Peter Heller - The Painter

The room phone rang. It would be Steve. Steve wondering why my cell phone was probably buried under trash in my truck. He had, remarkably, stayed out of the program, except a shot of him in pressed jeans and pink oxford waving like a beauty queen and disappearing into his office, the door closing. I was amazed. Uncharacteristic discipline for him. How could he resist? He’d been smart enough to know that the skyrocketing value of my work did not need his interpretation, that in this case discretion and modesty for once contributed to the mystique. They perpetuated the narrative of the outsider artist suddenly besieged by a fascinated popular culture and resisting it with all his might. Playing hard to get. His dealer, too. The mainstream seemed to love that: something authentic for once! Something that didn’t cave and crave at the first glare of regional television. The public treasured their Joe DiMaggios, their J. D. Salingers. I didn’t answer the phone, I couldn’t do that right now. Steve would be needing to crow. To somebody. My dramatic emergence from the sticks was thrusting him into the spotlight and it might make him a rich man. I mean, I was already a well known artist, but this was different. When Sofia went for the phone I stopped her.

She was in the middle of the big plush carpeted room. She seemed a little stunned herself. She stood there.

“I know,” I said. “Getting drunk is looking pretty good.”

She blinked. Then that impish smile crept across her face. She folded her fingers around the bottom of her shirt and lifted it off. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her wonderful breasts lifted as her arms went over her head, then they fell and buoyed like launching boats finding their float. I laughed. She had a way of cutting not to the quick but to my joy. Maybe it’s the same thing.

“You wanna get distracted you crazy vigilante?”

I shook my head.

“Not in the mood?”

Shook my head.

“Let’s go get some breakfast,” I said. I was shaking all over. “Let’s walk over to the plaza and have café con leche and eat huevos rancheros and pretend.”

“Pretend what?”

“That life is simple. That we can do what we want.”

The Pantelas were used to throwing big parties, but this took the cake. Cars were parked all the way down the driveway in the pines and out to the gravel road where they lined both sides. Couples in engraved cowboy boots that weren’t meant for walking held each other’s hands and tottled up the hill. We drove with Steve who promised to leave when we did, who slowed his Range Rover and opened his window and waved and made passing comments to everyone as we passed. This was his moment.

The pueblo house was built for autumn. Around the carved front entrance and all along the ledges at the tops of the stick ladders were bundles of Indian corn and strings of crimson chilies and piles of flame colored squash. My hand itched to paint it. Everything except the security guy on the main roof in fatigues, a shooter with an M4 assault rifle. There would be others, no doubt, keeping a perimeter, and probably some in plainclothes inside. That Pim had planned the party at all, so soon after the shooting; that he had let the target—me—anywhere near his kids again. But that was Pim: it was his way of saying: We don’t let the bad guys rain on our parade. We don’t let them win. For a moment, as the three of us were about to step inside, I wondered if he would be furious at me for putting his children in danger, ever, and I realized in the same moment that this was his way of forgiving me.

Leave it to Steve to time our entrance. We were an hour late. We came through the door past two more uniformed security men who checked our invites, and the crowd parted and something like a guffaw of pleasure and fascination billowed out of it, a little like a gust whomping the alders. Or the loud gasp at a hanging. I scared most of them I was sure, and the paintings inspired love, and I was a genius and under investigation for two murders and I was the dark celebrity of the hour, and here was the beautiful young lover-model we have all been reading about and and and. The mixture was high octane. The sea of admirers parted in a crush. Drinks were spilled.

The painting, under a drop cloth, was at the other end of the red carpet that was not red but blue, another Central Asian runner, maybe Kirghiz, woven with geometric green birds. The painting was on one of my easels against the big windows with the big view of the valley and the wooded ridges, and the light was already going graciously to dusk so as not to backlight the canvas.

A tray passed, balanced by a waiter, Knob Creek bourbon and water—my favorite, how did they know?—the bottle on the tray, and I took one without thinking and downed half the glass before I realized that I’d just thrown away almost three years of sobriety, every day hard earned as a day at the mills. I mean if you are into counting days and years. It was a moment of horror. Does that count? One slug? Yes.

Suddenly I felt I was in a nightmare. Did I just do that? Holy shit. The full impact hitting me at the same time as the sweet warm unutterably delicious booze, hitting my gut and then my blood and brain like the all smothering and transporting kiss of an old and favorite lover. Oh Jesus. In a panic I grabbed Sofia by the arm, hard.

“What?” she whispered.

“Don’t let me do that again. I mean it.”

“What?”

“I just tossed back a whiskey, oh fuck.”

I felt something like panic zing through her. We had talked about my fitful dance with booze, how nothing good could happen for me when I drank.

She reached for my hand. “You’re okay, it was a mistake. Reflex. You didn’t even know. Don’t worry.” She squeezed. “Really. Forget it.”

I glanced at her. She was smiling. Okay. I shuddered. Somehow I believed her.

Pim made a toast. He stood by the easel, held out his cut glass tumbler, someone else rapped the crystal of a wineglass with a spoon. He wore an alpaca vest with silver buttons, jeans. Ruddy tan, salt and pepper full hair, boyish, bushy eyebrows, hunter’s clear gray eyes and the lined drawn cheeks of an endurance athlete. Easy in a crowd. Could it be that most of the people who loved him also envied him so much they hated him? I thought probably so. Maybe my biggest collector.

“Some of you have champagne? Good. Good for a toast. I can’t drink it, it makes me giddy and I’m giddy enough already.”

Murmur of laughter.

“Julia, are you—? Ah, here.”

She appeared by his side, raised a glass of white wine to the crowd, smiled—Here I am, you knew I’d be here, I’m always a little late, aren’t I? I love you all and you love me always anyway. What her smile said. It struck me that Pim was running for something, for office. Julia, too. What was it? King and Queen of Santa Fe? Art Mavens of the American Southwest? And my paintings, one after another, my paintings in their aggregate were crucial to their winning. With my sudden fame their accession was a lock. This was a coronation as well as an unveiling. That was suddenly clear to me. The sense of nightmare was morphing into another kind of dream, something compounded of dread and excitement.

What I mean is: you get this pressure, this internal pressure that builds like a swelling lake and you paint. It’s all you want to do, all you know how to do. And if you focus in the right way, a way you had to learn, you let yourself go. You lose yourself and just about vanish and the painting asserts and fills and flows over the dam and down into the streambed of everything you have ever experienced and thought, and carries you both on a current that takes you into a country that neither of you have ever seen. Where you have never been.