"Tipped the…?"
"Made him depressed instead of excited. What did he learn that made him – "
She stood and looked at her watch. "Forgive me. I stopped work twenty minutes ago. I'm expected at a friend's."
My voice hardened. "Of course. I wouldn't want to keep you."
Outside the clinic, beneath the light at its entrance, I stared at my own watch, surprised to see that it was almost eleven-thirty. Fatigue made my knees ache. The trauma of the day had taken away my appetite, but I knew I should try to eat, and after walking back to the hotel's dining room, I ordered a chicken sandwich and a glass of Chablis. I meant to eat in my room but never got that far. Van Dorn's room and the diary beckoned.
The sandwich and wine went untasted. Sitting at the desk, surrounded by the swirling colors and hidden horrors of Van Dorn prints, I opened a notebook and tried to understand.
A knock at the door made me turn.
Again I glanced at my watch, astonished to find that hours had passed like minutes. It was almost two a.m.
The knock was repeated, gentle but insistent. The manager?
"Come in," I said in French. "The door isn't locked."
The knob turned. The door swung open.
Clarisse stepped in. Instead of her nurse's uniform, she now wore sneakers, jeans, and a sweater whose tight-fitting yellow accentuated the hazel in her eyes.
"I apologize," she said in English. "I must have seemed rude at the clinic."
"Not at all. You had an appointment. I was keeping you."
She shrugged self-consciously. "I sometimes leave the clinic so late, I don't have a chance to see my friend."
"I understand perfectly."
She drew a hand through her lush, long hair. "My friend got tired. As I walked home, passing the hotel, I saw a light up here. On the chance it might be you…"
I nodded, waiting.
I had the sense that she'd been avoiding it, but now she turned toward the room. Toward where I'd found the dried blood on the prints. "The doctor and I came as fast as we could when the manager phoned us that afternoon." Clarisse stared at the prints. "How could so much beauty cause so much pain?"
"Beauty?" I glanced toward the tiny, gaping mouths.
"You mustn't stay here. Don't make the mistake your friend did."
"Mistake?"
"You've had a long journey. You've suffered a shock. You need to rest. You'll wear yourself out as your friend did."
"I was just looking through some things of his. I'll be packing them to send them back to America."
"Do it quickly. You mustn't torture yourself by thinking about what happened here. It isn't good to surround yourself with the things that disturbed your friend. Don't intensify your grief."
"Surround myself? My friend would have said 'immerse.'"
"You look exhausted. Come." She held out her hand. "I'll take you to your room. Sleep will ease your pain. If you need some pills to help you…"
"Thanks. But a sedative won't be necessary."
Clarisse continued to offer her hand. I took it and went to the hallway.
For a moment I stared back toward the prints and the horror within the beauty. I said a silent prayer for Myers, shut off the lights, and locked the door.
We went down the hall. In my room, I sat on the bed.
"Sleep long and well," Clarisse said.
"I hope."
"You have my sympathy." She kissed my cheek.
I touched her shoulder. Her lips shifted toward my own. She leaned against me.
We sank toward the bed. In silence, we made love.
Sleep came like her kisses, softly smothering.
But in my nightmares, there were tiny, gaping mouths.
Sunlight glowed through my window. With aching eyes, I looked at my watch. Half past ten. My head hurt. Clarisse had left a note on my bureau.
Last night was sympathy. To share and ease your grief. Do what you intended. Pack your friend's belongings. Send them to America.
Go with them. Don't make your friend's mistake.
Don't as you said he said, "immerse" yourself.
Don't let beauty give you pain.
I meant to leave. I truly believe that. I phoned the front desk and asked the concierge to send up some boxes. After I showered and shaved, I went to Myers's room, where I finished stacking the prints. I made another stack of books and another of clothes. I packed everything into the boxes and looked around to make sure I hadn't forgotten anything.
The two canvases that Myers had painted still leaned against a corner. I decided not to take them. No one needed to be reminded of the delusions that had overcome him.
All that remained was to seal the boxes, to address and mail them. But as I started to close the flap on a box, I saw the notebooks inside.
So much suffering, I thought. So much waste.
Once more I leafed through a notebook. Various passages caught my eye. Van Dorn's discouragement about his failed career. His reasons for leaving Paris to come to La Verge – the stifling, backbiting artists' community, the snobbish critics and their sneering responses to his early efforts. Need to free myself of convention. Need to void myself of aesthete politics, to shit it out of me. To find what's never been painted. To feel instead of being told what to feel. To see instead of imitating what others have seen.
I knew from the biographies how impoverished Van Dorn's ambition had made him. In Paris, he'd literally eaten slops thrown into alleys behind restaurants. He'd been able to afford his quest to La Verge only because a successful but very conventional (and now ridiculed) painter friend had loaned him a small sum of money. Eager to conserve his endowment, Van Dorn had walked all the way from Paris to the south of France.
In those days, you have to remember, this valley was an unfashionable area of hills, rocks, farms, and villages. Limping into La Verge, Van Dorn must have been a pathetic sight. He'd chosen this provincial town precisely because it was unconventional, because it offered mundane scenes so in contrast with the salons of Paris that no other artist would dare to paint them.
Need to create what's never been imagined, he'd written. For six despairing months, he tried and failed. He finally quit in self-doubt, then suddenly reversed himself and, in a year of unbelievably brilliant productivity, gave the world thirty-eight masterpieces. At the time, of course, he couldn't trade any canvas for a meal. But the world knows better now.
He must have painted in a frenzy. His suddenly found energy must have been enormous. To me, a would-be artist with technical facility but only conventional eyes, he achieved the ultimate. Despite his suffering, I envied him. When I compared my maudlin, Wyeth-like depictions of Iowa landscapes to Van Dorn's trendsetting genius, I despaired. The task awaiting me back in the States was to imitate beer cans and deodorant packages for magazine ads.
I continued flipping through the notebook, tracing the course of Van Dorn's despair and epiphany. His victory had a price, to be sure. Insanity. Self-blinding. Suicide. But I had to wonder if perhaps, as he died, he'd have chosen to reverse his life if he'd been able. He must have known how remarkable, how truly astonishing, his work had become.
Or perhaps he didn't. The last canvas he'd painted before stabbing his eyes had been of himself. A lean-faced, brooding man with short, thinning hair, sunken features, pallid skin, and a scraggly beard. The famous portrait reminded me of how I always thought Christ would have looked just before he was crucified. All that was missing was the crown of thorns. But Van Dorn had a different crown of thorns. Not around but within him. Disguised among his scraggly beard and sunken features, the tiny, gaping mouths and writhing bodies told it all. His suddenly acquired vision had stung him too much.