The Underpainter (35 page)

I had been examining distance for two days. Sara’s moving body could have been misinterpreted as a flaw on the white skin of the bay, the white skin of distance. I knew this vista was beautiful now, more beautiful, perhaps, than it had been in the summer when it was all dancing and stars. The clean sheet, the new leaf, unscarred by experience. The clarity of the north that Rockwell raved about. Brigus Harbour. Greenland. Boreal. How he would have loved this bay. And how he would have loved the man mountain with all of winter spread out around him.

I could see that everything that had passed between Sara and me until this moment had been an approximation. Mere subsistence. I, who had previously been so restrained, would now engage in such blatant exposure that when I was finished she would have the entirety of my life in her possession: the Rochester ravines of my childhood, the nonsense of The Art Students’ League, Rockwell, Robert H., the self-conscious salons and soirées that had been my winter life since. I would place the facts of George, Vivian, Augusta, the China Hall at her feet, tell her how everything had smashed up. She would look at it all with the opalescent view of an innocent. She would forgive me and I would be exonerated.

All this was very clear and very real to me. I sat in a room blade-bright with sun. Prisms angled towards me from the bevelled edges of mirrors, and anything made of metal — the lamp base, a caster on the foot of the bed, my Zippo lighter — glared.
Things could not have been more transparent than they were in that light. Each thought that entered my mind was sharp, well defined. And out on the ice, the woman I had decided to want, moving slowly towards me.

How to explain what I did?

There are certain moments in a mans life that demand and deny response at the same time. I spotted her through the binoculars at eleven o’clock in the morning, this woman I had not communicated with for two and a half years. I might have seen her earlier, but I had begun to play those games one engages in when waiting — setting limits, making rules. I wouldn’t let myself pick up the binoculars except on the hour and the half-hour. Earlier in the morning, I had taken the mirror from the wall and had stood with my back to the window, superimposing my own head on the giant’s prone body in the glass. None of these games were games of skill, but they probably caused me to miss the exact moment of her materialization.

Watching the small approaching figure, I recalled that when I was younger and studying art history I had realized that medieval pilgrims would still have had a full day of walking ahead of them after they had glimpsed in the distance the spires of Chartres or Compostela; they who had already come so far. After that there could only have been anti-climax. I had always wondered what it was that continued to drive them forward. I had assumed, you see, that the perfection of the destination they had built in their minds during the journey could only fade or
tarnish as they drew nearer. And then there would be the beggars on the steps, the hawkers, the pickpockets, the corrupt clergy.

Yes, I remembered this as I sat in the radiant room.

I imagine you will judge what I did to be an act of cowardice — and perhaps you are right. I had come to the very edge of a moment, the moment when it might have been possible to remove the cloak of fear that had protected me all those years. But after all was said and done, the flesh beneath was too white and weak to be exposed. Is there really any one among you who in the face of such grief would not panic at the approach of happiness? If Augusta had waited, George would have returned to her whole, his emotional history utterly exposed, his love for her intensified. Could it have been something as banal as a wedding certificate that killed her? They had made their own marriage, after all, a pact based on sorrow, conceived in the halls of an asylum. And now that pact had been destroyed. The partnership might have cast off the mud of Flanders, the knives of the surgeons, the hoarded passion of a betrayed heart. Had Augusta glimpsed happiness, the banality of
that?

As Sara moved closer I was able to see that she was wearing her father’s old overalls. She was coming steadily towards me across a pristine whiteness where everything shone. Behind her the stone man slept on, unmoved by her journey, his body hard and rigid and unchanging.

Heart of granite. Bed of ice.

She must have been less than a mile from the shore when I decided to leave Port Arthur, remove myself finally and permanently from Sara’s life. How could I break into her innocence
with my own corruption? In all fairness, ultimately, I could not bear to pollute her strength with my own damaging weaknesses. I panicked in the face of the possibility of happiness.

As I followed the highway along the curving shore of Lake Superior, I watched the hotel where we were to have met diminish in size in the rearview mirror. I imagined Sara asking for me at the desk.

O
ver one hundred and fifty years ago in England, a Staffordshire potter was thinking of Upper Canada, a huge tract of land stolen for the Empire from a continent he had never seen, would never see, except in his imagination. Perhaps he was bored with repetitive calls for views of Niagara Falls and its attendant Terrapin Tower and Table Rock, wanted to explore instead the Great Lake towards which the waterfall hurled itself. Or perhaps he had read the journals of Samuel Champlain, where the foliage of the north shore of the gleaming ocean of fresh water is described as being almost ornamental in its beauty. Whatever the case, the title he gave to the landscape he composed — Ontario Lake Scenery — is so ambiguous that I spent the better part of the morning trying to determine whether it was all the lakes of Ontario or the Great Lake Ontario that he had in mind. For my own comfort I decided on the former inspiration, wanting, I suppose, to believe that both of my own north shores are memorialized by the last piece I place upon my shelves.

For I am pleased to be able to tell you that the huge task of reassembling the collection is completed. Completed as successfully as an old man can ever complete the task of piecing together all that has been broken. Some of the tinier fragments were impossible to place, and who knows how many hills and streams, birds and flowers were shattered beyond recognition or exploded into powder as they smashed against the floor. By pure coincidence this porcelain view of Ontario lakeside landscape emerged from the final small, sad pile of shards at the bottom of that crate I removed from a Davenport bedroom forty years ago. And yet the scene, which is now fully glued back together, has nothing to do with what I learned when I visited the shores of that northern country. As I pieced this painted terrain — my last jigsaw — together, I held elegant ladies, a ruined castle, several mountains, and East Indian tents in my old gnarled fingers. The Staffordshire china painter had created a theatrical mirage, a fantasy, then printed the words “Ontario Lake Scenery” on the reverse side of the plate.

But how much different is this from the complicated preconceptions I have carried with me? Had the potter visited Ontario, would he have been able to see past the fog of his fantasy straight through to the reality of swamp and muskeg, blackflies and bad weather? Would he have believed, as I believed, that nothing important would ever happen to a young man who sat in an apron behind the counter in a Canadian China Hall? Would he have valued the vulnerable skin of the art he created, and the real world that composed the earthenware ground on which it was based?

Would he have been able to accept the approach of happiness, of love?

Or would the elegant ladies, the romantic ruin, the nonexistent mountains have persisted, blocking his view, keeping him distant from his own life?

Despite the clear January weather that followed me south all the way to New York, my withdrawal from the north shore of Lake Superior was one of the most fatiguing journeys I had ever made. When the exhaustion became unbearable I would pull the Packard over to the side of the road and stumble into the winter woods, regardless of my stupid city shoes and the deep snow that often reached my knees. I would then become almost immediately alert because of the cold, and because I was so afraid of becoming lost in the forest. It says something about my state of mind, I suppose, that I had made at least a half-dozen forays before realizing that to return to the car I would only have to follow my own tracks.

It was on the second or third of these treks that I disturbed a deer that had been lying in the snow. She rose slowly, unsteadily to her feet and stared at me in terror. She was so thin her ribs were shadowed on her hide and her ears looked too large, too cumbersome on either side of her narrow face. Then, with a startling burst of speed, she pivoted and leapt away from me into the trees, clouds of powdery snow rising in her wake. I looked for some time at the soft shape her body had pressed into the snow, the steam of my own breath filling the space where she should have been permitted to remain.

I went back to the car. I wept.

Because, you understand, Sara had told me about winter-stricken deer, had described the delicate balance that keeps them alive when the season is unusually harsh. They have endured so much already, she had told me, so much scarcity and hardship, that their metabolism slows down to allow for survival. Any interruption of this, any sudden spurt of energy, causes damage.

“Don’t run,” I had shouted at the fleeing deer. “Please, please don’t run.” I stood yelling in the forest, causing the animal’s flight to intensify. Faster, farther, causing more harm.

“Often it is their last run,” Sara had told me. “This one final rush of adrenalin — no matter how minor — is just too much for them; the system can’t cope. You can see a serious amount of deterioration in a week. More often than not, after two weeks, they are dead.”

She had added that sometimes, walking in the woods in springtime, she had found carcasses.

I put my head on the steering wheel. I wept.

I live in this great white barn of a house with its sparse furnishings and few souvenirs. The current canvas leans against the wall, stretched and primed and ready for the hand that holds the brush. It is a flat white rectangle resting inside the walls and floors and ceilings of a cube, which is itself part of a series of cubes — the rooms I walk through, their generous allowance of natural light, their views of sorrow.

I remember that Rockwell, who loved the Nordic sagas, told me that Njal and his wife lay down on a bed in a burning house and covered their bodies with the skins of animals. The beams above them burst into fire and their enemies cheered beyond the blazing walls. Njal’s life had been one of frenzied transition; a history driven by wooings, slayings, voyages, and battles. His existence had been vehement, rough, and brief; there had been no passivity in it. Now with the hides covering him on the bed, he allowed experience to visit him for the first time, lay down with the bride of his heart to welcome it — this wild brightness, this burning, this atonement. There was one son called Kari who leapt from the roof of his father’s flaming house, his hair and clothing ablaze, and ran through the night to quench the fire he carried with him in a snow-filled valley he had played in as a child.

“There is not a trace of the house of Burnt Njal,” Rockwell told me. “Of course there is not a trace of that left. But to this day there is a ravine in Iceland called Kari’s hollow.”

A place to quench fire, lust, thirst: a place of rest. A valley in a northern country. A white canvas rectangle. A window overlooking a frozen Great Lake. All these views of snow.

Tonight I will begin
The Underpainter
, the last canvas of the series, a portrait of myself. In it, I will carefully detail both of my inheritances. Every piece of reconstructed china on the shelves that mar the famous modernist architect’s cold and empty walls. Each object and all the histories contained by Sara’s house.
The views of the lake outside her windows. George’s treasured pigeons locked behind glass. I will add my mother’s mausoleums, her fictional skating parties, her music box, the look on my father’s face the afternoon he knew that he was disappearing into wealth, Augusta’s grey girl, snow house, mauve dunes. Her glorious brothers, radiant in fields of golden hay, Sloan’s Bar, Rockwell’s laughing face. I will even add Vivian, the boats on which she twice sailed effortlessly, brightly away from tragedy.

I will paint Sara’s skin glowing in the yellow light emanating from a thousand autumn birch leaves. Then I will paint myself with the love I could not accept coming towards me, despite my cloak of fear, the implacable rock man, the miles and miles of ice.

It will be full of beautiful dark shorelines, this painting, full of all the possibilities that we believe exist in alternative landscapes, alternative homelands. Hills and trees, gold-leaf birches, skies and lakes and distances. I am old, it is true, but I know that I will be able to finish it. And when it is finished, I will want to keep it close to me so that I may look at the images there, from time to time.

This book could not have been written without the encouragement and help of many people. I am most grateful for the information and advice given to me by Katherine Ashenburg, Mieke Bevelander, Nick Carter, Anne Hart, Stuart MacKinnon, Émile Martel, Ian Munro, Amy Quinn, Roseanne Quirin, Helen Quinn-Campbelle, Diane Schoemperlen, David Staines, Ken Snyder, Tony Urquhart, Bernie Weiler, and my mother, Marian Carter. At McClelland & Stewart, thanks to Heather Sangster and, as always, especially to my editor, Ellen Seligman.