The Riverhouse (8 page)

Shane decided to head back.

By the time he got back to the cottage the sky was turning decidedly dark and foreboding. Clouds were pushing in swiftly over the river, turning it leaden and threatening an early evening thunderstorm. The air felt thick and metallic, dense with humidity. Wind gusted like the tail of a pensive cat.

The cottage didn’t have central air conditioning, and Shane had turned off the big window unit in the bedroom before heading outside. Now, as he walked through the stuffy rooms, he pushed up the windows, letting the hot breeze blow in and billow the curtains. It was only five o’clock, but the lowering sky filled the cottage with drab shadows, and Shane found himself switching on lamps as he went.

Passing the entry to the library, he saw that the answering machine light was blinking slowly. Apparently Greenfeld had indeed called while he’d been out. Shane had known he would. Still, he didn’t cross the small room and push the “Play” button on the machine. He decided he’d do it later, after he changed out of his sweaty clothes and took a quick shower.

He didn’t go straight to the bedroom, however. Instead, he clumped upstairs to the studio. It was especially hot and dark in the small room. He flicked the light switch by the stairs, but the overhead bulb didn’t come on. He glanced up at it, frowning a little, and then decided he didn’t really need it. He crossed the room and crouched down in front of the matte painting, where it leaned in the corner under the canted attic roof.

Carefully, he dabbed the pad of his finger on the upper corner. The paint was tacky, but not wet. If he put a fan in front of it and let it run all night, the surface would probably be dry enough for shipment. The humidity certainly wasn’t helping anything, but there wasn’t much he could do about that.

He stood up and turned to head back downstairs. As he went, however, he glanced aside at the new painting.

It sat on the big easel now, under the Escher quote, and in the dull storm light it seemed to glow faintly, full of unusually bright colors and blocky shapes.

Shane paused. He moved a step closer to the painting, studying it. He didn’t consider himself a painter with any particular style; he could mimic almost any artistic genre, from realistic to cubist, depending on the requirement of the contract. He’d expected to paint the manor house in a more photorealistic style, since that was his default technique, but as he’d begun it, he’d found himself using much more liberal brush strokes and generalized shapes, blocking out the essential bones of the house in big colorful patches. Instead of carefully blending the shadows, he’d layered them in with purples and blues, creating a sort of conceptual mosaic that most closely resembled expressionism.

And yet, it wasn’t abstract. It was representational and realistic, even hyper-realistic, like a crayon drawing overlaying a black and white photo. Shane had never painted anything like it before, and he had no idea where this had come from. All he knew was that it was incredible, almost hypnotic.

He’d painted it from a slightly different angle than that represented in his original sketch, the one that was still slightly visible in the dirt in front of the old portico. That had shown the house from the front, dead on. In the painting, however, the house was turned slightly, showing the left side in perspective as it receded toward the river. A chimney climbed that side of the house, stately and towering, casting its deep purple shadow onto the white siding.

In front of the house, sitting on the stone steps of the portico, Shane had begun the shape of a figure. It was merely a white blob at this point, but eventually it would be a woman in a pale dress, leaning back on one hand, the other raised to her brow, shading her eyes from the sun. He didn’t know who the woman was, he just knew that the painting wanted some human focal point, even if it was small and immaterial. A house by itself was just architecture. The woman on the steps would make it a home; she would give the house its story.

Shane felt the tug of the painting. The muse trailed her finger up his back; she wanted him to paint some more, wanted him to continue telling the story of the house.

Shane almost gave in, even reached for one of his brushes, but then he stopped. He was hungry, for one thing. And he was sticky with sweat from his work in the yard and his trek along the mysterious footpath. Surely, the muse could wait for an hour or so while he showered and ate.

He was just about to turn and leave when something in the painting caught his eye. He frowned a little, leaning in. This time, it wasn’t something wrong, exactly; it was something unexpected.

Last night, he had begun filling in the house’s surroundings, blocking in the tree line, the grassy hill sweeping down toward the river, and the brown curve of the river itself. He’d added a few details here and there; the edge of a rose garden protruding from the rear of the house, speckled with red buds, a wrought-iron W bolted to the bricks of the chimney, and a few decorative details at the furthest edge of the tree line, almost hidden beyond the crown of the hill. It was these details that had caught Shane’s eye.

He leaned closer, scrutinizing them, the frown lines on his forehead deepening. He’d only noticed it as he’d begun to turn away, catching the shapes with the corner of his eye. In the gloomy light, it was hard to resolve the shapes into anything other than blobs of paint, and yet even now they teased his eye, looking strangely familiar. There was a splash of red and pink, a few strokes of light gray, all of it nearly hidden in the deep green of the distant trees and bushes.

He was almost ready to give it up, convinced he was simply imagining things, when the shapes finally resolved and clicked into place. Once that happened, he couldn’t
not
see them. His eyes widened and for a long moment he forgot to breathe.

There, in the far corner of the painted yard, he had dabbed in the shape of a statue. It was comprised of no more than four or five quick brush strokes, but they were very economical strokes, like visual poetry. The statue seemed to have one arm raised, palm up, as if welcoming the viewer, as if beckoning them into some secret. Of course, Shane knew what that secret was, for he had seen that statue’s sister, covered in vines, leaning and nearly hidden in the woods.

Below the painted statue, a drift of red and pink flowers bloomed; hydrangeas, of course. Somehow, Shane had painted the entry to the footpath that connected the manor house to the cottage. He had painted it last night, without even knowing it, believing those lines were just squiggles of color, meaningless details.

He shuddered, and out over the river the thunder grumbled again. A moment later, Shane startled violently and let out a little bark of surprise; the ceiling light over his head had popped on with a tiny electrical snap. Its light suddenly filled the room, bone white and brilliant after the stormy twilight.

And downstairs, for the first time since Shane had returned to the cottage, the toilet flushed all by itself.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter Three

The next day was Saturday, and the phone was ringing when Shane woke up, bleary-eyed and disoriented. He squinted at the sunshine that speared through the curtains, reached for the clock on the bedside table, and groaned when he looked at it. A few seconds later, he rolled out from under the covers and clumped out of the bedroom, following the incessant ring of the phone.

“Hullo,”

“Morning, Shane. Don’t tell me I woke you up?” It was Greenfeld again. Damn but he was persistent. Shane wasn’t very surprised.

“As a matter of fact, you did. Not your fault, though. I was up late last night.”

“Burning the midnight oil? Or living fast and dying young?”

“Maybe a little of both. What about you? Don’t tell me you’re in the office on a Saturday morning?”

“Maybe I am, maybe I am,” Greenfeld replied easily. “I have this artist who likes to finish things on the Friday before a Monday deadline. Means I have to show up bright and early Saturday to arrange shipping and manage the fine print.”

“Look, I’m sorry about that, Morrie. Really. It’s not like me at all.”

“Yeah, you know, in your case I actually believe that. I get a sense of people, and you, you’re not a bullshitter, at least about your work. But don’t sweat it. This is what I get paid my exorbitant commissions for.”

“So you saw the photos I sent?”

“Yes I did. Got ‘em late last night, when I got home, otherwise I’d have called right away. Looks good to me, but the ball’s always in the air until the client takes shipment and gives us their final okey dokey. You know how it is. I sent the pics off to my contact at the studio, and I haven’t heard anything since. Considering how anxious they were about getting this matte just right, I’d say that’s a good sign.”

Shane felt a knot of tension loosen from his shoulders. He knew the average client well enough to know that Greenfeld was right; these weren’t the kind of people who sent handwritten thank-you notes full of high praise. The only time the artist ever heard from the client was when there was something wrong with the product. “That’s good news,” Shane answered. “So are you arranging the shippers?”

“Already set. That’s why I called. I’m sending over an intern to get the painting and pack it up, just to be safe.”

Shane nodded. Greenfeld was very thorough. “When will they get here?”

“I scheduled the pickup for here at the office at one. Chris is already en route to your place. Should be there by ten. You going to be there?”

“I don’t have my interview with Access Hollywood until noon, so I think I’ll still be around.”

“Sounds good. We still on for Thursday?”

“Sure. You need directions?”

“Nah. I know the general area. I’ll call you if I can’t find the house number on your cave.”

Shane told Greenfeld he looked forward to it and hung up, relieved.

While Shane waited for the intern from Greenfeld’s office, he sat at the little computer desk by the living room window, sipping coffee and staring hard at the screen of his laptop.

Outside, the previous evening’s storms had left the sky bright and hazy. The air was cooler than yesterday, and Shane had left the windows open rather than cranking up the window air conditioner. The curtains next to the desk hung limp, still damp from last night’s rain.

He had sat down at the computer to check the weather, then to browse the headlines. Eventually, however, he had remembered his trip out to the site of the manor house yesterday, and his plan to look up the original owner. The footpath had piqued his interest, but it was the painting upstairs that was really driving his curiosity. Ever since he’d begun it, he’d developed a rather detailed picture of the original owner—how he’d looked, his personality and history.

This was not especially unusual. Shane remembered watching a documentary about a well known comic book artist a few years earlier, remembered the artist saying that when he drew monsters and beasts, he’d sit at his art table roaring and growling, baring his teeth. If he was drawing battle sequences, he’d mimic the sounds of sword clashes, or gunfire, or fists on chins. Shane had grinned as he’d watched, because he completely understood that tendency. It was part of going fathoms deep into the art, becoming one with it, examining it from all the angles so as to best understand it.

It was a simple, elementary idea, one that any little kid with a box of crayons understood instinctively: being an artist meant creating in your head before you ever created on the canvas, and the more you gave life to the version between your ears, the more vibrant the final work on the canvas would be.

Thus, as Shane had painted the manor house, constructing it in his head and looking at it from every angle, he had begun to also create its occupants.

It had started with the owner, the man who had designed the house and overseen its construction, the famous artist whose name was Whitaker or Whitman—something that started with a W at least, to match the big wrought iron letter bolted to the chimney.

Shane envisioned a tall, thin man, closely shaven, but with thick black hair that he combed across his brow like a raven’s wing, Hitler style. He wore white button-down shirts, like Shane when he was working his shift, and gray flannel pants. He had large hands and deep set, heavy-lidded eyes. He was handsome, in a narrow, angular kind of way, and he was particular, almost fussy, about the design of the house, the landscaping, the placement of the garden and the decorative statuary. But he didn’t care about the interior of the house. That was the domain of the woman, the one visible on the steps of the house in Shane’s painting.

He didn’t know why he’d decided to paint her instead of the man himself; the painting had just seemed to ask for her. She was young and pretty, but quiet. Probably, she was the artist’s wife. While he, the artist, had hovered around the exterior, primping and overseeing the overall façade of the house, she had worked on the inside, arranging the furniture, hanging the art, populating the bookshelves and hutches.

Shane imagined her going on long shopping vacations, returning with shipments of antiques, rugs from junk shops in China, wall tapestries from castles in Scotland. She and her husband had both loved the house, but from entirely different directions. They complemented each other in that way, and yet, in Shane’s mind, as he painted, he didn’t sense happiness. He sensed a sort of wounded sadness, an existence of constant, low-grade anguish, at least for the woman. The shopping trips were a thin mask, overlaying that deep, sharp misery like a mortician’s sheet. Shane found himself more and more intrigued by her.

More than anything, the story of the manor house seemed to be her story, rather than that of the artist himself. Maybe that was because, while he had designed and built the house, she had lived in it and given it its soul. She had defined it as a home. In a rather poetic sense, the artist might have fathered the house, but the woman had been its mother, nurturing it and raising it, offering it her heart.

These, at least, were the things Shane imagined as he worked on the painting, even as he’d painted late into the previous night, filling in, adding detail, while the storm flickered and roared obliviously outside the cottage. It was pure invention, of course; stream of consciousness prose designed to breathe life into the image in his head. But it
felt
like more than that.

As he'd painted, it had been almost like traveling in time and space. He was barely aware of the brush in his hand, or of sitting on the stool in his studio. He’d gone into his paintings before, sinking fathoms deep, but never quite like this. He’d never come up out of the painting hours later, disoriented and stiff, his right arm aching deep in the shoulder from working so hard and fast, unable even to recall how long he’d been at it. It made him wonder.

And then, of course, there was the statue and the hydrangeas—the footpath entrance that he had painted into the background of the house before he’d even known there
was
a footpath. That made him wonder, too.

It had been easy enough to locate information about the artist on the internet. Shane had merely performed a Google search for “Famous Missouri Painter Portrait President”, which had pretty much summed up everything he knew about the man. He knew he’d recognize the name when he saw it. Within two minutes he had settled on a long article linked from a website about Missouri tourism. Shane cradled his coffee in his hands and leaned back to read:

“Gustav Ferdinand Wilhelm was born on March 12
^th
, 1898, in Cologne, Germany. His parents, Oscar, a shoemaker, and Henrietta, a seamstress, immigrated to the United States when Gustav was four years old. There, they lived in a small apartment in New York City, sharing the space with a Flemish couple that they had met during their crossing. Poor and struggling through their first hard winter, conditions were worsened by a lingering illness (probably scurvy, or ‘Barlow’s disease’, as it was known then) that Gustav had contracted aboard the ship. Nursed by his mother while his father and older brother sought work, Gustav spent that winter in a bed in the corner of the apartment’s kitchen, near the stove. Having always expressed an interest in drawing, young Gustav spent this time creating pictures on a small slate that had been given him by his father. The Flemish man who lived with them was a journeyman artist, specializing in miniature keyhole portraits. He recognized young Gustav’s talents, and spent many evenings teaching the boy portraiture and the basic artistic elements of balance, perspective and symmetry. Gustav fondly remembered these times, and looked back on this man, whom he only knew by his first name, Letard, as some of the happiest moments of his childhood, despite his illness.

“At age fifteen, Gustav, or Gus as he had come to be known, went to work for the same studio that Letard had worked at. The studio head put Gus to work painting backgrounds for landscapes and architectural scenes. Gus quickly chafed at these assignments, which he found boring and simplistic, and begged to be given a commission for a full portrait. The studio head, a painter named Sylvester Bertoni, allowed Gus his first paid portrait; that of Bertoni’s pet bullmastiff. Gus, who even then was known for his quick temper, felt insulted. He refused the commission, and was subsequently banned from the studio. After two days, Gus had second thoughts about the commission, and about the prospect of being unemployed in turn-of-the-century New York, and returned to Bertoni to request a second chance at the portrait. Bertoni refused him, insisting that while the young painter had talent, his ego had already rendered him untrainable, and therefore useless to the studio. This criticism affected Gus deeply. Secretly, he followed Bertoni home and spied on him as his former employer interacted with his beloved bullmastiff. For five days, Gus returned, sketching the dog in charcoal on butcher’s paper. Finally, content that he could represent the bullmastiff as Bertoni saw it, he returned to his family’s apartment and painted a small portrait. Years later, Gus would insist that it was this experience that taught him how to see his subjects, not as mannequins posed before him, but as living individuals, each with their own unique history and personality. This sensitivity, and Gus’s uncanny ability to transmute those stories into his portraits, became the hallmark of his work in later life, and led to his commissions from some of the most influential and important leaders of the day. Upon completion of the bullmastiff portrait, Gus presented it to Bertoni as a gift, asking only to have his position at the studio restored. Bertoni agreed, on the condition that he personally serve as Gus’ teacher. Gus progressed under Bertoni’s tutelage, and within two years became the most requested portrait artist in the studio’s employ.

“In July of 1916, Gus resigned from Bertoni’s studio with the intention of traveling to Washington D.C. to pursue a particularly unique opportunity. He explained to his parents that he had read about the recent death of the official presidential portrait artist, Herbert Woosterhouse, and intended to apply for the honor of painting the portrait of the next president. In fact, in the wake of Woosterhouse’s death, the White House had announced a search for a new presidential portrait artist, and an article detailing that search had made its way into the New York Times. Gus had determined immediately to move to Washington to apply for the job, despite the fact that the article declared that only artists with at least ten years’ experience and the references to prove it need apply. Bertoni himself warned Gus not to throw away his position and his growing reputation in the New York art world on such a foolish lark. Years later, Gus remarked in his memoirs that, despite the warnings of Bertoni and his family, there was never any question in his mind about the move to Washington. In his own words: ‘They insisted that by leaving New York, I was risking my future as an artist. What they did not understand was that, by staying in New York, I would have been risking my future as a legend.’

“Gus took what little money he had and moved to the nation’s capital. There, he shared a rented room with several other artists and performers, sleeping in a bunk barely twelve inches from the ceiling. Over two hundred artists applied for the position of official government portrait artist. All but twenty were sent home after a portfolio review by then Secretary of the Interior, Franklin Lane. Despite Gus’ lack of experience, he was not among those sent home on the first day. He and the remaining twenty artists were allowed the opportunity to paint a sample portrait of the sitting president, Woodrow Wilson. In his memoirs, Gus described the experience: