The Underpainter (8 page)

T
his morning I awoke to the sound of water gurgling in the troughs and dripping like slow rain from the hundreds of icicles hanging from the eaves. The sky is clear, however, the sun dazzling, but the melting snow has created such pools in the street outside my window that each time a car passes, it is obscured by a brilliant cascade of water. The January thaw is always a surprise, a kind of invasion. Short-lived, it will be forgotten in a week, overshadowed, upstaged by one of our blizzards. But while it lasts it will disturb me. Films of moisture covering hidden ice will make my walks slow and difficult. If I were to fall now I would break like porcelain, and then there would be hospitals and medical people — another kind of invasion — and then, undoubtedly, there would be death.

Early this morning I dreamed of Sara’s wrist bones, her wrist bones and the back of her hand… the ligaments there, the knuckles. The hand was lying in a narrow band of sunlight, resting on a table near a window. Because of the sunlight I could
see the fine golden hairs on her skin and the intricate grain of the wood. I could see the creases at the joint where her hand had bent back and forth over the years. But it was the bump on the outer side of the wrist that held my attention in the dream, and I thought suddenly that all the other bones in her body must hang like pendants from this spot. I know, now that I am awake, that it was the lower end of the bone called the ulna that was intriguing me, the outer edge of the hinge that is the wrist. The sun, of course, would be coming in through her father’s window, and the table on which it fell would be the one that had always been in his room. If I were to go there now, what would I do in that room, how would I use that table? But I have no need to go there. The accuracy with which I can recall Sara’s anatomy, the anatomy of that room, is frightening enough.

Could George, I wonder, have reconstructed Augusta Moffat bone by bone, tendon by tendon, vein by vein? Had he ever drawn her? I never even asked, believing I was indifferent to all his art, whether it was on china or paper. And I was for a long time unclear about the relationship between him and this woman who had entered his life after the Great War. Had I been indifferent to it as well? By the time Augusta had become a part of George’s life, I was adrift in my own, paying little attention to his letters, a semi-stranger during my then-infrequent visits. Augusta was a shadow on the wall of George’s early middle life, or at least that is how I saw her, until later when the shadow gained substance, and she defined all our lives.

As I looked at the wrist bones in the dream, I could hear the sound of Lake Superior through a slightly open window. I could
hear Sara’s clock ticking steadily in the kitchen below. But what I really heard was just these icicles that I see before me now, slowly diminishing, dripping onto the lawn.

The following summer my father returned to the verandahed house on the other side of Lake Ontario and I returned with him, somewhat less reluctantly this time, but still uncertain as to what a summer spent far from what I considered then to be intellectual stimulation might have to offer. My father stayed in Davenport for just a few days, however, before heading farther north to examine mining properties in which he had invested, trusting, and as it turned out correctly, that the threat of war in Europe would cause his stocks to rise. I was to be left alone in the summer house, after a year of New York City, a year of art classes with Robert Henri.

Everything about the city had been charged with significance for me. Each stray cat, each garbage pail, the laundry swinging on lines strung between the sooty tenement walls. I loved the unceasing breathing hiss of the metropolis, the texture of the pavement, the sidewalk beneath my feet. For the first few months I had trouble sleeping, concerned that I would overlook some important aspect of the life that continued to churn all night around me. Often I would find myself at the window at two or three in the morning, mesmerized by an interchange taking place below me on the street: an explosive argument between lovers, a fist fight between two lurching drunks. The city was unmasked in ways I had never imagined possible; its nerve endings quivering a fraction of an inch beneath its surfaces. Though I spent hours and
hours observing these flagrant acts of exposure, I was unable to participate, to enter the fray of experience.

I was a tourist then. I sense that I have remained a tourist. My recollection is that if I wasn’t in my room in Greenwich Village or in Robert Henri’s life studios at The Art Students’ League, I was standing in the air or moving underground. The crossed iron bones of the Hudson and Harlem and East River bridges and the labyrinthian passageways of the new subway tunnels fascinated me. During the decades just prior to my arrival in New York, armies of labourers had knit the city together with threads of steel — tracks and girders and cables — and I was able to pass under and over rivers, to walk on the Brooklyn Bridge above the tarred roofs of factories, then slip beneath the surfaces of streets as if I were a needle, anonymous and shining.

And then there was my teacher, Robert Henri. A tall man with a surprisingly small face, he was filled with the kind of certainties that bolstered my own reticence. Before I left the city for the summer, he had spoken to me about the value of solitude, had warned me about disappearing into others, letting their voices echo, pollute singular, clear thought. He had instructed me to contain my own reactions, to express my feelings to no one, nothing, except to the paper or canvas. “Each sensation is precious,” he would lecture. “Protect it, cherish it, keep it. Never give it away. You must develop that balance which allows all of the world to come in to you and only that which you have expressed in your art to move back out again into the world. When you are alone, without the distraction of community and affection, this will be easier to achieve.”

My teacher had no way of knowing that neither community nor affection played a significant role in my life. His words merely gave me permission to remain aloof. This lofty promoter of American art with the affected French last name had sanctioned the voyeurism that had become, already, such a vital part of my personality.

I remained alone in the summer house for eight ritual hours each day, drawing the still life of driftwood, bottles, and apples I had set up in the kitchen, or making watercolour sketches of the changing sky, the undulating water as I knew Constable had done. I was capable at that time of becoming overwhelmingly sad for no reason, or of experiencing a surge of pleasure so great I would have to run on the beach for an hour in order to return to a state of calm. I was certain I was learning my own heart, my own senses, and perhaps I was. The walls of the house were lined with cedar. There was the fragrance of that and the feel of polished pine boards beneath my bare feet. A trail of sand from the beach followed me everywhere, as if I were shedding exhausted cells and replacing them with new ones, electric with sensitivity. In the mornings a breeze from the lake and a rectangle of sun moved through the window and crossed the floor towards my bed to wake me. The first thing I heard was the long exhalation of the breakers as they touched the offshore sandbars then crawled up the beach.

I remember quite clearly how I would lay out my paper and sketchbooks on the table of a room overlooking the lake, how I would gather my pencils and brushes like bouquets in my fists and place them in jars all over the window sills. The sound of the lake was always in the rooms I walked through, and sun and
the trembling shadows of poplar leaves. There was still a child in me who appeared only when I was alone, and often I found myself playing in the sand below the verandah steps or collecting interesting pebbles near a shelf of limestone at the east end of our lakefront property.

I was almost happy.

I must have spent some time examining my body in mirrors because I can recollect it distinctly, the long, tight arms and legs, the smooth, browned skin, and the dark mass of hair on my head and at my groin.

It is the memory of that previous, younger body that causes the shock in me now, each night when I undress for bed.

Despite my commitment to seclusion, I visited the China Hall one day shortly after our arrival. I was anxious to see George, eager to describe my time in New York to one who I knew would be a receptive audience. It was early evening; the store had just closed for the day.

I stood outside the large window and for a moment looked through the glass. How inflated the term “China Hall” seemed now that I was gazing into its interior. It was not much wider than the cigar store farther down the street and only half again as long. The shelves that covered the walls from floor to ceiling were crammed with every kind of imported and domestic china; tea sets, dinner sets, chamber pots, foot baths, pitchers, spittoons, ornamental figures, basins, vases, jardinieres, and bowls. Here and there amidst the painted china I noticed the dull sheen of a silver-plated serving tray or candlestick, as George had decided to sell these items as well. The whole effect was rather like a busier than usual impressionist painting, but one executed
in richer, more vivid hues than the customary pastels. In retrospect, I would say that Vuillard’s wine and mauve colours might have accurately caught the atmosphere of the place. I can imagine that particular French painter adding the figure of a china merchant to his rendering of the interior, that and the collection of shadows that gathered at the back in the spot behind the counter where George often sat at his turntable, one small lamp illuminating a piece of china he was decorating.

I watched my summer friend for a moment or two before knocking on the door to get his attention. He was sitting on a tall stool, cradling a large piece of china in his lap — a compote or covered dish of some kind. On the counter in front of him I could see little pots of enamel paint and three or four delicate brushes. He was alternating between running his hands over the shape of the compote and reaching tentatively for a brush that he would then hold in his fingers for a few moments before returning it to the counter. A book and a magazine lay open to the left of the brushes. Behind him, on a shelf, were several large pieces of white china — urns, platters, pitchers — with what appeared to be the beginnings of paintings on their surfaces. Around him was an air of such intense absorption that it seemed to annul the riot of colour made by the jumble of china all over the store.

As I tapped on the glass in the door, George started, jumped to his feet, and the piece on which he had been working slipped from his lap and shattered on the floor. My apologies, when he let me in, took the place of the greetings I had planned.

He laughed then and pointed towards the shelf near which he had been seated. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I have lots of white bodies now, some I’ve already begun to paint.”

“White bodies?” I lifted my eyebrows and grinned.

“Undecorated porcelain,” George explained earnestly. He had either missed, or was choosing to ignore, my amused expression. He touched one or two of the scantly painted plates with his fingertips. “I always seem to want to work on several at the same time.”

When I knelt down to help him collect the fragments for the trash, I saw that he had already begun to paint the compote. There was part of a woman’s face on one of the shards; an eye, the outline of a cheek, the curve of a sensuous mouth.

“You were painting a woman,” I said, “and now I’ve ruined it.”

“It was already spoiled,” he said. “It wasn’t working.”

“You should paint faces on a flat surface,” I told him. “And you should work from a model.”

George was using a whisk and dustpan to gather the smaller pieces. “Where am I to get a model?” he asked.

I looked at the passersby beyond the window. “Anyone can be a model,” I said. “Anyone at all. It is line and shape you are trying to explore. You learn all that working with a model.”

At this time, my only knowledge of female form had come from Robert Henri’s life class; shop girls and aspiring actresses posing for extra cash. They had never seemed quite real to me, though sometimes at night they walked into my dreams in the most intimate of ways. Robert H. had told us it was the artist’s response to the subject, not the subject itself, that was important. He rarely spoke to the girls except to tell them when to break the gesture he had prescribed. I had seen more than one young woman begin to tremble and grow pale under the effort
of holding a twisted, difficult pose for more than half an hour when our teacher had forgotten to allow her to rest.

George was silent, the dustpan poised, a large hand at the end of his wrist.

“At least with a model you would have something to observe and respond to. Then what you do would be more important.”

Fragments were pouring, a miniature avalanche, from the dustpan into a tin wastebasket.

“How do you know this isn’t important,” he said finally.

In spite of the noise, I heard the sentence he spoke. More of a statement than a question, I am not certain it was really meant for my ears.

We walked down the length of the shop, opened the door, and stepped outside. The whole summer stretched before us like the main street where the China Hall stood, a street that was essentially a slow, moderately congested section of a central highway leading somewhere else. I watched while George lifted his arm above his head and began to crank an iron handle, watched the canvas awning over the window pull in on itself, fold after fold after fold.

Now and then during the time that I knew him, George would tell me about the larger industry connected to the decoration of china, about windowed rooms full of men and women painting Minton or Spode, not only in England and Europe but even in Canada, in cities that lay within a day’s journey of Davenport. Toronto and Montreal each had large ateliers where some of the china was given a particularly Canadian flavour. Typical
landscapes from each of the provinces were popular along with detailed renderings of specific flora and fauna. I laughed when George told me about one old woman who had spent her life painting beavers on soap dishes and another whose speciality was children frolicking in snow, a series entitled Boules de Neige. George, who at this time had never left Ontario, could, in his imagination, move through his country, landscape by landscape, because of the provincial plates so often displayed in his shop. Nova Scotia, he said, was fishing boats; Quebec, winter scenes with sleighs; Saskatchewan, sheafs of wheat and grain elevators; British Columbia, groups of mountains, and so on. Peculiarly Gothic-looking provincial legislatures and the spires of the Ottawa Parliament Buildings often appeared on cups and saucers. The whole collection gave me the impression that George’s was a toy country; one to be played in, and played with, but one to be locked away with the dolls when you reached a certain age.