The Underpainter (29 page)

Neither of us spoke about George that night. We were too busy assessing each other, circling each other like animals on the edge of aggression. We were both showing off, performing: our younger selves demanded this. What, after all, is the point of reputation if it can’t be flaunted in the face of the anonymity of the past?

Vivian was a remarkably fine dancer, but, by then, so was I. Others on the floor pulled back and watched us, and the room buzzed. She was famous, a household word. It was, she told me, what she had always wanted.

“Even then?” I asked her.

“Especially then,” she replied.

She owned a house in St. Johns Wood in London, and another somewhere in the south of France. Men appeared and disappeared at her command. She really didn’t have time for them, she claimed. Only now and then did one of them become difficult.

She eyed me closely as she told me this.

I decided to postpone rising to the bait. In all truthfulness I did not really desire her, but some angry sliver of my personality made it essential that I sleep with her. As if this single act, once accomplished, would prove my sophistication, my cleverness, my superiority.

Had I been able to suppress my lust we might have become passably good companions. She actually had the most marvellous sense of humour: abrupt, controlled, carefully balanced on the cusp of cynicism. A kind of frantic gaiety drove us forward. And then there was her beauty. Her beauty was violent and
shining, almost unbearably so, especially when she laughed. Our repartee was stunning, sharp and quick — blade-bright. Everything around us spun and glittered.

Eventually I asked, “Shall
I
appear then?” knowing full well that I could just as easily disappear any time she or I desired it. I added that, if it made any difference, I was far from difficult.

“Why not?” she said, sweeping her dark hair away from her forehead with one perfectly manicured hand.

Suddenly nothing I looked at, neither the lights that shone in the room nor the lights I could see in the streets below me, nothing I recalled from the studio, neither the twisted tubes of paint nor the brushes arranged by size in glass jars, none of it seemed to have anything at all to do with me. It was as though I were suffering from a peculiar brain disorder that caused me to perceive what was going on around me, and to remember something as simple as my own living quarters, as if these perceptions and memories belonged to someone else. I knew then what was wrong with my current paintings; those explosions of questionably spiritual light carried nothing across the canvas that really belonged to me. I had never felt so distant from the creative as I did during that brief bubble of time in a rooftop bar overlooking the city. This disorientation was temporary, however, gone almost before it had fully caught my attention.

I smiled at the woman seated across from me and then I downed what was left of my fourth cocktail. “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

Vivian was the only woman I have ever known who laughed when she made love. At the beginning I was somewhat disconcerted by this, but quite quickly I came to understand that for her this was an expression of appreciation, of pleasure. Unlike the mirth that had accompanied her witty conversation, this sound had no sharp edge, no ironic reference, and addressed itself only to the present. Memory, you see, was not a part of who Vivian was. She slipped easily in and out of roles, in and out of men’s arms. Her enjoyment was so honestly connected to the moment that it carried with it an odd kind of innocence.

We made love together in a large bed in her hotel suite. Apart from her musical laughter I remember very little else about our lovemaking except that it took place and that she wanted the lights left off. The next morning while she slept, however, I saw the young girl she had been in the past in her relaxed face, the curve of her mouth.

When she opened her eyes, her expression revealed no surprise at my presence by her side. She sat up and reached for my watch, which was lying on the bedside table, squinted at it, then buckled the strap around my wrist. “I suppose you drive,” she said.

“Yes, I have a car.” My new Packard was one of the few things about which I had been able to develop a genuine enthusiasm in recent months.

She lay down again and drew my arm close to her body. “Then take me to Canada,” she said. “I have four days before I sail. I want to see Davenport again, and George.”

I pulled back from her and looked into her face to see if she was serious. “Now?” I asked.

“Yes, now”

My studio, my daily life was miles and miles away, had nothing to do with me. “Why not,” I said.

We spent the night in an almost empty hotel somewhere in the Adirondacks. At the last moment Vivian decided that she Wanted her own room.

“You don’t mind, do you, darling?” she said. “I have to get my beauty sleep, you know.”

I assured her I did not. I was tired, recovering from a hangover, and beginning to be annoyed by the fact that I had agreed so quickly to make what was turning out to be a long journey over icy roads at the worst possible time of the year. There was no ferry, of course, in the winter, so we would have to drive along the St. Lawrence River and cross over to Canada at Ogdensburg. It was going to take us most of the next day to drive the north shore of the river and then along the edge of the Great Lake until we reached Davenport.

“I wonder if George will remember you,” I said, half seriously, the next day in the car.

“Of course he will…. How could he not?”

I laughed at her vanity. “Vivian,” I said, “it’s been more than twenty years. I don’t think he knows who you are. I mean, that you are
who
you are.”

“He knows who I am”

“He hasn’t said anything…. Nothing at all since the end of the war, nothing for twenty years.”

“He knows,” she repeated. She had brought a little silver flask of whisky along with her for the trip. She offered me a
swallow, carefully replaced the cap, and slipped it back into her handbag. “Has he changed at all?” she asked.

“He still has the China Hall. His parents are both dead, so he’s let the grocery business go, though he still wears that apron, you know, with the pens clipped at the front.”

It was late afternoon. We were travelling west at the time, I remember, so I was constantly altering the angle of the visor to keep the low winter sun out of my eyes. “And,” I added, “he still paints on china. He’s an alderman or something now,” I said. “Something on the town council anyway. No doubt some day he’ll be mayor.”

Vivian smiled, then turned her face towards the side window of the car. “Poor George,” she said. “Who would have thought that he would ever be grown up enough to be a mayor. Remember how angry he used to be if I danced with anyone else?”

“I didn’t think you noticed that.”

“I noticed,” she said. “In fact, I quite liked it.”

We passed through Belleville, then Trenton, then Brighton. I hadn’t seen the winter lake since I had been a boy and I had never seen it from this shore. I recalled my mother talking about her skating parties. There was nothing in the ash-coloured ice near the shore that suggested play or laughter, and I wondered for the first time if maybe these outings had been as fictional as our blood kin in their impressive mausoleums.

As we got closer to Davenport, Vivian moved closer to me and touched the sleeve of my coat. “Does George have a woman?” she asked.

I could smell her perfume, recognized it from our night together. “He has a friend, a woman called Augusta. Actually,
I’ve never been able to interpret their relationship.” I was lying, perhaps to myself as well as to Vivian, because even I had been able to understand that the remarkable compassion that passed between them must have been what some people called love. “She’s a nurse in Toronto,” I said. “Maybe they are just friends … I’m not certain. Anyway, he’s never married.”

Vivian smiled then. “You’re certain of this?” she asked in a teasing way, not expecting an answer. She opened her purse and removed the silver flask, which she shook near her right ear. “It’s all gone,” she said.

“No problem. I’ve got another bottle in my bag. Augusta might be there,” I added. “She sometimes gets the weekends off.”

It had already been dark for an hour or so when we drove into Davenport. I parked the Packard in front of George’s shop and turned off the motor just as the streetlights switched on. I remember this because there was a strange momentary silence in the car. And since then I have always thought of that pause as a kind of grace note at the beginning of a line of sombre music, a last chance for the theme to move in some other direction. Neither Vivian nor I showed any signs of being eager to leave the vehicle now that the journey had been accomplished. We didn’t look at each other, stared instead at the windshield, where large snowflakes were landing and then melting. I remember the way the light was caught on the surface of the empty silver flask Vivian nervously flicked backwards and forwards, and on the hood ornament of the car: a winged woman, her face slightly tilted towards the sky, the wheel of motion held firmly in her hands.

N
ight in the China Hall
is one of my least satisfactory canvases. For it to have been successful I would have had to paint everything I’ve told you so far, everything Augusta told me, the teeming floral patterns of the china that engulfed us, and the dreadful artificial light raining down on a place in which night was never meant to be witnessed. I would have had to paint Vivian’s black mink coat flung over the counter like a wounded beast, Augusta’s locket, the cardboard sign that read
CLOSED
and that George had carefully placed among the cups and saucers displayed in the shop window. I would have had to paint the smoke from my cigarettes that gradually filled the place with a dirty fog, the tassel hanging from the end of the old green blind that George had forgotten to pull down over the glass in the door. I would have had to paint the dining room where we all consumed in silence the simple meal that Augusta hurriedly put together for us, George’s homemade wine that we drank with our food. I would have had to paint the look on George’s face as
I walked into the shop with Vivian beside me, the bell that hung above the door and that rang too long and too loud in the silence. But, in the end, I painted Augusta talking to me in the shop in the early hours of the morning. Only this. Nothing else.

“Look who’s here,” I said. “What a surprise,
n’est-ce pas?”

“What a surprise,” George echoed. He stood with a small tube of paint in one hand, the doorknob in the other, and a paintbrush clenched in his teeth. I could not interpret his expression.

“It’s Vivian,” I prompted. “Or I suppose I should say the famous Vi Desjardins.”

George said nothing, seemed frozen.

Then, after several awkward moments, Vivian raised one hand towards George’s face, removed the paintbrush from his mouth, and kissed him lightly on the lips. When he didn’t respond she took a step backwards and looked at him. “You haven’t changed,” she said. Silence. Vivian placed the brush in a vase on a nearby shelf, walked past George to the far end of the store, took off her coat, and dropped it on the counter. She stared at each of the three walls in turn. “This place hasn’t changed either,” she added.

A brief, vivid picture flashed in my mind, a picture of George leaning from the train window.
She crushed it beneath her heel

I hoped that Vivian would behave decently towards George’s friend. I suspected she was capable of utterly ignoring the presence of another woman in the room.

George didn’t answer, began walking down the length of the shop towards Vivian, a peculiar smile on his face. “Oh, I’ve changed,” he said to her. “Everything about me has changed completely.”

Vivian tilted her head, looked at him quizzically, then announced brightly, “Not in my view, you haven’t.”

I looked at the man and woman who stood face to face at the far end of the China Hall. Quite suddenly I knew that in spite of the youthful George’s angry misery, a relationship of some kind had developed between them over the course of that winter preceding the war. I found the idea surprising and somewhat amusing. Just as I was smiling to myself about George’s romantic past, I heard Augusta call from somewhere in the rooms at the back of the store.

“George,” she was asking, “who’s in the shop with you?”

It wasn’t until after supper, until after I had brought out the bottle of scotch, that George stopped breezily articulating pleasantries. Augusta had excused herself in order to tidy the kitchen, and George had fallen into the kind of quietness that could be mistaken for contentment were it not for the way he stared at the tumbler on the table in front of him, suddenly drained the contents, then pushed it towards the bottle at my end of the table without raising his eyes. I refilled the glass and slid it into his hand. Still, he did not look at me, or at anything else for that matter. Vivian began to relate a long anecdote concerning the unpublished lyrics of a Cole Porter song. George coughed once in the middle of this, shoved his chair back with
an abrasive, grating sound, and Vivian paused. But he did not get up from the table and so she continued, her voice rising in pitch. In the middle of a sentence that began with the words, “Then Cole said to me,” George said hoarsely, “That’s not what we care about Vivian, not what we want to know”

She appeared not to have heard what he said. “What was that, darling?” she asked, leaning her head in his direction.

“Darling,” he repeated, still looking at the table, his voice flat. “What kind of a word is ‘darling’?”

I could hear Augusta’s footsteps in the kitchen, then the sound of running water.

Vivian swallowed. “George,” she said, “I wanted to —”

But he interrupted her. “Where did you go … darling? Or perhaps we should ask you what you are doing here, what in hell made you come back here?”

Even in the lamplight I could see that his expression was bleak, his face white. The tumbler was shaking in his hand, the ice clinking slightly as if he were drinking on a train. I began to feel uneasy, remembered the day in the shop, George’s violent trembling, the lavender paint dripping onto the floor. What was this mood that he had so carefully concealed, hoarding it for three hours, until Augusta was out of the room? It was only in the face of his strangeness that I realized how artificial his previous politeness had been.