The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  “Yes, sir, he certainly is. But you’ve surprised me again, M. Debierue. I had no idea you were a movie fan.”

  “It is pleasant to see the cinema in the evenings.” He shrugged. “And I like also the grape snow cone. Do you like these, the grape snow cones, M. Figueras?”

  “I haven’t had one in a long time.”

  “Very good. Fifteen cents at the snack bar.”

  “That’s quite a long walk down there and back every night, M. Debierue. And as long as you haven’t seen these old movies anyway, why don’t you buy a television? There are at least a half-dozen films on TV every night, and—”

  “No,” he said loyally, “this is not good advice. M. Price has already explained to me that the TV was harmful to the eyes. The little screen, he said, will give one bad headaches after one or two hours of watching.”

  I was going to refute this, but changed my mind and lit a cigarette instead. Debierue excused himself and left for his bedroom. I stubbed out the cigarette in the sticky remains of the imitation cranberry sauce well in the TV dinner plate. My mouth was too dry to smoke.

  “Have you got any tranquilizers in your purse?”

  “No, but I’ve got a Ritalin, I think.” Berenice untied the drawstring and searched for her pillbox.

  “O.K., and give me two Excedrins while you’re at it.”

  “I’ve only got Bufferin—”

  I took two Bufferin and the tiny Ritalin pill and chased them with the remainder of my orange juice.

  “It looks as though things are going to break for us after all,” I said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you think I mean?”

  She looked at me with the blank vacant stare that always infuriated me. “I don’t know.”

  “Never mind. We’ll talk about it later.”

  Within a few minutes Debierue returned, wearing his moviegoer’s “costume.” He had exchanged the short-sleeved polo shirt for a long-sleeved dress shirt, and it was buttoned at the neck and cuffs. He wore long white duck trousers instead of shorts, and had pulled his white socks up over the cuffs and secured them with bicycle clips. With his tennis shoes and Navy blue beret he resembled some exclusive tennis club’s oldest living member. In his left hand he carried a pair of cotton Iron Boy work gloves. It was a peculiar getup, but it was a practical uniform for a man who was determined to sit for six hours in a mosquito-infested drive-in movie.

  Debierue locked the front door and dropped the key into a red pottery pot containing a thirsty azalea, and trailed us to the car. Berenice sat in the middle, and as I drove cautiously down the grassy road toward the highway she and the old man discussed mosquitoes and mosquito control. His beloved M. Price had a huge smoke-spraying machine on a truck that made the circuit of the theater before the films began and again at intermission, but Debierue had to take the gloves along because the mosquitoes were so fierce on his walk home. She told him about, and recommended, a spray repellent called Festrol, and I was repelled by the banality of their conversation. But with his mind on the movies, it was too late for me to ask him any final questions about his art.

  I pulled over in the driveway short of the ticket window and waved a car by. I gave the old man one of my business cards with the magazine’s New York address and telephone number, and wedged in a parting comment that if he changed his mind about letting me see his pictures he could call me collect at any time. He nodded impatiently and, without looking at the card, dropped it into his shirt pocket. We shook hands, the quick one-up-and-one-down handshake, Berenice gave him a peck on his beard, and he got out of the car. By the time I got the car turned around, he had disappeared into the darkness of the theater. Music and insane woodpecker laughter filled the night suddenly as I turned onto the highway. Berenice sighed.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking,” she said. “We held him up too long and now he’ll have to wait until intermission to get his grape snow cone.”

  “Yeah. That’s tough.”

  4

  I drove into Debierue’s private road, stopped, and switched off the headlights. Before she could say anything I turned to Berenice and said, “Before you say anything I’m going to tell you. Then, if you have questions, ask them. I’m going down now to take a look at Debierue’s pictures. He said he had painted a few, and now that I know there are pictures in his studio I can’t go back without one for Mr. Cassidy.”

  “Why not? He doesn’t know that there are any.”

  “I made a deal. And even if I decide not to take one back, which I doubt, I still have to see them myself. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand me very well.”

  “I understand, but it’s dangerous—”

  “With Debierue in the movies, it’s safer than houses. He dropped the door key into a potted plant on the porch. You saw him, too, didn’t you?”

  “But the studio is still locked, and—”

  “I don’t want to get you involved any more than you are already. But I want you to stay here by the highway, just in case. Debierue might think about the key himself and come back for it. I don’t believe he will, but if he does you can run down the road and warn me and we’ll get the hell out. Okay?”

  “I can’t stand out here in the dark all by myself! I’m scared and there are all these mosquitoes and I want to go with you!”

  “We’re wasting time. It’s one thing for me to be a house-breaker, but it’s something else for you—as a schoolteacher. There’s nothing to be frightened about—I’m sorry about the mosquitoes—but if you’re really afraid I’ll take you down the highway to a gas station. You can lock yourself in the women’s room till I come back for you.”

  “I don’t want to lock myself up in—”

  “Get out of the car. I want to get this over with.”

  “Let me have your cigarettes.”

  I handed her my half-empty pack, not the full one, and she climbed resignedly out of the car. “How long are you going to be?”

  “I don’t know. That depends upon how many paintings I have to look at.”

  “Don’t do it, James. Please don’t do it!”

  “Why, for God’s sake?”

  “Because Debierue doesn’t want you to, that’s why!”

  “That’s not a reason.”

  “I—I may not be here when you get back, James.”

  “Good! In that case, I can say you weren’t with me at all tonight if I’m caught and you won’t get into any trouble.”

  Without lights I eased the car down the road, but turned them on again as soon as I was well into the pines and around the first bend. There was no good reason not to have taken Berenice with me except that I didn’t want her along. That is, there was no rational reason. She had looked rather pitiful standing in the tall grass beside the road. Maybe I thought she would be in the way, or that she would talk all the time. Something. . . . It might have been something in my subconscious mind warning me about what I would find. As soon as I parked in front of the house I considered, for a brief moment, going back for her. I got out of the car instead, but left the headlights on.

  Because of the rain-washed air the few visible stars seemed to be light years higher in the void than they usually were. There was no moon as yet, and the night was inky. In the black swamp beyond the house a lonesome bull alligator roared erotically. This was such a miserable, isolated location for an artist to live, I was grateful that the old painter had a place to go every night—and not only because the house was so easy to break into. If I had to live out here all alone, I too would have been looking forward to seeing the Bowery Boys and three color cartoons.

  Debierue’s “hiding” of the key was evidently a habitual practice, a safeguard to prevent its loss as he walked to and from the theater each night. I doubted that the idea entered his head that I would return to his empty house to make an illegal use of the key. But I didn’t really know. My guilt, if any, was light. I felt no more guilt t
han that of a professional burglar. A burglar must make a living, and to steal he must first invade the locked home where the items he wants to steal are safeguarded. I meant no harm to the old artist. Any picture I took, and I was only going to take one, Debierue could paint again. And except for the visual impressions of his paintings in my mind—and a few photos—I would take nothing else. There was no reason to feel guilty.

  So I cannot account for the dryness of my mouth, the dull stasis of my blood, the tightness of the muscles surrounding my stomach, and the noticeable increase in my rate of breathing. These signs of anxiety were ridiculous. The old man was sitting in the drive-in with a pair of headphones clamped to his ears, and even if he caught me inside the house, the worst he could do would be to express dismay. He couldn’t hurt me physically, and he would hardly report me to the police. But I was an amateur. I had never broken into anyone’s house before, so I supposed that my anxiety stemmed from the melodramatic idea that I was engaged in a romantic adventure. But after I had unlocked the front door and let it swing inward, I had to muster a good deal of courage before I could force my hand to reach inside to flip on the living room lights.

  The light coming through the window would be bright enough to see my way back from the car. I switched off the headlights, and returned hurriedly to the house with a tire iron and a hammer I got from the trunk. But as it turned out, these tools were unnecessary.

  The only barrier to the studio was the hasp and the heavy Yale lock on the door. Once broken there would be no way to prevent Debierue from guessing that I had returned. But if the artist had been afraid he might lose his house key, it also seemed unlikely that he would take the studio padlock key to the theater.

  Switching on the lights as I searched, I made a hasty, fruitless examination of the kitchen before moving on to the bedroom. Two keys together on a short twist of copper wire, both of them identical, were in plain view on top of the highboy dresser. I unlocked the padlock, opened the studio door, and flipped the row of toggles on the wall. The boxlike windowless room, after hesitant blue-white flickers, brightened into an icy, intense brilliance. There were a dozen overhead fluorescent tubes in parallel sets of three (two blue white to one yellow) flush with the ceiling. Under this cold light I noticed first the patching of new brickwork that filled the spaces where two windows had been before, despite the new coat of white enamel that covered the walls.

  Blinking my eyes to accustom them to the intense overhead light, I closed the door behind me. My thumping heart was prepared for the impact of the unusual, the unique, for the miraculous in visual art, but instead of wine and fish I didn’t find even bread and water.

  There were canvases, at least two dozen of them, and all of these pristine canvases were the same size, 24" × 30". They were stacked in white plastic racks against the western wall. The racks were the commercial kind one often finds in art supply stores. I checked every one of these glittering white canvases. None of them had been touched by paint or charcoal.

  There was a new, gunmetal desk in the southwest corner of the studio, with a matching chair cushioned in light gray Naugahyde. On the desk there was a fruit jar filled with sharpened pencils and ballpoint pens, a square glass paperweight (slightly magnified) holding down some correspondence, and a beautiful desk calendar (an Almanacco Artistico Italiano product in brilliant colors, made by Alfieri & Lacroix, Milano). Without shame, I read the two letters that had been held down by the paperweight. One was a letter from a Parisian clipping service, stating that Debierue’s name had been mentioned twice in the foreword to a new art history pictorial collection, but inasmuch as the illustrated volume was quite expensive, the manager had written to the publisher and requested a courtesy copy for Debierue. He would send it along as soon as—or if—he received it. There was a news clipping from Paris Soir, an unsigned review of a Man Ray retrospective exhibit in Paris, and Debierue’s name was mentioned, together with the names of a dozen other artists, in a listing of Dadaists who had known Man Ray during the 1920s.

  Debierue had answered the manager of the clipping service in a crabbed, backhanded script with cursive letters so microscopic he must have written the letter with the aid of the magnified paperweight. He merely told the manager not to send the book if he got a free copy, and not to buy it if he did not. Except for Debierue’s surname (the tiny lowercase letters “e” through “e” were all contained within a large capital “D”) there was no complimentary closing. Debierue had a unique signature. I folded the letter and put it into the breast pocket of my jumpsuit.

  As I looked through the unlocked drawers of the desk, I found nothing else to hold my interest, except for a scrapbook of clippings. The scrapbook, 10" × 12", bound in gray cardboard covers, was less than half filled, and from the first clipping to the last one pasted in, covered an eighteen-month period. Most of the earlier clippings were reports of the fire that had burned down his villa, similar accounts from many different newspapers. The more recent clippings were shorter—like the mention of his name in the Man Ray art review. The items in the other drawers were what one expects to find. Stationery and supplies, stamps, glue, correspondence in manila folders—unusual perhaps because of the meticulous neatness one doesn’t associate with desk drawers.

  There was a two-shelf, imitation walnut bookcase beside the desk that held about thirty books. Most of them were paperbacks, five policiers from the Série Noire, three Simenons and two by Chester Himes, Pascal’s Pensées, From Caligari to Hitler, Godard on Godard, an autographed copy of Samuel Beckett’s Proust, and several paperback novels by French authors I had never heard of before. The hardcover books were all well worn. A French-English dictionary and a French-German dictionary, in library reference size, a tattered copy of Heidi (in German), a boxed two-volume edition of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea (also in German), Les Fleurs du Mal, and an autographed copy of August Hauptmann’s Debierue. I fought down my impulse to steal the autographed copy of Beckett’s Proust, the only book in the small library I coveted, and scribbled the list of book titles into my notebook.

  In addition to the books, there were several neat piles of art magazines, including Fine Arts: The Americas, all of them in chronological order, with the most recent issues on the top of each stack, arranged along the wall. I considered leafing through these magazines to look for drawings, but it would be absurd for Debierue, with his keen sense of order, to hide sketches in magazines.

  In the center of the studio was a maple worktable (in furniture catalogues, they are called “Early American Harvest” tables), and this table, in a rather finicky arrangement, held a terracotta jar with several new camel’s-hair brushes in varying lengths and brush widths, four rubber-banded, faggoty bundles of charcoal drawing sticks, four one-quart cans of linseed oil and four one-quart cans of turpentine, all unopened, and a long row of king-sized tubes of oil paint in almost every shade and tint on the spectrum.

  There were at least a hundred tubes of oil paint, in colors, and three of zinc white. None of the tubes had been opened or squeezed. There was a square piece of clear glass, about 12" × 12", a fumed oak artist’s palette, a pair of white gloves (size 9½), a twelve-inch brass ruler, a palette knife, an unopened box of assorted color pencils, and a heaped flat pile of clean white rags. There were other unused art materials as well, but the crushing impression of this neatly ordered table was that of a commercial layout of art materials in an art supply showroom.

  Beside the table was an unpainted wooden A-frame easel and a tall metal kitchen stool painted in white enamel. There was an untouched 24" × 30" canvas on the easel. Bewildered, and with a feeling of nausea in the pit of my stomach, I climbed onto the high stool facing the easel and lit a cigarette. A single silver filament, a spider’s let-down thread, shimmering in the brilliant light washing the room from the overhead fluorescents, trailed from the right-hand corner of the canvas to the floor. The spider who had left this evidence of passage had disappeared.

  Except for th
e pole-axed numbness of a steer, my mind was too stunned for a contiguous reaction of any kind. I neither laughed nor cried. For minutes I was unable to formulate any coherent thoughts, not until the cigarette burned my fingers, and even then I remember looking at it stupidly for a second or so before dropping it to the floor.

  Debierue’s aseptically forlorn studio is as clear in my mind now as if I were still sitting on that hard metal stool.

  I had expected something, but not Nothing.

  I had expected almost anything, but not Nothing.

  Prepared for attendance and appreciation, my mind could not undo its readiness for perception and accept the unfulfilled preparation for painting it encountered.

  Here was a qualified Nothing, a Nothing of such deep despair, I could not be absolved of my aesthetic responsibility—a nonhope Nothing, a non-Nothing—and yet, also before my eyes was the evidence of a dedication to artistic expression so unyieldingly vast in its implications that my mind—at least at first—bluntly refused to accept the evidence.

  I had to work it out.

  The synecdochic relationship between the place and the person was undeniable. An artist has a studio: Debierue had a studio: Debierue was an artist.

  Here, in deadly readiness, Debierue sat daily in fruitless preparation for a painting that he would never paint, waiting for pictorial adventures that would never happen. Waiting, the incredibly patient waiting for an idea to materialize, for a single idea that could be transferred onto the ready canvas—but no ideas ever came to him. Never.

  Debierue worked four hours a day, he claimed, which meant sitting on this stool staring at an empty canvas from eight until noon, every day, seven days a week, waiting for an idea to come—every single day! At that precise moment I knew, despite all of the published documentary evidence to the contrary, that he was not merely suffering a so-called dry period, a temporary inability to paint since moving to Florida. Without any other evidence (my own eyes were witness enough, together with my practiced critical intuition), I knew that Jacques Debierue had never had a plastic idea, nor had he painted a picture of any kind in his entire lifetime!