The Art of Living

by John Gardner

  “Princess!” cried the picture on the box in a voice unlike any the Princess had ever heard from it, “he’s dying! Run to him!”

  Without thinking, the Princess obeyed. “Father!” she cried, “Father, for the love of God!” Now the servants were all around her, and it seemed to the Princess in her madness that the walls of the room had caught fire.

  “Don’t die!” she whispered, but she knew now, flames all around her, that that was why he’d come to her. In the ravening heat, it was as if her mind had flown open and she knew everything everyone in the room was thinking. Then, the next instant, in the blinding whiteness, her mind went blank.

  “Princess,” one of the servants said softly, lifting her as if she weighed nothing, “we’ll take care of him. Rest yourself.”

  Slowly, the illusion of fire sank away, and she was standing, supported by servants, gazing at something too still, too full of peace to be her father. Now his strange words came back to her: “Beg him to remove the curse.”

  The day after the King was buried, she went to the box-painter.

  9

  She could not believe, at first, the change that had come over him. He seemed much older, much sadder, so gentle that the Princess—or, rather, the Queen, since she now ruled the kingdom—could almost have believed she had dreamed their last meeting, when he’d charged those mad prices for the worthless pictures she and her friends had bought, carelessly scrawled landscapes of cows crossing streams, sickly, drab asphodels and forget-me-nots, day-lilies and primroses, or those maudlin little animals, cats, dogs, teddy-bears—not so much box-paintings as angry parodies, at best, of the box-painter’s art. He was busy at the same kinds of subjects now, but with such a difference that they seemed not the work of the same hand. His paintings of gardens were so accurate in each detail, even to the occasional weed or insect, so alive with the spirit of whoever it was that had planted them—some old woman, she imagined, or some old man in suspenders, once a farmer or a lawyer, who’d settled down in his final days to make the life he was leaving more comfortable for someone he knew, or perhaps did not know, for the world in general, with all its sorrows—so accurate in their depiction of both the beauty and the sadness of the world as it is, that one believed, if one closed one’s eyes, that one could smell the autumn leaves.

  Nor was the studio he worked in the same at all. What had seemed a kind of crypt never visited except by the artist’s ghost, a bleak place of weariness, misery, and failure, had now become a hive of activity. There were customers who greedily sorted through the boxes, pretending to find fault with them to get an easier price, children and old people, a lean, smiling banker with a terrible worried look flickering around his eyes—he was looking for a box for his wife, he said, and had no idea what might appeal to her (“Bring her in!” said the box-painter with gestures. “Bring her in!”)—an angry old woman, a laborer, a midget. … Vlemk the box-painter had taken on three young apprentices, two dull, lanky ones and one who was fat and near-sighted—“A master!” Vlemk told the Queen with gestures, “a genius!” She looked at the young man with distaste: plump, pink-cheeked, working with his tongue between his teeth, bending down to watch, almost cross-eyed, as his mallet ticked brads into the eight-sided box he was at work on. When he saw that she was watching he smiled and gave her a wink that seemed vaguely obscene. Quickly, she looked away. How Vlemk had done it all in less than a month was a mystery to her, for the Queen had no idea that she herself was at the heart of the change. Her friends who’d bought boxes had made Vlemk the social dernier cri, and they had done so just at the moment when, as chance would have it, he was in a mood to revise his life. That too was of course her influence, though she could not know it. She could know only that he was a changed man, an artist again, though not at all the artist she had come to seek out—and in fact not an artist she approved of. There had been in him, before, something scornful and majestic, the dignity and barely contained rage of a fallen Lucifer, a haughty detachment, unbending pride, even in his abject poverty, that transformed his afflictions, even his muteness, to bends of nobility. Now overnight he had become just another peasant artisan—indeed, a man at ease with peasant artisans: over by the window, timidly peering down with tiny pig’s eyes through his thick, thick spectacles, stood a famous stained-glass-window maker called Lefs—her father had often been his patron—and on a stool, half asleep, sat Borm the bell-maker, a thick-nosed, doltish-looking fellow with hair in his ears.

  She stood erect, her face half hidden in the cave of her hood, her gloved hand closed on the doorknob. She was half inclined to flee, sick at heart. It was at that moment, looking around her at the tedious goodness that rolled like granulating honey through the box-painter’s shop (such was her word for it; she was no longer comfortable calling it a studio), that the Queen understood that the terrible paintings of her were true. She might not like it, she might—knees trembling—feel shocked toward despair by the frightening fact, but she knew that those paintings she had seen were serious, as none of this was, that the mind that had seared through her flesh to the bones, the mind that with the icy indifference of a god had layer after layer torn the sham away, the childish eagerness, the ridiculous pretenses—the mind that had stripped her and used her and dismissed her—was the mind, sublime and coldblooded, of an artist. Tears sprang to her eyes as she considered the ruin he had become: a man worth, at his best, all the gold in the kingdom, a thousand kingdoms, now reduced, without even knowing it, to this. She remembered with incredulity how once she had refused to let a coin be tossed to him, imagining in her madness that it might lead him to “further debauchery!” Unconsciously she raised her hand to her eyes. The movement was enough to draw the attention of Vlemk the box-painter.

  Quickly he came toward her, moving his lips in some remark of dismay, as if he’d forgotten that he’d lost the gift of speech.

  “I must go,” she said, and opened the door. A warm breath presaging rain came in.

  Grotesquely, as solicitous as her moustached Prince, he caught the edge of the door, half closed it, and held it. He gestured and rolled his eyes. Heaven knew what he was saying. His gaze was fixed on her black band of mourning.

  “I must go,” she said again, this time more sternly.

  A calm came over him. A coldness, rather; faintly reminiscent of his greater days. With the look of a man killing an insect while holding a conversation—a brief wince, then no change in his expression—he closed the door. She stared, a little frightened, trying to read his eyes. He simply stood there, queerly smiling, the hum of sweetness filling the room behind him, customers chattering, his apprentices hurrying, now painting, now talking, no one noticing the two of them, herself and Vlemk, as removed as two stars. She jerked at the doorknob. She might as well have jerked at a knob on a wall of stone. She focused on the doorknob, studying the wild leap of feeling inside her. She was angry enough to scream at him, but at the center of her rage lay the mad question: am I in love with this pot-bellied old man?

  “I’ll come back when you’re less busy,” she said.

  “You’ve come to see the pictures,” he said. Though she knew it was impossible, he seemed to say it with his voice.

  “Yes, I have,” she said.

  Vlemk the box-painter nodded, polite, then took his hand from the door and turned away. He stopped to speak in gestures to one of his apprentices—the young man looked over at the Queen, then quickly back at Vlemk—then, half smiling, nodding to his customers, stepping carefully past his table of boxes, the box-painter went to a covered stack in the corner of the room, lifted off the cover, took a folded sack from the floor beside them, and indifferently dropped the boxes, one by one, into the sack. When he returned to her, the box-painter took her hand as he would a child’s, hardly looking at her, opened the door, led her from the room, and softly pulled the door closed behind them. Then, letting go of her hand, he started down the stairway. The Queen followed.

  Strange as it may seem, the Queen had
never before seen the inside of a tavern. She walked with the false assurance of a blind man pretending he needs no help, pressing forward, stiff and erect, waiting as if impatiently for Vlemk to choose a table, though in fact she had no idea whether or not it was accepted practice for a man and a woman to be seated together in a tavern. She was assaulted by such sensations, such newness and mystery, that she could hardly think, could only see and see, drinking in vision with the wide eyes of a child—indeed, she thought instantly of the way she had seen things at four or five, every surface alive, unnaturally sharp-edged: she remembered when she’d gone to the Fair with her father, servants all around them, looking out with sharp, fearful eyes for anarchists, her father still strong and tall, almost fat, crying “Ho, ho, ho” and shaking hands with his people when he could reach past the circle of guards.

  The room was still, the people all pretending not to look at her. She stood, chin lifted, feeling a strange thrill of evil in her veins. What would people say? she wondered, knowing what they’d say, and an image from one of Vlemk’s paintings rose before her, what she secretly called “The Queen as Fallen Woman.”

  Then the barmaid stood before them, more innocent than the Queen had been even in childhood, or so the Queen imagined, the barmaid companionably nodding and smiling, guiding them to a long table close to the front door, a table with candles on it, alongside it six stolid chairs. Vlemk led the Queen to a chair by the wall, went back around the table to the chair directly opposite, and laid the sack on the table while the barmaid silently moved the other four chairs away. Vlemk made a signal, presumably his order, and the barmaid left. Then, without expression, Vlemk opened the sack and took out the boxes, one by one, and slid them across to her. When he’d removed the last box, he folded the sack and put it on his lap like a napkin. He splashed open his hands and smiled disparagingly, eyes remote. The Queen looked down at them.

  It was incredible to her that they’d so shocked her the first time she’d seen them. There they were, her possibilities, each more terrible than the last; but they did not seem to her terrible now. It was like reading history books: this king died in battle, this king of syphilis, this one by a fall from his horse. What she felt, more than anything else, was a sense of new freedom, release. It was true, she thought, as if responding to something the talking picture on the box had said to her; this decorous life she’d pursued all her days was trivial, ludicrous. How strange and wonderful to be able to gaze down from the mountaintop, like a soul at last free of its body, and see life as it was. This king died in battle, this one of syphilis….

  One of the pictures showed her face tipped so high it seemed her neck would snap. “The Queen Full of Pride,” she secretly named it. She laughed. Vlemk the box-painter glanced at her, judgmental, and she laughed again, more openly than she’d meant to. A man with yellow-white flaxen hair and sleepy eyes stopped abruptly in the middle of the room to look at her, then after a moment drew up a chair and sat down beside her. At just that moment the barmaid returned with the drinks Vlemk had ordered, two small, crude glasses that contained something thick and vaguely black. The barmaid looked daggers at the man who had come to sit with the Queen, then looked questioningly at Vlemk, who lowered his eyes and shrugged. With a frightened expression, the barmaid glanced at the Queen. “It’s no harm,” said the Queen, and mimicked Vlemk’s shrug. One casual hand raised to hide her ugly birthmark, the barmaid looked again at Vlemk, who pretended not to notice; then, at last, she reluctantly turned away to go about her business.

  “Hello,” said the man with flaxen hair, and grinned one-sidedly. His teeth were discolored and tilted, like headstones in an old, old graveyard.

  She nodded and glanced at his patched, ragged elbow, too close to her own.

  “I,” said the man, “am a poet.” He tipped his head back, slightly to one side, letting his remark sink in.

  “That’s nice,” she said, and glanced at Vlemk. He was looking at the boxes. She too looked down at them.

  “Poets are much disparaged in this moron age,” said the poet.

  She said nothing, but gave him a noncommittal nod and reached for a candle to give the boxes more light. The poet leaned closer, looking too. She lowered her eyebrows and tensed her forehead, straining to ignore him.

  It seemed that any one of the paintings might speak if it wished to, even the ones done most carelessly, as if in disgust. What had he been thinking as he painted them? she wondered again. And how was it that he could sit there so calmly now, two fingers around the stem of his glass, hardly looking at her, beginning to show signs of impatience. She drew away from the poet a little, shooting him a look, and then glanced again at Vlemk. Here in the tavern, with the candlelight making his graying hair glow like newly cut iron, he no longer seemed just one more artisan. In comparison to the poet, he might have been made of solid marble. “I have come to beg you to remove the curse,” she thought of saying, and quickly looked down, driving out the image of her father by saying to herself with intense concentration, “It makes no sense.”

  The poet said, “Your eyes are like curdled cream. Does that offend you?”

  She looked at him as she’d have looked at some curious insect.

  Instantly, the poet rolled his eyes up and waggled his hand.

  He looked exactly like her father, and the breath went out of her. She threw a wild glance at Vlemk for help, but Vlemk had his eyes closed, infinitely patient, burying both the poet and herself in the rot of time. Suddenly she found herself shaking like a machine, and Vlemk opened his eyes. He looked at the poet, so calmly that the whole world changed for her. Yes, she must learn to be like Vlemk the box-painter. Learn to dismiss with absolute indifference the antics of mere mortals! She must live for the imperishable! She’d been wrong about him, she saw now. He had not mellowed, gone soft. In the end he had dismissed even rage and scorn, even the young artist’s hunger for Truth. He had moved beyond silence to a terrible kind of comedy, painting nonsense with unholy skill—landscapes, animals, all that dying humanity foolishly clings to.

  That instant Vlemk leaned forward, one finger raised as if in warning, and with a stern expression shook his head. Was he reading her mind? she wondered. He must be, of course. He knew her as no one had ever known her before, every spasm and twitch.

  The boxes gleamed in the candlelight, a coolly disinterested catalogue of horrors—wretched grimaces, rolled eyes; ten obscene masks of corruption. And it came to her suddenly that the point was not that one of them was fated to come true: all of them were true. And it was not that he loved her or hated her. She was a specimen, simply, like the rat the biologist happens to come down on with his glove. He could have done it as well with the poet—she could do it herself, if she had his craft! This is the world, he had said. So much for the world! And he’d gone back to painting pretty gardens, where weeds pushed up, merry as crocuses, and insects chewed and were chewed, like gargoyles on a church. This is the world, my children, my moustached princes, coyly smiling ladies. Again Vlemk’s eyes were closed, burying all that lived. I never heard him mention you, the picture that could talk had said. Even when he was painting her hour after hour, he’d given her no more thought than the biologist gives to the frog he is cutting to pieces, still alive. That was Art. That was the mountaintop. The boxes blurred together in an image of her father’s dying face.

  She leaned forward, clutching the table, struggling to clear her sight. Her wits reeled, though she hadn’t yet tasted the vaguely black drink. She found herself staring now at one of the boxes in particular—perhaps she’d been staring for some time. “The Queen Envious,” she thought it might be called. It showed her face almost comically narrowed and peaked, her eyes enormous, the tips of her teeth showing.

  Vlemk opened his eyes. “Your health,” he said soundlessly, murderously ironic—or so it seemed to the Queen—and raised his glass.

  Soon there were two more of them, friends of Vlemk, or so they claimed, and Vlemk accepted it in silence, eyeli
ds sinking again. One maintained he was an ex-violinist. The other maintained nothing at all, staring at her throat a moment, occasionally glancing at the door as if expecting more of these “friends.” The Queen could hardly breathe. All her life she had scorned and avoided vulgarity, ugliness: but here, sunk deep in both, she was revising her opinions. She had wanted gardens without insects. She wanted that no longer. She wanted now only to see. But her mind was fuzzy. She strained for concentration. There was no feeling in the tips of her fingers.

  The poet said things so foolish one had to think about them.

  “Suppose,” he said, floating his head toward her, half-moons of yellow below his irises, “suppose God were a spider!”

  She waited. He seemed to have nothing more to say. But when she turned to the ex-violinist for help, the poet broke in quickly, seizing the floor again, violently trembling, “Out of his own entrails the spider spins!” He gave a jerk, trying to raise his arm to shake his fist at her, but his elbow struck hard against the edge of the table, making him yelp and bringing tears to his eyes. The ex-violinist shook his head and said, “Listen—” Furiously, wildly, the poet struck out with his narrow left arm, hitting the ex-violinist in the chest. “But also the spider stings!” the poet yelled. The voice, thin and high, reminded her of the voice of the picture that could talk, and abruptly she remembered that the picture was herself. She looked at Vlemk. He was asleep.

  The poet, for no reason, was crying. Softly, the ex-violinist said, “He’s so full of hate, this man. Who can blame him?”

  She looked for help at the man who sat staring at her throat. Something in his look made her blood curdle, and, smiling nervously, lowering her lashes, she asked, “And what do you do?” Nothing in his expression changed, but he looked into her eyes, giving her a terrible sensation of endless falling. After a moment he indicated by a shift of his eyes that she should look under the table. She felt herself blushing scarlet; then, biting her lip, she obeyed. In the darkness below, almost touching her shoes, lay the blade of an axe. Instinctively, before she knew she would do it, she touched her throat. The man smiled, then his eyes once again went out of focus. She put both hands over her heart to calm the pounding, like a fire behind her collarbone.