Bee-Loud Glade (17 page)

24

I
kept at the painting, but I won't say I became any better. It always took me so long to find a subject, to choose the right leaf or best flower, that by the time I actually got around to opening my paints my energy and attention were drained, and it was time for me to swim. Over however many mornings my painting went on, I never completed one canvas. I only really started a handful—two or three tentative strokes, a preliminary swathe of background color, and that would be it. Maybe I set myself up for failure by seeking out perfect specimens every time. I might have been more successful painting flawed mushrooms, flawed flowers, birds and bees with only one wing; maybe their own imperfect nature would have allowed me to embrace my own, to get paint on canvas without worrying so much about how it looked and whether I was producing the painting Mr. Crane had in mind.

Or maybe—and this seems more likely—maybe I'm just a naturally, unavoidably terrible painter.

Mr. Crane must have noticed that I couldn't paint and that I wasn't improving from one day or week to the next, that my circles were getting no rounder and my apples looked no more like apples—though my pears did, in fact, look like green apples and my apples looked like overgrown strawberries and my strawberries... I don't think I tried painting strawberries, but perhaps they would have turned out like apples. Had I only known the fruit Mr. Crane preferred me to paint, I might have known which one to
try
painting in order to produce the one he had in mind. Would he have known that my apples were meant to be berries, or would he have been satisfied with the apples I offered so long as that's what they seemed to be?

Whether he recognized my fruited attempts as I'd intended or not, my days as a painter didn't last long. After a few weeks or a couple of months wasting canvasses on my mistakes, I returned to the cave after swimming to find that my paint box was gone. No note, no replacement, just gone—the canvases, the brushes, the works. And I can't say I minded much, either, because no painting meant more time for swimming and for my meditations, which had suffered between the time lost to art and the frustration of failure I carried to the water each day.

But painting hadn't passed from the garden, it had only passed from my hands. The next morning while I sat on my cave top and watched the sun, trying to work out how the whole scene came together as if it were paint—bands of purple and orange like leis I'd seen draped on the necks of arriving tourists on TV shows about Hawaii, against a blue background that was darker at the bottom and lighter up top somehow without seeming to change—Mrs. Crane walked down from the house, carrying a paint box and easel far more modern but also far more smeared and smudged and broken in than mine had ever been. Mine had come pre-rusted and worn, but hers had gotten that way over time. She wore faded, paint-spattered denim overalls, the most clothing I'd seen her in at one time.

“Come on down, Finch,” she called up to me from the ground. “I'm going to paint you.”

Once I was on the ground she explained that she'd studied painting and sculpture in college, an art minor to her theater and acting major. Though she usually painted still lifes in the studio Mr. Crane had built for her in the house, she'd come to do some painting outside after watching me fail at it so miserably from her window.

“Your pears look like apples, Finch,” she said and laughed, “and I don't know what you've done to the apples.”

I was glad not to have to reply.

She pointed toward a large, flat-topped boulder not far from my cave, and yet one I'd not noticed before. “Why don't you sit over there so we can get started,” she said. “Try to look, I don't know, contemplative or something.”

By the time I got myself perched on the rock, she already had the easel set up and a canvas upon it, and was mixing paints on her palette.

She told me to move this way and that, raise and lower my arms, stretch my legs, until at last I must have looked like some crumpled replica of
The Thinker
. Then she said, “Good, now don't move,” and left me to sit there for what felt like hours with a sharp point of stone stabbing the left cheek of my ass.

As I sat I heard the distant shudder of the helicopter approaching, and watched as the underbrush bristled with the flight of small animals back to their burrows and dens, and the branches fell quiet but tense as every bird in the garden seemed to quiver and hide in the leaves. As if the helicopter wasn't loud enough on its own, it swallowed up every competing sound in the garden.

I watched it come in over the house, glinting and black in the sun, and its rumbling grew louder and louder until finally it spun and settled onto the pad and the rumbling whirred down to a whine. Several men in black suits climbed out, and Mr. Crane came from the back door to meet them, shaking their hands on the grass gap between the concrete of the back patio and the concrete of the landing pad. Once they were all out of the helicopter, I could see that there were six, plus the pilot in his black helmet, tending now to the machine. They stood where they were in that in-between space, apparently talking, and Mr. Crane pointed in my direction, and the men with him turned their heads toward me as one. Then they all followed him into the house.

Mrs. Crane didn't talk much on that first day of painting, which was a surprise because she always had so much to say, and I listened to the swish and the scratch of her brush against canvas, the soft slap of paint as she loaded bristles with color. A few of those black birds with red patches concealed on their wings had been hanging around a few days, and one of them spent that whole painting session perched on a branch just over my head (and, I learned later when I saw the canvas, found his way into her painting—maybe he'd perched himself there on purpose).

The longer I sat, the longer I posed, the more I was able to listen and look and think about things, and the more glad I became that I was no longer painting myself. I'd enjoyed it at first, but posing for someone else left me more time for the things I would rather be doing, which is to say no things at all. Even the posing itself was fascinating—how still could I hold, could I slow down my breathing, could I become so attuned to every quiver and spasm throughout my whole body that each follicle and muscle revealed itself? Could I be so inactive that body parts I'd never noticed made themselves as present to me as my eyes or my mouth? Posing for Mrs. Crane was, even on that first day, a lot like floating along on the river: the simpler it seemed, the more complex it actually was. It took great effort of will to do nothing, nothing at all, so completely for such long a time, and I was disappointed, though hungry and a bit sore, when she finally called it a day and packed up her paints and her brushes. I spent the rest of that day on the water, thinking about how much effort it took to hold still, and how much work it could be to do nothing.

She was back the next morning and the next morning, too, and most mornings after that for a long time to come. It became part of my routine, a new routine, I suppose: wake up and climb to my roof for the sunrise, get painted by Mrs. Crane, spend the afternoon swimming. Between posing and floating, I spent the better part of my day trying to hold my body as still as I could while my mind wandered further and further afield—much of my daily movement was only walking from one place in which I wouldn't move for a while, to another place where I wouldn't move, either.

Mrs. Crane also found a routine to our work, and after the first morning that routine involved talking to me while she painted. The second morning I posed for her, she got me to climb to the crook of an elm tree where two branches reached away from each other. I perched in the seat of the vee, looking off toward the house (which wouldn't appear in the painting, she said, because her husband didn't like it when she included anything more than the garden and me), and she stood below at her easel. I was pretty high up in the branches, but when she spoke in her normal, quiet voice I could hear like we were close together—perhaps the shape of the tree helped to funnel the sound of her voice upward to where I sat.

She said, as she had many times before, “You can talk to me, you know. I really won't tell anyone. My husband won't need to know. He already knows enough about everything else.”

The first few times she'd invited that secret between us—a long time before, when I was new to the garden—I had considered it, at least vaguely. I'd thought how nice it would be to have a conversation with her every once in a while, what I might tell her, what I might ask, how I might share all the things I'd discovered about myself and the world during my time spent in the garden. I'd fallen out of the habit of imagining how my bloggers might have described my new life—I hadn't thought about them in a very long time, not since the day of the bee attack when I found they'd gone quiet. Instead, without noticing at first or until it was an entrenched part of my routine, I'd taken to imagining how I might tell my story, picturing someone who followed me around and took dictation the way I'd seen medieval scribes do on historical reenactment programs. I came to imagine him as a monk in a dragging brown robe, rushing after me with a quill and a parchment at hand, to be called upon when I couldn't remember and always at hand to see what I saw and make a record I could return to. Arrogant, yes, and absurd, but sometimes, on some nights, it's a comfort even to imagine having someone to share all this with, someone else who knows my story like my scribe does—all that we've done here together and all we still have here to do. Imagining someone exists to record what I do, imagining that somebody knows—on days of great itching or illness, or when a toothache plagues me as they do sometimes—reminds me what my silence and occasional suffering are worth.

So I would be lying if I said I wasn't tempted to talk when Mrs. Crane offered. But I knew there were cameras, I knew there were microphones in my garden, and I knew I'd be found out whether it was her intention or not, and I wasn't going to lose my whole life only to utter a few worthless words. What could I possibly have to say to her that would be worth giving up all I'd found? I wouldn't be fired, I wouldn't be expelled from my garden, for the sake of casual conversation.

The only thing I really wanted to tell her was that I'd like a painting of myself with Jerome, perhaps of him curled asleep at my feet the way he so often was in the evening, while I ate my stew or drank my tea by the fire. But I had no way to ask without breaking my silence, and the request didn't seem important enough to do that.

So I smiled at her offer as I did every time, I shook my head no, and I didn't say anything.

“Fine,” she said. “Suit yourself. But that doesn't mean I can't talk to you. Maybe I'll trick you into speaking. Maybe I'll get you so worked up about something that you can't help but talk. How about that?”

I smiled again, but I didn't want to encourage her plan by seeming concerned about it one way or another. Then I went back to concentrating on my pose in the tree, on trying to map the rough skin of the bark against my flesh in as much detail as I could, each ripple and bump, each broken-off piece of twig pressed under my thigh and each knot digging into my back. It was almost my own way of painting, perhaps, trying to develop a perfect mental image of everything touching my body, trying to capture the tree more fully than my inept brush ever could.

“So what should we talk about?” she asked. “Any suggestions?” She waited, with a smile that dared me to answer. Or dared me not to, perhaps. “No? I guess it's up to me then... Why don't you tell me about yourself?”

She waited again, and really seemed to believe I might speak at any moment. When I didn't, she said, “Honestly. Really. I'm not going to tell anyone—you can talk to me when we're alone. I'll let you know if anyone's coming. Besides, the boss man's not even around.”

I must have made some expression of surprise, or of interest, when she mentioned Mr. Crane being away; probably it was my eyebrows—they'd developed a mind of their own, jumping up and down at things I didn't even know I was interested in, and the longer and shaggier they'd grown over time the more exaggerated their behavior became. They'd gotten so bushy I could see them myself just by looking up.

“You didn't know?” she asked. “Sure, he's in Afghanistan or Pakistan or somewhere like that. One of those places with more money than missiles, I guess.”

My eyebrows and I both avoided asking that time, so she went on. “You're not going to tell me about yourself, huh? You really aren't going to talk? As long as you've been here, as long as we've been friends now, you still won't give me even that little thing?” I thought she might laugh, or else get up and leave.

I offered a sorry little smile and a shrug of my shoulders by way of reply, which was more difficult than it may sound, considering I was still perched in the tree and couldn't let go of the branches for fear of falling, and was trying to hold perfectly still. She didn't know what I'd given her, the sacrifice I had made for our conversation and the risk I took making that gesture.