The Underpainter Read online

  Quite early on, perhaps immediately, I could see that, though I was a few years his junior, George found me intriguing. And I, of course, was attracted to his interest, having never before been so admired. He had the amateur’s fascination for the arts, and a strong belief, which I did not dispel and probably encouraged, that he was in the presence of a genuine practitioner. I scoffed at the designs on incoming shipments of tableware, lectured him shamelessly about real art while he smiled good-naturedly on the other side of the counter. Only once, I remember, did he interrupt me. He had been reaching for something high up on a shelf, his back to me so I couldn’t see his face. “It’s the only thing I can do,” he said, “in this place.”

  On Sundays we borrowed the old horse and delivery wagon from George’s father and made our way slowly into the hills that arced on the northern horizon and that one could see from the centre of town. Once we arrived in a spot where there was shade for the horse and a view for us, George would remove two old wooden chairs from the vehicle, settle himself into one of them, and begin to draw wildflowers and pastoral scenes while I paced back and forth along the lane searching, unsuccessfully, for signs of chasms and falling water. I was uncomfortable with the docile atmosphere of summer pastures so sometimes I drew George, or the horse and wagon. I spent much of the time commenting on George’s drawings, which were proficient if somewhat sentimental for my taste. I was pleased and inflated by what I considered to be my ability to instruct him and with his readiness to accept my instruction.

  But, try as I might, I could never turn him from his china painting. He always brought along a cardboard folio in which to press certain plants and flowers that interested him and that he would use as references for his designs. This was a practice I sneered at as much for its girlishness as for its unsuitability to the making of what I believed, then, to be “real art.”

  I told him this, told him no one would get away with such nonsense at art school, then asked him bluntly why he didn’t go to art school if he was so interested in drawing.

  “I can’t imagine that,” he said. “A school for nothing but art”

  “Don’t they have them here then?” I asked. “Are there none at all in Canada?”

  “None for me,” George said. I thought he was being protective, evasive in his answer. It had simply never entered my mind that a family, dependent for its income on a grocery store and china shop, might not have sufficient money to send a son to the city to play with paints and crayons. Only one son’s education could be paid for in his family. His older brother, I later learned, had gone to law school.

  “Besides,” he continued, “I like china. I like the business. It gives me time to think and something to look at while I’m thinking. I can read in the shop. I can order things from England and France.” He squinted at the poplar tree he had been drawing. “It’s really not so bad.”

  I glanced at his perfect face — a face more fine-featured, more youthful-looking even than my own — his blond hair and moustache, his fine skin. I tried to imagine a life filled with saucers and teapots, account books and cash drawers, and was utterly unable to do so.

  But I could imagine what George would be thinking about in the yellow light of early afternoon, the slow, quiet hour in the shop, what he would be thinking about while he unpacked shipments from England and France and set up his fragile displays. It was already halfway through the first summer. Yes, I would have known what he was thinking about because he had already taken me to the pavilion. I had already seen the way he responded to Vivian.

  About twenty years ago, before I began my current series of paintings and while I was still living in New York, I worked on ten small abstract paintings called Objects in a China Hall I was beginning to put together the collection by then, though for many reasons it had taken me eight years to make the decision to do it. Each time I added a new piece to the shelves I had built for this purpose, I would draw it and then paint it on a one-foot square canvas. I would walk around the studio for hours at a time with a Sèvres teacup mere inches from my eyes, then try to capture on canvas what I had seen. I was experimenting with visual intimacy, moving the object closer and closer until proximity obliterated meaning as I always suspected it would; the patterns — flowers, birds, garlands, swags, or whatever — exploding and blurring on the surface of the paintings. The series was meant to be a memorial to George, to the delicate, breakable cosmos that had surrounded him. But, in the end, the paintings — a wasteland of colour — didn’t work. I could never determine the right format for them. Squares were not appropriate, and when I experimented with the shaped canvases that were in fashion then, they fought with rather than mirrored the curves of saucers and bowls.

  But I’ve put all that away. There is ample storage in my modernist basement. “Go forward with what you have to say,” Robert Henri once told me, told all of us who listened — mesmerized — to every word he uttered. “You are new evidence, fresh and young.”

  Well, I am old evidence now. There is no testament that has not been tarnished by age.

  Entire kingdoms of objects have disappeared from the planet, it seems, but not from my visual memory, my eidetic malediction.

  Think of all the gear associated with the horse-drawn carriage, the winter sleigh; all the straps and bits and bells, the reins and shoes and blinkers. Think of the wrappers for razor blades decorated with bearded men, a tin container for coal oil, the paper rolls for player pianos, spats, moustache cups, a square box sporting a huge red blossom from which music spills. This century has been one particularly concerned with disappearance, elimination. What ever happened, for instance, to the pale-yellow tickets from the pavilion, summer 1913? Five cents a dance.

  I would stroll up from our beachside house in the early evening and meet George in front of his locked store. Even from a block away I would be able to see his frown, know that he was preoccupied. Vivian Lacey would have been the focus of his imagination for the better part of the afternoon, the possibility of her appearance that night ringing like an adamant bell in his mind, until he would have been unable to hear, to see anything else.

  As we crossed the park he would become more and more silent, finally not talking at all except to reply monosyllabically to random requests I was making for information — facts I hoped would fill the void I could now feel developing between us. He never looked at me when he answered, and I know now that to speak would have meant his breaking through the dark, painful music that he took with him to the dance, to Vivian. But at the time I simply noted with surprise and mild anxiety that there was an odd kind of absence that the mere idea of a woman can create in a man like George, as if, lifted by the evening breeze, he was left floating somewhere, far out over the lake.

  Once we were inside the pavilion his mood would mutate; he would become garrulous, almost coarse, punching the shoulders of the young men he knew, referring to me as his “Yank pal,” all of this a shoreline of angry energy around the deep lake of the inexplicable suffering that, even then, related to Vivian. Claiming that women liked Americans best, he insisted that I dance with every girl he spoke to, though many of them were several years older than I was and all of them blushed with embarrassment. Sometimes when I miserably blundered through dance steps I was only just beginning to learn, I would see George looking towards the door, his face strained, as if he wished to break from this artificial interior of coloured lights, loud music, and paper scenery, as if he wished to be out in the meadows, or back in his cluttered China Hall, alone, with moonlight shining on the platters.

  Then Vivian would appear — her dark, upswept hair, her perfect, gleaming teeth. She would approach George, who would be forcing himself to study the opposite wall, and seize his arm, tugging him towards the centre of the floor. The dance that ensued was one of the oddest I have ever witnessed; the whole room turned to watch it. Vivian led George through the steps, positioning his limp arms, one on her shoulder, the other on her hip, and then moving her own right hand rhythmi
cally from his back to the nape of his neck, lifting it now and then to caress his hair or lightly touch his lips and cheeks. She was like a light flickering near him, a brush painting his features. All the time they were dancing, she laughed, chattered. He remained stiff, impassive; moving, or being moved, from static pose to static pose. His expression was grim.

  I thought, at first, that he hated her.

  At the end of the dance she released him, a pet bird with whom she had tired of toying, and stepped from partner to partner, treating each with the same bright, yet oddly detached attention. I was amazed by her beauty — there was no one there like her — but I was even more astonished by the fact that she chose her own partners, often even paying for the dance tickets herself, while the other girls sulked shyly in corners waiting to be chosen.

  Vivian never waited for anything. She was always in perfect control.

  It wasn’t until the end of the summer that I managed to persuade George to talk about her. By then, however, I had gathered information from some of the other young people my age I had come to know around town. Vivian was new in Davenport, I was told, had arrived the previous autumn with her mother, who was choir director at the Presbyterian Church. Vivian played the organ there and sang, had, in fact, made a name for herself all over the province as an amateur musician. But that wasn’t all; she and her mother rented themselves out as entertainment (The Lacey Girls), and it was rumoured that they had played the northern mining towns — the dance halls as well as concert halls. There was an air of scandal about them, softened somewhat by their connection with the church. The father, it was said, remained in Toronto, where he ran a boarding house. The mother apparently had great ambitions for her daughter, kept her home most evenings when they weren’t performing to practise scales. She was allowed to go out only on infrequent nights. I thought this explained Vivian’s desperate gaiety, her need to harness every partner in the room.

  George and I were painting in watercolour on a Sunday afternoon after a Saturday night during which Vivian’s appearance had reduced most of the young men in the room to a collection of servile suitors and had caused in George a melancholy anger so fierce it was palpable and so prolonged it was changing the shape of the whole afternoon.

  “What is it about that Vivian woman?” I asked, breaking a taboo I knew perfectly well was in place. She had chosen to dance with me once or twice during the previous evening. I was pretending that I wanted to know more about her, but I really wanted to know more about George.

  “What do you mean?” he snapped. “What about her?”

  “Why does she make you so angry?”

  “She doesn’t make me angry.” George banged his small tin paint box shut. “Why should she make me angry?”

  “That’s what I’m asking you.”

  George stood, picked up his chair, and tossed it in the back of the wagon. He walked around the vehicle and slouched beside the old horse, stroking the soft part of the animals nose for several minutes. Then he turned, walked past me, and collapsed into a sitting position on the ground near the edge of the hill. I could tell by the movement of his curved back that he was breathing heavily, almost as if he were gasping for air.

  I had begun to walk towards him when he put his arm out to one side to discourage me from coming any closer. “The truth is, I’m terrified of her.” From where I stood his voice was barely audible.

  “I mean nothing to her,” he whispered. “I become invisible whenever she enters a room.” I stepped in front of him so that I could see his face.

  George said nothing, but let the extended arm fall to his side, a gesture of surrender. Still, he did not look at me for longer than a fraction of a second, keeping his gaze fixed instead on the horizon of the distant lake.

  “George,” I began, “she’s just a woman. There is nothing about her —”

  He interrupted me. “Fate,” he said, “destiny. I’m connected to her somehow, but she’s not connected to me … not at all.”

  “Oh, come on,” I said, laughing, unable to envision fate or destiny playing any kind of role in the life of a man in a white apron, a man operating a china emporium. I bent to pick up the drawing that George had absently brought with him to the edge of the hillside and that was now about to be carried off by the wind. I was still smiling, but I stopped when George looked at me oddly and I realized there were tears in his eyes.

  I knew nothing of passion then. Two decades would have to pass before I would be able to recognize it when I was in its company, and, even now, I am not certain that I ever let it slip beneath my own skin. Still, after I had looked at George’s face that August afternoon, something briefly altered in me and I was able to turn and see the summer landscape as I never had before. It was almost evening, the fields that lay before us were richly lit, as if the sun that had poured itself into the earth all day, all season long, were now being released through bark and foliage. Fields of grain, elm trees, sumac bushes, pine groves became sources rather than reflectors of light, the soft shapes of hardwood lots seemed as full of sky as the banks of cumulus clouds that floated above them. Even the rail and stump fences, the cairns of boulders assembled a century before were charged, radiant, their awkwardness a shining memorial to the labour of the men who had built them. This was the first time I had been moved by the tranquillity rather than the violence of nature, the first time I felt the scene before me to be one of perfect harmony. I had never before suspected it was possible that landscape — this impression — might be a compensation for misery, for loss.

  The lake was bright blue, sparkling below us. Two or three white sails were visible near the harbour. On the other side lay my own country, my own city. I looked again at George, who had remained seated, his back bent, his arms on his knees, his face dark with emotion.

  “I’ll be going back soon,” I said, handing him his uncompleted drawing.

  He looked at the piece of paper for a moment, then crumpled it in his fist, threw it towards the view. He rose to his feet and smiled. “There’s always next summer,” he said.

  A few years later, when both Robert Henri and Rockwell Kent were making their philosophies known to me, the former was quite vague and the latter absolutely clear on the subject of passion. Robert H. would have admired my tranquil vision, would have nodded with approval as I described it. Conversely, Rockwell would have instructed me to turn my back on the scene, to seize the tail of the northwest wind, to travel into storm and chaos, with the assurance that brightness and clarity would follow. He was a man who craved the catastrophe of experience. “The impossibility of one life,” he would rage, shaking his fist at the sky above MacDougal Street, “against the brilliance, the possibilities of everything alive in it!” Almost anything was capable of carrying him off: women, islands, politics, weather, his own thundering heart. He once said to me, quite seriously, “Get drunk, Austin, have a love affair. It would be a tragedy to die and discover that you hadn’t completely used up your body.”

  Robert H., on the other hand, spoke of states of being, long hours with materials and tools available and ordered, the hand ready to capture the image. To his mind, there was no experience more important than the art that was produced by it.

  Robert Henri was my teacher; Rockwell Kent my friend. They both took their leave of me one way or another. No, I should be honest here. It is I who spend long hours in the studio trying to take my leave of them.

  On our last walk to the pavilion that summer, George offered me a swallow from the flask he was carrying in his hip pocket. I accepted but pretended to drink more than the few drops I allowed into my mouth. I hadn’t had much experience with alcohol.

  He was unusually talkative for a Saturday night with Vivian’s appearance imminent, asking many questions about The Art Students’ League in New York, since I had decided to spend my academic year in that city. At one point, I remember, he told me, half in jest, that I would be a great artist one day, and asked me to remember him when I was.

 
“I’ll still be painting on china,” he said, his tone flat, difficult to interpret.

  “Because you want to,” I reminded him.

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s what I want to do.”

  The autumnal moon was beginning to rise over the lake, its orange shape distorted, as if pregnant. The Baltimore Rhythmaires were playing an upbeat melody as we walked towards the octagonal pavilion. By this time I knew so many of George’s friends that they called and waved to both of us as we approached. I had stopped moping weeks ago, was now aware that I was unhappy that the summer was ending.

  Just before we were to enter the building, George pulled me aside and offered me a cigarette. When I refused, he lit one himself, inhaled, threw his head back and blew smoke towards the darkening sky. Then he looked around him warily before he spoke.

  “Tonight I won’t dance with her at all,” he said. “Tonight I will dance with everyone else. I will not dance with her, even once.”

  “She’ll ask you,” I said. “You know she always does.”

  “I’ll refuse her.” He ground the cigarette into the dust with his foot. “I’ll refuse her,” he said again. “I won’t dance with her.” George looked towards the pavilion. “She talks … she talks about nothing.”