An Emergence of Green (7 page)

“It’s one of a series of figurative paintings I’m doing right now. Neal and I took a trip into the Mojave and found just wonderful things. This one’s a fascinating plant, it looks like green-red mist on the desert sand. The tiny flowers and fine tracery of stems make me think of the human body with its connections of veins and arteries and blood vessels—the sand holding it could be human skin. I’m laying film over film—I’m looking for an opalescent glowing effect and I want the brush strokes to show. It’s still taking shape in my head and very interesting to think about. I can’t do anything more till it dries.”

“I see,” Carolyn said. Until this moment she had thought it possible that Paul was right—Val Hunter might be a dilettante. She said, “I thought all painters used an easel.”

“Never had one. A box on a table works perfectly well as long as it holds the canvas still and you have the best light on your work. I get good strong morning light through this window—it’s the best kind. Besides, any extra money, there are always so many other things more important…Neal’s been wanting to go to day camp every year and I’ve never had the money till now.” She shrugged. “I’ve been painting this way for years. He’s a boy only once.”

Carolyn surveyed the jumble of supplies on the table. “Looking at a painting, you never imagine all the things an artist has to buy. Canvas, paint, brushes, a palette—”

“No palette,” Val interrupted. “This is my version.” She reached to the end of the table under paint-stained cloths and unerringly fished out a piece of plate glass with beveled edges, the underside painted white. “I just scrape it off when I’m finished. It works beautifully, I’d never have any other kind. And except for watercolors I buy the basic ingredients and make my own paints. I really prefer to now. But there are a thousand other things you always need. I use a lot of sketch pads and good pencils; I do a lot of sketches to make color notes. And frames and turpentine and varnish. I sometimes use a palette knife—that means quantities of paint that would put a house painter to shame.” Carolyn picked up several tubes of color and examined them curiously.

“I’m still learning things about color,” Val said. “Different approaches, techniques, ways of emphasis. To this day, as well as I’ve learned the discipline of preparation and concentrating fully on a concept, sometimes an entirely new idea takes over and I have to begin all over again. And starting over costs money and time. Quality materials are so very expensive…not like when I was first learning and could afford to experiment with student-quality paint and cardboard for canvas.”

“I had absolutely no idea,” Carolyn murmured, running her finger-tips over the soft pliant bristles of several paintbrushes.

“A few years ago was the worst, when inflation was so bad. Prices just skyrocketed. I didn’t have Susan’s gallery then and I was scrounging to have my work shown anywhere—laundromats, anywhere. For a while I even had to stop working till there was a little money again…Either that or sell my body for paint, which believe me was a temptation. Imagine me down on Hollywood Boulevard—a six-foot hooker.”

Val lifted a large canvas that leaned against a wall facing into the light and propped it against the box. “This is another in the series I’m doing. It’s finished.”

Carolyn felt enmeshed in the painting, as if she were caught in the multitude of tiny shapes tinged with pink and green against a riotous background of wiry dark green. The detail of the painting was dense, the images covering the canvas from edge to edge without break.

“Manzanita,” Val said, frowning at the painting, chin between a finger and thumb. “This particular kind grows along the California coast.”

Carolyn said faintly, “I feel like I’ve fallen into the bush.” She was frustrated by her inability to articulate her perceptions.

“You do? That’s wonderful.” Val looked genuinely pleased. “Susan likes this entire series and this one in particular. She says it’s like a Pollock, and I guess it does have that barbed-wire effect.”

Swiftly, Val removed the canvas and replaced it against the wall. Her upper arms in the sleeveless T-shirt were lighter tan and large, the muscles firm and smoothly working as she pulled canvases away from the wall. “Here it is. This one’s almost finished.”

Carolyn blinked at the feast of color—red, yellow, blue, and white hues and tones. “It looks so…joyful,” she managed to say, again angry with her inadequacy, her eyes drawn to the rich yellows and blues, following and exploring the color patterns.

“I like how you react to my work,” Val said immediately. “This is a fusion of desert flowers. It was very hard to do. To me the desert has always been like a starving entity that goes on an incredible binge in the spring, as if to compensate all at once. I wanted to show the profusion, the sheer extravagance.”

“Warm,” Carolyn murmured, “the painting is warm.”

“Thank you. That’s what I was hoping to achieve with the reds and yellows. But balance was such a serious problem with so many color tones…Color is energy; colors act and react with one another. There were more decisions than usual about composition. I do love the red flowers,” Val said, smiling and indicating a section with blossoms shaded rose to reddish purple, the stamens long and white and tipped with scarlet, the branches profligate. “It’s called a fairy duster. Remarkable, isn’t it? And this one with the brilliant leaves and inconspicuous flowers is Indian paintbrush.”

“Did you…do you paint from memory?” She wondered if the question was foolish, if any question she might ask would be foolish.

Val hesitated, “Well, when my work isn’t representational, actual color isn’t relevant—it’s just one of the many elements you synthesize in creating a painting. I usually sketch and make color notes and then let things percolate in my head till it feels right to begin. But for this series I took pictures. I have a terrible camera but I matched my snap-shots with high-quality photos in books about desert flowers. That’s how I learned their names. I want to do more of these paintings, focusing on light and shadow. I’ll need to look very closely at the actual flower for those, too.”

She pointed again. “This flower’s called blue sage. This one’s baby blue eyes. Aren’t the names marvelous? The white with the bluish band down each petal is a desert lily. See the ruffle-edged leaves? And this lovely yellow is a woolly marigold. And this is desert sienna.”

“It’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful, wonderful painting.” She could think of nothing more to say.

“Thank you. It does need more work but it’s almost there. The yellows come forward too much, the blues need to be brought up a bit. Now I’ll show you a real change of pace—from an artist who ordinarily loves bright color.” Val came out of her tiny makeshift bedroom with a painting perhaps five feet long and three feet high, and propped it against the box.

A succession of gray tones lay across the canvas, beginning at the top with deep gray which was not opaque but seemed somehow impenetrable, and dissolving into successive bands of lighter grays which became a pearl mist that ended abruptly at bold gray-black brush strokes of solid squarish shapes. Thin needles of color knifed down through the gray bands, into the gray-black, the needles of silver, blue, blue-purple.

Carolyn stepped closer to the painting, needing to shut out her surroundings, and in the stifling heat of Val’s house rubbed a sudden chill from her bare arms. “I don’t know the first thing about art,” she finally said. “All I can tell you is I truly love this.”

“What is there about it that touches you? Can you tell me?”

“I don’t know…” Looking at the painting, searching for words, Carolyn answered slowly, “The peaceful quality…the way the grays combine. It makes me feel mellow. Like I do on rainy days.”

Val’s smile was intense with pleasure. “You do know about art. Rain—our rain, Los Angeles rain—was exactly what I was trying to convey. The distinctive way it rains here, how it doesn’t cloud up but grays over, darker and darker, then lightens and rains.”

She indicated the gray-black shapes at the bottom of the painting. “This is the horizon line with the suggestion of our endless, mostly flat city. Susan likes this one but won’t take it, it’s too much of a departure to hang with my other work.” Val chuckled. “She’s hoping I haven’t gone into what she calls a gray, uncommercial phase. She’s not enthusiastic about a series of paintings I’m working on at the beach house either, but—”

“Beach house?”

“Her parents have a small place in Malibu. In exchange for checking things out every week while they’re in Europe, Neal gets to play volleyball on the beach and I get to work on a series of ocean paintings.”

“Seascapes? How wonderful.”

“No, not seascapes,” Val said with a grin. “Sorry to disappoint you. Better talents than mine have tried to capture the ocean. I don’t think anyone has—at least not enough of it. I’m painting the effects of ocean—surfaces of rocks, the scouring of high tide, things like that.”

Carolyn was staring at the painting. She asked impulsively, “How much do you charge for your work?”

“It’s negotiable, like all art. Whatever the traffic will bear and depending on Susan’s opinion, and the size of the canvas. Most of my work is fairly good size and Susan asks in the four to six hundred dollar range, before gallery commission.”

Carolyn closed her eyes for a moment. She said recklessly, “I want this one. I want to buy it. I love it. I want to own it.”

“It’s yours then. But I won’t sell it to you.”

“What? I want to buy it. You know I can afford it; you can’t just give your work away—”

“Of course I can. I can do anything I want with my work. And I refuse to be any more in debt to you than I already am. I’ve been using your pool for months. Your air conditioner is a lifesaver, it’s making it possible for me to work better and longer.”

Carolyn sighed. This was crazy. “Anything I’ve given you isn’t that much and isn’t important to me at all.”

She continued to argue, but Val parried her points with good-humored grins and shakes of her head. “All right,” Carolyn conceded. “Can you tell me a good place to have it framed?”

“I’ll do that—don’t argue. It doesn’t cost much. I always make my own frames. It’s not difficult and I enjoy it. Besides, who better than the artist knows how it should be framed?”

Carolyn asked in resignation, “When can I have it?”

“It’s finished drying but needs to be varnished. Let’s say Monday.”

Val glanced at her watch and was startled. “I haven’t even thought about dinner. And Neal’s due home. I want you to meet Neal. I think you two would like each other.”

Carolyn was pleased, as if she had passed an important test. But she hesitated. How would she explain this to Paul? Any of this? “Of course,” she said. “Soon.”

“How about some evening?”

“Sure.” She wanted to flee, to sort through what she had done before Paul came home. She changed the subject, not wanting Val to pin her down before she had time to think. “I’ll have the painting Monday for sure?”

“I’ll varnish it in the morning when the light’s good. I see no problem…Yes, Monday.”

“Good.” She edged toward the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow in the pool?”

Val smiled at her. “Monday. Neal and I are going to the beach house, then backpacking in the San Bernardino mountains.”

Val pulled a sketch pad out of the pile on the coffee table, the same pad she had used for her first penciled impression of Carolyn Blake. The latest drawing was of Carolyn on the white sofa in a silk shirtwaist dress, her feet drawn up under her, her head tilted slightly to the left in what Val knew to be unconscious habit when Carolyn was listening. A hand rested on a knee, and Val spent some time on the tapering fingers and the thumb that was in interesting apposition, a wide angle out from the fingers. She filled in details of the dress, the folds of soft silk, her pencil straying back up to the throat, lightly sculpting and accentuating the curve.

She turned the page, and in a few strokes Carolyn stood with her feet close together, arms crossed, her hands clasping the inside of her arms; as she had stood in this room only a few minutes ago looking at paintings. Several lines completed the shorts Carolyn wore, but Val lingered over the legs, the long curves, the slenderness of them.

Again she turned the page. In close-up she emphasized delicate bone structure, the rounding at the end of the nose and at the center of the chin, the fine breadth of forehead. She feathered in an irregular hairline at the temples, a suggestion of eyelashes not readily apparent because of their blondeness.

She held the sketch at arm’s length, appraising not her work but the subject. Carolyn Blake was by no means conventionally pretty, yet she was exquisite.

With tender strokes she finished the soft lines of the throat. The sketch was now asymmetrical on the page but still her pencil descended. Under her hand slender shoulders and then small breasts took shape, shadowed, suggested by a top piece of the bikini, cleavage clearly visible.

The image of Alix filled Val’s mind, and Val’s pencil stilled.

—Sometimes when a person wants another for so long, the want can go away. And finally the want of you has gone, Val. I’ll always love you but I don’t have to have you anymore. You know it, how I wanted you. And I know you could have loved me. Even with Bette and my other lovers, knowing you could love me kept me hoping, kept me tied to you. You never allowed yourself to love me.