I
"Mondrian,
as I recall, hated green. (He was a famous painter.) There's less green in his work
than any other colour. Whatever issue he had with the colour green, who knows?
It was his own thing. I myself avoid green probably for a completely different
reason, though I can't really explain it. Usually I sum it up to be a technical
challenge. How can I paint landscapes while avoiding the colour green? Sounds
crazy, right, kid? You can see there's bits of green in this picture here:
these stripes here are a dirty green, but they fade off into ochres and
yellows. In any case, can't you see you can reduce the picture to three
stripes: there's trees, off-greenish; with sky, bluish, above; and water,
mostly blue, below? I'm not much interested in detail here. I'll be re-doing it
in my basement studio in town. Getting away from light‑I paint in very dim lighting‑lets me get down
to focussing on the forms in play, to clarify how everything in my vision fits
together."
The
kid watched the painter mix together some watercolours‑'yellow' and 'red'
was about as far as he could express them‑then look out onto the quiet
Muskoka-area lake and sigh: "This might work." He smeared the picture
with yellow-red through the middle and studied it quietly.
The
kid asked: "So, so do you paint naked girls too?"
The
painter looked at the kid carefully. "Aren't you a bit young for
that?"
"I'm
almost eleven. Girls are weird. I saw my mom naked once. It was weird."
Mid-August,
and midday, and quiet but for the lapping waters on the lake's shore and the
birds up to their bird-business 'twas when the opinion that it was 'weird' for
the kid to see his mother naked was offered up. The painter frankly told the
kid, "I haven't painted a 'naked girl' for quite some time. Twenty years
at least. I think I quit all figure, 'naked,' drawing without even
noticing." He shook his head. "It wasn't my thing."
The
kid grabbed his bare toes and kneaded them. Squinting in the sun he asked:
"You wouldn't happen to have any of your naked girl pictures on you, would
you?"
The
painter shook his head. "Not a single one." He shrugged, smiling.
"Sorry."
From
afar a woman called the kid's name, three times.
The
kid looked. Hesitated. "I guess I should go see what that's all
about. See you round."
"Later."
The
kid got up and trotted away with a skip in his walk. The painter and the kid
had been living side-by-side in adjacent cabins for four days. The kid had
approached the painter, and once the kid's parents had reasonably-well-guessed
the painter wasn't some kind of pederast, everything was okay. The kid knew how
to keep his distance for the most part because he could tell the painter was a
serious guy who spent most of his time sketching and painting and who didn't
have the time for any fooling around. The painter did his work from dawn to
dusk, with breaks for meals and a late-afternoon swim, just as he'd been doing
at that exact spot every summer for fifteen years, every day, for a two-week
period, Jul/Aug. In all the evenings of all the days of the other fifty weeks
of the years you could find him in his basement apartment developing his
sketches and waters into oils, as if he was living in a photographer's
dark-room.
The
kid had asked him the day before, "So, how much do you sell them all
for?"
The
painter said, "No-one wants to buy my paintings. Yet."
"So they will want to at some time?"
"I
think so ... though the world may never ever catch up to the brilliant ideas I
have. The ordinary artist aims at a target everyone can see, but the
extraordinary artist aims at a target no-one can see."
[For
the rest of the year, down in the city, the painter had an okay day job. But
that's not relevant at all.]
The
light changed, causing the lake and the trees to change, signalling that the
afternoon sky had ceased to be, and that it was now twilight sky. The artist,
as usual, took the event to mean it was time to set down his gear for a
two-hour break. He carried his stuff up to the cabin and put it all down on the
round russet spruce table in the sun-porch. He went inside, to bed-side, where
he slipped into his swimsuit still stiff from drying after yesterday's plunge.
He took up his striped towel, went outside again, then down to the boathouse
from which he'd launched himself ten to fourteen times every year for a decade
and a half. (Some days, of course, it had rained.) He dropped his towel and
jumped into the lake.
He
swam out vigorously, under and over, fast, the water pulling his hair. He was
looking at the vivid dark greens of the lake murk down below, seeing in them
the colour of the trees as they would be three hours in the future. The sky,
the land, the water: all of a piece and interchangeable. He put his head up to
see he'd gotten turned around and looking at the boathouse. He looked to his
right to see smoke rising‑the kid's dad had started up the evening
barbecue; the family was a quiet family that kept to themselves save for the
kid. He looked to the left to see the next promontory or cape or whatever‑a
strange blue car was parked there, with its driver door open; the painter could
hear music coming from it; music slow and old that he couldn't quite make out.
He swam back to the boathouse to push off again one last time, to stare at the
cloudless sky. It would be a good night for star-gazing, if you were into
star-gazing, which he wasn't.
He
climbed out of the water and towelled off. He went up to the clothesline near
his cabin, shucked off his trunks under his towel, carefully so as not to
expose his genitals. In the cabin he pulled on his jeans and shirt again. His
hair felt nice. Seldom did it get so clean.
The
barbecue got lit again and a steak went onto it. He turned it a couple times,
medium rare, put it on a plate and went inside and ate it. It was a simple life
he led up there, two weeks a year.
The
sun was about thirty degrees above the horizon, meaning (to the painter) that
he still had two-and-a-half hours in which to rapidly sketch and gouache and
paint representations of the effects on the landscape of destroyer time
consuming the sun as had happened every single day for some five billion years.
Out he went down to the table by the lake with his usual equipment and two
bottles of beer. He looked out across the lake and squinted, meanwhile asking
himself if he believed what he'd told the kid about the world eventually maybe
never catching up with him. Maybe he was off on an intellectual dead-end branch
line; maybe his aesthetic theories were all folly. Regardless, he figured, he'd
gone too far to turn back now; he had to continue with his routine; and it was
a good routine.
Two
hours later, after a quick-sketch phase, a colour-field phase, and an India-ink
phase, and a combination-of-all phase, he heard a loud splash from off to his
right. By that time the landscape was almost completely ebony. He sat still,
brush in hand, awaiting some more noise from the general direction, but there
wasn't any. Perhaps it had been a bear jumping after a surprised trout. It was
difficult to say, there in the very dark.
He
gathered up his things and carried them into the sun-porch. He turned on a lamp
and sat in the uncomfortable chair he liked to sit in. It was time for some
easy time. He picked up Goethe's book on colours and started to read.
Little
did he know....
Little
did he know....
Little
did he know, the next morning, the next pre-dawn, after carrying down to the
table his tray of colours and an easel and canvas, that he would settle into
the near-darkness to watch the changing of the light across the horizontal stripes
of sky, ground, water and, after some time, after the sky brightened up, notice
something out-of-sorts in his vista. Little did he know he would then realize
that the naked corpse of a girl had washed up onto the rocks not fifteen feet
away from where he would be sitting, and that he would quietly look over her
corpse and then after a quick scan for witnesses through the lake and through
the sky that he would take the girl's corpse up by the armpits and drag her
past the easel, past the firepit, and to the cabin door. Not yet did he know he
would pull open the cabin door and drag her inside, into the sun-porch and
through, into the bed-space, and put her on the bed and cover her up with a
tawny blanket. Little did he know then, as he was sitting and reading Goethe,
that he would a little after dawn next morning sit down in a wooden chair
beside the corpse of a young woman, in his fourteen-nights-rented bed, and not
do unspeakable or horrendous things to her.
II
Since
her unconsciousness could no longer fight against dawn's sun, a neck-ache, and
an irritating dream about a crossword puzzle, the mother awoke. Window, cabin,
husband, kid, land, walls, lake: they got her out of bed and onto her feet. She
scratched and pulled at herself before going into the little room, and next she
had to find the kid, who was already up and at em, natch, out on the back step rocking to-and-fro and
seeing things adults can't.
She
saw him through the screen.
That
done, she sat down on the urethane-cushion-covered wood-frame excuse-for-a-couch
far away from the screen. It's hard to do, isn't it? To sit quietly in a
disconnected corner, just you, yourself, and you, and see the world swirling
around, with all its scents and heights and sparks and burns, only to find
yourself mysteriously occupying the dead centre of it all.
(We
can't feel like that all the time, for we got rent to pay, but there does come
precious times seldom‑very seldom‑when we can sense Mind and Cosmos
and how they inter-relate, like the falcon and the falconer when their eyes
lock to see.)
The
mother felt almost there; she tried to understand; then her
husband blew a loud one; and she wanted coffee.
She
made the coffee and started up the breakfast. The father, she heard, get up, so
everything was right on schedule. In no time at all they shoved into the table
nook with coffee, toast, bacon, and eggs.
It
was a very important day that day, you'll see. Her husband was going to take
the kid to the other side of the cape where another lake lay, a lake rumoured
to be the kingdom of a dinosaur fish older than the Earth itself, who had
already killed some fifty men, and who was in there just below the surface
literally asking to be caught with a dime-store rod-and-reel.
Father-and-son
put all their gear in the car, and, as you've no doubt already expected, mother
and father kissed as intimately as you'd do when you're writing down your
signature at some shipping company's dockside dispatch.
Now
left alone, with the hiss of gravel fading, meaning that father-and-son were on
the other side of the cape, she went out onto the porch and looked to where the
painter should have been.
But
he was not there. She'd known the painter for such a long time that she thought
maybe he'd finally blown a shell through his brain and ended it all, or
something worse. She had no idea if the painter remembered her from some
fifteen years before, when she'd been fifteen, a fact which she'd recalled only
the day before, in that exact cabin beside his, where out there on the push of
rock he'd paint and sketch all the time and where she'd feared to tread. She'd
of course been with her parents at the time....
She
went outside her cabin. The screen door groaned behind her.
Are
you surprised that I am telling you she went down to the painter's vista and
sat herself down there, doubtless fearing that she was audaciously trespassing?
Can you believe me when I tell you she sat like a $50-an-hour junkie model at
OCAD?
It
would be wrong for me to reveal explicitly her motivation. Nonetheless, that's
what she did. She went down to the water's edge to the place she'd seen him
painting or sketching or whatever three out of the last four days and she chose
to sit there, waiting.
He
will come down, soon for sure.
Fifteen
minutes passed. She heard him before she saw him, as a screen door creaked, as
she looked up to his cabin. He was coming down to the lake, unburdened by
easels and paints. He waved lightly, and she waved back. "Hi," she
said.
"Good
morning," said the painter. "What's up?"
"They've
gone fishing, and so.... Do you know I met you fifteen years ago?"
"Did
you?"
"Yes,
here. I was with my parents, beside you, up there. I didn't realize it until
yesterday."
He
looked amused. "You must've been young."
"Something
like fifteen."
"Well,
well, well. Now you're married and got a kid."
"That's
right." She twisted around a little, she put her body in motion, she
showed him what she was made of. "And you're still painting the same
lake."
He
thought for a moment. "It's a good lake."
"Yeah,
but do you ever do figure-painting?"
He
laughed. "Funny, your son asked me the same thing yesterday."
"Did
he?"
"Naked
girls. He wanted to know about naked girls."
She
smiled. "Ah yes. One time in a motel he saw my naked. He acted pretty
strange the whole day."
The
artist didn't mention he'd heard tell of that event already; rather, he looked
out at the lake and thought about his indoors project.
She
interrupted his thoughts. "So no-one's around. Do
you want to do some figure-painting?"
"Right
here? Now?"
She
hopped up. "Sure. Here. Give me a couple minutes."
She
ran off to her cabin. Meanwhile, the artist went in and got his sketchbook and
pencils and charcoal. He kept himself from thinking about what any of it meant
or how it had come about. He concentrated on his vision. He named off the hues
he saw in front of him, trying to see around the corners of nature. He turned
when he heard her say: "Here I am." She was in cargo shorts and a
t-shirt and her hair was damp. She was barefoot and she had a towel in hand.
"Well,
well." He looked at a big rock right at water's edge. "That looks
like a good spot. Here." He took her towel and ran it over the rock then
laid it down flat in a perfect gesture of form-making. "Sit down there and
look somewhere. For three minutes."
She
sat down, keeping her legs straight, put her palms on her knees, and looked at
a yellow bird-feeder. Scritch-scratch said the
charcoal and pencils. She was the centre of attention for at least two miles
around; this had something of a biological effect on her.
"Okay
now; find a different pose. This one's up to you."
She
looked slowly and carefully around the lake and then slowly and carefully
around the land. She crossed her arms, took the hem of the shirt in hand, and
pulled it off to toss it aside. She unbuttoned her cargo shorts and pushed them
off. They went to where the shirt was.
She
resumed the same pose, now entirely naked, staring at the yellow bird-feeder.
Scritch-scratch said the charcoal and
pencils. He said, "This is coming along nicely."
She
heard big paper turning over. He said, "Okay, I want to try something. Lie
on you back and stare up at the sky. I want to get something of the lake and
the trees in the background. That's right. Put your arms out, and spread your
legs a little. Give me some time with this one."
She
lay there, staring up at the clouds as they broke apart and joined other
clouds. They were lower in the sky than you'd think. She dozed off once, into a
dream. She was waiting for her demon lover in a garden. She awoke when she felt
a rivulet coldly wetting the towel under her ass. She turned her head to look
at the artist. He looked very serious. She looked up at the sky again. She
thought about the birds all around and the lake lapping over rocks. She
wondered what the next pose would be. According to the day's precedent, it
would be her choice. She thought of certain poses and the towel got wetter.
An
hour seemed to have passed when the painter said, "Okay, that's about all
I can do for now." He gently slipped the sheet to the back of the pad.
She
said, "I think you need another pose," as she stood up to face him
head-on, putting her hands on her thighs and moving her upper arms together.
Without
looking away he put the pad down to the ground. "I thought your mind was going there."
"The
towel never lies."
He
stood up and pulled off his shirt. She said, "Your place or mine?"
For
a moment he couldn't say anything, and even blushed. He laughed. "No-one's
around for miles and miles. It's such a nice morning out here." Her
demeanour did not change as he took off his shoes socks shorts.
She
sat down on a non-wet spot of the towel on the rock. She took him by his hips
as he got closer.
[...]
She
said, "The sun's starting to get to me. It's, like, noon. Let's go in your
cabin."
"I'd
rather we went into yours."
"Fine
by me." She wasn't about to make an issue of it; they could be together a
whole five days more. "Let's go to my cheap filthy couch."
He
picked up his clothes and supplies and took them up to his porch. She followed,
clothes in hand. They walked over to her cabin, and she was amused by his
'swing.' They went into her cabin, which was much bigger than his cabin, with
two bedrooms rather than none. She lay back on the couch and let her left arm
and left leg trail to the rag carpet.
[...]
Little
did she know....
Little
did she know....
Little
did she know that the following morning the drowned body of a young woman would
be found on the property, a little down the shore as the current went, by the
groundskeeper who only came on Thursdays, and the local police would arrive to
investigate, and she, her husband, and son would be questioned as to whether
they knew the girl who by that time had been identified as a local girl who'd
gone missing on Tuesday. She didn't know she would be crying about the
senselessness of it, nor did she know she would stand biting her thumb reading
the police tape when the painter came up to her to shake his head and say, "Just
awful. Awful." She didn't know the whole cape would become a crime scene,
nor that her family would get carted off to a local hotel so the investigation
could proceed, nor that two days later they would return to the cabin whereupon
they would gather up all their belongings and depart. She didn't know the
police would find the young woman's car up the lake, and call it all a case of
an accidental drowning. Finally, she was very far from knowing they would not
return to the cabin for almost precisely a year.
III
"The
colour green is in everything. I noticed it last year. So now when I paint I
always add a little pure green to any colour. It's life, and it's also
putrefaction. You know what putrefaction is?"
The
kid said: "It's like rotting?"
"Yes,
like rotting." His canvas looked almost underwater, so slightly green.
"Everything connects through greenness."
"Huh."
The kid was bored. "When will my sister start talking?"
"I'm
the wrong person to ask." The artist cross-hatched some clouds. "It's
under a year, I think."
"Well,
she's almost three months now. I hope she's a fast learner.... Painted any
naked ladies?"
"Oh,
I did something over the winter. It was from sketches made up here, a year ago
in fact."
"Can
I see?"
"....I
don't have it with me."
"Too
bad."
"Yeah,
too bad."
A
familiar voice called his name. The kid said, "There she goes, like
clockwork."
"She
doing okay?"
"Who?"
"Your
mother."
"Sure,
I guess. My new sister came out okay. It was very exciting."
"I'll
bet it was." The painter squinted at the lake and everything dissolved
into a kaleidoscopic blur.
The
kid said: "Too bad about that girl last year." He sounded genuinely
sad.
"Yes,
it was a shame. Accidents. I've seen some; had some. Nasty stuff."
Man
and boy both contemplated fate for a moment. Then the younger said: "I
have to go. I'll see you later."
The
artist said: "I'll see you later, kid."
The
kid ran off. The artist mixed his green-greens, his blue-greens, his
black-greens, and his brown-greens to continue his landscaping. Contrary to
reason, he didn't think his earlier aversion to green had meant he had been on
the wrong track. There's a time and a place for everything, even contraries.
Figure and background, water and sky, life and death: he gathered up his art stuff and carried it
all to his cabin.
Ten
minutes later he was in the water, swimming out strongly. He turned back to
look at the land. He looked to his left, where a strange car had once been, and
he looked to his right, to the cabin in which lay encradled a girl that may
have been his daughter. He laughed in the water and coughed as some millilitres
of water got into his lungs. He coughed more, saw he was in trouble, and
quickly swam back to the boathouse. He pulled himself up and coughed like an
elephant for a minute. It had been, he thought, a close call. Oh, to drown!
Time
for his steak and beer, like always. Down near the water's edge he ate. He had
the feeling she was biding her time; maybe she would drop by next day. Maybe
yes, maybe no, maybe yes, maybe no. He'd play it as it lay.
He
sketched the sun-set sky. The sun was in the same place as the year before. The
moon, on the other hand, was further along on its line through the sky, which
had an effect on his picture-making. Just when it was almost too dark to see,
the painter gathered everything up and got to bed.
In
the morning he was back down at the water-edge, sketching and painting and
mining enough raw material to last him through the winter. A breeze carried an
unforgettable scent to his nostrils. He turned his head, and she was there.
"Hi,"
she said.
He
nodded. "I figured you'd be by. I hoped
you'd come by."
She
shrugged. "I should have come by earlier, but you know how it is."
"Nice
baby."
"Yeah.
She's sleeping right now. Sleeping like a baby."
He
didn't ask the obvious question, and thus they both learned the answer to it.
He smiled. He'd never had a child before. His pipes worked after all.
"My
boy tells me you're now painting with green. Green everywhere, he says."
"Yes,
I've done a total about-face. I could go on about why ... but then you'd have
my secret and I'd have to kill you."
She
laughed. "So last year.... Oh, last year!" She blushed and her knees
knocked. "With everything that happened, the ... accident ..., we didn't
have the chance for a proper farewell."
He
gestured to her, to himself, to the landscape. "It looks to me now like we
had no need for a farewell, considering we're together again; and I take it
we'll be together forever."
She
got his point. They were joined, by a baby girl, ... perhaps. (I personally
know the truth of the matter but I'm not telling.)
She
looked over to the water, which was very inviting, like it was asking her to
join it. "A farewell happens every minute, somewhere. Did you do anything
with those drawings?"
He
bucked up, for he had an answer prepared. "I painted a really good
painting from that day. I spent all August on it."
"It's
a good picture, is it?"
He
blushed. "I made something of a breakthrough."
She
thought things through, then said, "I guess you don't have it on
you?"
"No,
no. But I took a couple pictures of it." He didn't tell her he'd
photographed his painting for her and her alone. He didn't tell her how lucky
he'd felt three days before, when he'd seen a familiar car roll up to cabin A.
He didn't tell her that his digital camera was queued up to the very shot and
ready to be seen.
She
trembled with laughter and shook her head. "Then go find me the picture
and show me, whatever your name is."
The
painter went up the bank to his cabin and disappeared briefly then was present
again and holding a laptop.
"I'm
not so great at photographing," he said, "so the colours here are a
bit off."
The
painting showed a landscape, as she expected, with a lake and excessively green
trees on the other side and just a couple rocks in the foreground, with the
lake itself making up the main part of the picture. Slightly off to one side,
middle, was a naked woman floating on her back, with her eyes closed. She
recognized her body as it had posed a year before, but the face was entirely
different. It was the face of a younger woman, possibly twenty, with her mouth
slightly parted. In the lower right corner were the words written in cursive:
Ophelia ex Arcadia.
She
looked at the picture for some time. She thought it quite beautiful. She asked,
"So did you sell it?"
"I'm
never selling it."
She
looked up to her cabin. Their alleged daughter was probably still sleeping
soundly, for she always slept for hours at a time. She undid two buttons of her
shirt and said, "It's really a great picture." She closed the laptop.
"Do you have some free time?"
He
looked out at the calm lake and said, "Sorry. I know what you got in mind
and ... frankly, I'm just not inspired."
