The Surf Guru (15 page)

An hour later, she rinses him. He regards himself in the mirror. Even wet, his hair is still several shades lighter than the artist's.

“Again,” he tells her, as orange droplets fall from his face, dotting the towel wrapped around his neck. “More. Redder.”

The gun is Dr. Gachet's own. Last week he gave it to the artist, who said he needed it to scare away crows that were plaguing him as he painted outdoors. Each afternoon since, the pastoral quiet has been disrupted by gunfire as the artist bangs away up in the fields. And just an hour ago, the dairy farmer Jomaron came pounding on the doctor's front door in a state of vexation. That lunatic is frightening my stock, he complained, and their milk now has the bitter taste of fear. The farmer was unwilling to accept that this was a sacrifice to be made in the name of art; instead he accepted thirty francs in recompense.

And now the black bore of that very gun is inches from Dr. Gachet's face. The artist holds it with two hands that tremble with rage, the barrel tracing paths across the doctor's forehead and back, across and back. Dr. Gachet looks the artist squarely in the eye, as if there is no gun between them, and asks why he is so upset.

“The Guillaumin!” the artist says. “What else?”

The canvas in question: a portrait of a bare-breasted woman lying on a bed, which Armand Guillaumin traded for twelve bottles of Elixir to steady his own erratic heart. It is a lovely work—the artist was even moved to tears upon first beholding it—but Gachet has not yet had time to take it into Paris for Père Tanguy's man to frame it.

“Sacrilege,” the artist spits. “Incredible. Nothing in this world has to tolerate more stupidity than a painting when it is regarded by fools. You are no better than the rest. You know
nothing
of art.”

“I know the most important thing of art,” Dr. Gachet answers. “And that is
work
. Stop behaving like an infant. Be a man, be an artist, and get on with your
work
.” The artist attempts a retort, but Gachet stands, interrupting him. “I have been very busy,” the doctor says, pointing a stern, steady finger into the artist's chest. “Busy with many things, not least of which is your treatment.”

“You are a fraud,” the artist seethes. “I am insane to think you can help me.”

The doctor still refuses to look at the gun but imagines the artist's finger softly pressing against the trigger, then lifting, pressing and lifting, pressing and lifting. The only thing between him and death? A few pounds of force and the indecision of a melancholic mind. He holds his ground, holds the artist's gaze.

A standoff then, for a long, humid stretch of time, until a door slaps open and Marguerite emerges from the house with the doctor's afternoon tea. Silently she sets the tea tray down on the garden table—the doctor watches the other man's eyes following her—then goes to the artist and rubs broad reassuring circles on his back. The artist lowers the gun. He tucks it into the pocket of his blue twill jacket. At a glance from her father, Marguerite returns to the house, and the men sit.

Dr. Gachet produces a vial of Elixir from his satchel and hands it across the table. Obediently, the artist drinks. He lays his head on the table. “My attacks are returning,” he says. “I see no happy future at all.”

“Then you must paint more,” the doctor says. “You are an artist. That
is
your happy future.”

Dr. Gachet lies awake that night, tormented by suspicions that the artist has begun an affair with his sweet Marguerite, his only daughter. He flips through pages of the Goncourts'
Germinie Lacerteux
, absorbing nothing. He wastes his morning pacing through the house and grumbling to himself; at noon he puts on his boots and goes looking for the artist outside. He stomps through the cemetery, along the edge of the wheat field, past Jomaron's jumpy cows. Turning south, he enters a field of giant sunflowers and walks straight through it, yanking brilliant yellow heads off their stems as he goes and stamping the flowers into the dirt. Pollen clouds the air, and he is seized by fits of sneezing—ten, eleven, even twelve at a stretch. Sweating and panting, he climbs a grassy hill overlooking the field to rest. His mouth hangs open when he looks out over his path of destruction: the trail of headless stalks has left an emerald serpentine through the field of gold. It is a stunning scene, he thinks, one that must be painted. He races back to town, nose running, lungs constricted and burning, to find the artist. An inner voice tells him that a painting of this scene might be the cure for that poor, great man. And the sooner the canvas is completed, the sooner Dr. Gachet can set up his easel, mix his paints, and create its double.

Dr. Gachet dresses the wound, which is level with the edge of the ribs, just in front of the axillary line. The heart was not hit. “The bullet is inaccessible,” he tells the artist, “but you still might be saved.”

“Then I have to do it all over again,” the artist says.

He dies the next day.

When the artist's brother arrives from Paris and kneels in prayer at the foot of the cot, Dr. Gachet takes out charcoal and paper and begins to sketch, his nerves ajangle, his hands excited. He sketches the sharp ridge of the artist's eyebrows, the sunken cheeks, the knobby chin, the thin downturned lips; sketches as the artist instructed him to, quick as lightning, sheer work and calculation, with his mind strained to the utmost, like an actor on a stage in a difficult role with a hundred things to think of at once. He sketches with sadness and regret and loss and all the anger and agony that come with gazing at the faces of people you have failed. He signs his finished sketch
P. Gachet
, adding his name to the provenance of melancholy, to the provenance of art.

He will give the sketch to the artist's brother, and in a few weeks will receive a letter from him.
I must tell you that it gave my mother immense pleasure to see the drawing you did of my dear brother
, it will read.
Several people who saw it found it admirable
. And Dr. Gachet will run out to the garden and toss the letter in the air and laugh in the purest joy and dance in circles with his arms outstretched while the chickens and ducks and rabbits and cats look on.

The artist's coffin is badly made. As the pallbearers carry it up the winding road, a foul-smelling, dark liquid drips from a crack where the green wood has curled away like a sneering lip. The liquid stains Camille Pissarro's shoes. Émile Bernard turns away, gagging.

The next day, an enraged Dr. Gachet kicks open the door to the carpenter Levert's shop. He pushes the wide-eyed man—much younger and brawnier than he—to the wall, seizes the front of his apron in a fist. “I should kill you,” he shouts. “You are a disgrace. An exceptional artist deserves exceptional craftsmanship.”

Levert, recovering from the surprise, wrenches the doctor's hand from his apron and twists the older man, clamping his neck and arms in a firm but painless hold. “I am a fine craftsman,” Levert tells him flatly. “I am also a businessman, and I was paid only enough for cheap wood.”

The doctor fights against him, his legs wheeling and battering the carpenter's shins, his shoulders straining in their sockets. Pinpoints of light in primary colors fleck his vision. He sees a hammer lying on a workbench and wishes he could reach it and bury the claw in the carpenter's skull. Soon, though, he tires, and limp with grief, he begins to wheeze and sob. His tears and mucus glaze the carpenter's bare arm.

After Levert carries him to the doorway and pushes him softly outside, Dr. Gachet turns to face the bigger man and taps his thumb against his own chest. “I promise you,” he says, his voice a corvid croak, “that
this
artist's bones will not molder in any coffin of your making.”

A month later, thick boards of the finest Provence cypress arrive at his home, and he goes to work in the salon. The plans, which he has drawn himself—designed according to his own dimensions—are spread over the tea table. When he saws, his cuts are clumsy and crooked, and they leave jags and recesses. When he hammers, the nails bend; when he tries to correct them, they bend in new directions, until he angrily pounds them down and they protrude from the wood, gnarled as olive trees. Drifts of sawdust accumulate on the antique rug. Empty Elixir bottles clutter a corner of the room. He flings scraps of ruined wood through the open door to the garden, where they skitter and thunk on the patio bricks. Each night, his children come downstairs in their nightclothes and beg him to stop.

Instead of a mirror, he uses the first portrait to guide him. It is a rare gift, he thinks, to be able to paint oneself as one has been seen most truthfully—distilled, by a great artist, down to one's very essence. With a strong and sure slap of blue, he begins his work—another Gachet in Tasso's pose, at once homage, memoir, collaboration. His mind whirls and he paints, artist and subject in the purest senses.

Changes: softer sky, a less-jagged blue rain. Remove the Goncourt brothers' books—those cadmium yellow blocks—a distraction, a xanthopsic redundancy—for is not the essence of brotherliness already concentrated in this very act of creation, this self-portrait of portrait? The foxglove must remain, though—yes, those sprigs of
Digitalis purpurea
, those twinned stems of indigo teardrops—it remains—remains—as does all the world's melancholy, always bearing down—

Outside the sun sinks, and the shadows in the room deepen. At one point, his brush hand shakes and tingles so badly that he has to pause to fetch a fresh bottle of Elixir. It is night when he finds himself watching himself from above, watching in the guttering lamplight as his hand, firm and steady, signs the canvas
Vincent,
watching as his body collapses into a chair, watching as this one iteration of him falls into a long, deep, holy sleep.

He watches her dance, this American sensation, this ethereal sylph. She pirouettes and spins, her flowing white costume awhirl about her, diaphanous veils fluttering and flaring in light that spins and flashes and wheels and washes in soft creamy white and in cool complementary pairs: pink and pale green, orange and cyan, purple and yellow. She is an unfurling flower, then a flame, then a butterfly.

The music ceases. A barrage of applause then, and the dancer disappears behind the brocaded curtain. The stage is dark, empty, but Dr. Gachet still feels her shining, sinuous grace, feels it as surely as if it were a thick impasto sky under his fingertips.

Closing time is called, and although around him chairs are sliding and groaning on the wooden floor, feet are shuffling, elbows are nudging, and voices are prodding barmen with
One last drink, please
, Dr. Gachet sits quiet and still, his eyes closed, colorful circles and swirls burning the dark inside him. He feels time's fingers curled around his fragile heart, pinching and releasing, pinching and releasing, teasing and teasing him; one day they will clamp down and crush it in a fist. He sees himself stretched out in a white nightgown while his son sits at his bedside sketching his pale dead face. He sees his son and daughter growing old and silent and alone together in the house at Auvers as they sit and watch the red pigments in the artist's paintings fade to bloodless pink. He sees a newborn rabbit, finger-sized, squirming in a patch of thistles in the garden, blind and helpless and moist and new.

A strong arm guides him out into the night. Colors streak and voices yammer and nothing makes sense until he spots that stunted, drunken Toulouse-Lautrec under a gas lamp, wobbling on his cane and addressing a small circle of laughing men and painted women. Dr. Gachet pushes past all the bodies and, breathing heavily, presses a bottle of Elixir into the tiny, crooked man's hand.

“What's this?” the painter asks. “Why are you—?”

“I can help you grow,” the doctor says.

I
t is past midnight. The kid is tired after a long day of marching and slashing through undergrowth and dodging ambushes, but he has been forbidden to sleep. He would like to swim in the cool ocean, but he has also been forbidden to swim or dip or even wade. Nor may he remove his boots to wrinkle his burning toes in the spent waves that bubble over the sand. He has been forbidden even to sit. He has strict orders, from the general himself. He must stand and guard Sergio's head.

The kid does not understand why the head must be guarded. Who would want it? It is a dead thing, caked in blood, with a sour, meaty stink that the ocean breeze cannot carry away. Flies buzz dizzily around it, then alight and prowl its terrain.