The Underpainter (18 page)

The log house, I’m certain, is still fully furnished with all the objects I know so well. Oh, how easy it is for all of it to manifest itself in my visual memory. I rendered every inch of the place, after all, with my well-sharpened graphite pencil. Now I can see the interior in the bright winter light, each item unwarmed by recent contact with skin. I can see the unlit windows of the house, dark enough to reflect stars at night. I can see the white blanket of the lake mirrored in these windows in the morning, and unwitnessed blocks of light moving through the rooms. Dust accumulating on abandoned furniture. Untouched clothing hanging from hooks. Water frozen in the kettle on the cold woodstove. Ashes in the grate.

This is what I have so effortlessly inherited; this cold, this dark, this emptiness. It is odd how vacancy becomes a kind of presence, how it becomes tangible, real.

It is what I live with now, this vacancy. I am full of emptiness.

There were things that Sara didn’t tell me.

I was always startled by the discovery of this, not angered, really, but surprised because she had opened every drawer, every cupboard of her house to my dispassionate scrutiny, to the crazy inventory I was making in my sketchbooks. She often spoke of her small flower garden — something of a miracle in that terrain — and when I asked her how she managed it, she showed
me her rakes and pruning sheers and spades and explained how she had placed used tea leaves all over the soil as a kind of fertilizer. Then she took me outside to observe while she staked tomato plants, as it was the time of year to do this. The garden had originally been her father’s, and Sara said that it had been a great joy to him — this small, dense patch of colour — after the ebony dark of his workplace, on the one hand, and the relentless white of the winters there, on the other. I made a small drawing of Sara working in the garden, and another, a still life of spades and rakes and pots.

She never denied me anything, not one thing, ever. And God knows I took whatever was offered, and more. But there were certain things she didn’t tell me.

I had begun to teach at The Art Students’ League and my schedule one year — sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s — did not allow me to leave New York until late June and would have, therefore, cut short the three full months I normally spent in the north. I have always been irritated by changes such as these, and so, to allow myself the usual amount of time for painting and because I hadn’t intended to teach the following autumn, I decided to stay at Silver Islet until the end of September. Monsieur et Madame Bougereau, the couple who owned the hotel, were pleased with my decision. They rarely had guests who stayed for more than a week or two after the end of August and they were happy to extend the season. They were good people, had been particularly kind to Sara since her father’s death, treating her not just as an employee but almost as a member of the family.

They must have been dead now for years.

I had tried to keep everything constant in my relations with Sara, tried to keep the emotional level calm and unfluctuating so that I could slip as smoothly as possible in and out of her life. I would not allow her, for instance, to come to the dock when I boarded the ferry at summers end. Quiet appearance and disappearance were specialities of mine; I wanted no sentimental attention paid to either. For the most part I believed I had been successful, that each separation was without reverberations, that I had kept feeling behind the fence of my own selfish practicality. I cannot for the life of me think what it was that made me so certain that by controlling my own responses I could control Sara’s as well. Her beautiful strength, perhaps, which I took entirely for granted and which, in my ignorance, I may have confused with a lack of vulnerability. Yes, that may have been it.

All those summers run together in my memory now, become one long summer. But because, one year, I stayed on into the autumn, because I altered the pattern, I recall the time with striking clarity, as if Sara were some other woman altogether and Silver Islet Landing some other place.

At the end of August, boatload after boatload of seasonal people departed, scarcely looking back at the summer shore, their faces turned towards the grain elevators of Port Arthur, towards schools and industries, brick houses and winter. This exodus was followed by several days of gale-force winds, rain, and crashing breakers. At one point the waves were so high and so energetic they hurled themselves over the lane I walked each day to Sara’s house. I was unnerved by this, as unnerved as I had
been by the brief, fierce storms of earlier in the summer that had swung in from the centre of the lake. But even they didn’t have the insistency of this kind of equinoctial front that pounded the land and refused to pass on.

Still, it moved me, this wildness, and so I drew Sara standing by windows, looking out towards the frantic lake, the hectic sky. I drew her stillness in the face of torn clouds and rain — I wanted that contrast. Also, I was attracted by the muted light that comes into a room when the sun is buried under blankets of heavy clouds, the soft-blue tinge it lends to the skin. Two of my best canvases developed from my drawings of this period.

In the first, Sara’s shoulders are draped with a light shawl and her face is turned away from the window, the furious lake. One hand reaches towards the opposite shoulder, and the other clutches the shawl over her breasts. In the second painting, she stands naked in the centre of the window that occupies the full canvas. Her arms are outstretched and her hands grasp the edges of the window frame. She is viewed from the back, her hair is twisted into a bun; each small knot of vertebra in her neck is visible. The backs of her knees shine, the muscles of her calves are clenched and firm so that she looks as if she were about to leap from the window into the angry lake.

It was not an easy pose for Sara — for anyone — to hold. She had to stand on her toes to make the muscles in her legs tighten and her arms were raised above the level of her heart, so we rested at twenty-minute intervals. The whole process, my drawing, the breaks in between, took us through the several days of the storm.

Sara brought food upstairs at noon on the second day, and we picnicked like gypsies on her father’s iron cot. When we had finished I lifted the flannel nightgown she had hastily thrown over her and began to caress the legs, the body I had been so carefully rendering, pulling first one, then the other ankle towards me so that the limbs would straighten. I removed my own clothes and lay on top of her, stretching her arms out from her sides by grasping her wrists and finally, because my arms were longer, pushing the heels of my hands into her palms. After I had entered her, I clamped her legs shut with my knees, making sure every inch of her body was covered with my own, making sure she was immobile. I held her head still with the pressure of my mouth on hers, the weight of my torso making it impossible for her to arch her back. I couldn’t see her at all. The only part of her body that was moving was her heart, hammering against her ribcage.

I had never before made love to her in September.

Later in the day she stood behind me and looked over my shoulder at the drawing I had been working on all afternoon. She pointed to the straight lines with which I had formed the intersecting mullions of the window and which were, at that stage, still visible through the body despite the tension of the pose.

“A cross,” she murmured. “You’ve crucified me.”

She wasn’t touching me, yet I could feel the heat of her body on my back. I laughed out loud but did not turn to look at her. “That wasn’t what I intended,” I said. I wasn’t even looking at the
window by then. Instead, I was attempting to capture, as I might have with one of Mr. Eastman’s Brownie cameras, the frenetic patterns of the water beyond the window as it was defined by the wind.

The next day the storm had finally worn itself out. The sky was a piercing shade of blue, and not a tree, not a leaf was moving. But the upheaval in the lake, the thunderous noise, was worse than ever; the water inkier, the whitecaps whiter. Spray shot up from the edges of offshore islands, including the one whose rumoured silver had brought my father and, indirectly, me to this spot. My rooms at the back of the hotel, rooms that faced the lake, were moist and uncomfortable. All night long the roar of the water and the dampness of my surroundings had me believe that the frame building might be cast adrift, and shipwrecks had figured in my dreams.

In the middle of the morning — there was sunlight now, coaxing an impression of pastel colours from under her skin — Sara leaned her forehead against the glass of the window and said, “I can’t do this.… I can’t stand here any more.”

I put my brush down on the ledge of the easel. “All right, we’ll take a break then,” I said, though nothing in me wanted to stop.

“No, it’s not that ….” she said. “I can’t look at the lake any more. I can’t bear it.”

I stared silently at her familiar back. I never thought about what Sara would be doing while she was posing. I was interested
in anything that belonged to her in the immediate vicinity, felt that knowledge of the objects around her would enrich my drawings and paintings. But while I was working I believed that the gesture I had prescribed was absolute; her pose, my line, the contour of her shoulder working its way into the composition on the page. I believed that I was drawing — deliberately drawing — everything out of her, that this act of making art filled the space around me so completely there would be no other impressions possible beyond the impressions I controlled.

Three full days of staring at a seething lake, larger and wilder than some oceans, a man seated behind you concentrating on the seventh vertebra of your spine or the blue veins at the back of your knees, the dispassionate scratch of the pencil reproducing the creases in your flesh. What did I know of that? It would be years before I could admit that although I wanted every detail of her in my painting — her body, her ancestry, her landscape, her house — wanted the kind of intimacy that involved not just the rendering of her physical being but also the smell of her skin and hair, the way she moved around her kitchen, the sounds at the back of her throat when she made love, I would have preferred not to have been known by her at all.

But, at that stage, my motives were pure, uncomplicated. I was interested in anything that would enhance the quality of my work and oblivious to all manner of things that I felt didn’t or couldn’t.

“What is it about the lake you can’t bear?” I asked her quite gently, careful not to let the irritation I felt at the disruption enter the tone of my voice. I needed at least two more hours.

“I’ve looked at it for too long,” she said, still not turning towards me, still not turning away from the window. “I’m beginning to despise it.”

I said nothing. I waited.

“I used to love it… but all these hours of looking at it. I’ve turned against it.” Her forehead touched the glass again, the back of her neck gleamed. She had crossed her arms over her breasts. By concentrating on these things I was able to pass over the terrible sadness in her voice. “I think of you,” she whispered, “looking at me, hour after hour, day after day, coming to despise me.”

“No,” I said.

“Coming to despise me more than you know.”

“That’s nonsense,” I said.

“You are always on the other side of the room. There is always this gap between us.”

The light had already begun to change. I squinted at the oil sketch in front of me. There might be enough there for me to work with in the studio once I returned to New York. But, perhaps not.

Sara’s reaction to the lake might have interested me if she had not brought it directly to my attention, had I been able to discern it without her knowledge. Otherwise, it was simply an imposition. In my vanity, I wanted to choose my own subjects. I remember Robert H. had quoted Corot as saying that art was nature seen through a temperament. I believed him, I believed that. I had my own temperament. I didn’t want it interfered with. I was at times interested in other views of the world, but only when they satisfied my own artistic curiosity.

“You need a rest,” I announced. “We’ll go for a walk.”

She was dressing in a corner of the room. I walked over to the window and stared at the lake that had so disturbed her. I always turned my back whenever she dressed or undressed. I had been carefully taught, you see, to respect the model’s privacy.

We walked that day away from the lake, taking paths Sara had known since childhood, into the woods of The Sleeping Giant, the man mountain, the Sibley Peninsula. We followed swift-moving shining streams that Sara referred to, poetically, as the veins of the slumbering Gargantua. She had read more books than I had. Her father had loved poetry: there were, and probably still are, old editions of Byron and Shelley in the log house. And then there was the public library in Port Arthur. Requested volumes could be sent over by steamer in the summer, dog team in the winter.

“There is more than one way to visit the body of a man,” she said.

I thought the allusion was sexual, until she told me of the Ojibway legend that claimed that the whole twenty miles of the human-shaped peninsula was the warrior Nanibijou, whose body had been turned to stone after he revealed to the European acquisitors the location of the sacred silver.

She told me the names of the various trees, laying her hand flat against the bark as she spoke. She identified plants. She said that her Cornish father had taught her how to do this. Denied access to it for much of his life, because of his work in the mine,
he had developed a passion for the surface of the earth and had taken his daughter walking far into the woods on Sundays, even when the snow was deep. Sara could not remember a time when she had not known how to walk through the woods on snow-shoes or how to glide over the frozen lake on skis.

The pines were straight and tall and thick. Sara wanted me to look up to admire their great height, but, captured by my own temperament, I barely raised my eyes. I preferred the visual to be a private experience.