The River Swimmer Page 4

  “It’s your funeral, son.” The evident anguish Laurette had put her son through in high school was still unforgivable. And how could she have divorced Keith and given up on the best farm in the county? Teaching had been a livelihood but a farm was a life.

  Chapter 6

  It was a mental funeral. The interior of Laurette’s old stone farmhouse was startling with too much white everywhere on the walls and carpet and that outré blond furniture called Danish modern. There were several gauche bullfight posters from Seville and Granada that Clive perceived to be genuine rather than riffraff reproductions. Laurette’s house sitter or whatever met him at the door and introduced herself as Lydia. She was handsome, pouty, and bored in a short green skirt and white sleeveless blouse. She said that Laurette was in the shower and pointed to the side table with bottles and ice. He could hear a hair dryer down the hall above an annoyingly emotional CD of Mendelssohn that jarred him.

  “Lydia? That’s a rare name these days.”

  “It’s my nom de plume. I’m a poet. It’s just Lydia. No last name.”

  She plopped herself down on the sofa showing a good deal of leg which Clive thought she perceived as her best feature. Her head struck him as a tad small and her black hair had small empire curls at the temple like the old pictures of Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson.

  “You like it here?” Clive had made himself an over-full drink to melt the awkward ice in the room. He noted a platter of carrot and celery sticks surrounding a cup of dip on the coffee table, also the cheddar cubes and ripe olives that went with cocktails in the northern Midwest where the quasi food revolution was not apparent.

  “I love it here. I’m from Chicago. There’s no nature there. Laurette is giving me space to find my voice as a poet.”

  The language made his jaw ache. Previously when he had come home for a visit he hadn’t come home in spirit, but now the whole of him was stuck there. Why did so many young people want to become painters, poets, environmentalists, or chefs? How ill-advised. He wondered what was wrong with engineering, though aside from trains he had no idea what engineers did. In New York window washing was the most daring job. Window washers were jaunty and women adored them high up there working away so we could see clearly. He drank deeply and glanced up Lydia’s green skirt, well up in fact. The legs were tan from the South or a tanning parlor. Lydia aimed a clicker at the CD player and the music segued to Brahms, another of Clive’s hundreds of bêtes noires.

  “Brahms mellows me,” Lydia offered.

  “Why not roll in a tub full of warm butter,” Clive joked and she giggled and gave him the finger which he thought charming. He got up and made an equally large second drink. He felt a specific dislocation looking out the south window because the barn door in the distance was still off its hinges and the silo was in the same state of disrepair as forty years before.

  “I’m smoking a joint because my favorite gin adds pounds to my ass,” said Laurette entering the room in soft mannish slacks and a peach-colored short-sleeve sweater. “Talk about six degrees of separation, which no one was. I forgot to tell you that a friend in San Francisco went to a party at your ex-wife’s lavish home. You lost a gold mine. She’s living with a young man half her age, lucky girl. We have to leave for a dinner in half an hour. You could tag along but you have to look after your mother. When it warms up we’ll have to go skinny-dipping at the lake like we used to.” She passed the joint to Lydia who demurred.

  “I’m the designated driver. Remember?”

  “Of course, dear.”

  Laurette rattled on but Clive wasn’t listening to the particulars. She certainly looked ten years younger than her sixty. Many women kept themselves so well these days compared to the men. He had seen a big man jogging behind the Metropolitan Museum one Saturday stop at a vendor’s for two hot dogs with kraut and then a leisurely cigarette. He had certainly never been skinny-dipping with Laurette and the in crowd. “Remember our last night in the car before I got married to Keith? Afterward I was worried that I might be pregnant.” She laughed.

  “We never closed the deal,” Clive said in a semihuff.

  Suddenly Lydia lunged forward, grabbed the appetizer platter, and threw it high toward Clive. In a millisecond he thought, What the fuck, has she gone mad? and ducked. The celery and carrot sticks, olives and cheese cubes, cup of dip were realistically made of plastic and the platter clattered to the floor intact.

  “It’s an objet d’art,” Laurette shrieked, laughing while Lydia settled for smirking. Laurette pronounced objet as in jet plane.

  It went poorly after the flying appetizers. They were no match for Clive’s talents at Manhattan condescension.

  “It’s interesting to see what happens to art when it works its way down the food chain,” Clive said, composing himself.

  “What do you mean?” they asked in unison.

  “I mean that historically art doesn’t necessarily include needlepoint hot pads and macramé plant hangers. Eisenhower painted well by numbers, and Charlotte Moorman did OK playing the cello in the nude. Hobbyism therapy is quickly yesterday’s pizza. Trying to teach creativity is the major hoax of our time along with the Iraq war and plastic surgery.”

  “What a fucking prick you are. A prick and a prig. It was just a joke,” Lydia huffed.

  Laurette bounced off the couch and jumped very high, quite stoned. “I don’t know much but I know what I think,” she said in a parody of a widespread attitude.

  “She works out on a minitrampoline. It’s a new thing,” Lydia said in response to Clive’s raised eyebrows. She gave him one more good peek up her green skirt. It was girlish but fun. In her poems she did not avoid the merging of organs. At the workshops at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh she had the pleasure of noting the unrest of the young males when she read aloud her dampish sexual poems.

  On the short drive home his brain was antic enough from two large drinks to enjoy the trivialization of everything including himself.

  He swerved to avoid a rabbit and came altogether too close to the deep ditch which was momentarily sobering. As a boy he would shoot and clean rabbits and his dad would fry them. They both loved rabbit and venison. His father shot a deer every late fall but his mother wouldn’t eat wild game which didn’t lessen the pleasure taken in it by her husband and son. She would eat a bowl of barley soup in the parlor because of her intense empathy with the natural world, which did not include the human species except blacks and Indians.

  In the driveway he got out of the car too quickly and felt dizzy so he put a hand against the rough bark of a maple tree to steady himself. He was suddenly quite tired of the mythology he had constructed for his life. The idea of having quit painting was far too neat. He had lost heart, run out his string, or the homely idea he had painted himself into a small dark corner. Back then there were hundreds of artists in the city trying to attract Leo Castelli and other prominent gallery owners who were clearly unable to democratically sort out the good and the bad in the hordes. Much later he figured it had been like Hollywood trying to predict a trend. The dominant problem, however, on a day-to-day basis had been Tessa’s burgeoning obsession with Tibetan Buddhism. For a number of years their frequent parties in the loft had been fun and then suddenly the parties were too full of these people eating yogurt and tsampa and drinking tea with yak butter which was expensive and hard to get but Tessa managed. They were a bit scruffy like folk music people used to be and left out indefinite articles in a faux Oriental patois. He couldn’t comprehend these Tibetan Buddhists any more than he could all the varieties of Protestantism. The true beginning of the end came when he refused to accompany Tessa on what she called a “pilgrimage” to Kathmandu one August. She also intended to visit the Bodhi Tree in India where the Buddha had achieved what Tessa referred to as “perfect realization.” Summertime in India? I think not. She had also insisted on taking along little
Sabrina who was five at the time. He feared his daughter catching a disease and sure enough Sabrina had had to be hospitalized for dysentery in Calcutta which he had imagined to be chock full of snake charmers and starving riffraff in dirty turbans.

  He looked straight up at a raucous blackbird scolding him. He still felt a bit dizzy and wondered idly if it were something more than the alcohol. Perhaps a coronary? He unwittingly pulled away the hand braced against the maple trunk to feel his chest and pitched sideways to the ground. No real damage was done except a loss of wind, though his head had narrowly missed one of the railroad ties that lined the driveway. He didn’t stop thinking, and immediately ascribed the fall to a freshly learned concept of impermanence but then the question quickly arose of why everything he does should be of importance as if it were being written in a story? Had even his love for Tessa with her high Botticelli forehead come from an art book? The point of view was interesting, looking straight up at the silvery undersides of the maple leaves. Suddenly his mother wordlessly appeared above him and poured a pitcher of water down onto his upturned face. His scrambled brain slowed the course of the water. His dad had said that Ted Williams could see the seam of a baseball pitched at 100 mph. She helped him into the house, through the kitchen to the stairs to the second story. Still a tad dizzy he half crawled upward, hearing her slam the stairwell door behind him.

  Chapter 7

  He awoke at midnight according to his cell phone which wouldn’t work out here in the country. He had a headache, a pointless hard-on, and was sweaty from sleeping in his clothes. He was also very hungry and a suppressed memory had arisen from when Laurette had shown him out the door and had whispered with a glance at Lydia in the yard, “I drive both ways on the freeway,” meaning, he suspected, that she and Lydia slept together however crude the expression. On the way out Laurette’s driveway he had paused to watch Lydia in Laurette’s ancient tire swing pumping ever higher and offering him a lavish display of the undersides of her thighs up to her black panties. Maybe the rope will break, he had thought.

  He tried to dispel the overgenerous sequence of nightmares during his five-hour nap by staring out the window at a three-quarter moon rising through the top of the willow so that the tree’s branches looked almost flossy. He tried to think about how our vision tends to be partial and semiabstract when you stop the brain from making sense from it. That didn’t work. Unlike Tessa who had gone through Jungian dream therapy at enormous cost, Clive put no stock in his dream life. Her endless banal recitation of her dream life had made him irritable. Where’s the story in the story? His nightmare had been long-winded and tedious and was comprised of his gay, meticulous art history professor showing an endless five-hour display of slides of colors. No objects, just gradations of colors, variations of the primaries. In the nightmare Clive was aware of clutching his Christmas gift box of seventy crayons. His heart and head ached from the thousands of slides.

  Hunger brought him back to full consciousness, also the memory of his only truly positive sexual experience in New York. It happened about five years before when he was in his midfifties. She was a waitress in a simple Greek diner way over in the midfifties. She was in her midtwenties, from Fort Wayne, Indiana, and trying to be an actress of course. He was given to taking very early and very long walks on the West Side to keep his body from deliquescing at a faster rate than it already was. After a half dozen visits to the diner they were nearly friends. She had a single art history course at the University of Indiana and claimed to be a distant relative of the painter Sheeler. She said that he was the first man she had ever met who knew who Sheeler was. He took her out to Babbo and Del Posto, restaurants she could never afford and he could only barely. Her name was odd, Kara, and her body was undramatically perfect, the divine ordinary. They made love only three times before she announced she was returning to Indiana to marry her hometown lover, Josh. The last time he had awakened at four in the morning without her in bed and found her in his study looking through a pile of art books in the nude. They had made love against the desk and it had been the most convulsive orgasm he had had since parting from Tessa fifteen years before. They had gone to Barney Greengrass for breakfast and he had never seen a woman eat so much herring for breakfast. It amazed him, but then she disappeared and he never saw or heard from her again. New York was like that but he still thought of her frequently. He had taken her to a Joshua Bell concert and she had wept profusely at the beauty of the music.

  He made his way quietly downstairs and heated up the roast pork hash noting that Mother had eaten more than her share. He chuckled at his foolishness in drinking two large glasses of vodka on an empty stomach at his age. Some fool had written about a man’s sixties being the new fifties which he certainly didn’t believe. He imagined geezers wandering around with knapsacks laden with Viagra. He got out his laptop ignoring thirty-seven e-mails, found a site, and ordered a deluxe box of crayons to be FedExed overnight. Now that he was on a roll he also made a big order from Zingerman’s deli in Ann Arbor. He had nearly three weeks to go on his mother-sitting and couldn’t envision enduring the purgatory of her bland cooking. He chuckled again imagining Laurette driving on a freeway in her yellow Jeep with both male and female sexual partners.

  “Please go to bed, son, you’re keeping me awake.” His mother peeked from her bedroom door.

  Back upstairs he kept his night-light on for fear that the nightmare might return. It had been his first in recent memory. There had been a poignant mudbath in the loft so many years before, when Tessa and her friends had done Tibetan chants all night for a mutual friend who had died of breast cancer. He couldn’t very well object. Tessa had remodeled a small guest bedroom toward the back of the loft and had decorated it just so with Oriental bric-a-brac. He couldn’t stand earplugs but while sleeping intermittently he had dreamt of being trapped in the middle of a herd of elephants. In the nightmare he was also hearing Mozart’s “Grand Partita” but the music was horribly distorted. It was a curious relief when the elephants trampled him into a bloody pancake.

  He glanced over at the bookcase, dismissing the idea of rereading The Moon and Sixpence, a fictionalized rendering of the life of Gauguin. There were others that had poisoned his teens with their romanticism, including novels on the lives of van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Modigliani, and Caravaggio. At sixteen he had wept until his pillow was wet over the murder of Caravaggio. There were also dreary texts by Berenson, Herbert Read, and a tome by Gombrich.

  He suddenly wished he had a photo of Kara from Indiana to put on the wall. There was the abrupt idea that he could easily paint her likeness from memory. He closed his eyes and could see her perfectly. Who would care? No one of course. He had anyway exhausted his feeling of failure over quitting painting twenty years before. The only remnant of the guilt came from having failed his father, a residual nexus of emotions from his father being proud that his son would be an artist rather than a farmer. He mentally organized a self-mocking headline “Professor Takes Up Painting Again” but the irony, as always, was weak-kneed, wobbly in fact. He wanted to see Kara again so he could paint her alive. Simple enough. There was immense freedom in not having a career to protect. His mind, a virtual encyclopedia of the history of art, briefly whirled with likes and dislikes. He never cared for Warhol, Johns, Rauschenberg, or Judy Chicago. He rather liked Franz Kline, Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and the long forgotten Abe Rattner and Syd Solomon, and even the more recent Ed Ruscha. But he loved Burchfield and Walter Inglis Anderson not to speak of Edward Hopper. He lay there feeling pleasantly irrelevant, recalling a Toronto periodical called Brick that a friend had given him, in which there was a goofy essay about food that included a comment to the effect that 99.999 percent of all writers, poets, painters, sculptors, and composers are eliminated in their last act and once you reach sixty you had to kill your ego so that you wouldn’t become desperately unhappy about disappearing in your old age. It wasn’t up to you anyway. Your life’s
work would become a mild quarrel among the air guitarists.

  Turning in the bed he could see Henry Miller’s To Paint Is to Love Again beneath a slender folio of Pascin. His daughter Sabrina had given him the book when she was twelve and feeling insufficiently loved. He liked Miller’s work very much but had never opened the book under the notion that he didn’t want to be disappointed with the man’s views on painting. He had seen a few of Miller’s aquarelles in the possession of a collector in L.A. and they were almost nice though the painter was trying something beyond his capabilities. These thoughts made him feel priggish. Miller had seemed quite happy in his last decade unlike most artists. He painted, played a lot of Ping-Pong, and was involved with younger women. This reminded Clive of Goethe who at seventy-three had gone into a depression because the eighteen-year-old girl next door wouldn’t marry him. This was an amusing presumption by a mountainous ego.

  Clive dozed for a few moments then awoke to a moth battering itself against the bed lamp. How could he paint Kara without supplies? He got up and rummaged at the back of his big closet. Luckily his mother never threw anything away and he found a set of caked and cracked water­colors that could be revived, but the tubes of oil were all toast except unopened tubes of Titanium White and Burnt Umber. There was also his flimsy twelve-dollar easel from his twelfth Christmas. He would get on the laptop and order some minimal supplies. He knew that in the back of the garage in his father’s huge tool chest there was still a stack of seven-inch-by-nine-inch pieces of Masonite that had been cut for his early efforts. With an undercoat of white they would suffice. He smiled remembering again the blimpish matron who popped out the paintings at the fair saying that she only wanted the frames. He knew that he was going to feel awful in the morning, both fatigued and enervated, but so what? He used to paint up to eighteen hours a day in a frenzy and Tessa would bring a liquid health food concoction to give him energy which he often dumped out a window in his studio into the alley below. He doubted that even rats would find the combination of the blender-whipped carrot, beet, and bananas palatable. He thought that discomfort might be new and interesting in that he had so studiously avoided it in recent years with his two short naps per day, a modest walk, and good meals. The closest he came to discomfort was jet lag, but on his morning arrivals in Spain, France, and Italy he would loll around the first day before the somewhat busy schedule of the second, and in recent years he had been uniformly successful in wheedling a business class seat from his hosts.