Orchard (8 page)

14

Harriet Weaver was not allowed to enter her husband’s studio unless he brought her there, and that he was likely to do only when he had new work he needed her help with. Harriet had learned over the years that when he showed her a painting it meant it wasn’t finished, not quite, and it would not leave the studio until Weaver was certain he could do nothing to make it better. A completed work he might bring to the house before shipping it out, but by then he was generally indifferent to her opinion.

Harriet, however, had reached the point where she no longer trusted her ability to see a painting for the first time and instantly offer an assessment, at least one that might truly aid her husband and not enrage or disappoint him. That was why for years now she had been sneaking into the studio, not only so she could prepare her critical response but also so she might see into the life he walled off from her. She always waited until she could be absolutely certain he would not return for hours or perhaps even days—a business trip (or so Ned termed it) to Chicago usually, but also to London, Paris, New York, Santa Fe, Minneapolis. Ned enjoyed attending any new exhibition of his work, if for no other reason than to needle the critics and charm the patrons, and he used the same rough-edged, plainspoken, prickly persona for both purposes.

On this sunny afternoon in late September, Harriet decided to visit the studio as soon as her husband climbed into the station wagon to drive into Fox Harbor. She knew she had at least two hours. At the end of a workday, Ned liked to drink, and he preferred to do his drinking in the company of other men, talking about baseball or fishing, mocking the tourists, complaining about the weather. He had a few favorite taverns, though Harriet doubted it was known in any of them that Ned Weaver was an artist of international reputation. At the Lakeside Tavern they probably thought that the short man standing at the end of the bar drinking gin was a housepainter or a carpenter, and that suited Ned just fine.

Ned’s studio was forty yards from the main house, up a slope lined with lilac and spirea bushes, their white and lavender petals in spring strewing the artist’s stony path as he walked to his work. The studio itself, a century-old, rough-hewn, chinked log cabin, was snugged up against a steep hill overhung by an apple orchard.

The cabin, built by one of the county’s first white settlers, was the only building on the property when Ned and Harriet bought it, and for two summers that was where they lived while the main house was being built. Then they sold their town house in Chicago and moved to Wisconsin to live year-round. Harriet had a sentimental impulse that made her want to say she and her family were never happier than when they lived in the cabin’s small rooms, but she knew it wasn’t true. A hundred years of dust clung to the splinters of the open beams and unfinished timbers. Insects found their way in through every open crevice. The plumbing and cookstove were primitive, and the stone fireplace did not draw properly. The girls lamented the lack of privacy in the cabin, and they liked even less that they had to leave for hours if Ned decided to work indoors. They were all happier when the big house was ready for them, though in that brief period when they lived in the cabin’s cramped quarters, both Ned’s life and work were open to Harriet in a way they had not been before or since.

Ned converted the cabin to a studio. He knocked down an interior wall. He increased the size and number of the windows. He put a padlock on the door. After Harriet found the key, hidden in a mustache cup that belonged to Ned’s father, she still waited almost a year before going into the studio. Even then, she might have continued to obey his command to stay out if she had not been certain that Ned took to England with him the woman who wrote the catalog for his show at the Sand Gallery in St. Louis.

Now Harriet stepped inside, feeling as always a mixture of both fear and anticipation. She never knew what she might find. Last year she walked in and gasped, sure she had stepped into a booby trap. A rifle, its barrel pointing at the door, lay on a table. But there were no trip wires attached to the trigger; the rifle was simply another of Ned’s props. Six months later it appeared in a painting. She could as easily discover that Ned had begun an exciting new phase—the watercolor series of weather over the lake, for example, each painting representing the storm of a different season. Or she might happen upon the evidence that Ned had found a new model, as when Harriet saw the painting of a familiar-looking woman seated naked on Ned’s footlocker. Harriet finally placed her as Dr. Van Voort’s nurse. Ned had cut his ankle scrambling around the rocks below the Egg Island lighthouse, and his leg became infected, necessitating frequent visits to Dr. Van Voort’s office. Obviously those trips had also provided Ned the opportunity to persuade the dark-haired nurse to pose, not that women usually needed much persuading. Either they knew of his stature as an artist or they succumbed to his charm, which he knew how to wield almost as well as a drawing pencil. Harriet had long ago reconciled herself to the fact that when Ned’s models were females and attractive, the chances were excellent that he fucked them. How did she know this? She knew her husband, and how his art—the act of making it rather than the made object—stimulated him almost beyond release. She remembered well the demonstration he had once given. He picked up a red sable brush, spread its hairs, then wet them between his lips so they came together in a stiletto point. He held up his forearm, and while she and others watched, he somehow made the hairs on his arm stand up, though there was no chill in the room. “See,” Ned said to those assembled around the Weavers’ dining room table—Harriet, the novelist Jake Bram and his wife, Caroline, along with the writer from
Art and Artists
there to do the article on Ned—“that’s what painting does to me. It’s as if my whole body is trying to turn into a brush, and if I could figure out a way to paint with
these
hairs, I’d do it.” The entire episode (none of which made it into the printed article unless one counted the sentence “Weaver brings his entire being to every work”) seemed to Harriet akin to a parlor trick, but it expressed, no matter how crudely, a truth about Ned and his attitude toward his art.

She also knew, from those long-ago years of posing for him herself, of how in Ned the wires connecting art and sex were hopelessly crossed. In her memory, it seemed as if most sessions ended with Ned saying, “That’s it. You can relax. We’re done for the day,” followed by the sound of his belt unbuckling. Some days she had been posing for only minutes before Ned made his way out from behind the easel.

But it wasn’t only Harriet’s insight into Ned’s artistic soul that provided her with proof of his infidelity. She needn’t be so lofty. Ned seldom cleaned the studio, and on more than one occasion she found his discarded condoms under the iron cot next to the window. She had long since given up trying to gather evidence to convict her husband of cheating on her. She had never made use of what she already found—why would she wish to gather more? No, on that day, it was art she was looking for, not adultery.

She stepped carefully through the usual detritus of the studio—the coffee cans filled with brushes, the piles of rags, the empty paint tubes, the palettes so clotted with paint they were no longer usable, the paper balled up and tossed aside, the ashtrays brimming with cigarette butts, the empty coffee cups and Coca-Cola bottles. If Ned were to die, Harriet would immediately run to this place, where his presence was so strong it felt as if it could ward off death. Then, when it seemed at last as though his spirit had left even the studio, when she could walk through these rooms without feeling she might at any moment hear his voice—his basso profundo voice demanding to know what the hell she was doing in here—she would leave the building and perhaps Door County forever.

Now, however, the easel held new work, and Harriet made her way toward it as surely as if it were lit by a spotlight and hanging in a gallery.

It was an oil, and it was larger than most of Ned’s works, maybe three feet high and four feet wide. On the canvas was a reclining nude, the young woman lying on the cot under the studio’s east window.

Ned liked to pose his subjects next to a window—to take advantage of natural light, he said—and Harriet didn’t doubt that was so, although he had another motivation as well. He liked to expose his models, as this woman’s backside was exposed to anyone in a position to look through the window, as unlikely as that might be considering how close the cabin was to the wooded hillside. Nevertheless . . .

Years ago, the Weavers lived briefly in Manhattan while Ned taught at the New York School of Art, his only brush with academia, such as it was. They lived on the eighteenth floor of a Midtown apartment building, and it was there that Ned painted “Solstice,” which featured Harriet lying naked on the bed while the afternoon sun bathed her in its dying light. Harriet asked Ned to close the curtains—if she could see people in the surrounding office and apartment buildings then certainly they could see her. Ned refused. The light, he said, the city sunlight glancing off glass and stone before finding her, could not be duplicated.

Ned posed her with her head hanging over the foot of the bed staring up at the sky—and at the banks of windows where she was sure innumerable eyes were trained on her. At least they didn’t know who she was, she told herself; at least her body looked good.

“You’re blushing,” Ned said. “Perfect!” He loved the way her embarrassment pinked her pale flesh and contrasted with the sun’s efforts to leach all the color from her and the rest of the room. What he called her blush, she thought, might have been blood rushing to her head.

The next day Ned put his brushes aside early, but before he undressed to join Harriet on the bed, he drew the curtains.

“So,” she said, “people can see me, but they can’t see you.”

“That’s right,” Ned said. “They can see you, but they can’t see me.”

She knew too that this statement was not only a literal fact but also had something to do with his desire for his work to be seen while he remained invisible. What she didn’t know was whether she, as she lay revealed on that bed, counted as one of his works. She could not brood on the question for long; during those years, Ned’s sexual needs had an urgency that took her breath away and left her feeling as though she should search herself for bruises in the aftermath of love.

Back then, Harriet had both posed and offered suggestions on the painting. It had been years now since Ned had wanted to draw or paint her, but thank God he still valued her opinions. She didn’t know what she’d do if the day came when he no longer needed her on either side of the easel.

The nude woman in the new painting lay on her side, stretched out with one hand tucked under her cheek, the other hand extended off the bed. She lay as unselfconsciously exposed as a sleeper.

Ned had done something in this painting that Harriet had never seen before. The portrait was filled with his signature photographic details— the veins standing out in her long, bony feet, the scuffs of dirt on her knees as if she had recently been kneeling on the earth, the rust-colored pubic patch so sharply rendered the coils of individual hairs were visible, the tracks where childbearing had stretched her skin beyond its ability to spring back, and her breasts, her breasts, detailed down to the tiny milk slit in each nipple, painted so that—my God, how did Ned do it!—it seemed as though the viewer could know the weight and feel of each one in hand. But for all the exactitude of this woman’s interior lines, Ned had blurred her outline in places so it seemed as though she were losing herself to the world outside her body. The fingers of her outstretched arm were losing their individuation. The curve of her hip seemed to vanish in the colors of the wall behind her. Her shoulder was losing its definition of muscularity. The pillow bunched under her head was draining the ruddy color from her cheek.

Harriet had seen Ned do something like this with watercolors, but this was different. And the painting did not seem unfinished. No, Ned saw that this woman was in danger of dissolving, whether from her own sense of self or from Ned’s sight, Harriet couldn’t be sure.

She looked away from the blurred borders and returned her attention to the woman’s wide-eyed gaze. Ned had done her eyes with such care that Harriet could see the striations of the iris, the glint of light in the pupil. The woman stared straight ahead, as if she could see into the future, and nothing there promised any end to her sorrow.

Harriet stepped forward and tentatively touched a spot on the canvas that seemed to glisten. She hoped the surface would be tacky, the paint still wet. That would mean the portrait was definitely not finished; Ned might decide yet to alter her expression. And if Harriet’s finger came back dotted with ocher that would mean Ned had worked on the painting that afternoon. Harriet was sure no model had entered today—perhaps Ned was working not from life but from memory. Perhaps, as he put brush to canvas, he was thinking of no one but Harriet. God knew, Ned could have seen that look often enough in her eyes.

The paint was dry.

15

Nearly two years before, Henry, Nils Singstad, and Reuben Rosicky were fishing the early ice down on the Oxbow, a kink in the back-waters of the Grouse River, when they realized they had the wrong bait. Henry volunteered to drive back into town to pick up some wax worms, and since they had all ridden down in Reuben’s truck, it was Reuben’s truck Henry drove back up the hill.

There was fresh snow that day too; it had fallen all night, and when it finally ended, more than six inches of heavy, wet snow covered the ground. Henry had to gear down and gun it hard to make it up the steep, twisting trail. Halfway up, the narrow path veered sharply to the right, but the truck slid to the left, heading for the trunk of a massive oak. No matter how hard Henry turned the wheel, he couldn’t do anything to alter the course of what seemed the certain collision of truck and tree. Strangely, Henry did not think at all of his own safety or survival at this moment, but only about what would be his shame over wrecking Reuben’s truck.

But the next thing Henry knew, he fishtailed past the tree and slipped back on course up the hill. He had not asked for the aid of providence, yet it seemed as though nothing less than the hand of God could have kept him from crashing into that oak tree.

Similarly, Henry could think of nothing—no impediment, force, or spirit—that might have halted his feetfirst slide toward the cabin’s chinked walls, but halt he did and once again a collision that seemed fated was averted.

Nevertheless, even though his fall was stopped, Henry did not get back on his feet, not right away. He scooted forward on his backside until he was up against the cabin. If anyone had seen him stumbling, scraping, and sliding down the hill, they would certainly appear soon, so Henry stood slowly, kept his back pressed to the log wall, and listened for a window to raise or a door to slam. While he waited, Henry did inventory. He did not have to feel for the pistol; its weight in his pocket was so unfamiliar its presence unbalanced him. He patted his other pocket to make sure the box of kitchen matches was there. If no one came out in the next minute or two, Henry would proceed with his plan.

He was on the east side of the cabin, and he thought Max had said it was through an east window he had seen her. But that hill Henry came down was so steep and overgrown—could Max have looked in through a window on the north or south? Henry would simply have to peer in each one until he saw her for himself.