The Painter: A Novel Read Free

real adobe bricks by a poet no less—a good one named Pete Doerr, I read his stuff—who had to go back East because his sister contracted cerebral palsy. Wait, I don’t think you contract that. She contracted something that as he described it to me halted her gait, confined her to a wheelchair and turned her into a Christian fundamentalist, which he said is like watching someone turn into an idiot before your eyes. I laughed so hard and liked the guy so much I bought the house without negotiating. Plus, he said I could have the books, which I appreciated. For a poet to do that. I asked him if he was going into this deal of sound mind, giving away his books and all. He laughed loud and long. I really liked this guy. He said Yes, I just don’t have the time or the energy or the money to box them up and send them. I offered. Nah, keep ’em, he said. Maybe one day I’ll come out and pick a few favorites and we can drink a bourbon together. Do, I said. I really wish you do, and I meant it. Thirty months of sobriety or not.
    He was big into Pablo Neruda and Rilke. I read some of them. Seemed like very different guys, to me, what do I know. Neruda making little doves out of his lover’s hands and wheat fields out of her stomach and stretching out like a root in the dark, he made me horny he really did. Made me want to find a Latin lover, Spanish or Chilean, not too young, one with hips and eyelashes and a voice like dusk rubbing over a calm water. Read enough Neruda you can’t stop.
    Rilke on the other hand did not make me horny at all. He walked around like a man who had been skinned alive, didn’t know what to do with all those acute impressions and so made his poems. I can see why Pete Doerr was fascinated by him. I mean Rilke wrote the
Duino Elegies
in three weeks in the so named castle. I paint fast, but not that fast. Anyway, I admired Rilke as I read him and loved some of his poems, especially the part in the
Elegies
where he talks about animals, and the one poem about the panther in the cage which has to just slay you:
    As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
    the movement of his powerful soft strides is
    like a ritual dance around a center
    in which a mighty will stands paralyzed …

    The cell phone rings. The house has no phone line, it’s off the grid, all the electricity comes from four solar panels on a pole off the northeast corner. Doerr was probably some sort of an environmentalist with this solar power, the woodstove, these thick dirt walls that absorb the sun coming in from the big plate windows on the south side. No phone, no grid, a little propane, the poet was an idealist and an environmentalist and so probably mostly miserable.
    The phone rings. It’s Steve. He’s my dealer in Santa Fe. Has been for almost twenty years. The Stephen Lily Gallery. Very high end.
    “How’s my clean and sober genius?”
    I wince. How does a guy who has known me for twenty years talk to me like this? Hmp. Maybe exactly because he has known me that long, I think.
    “You are, aren’t you?” Edge of anxiety.
    That’s his big sweat. I am one of his top earners. The gambling addiction, the costly divorces, these things he can absorb with epic calm, without even a little pit stain on his immaculately pressed madras shirt. Those times, the chaos, they actually serve him because when I get hard up and desperate I paint faster. But when I binge, forget it. He might not see a canvas for three months. That makes him nervous. I suspect he has payments on things even his wife doesn’t know about.
    “Huh?” I say. All muffled and growly. “Who the fuck’s jis?” I slur it.
    I can almost hear the sharp intake of breath.
    “Jim? Jim?”
    Poor bastard. I relent.
    “Oh, Steve, it’s you. Christ. I thought it was the collection agency.”
    His relief is a cool wind through the airwaves. “You’re not in trouble with the car payments?” he says hopefully. “Or the rent?” His good cheer is truly obnoxious. How