The Underpainter (7 page)

Once we were inside the pavilion his mood would mutate; he would become garrulous, almost coarse, punching the shoulders of the young men he knew, referring to me as his “Yank pal,” all of this a shoreline of angry energy around the deep lake of the inexplicable suffering that, even then, related to Vivian. Claiming that women liked Americans best, he insisted that I dance with every girl he spoke to, though many of them were several years older than I was and all of them blushed with embarrassment. Sometimes when I miserably blundered through dance steps I was only just beginning to learn, I would see George looking towards the door, his face strained, as if he wished to break from this artificial interior of coloured lights, loud music, and paper scenery, as if he wished to be out in the meadows, or back in his cluttered China Hall, alone, with moonlight shining on the platters.

Then Vivian would appear — her dark, upswept hair, her perfect, gleaming teeth. She would approach George, who would be forcing himself to study the opposite wall, and seize his arm, tugging him towards the centre of the floor. The dance that ensued was one of the oddest I have ever witnessed; the whole room turned to watch it. Vivian led George through the steps, positioning his limp arms, one on her shoulder, the other on her hip, and then moving her own right hand rhythmically from his back to the nape of his neck, lifting it now and then to caress his hair or lightly touch his lips and cheeks. She was like a light flickering near him, a brush painting his features. All the time they were dancing, she laughed, chattered. He remained stiff, impassive; moving, or being moved, from static pose to static pose. His expression was grim.

I thought, at first, that he hated her.

At the end of the dance she released him, a pet bird with whom she had tired of toying, and stepped from partner to partner, treating each with the same bright, yet oddly detached attention. I was amazed by her beauty — there was no one there like her — but I was even more astonished by the fact that she chose her own partners, often even paying for the dance tickets herself, while the other girls sulked shyly in corners waiting to be chosen.

Vivian never waited for anything. She was always in perfect control.

It wasn’t until the end of the summer that I managed to persuade George to talk about her. By then, however, I had gathered
information from some of the other young people my age I had come to know around town. Vivian was new in Davenport, I was told, had arrived the previous autumn with her mother, who was choir director at the Presbyterian Church. Vivian played the organ there and sang, had, in fact, made a name for herself all over the province as an amateur musician. But that wasn’t all; she and her mother rented themselves out as entertainment (The Lacey Girls), and it was rumoured that they had played the northern mining towns — the dance halls as well as concert halls. There was an air of scandal about them, softened somewhat by their connection with the church. The father, it was said, remained in Toronto, where he ran a boarding house. The mother apparently had great ambitions for her daughter, kept her home most evenings when they weren’t performing to practise scales. She was allowed to go out only on infrequent nights. I thought this explained Vivian’s desperate gaiety, her need to harness every partner in the room.

George and I were painting in watercolour on a Sunday afternoon after a Saturday night during which Vivian’s appearance had reduced most of the young men in the room to a collection of servile suitors and had caused in George a melancholy anger so fierce it was palpable and so prolonged it was changing the shape of the whole afternoon.

“What is it about that Vivian woman?” I asked, breaking a taboo I knew perfectly well was in place. She had chosen to dance with me once or twice during the previous evening. I was pretending that I wanted to know more about her, but I really wanted to know more about George.

“What do you mean?” he snapped. “What about her?”

“Why does she make you so angry?”

“She doesn’t make me angry.” George banged his small tin paint box shut. “Why should she make me angry?”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

George stood, picked up his chair, and tossed it in the back of the wagon. He walked around the vehicle and slouched beside the old horse, stroking the soft part of the animals nose for several minutes. Then he turned, walked past me, and collapsed into a sitting position on the ground near the edge of the hill. I could tell by the movement of his curved back that he was breathing heavily, almost as if he were gasping for air.

I had begun to walk towards him when he put his arm out to one side to discourage me from coming any closer. “The truth is, I’m terrified of her.” From where I stood his voice was barely audible.

“I mean nothing to her,” he whispered. “I become invisible whenever she enters a room.” I stepped in front of him so that I could see his face.

George said nothing, but let the extended arm fall to his side, a gesture of surrender. Still, he did not look at me for longer than a fraction of a second, keeping his gaze fixed instead on the horizon of the distant lake.

“George,” I began, “she’s just a woman. There is nothing about her —”

He interrupted me. “Fate,” he said, “destiny. I’m connected to her somehow, but she’s not connected to me … not at all.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, laughing, unable to envision fate or destiny playing any kind of role in the life of a man in a white
apron, a man operating a china emporium. I bent to pick up the drawing that George had absently brought with him to the edge of the hillside and that was now about to be carried off by the wind. I was still smiling, but I stopped when George looked at me oddly and I realized there were tears in his eyes.

I knew nothing of passion then. Two decades would have to pass before I would be able to recognize it when I was in its company, and, even now, I am not certain that I ever let it slip beneath my own skin. Still, after I had looked at George’s face that August afternoon, something briefly altered in me and I was able to turn and see the summer landscape as I never had before. It was almost evening, the fields that lay before us were richly lit, as if the sun that had poured itself into the earth all day, all season long, were now being released through bark and foliage. Fields of grain, elm trees, sumac bushes, pine groves became sources rather than reflectors of light, the soft shapes of hardwood lots seemed as full of sky as the banks of cumulus clouds that floated above them. Even the rail and stump fences, the cairns of boulders assembled a century before were charged, radiant, their awkwardness a shining memorial to the labour of the men who had built them. This was the first time I had been moved by the tranquillity rather than the violence of nature, the first time I felt the scene before me to be one of perfect harmony. I had never before suspected it was possible that landscape — this impression — might be a compensation for misery, for loss.

The lake was bright blue, sparkling below us. Two or three white sails were visible near the harbour. On the other side lay my own country, my own city. I looked again at George, who had remained seated, his back bent, his arms on his knees, his face dark with emotion.

“I’ll be going back soon,” I said, handing him his uncompleted drawing.

He looked at the piece of paper for a moment, then crumpled it in his fist, threw it towards the view. He rose to his feet and smiled. “There’s always next summer,” he said.

A few years later, when both Robert Henri and Rockwell Kent were making their philosophies known to me, the former was quite vague and the latter absolutely clear on the subject of passion. Robert H. would have admired my tranquil vision, would have nodded with approval as I described it. Conversely, Rockwell would have instructed me to turn my back on the scene, to seize the tail of the northwest wind, to travel into storm and chaos, with the assurance that brightness and clarity would follow. He was a man who craved the catastrophe of experience. “The impossibility of one life,” he would rage, shaking his fist at the sky above MacDougal Street, “against the brilliance, the possibilities of everything alive in it!” Almost anything was capable of carrying him off: women, islands, politics, weather, his own thundering heart. He once said to me, quite seriously, “Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a
tragedy to die and discover that you hadn’t completely used up your body.”

Robert H., on the other hand, spoke of states of being, long hours with materials and tools available and ordered, the hand ready to capture the image. To his mind, there was no experience more important than the art that was produced by it.

Robert Henri was my teacher; Rockwell Kent my friend. They both took their leave of me one way or another. No, I should be honest here. It is I who spend long hours in the studio trying to take my leave of them.

On our last walk to the pavilion that summer, George offered me a swallow from the flask he was carrying in his hip pocket. I accepted but pretended to drink more than the few drops I allowed into my mouth. I hadn’t had much experience with alcohol.

He was unusually talkative for a Saturday night with Vivian’s appearance imminent, asking many questions about The Art Students’ League in New York, since I had decided to spend my academic year in that city. At one point, I remember, he told me, half in jest, that I would be a great artist one day, and asked me to remember him when I was.

“I’ll still be painting on china,” he said, his tone flat, difficult to interpret.

“Because you want to,” I reminded him.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s what I want to do.”

The autumnal moon was beginning to rise over the lake, its orange shape distorted, as if pregnant. The Baltimore
Rhythmaires were playing an upbeat melody as we walked towards the octagonal pavilion. By this time I knew so many of George’s friends that they called and waved to both of us as we approached. I had stopped moping weeks ago, was now aware that I was unhappy that the summer was ending.

Just before we were to enter the building, George pulled me aside and offered me a cigarette. When I refused, he lit one himself, inhaled, threw his head back and blew smoke towards the darkening sky. Then he looked around him warily before he spoke.

“Tonight I won’t dance with her at all,” he said. “Tonight I will dance with everyone else. I will not dance with her, even once.”

“She’ll ask you,” I said. “You know she always does.”

“I’ll refuse her.” He ground the cigarette into the dust with his foot. “I’ll refuse her,” he said again. “I won’t dance with her.” George looked towards the pavilion. “She talks … she talks about nothing.”

“She must say something if she talks.”

“No … nothing, she says a lot of nothing. I could be anyone. Anyone else at all.”

“But she is all you think about when you come down here.”

I was beginning to understand that he was drunk. The whisky, the emotion. It occurred to me that he didn’t resemble in any way the quiet, sanguine young man who stood behind the counter in the China Hall, as if when he had taken off his apron at six in the evening, he had removed a layer of his own skin, leaving him raw, edgy, vulnerable.

“It’s all I think about,” he said, “but I don’t want to see her, have her talk about nothing, dance with her.”

“I’m going in,” I said. “Are you coming?”

“In a minute,” he said and lit another cigarette. “By the way, I’ve always wondered — how did your father make all his money?”

I was a bit taken aback. “Something about mining stocks. Silver.”

“So you’ll be able to be an artist then, for as long as you want.”

“I don’t think my father’s too keen on it. But more than likely he doesn’t really care one way or the other.”

“She likes it that your father has got money. She told me that.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “She’s never had anything to do with me. She doesn’t even glance in my direction.”

But I was misinterpreting George. “No, listen,” he said. “That’s who she is, what she talks about. She thinks about status constantly — can’t wait to get away from here. She wants to be somewhere more important.” He pulled the flask from his pocket. “You go on ahead, I can’t go in there yet.”

When I walked out onto the dance floor with a girl whose name I’ve forgotten now, I saw Vivian spinning in the arms of one of George’s friends. She wore high heels and a blue linen dress that reached to her ankles but exposed her wonderful throat. She smiled and nodded to me, then said something to her partner, who rocked with laughter. I felt my face redden. One always wanted Vivian’s approval.

George came through the door a few minutes later and stood near the wall with his hands in his pockets, staring hard in her direction. Then he shook his head like a beaten animal and began to walk straight across the floor, his eyes focused on the
opposite side of the room. He brushed by Vivian, his hip and shoulder making brief contact with her body, and continued purposefully towards the lakeside of the building. The screened door slapped back into place after he passed through it.

Vivian had been thrown slightly off balance. She stumbled, stopped dancing, and looked at the door for four or five seconds, just the hint of a question passing over her face. Then she turned again, laughing, towards the young man she had chosen earlier in the evening.