Far from losing his way, as his friend Gordon supposed, Ellsworth had found it (dark inward turnings are not always what they seem), and thanks in large part to the nefarious Stalker. This unwelcome intruder had, more than a year ago, crossing some impossible barrier and against the author’s determined will, invaded his novel-in-progress, The Artist and His Model, threatening to destroy it from within, merely by lingering, leeringly, in the shadows at its periphery, seen and not seen, like some incipient but irresistible malignancy. Ellsworth’s courageous efforts to banish the trespasser (he was the author, was he not?) were not only ineffectual, they actually seemed to augment the Stalker’s sinister powers, confirming his presence here once and for all and emboldening his ruthless encroachments. Collapse set in for several months as Ellsworth watched his novel disintegrate before his very eyes, his Artist’s wise and eloquent quest for Beauty (this was the work’s tragic theme: the noble pursuit of the unattainable ideal) turned to hollow self-parody in the presence of the derisory Stalker. The Artist seemed somehow aware of the Stalker’s hovering contempt and grew increasingly querulous and impatient, tearing up what he had not yet begun, which confused his Model, who only wished to please, and brought tears to her eyes, which, on his seeing, caused him too to weep. “Stop! Don’t cry,” she pleaded, sobbing. “Why are you crying?” And gazing then, tearfully, into the child’s tearful eyes, he (the author now, not the Artist) perceived that the theme of his work had changed: the Artist’s arrogant quest for absolute Beauty had given way to a new understanding of the essential innocence of Art, an innocence embodied in this child and now in peril. Whereupon he (the Artist, of course, not the author) turned to face the Stalker. For weeks, then, Ellsworth had been struggling with this confrontation, finding it much more difficult than he could have imagined, but knowing that only by battling through would he rescue his life’s work. No wonder Gordon had found him distant and moody. The Stalker, far from fleeing the Artist’s bold challenge, had welcomed it, and indeed it was he who spoke most often, the Artist frequently reduced to a grave contemplative silence, perceiving that the defense of innocence was more the task of heart than mind, yet could not succeed by heart alone. He said: “Argument is useless. Art knows nothing, which is its power.” “Nonsense,” scoffed the Stalker. “Art, like your meaningless little aphorism, is an idle parlor trick, its so-called power nonexistent, once you escape the stifling oppression of the parlor.” “It is you who have brought the parlor to the forest,” said the Artist, and he took the Model’s little hand and led her back to the abandoned rock beside the riverbank, posing her there as he had done once before in pre-Stalker times, experiencing once again the dreamlike quality of the scene as he composed it. He leaned her forward so that she rested more on her hands and thighs than on her backside, and he twisted her hair into a loose braid that fell over her far shoulder, revealing the inquisitive delicacy of her profiled face, the poignant vulnerability of her slender throat. “Art is the expression of Nature’s exquisite insouciance,” he said, setting up his easel. “No kidding!” someone sniggered in his ear. “So, tell me, why is the insouciant little tootsie in the exquisite altogether?” He spun about, but there was no one near. Far away, on a crest bereft of trees, a shadowy figure stood masquerading as — what? a devil, satyr, fiendish critic? “Because Art is pure,” the Artist replied at full throat, “and begs no concealment or disguise.” “So you say,” laughed the voice in his ear, “but I find her maidenly flesh cushions, poised unconcealed above the stone there like the cloven earth rising behind the barren moon, a pure delight, if you’ll pardon my saying so, and so, I think, do you.” “Art, when pure,
is delightful,” responded the Artist, refusing to be baited, and with his charcoal blocked in the principal areas of light and darkness, moved, as always, by luminosity’s contrast to its surrounding absence, the pluck of it, the audacity. The soft radiant curve of the child’s back against the dense forest on the far bank alone made his heart ache with something like remorse. He thought (it was perhaps at this moment that Gordon stopped in at the plant to ask if Ellsworth would like a photographic essay of the town’s flower gardens this summer and got such a brusque inattentive reply): Innocence is like the morning dew: it vanishes as soon as light is cast upon it. “Ah, well done there!” laughed the voice of the Stalker, as though peering at his canvas from behind his ear, the Stalker himself, up on the barren crest, dancing lewdly his faunlike dance. “See how you’ve captured the flushed glow of her juicy little buns, and the comic opposition of the shadowy gap between them, spreading naughtily like a dimpled grin! Ho ho! What a genius!” “Who’s there?” the Model asked, breaking her pose and looking round. “No one,” the Artist snapped, regretting his lie as soon as spoken, but suddenly afraid that the boundaries violated by the Stalker were but the first to fall. He reset her pose, but before he had returned to his easel, she had turned again to peer back over her shoulder. “Is someone there?” she called, and the Stalker replied: “Someone there!” “It’s just an echo,” said the Artist irritably, hearing, far away, the infuriating laughter of his adversary, itself echoing and reechoing as it died away. “Now resume your position, please!” But the child could not. Her foot had moved, her thigh was raised, her shoulder turned, her ear was cocked, her gaze restless. She seemed curious, annoyed, excited, amused, apprehensive, all at once. Her love and respect for him were unconditional, he knew that, yet her limbs would not stay where he directed them. “No, tuck your foot under here,” he insisted, showing her where he meant, “then lean forward onto your hands, that’s it — no, no!” He seized her thigh in both his hands and pulled it toward him, his sudden fervent grasp surprising them both. Except to take her hand or to push and prod a bit to set a pose, the Artist had rarely touched his Model. In fact, perhaps, he hadn’t really known he could. He stared now at his broad long-fingered hands and what they — yes, so ardently — encircled. Her childish flesh was firm yet resilient, silky smooth, luminous, cool to the touch yet pulsing with a hidden warmth, and palpably without history. He slid one finger along a pale blue vein on the inside of her thigh, thinking: Art, even when idealized, participates in the Real. But it is the vein, not the blood, the container, not the contained, the design, not the flux. Or, perhaps, it is the finger on the vein … He relaxed his grip but did not release it, allowing his hands to encompass the child’s tender thigh without quite grasping it (she was watching now, not his hands, but his eyes), the surfaces of their respective flesh in unbroken contact with one another, but only as a whisper is in contact with the ear, providing him with a direct heart-stopping apprehension of the radical sensuousness of all Beauty, and he knew then that he had not yet begun to be a true Artist, nor would he be one until he could approach his canvases with the same desire and the same restraint as he now held yet did not hold — as he now, in a word, be-held — his Model’s soft young thigh. Was that the Stalker laughing? No, it was Ellsworth! He was leaping about in his study above the printshop like the Stalker doing his taunting satyric dance, whooping and laughing and yelling all at once! He blew kisses at the Stalker: his savior! All around him, heaps and heaps of paper, scrawled on and typed on and scrawled on again: his novel! Underway at last! It really was! “I am a writer! I really am a writer!”