Peter Heller - The Painter

The phone rang loud in my room at eight, and I woke and took the down pillow from under my head and put about half a goose between my ear and the receiver, and listened to Steve crow. He wasn’t going to let me sleep in.

Pim’s house was up Double Arrow Road, a twisty washboarded dirt road with a locked gate for the big houses at the very top. There was a Buddhist stupa up there that few people knew about, a tall gold cross-legged Buddha off in the pines. He had serene, all loving eyes, and I admit that after Alce died I drove up there more than once and knelt before the Lord of Compassion and looked into those eyes and wept. I didn’t know what else to do. I would park below at the gate and walk up the last steep mile. Once it was during a snowstorm and I lost myself in the trees and almost froze to death like a polar explorer. I can’t even remember now what color his eyes are, blue agate I think, or green, but I remember feeling that they were without judgment and without the desire even to comfort, and so they were naked in the conviction that everything would unfold as it was supposed to. I took great comfort in that.

This morning I didn’t have to walk to the top of the road, I had the code for the gate and it slid open. I was on time. I was already breakfasted, I was coffeed, I was a good boy.

From the road there was a long driveway that climbed to the highest knoll of the ridge. A circular drive pooled before a two story pueblo with latilla fences and stick ladders on the stepped roofs. Here was a massive front door carved with suns and corn. Pim’s wife Julia came to the door. Yoga pants and a ponytail. She was sunny and brisk. She had a French accent, but she was not French, she was Canadian, from Montreal. She had been running a health club and I guess Pim was on business there and went for a workout and presto. She gave me a great big hug and I could tell she wasn’t holding my truancy and the girls’ hairdos against me. She understood the unpredictability of art. Yesterday I told Steve to tell Pim: No more hairdos, I wasn’t Rembrandt. Please have the girls come as they were on a normal day, if there were such a thing.

Sailor suits, it would turn out. White with blue trim. I guess that was normal.

Julia ushered me into a great open room with a grand piano that looked straight down on the campus of St. John’s College in the valley below. Church, adobe dorms, soccer fields, almost like looking down from a plane. And the steep wooded ridges behind it. My easel was already set up, the light from the north facing windows was clean and tempered. Perfect.

Julia asked if I wanted an espresso. I said, Please.

“Come into the kitchen. The girls are almost ready.”

She walked briskly ahead of me down a tiled hall covered in Persian and Indian runners and lined with paintings. I was there, two of the beetle series, as was my friend from Vermont, Eric Aho. Also an early Alex Katz from when he spent a lot of time out West. Good mix. Down two steps and through a dining room with big windows looking out on the same mountain view and featuring a table that must have been sliced from a redwood. One solid slab. One tentacled candelabra in the middle made from handworked black steel, vines that flowed to each corner of the board, flowered with small yellow candles. Pretty nifty. I could imagine having dinner here as long as there were a butler to carry the ketchup. Julia stepped briskly, talked briskly over her shoulder as she went. We pushed through the swinging door into a red saltillo tiled kitchen bright and warm with a round table in a corner cove. The table was backed by tall windows outside of which bloomed the oranges and yellows of fall flowers. The room smelled of toast. On the brushed steel of the double fridge were taped the artistic endeavors of the girls, watercolors of Mom and Dad and dogs and trees and some animals that might have been moose. There was a newspaper spread on the table, and crayons, and there was a tiara on the bench and a plush baby seal and a doll face down on the floor in the attitude of a bomb victim. I understood that this was the heart of the house. It was the only room where anything was out of place and the only place that was alive. I thought of Alce, how she had never felt kinship with dolls, human dolls, and had left them scattered on the floor like this one; her favorites were birds and dogs, which I had taken as an early sign of good values.

Julia made us both espresso in a fancy machine, going through the motions with practiced ease, barely looking at the cups, talking all the while in high spirits, about I’m not sure what. I liked her accent. She said that Pim had to go to Detroit on business, he was sorry to miss me, I said I didn’t know Detroit still existed, except for baseball, she laughed, she said You look good, Jim, better than when you were married to that playmate. Bachelorhood is good for you, maybe. I said, maybe. I said that I wanted to paint the girls in the kitchen.

“Here? You mean in the kitchen?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it smells like toast.”

She laughed. “Well, paaw! Okay! Or if you want we can bring the toaster into the big room and make toast in there!”

Shook my head.

She smiled. I could see what she was thinking: Artists! Already the project had taken a delightfully surprising turn.

“I can help you move the easel.”

“I can do it.”

We polished off the little cups and I moved camp. I got everything ready before they came so the twins wouldn’t tire as fast. I set up the brushes and jars and spread a palette of bright oranges, cadmium and transparent, and yellows and blues. I wanted them next to the table with the flowers in the background. She got the girls. They were six, in sailor suits, and nervous. They gripped each other’s hands like a lifeline. Celine and Julie. They were tiny. Seemed smaller maybe than I remembered Alce at six. Julia shuffled them sideways two feet to their left so they were framed in the windows. They stood holding hands by the table and chewed their lips and watched me wide eyed as if I were the polar bear at the zoo. Like there were no bars on the cage, just this moat, and wasn’t this supposed to be safe but maybe the bear would jump?

I went to my coat which I’d tossed over a chair and dug in the pockets and pulled out three candy necklaces. They took theirs without letting go of hands and without taking their eyes off me.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Maybe let’s try eating all the blue ones first.”

They couldn’t open the plastic wrapping without letting go of a hand, so this presented a dilemma. Probably couldn’t open them anyway. Here, I said, I’ll open them. The tiny hands holding the candy came up in unison and they relinquished their prizes without protest and without taking their eyes off me. I tore open the cellophane and the hands came up again.

“I brought one for me, too,” I said. I opened the third one.

“I eat the blue ones first for good luck.” I began to chew on one blue bead at a time, like a parrot high-grading the seeds of a fruit. “Yum!” I said. “The blue ones taste cool somehow.”

They were watching me. I thought I saw a growing light of fascination in their brown eyes. They looked down finally at the candy necklaces in their hands and moved their lips around. Quick glance at each other and the hands came up and they began to chew on the candy, the blue beads, still watching me.

“Good?”

Nods.