The ease with which he plunged into an all-revealing, vulnerable state of unconsciousness was perhaps the most troubling thing of all. Kate herself never slept in the presence of strangers, on a plane, with a half-known man she’d taken to her bed. Exhausting hours later she would invariably get off the plane, out of the bed, red-eyed, unable to let go and sleep until she was by herself.
Except for Lee, of course. With Lee, at home, for the last four years, she had let go entirely, utterly. With Lee, and with no one else, she was absolutely vulnerable, freely open to crushing criticism or heart-filling communion. With Lee. Alone.
How could a person sleep with a stranger watching?
Another image came from out of the long, busy day, that of Vaun Adams at the door of her house: the beauty of the fairy-tale princess—blackest hair, palest skin, red lips, ethereal eyes—and the flat expression of a person dragged out from the gates of hell.
That expression—all her expressions, with the exception of that one moment of surprise at their ignorance of her identity—was not a normal reaction to a police questioning. The only people Kate had known who did not respond to the police with nervously exaggerated emotions, of politeness, aggression, humor, or whatever, were old lawyers and young punks convinced of their own invulnerability, and even in the latter there was always a slight air of disdain to give them away. In Vaun Adams, though, there had been no nervous exaggeration whatsoever. Watchful caution, yes, and a vague amusement, but, as Hawkin had said, there had been no fear, which in a woman who had spent over nine years in prison was a very strange thing.
She had seemed, now that Kate thought about it, open, honest, even trusting, amazing as that might be. Childlike in her confidence that the world would not hurt her. Less guarded, in fact, than twelve-year-old Amy Dodson had been.
Yet, this was a murderer who had spent a quarter of her life in prison.
Vaun Adams had claimed that her innocence had been taken from her. Certainly her paintings were not innocent. They were powerful, raw, subtle, moving, beautiful, sordid, pain-filled, and joyous, sometimes all at once, but innocence was not a word that came immediately to mind.
What is innocence, though? Kate wondered. There’s the legal definition, but isn’t innocence the absence of wickedness, of sin—that old word? “One of the world’s innocents.” An innocent was someone untouched by the wickedness of the world, whose simplicity was a highly polished surface where the dirt of the ugly world could not cling. (Oh, come now, Martinelli, the Scotch fumes are getting to you!) Nonetheless, she had met one or two of them, who would have been called saints in other times.
Is that what Vaun Adams is, truly: an innocent? A mirror who has seen considerable evil, in herself as well as others, and reflects it back, along with the good, becoming ever brighter in the process? How else to explain the lack of fear, or anger, or joy, or any strong emotion in the eyes of the painter, yet the tumultuous presence of all of them in the canvases she painted?
Can an innocent commit murder?
The muttering radio was forgotten as Kate’s mind reached back to a hot afternoon in New York the summer before, and the series of paintings that leapt from the white walls of the gallery. She and Lee stood long in front of the one entitled Strawberry Fields (Forever). It was a single figure of a man, a middle-aged Mexican farm worker, standing in the center of a vast field, row after row of strawberries, radiating endlessly, hypnotically, out from the horizon. He was leaning on a hoe, and the viewer’s eyes met his with a shock, for in his face and stance lay a total and uncomplaining acceptance of the miles of grueling work that lay around him and the knowledge that he would never finish, he could never really stop, would never get the dirt from under his thick fingernails or the ache from his back.
Many painters would have left it at that, glad enough to disturb the wealthy elite who would see the work and for a few hours feel ennobled by their guilt. Eva Vaughn, however, had gone one step further. As one studied the farm worker, the huge flat field, the hot blue sky, and came back to his face, gradually the feeling grew that this man was deeply, sublimely happy, in a way that someone with a choice could never be. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant” came to mind, and Kate had left the gallery much shaken. Strawberries had never tasted quite the same ever since.
Afterward she and Lee had gone to a nearly empty coffeehouse, and for an hour they had talked about Eva Vaughn and women in the world of art.
“Why do you think there are so few great women artists?” Kate had mused.
“Didn’t you even look at that Germaine Greer book I gave you?” Lee chided. “Yes, I know, anything that doesn’t have the word ‘forensic’ in the title gets pushed to the back. You do remember what the title of this one was, don’t you? The Obstacle Race, right. That should tell you what her thesis is. Men start off on a flat track, half the time with the proper shoes, starting blocks, and coaches. Women have to climb and struggle the whole way, mostly against the circular argument that women artists are minor artists, and therefore if a painting is by a woman it is a minor painting. Training of techniques, not just of art but of the craftsmanship that makes a painting last, the apprentice system, patronage—” Lee was launched on a monologue that left Kate far behind, catching the occasional familiar name—Rosa Bonheur, Berthe Morisot, Mary Cassatt, Suzanne Valadon—and a flood of others. “There’ve been any number of extremely competent, even brilliant women artists. Look at Artemesia Gentileschi—an infinitely superior painter than her more famous father. Or Mary Cassatt: some of her stuff is every bit as good as some of the male artists who were—and still are—better known than she was. Maybe if she’d had less of an emphasis on mothers and babies…I don’t know. I’m afraid that women have to be ten times as good as men to overcome their early training. Little girls are raised to be cautious and sensible. Even tomboys like you are too busy fighting their upbringing to leave it behind, and it’s the complete, passionate absorption in one single thing, like painting, that allows genius to produce. If you have to worry about folding clothes and constipated babies—if you have to worry about having babies at all—you can’t concentrate on one important thing. Geniuses of any kind are always impossibly bloody, single-minded bastards, and women have never had that option, not as a class, not until very recently.”
“What about Eva Vaughn? Or wouldn’t you count her as first rate?”
“Oh, God, yes, especially considering that she’s only in her thirties and getting better all the time. I don’t know about her, why she doesn’t fit the mold, except that maybe her genius is just so exceptionally great that it rules her. Nobody knows much about her. Even that article in Time said that she wouldn’t meet with the person who wrote it, although they talked on the phone a couple of times. Remember the rumor that Eva Vaughn was actually a man? That one’s still around, by the way. I heard a couple talking about it in the gallery.”
“You don’t think it’s possible, though?”
“There’d be no point in it. The work is so good it makes no difference if it was done by a man or a woman. No, I’m sure she’s a woman, a woman who’s somehow managed to break away from caution.” Lee tapped the photograph of Strawberry Fields that lay on the table, and looked wistful. “I’d love to meet her, to know how she’s done it, how she was raised to be that free.”
And now Kate knew how it had happened. Eva Vaughn would have been a fine painter any time, any place, but nearly a decade in a tough women’s prison, convicted of a crime intolerable even to the other inmates, had flayed her of her caution, had cut her loose from any of the expected possibilities. A normal woman would have gone mad, or retreated into the anonymity of ordinariness, or died. Instead, Vaun Adams, Eva Vaughn, had become empty of herself, had become a pair of all-seeing eyes and a pair of hands that held a brush, and she had channeled the pain and the beauty of life into her canvases. She was a murderer who had strangled a small girl, a child who would now be a woman of twenty-four had she lived. Nothing Vaun could be or d
o would make up for that, and deep down Kate could never finally forgive her. Painful as it was, she knew that her own work, her own humanity, demanded that she pit herself against the woman who had painted those magnificent visions of the human spirit. It was a bitter thought, as filthy and oppressive as the night outside.
On the outskirts of the city Hawkin woke and reached for the thermos.
“Not letting up any, is it?”
Kate pulled her thoughts back into polite normality with roughly the effort of pulling a boot from deep mud.
“No,” she said. “No, if anything it’s worse. The wind certainly is, even on this side of the hills.”
“Ah, well, it’ll blow over soon.” He seemed almost cheery, disgustingly so considering the night and the thoughts that had been in possession of Kate’s mind.
“Do you always wake up so cheerful after a nap?”
“Always, if it’s a nap. Sleep is a fine thing. You should try it sometime.” Kate hadn’t had a nap since she was five years old.
“Not while I’m driving, thanks.”
“You’re probably right. What’s that line about Brother Sleep?”
“Something from Saint Francis, no doubt.”
“No, it’s Shelley. ‘How wonderful is Death, Death and his brother Sleep.’”
“A comforting thought,” she said drily.
“Isn’t it? Isn’t it just?” He took a swallow of the coffee and made a disgusted noise. “Goddamn goat’s milk again. What’s that you’re listening to?”
She reached over and switched off the mumble of voices.
“A discussion of how to prepare for a catastrophe.”
“Appropriate. Drop me at the station, would you? Then go home and get some sleep. You’ve done well today.”
She tried to find the words patronizing, but in the end succumbed to the little glow of warmth they started up in her.
“We aim to please.”
“Wish I thought the same of Trujillo. Christ, what a miserable night.”
The garage was empty, which gave Kate a moment’s pause until she remembered that this was a third Thursday, Lee’s night working at the med center. Hell. The automatic door rumbled shut behind her, and she gathered up an armload of debris from the car—sodden clothing, sandwich bags, thermos and two cups, handbag, shoulder holster, jacket. Plodding up the stairs she thought, I have been on duty or reading files for fifty hours out of the last seventy-six, since six o’clock Monday night. I am tired.
With that thought came another, something that had occurred to her as she drove home. She glanced down at the boxes of newspapers and magazines piled at the back of the garage awaiting recycling, and then shook her head firmly and went on. Nope. Not even for Al Hawkin. It would wait. She needed to sit still, think of nothing, eat something. One word of praise from the man was not going to turn her into a fanatic.
At the top of the stairs she unlocked the door, stepped into the house, dropped the armload in an untidy heap on the floor, turned, and walked back down the stairs.
The magazine she was looking for wasn’t in the recycling bins, so she turned to the doors under the stairs and began a haphazard search: intuition, past experience had taught her, was the best tool to use in breaking Lee’s idiosyncratic filing system.
It took another twenty minutes, about average. She shoved the rest of the journals, magazines, and photocopied abstracts back into place, wrestled the doors shut, and returned to the house.
She tossed the magazine onto the kitchen table and went to investigate the refrigerator, whose contents sat complacent in the knowledge that in her present state they were quite safe. She took out the cheese bin and broke off some knobs of a hard orange cheddar, dumped half a box of crackers into a big bowl with the cheese and a couple of pears, poured some dark, heady Pinot Noir into a stubby French glass, and took the lot back to the table, where she sat with her elbows on either side of the magazine, emptying bowl and glass and reading the article.
It was even longer than she remembered, a fair chunk of the glossy art journal’s hundred and fifty pages, and actually comprised separate articles by three different people, two men and a woman. She looked at the three photographs, two of them older and aristocratic faces, one aggressively blue-collar, and glanced through their biographical sketches, filled with vaguely familiar names of galleries, museums, and art schools, before turning to the articles themselves.
The woman, an editor of the journal, had written a very helpful if noncommittal review of the known history of Eva Vaughn, from the first, almost unheard-of one-woman show twelve years before, which had set the art world to talking and had sold out within a week, to the recent New York show that Kate had seen with Lee. Noncommittal was not the word, Kate decided. Frustrated, perhaps. Baffled, even. The woman was certainly torn and had retreated into the safety of facts. That Eva Vaughn was a difficult person to contact, and quite impossible for a mere journalist to meet face-to-face. That her oeuvre of paintings and sketches represented the first real threat to the supremacy of Abstract Expressionism since it had conquered the art world beginning in the forties. That her approach to art, painstaking and painfully traditional, had already begun to make people think about the role of art and about “painterly” paintings (a derogatory description, Kate was surprised and amused to find). That, most amazing of all, it was a woman who had swept in like a Vandal through Rome, a barbarian with power on her side against the civilized art establishment; a woman, an outsider, a source of absolutely maddening frustration.
The introductory article came to an abrupt end, through poor editing or a fear on the part of the author that her objectivity was about to fail her. The other two essays, by the men, were a pro and con, which began side by side before setting off to leapfrog through the advertisements for galleries, liquors, and jewelers. After trying to keep both going at once, Kate gave it up and read the anti-Eva Vaughn first, written by the man who looked like a bricklayer, beginning it at the kitchen table and ending up in the bath.
It was like reading a technical piece in a foreign language: the words looked familiar, but she found it almost impossible to hang on to the train of thought. Individual phrases stood out, though, and the cumulative effect was one of scathing, vituperative condescension. Eva Vaughn’s vision was compared with flea-market seascapes, “Wyeth with a social conscience,” “Grandma Moses naiveté combined with Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro,” whatever that meant. As the writer became more insistent his obscurant terminology fell away like an acquired accent, until he seemed to be holding off Anglo-Saxon monosyllables with an effort.
Miss Vaughn [he wrote] has proven highly popular with the masses, those who grumble that they know what they like, that their five-year-old can do as well, those who like their bodies three-dimensional and their emotions simple. Eva Vaughn has legitimized classical forms for the twentieth-century proletariat. That the forms are empty of anything but nostalgia matters not.
Ouch. The writer went back to another bout of technical language, which Kate skimmed in self-defense, although some passages stood out:
In The Creek Vaughn achieves a level of sensual sentimentality that would render a male painter suspect of pedophilia. Quiet belongs in the pages of a specialist journal of female erotica. The derivative Troll Bridge looks as though Bouguereau had set out to finish Munch’s Scream: horror prettied up.
Finally, he concluded:
Miss Vaughn’s refusal to see and be seen makes her highly suspect in the world of art, where dialogue and criticism are the only things that save an artist from drowning in her own vision. Instead of learning from her century, she seems determined to turn her back on it, to the extent of an eremitical existence somewhere, apparently, in California, judging from the recurrence of redwood trees, Hispanic farm workers, and unreconstructed flower children gone somewhat to seed. Her motto seems to be ‘Eva Vaughn, mystery lady of the brush,’ as carefully nurtured an idiosyncrasy as we have seen for a long time, on a par with Dali’s moustach
e and Warhol’s collections. The public is beginning to know her by her characteristic absence. Perhaps the walls of certain galleries should follow suit, and recognize Miss Vaughn for the absent, imitative would-be that she is.
Scalpel and bludgeon. Kate wondered if Vaun had seen it, and if so whether she had difficulties picking up her brushes the next day. She took herself and her reading to bed, and tackled the third writer.
The aristocratic gentleman’s style was more accessible than the anti’s, but his enthusiasm was cautious. It would have been easy, Kate realized, for the editor to have chosen for this section an author whose effusiveness undermined his case but, despite her own reservations, the editor had not done so. His praise was unstinting, but he was sternly prepared to demonstrate the flaws and inadequacies of Miss Vaughn’s work.
The names that come to mind [he wrote] are not those of the moderns, not Rauschenberg or Picasso or even Monet, but the noble and formal names of centuries past and styles no longer taught, or taught only as a dead language, for the purpose of translation. For Eva Vaughn has taken an outmoded, classical, dead style, imbued it with the idiom of the twentieth century, and restored it scintillating to life.
Her images are classically simple: a man, a woman, some children, a kitchen. Landscape is background, allegorical in its overtones but secondary to the humans who dominate all her work. The figures are generally unposed, or informally so, and so intimately known as to embarrass the viewer.
Aside from that, it is difficult to reduce the Eva Vaughn style to mere description, even to say that she belongs to one school or another. The lesbian lovers of Quiet are caught in a shaft of light from a window, two fresh bodies pinned into the still, silent moment of a Vermeer, a suspension of movement before life sweeps in again to animate and discomfit. Her farm laborers—Strawberry Fields, Three P.M., and Green Beans—rival Van Gogh for lumpen grittiness. The surface beauty (how seldom does a critic use that word in a review!) of Cos, Asleep could have come from Bouguereau’s brush, and the voluptuous pleasure of the woman’s sprawl could be an early Renoir, but whence comes the vague sense of unease? Is there menace in the shadow that falls across the bed, or is it merely the drapes? Is that a man’s shoe in the corner, or the arm of a chair? Is the scarlet stain a part of the multicolored bed cover, or something more sinister? Is Cas actually asleep? Or does she lie there, murdered in her bed?
A Grave Talent Page 10
