“Is it my breath?” I asked RuthClaire. “Too much garlic in the blintzes?”
“He’s shy, that’s all. His duty here is his life.”
“Shy, huh? How long had you and Adam known him before he began spilling his war and repo-man stories?”
“He wanted a job, Paul. He had to talk to get it. He doesn’t dislike you. He just feels uneasy about you, knowing you came to bolster the guard.”
Late one evening, then, after cleaning up after another midnight supper, I went to Bilker’s pantry to air the question man-to-man. The door to the pantry was ajar, revealing one wall of naked studs and a section of ceiling composed entirely of ancient tongue-and-groove slats. Tentatively, I rapped.
“What?” demanded Bilker Moody.
Beyond the pantry’s raised threshold, he sat on his rollaway bed with his Ruger trained on my abdomen. Recognizing me, he laid the pistol down. Disdainfully.
“Thought we could talk a minute,” I said.
The pantry contained a plywood counter upon which sat a sophisticated array of surveillance equipment, a hotplate, a General Electric coffee maker, a computer, and a small wire rack of paperback computer manuals and soft-core pornographic novels. A huge commercial calendar hung over the bed. Its pinup photograph was not of a bare-breasted nymphet but of a customized car with mud flaps and Gatling-gun exhausts. The company responsible for the calendar made socket wrenches.
Bilker Moody shook some cartridges into his palm from a box. He inspected each bullet tip in turn.
“I’ve been impressed with your performance around here,” I told him, hoping to disarm him with praise. He looked me full in the face, his expression grim. “Do I rub you the wrong way, Mr. Moody?”
“Ain’t no right way to rub me. Don’t like to be rubbed.”
“I’m not here to put your job in jeopardy. I’m glad you’re here. I only came because Adam wanted me to.”
“Why?”
The question surprised me. “As a kindness to RuthClaire, I guess.”
“If Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.”
That stopped me briefly. Then I said, “That’s what I tell myself when I’m feeling down: ‘Hey, Paul, if Adam likes you, you can’t be too big a turd.’ Cheers me right up.”
“Stay out of my way.”
“This time next week, I will have been gone three or four days.”
“I tell you that,” Bilker Moody said, unblinking, “’cause wherever I am, that’s where the heat’s gonna be. You come in, I go out. It’s for your own good.”
“That’s a little melodramatic, isn’t it?”
“You’re the joker got took for that joyride down in the Fork? The one got a cross burned on his lawn?”
“So you’re really expecting trouble?”
“I’m paid to expect it.”
“Then maybe I’d better leave you to your work.”
“’Night,” he said. “And on your way out—”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t let the doorknob ream you in the asshole.”
“Mr. Moody—”
“Call me Bilker.” His eyebrows lifted, maybe to suggest his vulgar parting shot had been intended companionably, maybe to stress the irony of inviting me to use his first name after firing that shot. He raised the Ruger and waved it at the door.
“Good night, Bilker. Really enjoyed our chat.”
The next morning, I told RuthClaire about this exchange, as nearly verbatim as I could make it. She said I’d made a skeptical convert of Bilker. The proof of his good opinion was that he never joked with incorrigible turds, only those who struck him as recyclable into relatively fragrant human beings. Thanks a lot, I said. But I settled for it. It was better than getting fragged in my sleep….
RuthClaire and Adam had a downstairs studio, once a living room and parlor. Previous occupants had knocked out the wall, though, and now you had elbow room galore down there. In this vast space were unused canvases, stretching frames, makeshift easels, and even a sheet of perforated beaverboard with pegs and braces for hanging art supplies and tools. Elsewhere, finished and half-finished paintings leaned against furniture, reposed in untidy stacks, or vied for attention on the only wall where the artists had thought enough of their work to display it as if in a gallery.
“No more plate paintings,” RuthClaire told me the night after my visit to Bilker. “I’m off in a new direction. Wanna see?”
Of course I did. RuthClaire led me to a stack of canvases near a table consisting of three sawhorses capped by a sheet of plywood. All the paintings were small, no larger than three feet by four, most only a foot or two on their longest sides. RuthClaire had painted them in drab washed-out acrylics. They weren’t quite abstract, but neither were they representational—an ambiguity they shared with Adam’s bigger, bolder canvases.
To me, in fact, RuthClaire’s new paintings looked like preliminaries for paintings she had not yet essayed in final form. That she considered them finished, and regarded them with undiluted enthusiasm, astonished me. I wondered what to say. M.-K. Kander’s photographs had at least given me the verbal ammunition of my outrage. Here, though, was little to comment on: murky beige or green backgrounds in which many anonymous shapes swam.
“Well?” Then, noting my hesitation, she said, “Come on. Your honest reaction, Paul—the only kind that’s worth a flip.”
“The honest reaction of a chef probably isn’t worth even that, Ruthie Cee.”
“Oh, come on. You’ve got good art sense.”
“Let me off the hook.”
“You don’t like them?”
“If I’d crayoned stuff like this in Mrs. Stanley’s fourth-grade class in Tocqueville, she’d have said I was wasting paper. That honest enough for you?”
As if I’d yanked an invisible bridle, my ex’s nostrils flared. But she recovered and asked me why Mrs. Stanley would have made such a harsh judgment.
“For muddying the colors.”
“The muddiness is deliberate, Paul.”
I said that, as a consequence, these paintings looked anemic, downright blah.
“That’s an unconsidered first impression.”
“I’ve been staring at them a good five minutes.”
“A gnat’s eyeblink. Maybe you should live with one a while. Pick out the one you hate the least—or hate the most, for that matter—and take it home with you.”
I sighed. RuthClaire’s pitiful acrylics belonged on a bonfire. Even Paleolithic cave art—the least rather than the most polished examples—outshone these hazy windows on my ex’s soul. In the nearly ten years I’d known her, I’d never seen her do less challenging or attractive work. It was hard to believe that living with one of these paintings would heighten my appreciation of it or any of the others.
She began to explain what she was up to: freeing the work of pretense. Bright colors had a primitive appeal that rarely engaged the intellect. She was after a subtler means of capturing her audience. Artists had to risk alienating their audience—not with violence, sacrilege, or pornography, but with the unfamiliar, the understated, and the ambiguous—in order to make their art new. Viewers with the patience and the openness to outwait their first negative reactions would see what she was trying to do.
“But what if the paintings are bad, kiddo—banal, lackluster, and ugly?”
“Then they’ll never enlighten you, no matter how long you hang around them. Eventually, your negative reactions will be vindicated.” Quickly, though, she hedged this point: “Or maybe you’re just color-blind or tone-deaf to the work’s real merit.”