Peter Heller - The Painter

“You sure you want this in small bills like a felon?” he said, holding out a courier bag full of twenties. Then he turned white. He actually paled.

“Oh, sorry, Jim. Dumb dumb stupid.”

“I am a felon, get used to it. A felon who pled down to misdemeanor.”

“Yes, before. A long time ago, well. But. I’m sorry.”

I took the bag and slung it on my shoulder. “It’s been a weird month,” I said.

He chewed the inside of his mouth, hesitated. I knew him so well.

“What? Spit it out,” I said.

“Well, I’ve been hanging your paintings as they come in, in order. The west wall. And.”

He took a big breath, it expanded him, there was hope for all of us, and then he slumped. He looked beset, excited, too. Not sure I’d ever met anyone who could telegraph so many battling emotions at once.

“And what?”

“Your work has changed. Whatever is going on out there on the road, with our nice detective friends, whatever. Something has happened to your painting. I’ve known you since you were a kid. And—” I knew what he was going to say next: “I’ve been in this business a long time.” He continued: “When Alce died things changed, too, it got darker sometimes, but not like this. Back then it seemed you fought your grief by getting more and more whimsical. I’m not saying the work is better now, but it has deepened. The patrons are noticing it, too.”

“You raised the prices.”

He shrugged.

I thought about that. Sour disgust. And then for some reason a huge sadness overtook me, right there in his office, holding a bagful of money. All my lightness vanished.

“I couldn’t paint my way out of it,” I said. “Of Alce.”

“I know.”

“I tried everything.”

“I know.”

I stood there.

“I was drinking, fucking people. I didn’t protect her. She came to me for help before she died and I just yelled at her.”

Steve looked at me. He didn’t say a word, for once.

“Okay,” I said, and adjusted the bag on my shoulder. “Thanks.”

“I’ve gotten some calls from some producers,” Steve said. “And magazines.”

“What?”

“Go, get out of here. Spend some twenties. I’ll tell you later.”

That was the long way of saying I had a pocket full of money and I didn’t mind cutting loose and spending it on the two of us, Sofia and me. Also, Steve was up to something. He is always up to something. I hadn’t been this flush since the book about me came out. That had lasted a little less than a year and I pretty much blew it all gambling and doing other stupid shit. This time it felt different. This was a better cutting loose, with Sofia, and for some reason when it’s all cash it spends easier and lighter. I liked it that way. At the little table in El Farol we leaned forward and talked into the music the way you would talk into the wind. Sofia had been several times to the gallery on mornings I was working in the sun room, she’d walk over and study the wall of my paintings. She and Steve got along like two train engines on fire. I made that painting fast one morning, on a small canvas, their two locomotives flaming and chugging happily toward each other under a benign mesa. With her training at RISD and all her reading and the traveling she’d done in the best museums, they could talk to each other in a way I never could. “You and Steve,” I’d said, holding up the picture. “Wow,” she said and laughed. “Those billowing plumes of black smoke, that’s art talk,” I had said. She laughed harder. “It’s for you,” I said. She was very touched. “I think I can I think I can,” she murmured and kissed my ear. Now in El Farol we drank espresso, full caffeine, we weren’t on any schedule, and leaned into each other and she asked about the horse and the crow and I tried to tell her about their evolving conversation.

I said, “Paintings can take on a life of their own. It’s like stuff happens in them when you’re not looking. The crow and the horse started out as adversaries—I mean the crow would love to eat the horse, if he ever, say, jumped off the cliff and became a carcass. But instead they began to talk. I think maybe the crow cursed the horse. I told you that I thought the crow was telling the horse that he had a choice, that he didn’t have to jump after all. Well, I think that’s sort of like Eve biting the apple. You were talking about Genesis. I think it’s like that, the crow is like the serpent. He is giving the horse the awareness of choice. And with a full knowledge of choice comes a foreknowledge of death.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, when we have no choice, everything just happens. Everything is compelled by instinct or by some shit from outside us, some imperative, and then, well, we never have to think about where it’s all headed. We react and it’s headed where it’s headed, that’s all, and we are where we are. Just being. There is nothing but the fullness of being, the moment we are in. What the animals have, why they are blessed.”

“Huh. Why Dugar wants to have sex with sea elephants or beavers maybe.”

I laughed. I dug in the pocket of my barn coat and pulled out the slim volume of Rilke.

“Listen to this.”

I flipped through the Duino Elegies until I found the page I’d turned down—it was at the beginning of the Eighth Elegy. I started to read it out loud, but the words were beaten around by a loud Venezuelan merengue, so I just handed it to her. Her eyes weren’t that great. She squinted and shifted around in her chair so she could hold it up to the patterned light from a stamped metal wall sconce.

She rocked her head as she read, not with the rhythm of the salsa but with the poem. She read it again, came around and put the book face down on the table.

“I always thought you were more like an animal, the way you worked. The way you don’t think, the way you are just in it.”

“And?”

“Turns out you are thinking all the time. Fuckin A.” She laughed.

“I’m serious,” I said. “I don’t think the crow is doing the horse a favor, and I wonder if painting isn’t a way just to be like an animal for a few hours. To be in the stream of eternity or whatever. To feel like that. Same as fishing.”

“It’s not the same as fishing! You were on a roll and now I realize you’re the same old retard. Phew.”

And then she didn’t say anything. She frowned and she was very thoughtful. I wondered if she was thinking about what did that for her, put her in the stream, I wondered if she missed working on her own art.

On the fourth day after Sofia’s arrival I did a big portrait. I guess it’s a portrait. I asked Steve to send up another fifty by eighty stretched canvas, same size as the one I’d done of the girls. I’d enjoyed working on the larger size, and I wanted to be ready in case the mood struck me again. Steve loved it, because the bigger pieces commanded quite a lot more money. So he had Miguel deliver it to the sun room. But first he asked me if I’d called a lawyer yet, and when I said no he had a small fit and then had a prominent local defense attorney’s card hand-delivered to me on the roof, with Steve’s scrawl in red marker right across it: Call him you idiot! I put it in my shirt pocket and forgot about it.

The management, meanwhile, was getting into the swing of having a famous New Mexican artist working in their penthouse. They began to make hay with it. A young reporter ambushed me twice at the main entrance after the St. Francis leaked to the Santa Fe New Mexican that the famously reclusive Jim Stegner, celebrity artist, was staying in the Artist Suite and actually painting major new work in the rooftop conservatory, the same “colorful” artist that had recently been in the news as a person of interest in the killing of a notorious animal poaching kingpin and horse abuser in Colorado. And a POI in the curious death of the kingpin’s horse abuser brother. I refused to talk to the journalist, I hurried by, but a few days later I picked a copy of the paper off the front desk to take with me out on the gallery with a large cup of coffee, and I settled into one of the big chairs, thinking, Life doesn’t really get better than this —when I flipped to regional news and there on the second page of the section was a photo of me, bearded, in my spattered cap, smoking a little stogie and fishing. I spilled the coffee into my lap. The impulse was to cover the picture. The story told about my stature in the art world and the killings, and said I was accompanied by my comely young model. At least they didn’t put model in quotes. For a moment I was blind, literally, with rage. I felt ill. Two men were dead, a sickening fact, more sickening if you knew them, way worse if you had spattered the last jets of their blood on the ground. I recognized the picture as coming from Steve, it was one we had used for some promotional stuff in the last couple of years. I went straight through the lobby and took the elevator and called him up from the room phone.