Peter Heller - The Painter

Is she dreaming? Doesn’t seem so. The deathlike quiet seems to extend to her spirit, her mind. She could be dead. The first time I saw it I had just galumphed through three galleries of paintings with barely a pause and I was suddenly transfixed. Was she? Dead? Or sleeping? I needed to know. Her skin, as I said, was flawless, seemed alive, did not have the waxy sheen or grainy gray of a corpse. Was it ruddy? No, that was the gloom. Okay, if she was not dead she was deathlike, she suggested death, as did the night, and whatever death was not yet here it certainly was on its way.

Standing before the painting I realized that I had been holding my breath, and that I was attracting stares. Well. I was right in front of it, and it was a graphic nude and I was an imposing man with a beard with flecks of gray. Dirty old man is what they must have been thinking, though why in this age of Internet and cheap nudie bars a dirty old man would go anywhere near a museum is a sensible question. I was not. I was not even old, I was maybe thirty-four. I had been asked to come to London to join an arts festival, I was staying in a four star hotel in Bloomsbury, and I felt like a king.

The painting disturbed me profoundly. I got the sense that the scene was taking place during a terrible war, a war that had left little in the world alive, but I couldn’t be sure of that, either. I couldn’t be sure of anything. What it made me feel in the end was something that was not fully realized until I saw the second painting.

This one was more famous, I think, the way the curator’s card spoke about it, and I was surprised that I’d never seen it. It was Picasso’s Nude Woman in a Red Armchair . The card said it was Marie-Thérèse, Pablo’s seventeen year old lover. Apparently he was head over heels in love with her. I could see why, even through the stylized geometry of her round and semi-reclining form. She was all round. She was in a red chair as advertised and she was frankly uncovered. Her tilted face was round. The sweep of the hair framing her face was round. Her head was leaning into her right hand, her other hand up to her chin in reflection, and her hands and her arms were round round round, and her ear, her hips, her thighs, and whatever thought she pondered was light and pleasant and round. Her pearls or beads. Everything about her, especially her breasts, which were circles, it all rounded and came back to her simple fresh beauty, as if the lines and the light could not bear to be anywhere else, everything was round but her lovely cat eyes and the V and crease of her vagina. Well. She made me instantly happy. Her contained exuberance was contained, barely, in the simple circle of her being. She also aroused me. She was not perfect like the other, not in a classical sense, her limbs were short, she was pudgy, she might even waddle a little as she walked. But. She was devastatingly sexy. That was it, maybe. The painting was so simple. Simple joy, simple sensual heat, simple love in her presence. I felt what Picasso must have felt. She was clearly an uncomplicated soul and I imagined that she reduced all the world before her to its simplest and most fiercely living elements. I imagined that the world talked back to her in the clearest colors, the cleanest music. How else to live in love?

Now back to the other, the dead or sleeping woman. I wended my way back to her through several large rooms. As soon as I caught sight of that pale form, the very realistic length of her limbs, her shadowed armpit, the closed but beautiful eyes, I was aroused. A much different arousal—dark, tinged with what? Guilt maybe. At the voyeurism of studying this woman who could not know I was watching. At the shame of being stimulated by a body that might be a corpse. It was a dark and groaning and maybe violent feeling, violent in the sense of being drawn, exquisitely, toward death and what it does to all things in its proximity. The way it both chills and sanctifies them. The way death is both near and infinitely remote, the way it freezes and somehow kindles the heat of something grotesque and maybe irresistible and sexy, which is life at its most desperate. Phew. What I realized standing there, is that this dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead. The spiritual impulse becomes religion. And dead. To my mind.

That is when I decided that whatever I did as an artist, I would try to go toward the living and not away from it. Even, especially, in the most abstract paintings.

A funny memory to have as I drove that morning toward Santa Fe, me, the recent purveyor of death. I kept checking my mirror for a black El Camino, but the road behind me was empty.

I wasn’t ready to go back to—what? Everything. Not right away. I checked into a Super 8 on the strip in Española and spent two days watching TV and napping and soaking in the hot springs, which weren’t that hot, and eating Chinese food. I let the phone run out of juice and didn’t recharge it. I didn’t drink. I wanted to. I kept an eye out for Jason and his car and never saw him. On the third day I drove at dawn into Santa Fe. Went straight up to the room, took the cell phone out of my coat pocket and left it on the charger. I went back downstairs and got in my truck. Fishing gear was still in back just in case and I drove out Washington past the pink church and north into the country toward Tesuque.

The road skirted the base of the mountain and dropped off the mesa. It narrowed and followed the creek. Along the stream the big old willows and elms, the cottonwoods grew over the road and their leaves were already starting to turn and some had already fallen. I could follow a road like this forever: narrow and winding, tunneled with old trees and littered with yellow leaves. Dappled sunlight slid up the hood and over the windshield. The morning was cool. Clouds massed in the west over the mountains, but here it was sunny. At the church I took a right and wound up into the juniper. Sad to leave the big twisted poplars and the stream, but. Pretty up here, too. The sky opened and I saw two hawks floating in it, big raptors. The road turned to dirt and leveled out and I downshifted and slowed. The washboards could loosen your teeth. The driveways along here led to double-wides, leaning barns, yards with rusted horse trailers, dirt corrals. At a mailbox painted with a leaping fish, my fish, I turned in to a sage field and wound toward a grove of piñons and a small adobe.

She was standing on the step, waiting. Smoke threaded from the chimney. The sun was behind me, rising into the morning, everything was full lit with a warm russet light. That time of day. Her long black hair was loose, hanging to her waist, the silver flashed at her ears, her eyes were sharp with concern. The sight of her. She was not tall but she looked tall. She stood with her arms crossed over her stomach, comfortable, waiting. She knew. She probably knew hours ago, days, that I would be here. She never claimed to be psychic, but she was. She knew things people shouldn’t know, like that a good friend would show up today.

Where have I been? That’s what I thought. For weeks, months now? Where the fuck have I been? On some journey. I can’t say for what. Just the sight of Irmina cracked me open. The simple love, my oldest friend.

She reached out a hand as I came up the steps and took mine and turned and led me inside. The house smelled warm of woodsmoke and stew maybe. At the kitchen table, she let go of my hand and faced me. We were inches apart. For a moment I felt fully occupied by another soul, and then released. She trembled all along her length, like a tree struck at its base by an axe.