Before the Fall(58)
“What practical value could my paintings have, in your mind?” he asks.
He truly wants to know, as a man who has spent (wasted?) twenty-five years smudging color on canvas, ignored by the world, chasing windmills. A man who has resigned himself to impracticality and irrelevance.
“It’s not what they are,” says O’Brien. “It’s what they’re about.”
“Disaster paintings,” says Hex. “That’s from your agent. Pictures of car wrecks and train crashes.”
“Which,” says O’Brien, “putting aside the intrinsic f*cked-upness of that as an art form, is interesting to us on a procedural level. As in, maybe you got tired of looking for disaster to paint, decided to cause your own.”
Scott looks at them with interest. What fascinating brains these men have, creating plots and deception from whole cloth. His eyes move to Gus, who is pinching the bridge of his nose as if in great pain.
“How would that work?” Scott asks. “On a practical level. A penniless painter with a three-legged dog. A man who spends his days chasing something he can’t define. A story with no verbs. How does this man—I don’t even know how to put it—turn?”
“It happens all the time,” says O’Brien. “Small men in small rooms thinking big thoughts. They start thinking things, going to gun shows, looking up fertilizer bombs online.”
“I don’t go online.”
“The physical f*cking library then. Notice me, is the point. Revenge.”
“On who, for what?”
“Anyone. Everyone. Their mothers, God. The kid who buggered them in gym class.”
“In the actual class?” says Scott. “In front of everybody?”
“See now you’re joking, but I’m being serious.”
“No. It’s interesting to me is all,” says Scott. “How your mind works. Like I said, I walk on the beach. I sit in coffee shops and stare into my cup. I think about image, about color and mixing media. This is new to me, this kind of television projection.”
“Why do you paint what you paint?” asks Gus quietly.
“Well,” says Scott, “I mean, I’m not sure really. I used to do landscapes and then I just started putting things in them. I guess I’m trying to understand the world. I mean, when you’re young you expect your life to go well, or at least you accept that that’s possible. That life can be navigated. If you choose a path, or even if you don’t, because how many people do you know who end up on top by accident? They fall into something. But what I fell into was bourbon and my own *.”
“I’m falling asleep over here,” says O’Brien.
Scott continues because Gus asked, and, because he asked, Scott assumes he actually wants to know.
“People get up in the morning and they think it’s another day. They make plans. They move in a chosen direction. But it’s not another day. It’s the day their train derails or a tornado touches down or the ferry sinks.”
“Or a plane crashes.”
“Yes. It’s both real, and—to me—a metaphor. Or it was—ten days ago. Back when I thought painting a plane crash was just a clever way to hide the fact that I’d ruined my life.”
“So you did paint a plane crash,” says Hex.
“We’re gonna wanna see that,” says O’Brien.
Through the window, Scott watches the men drop their cigarette butts in the mud and grab their shovels. He thinks about Sarah Kipling, who humored him on a sunny day in August, a weak handshake, a perfunctory smile. Why is she in the ground and not him? He thinks of Maggie, of her daughter, nine years old. They’re both at the bottom of the ocean somewhere and he is here, breathing, having a conversation about art that is really a conversation about death.
“Come by anytime,” he tells them. “The paintings are there. All you have to do is turn on the lights.”
*
He has the cab drop him at Penn Station, figuring that with all the press at the funeral someone will have followed the cab, and as he pushes through the doors he sees a green SUV pull up to the curb and a man in a denim jacket jump out. Scott moves quickly to the subway, descending to the downtown number 3 train platform. Then he doubles back and makes his way to the uptown platform. As he does he sees his pursuer in the denim jacket appear on the downtown side. He has a camera out and as the uptown train sharks in, the man sees Scott and raises his camera to get a shot. Scott turns on his heels as the train screeches past him, obscuring his face. He hears the sluice of air and the subway ding and backs through the doors. He sits, holding his hand in front of his face. As the doors close he peers through his open fingers, and as the train pulls out he catches a glimpse of denim on the far track, camera still raised, praying for a shot.
Scott rides uptown three stops, then gets out and takes the bus going downtown. He is in a new world now, collision city, filled with suspicion and distrust. There is no room for abstract thought here, no room to ruminate on the nature of things. This is the other thing that died in the turbulent Atlantic. To be an artist is to live at once in the world and apart from it. Where an engineer sees form and function, an artist sees meaning. A toaster, to the engineer, is an array of mechanical and electrical components that work together to apply heat to bread, creating toast. To the artist, a toaster is everything else. It is a comfort creation machine, one of many mechanical boxes in a dwelling that create the illusion of home. Anthropomorphized, it is a hang-jawed man who never tires of eating. Open his mouth and put in the bread. But poor Mr. Toaster Oven. He’s a man who, no matter how much he eats, is never truly fed.