Shane blinked as he led Greenfeld down the stairs. It was the term “haunted house” that had struck him. He’d never thought of it that way. Was that how it looked to others? He decided not to press Greenfeld about it. Instead, he shook his head and said, “‘Pathos Princess Number Sixteen’? How long did it take you to come up with that one?”
“I only wish I had. I didn’t make any of that up. The doorknob overcoat on the skeleton was in Chris’ first gallery show, late last year, before she knew how to separate avant-garde from basic silliness. She’s learned a lot since then, but she’ll probably never live that one down.”
“You think she’d want my painting in her show?” Shane asked, taking Greenfeld’s empty beer bottle and following him to the door.
“Sure. She’d probably have asked you herself if she’d known you’d be done with it by now. She needs something a little crooked and dark like that. She’s being a little too careful this time, afraid of producing another freak show. Still, nobody will take her seriously if there isn’t something a little bit… I don’t know. Unsettling? No offense.”
“None taken, I guess,” Shane said, shaking his head, bemused. “You really are serious about this, aren’t you?”
Greenfeld nodded. “Nobody is going to be turning that little number of yours into a Thank You card, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its own odd attraction. My first thought, looking at it, was that I wanted to burn it. That’s how strong it was, I’m dead serious. Art that strikes someone like that, though, that’s nothing to sneeze at. Loads of artists aim for that sort of visceral reaction, and all they achieve is a sort of bland offensiveness. That’s easy. Anyone can be offensive. Hell, give
me
a paint set and a canvas and
I
can offend someone. That piece upstairs, though… it’s a little like a Salvador Dali painting mixed with a Pablo Neruda book. That probably doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what I think.”
Greenfeld stood in the light of the front screen door and shook his head wonderingly, meeting Shane’s eyes, and Shane realized something that shocked him: Greenfeld was truly excited. He was nearly panting, as if he’d just discovered a Rembrandt at a garage sale. Shane felt increasingly worried by Greenfeld’s response.
“All right,” he said slowly, “if it’s OK with Christiana, I’ll agree to show the painting. On one condition.”
Greenfeld narrowed his eyes a little. “Name it.”
“It’s not for sale,” Shane said flatly. “Not as an original, at least. The original is mine.”
“That kind of defeats the purpose, Shane,” Greenfeld said pedantically. “Seriously?”
Shane nodded. “Yeah, sorry. I’m… not done with it yet.”
“I thought you said you finished it?”
Shane shrugged and didn’t say anymore. Greenfeld sighed and spread his hands. “I’d never have expected it from you, Shane Bellamy, but you get artsier every time I talk to you. That’s not a bad thing, as long as you don’t go all native on me. I’m not done squeezing you dry yet.”
“I’ll call your office if I decide to go crazy and cut off my own ear.”
“I appreciate it,” Greenfeld said, nodding gravely. He opened the screen door and stepped out into the sunny afternoon. “The showing is this Saturday. It’s late notice, I know, but I suspect you can squeeze it into your busy schedule if you really try. You know where the museum is? Downtown, Forest Park?”
“Er, yeah,” Shane blinked. “Why?”
Greenfeld turned back to Shane as he reached his car. “So you can bring the piece. You do know you’ll need to be there yourself, don’t you?” He grinned and shook his head. “You really are a newbie at this. That’s excellent. The
Post Dispatch
people are going to love you. You’re the
artist,
Shane. People will want to talk to you about that wacky painting of yours,
especially
if you aren’t selling it. The show starts at six, but if you can get there by five, latest, that will give us time to get set up. Can you make it?”
Shane nodded slowly. “Sure. I guess. I just didn’t realize. Yeah, that’s fine.”
Greenfeld clapped Shane briskly on the shoulder and turned to get in his car. “I wouldn’t have guessed it,” he said, dropping into the low seat and draping his hand over the steering wheel. “You’ve really never painted anything like that before?”
Shane stepped back from the car as Greenfeld started the engine. “Not even close. It surprised me as much as anyone.”
“It was the woman on the front step that did it,” Greenfeld said, peering up at Shane, his smile gone. “My first thought was that I wanted to burn it, like I said, but then I saw her.”
“Yeah?” Shane said. “And then what did you think?”
Greenfeld’s eyes grew unfocussed and he squinted. “I thought: ‘It’s all just a stage. The first act is about to begin, and she’s going to be the main character. I wonder what happens next.’” His eyes sharpened again and he studied Shane’s face. “That’s the point, right? Why’s she sitting there, watching, waiting? Who’s coming up the path, and what happens when they get there? That’s what I was thinking, at least. At first, I hated it. Then I saw her, and I still hated it, but I was too curious to look away.” He shook his head again, quickly. “I don’t know how you did it, Shane, but it’s quite a trick. Keeping that balance must be like walking a tightrope.” He smiled crookedly at Shane and tapped his temple twice with his left index finger.
Shane smiled and nodded, not quite knowing what the gesture meant. Greenfeld shifted into reverse and backed gingerly out of the turn-off. A minute later, Shane was alone again. He walked back to the cottage a little dazedly. For some reason, he didn’t really want to put his new painting into the gallery showing, and yet he hadn’t been able to say no to Greenfeld. Probably because he had no good reason to refuse. It was just a strange, gut feeling. Somehow, the painting wasn’t meant for the rest of the world. It was for him, alone. But that wasn’t entirely accurate, either, and he had to be honest with himself about it. The painting was for him, and it was for the ghost.
And suddenly Shane thought he understood what Greenfeld’s head-tapping gesture had meant. He’d said that painting something like the house portrait—the “haunted house”, he had called it—was like a balance, like walking a tightrope. The head tap showed that Greenfeld understood where that tightrope existed. It was a tightrope of the mind. The balance was between realism and abstraction, between ugliness and beauty. Shane had felt that balance, that strange tension, from the very beginning, from the first night he had begun to paint the house, responding to the insistent prodding of the muse. But now another question occurred to him: what happened if he fell off the tightrope?
In the warm afternoon sunlight, Shane shivered.
The second painting started differently than the one of the main house. With that one, Shane had known what it was going to be from the start, and had begun with the basic shape. He’d blocked in the house in one quick sitting, and then spent the following days filling in the details. Now, with the second painting, it seemed to be happening in reverse.
Shane had sat in the mid-afternoon light of the studio for half an hour, merely staring at the blank canvas, trying to see where the first brush strokes were supposed to go, but nothing had come. The muse still had her fingernails dug into him, but she wasn’t offering any specific help for the moment. Now, she merely provided the hunger to make, but not the details. Shane had stared at the canvas, his brow furrowed, his lips pressed together, until he’d gotten frustrated.
In a gesture of annoyance, he’d reached forward with his brush and slashed at the canvas, making a quick, tapered black stroke. And then he’d stared at it.
Maybe it had just been the cathartic gesture he’d needed to break free from some unexpected artist’s block, but the stroke seemed like more than a random slash of paint. It looked like a shape, like the suggestion of something much more complex, buried in the white. Shane had studied it, trying to divine its meaning. Then he abandoned that logic; that was the sort of thinking that had left him stymied for the past half an hour. Instead, he leaned forward once again, raised his right arm, and added a second line, an arcing sweep that curved under the first line. Suddenly it wasn’t just two lines. It was the beginning of a face.
Realizing that, the picture suddenly clicked into place. The next half a dozen strokes had come a little more easily, with less thought. After that, he was hardly even aware of the brush in his hand. After that, he fell into the canvas.
This painting was like a puzzle, or piece of complicated origami, unfolding as it went. It had begun with a face, and Shane had been dimly aware of whose it was, even as he’d drifted deep into the canvas, sinking fathom after fathom into the story. It was neither of the Wilhelms; he knew that immediately. There was no life in the face, no vibrance or story.
And then he realized why this should be so. He was not painting a face, technically; he was painting a
painting
of a face, duplicating one of Wilhelm’s portraits.
The image expanded out of those initial brush strokes, filling the middle quarter of the new canvas, quite small, but rich with color and detail. It was the portrait of Woodrow Wilson, the one Gus Wilhelm had painted in an effort to win the post of official White House portrait artist. As Shane painted it, he turned it over and over in his mind, wondering, inventing.
Gus Wilhelm had not received the post he had painted the portrait for. Shane knew that much from the article he’d read on the Internet. The post had instead been awarded to another artist, a veteran portrait painter named Hallsley. Wilhelm’s portrait of Wilson had been returned to him with a note pinned to it: “This work is more suited to the bathhouse than the white house.”
Wilhelm surely would have kept that portrait, and the note as well, perhaps even leaving it pinned to the work, a constant reminder of his first major setback. Based on what he knew of Wilhelm, Shane imagined he’d looked at the portrait as a motivational tool
. I’ll show them,
he’d have thought to himself, firming his jaw, balling his hands into big fists.
Reject me, will they? I’ll see them seeking
me
out someday, pleading with me to return and paint their damned portraits. And will I do it? Yes, I will, and I won’t even tell them how they once rejected me. That will be my little secret. That will be the jaunty feather in my cap, the one that only has special meaning to me, and me alone.
Shane imagined Wilhelm hanging the portrait in the Riverhouse, years after he had achieved fame and wealth, long after he’d met the challenge of that snide little note. And yet the painting remained, and always enjoyed a place of high honor. Why?
Because despite his braggadocio, that note had wounded him. He’d remembered it with great, vivid clarity, remembered the shocked numbness of that rejection. It lived in his mind, even after the writer of the note had been replaced, even after Wilhelm had indeed gone back and painted succeeding presidents. Because none of those latter portraits had bested that first one, the one that had begun in the hot confines of the Oval Office, surrounded by other artists while the sun dazzled just over the President’s right shoulder. Secretly, Wilhelm had believed it was among his best works, and he’d hated the fact that it had failed.
He often recalled the day of that rejection, remembered examining the returned portrait, confused and crushed. He had painted the president exactly as he had witnessed him; his glasses pushed up on his forehead, leaning over his desk with his chin resting on his cupped right hand. Wilson’s face was shaded, but a line of brilliant orange sunlight followed the angle of his cheek, his left ear, and his severely combed hair, glowing in the drab office like a halo.
Wilhelm had been confused because he’d felt that the portrait had perfectly captured the intensity of the man in his work. The line of backlit sunlight was like a streak of molten gold, starkly accenting the president’s features, implying the Olympus-like grandeur of the highest office in the land. Later, however, Wilhelm had seen the winning entry, and had understood. The winner of the post had painted Wilson in a completely invented pose; standing, fully lit, chin raised and hand on hip. Behind him the artist had even injected a pastoral scene of rolling fields and idyllic forest. Wilhelm had then realized that the winning painting, with its invented nobility and stiff formality, was the very antonym of his own portrait, which delved into the ethos of the man himself.
Apparently, presidential portraits were not meant to be portraits at all; they were only architectural renderings, displaying the mere meat of the man’s body and some contrived sense of what people expected of their leaders. Wilhelm told himself that, if such was the case, he had been granted a divine blessing in being passed over for the post. Perhaps he could even find it in his heart to pity the man who had bested him, George Hallsley.
Then again, perhaps not. Hallsley was perfectly content with creating mere painted waxworks. And he had been condescending to Wilhelm, looking down his long, skinny nose and peering through a fussy little pair of Pince Nez glasses, as if Wilhelm had been someone’s dirty-faced child with a slate and a chunk of colored chalk. Deep down, Wilhelm had hated Hallsley, and hated the rejection he represented. Gustav Wilhelm had spent the next decade furiously working to live down that failure. He’d succeeded everywhere except in his own mind.
