20
An Old Master
Why, in the name of heaven’s fat white rolling arse, is everything I attempt so utterly wretched? Were I one fraction less indolent, then I might improve. Were I one fraction less idealistic about my endeavors, then I might be content. Were I one fraction less intelligent, then I might fool myself into thinking I was better than I am. Instead, I am triply cursed. And still, after all this cursing, the fact remains: I am bloody awful at portraiture, Chloe. I stand before you as beside the point as a businessman in an orchestra pit.”
The pure white canvas had become a wretched oozing swamp. Nicholas had long ago lost sight of the painting itself, so cleanly sketched and proportioned in a deft burnt umber only two hours ago. But now even the local details on which he had fixated were disappearing; his representation of the nose, for example, had turned to sludge; whole patches of the picture were swimming in paint, and the only colors he could conjure were tertiary. He simply could not place his brush with any kind of precision; it was all too slippery and oily. And all the while, nature continued to mock him from where it lay, propped up on its little lilac pillow, feminine beauty indifferent as ever to the effort of man.
In the first few weeks he had felt anxious, dislocated, shaken, and saddened by turn, but these reactions had soon given way to an indistinct but abiding sense of annoyance with everything, and most of all with himself. As if he had been consistently putting off an important job or failing to give up smoking day after day. These feelings were familiar to him, of course—he had suffered from something similar for most of his life, but in recent years he had managed to block it out, to beguile time with such single-minded commitment to his own amusement and pleasure that the days had not been able to round on him. This was the peace deal he had negotiated with himself and he’d grown accustomed to living contentedly under its terms: in return for a program of unstinting indulgence, he had promised to stop the self-antagonizing. Now, though, even his most tested techniques (of which painting was one) were failing him: distraction, denial, diversion—nothing was working. Life had reneged. Death had interfered. And hostilities with himself were resumed. He saw now what a flimsy little sham of a deal it had been all along.
He suspected that his blood pressure was higher than normal today—whatever normal was. He turned to glance out of the great window behind. Even the light refused to be precise—the morning’s watery sun had given way to heavy, sullen cloud, as if Paris were about to enter one of its long winter sulks. The traffic on the opposite bank rushing on, endlessly urgent. But the heavy Seine between was a sluggish thing this afternoon, a sluggish thing of surliness and sullage.
He returned his eyes to the room—or rather, his studio-study (as he called it)—and they carried slowly across the ephemera therein: his stack of canvases in one corner, the desk he never used, magazines and papers, articles unread or unwritten, rags and paintbox, his easel; too small to be a studio, really, and the only thing he had ever studied in here was failure. He held up his brush and squinted. He wanted to scrape the whole head off with his knife, except that long experience had taught him that scraping never worked quite well enough and that at this stage the only thing to do was to wait until the paint stiffened and became compliant. Or start again.
Start again.
How many times must he start again? Blood and sand: surely it was possible to paint what he saw, at least. Those pretty toes pointed toward him, one leg up and bent, her arm above her head, the other arm loosely across her hips, a sort of lying-down contrapposto… The canvas should smell of her naked body. Instead, foreshortening had defeated him—even the basic proportions now seemed wrong, making her look freakish, steatopygous, when she was anything but. And then there was the big problem of the perspective of her face—totally counterintuitive, since her eyes in this pose were almost lower than her nose, itself an odd triangle of nostrils and nothing else. He had found himself transforming the never-ending wonder of animate human features into an ungainly and geometric thing in order to map it doggedly onto the slimy mulch of his canvas. He shut his eyes completely. All hope of capturing the intoxicating mingle of her expressions had now vanished.
If nothing more, Nicholas was honest with himself on the subject of art: he knew rubbish when he saw or heard it (as he did, often); he could recognize genuine talent even when it was confusing itself; and he saw mediocrity clearly for what it was. His own first and foremost. But like everything else he had done in the past forty years, Nicholas was doing this entirely for himself, so the success or failure of the work didn’t matter beyond his own struggle with it, and the fact that he was a profoundly mediocre painter might not have bothered him at all except… Except that every time he closed his eyes, he could see quite clearly what it was that he wanted to achieve. Except that he did possess artistic vision. And—here, today, again—it was the very fact of this vision that made his abiding lack of skill or talent or stamina (or whatever it was that was needed to render artistic vision into reality) so infuriating, so demeaning. Worse stilclass="underline" this problem was an old problem. Indeed, he sometimes thought it was the defining problem of his life. The artist’s vision without the accompanying artistry: the cruelest curse of the gods.
The only way forward was to stop. The only way to stop was to escape. And the only way to escape was to lose himself—physically lose himself—in the very body that was evading him artistically. There was one distraction left to him that never failed.
He addressed his model in French, which, curiously, still included the occasional suggestion of a Russian accent, an echo of the much heavier intonations of his private tutor during those long confined Moscow summers of his childhood.
“Chloe, I think we’ll leave it there for today. I am making a mess of it. The paint is too wet. I need to let it dry.” He stepped back from his easel, as much for effect as anything. “We can carry on next week. Or in another lifetime, when I have learned how to paint.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Okay, you are the artist.”
“I wish that were true. Unfortunately, I am merely yet another commonplace toiler in the mud.”
Then the old magic began to happen: as she sat up, she disappeared altogether as a model and became Chloe Martin once again—sometime actress, sometime real estate agent, once a little famous, twice divorced, an auburn-haired bob cut woman of a flat-chested forty-three, wide-wide mouth, all gum and marching molars when she smiled, freckles, crow’s feet, translucent skin (which she ill-advisedly exposed to sun whenever she could), and eyes as green as pale nephrite. And watching her rise, he felt desire surging back to reassert its hegemony over his emotions.