The Burnt Orange Heresy

by Charles Willeford

  I allowed Berenice to drive between the Fort Pierce and Yeehaw Junction rest stops, but, finding that I thought better at the wheel, persuaded her to put her head on my shoulder and go to sleep with the promise that she could drive all the next morning while I slept. Toward morning the air became nippy, but by nine A.M., with Berenice driving, as we entered the long wide thoroughfare leading into downtown Valdosta, I knew that we had to stop.

  If I didn’t write the piece on Debierue now, while my ideas were still fresh, the article would suffer a hundred metamorphoses in my mind during the long haul to New York. I would be bone tired by then, confused, and unable to write anything. There were some references, dates, names, and so on, I would have to check in New York, but I could write the piece now and leave those spaces blank. Besides, Tom Russell would want to read the piece the moment I got into the city. I also had to paint a picture before I wrote the article. By looking at it (whatever it turned out to be), it would be a simple matter to describe the painting with it sitting in front of me, and I could tie the other paintings to it somehow.

  “Berenice,” I said, “we’re going to stop here in Valdosta, not in a motel, but in the hotel downtown, if they have one. In a hotel we can get room service, and two rooms, one for you and—”

  “Why two rooms? Why can’t I—”

  “I know you mean well, sweetheart, and you’re awfully quiet when I’m working, but you also know how it bugs me to have you tiptoeing around while I’m trying to write. I won’t have time to talk to you while I’m working, and I won’t stop, once I start, until I’ve got at least a good rough draft on paper. Take a long nap, a good tub bath—motels only have showers, you know—and then go to a movie this afternoon. And tonight, if I’m fairly well along with it, we can have dinner together.”

  “Shouldn’t you sleep for a few hours first? I had some catnaps, but you haven’t closed your eyes.”

  “I’ll take a couple of bennies. I’m afraid if I go to sleep I’ll lose my ideas.”

  Being reasonable with Berenice worked for once. Downtown, we stopped at the tattered-awninged entrance of a six-story brick hotel, The Valdosta Arms. I asked the ancient black doorman if the hotel had a parking garage.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “If you checking in, drive right aroun’ the corner there and under the buildin’. I’ll have a bellman waitin’ there for your bags.”

  I reached across Berenice and handed the old man two quarters.

  “If you want out here, I’ll carry your car aroun’ myself,” he offered.

  “No,” I shook my head. “I like to know where my car is parked.”

  He was limping for the house phone beside the revolving glass doors before Berenice got the car into gear.

  I wanted to know where the car was parked because I intended to return for the canvas and art materials after getting Berenice settled in. The bellman had a luggage truck waiting, and we followed him into the service elevator and up to the lobby.

  “Two singles, please,” I said to the desk clerk. A bored middle-aged man, his eyes didn’t even light up when he looked at Berenice.

  “Do you have a reservation, sir?”

  “No.”

  “All right. I can give you connecting rooms on three, if you like.”

  “Fine,” Berenice said.

  “No.” I smiled and shook my head. “You’d better separate them. I have to do some typing, and we’ve been driving all night and it might disturb her sleep.”

  “Five-ten, and Five-oh-five.” He shifted his weary deadpan to address Berenice. “You’ll be dreckly across the hall from him, Miss.”

  I signed a register card, and while Berenice was signing hers, crossed to the newsstand and looked for her favorite magazine on the rack. Unable to find it, I asked the woman behind the glass display case if she had sold out her Cosmopolitans. Setting her lips in a prim line, she reached beneath the counter and silently placed a copy on the glass top. I handed her a dollar and she rang it up (a man who buys “under the counter” magazines has to pay a little more). I joined Berenice and the bellman at the elevators and we went up to our rooms.

  The first thing I did after tipping the bellman and closing the door was to change out of my jumpsuit. From the guarded but indignant looks I had received in the lobby from the newsstand woman, the bellman, and two blue-suited men with narrow ties (the desk clerk’s face wouldn’t have registered surprise if I had worn jockey shorts), gentlemen were not expected to wear jumpsuits in downtown Valdosta. And I didn’t want people to stare at me when I went down to the basement garage for my art materials. I put on a pair of gray slacks, a white silk shirt, with a white-on-white brocade tie, and a lime sports jacket, the only unrumpled clothes I had.

  By taking the service elevator down and up, I was back in my room in fewer than five minutes. The room was hot and close. I stripped to my underwear, turned the air-conditioner to “Cool,” and put the blank canvas against the back of a straight laddered chair. There was a large, fairly flat, green ceramic ashtray on the coffee table. This ashtray served to steady the canvas upright against the back of the chair, and would perform double duty as a palette. I squeezed blobs of blue, yellow, red, and white paint onto the ashtray, opened the cans of turpentine and linseed oil, lined up the brushes on the coffee table, and stared at the canvas. After fifteen minutes, I brought the other straight-backed chair over from the desk, sat down on it, and stared at the blank canvas some more.

  Twenty minutes later, still staring at the white canvas, I was shivering. I turned the reverse-cycle air-conditioner to “Heat,” and fifteen minutes later I was roasting, with perspiration bursting out of my forehead and clammy streams of sweat rolling down my sides from my damp armpits. I turned off the air-conditioner and tried to raise the window. The huge air-conditioner occupied the bottom half of the window, and the top half of the window was nailed shut, with rusty red paint covering the nailheads. But there was an overhead fan, and the switch still worked. The fan, with wobbly two-foot blades, turned lazily in the high ceiling. The room was still close, so I unlocked the door, and kept it ajar with an old-fashioned brass hook-and-eye attachment that held the door cracked open approximately four inches. No one could see in from the corridor and within minutes the room was perfectly comfortable with just enough fresh air coming in from the hallway to be gently wafted about by the slow and not unpleasantly creaking overhead fan.

  An hour later I was still physically comfortable. I had smoked three Kools. I was still staring at the virgin canvas, and realized, finally, that I was unable to paint an original Debierue painting. Not even if I sat there for four straight hours every day . . .

  2

  My eyes, bright and alert, stared at the blank, shining canvas, and my stout heart, stepped up slightly, if inaudibly, from the depressing uppityness of two nugatory bennies, pumped willing blood to my even more willing fingers. I had forgotten, for two wasted hours, the hard-learned lesson of our times. In this, the Age of Specialization, where we can only point to Hugh Hefner or, wilder yet, to the early Marlon Brando as our contemporary “Renaissance Men,” I had tackled my problem ass-backwards.

  I was a writer confined by choice but still confined to contemporary art—writing about it, not painting it. I could wield a paintbrush, of course, passably. I had learned to paint in college studio courses before going on to my higher calling, in the same way that a man who wants to become a brigadier general and command an Air Force wing must first learn how to fly an airplane. The general does not have to be a superior pilot to command a wing, but he attains his position because, as an ex- or now part-time pilot, he understands the daily flight problems of the pilots under his command. The system doesn’t work very well, of course, because the man who wants to fly an Air Force jet, and plans his career accordingly, seldom enters that active occupation with the preconceived plan of ending up some day at a desk where he rarely flies. The “hot” pilot does not make a good paper-shuffling general because the makeup of a man who wants to
fly does not include a love of administration, writing letters, and enforcing discipline.

  I had learned how to paint because I had to learn the problems confronting painters, and I had taught college students because that was what I had to do to survive as an art historian. But in my secret heart I had intended to become an art critic from the very beginning. And although my major passion was contemporary art, during my year in Europe I had grimly made my rounds in the Louvre, in Florence, in Rome, tramping dutifully through ancient galleries because I knew that I had to examine the art of the past to understand the art of the present.

  I was a writer, not a painter, and a writer gets his ideas from a blank piece of paper, not from a blank piece of canvas. I moved my chair to the desk and my typewriter and immediately started to write.

  This is the way it works. The contemporary painter approaches his canvas without an idea (in most cases), fools around with charcoal, experimenting with lines and forms, filling in here, using a shaping thumb, perhaps, to add some depth to a form that is beginning to interest him, and sooner or later he sees something. The painting develops into a composition and he completes it. His subconscious takes over, and the completed painting may turn out well or, more often than not, like most writing, turn out badly. Even when the painter begins with an idea of some kind his subconscious takes over the painting once he starts working on it. The same theory, essentially, holds true for the writer. A man paints or writes both consciously and subconsciously beginning with, at most, a few relevant mental notes.

  So once I sat at my typewriter, the article began to take shape. One idea led quickly to another. It was an inspired piece of work, because it was morally right to write it. My honor and Debierue’s were both at stake. And yet, although it was in some respects easy to write, it was one of the most difficult pieces I had ever written because of the fictional elements it contained.

  My creative talents flagged when it came to describing the pictures Debierue had failed to paint, although, once over this block, it was a simple matter to interpret the paintings because I could visualize them perfectly in my mind’s eye. I was familiar enough with Debierue’s background to summarize the historical details of his earlier accomplishments. It was also simple enough to record a tightly edited version of our conversation, with a few embellishments for clarity, and a few bits of profundity for reader interest. Perhaps there is a little something of the fiction writer inside every professional journalist.

  My imaginative powers were strong enough to describe the paintings that I, myself, would have liked to paint if I had had the ability to paint them, but I ran into conceptual difficulties because, at first, I thought I had to describe the paintings that Debierue wanted to paint. But this was a futile path. I could not possibly see the world as Debierue did. And if I was unable to live in his arcane world, I could never verbalize it into visual art.

  My predetermined term, “American Harvest,” for Debierue’s so-called American period, provided me with the correlative link I needed to visualize mental pictures I was capable of describing. I began with red, white, and blue—the colors of France’s noble tricolor and our own American flag. Seeing these three colors on three separate panels I began to rearrange the panels in my mind. Side by side, in a row, close together, well separated, overlapping, horizontal and vertical with the floor, and scattered throughout a room on three different walls. But there are four walls to a room. A fourth panel was required—not for symmetry, because that doesn’t matter—but for variety, for the sake of an ordered environment. Florida. Sun. Orange. An autumnal sun for Debierue’s declining years. Burnt orange. But not a panel of burnt orange in toto—that would be heresy, because Debierue, even at his great age, was still painting, still creating, still growing. So the ragged square of burnt orange required a lustrous border of blue to surround the dying sun and to overflow the edges of the rectangle. Bluebird blue? Sky blue? No, not sky nor Dufy blue, because that meant using cobalt oil paint, and cobalt blue, with the passage of years, gradually turns to bluish gray. Prussian blue, with a haughty whisper of zinc white added to make it bitterly bold. Besides, right here in this hotel room, I had a full tube of Prussian blue.

  Texture? Tactile quality? Little if any. Pure, smooth, even colors.

  The four paintings, 30" × 24", were the only paintings Debierue had painted since coming to Florida. The paintings were for his personal aesthetic satisfaction, to enjoy during the harvest years of his stay in America, and yet they were in keeping with his traditionally established principles of Nihilistic Surrealism.

  Every morning when Debierue arose at six A.M., depending upon his waking mood, he hung one of the red, white, or blue panels next to the permanently centered burnt orange, blue-bordered panel, the painting representing the painter—the painter’s “self.” For the remainder of the day, when he was not engaged in the planning of another (undisclosed to the writer) work of art, he studied and contemplated the two bilateral paintings which reminded him of America’s multiple “manifest destinies,” the complexities of American life in general, and his personal artistic commitment to the new world.

  Did he ever awaken in a mood buoyant enough to hang two or perhaps three panels at once alongside the burnt orange panel?

  “No,” he said.

  I had typed eighteen pages for a total of 4,347 words. Now that the concept was firmly established, I could have gone on to write another dozen pages of interpretive commentary, but I forced myself to stop with the negative. Wasn’t it about time? Does every contemporary work of art have to end with an affirmative? Joyce, with his coda of yesses in Ulysses, Beckett, with the “I will go on” of his trilogy, and those 1,001 phallically erected obelisks and church spires pointing optimistically toward the heavens—for once, just once, let a negative prevail.

  My conclusion was not a lucky accident. It was a valid, pertinent statement of Debierue’s life and art. Skipping two spaces, I put a “—30—” to the piece.

  I was suddenly tired. My neck and shoulders were sore and my back ached. I looked at my watch. Six o’clock. There was a plaintive rumble in my hollow stomach. Except for going into the can three times, I had been at the typewriter for almost six straight hours. I got up, stretched, rubbed the back of my neck, and walked around the coffee table shaking my hands and fingers above my head to get rid of the numb feeling in my arms.

  I was tired but I wasn’t sleepy. I was exhilarated by completing the article in such a short time. Every part had fallen neatly into place, and I knew that it was a good piece of writing. I had never felt better in my entire life.

  I sighed, put the cover on the Hermes, moved the typewriter to the bed, and sat at the desk again to read and correct the article. I righted spelling errors, changed some diction, and penciled in a rough transitional sentence between two disparate paragraphs. It wasn’t good enough, and I made a note in the margin to rewrite it. One long convoluted sentence with three semicolons and two colons made me laugh aloud. My mind had really been racing on that one. I reduced it, without any trouble, to four clear, separate sentences—

  The phone rang, a loud, jangling ring designed to arouse traveling salesmen who had been drinking too much before going to bed. I almost jumped out of my chair.

  Berenice’s voice was husky. “I’m hungry.”

  “Who isn’t?”

  “I’ve been sleeping.”

  “I’ve been working.”

  “I’ve been awake for a half hour, but I’m too lazy to get out of bed. Why don’t you come over and get in with me?”

  “Jesus, Berenice, I’ve been working all day and I’m tired as hell.”

  “If you eat something, you’ll feel better.”

  “All right. Give me an hour, and I’ll be over.”

  “Should I order dinner sent up?”

  “No. I prefer to eat something hot, and I’ve never had a hot meal served in a hotel room. We’ll go down to the dining room.”

  “I’ll do my nails.”

 
; “In an hour.” I racked the phone.

  I finished reading and proofing the typescript and put the manuscript in a manila envelope before tucking it safely away in my suitcase. There were only minimal changes to be made in New York. Only two pages would require rewriting. I put the canvas, ashtray palette, and other art materials into the closet. I could paint the picture after dinner.

  The tub in the bathroom was huge, the old-fashioned kind with big claw feet clutching metal balls. The hot water came boiling out, and I shaved while the tub filled. The water was much too hot to get into, but I added a little cold water at a time until the temperature dropped to the level I could stand. Sliding down into the steaming, man-sized tub until I was fully submerged, except for my face, I soaked up the heat. The soreness gradually left my back and shoulders. I finished with a cold shower, and by the time I was dressed, I felt as if I had had eight hours’ sleep. I called the bar, ordered two Gibsons to be sent to 510, Berenice’s room, and studied the road maps I had picked up at the last Standard station.

  After dinner, I figured I could paint the picture in an hour or at most an hour and a half. Now that the article was finished there was no point in staying overnight at the hotel. I wasn’t sleepy, and with both of us driving we could make it to New York in about thirty hours. The front wheels of the old car started to shimmy if I tried to push it beyond fifty-five mph, but thirty hours from Valdosta was a fairly accurate estimate. I had forty dollars in my wallet and some loose change. My Standard credit card would get the car to New York, but I decided to save my cash. Berenice had traveler’s checks, and she could use some of them to pay the hotel tab. Through the cracked door, I heard the bellman knock on 510 across the way. I waited until Berenice signed the chit and the waiter had caught the down elevator before I crossed the hallway and knocked on her door.