Peter Heller - The Painter

While she chopped garlic and heirloom tomatoes, while she hummed and sang, I painted a house. A small adobe house on an ochre hill, like this one, like mine. I painted a blue pond and sailing glad clouds, and I mixed the terre verte with cobalt violet and tinted it in half with the white to make the delicate undersides of the cumulus. I began to feel that gladness that can only come when I paint. I painted a crane-like bird hunched at the edge of the pond fishing. Then I painted a man in the garden, also hunched, leaning to a shovel digging. An intensity in the man. A garden? Yes. No. The dirt he threw grew into a pile. As I painted, I myself grew alarmed. The pile grew and grew, the man dug, until the hole could only be of a certain size, could only be one thing. I squeezed a tube of Mars black onto the palette and I painted birds: one two three four large night colored birds. Like that Carl Sandburg poem I had read the other day They have been swimming in midnights of coal mines somewhere . Except they were not crows. They were bigger, they were ravens, but big as vultures. Four in a line looking down off the roof at a man digging a grave. A man like me.

I painted fast. Sometimes I painted so fast I did not see how it could be done. If I happened to look at a clock. Sometimes a big painting with a lot of elements in four, five hours. Or one. Or half. Sofia was humming, I could hear the bubble of boiling water. Smell sautéed onion, garlic, simmered tomatoes. In the time it took her to make dinner.

We had no Italian bread, she had popped two slices of Sara Lee into the toaster. Could smell that too. Out the open double doors the mountain was catching the full brunt of the lowering sun. Every outcrop and rockslide, the quilt of the forests: spruce and aspen, juniper, oak, lit to sharper detail and warmed by the honeyed light. Sharpened and softened at the same time. One reason I could spend so much time alone up here, happily: could sit and absorb the two hours before dark every evening as if it were a pageant.

But the picture on the easel. Somehow it spawned itself and somehow it felt, what?

I felt guilty. Like the man digging the grave. I got myself, the bulk of me, between the painting and Sofia behind the long counter. As if I could cover it. She glanced up now and then as she worked and she seemed happy—happy that she was cooking, happy that I was painting, happy that it was a lovely evening and that we were doing whatever we were doing, happy maybe that it wasn’t at all defined. She did not seem to be focusing on the painting in particular when she looked, on the details, maybe it was a little too far away. It was a landscape with a figure, like so many. I stepped to the canvas and quickly lifted and flipped it and leaned it against the wall frame out, against a large piece of fiberboard I tore up for palettes. Leaned it at enough of an angle that the paint wouldn’t smear. And straightened.

“Smells good,” I said a little too loud, a little too hearty. Her head came up sharply and she studied me for a second, curious, then went back to laying out plates. I went onto the ramada, lit up. What the hell was going on with me? I had never hidden a painting ever. A bug, a freight train, a trout, they had all seemed born more out of themselves than me, they deserved the simple respect of being. I could not remember hiding a painting from anyone, much less myself. Even the nudes that had so pricked Maggie. Because that’s what it felt like—hiding. I had turned the picture’s face to the wall so fast as much to hide its guilty expression from my own eyes. Strange. That’s one thing, I murmured. One thing we are learning to be sure of: life does not get less strange.

“Ding ding!” she called happily. “Ding a ling. Pronta!”

“Great,” I called. I called Great and didn’t feel so good.

Watch it brother, I said to myself, and set the cheroot carefully on the arm of one of the Adirondack chairs. Watch yourself. Start lying this early and. It can’t be good.

We hit the hay early, soon after full dark, must have been close to nine, and I asked her to rub my shoulders, and she did, and we fell asleep curled around each other. Me around her, looking out the screen door to the broad shadow of the mountain. She slept, the even breathing, deep, the twitches, sighs. A content sleep I envied. I could not. I lay awake, elbow against her hip and hand cupped over her breast. The weight of it. I lay awake and watched the heat lightning. Wondered what good would come of it. Had found a model I could really work with and now look: complication. Well. It worked for Wyeth and Helga, for decades, wasn’t it? Had never worked for me. I never needed a subject that badly. Fuck, Jim, way to go.

I watched the heat lightning and small fleets of clouds sail over the mountain ridge, lit from underneath, pale hulls and dark in the rigging. The lightning shimmered and boomed without sound, a far off battle. Heat lightning is a funny name. I guess because it comes this time of year, in the heaviest, sultry nights. But the glimmers seemed cold, part of the same cold distance as planets and stars.

Few stars tonight, just noticed. And then a minute later I saw why: as I watched the clouds scudding over the mountain’s shoulder, a bright white light flashed on the eastern ridge. Like hunters playing with a powerful spotlight up there. It wasn’t a spotlight, it was the moon. It flashed and then domed and it backlit perfectly the trees on the ridgeline, made of them a finely drawn fringe. I sucked in a breath. I hadn’t seen this, not since I’d been here. It rose, the moon, so fast it seemed to lift off like a big bright bird. Like a great egret rising out of the cattails, too big too white too slow. Too pure. The moon in that instant brought the mountain close, close enough it seemed I could reach out and touch the bristle of trees.

The same moon was shining down on Santa Fe, on Irmina with her losses, who harbored nothing it seemed but compassion, on Steve, on whatever deals were hatching like red birds in his head. On the Box of the Rio Grande where the river was threshing pale and loud over the big drops, in the long pool where I had spread Alce’s ashes. On the bends of the little Sulphur where I had found some peace in the past weeks. On bow hunting camps and bronze grizzly bears.

I lay watching the moon detach and distance itself from our troubled topography, and sail, it seemed, with some relief into the absences of space.

The trout were probably wide awake like me tonight, finning the current at the edge of the riffles, feeding on the bugs haplessly lit.

That is where my heart went. To them. To the cool water. The unburdened sounds of water flowing over rock, smooth water over smooth rock, roiled into a rough edged rush and burble that was also somehow soothing. Under the moon the whitewater would be rips and tears in the darkness, the pools black, or maybe black with the bright moon reflected there, the trout lost to sight but looking up themselves into a bright firmament. I cannot name it but my heart felt like that. All those reversals, rough to smooth and back again, light erupting in the dark and subsiding back to a blind flow where sound and smell and cold were more important. Where touch was. The thing about night, about dark: touch is most important. And lying there against the heat of Sofia I could feel the stones underfoot, the press and cold of the current.

I, we, used to fish at night. Alce and I. Under a moon. We did well when we could rouse ourselves to do it. When we could be bothered to put on sweaters. There was something so magical about the two of us fishing a run together in the dark, barely visible to each other, throwing flies for fish we would never see until they leapt into the sere gaze of the moon.