“But would you hang them on your wall?”
“I…?” Her gaze flickered under his, then held quite firmly. “I tend to like a painting that challenges just a bit more. It’s a matter of taste.”
“And these don’t challenge?”
She studied the watercolours once more. She perched on the work-table and held the paintings on her knees, first one then the other. She pressed her lips together. She blew out her cheeks.
“I can take it, you know,” he said with a chuckle that he realised was far more anxious than amused. “You can give it to me straight.”
She took him at his word. “All right,” she said. “You can certainly copy. Here’s the evidence of that. But can you create?”
It didn’t hurt nearly as much as he thought it might. “Try me,” he said.
She smiled. “A pleasure.”
He’d thrown himself into it for the next two years, fi rst as a member of one class or another which she offered the community, then later on as a private student, alone with her. In winter they used a live model in the studio. In summer they took easels, sketch pads, and paints out into the country and worked off the land. Often they sketched each other as an exercise in understanding the human anatomy-the sternocleidomastoid muscles, Tony, she would say and put her fingertips to her neck, try to think of them like cords right beneath the skin. And always she filled the environment with music. Listen to me, if you stimulate one sense, you stimulate others, she explained, art can’t be created if the artist himself is an insensate void. See the music, hear it, feel it, feel the art. And the music would start-a haunting array of Celtic folktunes, a Beethoven symphony, a salsa band, an African mass called the Missa Luba, the nerve-shaving whine of electric guitars.
In the presence of her intensity and dedication, he’d begun to feel as if he’d emerged from forty-three years of darkness to fi nd himself walking in sunlight at last. He felt completely renewed. He felt his interest engaged and his intellect challenged. He felt emotions spring to life. And for six straight months before she became his lover, he called it all the pursuit of his art. There was, after all, a certain safety in that. It did not beg an answer for the future.
Sarah, he thought, and he marvelled at the fact that even now-after everything, even after Elena-he could still wish to murmur the name that he hadn’t allowed himself to say for the past eight months since Justine had accused and he had confessed.
They’d pulled up to the old school on a Thursday evening, just at the time he’d usually arrived. The lights were on and a fire was burn-ing-he could see its shifting glow through the drawn front curtains-and he knew that Sarah was expecting him and that music would be playing and a dozen or more sketches would be strewn among the pillows on the fl oor. And that she would come to meet him when the doorbell rang, that she would run to meet him, throw open the door, and draw him inside saying Tonio I’ve had the most marvellous idea about how to compose that picture of the woman in Soho, you know the one that’s been making me wild for a week…
I can’t do this, he said to Justine. Don’t ask me to do this. It’s going to destroy her.
I don’t much care what it’s going to do to her, Justine replied and got out of the car.
She must have been passing the door when they rang the bell, because she answered it just as the dog began to bark. She called over her shoulder, Flame, stop it it’s Tony you know Tony you silly thing. And then she turned back to the door, to the sight of them both- he in the foreground and his wife in the background and the portrait wrapped in brown paper and held under his arm.
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t even move. She merely looked beyond him to where his wife stood, and her face summed up the count of his sin. Betrayal works in two directions, Tonio, she’d said in the past. And he understood that clearly when she dropped into place that insubstantial patina of breeding and civility that she actually believed was going to protect her.
Tony, she said.
Anthony, Justine said.
They walked into the house. Flame trotted out of the sitting room with an old knotted sock between his teeth and he barked through it happily at the sight of a friend. Silk looked up from a doze by the fire and undulated his long serpent tail in lazy greeting.
Now, Anthony, Justine said.
He lacked the wilclass="underline" to do it, to refuse, even to speak.
He saw Sarah look at the painting. She said, What have you brought me, Tonio, as if Justine were not standing at his side.
There was an easel in the sitting room and he unwrapped the painting and set it there. He expected her to fly to it when she saw the great smears of red, white, and black that obscured the smiling faces of his daughter. But instead she simply approached it slowly, and she gave a low cry when she saw what she had to have known she would see on the bottom of the frame. The little brass plaque. The scrolled ELENA.
He heard Justine move. He heard her say his name, and he felt her press the knife into his hand. It was a sturdy vegetable knife. She’d taken it from the drawer in the kitchen of their house. She’d said get it out of my life, get her out of my life, you’ll do it tonight and I’ll be there to make sure.
He made the first cut in a blaze that mixed both anger and despair. He heard Sarah cry No! Tony! and felt her fingers on his fist and saw the red of her blood when the knife slid across the back of her knuckles to carve a pathway through the canvas again. And then the third cut, but by that time, she had backed away with her bleeding hand held like a child against her, not crying because she wouldn’t do that, not in front of him, not in front of his wife.
That’s enough, Justine said. She turned and left.
He followed her out. He hadn’t said a single word.
She had talked one night in class about the risk and the reward of making art personal, of offering little here-and-there bits of one’s essence to a public who might misunderstand, ridicule, or reject. Although he had listened dutifully to her words, he had not understood the meaning behind them until he had seen her face when he destroyed the painting. It wasn’t a reaction to the weeks and months of effort it had taken her to complete it for him, nor was it a response to his mutilation of a gift. It was simply that three times he had driven the knife through what had represented to Sarah the most singular manner in which she could show him compassion and love.
This was, perhaps, the greatest of his sins. To have prompted the gift. To have ripped it to pieces.
He took his watercolours-those terribly safe apricots and poppies-from the wall above the sofa. They left two darker spots on the wall-paper, but that couldn’t be helped. No doubt Justine would find something suitable to replace them.
She said, “What are you doing? Anthony, answer me.” She sounded frightened.
“Finishing things,” he said.
He carried the paintings out into the hall and balanced one carefully, thoughtfully, on the tips of his fi ngers. You can copy, she said, but can you create?
The last four days had given him the answer that two full years with her had failed to provide. Some people create. Others destroy.
He smashed the painting against the newel post at the foot of the stairway. Glass shattered and fell onto the parquet floor like crystal rain.
“Anthony!” Justine grasped his arm. “Don’t! Those are your paintings. They’re your art. Don’t!”
He smashed the second with even greater force. He felt the pain of connecting with the wooden post shoot like a cannonball through his arm. Glass flew up at his face.