Peter Heller - The Painter

Pim decided to hold an unveiling party when he got back from Detroit. The police had assured him that he was not under any threat, but that extra security for the party might not be a bad idea. The Pantelas were the kind of couple that would make a show of shaking off any kind of mishap or misfortune, could send out one hundred and fifty evites for a party five days hence and a hundred and forty-three people would show. I would be the guest of honor and Julia asked me who I’d like to be there. I told her John “Wheezy” Hinchman, Santa Fe PD, and Celia Anson. The Pantelas adored their portrait of the girls, and even better, Julia called to tell me that Celine and Julie couldn’t get over it. Her voice was bright, without a hint of trauma, a marvel of resilience. She told the girls that what had happened that afternoon was a hunting accident, that everybody had gotten excited over nothing, and they had digested that and accepted it, the way children do. She said the painting made them laugh and laugh and they had endless discussions about what the chicken and colored blackbirds were doing on each other’s heads. The best theory was that being atop a small person, especially one linked to another small person, kept the foxes away and gave them a changing view of the world that was way less boring than, say, being in a tree. Julia’s laugh rang over the phone as she told it. I told her that I thought the girls simply had a strong association between the painting and bubble gum cigars.

I said, “I told Steve to keep a box of them on a pedestal next to my wall of latest paintings.”

“Paaw! You didn’t!”

“Yes, and just for fun, he did. Go look. He put them in a Cohiba box, pink and blue ones, and one of his customers said it was a terrifically ironic comment on tradition, authenticity, self-congratulation and self-mockery in contemporary art and asked how much.”

“Oweee! Knowing Steve, he probably sold it.”

“No, he wasn’t fast enough on his feet. He didn’t have clearance to put my name on it. That’s when he got the idea of inventing an artist, like in that Banksy movie. Dunno. I think he’s working on it. The backstory et cetera. It’s like inventing a cover dossier for a CIA agent or something. He’s afraid of the liability issues but he can’t get over the temptation of not splitting the sale price with anyone.”

“You make me laugh.”

“Yup. We started a tradition with those cigars. He says it’s a hit with the patrons. Gets them in a buying mood like balloons at a car dealership.”

I hung up feeling happy. Pim also decided that he’d like to keep me in the hotel another week, until after the party. It was only fair, he said. I wasn’t going to argue. I was painting every day up on the roof and I was painting well. I had Steve send half a dozen thirty by forty canvases and I tore through them in four days. I don’t paint with a lot of detail, especially in landscapes it’s mostly about color and movement, and I painted into the afternoon without pause. I felt lighter in my spirit. Sofia stayed with me in the suite and delighted in letting the valet dudes park Triceratops. Which they did with alacrity, as she always blessed them with very small fitted tops. The management politely asked that she please not pull out or in too early in the morning or too late at night because of the roar. She loved the hotel. She put in dedicated time reading on the wide porch, and in the big tub with lighthouse candles and whirlpool jets. We went to Ten Thousand Steps one afternoon and got sunburned and turned into raisins and on another day I showed her the stick hobbit shelters up on the mountain, and we followed the creek on a deer trail up through the aspen and all the way to the high ridge. In the evening we liked to walk up Canyon Road and tour the galleries. Unlike me, she was methodical, and she found a lot to appreciate. She even found a blue coyote red moon painting to love.

“Look, look you big lug. This one. Stand here. No, here. Close your eyes. Now imagine there had never been a blue coyote in the world. There was water, there was darkness, there was the Void, and then the Word and then there was a blue coyote! Voila!”

She poked me. “You can open your eyes now.”

“Oh, sorry.”

She was sort of right. To me. It was a good painting. That’s probably how it happened for Heberto Nuñez-Jackson. He painted the first one out of the Void and it was really compelling and he did it again and it was also pretty good and he got addicted to that relationship with Creation: him, the darkness, the coyote, blue. And the red moon broke his own heart one day. I got it. And then you have a habit and all you ever wanted in the world was to feel this thing about what you create, and then presto your coyote paintings begin to sell like hotcakes. And the people in the ski lodges and big adobe houses who buy them don’t really care if their blue coyote has a hundred cousins, maybe they actually like it, it makes them feel part of a trend, a phenomenon in art that is repeatedly reinforced. And so everybody is happy.

“What do you think?” she said, standing before it and gesturing with her hand like a game show model. “The only, the first. Look! The composition, the color. It’s really good. How is it different than a thousand of your Diebenkorn Ocean Park paintings?”

I looked.

“It just is.”

“Ohhhh, snobbism. I never, ever thought I’d see that in Jim Stegner.”

“Not a snob. I believe in truth. Which is also excellence, by the way.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You mean raw, clumsy honesty is the same as excellence?”

“I didn’t say that. Truth is excellence. Honesty is not the same as truth.”

“Huh.” She frowned, willing, maybe, to give me the benefit of the doubt for at least a split second.

“Truth needs honesty, but that is not all it needs.”

“Speak.”

“Well, an artist can be honest in her rendition of say a hummingbird, in how she sees it, in her application of technique, but she may not be true to the bird.”

“You mean in skill?”

“In skill, in her ability to see. To really see the bird. To see the bird as it bears its spirit forward into the world. In empathy. When all of that is there you can feel it. It knocks you over.”

“Huh.”

“There is something in even this coyote, this dawn of the world Genesis coyote, that is not true. He did not see into the heart of the coyote. And so I reject it. That’s not snobbism.”

“Huh.” She smiled at me. She said: “He speaks, who knew? He’s sort of a guru.”

“You didn’t think I had opinions on art?”

“Pretty much I just saw you as a sex object,” she said.

“Hah!”

One night we walked all the way to the top of the road and I took her into El Farol for dinner. I’d about gotten over the shame of my incident with Celia. I had played it over and over in my mind and I could not see the man’s moves as expressing anything other than malicious intent. He needed to be stopped and I stopped him. Right? Maybe. A salsa band was rocking in the packed low-beamed room. We sat at a small table in a corner and ate little plates of sautéed eggplant and duck empanadas. Who would make an empanada out of a duck? Someone straining for originality like Nuñez-Jackson. Tapas is a fancy way of saying a morsel of food for a fuckload of money, but I didn’t mind, I was feeling flush. Pim wired the money for the portrait before he had even seen it. Steve forked over the promised 60 percent in cash, twenty-one grand, though I could tell it hurt him.