[30] We understand and then we die

 

And this morning I’m going to Gus’s studio, which means another fiaker, on another day that Paul’s gone out to his models. It drops me and Johnny at the mouth to a narrow lane off the High Street of the Seventh Quarter, the carriage district behind the Imperial Folly. You have to know the lane is there or you’d look forever. I walk down it and push open the gate and step into a long, narrow garden in winter, with snow hummocks where the peonies will be again and a row of tall fruit trees whipping their last brown leaves, a lunch table below them half-buried in a new drift. I peer under the berber cloak, the warmest thing I’ve got, and watch Johnny dreaming. Is there something inside him already that’s not about me? His right fist is pushed into my breast. I’m hungry too, Johnny. In my right hand a leather portfolio that I can’t put down because I couldn’t bend to pick it up. It was a rough journey through the previous night’s fresh snow. I exhale once, long, I inhale with my eyes closed and think of the sun. I kick at the door with my leather boot instead of knocking.

One of Gus’s sweet maidens answers and draws me in from the cold. Another model is sitting up straight on the sofa, knees locked together and hands crossed on her lap. Both are wearing long cassocks, like monks, wine-red and forest-green. The standing one, Ephie, is smiling at a joke she won’t share, the sitting one has a look of inchoate dread. He places ads every few months, auditions them, culls them out. Some have sat to him for years. Five or six have fathered his children. I have met Ephie before, but not the other. He would have chosen this new one for her pale-gold hair, which is tied above her neck a little too neatly with a blue ribbon. It will tumble soon enough.

When the door closes, I can hear the source of her dread. His work table is squeaking. In the past eight years he has never troubled to tighten the loose leg, or perhaps the sound inspires him, like a brass bed does Paul. Through the wall, grunts mingle with keening sighs. The table is pounding the other side of the wall, making the framed Japanese woodcuts jump on this side.

‘Don’t worry, dearie,’ Ephie tells the new one. ‘He’ll have a pillow with just your name on it. Hello, Emma. That’s Paul’s brat you’ve got?’

We share a bitten-back smile wait for the woman through the wall to let herself go. It’s happening soon, we can tell. Paul told me years ago that every woman has her own song. He thought he was telling me something new, but I already did from my sessions at Gus’s studio. There she goes. This one’s a Catholic babbler, it sounds like a prayer must. She keens for Jesus and God, Jesus and God, and then, suddenly, trills as if they just doubled-teamed her, and the trill morphs into a deep and powerful laugh.

The new one looks petrified, the old one smirks.

‘Nice one,’ she says. ‘Gus says it’s a boy. Healthy, you two?’

‘He ripped me up pretty bad,’ I tell her.

‘The first one’s the worst.’

‘I can’t have a second.’

‘You won’t miss it, you have any sense. My mother screamed out seven, then died of the eighth.’

‘Ephie,’ he calls through the door.

She and I nod agreement, and I go in instead. He takes a moment to turn from his window, where a squall has begun to cloak a pear tree. ‘Oh,’ he says, and his hands dart to pin down the tent in his robe. He’s dressed like them, in a cassock, but his is silk, and silvery blue. His model is lounging on a horsehair chair, one foot tucked up, the other trailing on the ground, her face still tightening back. While his soldier falls, Gus turns and fusses with his desk, straightens a ruler and moves a bowl of apples to one corner. He turns to me again and points at Johnny, and I let him hold him. A bear going bald, two tufts of curly black hair above the ears and a beard that nothing can rule. Bricklayer’s shoulders, innkeeper’s paunch. Is that an angel smiling? A devil? He lets Johnny squeeze his finger and winces in pain to make him laugh. No luck – Johnny never laughs. He lifts him to his nose and inhales the baby smell of him.

‘The cap,’ he says. ‘You like it, then? Is it warm?’

‘Beautiful,’ I say, and I turn slowly to model it for him. Unlike Paul, beauty is in his vocabulary. Paul never thinks about beauty much. Though his paintings can be that, beauty is always a side-effect for Paul, instead of a key point, the way it is for Gus.

‘And you?’

‘I hurt,’ I say. ‘He really ripped me up.’

‘Arrrrgggch. Doctors, eh? But you’re glad to be alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did Johnny just do?’

‘He doesn’t cry,’ I tell him. ‘He does this other thing.’

He looks down at the little guy, and snarls back.

‘We mustn’t let him be hungry. Would he like some lunch? We can put him just here. And if I put his bottle on the stovetop, will that make it warm enough?’

‘That’s what we do.’

‘And apples and some cheese for us. The doctors tell you to eat?’

‘They left me a stomach,’ I say.

He glances over his shoulder, just enough for his model to approach him. I inhale the smell of sex and watch her shoulder tilt under her smock, the sliding cant of her hips, and she glances at me with a stuffed full expression, and I think: ‘That was me once.’ He hands her three apples and three thick slices of cheese, chops a cannonball loaf of rye bread in three and places all of it on three sheets of linen paper from his desk drawer. Then he takes a bottle of decent red wine from his utility shelf, uncorks it, and shoos her out. I’m looking around the room. Under the window he has two canvases in progress. The uncovered one is a landscape from the Salt District, his summer home, of a beach forest and alpine flowers at dusk. Decadent art, some of the reviewers are calling his work these days, though in contrast to what comes next, no one can know yet. As if Gus was the end of something, and perhaps the reviews are right, except for their tone – sensual is as honest a result as anything else a painting can be. Gus is doing variations on things he did long ago. That isn’t a bad thing – any painting he does is a glorious example of what he knows how to do better than anyone, and I don’t see why it matters whether these were done in 1901 or 1913. But I know that the next steps this world takes will be towards a place he won’t have it in him to find.

The floor is cluttered with sheets of drawing paper and roaming cats. Johnny is holding a piece of blue crayon, trying to fit it in his mouth. Gus points at the leather portfolio I’ve placed beside me, and I open it while he peels and cores two apples and slices them into quarters, cuts cheese into strips with a Damascus knife.

I show him the sheets one at a time, a new one for every nod he makes. These are working sketches for Paul’s SilverDome show. Graphite with touches of white chalk and watercolour.

‘That’s Paul,’ he says. Then to me: ‘I go, “drip, drip, drip,” and he goes, you know, “woosh …’’’ He presses his palms together and shoots them apart. ‘I’ll come and see him soon. I’ll tell him, “That effect is one part yellow ochre and two tyrrhenian and three turpentine.” And he’ll already know, after a month of figuring out what I could …’ He winces long.

‘Tell him?’

‘Yes, tell him, exactly that.’

Yesterday in the studio I watched Paul daub away at an edge of free canvas, testing one blend, then another, turning it to the light. It’s his mad scientist mode, and I always think he’s avoiding the real effort when he’s doing that. But I’m not the one who could tell him.

‘He gets frustrated when colours don’t come to him,’ I say. ‘Not the colours, but the …’

‘I know what you mean. As if he’s painting with light. He wants people to see through his work, not bump their heads on it. I see what he’s trying to do. There’s a difference between technical skill and communicative skill that he hasn’t sorted out yet. Skill is only a tool to put down when you’re ready for the next one. Tell him that for me, will you? I know these don’t come as easily to him as his drawings. The energy people see in his work – that’s his effort poking through, no? His paintings will relax the more he knows. He won’t be able to stop that. I don’t see any edges to these.’

‘He isn’t using stretched canvases this season. He’s pinning them to a large board to work out the borders later.’

‘That works, too. The next one?’

I turn the next sheet over. He waves me to continue. Seven, eight, nine.

‘Four of these he finished last autumn.’

Almost finished.

‘And the others make only nine.’

‘One sketch he only made last week. It’s his sister, so it will be easier. And the eleventh he’s starting today.’

‘Good, good, good. They’re portraits but they’re not. That’s Paul, too. He still goes out to his models?’

‘He has one more trip to make.’

‘His sister asked me to sit her portrait last year. Did she tell you?’

‘She tells Paul everything, and then he tells me everything she says.’

‘Something in her was too dark. I would have used her as a model sometimes, for allegorical work. Oh, she was beautiful enough, in that cruel way that’s so difficult to carry. She wanted me to paint her in gold leaf and flowers and sunshine and so on. “The full Gus treatment,” she put it. But … what’s the word. Not a joke, but … when everything would have meant its opposite. She wanted me to tell that joke. I didn’t think about the money she offered. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to be able to say? The secret of happiness on earth – “I don’t think about money.”’

Gus lets himself be voluble around me. I’m one of the few.

‘Portraits but they’re not,’ I say. ‘He can’t stand not painting people. There was that landscape last summer, do you remember?’

‘He painted a forest crowded with people, and then painted the people out, and he had a landscape, just so. Johnny, he was an experiment, too. Did he work?’

‘The crucible exploded,’ I say. I meant him to laugh – I’m still angry enough about what happened, and I don’t want company for that – but instead he squeezes his eyes shut. There is too much kindness in him to ever get out. When he forgets to express it, it leaks out under pressure.

‘Is there anything I can do for either of you?’

‘He wants the central court of the SilverDome. The light’s better. It would change his colours if he knew which space he was filling.’

‘Anybody would want it,’ he sighs. ‘But Emma, for his first room? Not this year. The centre court to himself in, say, two years, at this pace. Let people come this May and see him, and say, “He deserved the skylight, not Prokop.” Most people will, and he knows it. So let him be impatient. These figures …’ He points with a slice of apple. ‘Are they doppelgängers? Gosiç will be showing a couple of them next month in the same hall as Paul gets. He wouldn’t want to look like a junior Gosiç, not that that should stop him if he needs.’

‘I don’t think they will be. Since Johnny, he’s seen people in twos.’

‘Not the ages of man, I hope. Another theme that’s too easy. I don’t see Johnny in these, except one.’

‘That’s not Johnny. He was drawing babies for it when I was still carrying him. On the street? Hundreds of drawings, but he …’

‘… waits for them to turn into two or three before he’ll paint them. I must go back to work. Sophie will probably hope for your company if you can stay. She’s the new one. This will be the first day she took off her smock for me. Those perfect teacup breasts.’

‘I noticed. You could move the table a little from the wall.’

He smiles. ‘If I had a wife, you would have been too much like her. No, you’re Paul’s notion of a perfect woman. You weren’t stupid enough, or simple enough, and you had no clients to bring me. But sometimes I tell myself, “I need Emma’s colour.” Let me show you.’

The landscape is aligned just so to the afternoon light. The sun dapples the forest floor, the wildflowers are blooming, the flowers carpeting the earth making a bed for eternal sleep. Another act of senseless beauty, the promised sleep of happy thoughts.

‘The trunks under the beech bark,’ he tells me. ‘That’s what I need you for. There’s just a hint of a colour where the bark has shredded. So I tell myself, “Emma’s hair.” Yes, hold Johnny, of course – its all right.’

He has placed a stool for me in front of a dropcloth that hangs from the ceiling, neutral grey, splashed with colours that follow the wrinkles. When I tell him my problem, he bats his head with embarrassment and pulls a horsehair armchair to the middle of the room, placing it just so. I sit and let the windowlight soothe my neck, take off my cap and loosen my hair from its pins and my dress from the shoulders. I’m facing the dropcloth, where he has pinned sketch after sketch of dreaming women, tacking them to the shelves. The air is streaked with colour.

‘Paul is the sun,’ he says, ‘and you are the moon. I know where you are this moment. When neither of us can see him, where is he?’