DANCING WOMAN

DANCING WOMAN

Sometimes the artist, working alone, following impulses he can barely fathom, creates an image that changes people’s lives.  It’s not that he strives to do this.  Striving for such an effect almost always results in failure.  When he succeeds, he does so unwittingly—unconsciously, so to speak.  That’s because the artist in him has spoken to the canvas and not the man, with all his explicit purposes, aesthetic biases, and manipulations.  This, the artist who wrought beyond his dreams, is nameless, anonymous even to himself.  And how much more so is he to the viewer who has been snared by him!  This is as it should be.  For it is not ourselves but the humanity in us that makes the work and the humanity in us that responds.  Both the making and the responding are rare.  And this, too, is as it should be.  For were it otherwise, it would not be art, or should I say, Art!  It would be just more stuff, for sale, for use, and, ultimately, for disposal.

     This is the story of a man named William Beale, into whose life a painting came.  The painting was called “Dancing Woman.”  Before his wife left, she had bought it for him as a birthday present.  She called him almost a week after his birthday, apologizing for letting it slip her mind, and told him about it.  It was in the frame shop getting reframed and matted and he should go pick it up—it was all paid for.  He could hang it where ever he wished, she said, it was his present.  Also, there were other surprises—he’d see.  She’d be gone at least another month, she said, maybe more.  But in two weeks, she expected a three-day weekend, and she’d come home then. 

     Well, he looked at the painting.  Actually, it was done in tempera, and he liked it.  It was a woman’s face, seen in profile, and her hair was very long and swirled about her head, making a spiral that seemed to drag the colors of the afternoon sky around with it.  The image was full of motion, spiraling, swirling, “dancing” as the title said.

     He took down the old piece on the dining room wall.  It was an oil representing a scene in the Swiss Alps, a piece they bought on their honeymoon a long time ago.  He was reluctant to take this one away, but that wall could be seen from every point in the house, and he wanted “Dancing Woman” to preside over the empty place, as seemed fitting.  He didn’t like his wife’s prolonged absences, but when she went on the road, she had to go, and they both felt they couldn’t turn the money down—it was too much.  So, they reconciled themselves to these periodic separations.  It was very thoughtful of her, he felt, to do this for him.  And he knew she didn’t forget to tell him about it.  That was her way of cheering him up after she had been gone for a while.  They were married long enough now he could read her pretty well.  He loved her, and he loved her more for doing things like this.

     But, there were other surprises, she said, he’d see.  He wondered what she was up to.  He expected the frame shop would have other things for him, and when they didn’t bring anything else out, he wondered and asked.  No, there was nothing else.  Well, he thought, the next few days would tell.  When he had “Dancing Woman” hanging, he stepped across to the living room to take a long look at it.  It was very fine.  It’s coloring was vibrant and the image was riveting, and one couldn’t help but to stare at it.  It dominated every part of the house.  Perfect location, he thought.  He kept looking at it, and the longer he did, the more it riveted him, until, finally, he had to tear himself away from it.  But when he went to his chair by the lamp and picked up the newspaper, he found he couldn’t read.  “Dancing Woman” lured his gaze back.  He couldn’t take his eyes from it.

     “It’s new,” he thought.  “It won’t be long before I cease even to notice it.  Habit kills.”

     He bent his gaze down to the newspaper on his lap and began to read.  But what he was reading was the image on the wall.  “Hmm,” he said, “I miss her that much.”  He threw the paper off his lap and got up.  He went to the TV room and picked up the remote, throwing himself into the couch and clicking on the set in the same motion.  It wasn’t long before he was asleep. 

     When he woke, the channel was off the air and the TV was hissing, its fuzzy light casting an eerie glow in the room.  He got up on his elbows and looked around, then at his wristwatch.  He had slept for hours.  It was 3:10 a.m.  He shook his head to come awake and looked again at his watch.  Then he got up and turned off the TV.  He had slept seven hours.  He wondered how it could have happened.  The couch wasn’t that comfortable.  He supposed it was because he was bored without Morgan.  They had active social lives, but when she wasn’t home, he didn’t feel motivated to socialize.  She was going to be gone a long time yet, he thought, and he had better get himself up and doing, or the time was just not going to pass.

     The light in the dining room was still on, as was the lamp by his chair in the living room.  He noticed the old painting he had taken down leaning against the wall behind the table.  Realizing sleep would no longer come, he decided to rehang that picture, since it held so many memories.  The problem was deciding where.  He would have to take something else down, and the problem with that was the picture was too large for any other wall.  Maybe he should put it back where it was.  “Dancing Woman” was a better fit for some other place.

     He decided to hang “Dancing Woman” in the living room on the wall behind his chair.  The lamp would light it fine in the evening, though it would be a bit dim in the day time, and he would really only see it when he actually faced it going to the chair.  On that wall now hung a small litho of Rockport Harbor on Cape Ann.  It was a minor piece he and Morgan picked up one time when they visited and found the artist colony there.  They had gotten a pair of lithos, but the other was in storage.

     “OK, buddy,” William said, “You’re going to join your mate.”

     When the switch was done, he stepped back and looked around the room.  The big oil of the Swiss Alps dominated the eye—as it always had, and “Dancing Woman” seemed ensconced in its own private domain.  It was not so vibrant in its present place, but it had a more intimate, almost secretive feel about it.  He liked the adjustment.  He looked at his watch.  It wasn’t four yet.  He wasn’t going to get any more sleep, so he decided to read.  He sat down—under “Dancing Woman,” as it were—and picked up the newspaper.  But the image behind him made the flesh crawl on his back.  He turned around and said, “Leave me alone, old girl, it’s late.  Time to turn in yourself.”

     But he couldn’t concentrate on reading.  He thought about “Dancing Woman” instead.  He wished he knew who the artist was, what he was striving for in the image and its colors.  Was it only decorative?  Was the artist concerned with the vividness and vibrancy of the image, the image itself only a vehicle for those values?  Or was he looking for something more, something in the image, wanting the strange swirling masses around the woman’s head to speak to the viewer?  What was Morgan thinking when she chose it?  Did she see something of herself in “Dancing Woman”?  Did she see herself as the Dancing Woman?

     He got up and looked again at the image.  The woman’s face held an incredible surprise when he attended to it.  He wondered why he didn’t notice it before.  It was undoubtedly the face of Jacquelyn Kennedy, but of her when she was young, and it bore a look of ecstasy.  The swirling masses around her head seemed to mythologize her.  He had the impression the artist painted her at a moment in youth when she held a prophetic vision of the shape of her life—that life wracked by the public eye and by deaths—too many deaths, and too violent.  The impression overwhelmed him, and he sank to his chair.

     “I can’t live with it,” he said to himself. 

     The moment, hypothetical as it was, was nevertheless too provocative and existential.  He got up again and examined it.  What seemed before merely a vibrant image now overwhelmed him.  He took the painting down, retrieved the old litho and rehung it.  Then he wrapped “Dancing Woman” in a sheet and stored it in the closet.  Returning to the chair, he picked up the newspaper and tried to read.  But it was impossible.

     “Dancing Woman” was becoming an obsession.  That look of ecstasy!  The vision!  The swirling hair!  Wrapped in a sheet, secreted in the dark!  He asked himself what was the matter—why was he troubled?  But all that came to him was the feeling of disorientation.  The painting unnerved him.  It was too intense. No, that wasn’t it.  It was the thought of it, of its being her.  Of her seeing.  But no, that wasn’t it, either.

     He went to the closet and unwrapped and set it against the wall where the dining room light fell brightly on it.  As he gazed, he calmed.  Yes.  It was as he thought.  It’s her.  She sees.  And as he gazed he was moved beyond himself by the beauty of it—of the image of fate in her eyes.  He returned it to the wall behind his chair and stood in front of it.  He was changing.  He could feel how his perceptions were affecting him.  They were opening a place in him he had not experienced before.  The painting had pulled something from that place and fastened it to itself. 

When his wife came home for the three-day weekend, he was surprised by her indifference to “Dancing Woman.”  During her absence, it had become a part of his life.  He found he could not talk about it.  She liked it, she said, and thought he would, too, and bought it on the spur of the moment.  It was an impulse directed at pleasing him and was glad he was pleased.  The word, he thought, was unsatisfactory.  But the picture never meant more to her than a successful gift.