Carry the One (23 page)

She stood at the window looking down at the dawn-lit cobblestone streets. At first glance it seemed as though a belated autumn had blown through; the pavement was covered in what appeared to be pink leaves. These, she then saw, were the remains of spent firecrackers. This was her third winter in Amsterdam. She had been right in her initial assessment; the city’s mild melancholy matched her own. Something about the mist and damp, the dark water of the canals. And in these months with so little light, there was the pleasure of walking along the water at night, watching the life of the city through the uncurtained windows of its canal houses.

“Will you come to the party Friday for Jan Doorn?” Charlotte asked, still half-asleep. Doorn was a photographer from The Hague. His work was impressive.

“I’ll think about it.” Alice came back to the bed in her coat and knit cap, to say goodbye.

“Which means no,” Charlotte said.

“But I will see you soon, yes?” Alice said. She avoided the art scene. Arriving with possibly too much fanfare, her last sequence of paintings—portraits of hookers she had connected with through Nick—was savaged by the critics. She was badly stung. She had grown so accustomed to success that she forgot to keep a guard up against failure. Maybe the paintings were simply not very good. Maybe there was no way to paint prostitutes that wasn’t sentimental, like sad-eyed clowns. Whatever, she couldn’t sort anything out back there, couldn’t hear herself. In this foreign city she could hide in a corner and lick
her wounds and think about painting in a solitary way without background noise and, she hoped, make new, better paintings.

Elements of her muted, smallish existence were purchased—the streamlined, lubricated daily life of someone modestly wealthy. She had a woman who came twice a week to shop and clean and do laundry. She had an assistant in the studio. This help allowed her to spend much of her day working. Nights she read, or entertained friends. She took Dutch lessons Tuesdays and Fridays. Two mornings a week she taught at an immigration center—kids mostly, but sometimes also their mothers. They painted the stories that had brought them here, and Alice tried to help.

She biked the few streets over from Charlotte’s, then three bridges up, to her own apartment, the top two floors of an eighteenth-century row house on the Singel, overlooking the bridge at Tornsteeg. This morning, halfway there, she was forced to stop and button her jacket. The cold in Amsterdam was nothing so fierce as the winters in Chicago, but it was impressive in its own way—a damp that settled in the bones, to be drawn out with a steaming tub at the end of the day.

Sunlight drifted down through the high windows. She was an orderly studio keeper. She had a drawered cabinet for paints. On top were two coffee cans stuffed with brushes, a row of bottles—medium, linseed oil, stand oil, assorted glazes, Turpenoid for cleaning brushes. In front of this paraphernalia, she taped down the thick pane of window glass that was her palette. She mixed her colors. Then pulled a high stool about ten feet back from the canvas, sat and plotted her course.

Hours had passed by the time she came up for air. She was hungry and had to pee. Painting was a world without clocks. Once she was out of the bathroom, and had made herself a cheese sandwich, she checked her message machine. Nick, asking for money. For something very important, an investment opportunity, top secret at the moment.

“So I’m going to need you to wire twenty-seven hundred thirty-two dollars and seventeen cents—”

Alone in her kitchen four thousand miles away, Alice burst out laughing at this absurdly exact amount he had concocted. She replayed the message. She missed him. He would like it here so much, although not in a savory way. Missing Carmen was more complicated. When her sister had come up from Rome in the summer, off-shooting from a business trip with Rob, Alice cried herself bleary after putting her on the train at Centraal Station. Still, she was happy to have a time-out of no one bullying her to get her teeth cleaned, or work for this or that progressive candidate, or read some actual literature instead of true-crime stories.

It wasn’t quite homesickness that afflicted Alice, more a nettling sensation that life back home wasn’t on
PAUSE
while she was over here. Nick was going down the tubes again and it was unfair to dump him on Carmen. Also, Horace had the beginnings of Alzheimer’s and Loretta was overwhelmed creating a comprehensible environment for him. Drawers with signs so he could find
SPOON
or
TOWEL
. Clothes set out for him in a particular order. Long walks in the early evening, when his agitation peaked.

Alice knew she probably shouldn’t linger in this idyll much longer.

She heard the door to the street open downstairs, then a good deal of bang and clatter up the staircase.

“I got everything on the list yesterday, except they were out of Naples Yellow.” This was Pim, her assistant. He dragged a little whip of wind in with him on the fabric of his jacket. He had ferried across town on his bike several tubes of paint, along with stretchers and a roll of canvas. He was incredibly agile, born on a bicycle like most Amsterdamers. Unlike Alice, who, when she first arrived, pretty much fell her way across the city, frightening pedestrians, bringing out Good Samaritans to pick her up and help her collect herself. She went around with chronically bandaged knees and elbows, an ankle that stayed deep
purple for weeks. She was better now, hadn’t fallen in some time. Still, she left the tricky or cumbersome supply runs to Pim.

“It’s okay,” she told him, about the Naples Yellow. “I can mix some myself. I’m just being a lazy butt. I feel guilty about you even coming by today, on a holiday.”

He wasn’t really listening to any of this. He wanted to see what she had done this afternoon.

“This part is great,” he said, crouching to see details of the final Casey Redman painting. These canvases had been a large part of her work through the time she had lived here.

In one, a gallon of milk rests on the hood of a pickup in the parking lot of a convenience mart; next to it Casey in her twenties leans back against a fender as she looks at the night sky. In another, Casey is lying in a field with somebody not her husband. Even though a husband isn’t present on the canvas, Alice somehow understood that he exists. In all the paintings, the girl is wearing the denim cutoffs and madras plaid shirt from the night she died. This last of the series had been the hardest painting to get right. Its setting is indeterminately tropical. Casey is sitting on wide, mossed-over stone steps. Behind her is a large wood door. Although it is inset with glass, what is inside is not visible, only the reflection of her back, the pale greens and pinks of her shirt darkened in the glass to crimson and viridian. It is night. Loose greenery and languid flowers play in the wind. Alice had to paint an exact tempo into them to make the painting accurate. The other element Alice had to imply with subtleties of gesture and expression was that Casey is waiting for someone. She is also holding something small and obscured at her ear, a small dark seashell maybe. Alice wasn’t sure. She was only taking dictation.

Pim was so tall and thin that when he crouched or sat, he collapsed in on himself, like an ironing board.

“I was just fooling around here,” she tried to show him. “I was trying to ruffle these ferns off to the side. I’m not sure I quite have it yet, though, the motion I’m looking for.”

“No, this is good painting here, I think.”

“I’m nearly finished. Verwey will see me next week. It’s time.” Alice was making a small pilgrimage to Haarlem, to see Kees Verwey, taking him up on his offer, now years back. But he was still alive and still painting and, remarkably, when she returned to Amsterdam, he remembered her. She had visited him a few times, to look at the work he had in progress. He reluctantly mentored her by showing her how he creates an effect (the eyes in his portraits, for instance, which are small starburst miracles), how he pulls back from representation into gesture. He talked to her about ways of folding dark into light.

This would be the first time she had brought her work to him. Fourteen canvases, each of them 36” x 36” square to approximate the boxiness of snapshots. These were all the Casey Redman paintings. She understood this was all there would be.

She had to bring the paintings to him. He was very old now, and did not leave his home much anymore. Although he knew she was coming today, he could very well not receive her once she arrived. He was still very temperamental.

When she and Pim were at the door of his house on the Spaarne, they rang the bell. Nothing happened. She didn’t want to ring again so they continued waiting, shuffling from foot to foot in the damp cold. After maybe ten minutes, the door opened and it was Verwey, in his suit of course, looking a little disoriented, and not entirely happy to see them.

“Go away,” he said, waving his hands as though he was trying to shoo out a bird that had come down the chimney. “I am disturbed by this ringing and ringing.”

“I only rang once,” Alice said. “I would never ring twice.”

“Yes yes, well come in then if you must,” he said, as though they’d been dragging their feet.

After they’d brought the canvases in, and Pim had gone back out to the rental van to listen to a tape of what he said was “very new music,
almost not music,” Alice set out the paintings. At her own studio, she liked to show work, even just for herself, to its best advantage. She had a long wall she had painted a perfect green—the color of green tea ice cream. This was her curing wall, for nearly finished work, to see what else it might need. Verwey’s studio was of an altogether other sort, a squalor of props that had itself been the subject of many of his paintings. He didn’t really need to go outside these walls. The inside of his head, she figured, must be filled with explosions of light and color. Like Nick’s nebulae.

She made room for her work amid this light chaos, tilting her paintings against chairs, amid unfinished lunches, vases of dead flowers, aged newspapers, rolled-up rugs. She could sense him growing impatient behind her.

“Don’t bother with this, I will do it.”

She tried to tell him it was still tacky but he waved her away, taking the last canvas from her hand. It took him maybe an hour, standing in front of each in turn, his hands clasped behind his back. When he was done, he settled slowly into an armchair across from her.

“The girl, she is not alive.”

“Right. I never knew her alive. There was an accident. It was night. The car hit her with almost no sound. The first I saw her, she was—I think—already dead. When I see her now, she’s suspended in one or another piece of time we stole from her. I can’t paint her to life. I tried a couple of times early on, but it read false.”

At first she worried he was about to say something very bad, and was working up to this. Then she thought he might be slipping into a nap. Finally he said, turning away from her, as though speaking to someone across the room, “These are very good paintings. They are, perhaps, something new.”

“Thank you. But what do I do with them? She’d be twenty-five now. What I think is she doesn’t need me painting her anymore.”

“But you should show them, of course. They would almost certainly bring your reputation back.”

Alice flushed with humiliation. He was clearly aware of the critical beating she took on her last show.

“I think they might be private paintings,” she said.

“What, you think maybe these were a conversation you were having with the girl? You were what—you were looking for her
vergiffenis
?”

Forgiveness. Alice pauses to think. “Maybe. Something.”

“But you are honoring her with these, giving her a kind of life. What if these are the best paintings you will ever make?”

“Then maybe not showing them is the terms of my atonement.”

Verwey looked at her with an expression that seemed to signal impatience. Of course, it could just be indigestion. He was a difficult person to read.

“I think you brought these to me to tell yourself what you need to do with them.” He put his feet on the floor so forcefully it was nearly stamping. He stood in creaking stages, then began making little sweeping gestures. “Now go away, please. I am tired of thinking about this work of yours and these old troubles of your life.”

One of the great things about him was that he never let Alice swoon into hero worship.

“So?” Pim asked her when she got back into the van.

“Just help me rack them back in here,” Alice said. “I’ll drop you at your place on my way home. I can take care of unloading them. I’ll take the van back in the morning.”

She waited until early evening and headed out. It took her a little while, but she eventually found a secluded spot in a picnic area along the A6 heading northwest out of the city, toward Lelystad. With twigs and fallen branches doused with Turpenoid, she made a good fire in a trash barrel. She pulled each of the canvases out of the van, leaning them against the bench of the picnic table, then hiked herself up onto the tabletop and watched the flames snap and surge against the night sky. She waited for the courage of destruction, but it never came. She
would never show these paintings, especially now that she was fairly certain they would buy back her reputation. But neither had she the heart to burn them. Alice knew the girl had been telling her something with the paintings, but she still didn’t know what. All she knew was the paintings were something very good she had made, and destroying them pulled against everything she believed about the intrinsic value of art no matter what its subject. She would store the canvases, over here where no one would find them. This was the best she could do.

Which left her in the position of the timid high diver who, unable to make a dramatic surrender, now had to creep backward down the rungs of the ladder. A flutter of sorrow and shame rushed through her. Along with a crazy sort of love for someone she never met. She searched for the girl amid the blue slips of flame but couldn’t find her, waited for something last-minute in the nature of guidance but there was nothing. Finally the blaze shrunk down inside the metal container, everything settled back to the ordinary, and it was just a cold night on a northern highway.