The Underpainter (22 page)

“I was the only woman in the room,” she said. “None of the men dared look in my direction. I think they pitied me.”

Did I say I experienced the stirrings of guilt? I’m not certain that is an accurate description of my initial reaction. It was only later that I understood, or perhaps hoped, that the irritation I felt was in all likelihood brought on by the beginnings of conscience. Whatever the case, as Sara talked about her two nights in the dining room, my mild anger began to be replaced by something else, something I can only describe as a kind of prurience. Shortly before I left New York I had stood one afternoon looking at a finished picture of Sara, naked in her kitchen,
and I had sensed suddenly that what the painting needed, what all my paintings of Sara needed, was a darker edge. I’m speaking about emotion here. There was an absence in these paintings, the nature of which I couldn’t identify: the effect was muted, calm, almost sentimental. Then, quite spontaneously, I decided it was her calm, the model’s calm, that needed to be shattered. She was, in the pictures and in actuality, like an animal at rest in a perfect habitat, a deer in an unthreatening forest. None of the energy caused by, say, entrapment, was present in her face, her body. I did not want my paintings to be mere reproductions of states of grace.

I listened to her speak in her understated way about her pain and shame in the face of these decent working men. Their curiosity, their pity for her. They would have known — anyone would have known — that she was waiting for a man, a man who had not yet and might never appear. And although she had told the hotel keeper otherwise, he and all his guests would have known that the man she waited for was not her husband. The humiliation of this was still with her when I undressed her and lay with her on the creaking bed.

Why did I not take Sara to the dining room for breakfast the next morning? Couldn’t I have allowed her the comfort of showing the men in the hotel that the lover she had waited for had finally arrived? We went instead to a soda fountain up the hill, where we ate bacon sandwiches. As if I had planned this endurance test — and perhaps in some ways I had — I did not
grant her respite from shame. I wanted to draw it in her face and body when we got back to Silver Islet. I wanted it to persist. I wanted to break her calm, add pain to the composition. The dark edge I was so certain I desired had entered the expression of her face.

She would not trust me again for a long, long time. I believed her attachment to me would be stronger as a result of her uncertainty. I became convinced that all of this would make the paintings better. But it was not Sara who caused the hollowness in my work.

How long did she remain in the memories of the miners, I wonder, this blonde woman, plainly dressed, alone at a table? Was there one among them who held on to a picture of her face, her downcast eyes. Or is it only I who retain the image of unease? She would have come down to eat in the dining room because she wouldn’t have known what else to do. Sitting in a room full of men reading letters from home, a room full of received messages, messages for everyone but her, food growing cold on the plate, shame making it difficult to swallow, she would listen to the trains pass the hotel, watch the coal smoke descend through the evening light. Then, when she could bear it no longer, she would wipe her mouth with her napkin, rise, cross the dining room with all eyes upon her, and climb the stairs to the empty room.

What, I ask you, is more intimate than this: total recollection of a scene I had never witnessed, but one over which I nonetheless had perfect control?

When I was again alone with Sara in the upstairs room of her log house, I painted her with her head in profile and her back
to the south wall. The charcoal reminder I had written the year before remained, smudged but readable, on the plaster.

I painted the wall and the words into the picture. I wanted the dark calligraphy of the appointment I had broken to look like an accusation emerging from Sara’s mouth.

O
ne of my stopovers in Davenport coincided with a weekend, but, according to George, his friend the nurse would not be in town as she didn’t have the time off. We were spending a quiet Saturday afternoon in the China Hall. It had been raining and few customers had made their way to the shop. George was working on one of his vases at the end of the counter; I was writing a letter to Rockwell at a small table on the other side of the shop. I must have been chuckling to myself because, quite abruptly, George placed his brush on the counter and asked me why I was laughing.

“I’ve just written something terribly funny,” I said.

George looked at me expectantly.

“It’s about New York,” I said. “Just something about an art dealer in New York.”

George picked up his brush again. I had noticed, since the war, there was sometimes a slight tremor in his right hand. At this moment it seemed more pronounced. He was painting a
delicate motif that involved stems and thorns and trellises, and I could see he was having trouble with it.

“Well,” he said, “I guess I wouldn’t know anything about all that.”

“You wouldn’t want to know,” I said. “Art politics.”

George placed the brush on the counter again, massaged his right wrist, then resumed painting. He leaned closer to the vase. He had begun to wear glasses now when he worked, and I saw he was squinting through the lenses. Without removing his gaze from the painting, he reached towards a pot with the brush, his hand now shaking quite visibly. He missed his mark, tipped over the pot, and enamel paint spilled across the counter. A small lavender stream trickled to the floor.

He made no move to clean up after the accident. Instead, he closed his eyes and was quiet for several moments. Then he dropped the brush, opened his eyes, rested his elbows on the counter, and looked at his hands, which he held, fingers splayed, about a foot from his face. Both of his forearms were trembling now. “God,” he said. “Jesus.”

He just sat there and stared at his hands twitching uncontrollably in front of him, the colour draining from his face. The white cloth of one shirt sleeve had turned lavender around the elbow. The paint made a ticking sound as it fell, drop by drop to the floor.

“I can’t…” George said. “I can’t…”

I could not interpret what was happening to him. “What the …” I began, unable even to form an appropriate question. Every cell in my body was moving towards panic.

George’s torso began to shake, but not with the same intensity as his hands, the fingers of which had begun to twitch spasmodically.

“I can’t,” he kept saying. “I can’t.” Certain objects on the counter were beginning to rattle. He had pushed his stool against the wall behind him where cups and saucers on shelves were now making slight clinking noises.

“What is it? What’s the matter?” My heart was hammering my ribcage. I registered a feeling of nausea, but I did not look away. I could see that George’s teeth were chattering. It was as if he were experiencing his own private earthquake.

Suddenly I found myself across the room, holding both of his hands in my own. Anyone looking in would have thought we were involved in an absurd form of arm wrestling. “Stop!” I was shouting. His face was so close to mine I could see his pores.

“I can’t,” he whispered. But the shaking was diminishing.

“Stop,” I said in a quieter tone, my own heartbeat beginning to slow.

“Just keep holding my hands,” George was saying. “Keep holding my hands.”

Later, when he had regained control, he thanked me, as if my actions had been ones of intentional kindness. “It’s the war,” he said, by way of an explanation, though I had not asked one question. “This happens sometimes.”

I had been thinking epilepsy, stroke. The war had been over for at least ten years.

Not wanting to dwell on what had taken place I returned to my letter and began to reread what I had been writing. I saw
then that the tone of it was mean-spirited, cynical. There was nothing amusing about it at all.

After this began a period of about a year during which George wrote me several long letters about his friend Augusta. It was as if he were trying to explain his attachment, not so much to me but to himself. He loved the notion that she had grown up not ten miles away from him, that she had lived on a farm, was reared in a world of fields and villages. He wrote that he wanted to restore in her everything that had been brought to flower in that life. Those things around her that had been all but obliterated by the war. Would he have succeeded, I wonder, even for a moment? In her love for him, would she let him believe that he was succeeding when, in fact, the opposite was true? After all, they were in so many ways each other’s reminder of the war, having both seen the results of battles, having shared — if only briefly — the ward at Étaples. Still, they may have believed that restoration was possible, in George’s unchanging China Hall and during her visits from the city. They would sometimes drive on the dusty country roads, passing small brick churches and schoolhouses. Now and then they visited Augusta’s village for weddings or funerals, and quite frequently they took a Sunday meal with Augusta’s now solitary mother.

Years later, Augusta told me that her most vivid memories of the farm concerned the infrequent days of complete silence in her
house. “When we were older,” she said, “my brothers and I were able to miss the first weeks of class because of the harvest. We considered this a great treat, though we worked harder than we ever did at school.”

Early September was often the hottest time of the year; the autumn sun burning into the earth; creeks and rivers shrinking in size. The boys would be out in the fields from dawn until dusk, and her mother would be busy with the large market garden directly across the lane, so Augusta, the daughter of the house, would be left indoors alone to clean the kitchen and bedrooms.

The four oldest boys slept in what the family referred to as the “north room” at the top of the stairs. Situated over the kitchen and the parlour, it was the largest space in the house, incorporating four windows and a snakelike stovepipe, which thrust itself up from the kitchen woodstove and entered the room through the floor, travelled across the ceiling, pierced the wall overtop the door frame, and continued down the hall. This leviathan distributed a surprising amount of warmth in the winter, but would seem cold, useless, awkward in a season of heat.

Each morning during the harvest, Augusta would pull a child’s wagon laden with stoneware water jugs out to the fields, which had become golden and lush with mature grain or which had transformed themselves into forests of tall corn. As they filled their cups, her brothers would sometimes talk to her about whether the work was going well, and this would please her. After this she would walk back, past the place where her almost forgotten snow house had been, return to the house, and climb
the stairs to sweep the floor, to remove the cobwebs that would have formed on the stovepipe overnight, and to make the beds in the north room.

Even though it was not yet ten o’clock in the morning, the heat was often terrific, the room stained yellow by the sun beating against drawn blinds. Evidence of activity was everywhere, making the absence and the stillness more profound. Flies, drunk with sunlight, buzzed now and then in the corners of windows, but apart from this, Augusta told me, the silence was almost palpable.

The room was like a memorial to animation. Each bed that Augusta straightened seemed to have been the site of a skirmish, each garment that she lifted from the floor was like something that, moments before, had been filled with energy and motion; something recently killed. A pleasant languor would start to envelope her as she moved slowly across the floor, stooping, smoothing, stretching sometimes, to hang discarded overalls from a hook or a nail on the wall. Flies continued to buzz drowsily in the heat. The smell of sweat — hers, her brothers’ — was always present. Occasionally Augusta would find herself standing perfectly still with a pillowslip, or a shirt clutched in a ball near her stomach. She could never remember what it was she had been thinking about.

This was the time of the year when the boys became particularly glorious. Their skin was darkened, their hair bleached by sun. Augusta said they looked to her like the apostles, or the muscular male angels she remembered from her Sunday-school cards. Calmed by labour, they were gentle, quiet, grateful at suppertime. Augusta could never understand how she, a girl with
such dark hair, could be a sister to boys so blond. But the blood they all shared was the central river of her life. She adored them.

During the early autumn evenings of 1913, while George and I were dancing at the pavilion ten miles away, some of the boys would go into town while Augusta and Fred sat near the open kitchen window to catch the night breeze. Augusta would sew while Fred carefully buttered their mother’s flat oatmeal cookies, and, between bites, read passages from
The World’s Great Exposition of Civilization
. When he came across something he knew would make Augusta laugh, he would read it aloud to her. “Psychological Discoveries in Vegetables” was a popular section (“Plants Can Think!”), as was the chapter on the great subway tunnel under New York City or the illustrations and instructions for spying by kite. Fred was interested in the “Careers at Home” section, interested in raising silkworms or frogs. Of all the boys he was the most shy, too timid to go into town in the evenings to look for girls.