The Arcadists

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."