Cartesian Sonata: And Other Novellas (2 page)

Scenes like this—that’s what Uncle Fogal filled his eyes with, why he lived … the swine.

There must be some truth to the tale, though, because you can view the boot, the shattered edges of the leather curled and the mud removed, at the Harrison County Historical Museum any hour it’s unlocked. Take the stairs you’ll see in front of you when you enter (mind the banister, it rocks), cross the balcony as it sweeps to the right, and you will find the boot on the first table through the door, by the spurs of The General, with a placard propped; but Mrs. Crandall keeps her schedule secret, so if you want to see it you’ll have to set a watch. Try to look honest, sincere and devout. She fears thieves and anyone with a pencil. It is generally believed that wags one day arranged a number of the mounted animals in attitudes of copulation, destroying as they did so the supports and backdrop of an educational tableau, much admired over the years, which had featured a leaping
frog, a frightened hare, and a screaming eagle. I happen to know that when Mrs. Crandall observed the address being paid by a moose to a deer, a terrible weakness overcame her and she almost fainted—not from modesty or outrage but from an unbearably poignant recollection—sagging against the banister I warned you about with such force it yielded, nearly spilling her across its upper railing onto a table of fans and combs and looking glasses just below, the mirrors cleverly arranged to multiply the combs and fans by three. (So I should, she said, have broken more of those fine combs and illustrated fans than ever had existence.) Instantly her weakness was replaced by indignation, for, as she very often told me later, the decorative scene had been created by Willard Scott Lycoming himself, and though the foreground was mostly grass enlivened here and there with daisies, the middle distance represented with astonishing fidelity (fidelity, alas, uncommon in the paintings of our faithless age) a view of the Harris Creek, where the Lister Farm had been before it burned and where the plant that folks now call the Pork Works was, while the far ground contained the barest suggestion of a pointed mountain scarfed with purple haze of which the artist had been vouchsafed, he had told the then Miss Swanson, a vision in a dream (there are no mountains in these parts, though several low hills lie along the river); a peak which had, he said, meant a great deal to him ever since and which the tableau had hinted was the home of the screaming eagle, whence it came; and the violation of this lovely historical work had filled her with such a fierce and avenging anger that she struck an indecent squirrel from its mounting, snapping its dry and ancient tail upon the floor. The placard was composed by Mrs. Crandall, who ought to know the facts, and it says nothing of Uncle Fogal or Pister Welcome either. (Pister, Mrs. Crandall tells me, is a myth.) It merely identifies the owner of the boot; relates the manner of his shooting simply and does not
fasten to his death the dignity of names; calls attention to the worn heel, the scuffed toe, the poor quality of leather; suggests that The Badman was hardly a fit object for hero worship, even though he has become a hero to our children; and closes with a bitter reference to the symbolism in his ruin, the coating of his shattered foot with clay.

What impressed me most about the boot, when I was taken as a boy to see it, was its size. It’s quite small, smaller than I felt it should be, dainty almost, and in those days the top had been allowed to droop upon its stem like a flower, although now there is a stick inside to stiffen it. While I made no public boo-rah, privately I snapped my jaws together and refused to believe in it, a judgment I have since had ample reason, of course, to change. A boot so small and cheaply made could not have held The Badman’s foot, I thought, and I was encouraged in this opinion by Pelcer Wilson’s dad, who said the boot had been fished from the creek—the hole looked bitten through by water rats—and anyway it was a lady’s style and size, look at the heel, he said, ever see a man wear a heel like that? and where was the mate if it was the boot of The Badman, a man near six foot five, he knew, and not a teeny-weeny dandy, his father having seen him kill a man with his bare hands, holding him clear of the ground at the end of his arms like a clutch of prize fish. It was Melon Yoder he killed this way, and Melon was at least six foot himself, broad in his shoulders like a steer, fat in his belly like a sow, thick through his thighs like Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife, and when The Badman loosened him he made a dent in the ground. His father told him, Pelcer Wilson said, that The Badman’s boots were tall and darkly glistening; there were silver nails in the heels and silver stitching over the toe and a row of silver tassels all along the top which shook joyously when The Badman walked like wheat in an intermittent wind.

Lies, lies, lies. What can anyone believe? The Badman was a mimsy parlor-chested squit who stole small change from empty poker tables and whose most daring and most desperate act was freeing Pister Welcome’s pigs to run the town. That sort of childish bullyragging jape was what he made his name by, how he lived … the swine. Men will always lie about the measure of their penis, you can bank on it. Sam T. Hoggart somewhere in his
History
says the same. Sam’s the only historian I know who hates numbers (excepting William Frederick Kohler, of course, up on charges now for molesting his female students). Anyway, his book is a fine one, and I more than echo our friendship when I recommend it. He’d do the same for me.

Then Lycoming. I take no pleasure in inventing him. He is a negligible painter. Three names for
snob
. A man, however, as they used to say, of parts. But no dent in the history of art. It may have been his contradictions that destroyed him, teetered him insane, for he was a hollow-eyed visionary of the romantically desperate kind, cruelly devoted to the truth, afire to prophesy, full of flummoxy notions about the nature of perception, intoxicated by geometry, royally ceremonious, utterly unscrupulous, wholly mad, yet loyal, with the stupid blind loyalty of the lover, to the world he saw and felt surround him. Well it threw him down. These fanatic, jealous, brutal devotions made him so fastidious with every detail he could not manage their subordination. He gave them all his skill, painting each with a microscopic precision that shattered the unity of his canvas and created there a kind of grossly luminous horror. Obedient to the perverse demands of his creative demon, he could not paint a crowd it did not fall into an anarchy of faces (Ensor’s
Christ Entering Brussels
comes to mind)—(no, it’s called
The Entry of Christ Into Brussels
), while these immediately became round porous noses and converging eyes—all, mind you, at the behest
of some arbitrary spatial symbol, mathematically shaped and mystically significant (like the logarithmic spiral or a chessboard, the lines of someone else’s poem, and so on). Yet it is nearly true that in his work each brush stroke speaks. Well they make a godly clamor (one should confess the virtue that gives suck to every vice), but the din, I must admit, despite my love for dear Peg Crandall, who may love him still (since it was he who first put paint-stained fingers to her breasts and chewed her ear), is awful, simply awful. The foreground of that scene I mentioned, although torn by the vandals and never repaired, is marvelously rendered, and so subtle was Lycoming’s genius that in its lower corner, by the signature which grime by now has nearly covered, he has broken off some blades of grass and flattened others to suggest that someone was standing there a moment ago, perhaps the artist himself, gazing across the Harris Creek to the overgrown stones of the Lister home and toward the vaguely risen dream peak in the distance.

W.S.L. You know what he asked her? To pose. What else? To pose. Oh to be a painter so to ask to pose. To pose. A request a lady’s vanity will always find appealing. To pose. Nibbling on her shell-pink ear. My genius is stirred by your beauty my dear. The snake. Not nude, of course, just naked to the waist—unclothed, that is to say, undraped. So she did, she posed—despite the best upbringing, despite her years of Sunday school, despite her love of fancy clothing, her doting father, and several carnal shocks that fell together in her fifth year, none of which she could remember, though one of them had to do with Willard Scott as a little bratty boy in a Sunday tie and collar, black short pants, and urgently opened fly; despite the fact her painter had a skinny penis and a stony cod, which she could hardly have known at the time and seemed never to mind; in spite of her mother, who slept in her corset, or her marriage vows, or the laws of the state, the commands of God, or the rules of her rutty artist’s maidenly
college; greedily, without listening for the sound of steps on the stairs or the stealthy creak of a peeper, with laughter and with solemn lewd intent, debonair as a true gymnosophist, and, as she fancied ladies often were in Aristophanes, with a smudge of ferrous green an inch below her rosier nipple. ’Pon my honor. By my faith. And I understand that in the painting, though I’ve never seen it, he put the metal smudge (tenderly, with the nostalgic tip of his finger) precisely where it belonged. Poor Peg. What an unending cliché her life has been. And so badly painted. It was a sweet joke they had to nibble on between them. Of course she couldn’t bear to wash it off, weeping when it flaked away. Prophetically. In the course of the fateful stars. My word as a disciple of Jesus.

To be looked at like that. Not the way the doctor did when he wasn’t playing doctor. But the way the painter did whose soul admired what his loins desired. What an aureole! What an inner-thigh line! Belly button to be gently pressed. Is anyone at home? To be looked at as if it were the sun, and her blood came up under her skin like a blush a burn where the eyes gazed, where desire grazed. But the result clearly compromised her ’cause it wasn’t art, it represented Lycoming’s adoration OK his lust.

So she hid the painting prudently beneath her bed until her husband’s hand uncovered it, fumbling for a slipper she had purchased Wednesday for the celebration of his fifty years.
N.B.
The husband and the wife made love above the oily canvas. Why not? Husband and wife. Calculate how often. Squirmed and giggled. Full orchestra for the beautiful ballad: Made Love Above the Canvas. Heedle deedle deedle. Or a cabaletta for tenor and tambourine. Ladies and gentlemen: introducing Philip and Phyllis, that inimitable pair of gymnasts, who will thrill you by making love on the giant swings—boom …, on the back of a galloping camel—boom, boom …, while riding a trike on the high wire—boom, boom, boom …, and as a special treat, never
before attempted outside the steppes of Asia, in midair above a trampoline—boom … boom, boom, boom. False nose straight? Want to borrow mine? It’s aquiline. Have a pink tasseled hat and a horn. Now, I hate to keep harping on this, but don’t forget the significance of the slippers. Shall we play a few more games? Tromp about in the rosin box, it’s slippery on the wire. Or bundle up with camera. Clothing disarrayed? Uncover to discover: your wife’s image as a lover’s longing. How many rents in Aphrodite’s tents? Lucky guesser gets a buss upon his plucky kisser. Ah, what a rouser! Well, sheepishly he’d worn them to please her. They looked foolish and bedraggled, flopping on his feet—the sort of man he was. O wise and worldly gods, what appropriate conjunctions! But a silly sort of horns. Now. What does he say? He says very naturally what is this? what? eh? um? eh? In short, nothing. He has difficulty sliding it from under. Like the bare leg of a lover. Discovered. He tugs and hauls while Peg what? claws at her rump where she’s been bitten by a spider. Unattractive patch that’s not in the painting. Well, insects have no nerves. Of course it puts him in a rage. Regular. Towering. Flames flash from his steeple. His nightshirt’s ashake. There follow a number of inner ticulations. So he destroys it, the iconoclast. He smashes it, rends it. Mem. must be a convenient size, consider the set. Next gesture: he takes it up in his hands and brings it down on the left post of the bed with all his excavator’s strength. The canvas does not yield, though the knurl strikes her belly. Poor old Bill. It was beautifully stretched and sized. It’s a problem for properties. Alarm them early. The painting springs from the post—look at those aureoles!—tears itself from his hands—the light down on her arms, what a likeness!—falls, strikes his unslippered foot, skids away, shoving the rug into waves, scratching the floor—tessellated too, what workmanship!—and so on. He nearly strangles her for that scratch, of course. Hopping, he takes her by the creamy throat.
O revengeful Italy
. But his foot pains him greatly and he sits on the edge of the bed to massage it. Rough skin. Needs a regular application of Bag Balm. In any case he had his thumbs misplaced. How did Othello do it? She kneels now, mewing, to rub his footie too.
Ah, soft France
. Later he is grateful for the slippers since he cannot walk around in shoes with such a knot in his toe. Peg coughs to make him feel he’s been dangerous. She may be a whore, he thinks in the freshest way he can, but at least she’s clean. No doubt in his mind about that, for some reason. Thereafter, his manhood challenged, he thinks of her as cheap enough to purchase wealthy pleasures, and makes love to her with gusto and invention. Well, for him—invention.
Dark and holy Russia
. Of which the upshot is—poor Lycoming’s acold. Cuckolded by the man he made a cuckold. Of. Not long after this scene whose shameful elements with zest we have provided, the husband was killed in a sewer by a slide of mud. For his sins against art.
O implacable Spain
.

Can you bear this peep show any longer? How’s this for a sneak: the painter pursuing the lady, who by now is naked, through the studio with a messy palette, mainly cobalt blue, for sky, and the brush from the hair of a camel. I’ll have a sweeter canvas soon, he cries, she giggling. There are jokes about Indians and sailors and circus shows. Also under canvas. And then he has her. Dirty-fingered artist. Chester the White.

Why should I complain? Our artist merely requested Peg to pose naked to the waist, and doubtless he said something about painting the delicate slope of her back or capturing the soft shadows which fell from her shoulder blades or rendering the swanlike tube of her throat. These were all lies, of course, lies; they were not meant to be believed; except the poor girl did think she had a delicate slope and that there were shadows flowing softly down her back and that her neck was tall and nobly bent, feathery smooth and white. A painter would surely
want to paint such things as these if he could stand to his easel to do it and wasn’t weak in the knees with lust. There must have been some excitement for her, too, in being looked at by another man, a painter, who, at least while he painted (as we’ve already reported), really examined his woman, consequently had to see the fine things she saw, had to touch them anyway with the soft tips of his eyes. Ah married, yet a maiden! Peg, your husband saw no further than his prick—it, elderly—and when that instrument was dangling, he was nearly blind; but a painter, even a miserable daub like Lycoming, sees too far, too dangerously far, you dare not leave an opening, he’ll enter your eyes, or your mouth and ears—any of the seven portals of the head—and for god’s sake tighten up your thighs. That carriageway is easy. The painter, my dear, the painter perceives as deeply as his seed. There he sends his eyes, curled like trichinae in the muscles of a pig. But never mind. It was thus, her back turned modestly, he painted her. Well, it was a fine painting, of course, though it would have been finer if the draperies, more in the classical manner, had fallen lower on the hips … to here, you see, creating a beautiful arabesque. Thank god that sort of flaw a little overpainting will correct. It’s a wonderful medium—oil. So now he wishes to treat the splendid bones of her behind. And hasn’t she, though! Her husband, bless his sewer-slid-on soul, not once hefted her there, hardly her breasts either, and his experiments at the very last were not of that kind. If you would turn please, a little, to the light …