THE PAINTER

The worst of all possible things happened.  He was fired from his job.  He had now to go home and break that bad news to his termagant wife and to his three sons.  He was, however, inured to bringing home bad news, having made a career of it. 

Over the years, he had lost many jobs and left many others because he couldn’t stand their drudgery.  He would return home to the shame his wife heaped upon him and resignedly accept it.  His wife, who worked loyally for the family, never restrained herself from shaming her husband in front of the boys when he was jobless.  But worse, she would make their first son sit at the head of the table, opposite herself, at mealtimes, and set her husband’s plate beside the youngest boy. 

Then, in middle age, he went to college.  Going to college was supposed to help him find a job without drudgery.  He looked around at what to major in and found everything equally boring.  He was not a student.  He grew up in the streets, working in the fish market while going to school, then as a grocery clerk, a driver, a waiter.  He finished high school, barely.  He had, however, a flair for drawing.  He always drew pictures for his sons, hanging them on the walls of their bedrooms—pictures of them doing ordinary things.  When one of them was bad, he drew a picture of him doing that bad thing and hung it on the wall near his bed.  More than anything, he liked to sign his name at the bottom of the picture.  He always found imaginative ways of blending his name into the drawing.  With a flourish, he would write: Ernest Christi, 1999. 

     This talent was untutored.  It was natural and unsophisticated, blooming like a dandelion in the boot-stomped patch of mud that was his life.  And the natural vision expressed by this talent was unspoiled by academic training, by which, of course, it would have been made to look like that of any number of thousands of others who went to the academy to become “educated.” 

But, to his good fortune, when Ernest decided to major in art, he proved uneducable.  What the college did for him was to enlarge his notions.  Whereas before college Ernest only knew pencil and paper, in college he discovered paint, canvas, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture—a dizzying array of expressive media he had never imagined as for himself.  When he got his hands on these he went into a spell of creative activity that only ended now with his being fired from his job.  It was a mighty spell, lasting seven years.  But it was over.

On the dusty, drought stricken plains of the north Midwest, far, far away from where Ernest lived, there was a god-forsaken little college that educated annually about five hundred students.  These came from the isolated regions of the northern prairie that were becoming increasingly more isolated as they lost population.  The combination of long, hard winters, hot dry summers, wind, economic deprivation, and lack of every kind of opportunity kept the prairie, and therefore the college, from prospering.  Having no realistic chance of hiring a genuine artist for their art department, the college was overwhelmed with gratitude when Ernest’s application came wafting in, and so the Christi family left its urban existence for a new life.  “Thank God,” Ernest’s wife said, when they arrived, “they have roads here.”

At first, Ernest prospered.  He had a place to work, a budget, though skimpy, to support that work, and a desire to work, to explore through every medium his own abilities, which he was still discovering.  Ernest was very much like a middle teen in these activities, and his joy and enthusiasm were infectious, making devoted acolytes out of his students—all three of them.  However, since he was the only person in the art department, he had to offer introductory art classes to all students.  Running the art department kept him busier than he wanted to be, considering the feverish pitch at which he pursued his own work and his devotion to his three art majors.

After two years on the job, he had let so much of the administrative work go unattended that the department was in danger of losing its accreditation by the state department of education, and in spite of all warnings, Ernest couldn’t tear himself away from his studios and from his teaching of his art majors.  The result was the notice:  his contract would not be renewed.  He stared at it, and all the old familiar feelings returned.  Already, he could hear his wife shaming him, see his sons’ faces, the mixed look of anxiety and contempt that they were too natural to know how to disguise.

But to his surprise, when he broke the news at home that night, the whole family was joyous.  “Don’t feel bad, dear,” his wife cajoled, with an expression of profound relief on her face.  “Think of it as a new opportunity.”  He never realized how unhappy they were living away from the city, so immersed was he in his work.  “We can go home to our friends, now,” his boys said.  They made him feel like they had been living in exile and that now those dry and barren paths were coming to an end. 

He appreciated their feelings but was unhappy at the prospect of having once again to depend on his wife while he drifted from job to job.  He despaired of finding another job teaching art.  The only reason he had this one was because no one else applied.  The college found him so inept an administrator that it would rather struggle with the problem of replacing him than continue to employ him.  It was a damning judgment, and he felt it as such. 

All the joys he had known drained from him.  He stood on the street in front of his house, looking towards the setting sun.  The street ended at an unplanted field in which cattle had been left to pasture.  They were grazing, many of them turned in the same direction, towards the sun, which was making the sky brick red.  Over the wide streak of redness, the sky was a pale aquamarine, and this faded into dusk overhead and around him.  “Yes,” he thought, “it is like exile.”  It felt like dying, too. 

In the morning, he went to the campus to begin the tedious job of moving out his belongings.  He had ambiguous feelings as he approached the doors to his department.  He was affected by the family’s excitement over going home.  But he was down over the prospect of not working, for he had three canvases in progress, a block of marble that he was sculpting into a bust of his oldest son, and numerous pots, urns, vases, cups, platters, and other things awaiting firing.  Would he ever get back to them?  Were these, he thought, the detritus of a dead career?

He was getting on in years, and the unsuccessful stint at teaching left him demoralized.  His wife readily found work and, glad to be back in familiar surroundings, left off harassing him.  The boys prospered in school again.  It was late November and he was still unemployed.  Things were back to the way they used to be, except that in the interim Ernest had found a calling, a deep and powerful urge to create, that was as useless to him and the family now as the picked-over bones of the Thanksgiving turkey. 

When he was alone in the shabby apartment that was all they could afford, he worked on the three canvases he had started at the college.  He set his easel in the parlor near the windows, and, his stomach feeling hollow and his self-esteem draping over the tops of his shoes, he painted—painted from memory, from instincts honed by his past painting, from a deftness acquired almost magically, and from desire to paint.  The three finished, he started others.  He painted quickly—roads on the prairie, lined on both sides with barbed-wire fences, hedged by corn or sunflowers, or covered with snow, or with the acid light of a prairie summer noon.  He looked out the parlor windows and painted the street below.  He painted the parlor.  He painted himself.  He painted the worn-out sofa with its bedraggled blanket cover, the lamp next to it, the floor, with its fake Persian carpet, even the door entering the apartment.  He painted the leafless limbs of the trees hanging over the street right in front of his windows, giving them more reality on the canvas than they had outside.  He painted his wife’s portrait, his three sons playing in the snow outside, his neighbors coming and going, he painted until he couldn’t see anymore.  And still he painted. 

The boys would come home from school and look at him and share in silence mournful expressions with each other.  Their mother shushed them when they tried to talk about their father, though she shared their concern.  She had given up harassing, but something new had entered their lives, and she didn’t know how to understand it, no less how to deal with it.  She looked at the canvases in wonder and said nothing.  But she saw how he grew thin.  He had stopped shaving, and she saw how his beard grew to his chest.  He had even stopped changing clothes, and she would have to go to him and take off his shirt and undershirt and dress him herself with clean ones.  The smell of the paints wore on her, though the boys never minded, taking this unpleasantness in stride.  But she could hardly stand to lie in bed with him anymore, for he stank of sweat and paint and paint thinner.

One night she woke from a bad dream and looked over at the clock.  It said three a.m.  She turned on her side, snuggling, and suddenly sprung awake alarmed.  Ernest was not there.  She got up and put on her robe and went to look for him.  But she found the apartment empty.  Something was amiss, she knew it.  She was overcome with fear when she saw the page of loose-leaf paper on the table in the kitchen:

Dear Miriam: I can make no further progress here.

All the paintings I have done so far are yours.  You

have a right to them since you paid for all the

materials.  But you have a right to them for another

reason, a spiritual one—namely, the claim of a wife to her husband’s substance.  They are all the substance

I have.  They are, in fact, more real than I am.  I must go.  Don’t look for me to return.  Tell the boys what suits you, only don’t tell them I don’t love them.  I am no longer the person you married.  I am not myself even to myself.  I have grown so different, I don’t know who I am.  I think I have ceased to be anybody.  I am only what I see and paint.  I must go, because I don’t have many years, and what I have to do is vast.  I don’t understand it, either.  Goodbye.

     What did it mean?  She couldn’t comprehend it.  She read it three times and then read it again.  It sounded crazy, driven and crazy, and she didn’t know what to think.  Had he lost his mind?  She called the police and told them that her husband was deranged and walking alone in the city.  She gave them a detailed description and waited, sitting up alone in the parlor, wrapped in her robe.  It was cold, so she pulled the blanket covering the sofa over her shoulder and rested back her head.

     She dozed and woke several times, hoping for a knock at the door, for it to be the police with her husband in tow, and him all apologetic.  She would care for him from now on, she thought, with more attention to his needs.  But the knock never came.  What came was a dim gray light against the shades of the parlor windows.  So she got up to open one, feeling like looking out as the morning came.  As the shade went up, however, she screamed in horror at what she saw—it was Ernest, floating in the air in front of the window.  He had an expression of pleading on his face and was holding one hand out to her, palm up, and gesturing up the block with the other—as though he were telling her he was sorry he was going.  She looked at him, floating in the air, and calmed herself.  Opening the window, she shouted in a whiny, tearful voice, “Ernest, shame on you! You’re acting like a little boy.  Shame!  Shame!  You can’t run away because life is hard.  Think of me!  Shame!  Shame on you for not finding work and being a better father!  Shame!  Shame!”

     She was still shouting “Shame!” out the window when her oldest son came into the parlor and shouted at her.  She stopped and closed the window and pulled down the shade so he wouldn’t see his father.  But it was too late.  He said,

     “What’s dad doing outside the window?” and ran over to it and raised the shade and looked out.  But no one was there.

     His mother said nothing.  She sniffed and wiped her nose and went back to bed.

     The boy, now sixteen years old, stood by the window and looked out.  He saw the sun lighten the sky and illuminate the houses across the street.  As he stood by the window, he heard the apartment door open and turned to see his father enter.  He saw his father then as one sees a stranger, unemotionally, objectively.  Tall and thin and bony with broad shoulders and a stoop and a long graying beard and long graying hair.  His father didn’t look at him but turned towards the bedroom.  Then, feeling a strange deadness he had no way of accounting for, he looked down at the street.  A policeman was there getting into a police car.  The door slammed and it pulled away, and as it did so, the driver turned off the headlights.