Cézanne, by the way, has always been a bone of contention between Perry and me, though the marrow should have been well sucked out of it by now. Perry thinks the master of Aix unsurpassed, I suspect for all the wrong reasons, while I have always resented him. I see the greatness, it’s just that I don’t like the things it produced. I confess I’m quietly at one with the old codger in certain matters, such as his insistence that emotion and what-have-you cannot be expressed directly in the work but must exude, like a fragrance, from form at its purest. I’m certainly with him there — see my own things, seriatim, through the years. They called me cold because they were too dense to feel the heat.
When we got to the house Perry dropped his leather flying helmet on the hall table, where it subsided slowly like a deflating football, draped his airman’s overalls on the back of a chair, and retired for a lengthy session to the downstairs lavatory, from which there issued upon the air a pulsating, spicy stink that would take a good quarter of an hour to disperse. Then, lightened and refreshed, he came bustling into the kitchen, where Gloria was preparing the pot of herbal tea he had ordered. He drew forwards a chair and sat as close up to the stove as he could get, rubbing together his little neat white hands. “I’m so cold,” he said. “My blood is thin. I’ve started taking regular transfusions, did I tell you? There’s a place in Chur I go to.”
Gloria, pouring water into the teapot, laughed. “Oh, Perry,” she cried delightedly, “you’ve become a vampire!”
“Very amusing,” Perry said stiffly.
Over his tisane he talked of this and that, who was selling, who was buying, how the market was behaving; to my ear, he might have been gossiping of the latest dealings on the Rialto, or assessing the state of the silk trade in Old Cathay. At one point in the tittle-tattle he paused and looked at me sternly. “The world is waiting on you, Oliver,” he said, wagging a finger.
Was it? Well, it could wait.
Gloria made an omelette, discarding the yolk of the eggs, at Perry’s behest, and using only the whites. It was his latest fad to eat only colourless foods, chicken breast, sliced pan, milk puddings, suchlike. Nor would he drink anything other than tea. He really is a wonderful type, as he would say, with a click of the tongue and a smacking of the lips, in the Frenchified manner that he affects. He is for me, now, the very breath of a lost, a relinquished, world, a place distant and quaint, like the background of a Fragonard, or one of Vaublin’s dusky dreamscapes, a place I know well but happily know I shall never return to.
“And how goes the work?” he asked, getting down to business. He was seated at the head of the table with a napkin tucked into the collar of his exquisite, iridescent, dragonfly-blue shirt. He looked at my blank face and sighed. “I presume you are about the making of some grand new masterpiece, hence the long silence.” That’s how he speaks, really, it is. “This is the reason I’m here, after all, to view the state of the edifice.”
Crumbling at the base, Perry, crumbling at the base.
“Olly is still on his sabbatical from work,” Gloria said. “From life, too.”
I threw her an injured look, but wasn’t she right, about me and life and the living of it? The truth is, I think, I never started to live in the first place. Always I was about to begin. As a child I said that when I grew up, that would be life. Next it was the death of my parents I secretly looked forward to, thinking it must be the birth of me, a delivery into my true state of selfhood. After that it was love, love would surely do the trick, when a woman, any woman, would come along and make a man of me. Or success, riches, bags of banknotes, the world’s acclaim, all these would be ways of living, of being vividly alive, at last. And so I waited, year on year, stage after stage, for the great drama to commence. Then the day came when I knew the day wouldn’t come, and I gave up waiting.
Just remembered: last night that dream again, of me as a giant snake trying to swallow the world and choking on it. What can it mean? As if I didn’t know. Always the disingenuous pose.
Perry glanced at his watch again, and frowned: France awaited, France and his dining companion too important to name.
After lunch we walked together to the studio. He had not been there before, I had made sure to keep him away. Why did I bring him now — what was there for me to show him, except elaborate failures? I had to lend him an overcoat, comically too long for his little arms. The rain had stopped and the sky was overcast and the streets had a watery sheen. Perry, his hands lost in the sleeves of my coat, cast a deprecating eye about him, taking in again the paltry scene. The houses and the shops, the very streets themselves, seemed to flinch before him. “You know what a fool you’re making of yourself,” he said, “don’t you, skulking in this ridiculous place and pretending you can’t paint?”
Skulk: that foxy word again. I answered nothing — what should I say?
When we got to the studio he flopped into a corner of the lovelorn sofa, complaining anew of the cold.
“Well, show me something,” he said crossly.
“No,” I said, “I won’t.”
He bent on me an injured glance. “After I flew all this way?”
I said I hadn’t asked him to come.
He got up moodily and began poking about the room. I watched as he made for the canvases standing against the wall. I could swear his little bloodless nose was twitching. The manner he adopts towards his trade is a calculated mixture of disdain and long-suffering impatience. On everything offered to his regard, everything, he turns at first a jaded eye, as if to say, Oh, what further dreary piece of trumpery is this? He doesn’t fool me: he’s ever on the lookout for something to hawk. Now he picked up that big unfinished thing, my last effort before lapsing into silence — this is silence? you ask — and held it up before him, drawing his head back and grimacing as at a bad smell. “Hmm,” he said, “this is new.”
“On the contrary.”
“I meant, it’s a new departure.”
“It’s not. It’s the end of the line.”
“Don’t be absurd.” He carried the canvas into the full fall of light from the window. “Are you going to finish it?” On the contrary, I said, it had finished me. He wasn’t listening. “Anyway,” with a sniff, “I can sell it as it is.”
I leaped from the sofa and ran at him across the room, but he saw me coming and whisked the canvas aside, pouting back at me over his shoulder. I made a grab, he trotted out of my reach; I reached further, caught him. There followed an unseemly tussle, with a lot of heavy breathing and muffled grunts. At length he had to concede. I snatched the canvas from him and raised it high above my head, meaning to smash it down on something. However, as anyone who has ever tried to hang a picture will know, they are damnably unwieldy things, big and flat and frail as they are, and I had to content myself by flinging it from me into a corner, where it landed with a satisfying clatter and crunch, like the sound of bones breaking.
“For God’s sake!” Perry, panting, cried. “Have you gone mad?”
I am thinking yet again of that dream, the world lodged in my gullet. They say a baby screaming for its bottle would destroy all creation if it could. My picture was smashed. What was I now, maker or breaker? And did I care?