Read The Man in the Tree Online
Authors: Damon Knight
The Man in the Tree (8 page)
"I have to go now," said Gene, and hung up.
In a curious way, he was relieved. For the first time in his life he
was free to do whatever he liked, go where he pleased, buy anything he
wanted. It seemed to him that he had died and been reborn, back there
in the darkness under the tree. Both his old lives were gone, the one
at home with his parents and the one in the tree house, and he felt no
regret, only a sense of gratitude and liberation.
He changed his dollar bills at the bank for fives and tens, spent them,
took change, got more fives and tens. He bought books, paints and brushes,
stretched canvases, an easel. He went to the movies every night; his
favorite films were those with Glenn Ford and John Wayne, but he watched
everything with uncritical appreciation, even Ma and Pa Kettle.
Television was a marvel to him; there had been no such thing in Dog
River two years ago. He bought a set for two hundred dollars; it had a
round picture tube on which the faces of actors bloomed in furry lines
of blue-white.
He ate prodigiously and with a pleasure that went beyond the simple
satisfaction of hunger: satiny scrambled eggs, toast covered with jam
or marmalade, rubbery cheese that broke in conchoidal fractures when
he pulled it apart, soda crackers with their mineral incrustations,
each one a pure glittering crystal. Every day for lunch and dinner he
had roast beef or ham, mashed potatoes hollowed by the chef's ladle and
filled with gravy, pale translucent slices of tomato on a bed of lettuce,
and for dessert a piece of cream pie, banana or chocolate, that seemed
to coat him inside with luxury.
His experiments in painting on canvas were not turning out well. No one
had told him about using a medium; he was putting the paint on as it
came from the tube, and his paintings seemed thick and lifeless.
On a side street, tucked in between two grimy office buildings, one day he
found an art school: it was called the Porgorny Institute of Fine Arts,
and a sign in the window said, "Register for Fall Classes." He opened
the double doors and found himself in a wide hall. The office was on the
right. "Fill out this application," said the mousy-blonde woman behind
the counter. Gene wrote down "Stephen Miller," and his address. Under
"Age" he put "15," and under "Education" he wrote "High school."
"Now you've checked four classes," said the woman, "and there's only
three periods a day, so we'll have to work out a schedule for you. The
best thing would be to take two of these classes every day, and then,
the third period, you would go back and forth between the other two."
"I don't understand," Gene said.
"Well, for
instance
, suppose you want to take Figure Drawing and Oil
Painting every day. That's your first two periods. Then; you could take
Sculpture on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays -- "
A large, heavy woman came in from the hall carrying a sheaf of papers. She
had an imposing bosom under a purple blouse, and a black ribbon hung from
her eyeglasses; her dark hair, streaked with gray, was piled on her head
in a haphazard fashion. "What is it?" she asked in a deep voice. "What
is the matter?"
"This young man is applying for classes -- "
"So." She looked him over. "You are how old?"
Her accent was so strange that he could hardly understand her. "Fifteen,"
he said.
"Perhaps." She was thinking. No pimples. Tall, but not more than twelve.
"And you think you can become artist?"
"I like to draw," Gene said.
"He likes to draw. So many like to draw. But why not? It is better than
murdering people in the streets." She turned to the woman behind the
counter. "Well, then, Miss Olney, what is problem?"
"It's just his schedule, Madame Porgorny -- he wants to take four
classes -- "
"Work it out! Work it out! Do not bother me with these details." Madame
Porgorny swept around the counter and into the inner office, where,
presently, they could hear her shouting on the telephone.
"Does she teach any of the classes?" Gene asked.
"Only China Painting, Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Did you
want to -- ?"
"Oh, no," Gene said hastily. He paid the application fee and got his
schedule. "When do the classes start?"
"September fourth."
The Porgorny Institute was not like any other school he had known. Down
behind the reception room and office was a row of large studios whose
individual smells were at first strange, then loved and familiar: smells
of oil and turpentine, charcoal dust, plaster dust.
Madame Porgorny's booming voice could be heard at intervals all day long
in the corridors. She seemed to live in a state of constant exasperation;
Gene heard her shouting at the instructors, at Miss Olney the receptionist,
at electricians and plumbers.
In the figure-drawing class the model was a dark-haired young man with
broad shoulders and narrow hips; he wore a thing like a black jockstrap,
but much skimpier -- the side part was only a narrow ribbon. He never
spoke; between posing sessions he smoked in the little courtyard, and
when he was through for the day he left, sometimes with a woman student.
In this class the students were given hard black crayons and large sheets
of paper torn off a roll. They were instructed to hold the crayon like
a knife and use the arm and wrist in drawing, but Gene could not do
this; he sharpened his crayon to a fine point, held it like a pencil,
and made careful, minute drawings that occupied only a small part of
the sheet. He drew the head, then the shoulders .and chest, the arms and
hands, then the hips, thighs, calves, and feet. His drawings were careful
and accurate in outline, but there was always something wrong with them;
they were off balance, or out of proportion, and he tore them up.
When he looked at the other students' work, he could see that they were
doing something entirely different. They seemed not to care about accuracy
of detail; their drawings were large, cloudy sketches of bodies in the
same posture as the model's but otherwise having no resemblance to it, and
they were all different: some fat and shapeless, some angular and thin.
The instructor, an auburn-haired young woman called Miss Williams,
pointed out that everybody tended to draw bodies like their own: wide,
muscular people drew wide, muscular bodies, and so on. Gene held up one
of his tiny sketches, and she laughed. "Well, Stephen is an exception
to everything," she said.
With the other students, he felt the continual embarrassment of being
the wrong age; he was sure they all knew he was too young to be there,
and he sensed in them the unspoken conspiracy of being grown up. When
they spoke to him kindly, he felt they were being condescending, and
when they ignored him he felt excluded. The very shapes of their bodies,
their hairiness, their smells (unsuccessfully disguised by perfume)
proclaimed them a different kind of humanity; the hints they gave of
their pleasures outside the classroom were alien to him; they laughed
at different things, and with a different laughter. He felt himself an
intruder, in constant danger of being found out.
He took the ceramics class and tried to throw pots on the wheel, but
he could never center the lump of clay properly, and his pots came
out lopsided; they wobbled on the wheel, and no matter what he did he
could never make them straight. He liked them anyhow because of their
magical transformation in the kiln ("the kill," Miss Jacoby called it):
from dried, leathery clay the color of lead they had turned pale and
hard as stone, scritching under his fingernails. The glazes were equally
magical: you painted them on like pale mud, and when they came out they
were clear, brilliant orange or blue or purple. He experimented with
his most ambitious piece, a tall vase that was only a little lopsided:
he painted it first with green glaze, then with blue. When he saw it
after the weekend firing, it was covered with luminous streaks of blue
melting into peacock green, and all the other students admired it. "You
took a chance, but it worked," said Miss Jacoby.
In Mr. Berthelot's class he learned the mysteries of armatures and plaster
casting. The hollow shape inside the mold was tantalizingly strange; its
was recognizable -- there was the arm, here the head -- and yet absolutely
unfamiliar. When they lubricated the mold and poured plaster into it,
then chipped the mold away, the result was again a magical transformation:
the clay model had been turned first into a mere vacancy, an absence,
and then into hard, chalky plaster. In a way it seemed to him that the
change was for the worse: the clay model, now destroyed, had been alive,
and the plaster cast was dead.
The school did not teach wood carving. "Old Lady says it's too dangerous,"
Mr. Berthelot told him. "Some student cuts his finger off, the insurance
wouldn't cover it. I don't know too much about it myself, tell you the
truth, and the students we got here, they just want to play with clay."
In an an store he saw a beautiful set of wood carving tools with wooden
handles all alike, shaped to fit the palm. He bought them, and some blocks
of hardwood, and took them home. He bungled his first attempts, but then
he got the hang of the tools, how the mallet drove the sweet cutting
edge through the surface of the wood, curling off a precise shaving.
He smoothed his sculptures with a broad blade, then with sandpaper,
until the wood was as round and slick as stone, but later he began to
like the texture of the worked surface, the trace of the tools, as if
patient worms had gone around and around the wood eating it away to
leave a beautiful shape.
Mr. Velton, the painting instructor, sent him out with a sketchbook,
and when he came back with simple drawings of tombstones in the cemetery,
sent him away again. It was clear enough to Gene what Mr. Velton wanted:
he wanted landscapes crowded with trees, stones, houses, a sky full of
clouds; but when Gene looked at landscapes he saw only a meaningless
jumble. At last, in despair, he sketched a pile of junk on a vacant lot:
barrel hoops, old tires, tin cans. Velton looked at this with pleased
surprise, and pointed out various dynamic relationships of which Gene
had been unaware.
In his frustration he dropped the oil painting class and signed up
for Madame Porgorny's china painting class on Wednesday and Saturday
evenings. The other students, gray-haired women in smocks, were already
painting on dishes, but Madame Porgorny gave him glazed tiles to practice
on: first to learn the strokes, and then to draw simple patterns of
stems and leaves. There was something wrong with her hands; the knuckles
and fingers were swollen, and she could not straighten them entirely,
but it never seemed to interfere with her painting.
When she came to Gene's table, she said, "No, it is not good. See here,
the lines are broken, that is ugly. In nature are no broken lines. Every
line must be one line, not three." She took his brush from him and fitted
it into a leather strap she was wearing on her hand, so that the brush
stood out beyond her swollen knuckles. She took a blank tile, dipped
the brush, and drew in one motion a long delicate curve that became a
curled leaf; then another. "Do you see now?"
"Yes, but why are you doing it with that?"
She looked at him. "Sometimes my fingers will not hold the brush," she
said. "It does not matter. Painting is with the wrist, so, not with the
fingers. Now make for me a yellow flower like this one." She showed him
a design in the book.
He dipped a brush in yellow and painstakingly drew each of the five
petals; he mixed a little white with the yellow and tipped each petal,
then a little orange and darkened their stems. Madame Porgorny came back
while he was finishing.
"No, again it is wrong. Look here." She sat beside him in a cloud
of perfume. She took his brush, fitted it into the strap of her hand,
dipped up paint, and with one stroke made a perfect petal, then another,
and another, until there were five. "Now do you see?"
"I'll never do that," Gene said.
"You can learn if you wish, but why should you? This is not what you
want. Tell me, why did you take this class?"
"It was the figure drawing. I can't do it big the way Miss Williams
wants me to."
"And so you thought you would do china painting because it is small? But
you see it is the same. Big, small, it does not matter, you must learn
to use wrist, not fingers. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Figure drawing you must have, if you want to be artist. I will speak
to Miss Williams."
"Let's try something different," Miss Williams said to him the next day.
She took the paper off his easel and handed him another sheet. It was torn
off a roll like the other, but it was white and faintly glossy. When he had
pinned it up, she gave him a cup of black paint and a soft round brush.
Almost from the first, he discovered a new freedom with the brush and
paint. He was not tempted to use the brush like a pen; he could stand
away from the easel and let the brush move by itself. His drawings were
no longer cramped and tight; they were not so accurately detailed,
either, but he liked them better because there was a sense of volume
in them. When he was interested in something, the hands, for instance,
he allowed himself to make them bigger, out of proportion, and yet they
seemed right. "Now
that's
a lot better," said Miss Williams, and he
was filled with a gratitude and love that choked him.
Every other month he measured himself against the wall with a book,
not the way most people do, balancing the book on the top of the head,
but in the proper way, using the book as a carpenter's square pressed
firmly against the head and the wall. He marked his height each time,
and dated the marks. Each one was a little more than three-eighths of
an inch higher than the last; he was growing at the rate of two and a
half inches a year.
He was sprouting hair in unexpected places, and he discovered that he
had to wash oftener than before, especially his armpits, or he would
smell. One morning when he lay naked on his bed after a shower, his penis
stiffened, rose, and began twitching in a slow rhythm. He watched this
phenomenon with interest until it stopped. The third or fourth time it
happened, a few weeks later, he touched his penis curiously, feeling how
the thin skin slid up and down as if it were not attached at all. After a
few moments, to his utter astonishment, his penis stiffened convulsively
and a spurt of milky fluid came out. The pleasure he felt at the same
moment was so intense that he knew instinctively it must be wrong.
In a curious way, he was relieved. For the first time in his life he
was free to do whatever he liked, go where he pleased, buy anything he
wanted. It seemed to him that he had died and been reborn, back there
in the darkness under the tree. Both his old lives were gone, the one
at home with his parents and the one in the tree house, and he felt no
regret, only a sense of gratitude and liberation.
He changed his dollar bills at the bank for fives and tens, spent them,
took change, got more fives and tens. He bought books, paints and brushes,
stretched canvases, an easel. He went to the movies every night; his
favorite films were those with Glenn Ford and John Wayne, but he watched
everything with uncritical appreciation, even Ma and Pa Kettle.
Television was a marvel to him; there had been no such thing in Dog
River two years ago. He bought a set for two hundred dollars; it had a
round picture tube on which the faces of actors bloomed in furry lines
of blue-white.
He ate prodigiously and with a pleasure that went beyond the simple
satisfaction of hunger: satiny scrambled eggs, toast covered with jam
or marmalade, rubbery cheese that broke in conchoidal fractures when
he pulled it apart, soda crackers with their mineral incrustations,
each one a pure glittering crystal. Every day for lunch and dinner he
had roast beef or ham, mashed potatoes hollowed by the chef's ladle and
filled with gravy, pale translucent slices of tomato on a bed of lettuce,
and for dessert a piece of cream pie, banana or chocolate, that seemed
to coat him inside with luxury.
His experiments in painting on canvas were not turning out well. No one
had told him about using a medium; he was putting the paint on as it
came from the tube, and his paintings seemed thick and lifeless.
On a side street, tucked in between two grimy office buildings, one day he
found an art school: it was called the Porgorny Institute of Fine Arts,
and a sign in the window said, "Register for Fall Classes." He opened
the double doors and found himself in a wide hall. The office was on the
right. "Fill out this application," said the mousy-blonde woman behind
the counter. Gene wrote down "Stephen Miller," and his address. Under
"Age" he put "15," and under "Education" he wrote "High school."
"Now you've checked four classes," said the woman, "and there's only
three periods a day, so we'll have to work out a schedule for you. The
best thing would be to take two of these classes every day, and then,
the third period, you would go back and forth between the other two."
"I don't understand," Gene said.
"Well, for
instance
, suppose you want to take Figure Drawing and Oil
Painting every day. That's your first two periods. Then; you could take
Sculpture on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays -- "
A large, heavy woman came in from the hall carrying a sheaf of papers. She
had an imposing bosom under a purple blouse, and a black ribbon hung from
her eyeglasses; her dark hair, streaked with gray, was piled on her head
in a haphazard fashion. "What is it?" she asked in a deep voice. "What
is the matter?"
"This young man is applying for classes -- "
"So." She looked him over. "You are how old?"
Her accent was so strange that he could hardly understand her. "Fifteen,"
he said.
"Perhaps." She was thinking. No pimples. Tall, but not more than twelve.
"And you think you can become artist?"
"I like to draw," Gene said.
"He likes to draw. So many like to draw. But why not? It is better than
murdering people in the streets." She turned to the woman behind the
counter. "Well, then, Miss Olney, what is problem?"
"It's just his schedule, Madame Porgorny -- he wants to take four
classes -- "
"Work it out! Work it out! Do not bother me with these details." Madame
Porgorny swept around the counter and into the inner office, where,
presently, they could hear her shouting on the telephone.
"Does she teach any of the classes?" Gene asked.
"Only China Painting, Wednesday and Saturday evenings. Did you
want to -- ?"
"Oh, no," Gene said hastily. He paid the application fee and got his
schedule. "When do the classes start?"
"September fourth."
The Porgorny Institute was not like any other school he had known. Down
behind the reception room and office was a row of large studios whose
individual smells were at first strange, then loved and familiar: smells
of oil and turpentine, charcoal dust, plaster dust.
Madame Porgorny's booming voice could be heard at intervals all day long
in the corridors. She seemed to live in a state of constant exasperation;
Gene heard her shouting at the instructors, at Miss Olney the receptionist,
at electricians and plumbers.
In the figure-drawing class the model was a dark-haired young man with
broad shoulders and narrow hips; he wore a thing like a black jockstrap,
but much skimpier -- the side part was only a narrow ribbon. He never
spoke; between posing sessions he smoked in the little courtyard, and
when he was through for the day he left, sometimes with a woman student.
In this class the students were given hard black crayons and large sheets
of paper torn off a roll. They were instructed to hold the crayon like
a knife and use the arm and wrist in drawing, but Gene could not do
this; he sharpened his crayon to a fine point, held it like a pencil,
and made careful, minute drawings that occupied only a small part of
the sheet. He drew the head, then the shoulders .and chest, the arms and
hands, then the hips, thighs, calves, and feet. His drawings were careful
and accurate in outline, but there was always something wrong with them;
they were off balance, or out of proportion, and he tore them up.
When he looked at the other students' work, he could see that they were
doing something entirely different. They seemed not to care about accuracy
of detail; their drawings were large, cloudy sketches of bodies in the
same posture as the model's but otherwise having no resemblance to it, and
they were all different: some fat and shapeless, some angular and thin.
The instructor, an auburn-haired young woman called Miss Williams,
pointed out that everybody tended to draw bodies like their own: wide,
muscular people drew wide, muscular bodies, and so on. Gene held up one
of his tiny sketches, and she laughed. "Well, Stephen is an exception
to everything," she said.
With the other students, he felt the continual embarrassment of being
the wrong age; he was sure they all knew he was too young to be there,
and he sensed in them the unspoken conspiracy of being grown up. When
they spoke to him kindly, he felt they were being condescending, and
when they ignored him he felt excluded. The very shapes of their bodies,
their hairiness, their smells (unsuccessfully disguised by perfume)
proclaimed them a different kind of humanity; the hints they gave of
their pleasures outside the classroom were alien to him; they laughed
at different things, and with a different laughter. He felt himself an
intruder, in constant danger of being found out.
He took the ceramics class and tried to throw pots on the wheel, but
he could never center the lump of clay properly, and his pots came
out lopsided; they wobbled on the wheel, and no matter what he did he
could never make them straight. He liked them anyhow because of their
magical transformation in the kiln ("the kill," Miss Jacoby called it):
from dried, leathery clay the color of lead they had turned pale and
hard as stone, scritching under his fingernails. The glazes were equally
magical: you painted them on like pale mud, and when they came out they
were clear, brilliant orange or blue or purple. He experimented with
his most ambitious piece, a tall vase that was only a little lopsided:
he painted it first with green glaze, then with blue. When he saw it
after the weekend firing, it was covered with luminous streaks of blue
melting into peacock green, and all the other students admired it. "You
took a chance, but it worked," said Miss Jacoby.
In Mr. Berthelot's class he learned the mysteries of armatures and plaster
casting. The hollow shape inside the mold was tantalizingly strange; its
was recognizable -- there was the arm, here the head -- and yet absolutely
unfamiliar. When they lubricated the mold and poured plaster into it,
then chipped the mold away, the result was again a magical transformation:
the clay model had been turned first into a mere vacancy, an absence,
and then into hard, chalky plaster. In a way it seemed to him that the
change was for the worse: the clay model, now destroyed, had been alive,
and the plaster cast was dead.
The school did not teach wood carving. "Old Lady says it's too dangerous,"
Mr. Berthelot told him. "Some student cuts his finger off, the insurance
wouldn't cover it. I don't know too much about it myself, tell you the
truth, and the students we got here, they just want to play with clay."
In an an store he saw a beautiful set of wood carving tools with wooden
handles all alike, shaped to fit the palm. He bought them, and some blocks
of hardwood, and took them home. He bungled his first attempts, but then
he got the hang of the tools, how the mallet drove the sweet cutting
edge through the surface of the wood, curling off a precise shaving.
He smoothed his sculptures with a broad blade, then with sandpaper,
until the wood was as round and slick as stone, but later he began to
like the texture of the worked surface, the trace of the tools, as if
patient worms had gone around and around the wood eating it away to
leave a beautiful shape.
Mr. Velton, the painting instructor, sent him out with a sketchbook,
and when he came back with simple drawings of tombstones in the cemetery,
sent him away again. It was clear enough to Gene what Mr. Velton wanted:
he wanted landscapes crowded with trees, stones, houses, a sky full of
clouds; but when Gene looked at landscapes he saw only a meaningless
jumble. At last, in despair, he sketched a pile of junk on a vacant lot:
barrel hoops, old tires, tin cans. Velton looked at this with pleased
surprise, and pointed out various dynamic relationships of which Gene
had been unaware.
In his frustration he dropped the oil painting class and signed up
for Madame Porgorny's china painting class on Wednesday and Saturday
evenings. The other students, gray-haired women in smocks, were already
painting on dishes, but Madame Porgorny gave him glazed tiles to practice
on: first to learn the strokes, and then to draw simple patterns of
stems and leaves. There was something wrong with her hands; the knuckles
and fingers were swollen, and she could not straighten them entirely,
but it never seemed to interfere with her painting.
When she came to Gene's table, she said, "No, it is not good. See here,
the lines are broken, that is ugly. In nature are no broken lines. Every
line must be one line, not three." She took his brush from him and fitted
it into a leather strap she was wearing on her hand, so that the brush
stood out beyond her swollen knuckles. She took a blank tile, dipped
the brush, and drew in one motion a long delicate curve that became a
curled leaf; then another. "Do you see now?"
"Yes, but why are you doing it with that?"
She looked at him. "Sometimes my fingers will not hold the brush," she
said. "It does not matter. Painting is with the wrist, so, not with the
fingers. Now make for me a yellow flower like this one." She showed him
a design in the book.
He dipped a brush in yellow and painstakingly drew each of the five
petals; he mixed a little white with the yellow and tipped each petal,
then a little orange and darkened their stems. Madame Porgorny came back
while he was finishing.
"No, again it is wrong. Look here." She sat beside him in a cloud
of perfume. She took his brush, fitted it into the strap of her hand,
dipped up paint, and with one stroke made a perfect petal, then another,
and another, until there were five. "Now do you see?"
"I'll never do that," Gene said.
"You can learn if you wish, but why should you? This is not what you
want. Tell me, why did you take this class?"
"It was the figure drawing. I can't do it big the way Miss Williams
wants me to."
"And so you thought you would do china painting because it is small? But
you see it is the same. Big, small, it does not matter, you must learn
to use wrist, not fingers. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
"Figure drawing you must have, if you want to be artist. I will speak
to Miss Williams."
"Let's try something different," Miss Williams said to him the next day.
She took the paper off his easel and handed him another sheet. It was torn
off a roll like the other, but it was white and faintly glossy. When he had
pinned it up, she gave him a cup of black paint and a soft round brush.
Almost from the first, he discovered a new freedom with the brush and
paint. He was not tempted to use the brush like a pen; he could stand
away from the easel and let the brush move by itself. His drawings were
no longer cramped and tight; they were not so accurately detailed,
either, but he liked them better because there was a sense of volume
in them. When he was interested in something, the hands, for instance,
he allowed himself to make them bigger, out of proportion, and yet they
seemed right. "Now
that's
a lot better," said Miss Williams, and he
was filled with a gratitude and love that choked him.
Every other month he measured himself against the wall with a book,
not the way most people do, balancing the book on the top of the head,
but in the proper way, using the book as a carpenter's square pressed
firmly against the head and the wall. He marked his height each time,
and dated the marks. Each one was a little more than three-eighths of
an inch higher than the last; he was growing at the rate of two and a
half inches a year.
He was sprouting hair in unexpected places, and he discovered that he
had to wash oftener than before, especially his armpits, or he would
smell. One morning when he lay naked on his bed after a shower, his penis
stiffened, rose, and began twitching in a slow rhythm. He watched this
phenomenon with interest until it stopped. The third or fourth time it
happened, a few weeks later, he touched his penis curiously, feeling how
the thin skin slid up and down as if it were not attached at all. After a
few moments, to his utter astonishment, his penis stiffened convulsively
and a spurt of milky fluid came out. The pleasure he felt at the same
moment was so intense that he knew instinctively it must be wrong.
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