Peter Heller - The Painter

I signed the painting. It was late afternoon. It had taken much longer than most of my pictures and it was perfect.

Now what? What I came here for and it was done. I wanted to take it off the easel and run it right up to Julia and the twins, just to see their faces. But then I thought I better let it sit for a day or two so no one thought I’d blown through my assignment. Nobody, not even artists, understood art. What speed has to do with it. How much work it takes, year after year, building the skills, the trust in the process, more work probably than any Olympic athlete ever puts in because it is twenty-four hours a day, even in dreams, and then when the skills and the trust are in place, the best work usually takes the least effort. Usually. It comes fast, it comes without thought, it comes like a horse running you over at night. But. Even if people understand this, they don’t understand that sometimes it is not like that at all. Because the process has always been: craft, years and years; then faith; then letting go. But now, sometimes the best work is agony. Pieces put together, torn apart, rebuilt. Doubt in everything that has been learned, terrible crisis of faith, the faith that allowed it all to work. Oh God. And even then, through this, if you survive the halting pace and the fever, sometimes you make the best work you have ever made. That is the part none of us understand.

The reason people are so moved by art and why artists tend to take it all so seriously is that if they are real and true they come to the painting with everything they know and feel and love, and all the things they don’t know, and some of the things they hope, and they are honest about them all and put them on the canvas. What can be more serious? What more really can be at stake except life itself, which is why maybe artists are always equating the two and driving everybody crazy by insisting that art is life. Well. Cut us some slack. It’s harder work than one might imagine, and riskier, and takes a very special and dear kind of mad person.

So anyway, best not to tell even your dealer that some masterpiece took you a few hours.

Fuck it. I couldn’t resist. I hadn’t felt this way about a painting in a long time, that almost bursting urge to show it, why shouldn’t I? The oil was set enough. I’d put the canvas carefully in the truck bed on top of a drop cloth on top of my gear and make sure all the sliding windows of the cap were shut tight to protect it from dust. I’d surprise them.

That’s what I did. I carried the painting by the stretcher bars in back, down the elevator and through the lobby and out to the truck in the back lot. I loaded it into the bed. I got in and felt under the seat. The .41 magnum was there, wrapped in a rag. I kept thinking about the talk with Wheezy, the cheerful Buddha-like cop. It set me on edge. It was like he was trying to pressure me into a slip about Dell, but also like he wanted to warn me about Grant, warn me to be careful, to maybe even keep a gun at hand. But I also believed he didn’t want any more fights. He was complicated. I couldn’t get a bead on him, as fat and simple as he seemed.

I drove up Double Arrow, let myself in at the gate, parked in the gravel circle and knocked. In a minute Julia answered. Her face was lit with surprise. She laughed, the high bell-like laugh that must have been one of the reasons Pim married her.

“You are back? So soon? Do you need another look at the girls or did you just come for some more espresso?”

She was wearing running shorts and shoes and a St. John’s College t-shirt that must have been Pim’s. No makeup, mother of pearl stud earrings, she was lovely.

“I have a surprise for you.”

A flicker of uncertainty crossed her face.

“What? Another surprise? I don’t know if I can take any more, Jim.” She laughed. “Did you bring more candy?”

“No, something else.”

I went to the truck. Her eyes followed me. I unlatched and raised the door in the rear of the topper and lifted the painting out of the bed.

“Oh, pawww! Jim, you can’t be serious? Come in, come in, I’ll get the girls. You remember the kitchen—”

She was off. There, then gone like a bird off a limb. I held the canvas by the stretchers and carried it into the bright kitchen and leaned it against the table where the girls had posed. The bomb victim doll was now head first behind a banquette pillow, and the tiara was under the table, but there were new toys, a pink princess convertible on the table edge about to pull a Thelma and Louise, and a large plush dolphin, about a quarter scale, in the middle of the floor. The girls were into sea life. I heard a clatter, an excited clamor of conversation and the swing door pushed open and in tumbled the three of them. The girls were wearing matching lilac capri pants and plaid light cotton hoodie jackets. Like something you’d wear after a session surfing. Everybody seemed ready for action. They saw me and squealed. Couldn’t help themselves. With delight. Ran to me, skidded to a stop a foot away and yammered over each other. I have to say that just then I felt happier than I had in years. Better. I felt good, I mean like a good man in a good world, like the sunlight slanting through the big windows was also warming our spirits. I turned my pockets inside out.

“No necklaces, no gum.”

The girls exchanged a quick look as if seeking permission to forgive me. The answer was simultaneous and seemed to be Yes.

“But. I have something else.”

I pointed behind them. They turned. They had their mother’s panache with exclamation. They released a high chirr like startled birds, then stood stock still and their mouths fell open in unison. Their hands came unconsciously together and their eyes widened. For a perfect moment they took it in, their delight about to take wing. Then Crack!

A clay pot shattered off a shelf above us.

Stung cheek, raining bits, sharp, pottery clattering over the floor, another pot exploding off the shelf, crack, gunshot, unmistakable. The airless hum. My hand to face, bloody, blinking, the girls screaming out of the sudden caesura and two neat holes in the plate glass in front of us, the garden sunlight altered there, swirling, tiny vortexes of shadow. Holy fuck. All this in a flash and I bent and grasped, picked up both girls as I spun and hunched and covered them, covering, on my knees now and pushing all of us back behind the granite island, down onto the floor and sliding backwards, somehow pulling Julia down with us. The girls wailing, Julia making a breathy keening, a stream of questions in French I didn’t understand, her hands everywhere, under us, on the heads of the girls. Everyone shaking, pushed back now into the farthest corner of the room, pushed over the clay tiles with a bunching runner carpet and shards of blue pottery, back behind the counter, one tiny hand clutching my beard, another poking my right eye trying to hug my neck. Okay okay. Above, down the wall I saw a portable phone.

“Stay, stay!” I breathed. “Stay, just a sec.” Released them all long enough to lunge up for the phone, grabbed it and back, punching in 9-1-1 as I covered them again.

“Talk to them,” I whispered to Julia. Why was I whispering? I pressed the phone to Julia’s ear, her eyes just focusing.

“Talk to them. Stay here. I’m going to get this thing away from here.”

“Non! Non!” She almost hysterical, pleading, gripping my shirt.

“No, please. It’ll be fine. He’s not coming back. Talk, talk to them, now!”

Her tearstained face, nodding.

I half stood. The line of fire from the window could not touch them here in the corner. Plus the counter. Okay for the moment, they were safe. Fuck. I moved fast, as fast as I could, through the swing door and down the runnered hall and out to the main entrance and pressed into the jamb of the front door and shoved it open. Nothing. I could see the flower garden at the corner of the house outside the kitchen, all golds and yellows and flecks of blue, and a stretch of buffalo grass lawn gently sloping away from the house to the pines, he had been shooting upward, barely, he had missed because of the angle probably and the hard reflections of flowers and sky off the window.