A Charmed Life, page 6
Miles began to pace up and down. His present wife’s attitude annoyed him—she was too conventional in her responses. He stopped by the liquor tray and poured himself a fresh drink. He was thinking of Martha. He had always had a weakness for intelligent women, though he knew them to be bad for him, like drink or certain kinds of food. They disagreed with him, in both senses of the word. Now that he was older, he knew enough to leave them alone. He had organized his life sensibly, and the proof was that he was writing again, after fifteen years. But he had bouts of dissatisfaction, when he resented the choice that had been made for him. That was how he felt about it on his glum days, as if an authority had chosen for him, though the authority had been no other than Miles Murphy: he had prescribed for himself, as his own therapist, studying his character structure and deducing from it the qualities he required in a mate. He had given a woman friend his specifications—a girl approaching middle life but not too old for childbearing, not previously married, unencumbered by family, possessing an independent income and an open mind, with a sense of her own dignity, submissive, pleasant-spoken, and moderately pleasing to the eye. And his friend had produced Helen the first crack out of the box.
Helen was all woman, and he was damn lucky to have got her. They did not make them like her any more. Her father was a Greek wholesaler in Chicago, with a big import trade; Helen had stayed home to nurse her mother when the old man died and the older brother married. She had helped run the family business for a time, done her bit for war relief, and studied ceramics at the Art Institute. The family was cultivated; she had an uncle who was a Metropolitan. When the old lady passed on, finally, she was practically alone in the world, except for a raft of suitors—Penelope waiting for Odysseus. And she had had the patience to hold out till crafty old Odysseus came. She was not stupid, though stupid people thought so, but she had learned how to efface herself, in the European way. For the first time in his life (his mother had never favored him), he discovered that he came first. She could take his abrupt dictation and decipher his manuscript notes and hold the dinner till midnight if he did not feel like eating. She could keep the child quiet in the morning when he had been sleeping a binge off. When they read Aeschylus together in the evenings, as they were doing this fall, she looked up the hard words in the dictionary and put them down on a list for him. She kept the household accounts and never bothered him about money. If he felt like talking, she listened and asked intelligent questions. If he was nervous and morose, she left him alone. She never turned on the waterworks, like Martha; a little bird must have told her that he could not stand women’s tears.
She did not stimulate him—that was her only drawback. He did not notice this, he found, unless he had been drinking. Then, in a disgruntled frame of mind, after he had sent her off to bed, he would open the desk drawer, stare at Martha’s little gloves, and set himself to recalling her clever remarks. Martha always hated this habit of his—the desk drawer, she said, and everything it contained of him. She hated his remembering things she said. “You turn everything into the past,” she would tell him sharply. And she also used to complain that he remembered her worst mots, accidentally-on-purpose. “That isn’t funny,” she used to say coldly, when he was chuckling over one of her satirical strokes. “Please, Miles, don’t quote me.” It was all part of her general pattern of rejection and self-hatred. She could not stand to hear anything said twice. One habitual phrase of his used to drive her crazy: “I’m inordinately fond of pickles,” “I’m inordinately fond of potatoes.” “You’re inordinately fond of saying that!” she had cried out once. “I know you like potatoes. Don’t dwell on it.” Today, whenever he used the expression, it tickled him to think of Martha.
She was awfully good on people. He had to hand it to her, even when he was the target. And every time he saw the Coes, nowadays, he remembered the night when everybody was saying that Warren was too intellectual in his approach to painting and Martha had retorted that he was just as intellectual as Barrett, who kept asking “Why?” all day long. That had hit Warren off to a T, though Miles had not appreciated it at the time. He was not as noticing as Martha; she was very feminine that way. He used to tell people, confidently, that Warren had a genuine epistemological bent. He groaned, now, to think of what he had started when he had put him onto Whitehead and Russell and Sullivan.
This, he felt awesomely sure, was a deed he would have to answer for on Judgment Day. He had not dreamed, when he first undertook to supervise Warren’s reading, that Warren was utterly innocent of the nature of an abstract concept: he took everything he read with a happy literalness and supposed that modern science had fixed it so that two and two equaled five. He had pounced on that notion in Dostoevski, and came bearing it to Miles like a retriever, a few years back. “Haven’t the scientists proved that?” he had asked, with startled eyes, when Miles tried to unscramble him. The poor fellow could not get the idea of proof out of his noodle. Science and philosophy had deranged his common sense. “How do you know that?” he kept challenging when you let drop the most casual observation. And since he could not understand the only two fields in which proof was possible—logic and mathematics—he had fallen back, despondently, on the notion that everything was false. He had even, for a time, lost faith in his painting. His work, he had discovered, was a lie, just as big a lie, he said bitterly, as Rembrandt or Titian, who at least thought the world they were painting was real. The fact that you could never see time—the fourth dimension—had hit him amidships halfway through a volume of Kierkegaard; he realized he was a faker and illusionist and probably ought to be put in jail. This revelation had made him sick; Jane vouched for it. He lay in their outsize bed, shivering, under the electric blanket, for nearly three weeks, baffling the doctor and the Freudian analyst, who was piped in daily from New York.
And then, deo gratias, he had recovered. He had telephoned Miles to tell him the glad tidings. He had been cured, he confided, by relativity—the hair of the dog that bit him, as Miles remarked aside. Under the electric blanket, he had thought about outer space and reasoned that a lie could be true there, just the way parallel lines could meet. Miles had not had the heart to gainsay him. What was the use of explaining to him that a lie existed only in discourse? The little fellow, he saw, had fallen in love with the concept of outer space. He visualized it as a sort of scientific heaven in which all the false appearances of this earth were corrected by curving back on themselves and becoming their opposites. For him, in his current phase, relativity (which he identified with philosophical relativism) was a new and blissful absolute, the absolute topsy turvy, like a kid’s picture of China. If everything was relative, as he now felt assured, then his painting might be just as true as Rembrandt; truer, perhaps? What did Miles think, he inquired eagerly, a year ago on the breakwater. Miles had shaken his head. Given Warren’s premise, he pointed out, it would not be truer—let it go at just as true as Rembrandt.
And pragmatically, Miles now admitted, the idea seemed to be working out. Warren was feeling no pain. He had come a long way since last year, he had explained to Miles during luncheon. The fear that he might have to wait till after his death for recognition no longer troubled him, he declared. It was not really a postponement, if you thought of time as curved. “Just a question of time, eh?” said Miles, chewing on a chicken breast, and Warren had nodded, joyously, blinking his soft eyes like a bashful lover and wiggling his bare toes in the sand. Miles, to tell the truth, had felt a little disturbed by this new packaging of pie in the sky. And yet, like all religions, it had done something positive for the true believer; here in the studio, Miles could see that. Warren’s work, certainly, had taken a leap into freedom, or a plunge into necessity, if this portrait was typical. It had entered a domain in which you could not tell whether it was good or bad.
Which, he supposed, was in a way what Warren was aiming at.
“It’s supposed to represent an equation,” proffered Warren. “The one the atom bomb is based on. It’s Martha in a state of fission. In my next series, I’m going on to fusion—the hydrogen-bomb formula.” Miles nodded—he had begun to get the drift of the painting—but Helen had a little frown, like shirred chiffon, between her dark brows. “Would you like to see the figures?” said Warren, hopefully. “I got them from a mathematician who was staying in the Hubers’ cottage this summer.” “Oh, Warren, that’s boring,” said Jane, in a flat, comfortable tone, looking sidewise at Helen, who was sitting up, with an air of determination, on the old sofa and tightening her knotted scarf about her throat. “Isn’t your idea rather literary?” she said to Warren in an anxious voice. “Almost like illustration?” She had an air of helpfulness. “All painting is literary,” Miles corrected. “It makes a statement about the world. What we used to call the artist’s vision. The rest is wallpaper.” Helen pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes, tilting her head from one side to the other, as she strove to see the canvas from Miles’s deeper perspective. Miles nursed his chin and watched her. He repented his rudeness. Evidently, she did not like the painting, but this was a wholly natural reaction. Nobody, to Miles’s knowledge, had ever liked Warren’s painting, with the exception of Jane’s father, who, so to speak, was its onlie begetter and owned examples of every period. And people trained in the arts, like Helen, were positively upset by it. “Shall I take it away?” volunteered Warren, with a solicitous, inquiring look at Helen, as if a guest had shown uneasiness of a pet dog or cat. Miles was touched. “Leave it,” he said, shortly, raising a hand. “I want to think about it.” He flung himself onto one of the benches.
A strange temptation was assailing him. He wanted to buy the portrait. There was a stifled impresario in him; he liked to think of himself as a Renaissance tyrant-patron commanding his goldsmiths and his limners. He had a number of portfolios of drawings, chiefly of erotic subjects and strange beasts and mythical monsters; before the old house burned down he had owned a half-dozen paintings done by artist cronies from the Village bars he used to haunt. Yet all his wives, even the gentle Helen, disparaged his taste in art. He liked “magic” realism, Dali, the Gothic scenes of Max Ernst, the color of Reginald Marsh—paintings that gave him something to chew on—but his wives were always trying to educate his eye with Braque and Juan Gris and Mondrian. Ever since he had closed up his consulting-room, he had not had a free hand. Draftsmanship, a fine line, appealed to him, and despite what his wives said he felt himself to be a connoisseur of drawing. Moreover, he was a gambler—the year he had had a hit on Broadway, he had owned a piece of a race horse—and the fact that Warren Coe was a hundred-to-one shot played powerfully on his fancy. He was a little drunk and he relished it.
Staring at the painting, he gave himself up to reverie. With a certain somber irony—for he knew himself full well—he heard himself showing a visitor through his Coe collection. “Interesting little fella; lives up here all year round, in New Leeds; never had a real show or a criticism; doesn’t know himself what he’s up to; got a science bug; dominated by his wife’s family, scientists, Germans, from the Rhineland. Extraordinary draftsman, though; used to be a drawing teacher. Not a primitive; an isolate. Got a spot of Blake in him. I was the first to discover him…. That’s my second wife, the picture that got me started—my last Duchess, you might say, if you still remember your Browning. ‘There’s my last Duchess hanging on the wall, looking as if she were alive.’” A short chuckle broke from Miles. The humor of the purchase nudged him in the ribs, sardonically. Martha, he remembered, used to say that he would like her if she were stuffed and mounted, like a dead bird.
“Helen didn’t care for it at first,” he went on in a more serious vein to his fancied guest. “She’s got more taste than I have. But people of taste are at a disadvantage when it comes to a long shot like Coe. It’s what I like to call the fallacy of the trained eye. Art historians pretend that it’s the philistines that scoff at the new men. Pardon me if I say that’s horse shit. The philistines aren’t interested in art unless it’s called to their attention as something they ought to get sore about. It’s the boys and girls with the trained eyes that come to smile at the Armory show and the Salon of the Refusés—the ones who know better than the painter. Who laughed at Whistler? Ruskin. Who laughed at Socrates? Aristophanes. Who laughed at Racine? Molière.”
A hard green light glittered in Miles’s eye. His narrow lips compressed like scar tissue. He had a sense of astuteness, cunning, and clarity. Every analogue in the history of culture told him that Warren Coe was hot. Coe was an idiot, but most of the masters were simpletons, like Monet, or had a screw loose somewhere. Yeats’s spiritualism was just as balmy as any of Warren’s notions; the plan of Ulysses was nuts and academic as hell; pointillism, as a theory, was drivel. Your typical genius, of today, was some modest little goof, like Warren, plugging away in solitude at a mad scheme or invention that no reasonable person would give a nickel for: Duchamp, the early Schonberg, Ives, that fellow who was a doctor in New Jersey. The more, in fact, Miles pondered the case, the more unaccountable it seemed to him that Warren had not been discovered already. And this, all at once, gave Miles pause; a morose suspicion overtook him. Somebody, he felt, was trying to deceive him; the wool was being pulled over his eyes. Some unidentified force was trying to maneuver him into buying a painting that nobody else would have as a gift. Or was it the other way round? Was a hidden force trying to dissuade him from answering the knock of opportunity? He heard his wife and the Coes talking and shot a mistrustful look in their direction. It seemed to him that they might be ignoring him for some purpose. All his ideas began to seesaw; he could not tell which side of the inward debate he was on. More and more, in recent months, he had found it difficult to think in his customary rapid, purposeful style. The more clear his ideas became, the less he could choose between them; it was as if he had floated into Warren’s relativity and hung, confused, over vast profundities.
“How much?” he said suddenly, in a thickened voice, jabbing a thumb at the portrait. The others turned and stared. Warren’s soft, driftwood-colored hair seemed to rise slowly on his scalp. They had not understood him, evidently. “Much?” Miles repeated, with an effort, pointing to the picture again. The liquor had half-paralyzed his tongue but he did not allow this to deter him, for he understood that art-collecting was conducted in terse signs and monosyllables. “You mean the price?” asked Jane. Miles nodded, heavily. They all sat there, goggling. “Why, gee, Miles, I don’t know,” said Warren mildly. “It’s ten years since I’ve put a picture up for sale. Mr. Carl—Jane’s father—is the only regular Coe buyer. And that’s in the family….” He went bubbling on, but Miles interrupted him. “Set a price,” he said. “You don’t mean you’re thinking of buying it?” cried Jane. “Why, Miles, where would you put it?” murmured Helen. “In the gymnasium,” retorted Miles. Last year, they had bought an old windmill and turned it into a gymnasium for Miles to work out in; up above, he had a study, where he wrote.
Roses bloomed in Warren’s fading cheeks; boyish tears stood in his eyes. “Golly,” he said. “Golly, Miles,” and he came over and shook Miles’s hand. “I don’t know what to say,” he added, staring bashfully up at the portrait. Jane intervened, with a sharp glance at Helen. “Why, Miles,” she cried, “you don’t want to buy a picture of Martha! People would think you were crazy.” Miles’s tongue loosened. “They wouldn’t know it was Martha,” he said playfully, with a fraternal wink at Warren. Jane was aghast. “I shouldn’t think Helen …” she began, but her voice faded away, uncertainly, as Helen, beside her, merely smiled and picked up the baby. “Why, you’d get awfully tired of it,” Jane resumed. “I mean I would, if it were my ex-spouse. I wouldn’t want Warren around to haunt me if I were happily married to another man. Why don’t you take something else? Get Warren to do a portrait of Helen and the baby.”
Miles thought he saw what Jane was up to: she was trying to obstruct the sale. Like so many of the New Leeds women, she wanted to keep her man in a state of financial dependence. Painting Helen and the baby, as Jane very well knew, was out of the question. Helen was far too busy, as a wife and mother, to give time to the sittings. “Helen has her hands full,” he said sharply, with a meaningful look about the studio, “taking care of her house and family.” He set his drink down, unfinished, and pulled himself to his feet. “Name a price,” he said to Warren. Warren looked at his wife. “You’d better think it over, Miles,” he said, smiling a manful smile. “Are you ready to go, dearest?” asked Helen, getting up. They were all trying to obstruct him; they thought he was in his cups.
