The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  Debierue was a slave to hope. He had never accepted the fact that he couldn’t paint a picture. But each day he faced the slavery of the attempt to paint, and the subsequent daily failure. After each day of failure he was destroyed, only to be reborn on the next day—each new day bringing with it a new chance, a new opportunity. How could he be so strong willed to face this daily death, this vain slavery to hope? He had dedicated his life to Nothing.

  The most primitive nescience in man cannot remain completely negative—or so I had always believed. Forms and the spectrum range of colors, the sounds a man makes with his mouth, the thousands of daily perceptions of sights and sound, invade our senses from moment to moment, consciously and subconsciously. And all of these sights and sounds—and touch, too, of course—demand an artistic interpretation. Knowing this basic natural truth, I knew that Debierue, an intelligent, sentient human being, must have had hundreds, no, literally thousands of ideas for paintings during the innumerable years he sat before an empty canvas. But these ideas were unexpressed, locked inside his head, withheld from graphic presentation because of his fear of releasing them. He was afraid to take a chance, he was unable to risk the possibility—a distinct possibility—of failure. His dread of failure was not a concern with what others might think of his work. It was a fear of what he, Debierue, the Artist, might think of his accomplished work. The moment an artist expresses himself and fails, or commits himself to an act of self-expression by action, and realizes that he did not, that he cannot, succeed, and that he will never be able to capture on canvas that which he sees so vividly in his mind’s eye, he will know irrevocably that he is a failure as an artist.

  So why should he paint? In fact, how can he paint?

  How many times had Debierue leaned forward, reaching out timidly toward the shining canvas before him with a crumbling piece of charcoal in his trembling fingers? How many times?—and with the finished, varnished, luminous masterpiece glowing upon the museum wall of his febrile mind?—only to stay his hand at the last possible moment, the tip of the black charcoal a fraction of an inch away from the virgin canvas?

  “Nonono! Not yet!”

  The fear-crazed neural message would race down the full length of the motor neuron in his extended arm (vaulting synapse junctions), and in time, always in the nick of time, the quavery hand would be jerked back. The virgin canvas, safe for another day, would once again remain unviolated.

  Another day, another morning of uncommitted, untested accomplishment had been hurdled, but what difference did it make? What did anything matter, at high noon, so long as he had delayed, put off until tomorrow, postponed the execution of the feeble idea he had today when there would be a much better idea tomorrow? If he did not prove to himself today that he could paint the image in his mind, or that he could not paint it, a tendril of comfort remained. And hope.

  Faith in his untried skills provided a continuum.

  Why not? Wasn’t he trying? Yes. Was he not a dedicated artist? Yes. Did he ever fail to put in his scheduled work period every day? No. Was he not faithful to the sustained effort?—the devoted, painful, mental concentration?—the agony of creation? Yes, yes, and yes again.

  And who knew? Who knows? The day might arrive soon, perhaps tomorrow! that bright day when an idea for a painting would come to him that was so powerful, so tremendous in scope and conception, that his paint-loaded brush could no longer be withheld from the canvas! He would strike at last, and a pictorial masterpiece would be born, delivered, created, a painting that would live forever in the hearts of men!

  All through life we protect ourselves from countless hurtful truths by being a little blind here—by ignoring the something trying to flag our attention on the outer edges of our peripheral vision, by being a little shortsighted there—by being a trifle too quick to accept the easiest answer, and by squinting our eyes against the bright, incoming light all of the time. Emerson wrote once that even a corpse is beautiful if you shine enough light on it.

  But that is horseshit.

  Too much light means unbearable truth, and too much truthful light sears a man’s eyes into an unraging blindness. The blind man can only smell the crap of his life, and the sounds in his ears are cacophonous corruptions. Without vision, the terrible beauty of life is irrevocably gone. Gone!

  And as I thought of all Debierue’s lost visions, never to appear on canvas for the exhilaration of my eyes, scalding tears ran down my cheeks.

  PART THREE

  If Anything Was Comprehensible, It Would Be Incommunicable

  1

  I took my time.

  What I had to do had to be done right or not at all. Once I committed, although my concern for Berenice (frightened and waiting for me in the tall grass by the highway) did not diminish, it would have been foolhardy to rush. I might have overlooked something important.

  I looked in the kitchen for string and wrapping paper, but there was neither. There was newspaper, but it would have been awkward to wrap a canvas in newspaper when there was no string to tie the bundle. There were several large brown paper grocery sacks under the sink, and I took one of these back to the studio to hold the art materials I would need. I took a clean sheet from the hall linen closet and wrapped one of the new canvases from the plastic rack in it. I then filled the brown sack with several camel’s-hair brushes, a can of turpentine, one of linseed oil, and a half-dozen tubes of oil paint. With cadmium red, chrome yellow, Prussian blue, and zinc white I can mix almost any shade or tint of color I desire (this much I had learned in my first oil painting course because the tyrannical teacher had made us learn how to mix primary colors if he taught us nothing else). I added tubes of burnt sienna and lampblack to the others because they were useful for skin tones (there were no compositional ideas in mind at the time, just nebulous multicolored swirls floating loosely about in my head) if some figures became involved in the composition. The palette knife was also useful and I dropped it into the sack, but I didn’t take the expensive palette. It was too expensive and could be traced, and I wouldn’t want to be caught with it in my possession.

  These art materials could be purchased anywhere, of course, as could the prepared 30" × 24" canvas, but I needed Debierue’s materials in the event the authenticity of the painting was ever questioned. Mr. Cassidy, who had purchased everything for Debierue, would have a bill from the art store listing these materials, their brands, and so would Rex Art. My mind was racing, but I was clearheaded enough to realize how close a scrutiny the painting would receive when and if it were ever painted and exhibited.

  I put the wrapped canvas, the sackful of supplies, and the hammer and tire iron into the trunk of the car, and returned to the studio.

  I ran into trouble with the fire. Turpentine is flammable, highly flammable, but I had difficulty in getting it lighted and in keeping it burning once it was lit. I finally had to take the remains of the Miami Herald, crumple each separate page into a ball, and partially soak each sheet with turpentine before I could get a roaring fire started beneath the Early American Harvest table.

  Once it got started, however, the fire burned beautifully. I poured most of the last can on the studio door, and dribbled the rest to the blaze beneath the table. I then tossed the new canvases into the fire, and backed out of the room. Because the fire would need a draft, I left the studio door and the front door standing open. Whether the house burned down or not was unimportant. The important thing was a charred and well-gutted studio. I wanted no evidence of any paintings left behind, and the crackling prepared canvases, sized with white lead, burned rapidly.

  Satisfied, I turned out the living room and kitchen lights and got into the car. When I reached the highway and stopped, Berenice was gone. I shouted her name twice and panicked momentarily. Had she hitchhiked a ride back to Palm Beach? If she stuck out her thumb, any truck driver who saw it would stop and pick her up. But I calmed down by putting myself in her place, turned toward the drive-in theater instead of turning left for Palm Beach
, and found her waiting for me in the gravel road of the driveway, standing near the well-lighted marquee.

  “What took you so long?” Her voice wasn’t angry. She was too relieved to see me, happy to be in the car again. “I thought you were never coming back.”

  “I’m sorry. It took longer than I expected.”

  “Did you stea—take a picture?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What were they like? The pictures?”

  “I’ll turn over here U.S. One. There’re too many trucks on Seven.”

  “How long do you think it’ll be, before he misses the picture?”

  “I’ve got to go back to New York, Berenice. Tonight. So as soon as we get back to the apartment I’ll pack—you’re still packed, practically—and then I can drop you off at the airport. Or, if you’d rather, you can stay on for a few more days. The rent’s paid till the end of the month, so . . .”

  “If you’re going to New York, so am I!”

  “But what’s the point? You’ve got your school year contract, and you have to go back to work, don’t you? Besides, I’m going to be busy. I won’t have any time for you at all. First, there’s the Debierue article to write, and the deadline is tighter than hell now. I’ll have to find a place to crash. The man in my pad has still got another month on the sublease, you see. I’m almost broke, and I’ll have to borrow some money, and—”

  “Money isn’t a problem, James. I’ve got almost five hundred dollars in traveler’s checks, and more than five thousand in savings in the credit union. I’m going to New York with you.

  “Okay,” I said bitterly, “but you’ll have to help me drive.”

  “Watch out!” she shrilled. “That car’s only got one headlight!”

  “I don’t mean that way. I mean to spell me at the wheel on the way up, so we can make better time.”

  “I know what you meant, but you might have thought it was a motorcycle. We can trade off every two hours.”

  “No. When I get tired, we’ll trade.”

  “All right. How’re you going to get your twenty dollars back?”

  “What twenty dollars?”

  “The deposit at the electric company. If we leave tonight, you won’t be able to have them cut off the electricity or get your deposit back.”

  “Jesus, I don’t know. I can let the landlady handle it and send me the money later. They’ll subtract what I owe anyway. Please, Berenice, I’m trying to think. I’ve got so much on my mind I don’t want to hear any more domestic crap, and those damned non sequiturs of yours drive me up the goddamned tree.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So am I. We’re both sorry, but just be quiet.”

  “I will. I won’t say anything else.”

  “Nothing else! Please!”

  Berenice gulped, closed her generous mouth, and puckered her lips into a prim pout. She looked straight ahead through the windshield and twisted her gloves, which she had removed, in her lap. I had shouted at her, but in my agitation, somehow, had consented to take her with me to New York. This was the last thing I wanted to do. It would take two days, perhaps three, to write the article on Debierue—and I had to do something about the painting for Mr. Cassidy. It wasn’t a task I could have done for me, although I knew a dozen painters in New York who could have produced anything on canvas I asked them to put there, and the product would have been a professional job.

  But no one could be trusted. It was something I had to do myself, to fit Debierue’s “American Period”—at that moment I coined the title for my article: “Debierue: The American Harvest Period.” It was a major improvement over my previous title, and “American Harvest”—the idea must have come to me from the worktable in his studio—would provide me with a springboard for generating associative ideas.

  But there was still Berenice, and the problem of what to do with her—but wasn’t it better to have her with me than to simply turn her loose where she could learn about the fire by reading about it in a newspaper, or by hearing a newscast? How soon would the report go out? Would Debierue telephone Mr. Cassidy and tell him about it? That depended upon the extent of the fire, probably, but Cassidy would be the only person Debierue knew to contact, and I could certainly trust Cassidy to make the correct decision. He might inform the news media, and again he might not. Before doing anything, he would want to know whether I got a picture for him before the fire started. And although Cassidy might suspect me of setting the fire, he wouldn’t know for sure, and he wouldn’t give a damn about the other “paintings” destroyed in the fire so long as he got his.

  I still had about three hours, or perhaps closer to four, to contact Cassidy before Debierue learned about the fire and managed to telephone him.

  And Berenice? It would be best to keep her with me. At least for now. Once we reached New York, I could settle her in a hotel for a few days until I finished doing the things I had to do, and then we could work out a compromise of some kind. The best compromise, and I could work out the details later, would be for her to return to Duluth and teach until the summer vacation. In this way, “we could reflect upon how we really felt about each other—at a sane distance, without passion interfering—and, if we both felt as if we still loved each other, in truth, and our affair was not just a physical thing, well, we could then work out some kind of life arrangement together when we met in New York—or somewhere—during her two-month summer vacation.”

  This was an idea I could sell, I decided, but until I had time for it, she could stay with me for the ride. It would take hours of argument to get rid of her now, and I simply couldn’t spare the time on polemics when I had to concentrate every faculty I possessed on Debierue, his “American Harvest” period, his painting, and what I was going to write.

  I took the Lake Worth bridge to pick up A1A, to enter Palm Beach from the southern end of the island, and Berenice shifted suddenly in her seat.

  “Do you know that we’ve driven for more than forty-five minutes, and you haven’t said a single word?”

  “Crack your wind-wing a little, Honey,” I said, “and we’ll get some more air.”

  “Oh!” She cracked the window. “You’re the most exasperating man I’ve ever met in my life, and if I didn’t love you so much I’d tell you so!”

  By leaving the food in the refrigerator, and the canned food and staples on the shelves, it didn’t take us long to pack. I put my clean clothes in my small suitcase, and the dirty clothes, which made up the bulk of my belongings, all went into the big valopack with my suits, slacks, and jackets. While Berenice looked around to see if we had forgotten anything, I took my bags and typewriter to the car and tossed them into the back seat.

  On my way back for Berenice’s luggage I stopped at the landlady’s apartment, gave her the receipt for the power company’s twenty-dollar deposit, and told her to take the money that remained to pay someone to clean the apartment. When she began to protest that this small sum wouldn’t be enough to pay a cleaning woman, I told her to add the balance of the rent money I had paid her in advance instead of returning it to me and she said: “I hope you have a pleasant trip back to New York, Mr. Figueras, and perhaps you’ll drop me a card some time from Spanish Harlem.”

  She was a real bitch, but I shrugged off her parting remark and returned to the apartment for Berenice and her things.

  I stopped at the Western Union office in Riviera Beach and sent two telegrams. The first one, to my managing editor in New York, was easy:

  hold my space 5000 words personal article on debierue driving with it now to ny figueras

  This telegram would put Tom Russell into a frenzy, but he would hold the space, or rip out something else already set for a piece on Debierue. But he would be so astonished about my having an article written on Debierue he wouldn’t know whether to believe me or not. And yet, he would be afraid not to believe me. I gave the operator his home address on Long Island, and the New York magazine address as well, with instructions to telephone the message to h
im before delivering it. The girl assured me that he would have it before midnight, which assured me that Tom would have a sleepless night. Well, so would I.

  The wire to Joseph Cassidy at the Royal Palm Towers, only a twenty-minute drive from Riviera Beach at this time of evening, was more difficult to compose. I threw away the first three drafts, and then sent the following as a night letter, with instructions not to deliver it until at least eight A.M:

  emergency stop urgent i report to ny magazine office stop will write and send picture

  from there figueras

  There was ambiguity in the wording, but I wanted it to read that way. He would not be able to ascertain from the way the wire was worded whether I would write and fill him in on the “emergency,” or whether I would be sending Debierue’s “picture” from New York. If nothing else, the wire would make him cautious about what he would say to the press about Debierue and the fire, although I knew he would have to release something. Knowing that he didn’t set the fire, and without knowing for sure that I had set it, Debierue would most certainly contact Cassidy. If he suspected that the fire had been set by vandals, Debierue would probably be afraid to stay at the isolated location even though the rest of the house was only slightly damaged.

  Berenice, happy to have her way about going to New York, sat in the car while I sent the telegrams, and, except for humming or singing snatches of Rodgers & Hart songs, confined her conversation to reminding me occasionally to dim my lights or to kick them to bright again. Brooding about what to write, and how to write it, especially after we got onto the straight, mind-dulling Sunshine Parkway, I needed frequent reminders about the headlights.

  The rest-stop islands, with filling stations at each end, and Dobbs House concession restaurants sandwiched between the gas stations, are staggered at uneven distances along the Parkway. Because they are unevenly spaced, it wasn’t possible to stop at every other one (sometimes it was only twenty-eight miles to a rest stop, whereas the next one would be sixty miles away), and a decision, usually to halt, had to be made every time. Berenice always went to the can twice, once upon debarking, and again after we had a cup of coffee. I said nothing about the delay (as a man I could have stopped anywhere along the highway, but I would have been insane to make such a suggestion to a middle-western schoolteacher), and besides, the rest stops soon became useful. Sitting at the counter over coffee with my notebook, I organized my vagrant thoughts about Debierue’s “American Harvest” Florida paintings, and by writing down my ideas at each stop, I retained the good ones, eliminated the poor ones, and gradually developed a complicated, but pyramiding, gestalt for the article.