Peter Heller - The Painter

“I haven’t seen so much buzz about your work in a decade—” He started right in, didn’t let me get a toehold.

“It’s super duper, Jim. I’m jacking up prices so often my arm’s getting tired.”

He went on to say that the Albuquerque paper, the Journal , had picked up the story from the New Mexican . Now the local news show, Albuquerque Channel 9 , wanted to do a segment, as did Art-Speak , the New Mexico PBS weekly art show.

Steve was so excited he was talking over himself. He said, “So 9News called this morning, they want to do a piece next week for the morning show. Vigilante artist or something. They are just beside themselves that you are one of our most famous artists and that you had this rough past and are now maybe a killer. Of course they can’t say vigilante because, after all, you are innocent until. But they can hint at it. And they just flipped over the clip from that radio interview in San Francisco. You scare the crap out of them I can tell. Maybe they want to skewer you but they won’t. Listen, this is your moment. You won’t believe how much Horse and Crow has gotten to. Kind of a grudge match between Pim and Sidell with a few others piping in. I’ve put in a call to the Harwood Museum—”

“Stop.”

“What?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

I couldn’t begin to tell him how it really felt, how awful, so I said, “Do you realize what that picture in the newspaper is going to do to my privacy? I’m going to have to leave town.”

Indraw of breath I could hear through the phone, then a long moan. “Aoooouuww!”

“What?”

“Don’t do that, Jim. You have no idea. Have you been online? Of course not, you’re so damn antique! A blogger who does a lot with the New Museum just wrote about you: ‘Art and Blood in the Wild West.’ The blog has gotten a storm of comments. The comparisons to Van Gogh again, some mention of mental illness, but I wouldn’t worry about it—”

That slugged me like a punch. Not the antique thing but the blogger thing.

“I’ve even been talking to the hotel, they want to give you like a month free! To keep painting on the roof. They are calling it the Artist’s Residency. They’re thinking of continuing it after you.”

I was now speechless. So officially steamed and disgusted I could not speak.

Out of the silence, timidly, Steve proffered: “You know, you need to take advantage of the hotel’s offer, stay. If you go back to Paonia it will follow you, the story, and I won’t be there to protect you.”

“Ouaaoauuw—”

“Jim? Jim ?”

“You’re a goddamn psychopath. I’m convinced now.”

“Who’s talking, Vigilante Man?”

“I want to throttle you. Seriously. No gun, no rock.”

“Don’t say that! Jesus.” Pause. “You don’t mean that?”

“Steve.”

“What?”

“Is this what you want? Seriously. To drive me at last over the edge?”

“What edge? One you haven’t been over already? Do you know what it’s like trying to keep track of you and your edges?”

“I mean it. Do you want me in living hell?”

“Is that how you think of me?”

“I don’t know how to think of you.”

“You aren’t miserable, Jim. I’ve known you practically since you were a baby. Trust me. I’m being serious now. You are happier now than you’ve ever been. We’ll get through this patch, this little media frenzy, we’ll try to make you rich, we’ll get you a museum show, some of the national attention that has been eluding you lately, and then you can slip quietly back home, wherever that is, and go fishing. Meanwhile we’ll pray that our friend Detective Hinchman—what do you call him, Wheezy?—and what’s his name who just called from Colorado, Detective Gaskill, pray they don’t find any eyewitnesses or guns or anything. We’ll keep you out of the pen and you can paint and fish and entertain. Sofia is a dish by the way.”

It was monstrous. Steve was going to take the killing of two living breathing brothers and make hay. I was going to make hay, if he had his druthers, if things went according to plan. I didn’t say a word, for what seemed like a long time. I was out of words.

“Jim? Jim?”

“I hate your guts,” I said. I meant it. Right then.

“Me, too. My guts. I hate myself so much sometimes I just want to give myself a big kiss.”

“It’s all I know how to do,” I said. I think I was starting to choke up. “Don’t you get it? I couldn’t stop if I tried. Painting. Do you want to kill it? Me?”

“Jim? You’re really upset!”

“Oh, fuck, Steve. Fuck . I am of a mind to stop painting altogether. Have Miguel send over the fifty by eighty ASAP.”

I hung up.

The painting I made was a reprise of the little girls except that it was two little boys. I made it for no other reason than it was building inside like an overstretched balloon and would burst. I put the boys standing in the bright kitchen with flowers behind them but not the same ones as for the girls. I put sage and Indian paintbrush, yellow alfalfa, clover, goldenrod, the scrappy stuff you’d find along the shoulder of any road. A thorny black limbed mesquite with a line of ants climbing the trunk. The energy of the girls had been like two chicks breaking out of the same egg, hungry, ready to be skeptical, and surprise! a candy necklace. They held hands, the habit of protection, but seemed to be saying, Hey this is fun, give us something else ridiculously delicious. The boys were holding hands, but they were turned slightly askew, as if ready to stand back to back. And they looked scared. On the smaller, on the left, call him Dellwood, I put a model ship in a bottle, in a wooden stand right on top of his head. Don’t know why. On the other I put three crosses and from the center one I hung a pale bird, ocean gray, hung from the neck and drooping dead like the pheasant by Lucas Cranach. An albatross maybe, which must have occurred to me because of the ship. I painted fast, not seeing anything, hard to describe but I mean I don’t think I was seeing in any conscious way anything I was painting, and for the first time in a long time I painted scared. The picture scared me. The boys scared me, their predicament, whatever it was. No one should have to carry around a ship in a bottle. In fact as I made the ship I found the whole project of bottling up a little ship to be so monstrous I was actually painting in a kind of spiritual pain that was not at all the pain of labor as I imagine it, of birthing forth, but the pain of killing someone.

I was shaking. I finished the picture maybe faster than I’ve ever finished anything of that size before. I was shaking all over. I stood back and I thought, Is that what you are trying to do? Put the brothers in some bottle and cork it? Is that what the painting is? The ship you are carrying around on your own head, your albatross and the spiky crosses too? What they say about dreams: you are every character? Is that the brothers and also you?

The thought that we were somehow the same made me gasp. When you kill do you also conjoin somehow? In some horrible communion you will never shake? Is that why soldiers come home and scream at night and kill themselves? Because they have become their targets?

I sat in the folding chair they’d brought for me. Only one end of the conservatory was glass. The easel and I were out of the sun in an end of the big room shaded by a wall and by a curtain. I put my head in my hands and shook. When Alce came to visit me she spoke to me softly. The brothers had never spoken and I suspected now it was because they were burrowed too deep inside, inside of me, they were becoming me, and you can’t speak to yourself except by speaking to yourself, which was a circular kind of conversation and what I suspected now I was doing with these paintings. I wanted a drink. I tasted bourbon and I wanted one badly and didn’t want to fight the easy ride down to the hotel bar. What time was it?