whether it was all the lakes of Ontario or the Great Lake Ontario that he had in mind. For my own comfort I decided on the former inspiration, wanting, I suppose, to believe that both of my own north shores are memorialized by the last piece I place upon my shelves.

  For I am pleased to be able to tell you that the huge task of reassembling the collection is completed. Completed as successfully as an old man can ever complete the task of piecing together all that has been broken. Some of the tinier fragments were impossible to place, and who knows how many hills and streams, birds and flowers were shattered beyond recognition or exploded into powder as they smashed against the floor. By pure coincidence this porcelain view of Ontario lakeside landscape emerged from the final small, sad pile of shards at the bottom of that crate I removed from a Davenport bedroom forty years ago. And yet the scene, which is now fully glued back together, has nothing to do with what I learned when I visited the shores of that northern country. As I pieced this painted terrain — my last jigsaw — together, I held elegant ladies, a ruined castle, several mountains, and East Indian tents in my old gnarled fingers. The Staffordshire china painter had created a theatrical mirage, a fantasy, then printed the words “Ontario Lake Scenery” on the reverse side of the plate.