Copyright © 1999 by Adrian Spratt (Revised)
1
As I walked into the artist’s corner studio from Philosophy 101, Amanda Millen said, “You look like you’re sleep-walking.”
I leaned on the counter that angled into the studio and tried to squeeze dopiness out of my expression.
“Hi, Terry,” her husband, Len, said.
Knowing from previous visits its location, I inferred he was painting at his easel. I asked, “What are you working on?”
“An abstract based on one of your fellow freshman. I think you know her — Cheryl DiFrancesco?”
“She’s friends with my suite mate, Peter.” Well, more than friends, but no need to get into specifics.
Len said, “Amanda has a proposition to put to you.”
“Oh?”
“Amanda will tell you.” To her, he added, “I’ll be home in time for dinner.”
Outside, morning sunshine had skimmed the chill from the early spring air. Amanda and I walked across campus to the library, where the college had set aside a room for my readers and my reel-to-reel tape recorder. Amanda read for two hours each on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I said, “Doesn’t this weather make you want to paint?”
“I seem to have suppressed the urge for now. It isn’t false modesty to say Len’s the one with the gift.”
“I’d never let myself even think that.”
“You’re still young, Terry. Truthfully, it’s a nice sabbatical, as the workers around here call vacation.”
“So what’s this proposition, Amanda?”
“Len wants to paint you.”
“Well, I’m afraid I don’t take off my clothes for anyone but a woman, and then only one woman at a time.”
“He wants to do a portrait — you know, your head.”
“I’m flattered.” I was skeptical.
“Not flattery. Tell you what. Let’s get your work done, then we can talk about it.”
My last project that day was to have her read Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” for me to braille for later study. As I finished the transcription, she said, “It’s a little strange to read about a painting, even in a poem. A painting speaks for itself.”
“Doesn’t mean you can’t talk about it and get even more out of it.” I recited, “‘The sun shone as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green water.’ The painting can’t say, ‘as it had to.’ That’s Auden, the poet.”
“What do you think the phrase means, Terry?”
“Something like life is tragic, but life goes on.”
“Breughel says that, too. He was an artist of ideas.” She paused and I waited. “But talking about a painting is like trying to explain a Beethoven symphony. Explanation helps, but what matters with music is the sound, and what matters with painting is the canvas. I guess I’m saying you can’t really appreciate paintings, not being able to see. I hope you don’t mind.”
I shrugged. “Few things are all or nothing.”
I shuffled my papers into some kind of order, then took her arm again and we walked through the book stacks. As we trotted down the library steps, she said, “How about we take a swing by the athletic fields?” We turned away from the campus and set out across gradual slopes of grass.
I said, “What exactly does Len want me to do?”
“Sit around for an hour.”
“Without moving?”
“Not like a statue. Len likes to have a model feel at ease so he can capture their expressions, not just some self-conscious photographic still.”
“I’d freeze up.”
“You soon forget yourself.”
“You’ve modeled for him?”
“We all modeled for each other in art school.”
“The face is revealing,” I said.
“Sure is. More than the body.”
Caught up in conversation, we’d picked up speed, and I tripped on the edge of the asphalt path to the science building.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I should have warned you. You know, sometimes I forget you don’t see. Is that a horrible thing to say?”
“My own fault. Don’t make such a fuss, Amanda.”
We headed over more lawn to the ridge overlooking the fields.
“Do you have any notion what Len sees in me?”
“A mobile, expressive face. Most people are more guarded or bland.”
“When I start writing a poem, it’s usually because I’m interested in someone or something, but I always need to move on to some larger idea.”
“Just like Breughel. But for me, there doesn’t need to be a big message with painting. Painting is about the artist’s look on the world and viewers opening their eyes to it. It’s about perceiving.”
“I’d like to think about it overnight.”
“There’s no hurry. We’re not pressuring you.”
2
It felt odd arriving at Len’s with no plans to meet Amanda. As he was finishing up his previous task, I stood just inside the echoing studio and marveled at the notion of my features being transformed into something that one day might be deemed a work of art.
At the far side of the room Len said, “I’m ready for you.” As he directed me by voice to a seat, I felt him staring at my movements. Finding I was looking down, I raised my head. I folded up my cane into its six sections, dropped it underneath the Windsor chair and sat down.
How to sit? I felt as if I were in my high school yearbook picture session all over again, when I’d wondered what to do with my hands. I found a position with my back straight and hands folded between my knees, which were slightly apart. I didn’t ask if the pose was acceptable, and he didn’t say.
Where to look? It had to be in Len’s direction, but he wasn’t talking. Fortunately, the methods of his trade involved rustling noises and the hardwood floor tracked the movements of his feet.
When he broke the silence, his voice carried the length of the room. “Amanda told me about Icarus’s white legs disappearing into the green water. You were wondering if paintings need to express ideas. Amanda and I disagree. I believe ideas belong in painting, though they aren’t always easy to articulate. Take Impressionism. Impressionism involved colors, natural light, and reflections. It was born and worked out in the paintings. It wasn’t intended for words, but out of it came lots of words.”
My mind drifted, and I’m sure expressions drifted across my face. Once I found the direction of my eyes had strayed to the far left corner of the room, following some trail of thought.
I crossed my legs. A few minutes later I found my left hand clasping my shin. God knew what Len would make of all this, but I felt comfortable, which Amanda had said was the important thing.
Amanda might be the first adult who acted as if we were equals, though I was easily half her age. Well, most of the time. Her “you’re still young” had nettled.
Feeling at ease with the posture I’d assumed and gazing casually in Len’s direction, I felt less the absurdity of someone wanting to paint me. If anyone was suitable for painting, then why not me? I all but said it aloud. Why not me?
“That will do for today,” Len said, banging something.
I took a deep breath and stretched. “I’d almost hypnotized myself.” Unfolding my cane, I headed for the exit. I was curious about the painting. But what could I ask? What have you done with me?
“Goodbye,” Len said. “Oh, and thanks. Let’s do a second sitting next week.”
Back at the dorm, I lowered myself into our scratched-up armchair and told my suite mate, “Peter, I can’t decide if sitting for a portrait is normal or weird.”
Turning from his desk to face me, he said, “A lot of normal things are weird, my friend.”
“How does Cheryl occupy her mind when she’s with Len? It has to be even weirder with no clothes on.”
“Cheryl doesn’t talk about modeling. I’ve asked, but nada.”
3
Amanda waited until we left the library before saying, “Len was pleased.”
“Have you seen what he’s done?”
“You can never tell which way he’s going. I can never tell with my own work.”
Outside the entrance to my dorm, I leaned against the wall and she sat on the end of the stone banister. I pictured her with one leg swinging.
“What are you thinking about?” she said.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to go all quiet on you.”
“That’s all right. I was thinking, too.”
“About?”
“About what an idyllic place this is. I’m distrustful. It’s like you put Adam and Eve in a garden and they fuck up.”
“So to speak.”
“Right. I mean, here we are in paradise, and all I’m thinking is where we used to live, Detroit, with all its crime and grime, was more — I don’t know — trustworthy.”
“I don’t trust this either,” I said. “I almost wish I owned it, so I could be sure of keeping it the way it is.”
“Terry, you sound like one of those people who buys Vermont air in a bottle. Uncap the bottle and it all escapes. This is one time I’m reminded how young you are.”
Second in two weeks, I almost pointed out.
She touched my forearm, prelude to “Gotta go. I have to fix up the house for a dinner party Len and I are having later. Would you join us one evening? Len and you could get to know each other better.”
4
“Hey guy, knock knock. Can I come in?” It was my roommate, Peter, standing inside my bedroom door, pretending it wasn’t open.
“Haven’t you already come in?”
“That doesn’t stop me from being polite, does it? Or would you prefer I just act like there ain’t no door here and walk in and out whenever I feel like? Huh? Huh?”
“Blow it out your ear, Peter.”
He sat down. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Is that like asking if I mind your coming in?”
“You just don’t appreciate good manners. Speaking of blowing, mind if I smoke?”
“Are you telling me I have a choice?”
“You have a choice.”
“Go ahead, light up.” I stood and raised the window as high as it would go.
“You make a guy feel real welcome.” Peter sucked his cigarette into life.
I sat down on the bed, but didn’t lean against the wall, as was my habit. I could tell he had something to say.
“I spoke to Cheryl,” he said.
“I’m glad. I mean it would be tragic if there weren’t a verbal component to your relationship.”
“Turns out she’s done with modeling for Len.”
“I’ll be happy when my own stint is over.”
“You know, I think she is, too, but she won’t ‘fess up. She went back to look at the painting she modeled for and to pick up the check.”
“That’s a point. I’m not getting paid. I guess I’m doing it as a favor to Amanda.”
He made his sucking sound with the cigarette. “So while she was there, she saw the painting Len’s doing of you.”
“Can’t be too abstract.”
“You’re recognizable.”
“Don’t make that sound like such an atrocity.”
“She noticed your eyes are closed in the painting.”
“They are?” I thought back to my session with Len. “Funny. The one time I worried my eyes were doing something strange, they’d sort of wandered off to a corner of the room. Most of the time I was looking right at him.”
Sucking sound. “Terry, he’s painting you as a blind guy.”
5
Cheryl stopped by the next day before Peter returned. I’d been reading over some notes in the armchair and resumed after letting her in. She took the chair at Peter’s desk.
“How are you?” she said. “Oh, don’t let me interrupt. I see you’re busy.”
I looked up. “Cheryl, I’m glad you told Peter about the painting Len’s doing of me. Could we talk about it some time?”
“I don’t know what there is to add, but sure.” We agreed to meet the next afternoon at the library steps. “I’m putting it in my date book,” she said.
The front door opened and Peter walked in, saying with histrionic suspicion, “Well, well.”
Languidly, Cheryl said “Hi, Peter.”
As I approached the library on Saturday afternoon, Cheryl was waiting halfway up the steps, not knowing if I’d be coming from inside or out. Calling to me, she descended to the sidewalk, and I took the arm of the woman I couldn’t help but think of as an extension of Peter.
We walked to the ridge overlooking the fields. On this side of the hill, narrow stone steps had been cut into the slope, and there was a landing every fifteen steps or so where ledges made solid seats. At the second landing, she suggested we sit down. She had a view over the fields and back up toward the college’s southern buildings. The wind gusting through the trees gave me a feel for the expanse of landscape. Had Amanda known how much I visualized my surroundings, she might have been less worried about discussing Breughel with me.
“I think the place to begin,” I said, “is by telling me about the painting.”
“Well,” she said to the woods in the distance, then stopped. In that one syllable I heard her reluctance to say something difficult to someone she hardly knew.
“Well,” she repeated, “There’s a feeling of red in the top half of the canvas and more shadow in the lower half. He’s caught the shape of your face, and there are hints of what he’ll do with your hair and mouth, but he was clearly concentrating on your eyelids and brows and the bridge of your nose.”
“And my eyes are closed.” Slumped forward, hand supporting chin, I surrendered with a shiver to the chill in the air. Had my mother been here, she’d be correcting my posture.
“Do you mind my asking what upsets you about that?” she said. “I mean I guess it’s obvious, but maybe it isn’t.”
I straightened my back. “I suppose I thought he was painting me for myself.”
“And what would that be, do you think?”
“I know lots of things I’m not – scientist, athlete, party organizer.”
“How about poet?”
“Much too grand,” I said, though it brought a telltale smile to my face. “How about a work in progress?”
“If Len got to the truth of who you are, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“But why paint my eyes closed? It must be how he sees me.”
“One way he sees you.”
“But the way he chose to represent me.”
“And that upsets you because?”
I recalled a moment from the time when my vision was fading. I’d closed my eyes, held a leaf and traced its moist undulations with a fingertip. Then I’d opened my eyes and observed the even tinier striations and gradations of green. Sight discerned the millimeters that touch glided over. Did it mean those features of mine that Len had dabbed on his canvas were truer than those I knew?
There was a poem here, if I were capable of writing it: The window on the soul gone blank, lights out, curtains drawn. I could work in Aristotle’s aphorism that the soul never thinks without a picture. Was vision essential to humanness, the poem would ask. I’d say no, and the sentiment would be genuine. But there on the hillside, making wild surmises about Len’s painting, I felt marginalized in a world where a single picture speaks a thousand words.
I’d been dishonest with myself. Len hardly knew me. I offered only one subject for him. The shut eyes confirmed it.
I burst out, “You know what, Cheryl. It wouldn’t matter what else he does with the portrait. What I already know about it obliterates everything I want to be.”
“What do you mean, Terry?” She sounded frightened.
“I mean that if Len paints me as blind, that’s all I’ll be. I’ll cease to be a poet, or student, or whatever else there might be in me.”
“I think I understand.”
Quiet fell between us.
“Okay,” I announced, “enough on the painting.” I racked my brains for something else to talk about, but my mind was a wall.
She said, “Shall we head back?”
Nodding, I rose stiffly from the cold stone ledge.
6
When I arrived at Len’s studio first thing Monday morning, he greeted me cordially. I leaned an elbow on the counter near the room’s exit for support and the option for a fast escape.
“Come around and take a seat,” he said, dragging a chair across the wood floor toward me. We sat down facing each other.
“The painting you’re doing of me,” I started.
“Yes?”
“I understand you’re showing me with my eyes closed.”
“Ah, Cheryl.” He spoke down, as if to himself. Then he looked back up at me. “Does that upset you?”
He knew it did. Why else would I bring it up? “I thought from Amanda that your interest had to do with what you saw as my expressiveness.”
“It does.”
My mind clamped shut. I recognized the trap I’d set for myself. Expressiveness and blindness weren’t incompatible.
He sat silent, clearly waiting for my next move. He no doubt guessed the cause of my concern, but he wasn’t going to say it for me.
“I didn’t realize you were going to paint me as someone blind.”
Finally, the accusation was out.
“I could tell you, Terry, that I’m not painting you as blind.”
“Despite my eyes being closed.” I stared, eyes open, at him.
“But as a young man in repose,” he finished.
“A young man in repose doesn’t display expression.”
“I said I could tell you that, but I didn’t. To be honest, I’m not sure where the painting’s going. You suggest certain images to me and, because of the kind of painter I am, certain ideas.”
“One of which is blindness,” I said.
“One of which is, yes, blindness.”
In my intentness, I’d been sitting forward. But after his admission, I leaned back, exhaling long and hard.
“May I ask why that upsets you?” he said, echoing Cheryl. But now I felt under attack.
“Because,” I said, “blindness is so sensational, that’s all people will see.”
“See blindness,” he mused. “Maybe that’s the point. Telling people not to look away from blindness. Not to treat it as something secret and shameful, like a scar or a family tragedy.”
He had a point. Blind people had been hidden away since time immemorial, even abandoned outside the city walls to die from exposure.
“That’s your intention?” I said, with a belligerence I hadn’t intended.
“I’m thinking aloud. Although I’m a painter with ideas, a painting can’t be just an idea. It’s not a static thing. A good painting keeps moving in the viewer’s mind.”
“I get that. But Len,” I went on, leaning forward again, “can’t you understand? I’m the only blind student — only blind anyone — at this college. A picture of me with my eyes closed will forever mark me as the epitome of blindness. Years from now, my classmates will see my photograph in a newspaper, and their first thought will be, oh yeah, the blind guy.”
“You’re planning on being famous?” he said. “There’s every reason to think you will be.”
“I was giving an example. More likely they’ll see me waiting to board a bus.”
“Let me put this to you,” he said. “Cheryl is that rare woman, a true blonde. Everyone is drawn to her hair. Does that mean that’s all she is?”
“That’s my fear; that for all the talk around here about the life of the mind, we’re Pavlovian dogs before images.”
“You’re a freshman, aren’t you?”
“Young, as Amanda keeps telling me. What’s that got to do with it?”
“What you’re saying — ” He cut himself short. Then he said, “Terry, what you’re doing is reducing human relationships to the bare-bones physical, which is what you’re accusing me of doing, isn’t it?”
He had me. I valued the life of the mind. I believed image wasn’t everything. Even so, I wanted to protect mine. I could live with the contradiction.
“Terry,” he said, “you’re telling me you want me to stop. That’s it, right? You feel I misrepresented what I planned to do.”
He was asking too many questions. It allowed me to latch on to the easy one. “I’m not saying you misrepresented.”
“Amanda told you I saw you as expressive. You made certain assumptions from that.”
He sighed loudly, stood up and walked to the back of the studio. “I’ll tear it up as soon as you leave.”
I sat speechless. I wanted to tell him not to destroy it, but hadn’t that been my objective, even if I hadn’t put it in words to myself? Okay then, I should thank him. But I was overwhelmed.
I stood, located the counter and, following it around to the corridor, said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
7
By prearrangement I met Peter at the cafeteria. He got coffee for us and chose a table out of hearing range from the other morning-subdued students.
I owned up to my misgivings. “When Cheryl posed for him, it was guaranteed he’d paint her breasts. If I’d had antennae coming out of my head, you know he would have worked them in.”
“You don’t go around with your eyes closed. It’s not who you are.”
I gulped coffee and crashed the cup onto the saucer. “Okay, so that’s what this is all about. It still sucks.”
We parted outside the cafeteria, Peter for class and me for the dorm. As I walked, the texture of the brilliant sun, the aromas of grass, stone and earth and intermittent breeze made a layered landscape for my mind’s opposing factions. I’d told Amanda I’d like to make this place my own, but would I really? I knew nothing about managing property. It would fall into ruin. Except as I’d also said, few things are all or nothing. I might not do it perfectly, but ruin wasn’t the only possible outcome.
At least I hadn’t rolled over and died before Len. I’d taken a stand. It had gone badly, but maybe the next time I asserted myself, I’d do better.
The phone was ringing as I unlocked the door to our suite. It was Amanda.
“I’m going away for a week, maybe longer,” she said. “I think you should find a replacement. I am sorry about this short notice. It’s a family emergency.”
Standing at Peter’s desk, where we kept the phone, I struggled for words to induce her to stay. In the end, I said, “I hope it isn’t too serious.”
“I just hope you find someone better.”