The Underpainter (6 page)

I have lived for years in two large American cities. I have spent winter vacations in French and Italian villages, and fifteen
summers on Lake Superior’s north shore, yet few of these places impressed themselves on my visual memory to the extent that Davenport has — a place where I spent only two summers, a place to which I returned less than a dozen times in the years that have followed. If I close my eyes I can see even the most irrelevant details of the summer town: the weeds in the kitchen garden that my father and I neglected. Places in the park — near the band shell or the dance pavilion — where the grass was worn thin. A striped awning shading a shop entrance. Lit windows viewed from the beach at night. But my mother was right about the danger of fixed images. I want none of this. A pebble from a Great Lake shoreline, a coin with a leaf and a king embossed on either side, a shard of porcelain — the smallest thing is capable of driving you mad if you are unable to forget it. I am like an old museum filled with relics no one is able to identify any more. But there it is. George Kearns is a particularly tenacious ghost, and Davenport was George’s home town.

I went back to Davenport a few years ago, slipped into town like a thief. I hadn’t been there since a brief and, in the end, brutal visit in the winter of 1937. and yet it was the memory of the serene summer of 1913 that afflicted me: a reflexive, backwards glance to the time when I was eighteen and George was twenty, and both of us were innocent.

Little had changed in the town. No, if I am to be truthful, I must say that everything had changed. The ferry terminal was abandoned. Neither
The Maple Leaf nor
the
Northern Star
travelled the waters back and forth to Rochester: the country where I lived was apparently seeking its playgrounds elsewhere. Kearns’s China Hall had also vacated its premises, and, when I looked
through what had been George’s shop window, I saw coils of rope, boxes of nails, cans of paint. Not that it made any difference. Cursed by recall, I could bring to mind every shining piece of precious bone china George had lovingly placed on the shelves of the China Hall during the course of that long-ago summer. That and how my own face and body had looked then, reflected in his window glass.

The ground floor of my father’s house on the beach was now being used as the office and the dining room for the unattractive modern motel that filled the space where the garden had been. Orange plastic chairs stood in front of sliding-glass entrances. Disgusted by the sight of these, I walked towards the lake, turned my back to the water, and stood for a few minutes on the sand, looking up at the miraculously unaltered verandah, remembering the young man who had brooded there. Then I left the place and walked across the park.

The dance pavilion had been torn down years before, and I was almost relieved at first to discover that I could not remember where it had been situated. A large expanse of grass where there were no mature trees, however, disclosed its site, and as I walked towards this place I recalled views of the night lake from windows and balconies, the music of The Baltimore Rhythmaires, youthful couples gliding over a hardwood floor. The irretrievable prewar calm.

We believe that the whole planet rotates at once, but, in fact, it seems to me each entity in it turns on its own private axis, independent of the larger dawns and sunsets. I wondered about this vanished building. How and when it had begun to depart from the forward momentum of social history. I wondered how
many sad old musicians had picked out the tune of the last dance, and when and if they knew that they, the dance floor, the scattered dancers, had all become irrelevant.

As I have become irrelevant.

Then I walked back to my car, climbed in, and drove east on the King’s Highway Number Two, towards the end of the lake, towards the bridge that would take me back to my own country. My own state.

It wasn’t long after that I added a canvas to what the critics would later call my
Erasures
series. It was the third painting I had attempted in my new style, the first two being entitled
Concealed Animals
and
The Sawhorse
, respectively. By the time I was finished, there was just the faintest trace of a building in it. A year later, I noticed that the shape of the roof and the dark blue of the lake were coming through the layers of white, but I solved that problem by scraping and repainting. I always wait at least two years before releasing a painting, placing it in the public eye, so that I am able to correct chemical impurities such as the one I’ve just described. It’s rather like waiting for cement to harden, or for a newly constructed house to settle.

The summer of 1913 in Davenport, Ontario, Canada. The chalky vermilion of the brick walls I passed when I walked, the bubbles in the clean, bright glass of the small-paned windows, and all the gardens but ours weeded, raked, perfect. As I said, I began to explore the town, and I met George Kearns.

It was a hot afternoon, the park and the beach were full of noisy children, their mothers and aunts; the main street was
practically deserted. I was walking west on King Street, the central thoroughfare of the town, when I saw a young man in a long white apron leaning in the doorway of a shop on the opposite side of the street. I noticed him first because he was about my age and then because of his extraordinary beauty, his blond hair shining like a lamp under the sun, the relaxed curve of his body against the door frame. Then I noticed that he held a sketchbook in one hand and a pencil in the other.

Even a person totally uninterested in art will approach another who is making a drawing, as if this strange activity of attempting to reproduce the perceived world is one which needs to be supervised, monitored. Or perhaps it is the intensity of the draughtsman’s focus that lures complete strangers to his side; some kind of primitive desire to impede a relationship this intimate between subject and renderer. Having myself been the object of such interference, having felt the drawing dissolve beneath my touch at the approach of an observer, I nevertheless crossed the street and casually broke the young man’s concentration. Smiling, puzzled, he looked up. He never did manage to master the distancing skills I had developed early in life; he never could keep the world at bay. How young and fresh his face was. Perhaps mine was as well.

He had been drawing Victoria Hall, he told me, because he wanted to paint it on a china vase. Beside him was that window I’ve spoken of, the window of the China Hall. He explained he was wearing an apron because he was sometimes called upon to help out in his father’s neighbouring grocery store, which he could enter by passing through a door in the east wall of his own china shop. I felt that this white apron separated him from me
entirely; as indisputably as the fact that he painted on china, a pastime of which I, a serious student of art, disapproved. I leaned on the other side of his door frame and we began to talk. I imagine it was a summer choice between George and his world and the superficial world my father was trying to coax me into that determined our friendship. But that day we spoke only about the heat, about drawing pencils and watercolour paper, about sable and camel-hair brushes. In the course of the following week I stopped at the China Hall to see George whenever I was out walking.

Quite early on, perhaps immediately, I could see that, though I was a few years his junior, George found me intriguing. And I, of course, was attracted to his interest, having never before been so admired. He had the amateur’s fascination for the arts, and a strong belief, which I did not dispel and probably encouraged, that he was in the presence of a genuine practitioner. I scoffed at the designs on incoming shipments of tableware, lectured him shamelessly about real art while he smiled good-naturedly on the other side of the counter. Only once, I remember, did he interrupt me. He had been reaching for something high up on a shelf, his back to me so I couldn’t see his face. “It’s the only thing I can do,” he said, “in this place.”

On Sundays we borrowed the old horse and delivery wagon from George’s father and made our way slowly into the hills that arced on the northern horizon and that one could see from the centre of town. Once we arrived in a spot where there was shade for the horse and a view for us, George would remove two old
wooden chairs from the vehicle, settle himself into one of them, and begin to draw wildflowers and pastoral scenes while I paced back and forth along the lane searching, unsuccessfully, for signs of chasms and falling water. I was uncomfortable with the docile atmosphere of summer pastures so sometimes I drew George, or the horse and wagon. I spent much of the time commenting on George’s drawings, which were proficient if somewhat sentimental for my taste. I was pleased and inflated by what I considered to be my ability to instruct him and with his readiness to accept my instruction.

But, try as I might, I could never turn him from his china painting. He always brought along a cardboard folio in which to press certain plants and flowers that interested him and that he would use as references for his designs. This was a practice I sneered at as much for its girlishness as for its unsuitability to the making of what I believed, then, to be “real art.”

I told him this, told him no one would get away with such nonsense at art school, then asked him bluntly why he didn’t go to art school if he was so interested in drawing.

“I can’t imagine that,” he said. “A school for nothing but art”

“Don’t they have them here then?” I asked. “Are there none at all in Canada?”

“None for me,” George said. I thought he was being protective, evasive in his answer. It had simply never entered my mind that a family, dependent for its income on a grocery store and china shop, might not have sufficient money to send a son to the city to play with paints and crayons. Only one son’s education
could be paid for in his family. His older brother, I later learned, had gone to law school.

“Besides,” he continued, “I like china. I like the business. It gives me time to think and something to look at while I’m thinking. I can read in the shop. I can order things from England and France.” He squinted at the poplar tree he had been drawing. “It’s really not so bad.”

I glanced at his perfect face — a face more fine-featured, more youthful-looking even than my own — his blond hair and moustache, his fine skin. I tried to imagine a life filled with saucers and teapots, account books and cash drawers, and was utterly unable to do so.

But I could imagine what George would be thinking about in the yellow light of early afternoon, the slow, quiet hour in the shop, what he would be thinking about while he unpacked shipments from England and France and set up his fragile displays. It was already halfway through the first summer. Yes, I would have known what he was thinking about because he had already taken me to the pavilion. I had already seen the way he responded to Vivian.

About twenty years ago, before I began my current series of paintings and while I was still living in New York, I worked on ten small abstract paintings called
Objects in a China Hall
I was beginning to put together the collection by then, though for many reasons it had taken me eight years to make the decision to do it. Each time I added a new piece to the shelves I had built for
this purpose, I would draw it and then paint it on a one-foot square canvas. I would walk around the studio for hours at a time with a Sèvres teacup mere inches from my eyes, then try to capture on canvas what I had seen. I was experimenting with visual intimacy, moving the object closer and closer until proximity obliterated meaning as I always suspected it would; the patterns — flowers, birds, garlands, swags, or whatever — exploding and blurring on the surface of the paintings. The series was meant to be a memorial to George, to the delicate, breakable cosmos that had surrounded him. But, in the end, the paintings — a wasteland of colour — didn’t work. I could never determine the right format for them. Squares were not appropriate, and when I experimented with the shaped canvases that were in fashion then, they fought with rather than mirrored the curves of saucers and bowls.

But I’ve put all that away. There is ample storage in my modernist basement. “Go forward with what you have to say,” Robert Henri once told me, told all of us who listened — mesmerized — to every word he uttered. “You are new evidence, fresh and young.”

Well, I am old evidence now. There is no testament that has not been tarnished by age.

E
ntire kingdoms of objects have disappeared from the planet, it seems, but not from my visual memory, my eidetic malediction.

Think of all the gear associated with the horse-drawn carriage, the winter sleigh; all the straps and bits and bells, the reins and shoes and blinkers. Think of the wrappers for razor blades decorated with bearded men, a tin container for coal oil, the paper rolls for player pianos, spats, moustache cups, a square box sporting a huge red blossom from which music spills. This century has been one particularly concerned with disappearance, elimination. What ever happened, for instance, to the pale-yellow tickets from the pavilion, summer 1913? Five cents a dance.

I would stroll up from our beachside house in the early evening and meet George in front of his locked store. Even from a block away I would be able to see his frown, know that he was preoccupied. Vivian Lacey would have been the focus of his imagination for the better part of the afternoon, the possibility of her appearance that night ringing like an adamant bell
in his mind, until he would have been unable to hear, to see anything else.

As we crossed the park he would become more and more silent, finally not talking at all except to reply monosyllabically to random requests I was making for information — facts I hoped would fill the void I could now feel developing between us. He never looked at me when he answered, and I know now that to speak would have meant his breaking through the dark, painful music that he took with him to the dance, to Vivian. But at the time I simply noted with surprise and mild anxiety that there was an odd kind of absence that the mere idea of a woman can create in a man like George, as if, lifted by the evening breeze, he was left floating somewhere, far out over the lake.