Seeing Redd

PART TWO CHAPTER 16

Montmartre, Paris. June, 1873

T HE PAINTER awoke from a fitful sleep, his nightmares cut short by the cries of his newborn son, who seemed to be suffering unquiet dreams of his own. Outside, rain thrashed the streets and lightning split the sky. The painter’s wife complainingly went to check on the baby, and the painter himself stared out the window at the few pedestrians making their way through the downpour; with their shoulders hunched and their heads bowed, they looked-to his trained eye-furtive and morose, people bent on illicit errands.

“What are you gawking at?”

His wife was standing at the door of their room with the whimpering baby in her arms. If he’d had any doubt before, he had none now: Her mood was as foul as the weather. What did he propose to do about

the landscape he’d been commissioned to paint with a storm raging the way it was, she wanted to know. How was she supposed to pay for the milk and butter they needed? No wonder the child was bawling all the time with such a useless thing for a father!

To get away from her, the painter locked himself in his studio, where he sat sulking and blinking at his blank canvas. But after what felt like an endless morning, the weather broke: The sky was overcast, the sodden streets blanched by a flat, pallid light.

“It will have to do.”

He packed up his box of paints and brushes and, with a folded easel under his arm, escaped into the streets. The gutters were choked with mud and litter. The rumble of carriages attacked his ears like the roaring of giant beasts, and the faces of those he passed, peering out sullenly from between lowered hat brims and upturned collars, seemed marred by unfriendliness if not outright hostility.

In the Jardin des Tuileries, he placed his easel next to an oval pond, with a view across its surface to a stand of chestnut trees. Normally a quick painter who finished canvases in a matter of hours, this one gave him trouble for some reason. He tried to empty his mind, to forget the morning’s fret and lose himself in the ecstasy of creation. But when he put away his brushes at the end of the afternoon, his canvas boasted little more than the clouds of color that comprised his background tones, in the middle of which he was surprised to see daubs of black paint.

“Let’s have a look at what you’ve done,” his wife commanded when he returned to the apartment. She reached for the canvas. Her lips pursed in perplexity, her brow collapsed. The baby, whom she held absently in one arm, began to cry. “What are these?” She pointed to the spots of black paint.

“I will correct them tomorrow,” he said.

“You’d better or you won’t get paid, and then where will we be?”

The next day’s painting went much like the first. He struggled to tap the vein of inspiration, to let himself become hypnotized by the wonder of nature, the rhythmic dipping of his brush in oils and the feel of its bristles on canvas. When he packed up his supplies in the late afternoon, he was stunned to see, amid the rough contours of pond and trees he had produced with hours of effort, that not only were the daubs of black paint still there, they were larger and more detailed-not daubs at all but the crude beginnings of human figures walking over the pond’s surface toward…him. Nor were they strictly black in color. One of the figures had taken on a decisively reddish hue.

He covered the painting with his jacket to avoid looking at it and, full of a foreboding he couldn’t explain, started the walk home, passing squalid brasseries and dingy apartment houses he had never noticed before. His usual route was blocked off, clogged with onlookers of some police activity-the crowd so greedy for a glimpse of others’ misfortune that he became frightened and turned off into the nearest lane. He took an unfamiliar course home and was hiding in his studio when his wife burst in.

“I want to see it,” she said.

“I don’t…It’s not…” he stammered.

She noticed his jacket hanging over the easel. “Is that it?” “No.”

She stepped to the easel before he could stop her, yanked the jacket off and-

“You said you were going to fix them!” she protested when she saw the strange figures. “Do you want your son to starve? Are you trying to kill us through hardship?”

After three full days in the Tuileries, there was hardly any landscape to speak of; the pond, the chestnut trees-the painter had buried all beneath streaks and daubs of paint that formed the two figures who had so hijacked his imagination. The palette he had used to render them was more primary than usual-consisting of heavy reds, blacks, and browns-but, as in all his paintings, the hard lines of the figures were blurred to suggest the constant movement of things. One of the figures wasn’t human but a broad-chested creature with overmuscled arms and legs and, where its hands should have been, thick paws with claws as glittering and long as polished carving knives. What’s more, it had the face of a cat, complete with whiskers and a menacing set of fangs. The other figure was probably a woman, though nothing about the thick bramble of red hair or the sneerful face with its wrinkles of disgust and eyes steeled with condescension suggested femininity. No, it was the couture that made the painter think the figure was a woman-a dress made entirely of thorny roses and their long, twisting vines. The blooms on several of the roses faced him, their innermost petals baring teeth like eager mouths hungry for a bite of…he didn’t like to guess.

In his studio, hiding from his wife, he threw the painting on the fire. The haunting figures were gone, cinders and ash; burning them had been for the best. But by noon the following day, among the background tones that had been all he’d managed to set on canvas, were two black splotches of paint he didn’t remember making. He painted over them immediately. Paint a landscape, any landscape. But they were already back by the time he was packing up to go home: the humanoid feline and the cruel woman in her dress of roses, taking up his entire canvas.

His next attempt turned out exactly like the others. As did the one after that. He could paint nothing but the cat-beast and the snarling woman. Bitter and depressed, he welcomed his wife’s scoldings. He deserved them; he was a failure. He carried his failings to a nameless alley. He entered a nameless establishment where neither beauty nor virtue were to be found-just cheap wine, which he slung down his throat until he could see nothing clearly, until everything inside and outside his head was a tilting carousel, spinning around in a blear of colors and textures. He had to dull his senses, had to keep himself from envisioning the cat-beast and its female companion.

Somehow, in the early dawn, and despite lampposts frequently darting into his path, he made it back to his apartment. In the unlit studio, he couldn’t see his latest attempt at a landscape, but he sensed it-a large canvas as tall as himself covered with a bedsheet and leaning against a wall in the corner.

“What’s that?” he said aloud because he thought he’d heard…was that the sheet rustling? Did he hear breathing? Purring?

“Ngah!”

He gasped awake, still in his suit. He lit the lamp and gazed around, trying to focus his thoughts, to understand what had-

“My God!”

The studio door was in splinters. The sheet that had been covering his painting lay on the floor. He started to lift his glance. He didn’t want to look; he was afraid. But he had to: Slowly, he raised his eyes to what was left of the canvas, too horrified to cry out at what he saw. Where the cat-beast and woman

had been there was nothing, just a hole exactly the shape of their outlines, as if someone had cut them out of the picture or-

“Impossible,” the painter breathed.

Because things like that didn’t happen. A pair of painted figures escaping their canvas? It was a joke. Inanimate figures did not come to life as in some fairy tale. It was one thing for his paintings to suggest

vitality and life, but to have actually created them? With nothing more than brushes and oils? “It’s impossible! Impossible!” he kept repeating.

But if it was impossible, why did he have a dream-fuzzed memory of the ferocious woman and cat-beast standing over him as he curled in his cot, sleeping off his drunk, a memory in which he was both participant and observer?

“The only reason I don’t kill him,” he remembered the woman saying, her voice sounding like the scrape of iron against iron, a corrosion of vocal cords, “is because he’s not important enough.”