Radiant Days (8 page)

In some way that I could neither wholly understand nor articulate, I believed that was a far more powerful bond than mere love. And yet it was a betrayal as well, because we both loved my paintings and drawings more than we ever cared for each other—a perverse love triangle: Clea, me, and my work.

I didn’t understand yet that it was possible to love someone
through
art. I only knew that I was alone, even if it was my own choice; and the one person I had believed could see me through the wall of pigments and pens and paint that I had constructed around myself was gone.

Near dawn, Brussels–Charleroi Canal

OCTOBER 8, 1870

IT TOOK HIM
a long time to fall asleep, between the sound of wind and the steady purl of water in the canal, twigs poking his stomach and the bristly touch of dried bracken like an unshaven cheek against his own. When he finally dozed, he dreamed of a silent bombardment along the ramparts of the Place Ducale back home in Charleville. His sisters ran toward him with their mouths open, screaming soundlessly.

Arthur! Arthur!

He jolted awake and lay frozen with terror.

A rippling curtain of green and azure split the sky, rent by crimson flares that streamed from horizon to horizon. Gold sparks leaped above the trees, darkened to scarlet then violet then deepest indigo, a blazing veil that consumed itself only to spiral up from its own embers in plumes of emerald and black.

The Prussians!

It was the only thing he could imagine: that Prussian soldiers
had burned Charleroi and were now marching through the forest. He sat up, heart pounding, and heard a strange crackling noise all around him—a horrible sound, as though the surrounding trees were made of ice and had been struck and shattered.

But the noise didn’t come from the trees.

And it wasn’t cannon fire. It came from the sky, from the sheets of green and violet snapping and lashing across the heavens, driven by a wind that roared from someplace behind the stars.

He stumbled to his feet. Above him a celestial river spewed flames of yellow and violet. He shook uncontrollably, overcome by an emotion beyond terror or astonishment, something that hardly seemed a feeling at all, but a new color or smell. He gasped and shut his eyes—the fire still blazed—opened them to gaze into a sky that mirrored the inside of his skull.

The veil between himself and the world had been ripped away. He was everything, nothing. He was someone else.

He threw his head back. The crackling noise faded, but the iridescent storm raged on.

Aurore boréale
, he thought. The northern lights.

He stood enthralled. When a shrike called hoarsely he started, and realized that the greening on the horizon wasn’t spectral flame but dawn. Slivers of gold flickered above the canal, like a cloud of minnows darting through the sky, and were gone.

Cold wind dried his cheeks. A cock crowed. He rubbed his eyes and brushed dried leaves and dirt from his clothes, and walked unsteadily toward the canal, where he knelt and splashed
water onto his face. When he straightened, he looked around and glimpsed something that loomed from the shadows a few yards off, tucked into the trees near where he’d seen the tramp.

A lockhouse.

He frowned. He couldn’t imagine why he hadn’t seen it the night before. He walked to the heavy oaken door, knocked tentatively, then yelled a greeting. When there was no reply, he shoved the door open and went inside.

The single small room held a cot, a chair, a table with the keeper’s logbook on it. An oilcloth coat dangled from a peg. The cast-iron stove was cold. Above the bed hung a plaque with a simple motto carved into the wood:
Dieu me conduisse
. God guide me.

He searched but found no sign of food. With a yawn he flung himself onto the cot and pulled the thin blanket around his shoulders. He didn’t bother to remove his boots.

Filaments of azure and gold continued to flash at the corners of his vision. His ears buzzed, as though he’d stood too close as the lock’s mechanisms were engaged, with their roar of gears and water sluicing through the gate. He stared at the plaque above his head, after a minute withdrew a stub of chalk from his pocket, and wrote on the wall:
Merde à Dieu
, his customary obscene scrawl. Beneath that he drew a crude sun with an eye in its center. He burrowed his face into his sleeve, and slept.

Washington, D.C.

OCTOBER 8, 1978

I ENTERED THE
underground passage that connected the National Gallery’s east and west wings. Clea didn’t follow me. Neither did the security guard. I stepped onto the moving sidewalk, still a novelty in those days, closed my eyes, and imagined traveling from one world to another. Not as stupid a notion as it sounds: the east wing contains mostly twentieth-century art, whereas the older west wing is all the stuff that put me to sleep when Mrs. Caldwell showed us slides back in high school. Landscape paintings, still lifes, gloomy portraits of people in clothing so uncomfortable-looking that the dejected subjects appeared to be facing a firing squad. There were almost no woman artists other than Mary Cassatt and Grandma Moses.

When the moving sidewalk came to an end, I trudged upstairs and began to wander through the galleries. I didn’t glance at the paintings on the walls, though I did a quick surveillance of one of the fountains and when no one was around scooped up some
change, which I shoved, dripping, into my pocket. A noisy group of schoolkids clattered into one of the corridors, and to avoid them I ducked into first one room and then another, until I finally reached a room that had no one in it, not even a guard. I sank onto the wooden bench in its center and for a long time stared at the floor. Finally I stood. I started to retrace my steps back into the corridor, then stopped.

On the wall hung a painting. Small, about two feet wide, oil on wood. At first it seemed like an ordinary landscape—blue sky and clouds and trees, a little hut with people sitting or walking outside it, also a tepee. In the distance loomed a castle and, even farther away, a city encircled by a winding river or canal. There might even have been more cities—I couldn’t be sure.

Because when I really started to examine the painting, I saw that nothing in it was ordinary. A pair of legs protruded from the roof of the hut. On the ground, a group of people appeared to be carrying a giant fish—only the fish had legs. There was a wingless bird like a kiwi, and tiny, goblin-like people hiding in the hut’s roof, and other people who were all legs. What I had at first thought to be a tepee was really an immense man—a giant—with a jug on his head. Another jug hung from a tree, although closer perusal made me wonder if it wasn’t a jug but a birdhouse.

And the trees! They were amazing—at once beautiful and mysterious, and so realistic that I drew my head beside the panel and held my breath, listening, as though I might hear them stir in the wind.

“No touching, please.”

I jumped as a guard called to me from the doorway. “Sorry,” I murmured, and reluctantly took a step back.

I didn’t want to touch that painting. I wanted to be
in
it. The panel was like a door in the wall, or a window, opening into that strange other place.

And it
was
strange. Things floated in the air above the canal, people and creatures like spiders, only too big and with the wrong number of legs. A boat sailed through the clouds with a man in it. He wore a pointed cap and waved at someone else, who rode a seal through the air.

I couldn’t stop staring at it, this surreal world within a world, familiar objects out of scale or utterly out of place. A flying seal? Who the hell would have painted
that
? The painting’s label said only that it was done by a follower of Pieter Bruegel, the famous Flemish painter from the mid-1500s. The title was
The Temptation of Saint Anthony
, but even that made no sense—there was no one who looked remotely like a saint, and nothing that seemed in the slightest bit tempting, unless you had a taste for hallucinogens.

I wandered around the rest of the room, but there wasn’t much else to see. A single Hieronymus Bosch, a few musty-looking old saints and madonnas. I returned to the panel, stood as close to it as I could, and just stared. When the guard stepped momentarily out of the room, I ran my finger across the painted wood. I traced the line of the canal with its glinting pewter surface, a pale glaucous sky that resembled the sky outside. Even though the painted trees were green, their canopies summer-full, the scene had a
charged, autumnal feel: an October sense of the world spinning too fast for me to catch it, before leaves and clouds and canal and sky were all snatched away.

The guard stepped back into the room. I moved away from the painting, but stopped when I noticed something I hadn’t seen before.

A man stood in a hole in one of the trees. An old man, dressed in gray, his head surrounded by a gray hood. He was smiling, hand outstretched to touch a bucket with a knife balanced on it. The bucket appeared to be floating in the air, and something dangled from the hole in the branch—a large key, suspended from a chain or thread.

“Don’t touch the paintings!”

I backed away. Behind me a group of tourists paraded in, led by a docent who stared at me pointedly until I moved aside.

“Dutch and Flemish paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” she announced, and I left.

I went back to the place on Perry Street. Now that I no longer had the distraction of that strange painting, the final rupture with Clea hit me hard. I walked slowly from the Brookland Metro station, dreading the moment when I’d turn the corner and see the abandoned house.

Yellowing ginkgo leaves drifted against the front steps like hundreds of tiny, discarded paper fans. A stray cat dozed in the sun, stared at me through slitted eyes before crawling through a gap in the concrete foundation. There was an acrid smell from where guys had been pissing outside after the water was shut off. I fumbled
in my pocket for the key, but when I reached the top step, I saw that the door was ajar.

“Hello?” I stopped myself from calling Clea’s name, instead made my voice sound as loud and confident as possible. “Jasper, that you?”

Inside was dark. Chilly afternoon light spilled through the filthy windows. I stepped over empty beer bottles, a stained pair of drawstring pants I recognized as my own. It was colder than outside and stank of wet cigarette butts, with an underlying reek of sour beer and sewage. Someone, presumably Janis, had written
BYE MERLE
across a wall pleached with mildew.

For the first time, I felt a stab of fear. I couldn’t stay here alone, in the dark and cold, with police sirens going off all night and the ceaseless throb of traffic outside. There was no telephone, no electricity; nothing but the rustling of feral cats in the basement, hunting the rats that had taken over once the power was shut off.

But I had nowhere to go. Even if I’d wanted to return to Greene County, I didn’t have money for the train or bus. I drew a shaking breath and headed for the steps to my upstairs room.

Someone was there. I gasped, too shocked to scream, as a slight figure flung himself down the steps, knocking me against the wall as he fled. Before I could straighten, a second figure barreled past me.

“Run!”
he shouted, and I recognized him—Errol, a boy of twelve or thirteen who lived at Edgewood Terrace, the projects a few blocks away. He hung around the 7-Eleven, and I used to say hi to him and his friends when I’d go there to buy Snickers bars.

“Errol!” I yelled.

He paused in the doorway and stared straight back at me with his head cocked. Something dangled from his hand. I pointed at it, then lunged at him.

“That’s my bag!”

The boys turned and clattered down the steps. I chased after them, and almost fell as I skidded down the steps to the sidewalk. The boys were already at the end of the block, racing across Michigan Avenue and laughing as they looked over their shoulders. A bus pulled over at the corner. I started to dash across the street, halted, breathless, as the light changed and traffic roared toward me.