Chapter 22
Asher got up and walked to one of the front rooms that served as his office.
He closed the door behind him. Theo put down his coffee cup, rose from his chair, and stood hesitantly for several seconds, uncertain of which stack or corner to visit first. Street sounds, muffled in the distance, reminded him there was life outside the sanctum of the studio.
But he was heedless of it all as he returned to the front hallway and began his tour of Asher’s world.
An array of framed items, displayed higgledy-piggledy, filled the left wall, floor to ceiling: a feather, a page torn from a book with the word “dulcet” circled, small framed pieces by artists named Sutphin and Lanier, various certificates from art organizations and civic groups, and a child’s stick figure with the words “you are my best Dabby in the werl.”
Theo turned to look at the opposite wall. Only a few items hung there, all of them precisely arranged.
One of those items, displayed at eye level, was an oil painting, two feet square, of a lone tree in a field. It seemed to be more a study than a finished work.
The colors and foliage in the painting indicated a spring day.
A splash of crimson was on the ground. A blanket?
In the field, slightly right of center, was what appeared to be an artist’s easel.
Behind the easel stood a barely visible figure, presumably a woman.
Only the arms and legs could be seen. At the bottom of the canvas were the words, written in freehand, “Me, painting you, painting.”
Judging from the frame, and the slight yellowing at the edges of the canvas, the piece was old.
That painting was surrounded by four handwritten letters in separate frames.
They came from four different writers, on stationery of various sizes and tones.
Each was addressed to Asher who, judging by the dates of the letters, must have been a young boy when they were sent to him.
They all acknowledged Asher’s hope of being an artist someday.
One was from his grandfather. The others were from artists — renowned artists — prosperous enough to have engraved stationery with letterhead, office addresses, and gallery listings.
Theo knew the names on the letters; even people unfamiliar with the art world would have known them.
As he read what they had written to the young Asher, he was impressed by the warmth of their tone.
Theo’s own experience with artists had led him to the unflattering belief that they were often detached and impersonal, sometimes pompous and self-important.
These letters were an argument to the contrary.
They used words that a child could understand.
They were short, the longest just a couple of paragraphs.
At the bottom of one, the writer had drawn a small bird and a lightning bolt.
Theo continued down the hall. A dozen, twenty, fifty objects begged for his attention. He hoped that, in time, he might be granted an unhurried opportunity to revisit the studio and study all that was there.
The drawing that captured Theo’s attention, the one nearest him, was a pencil rendering of a female figure, waist up, bare except for a scarf that covered one shoulder.
Her face and eyes were turned slightly upward.
There was a dreaminess about her countenance.
Each feature — the unbrushed hair, the half-open eyes, the prominent cheekbone, the porcelain lips and tapered chin, the curved neck, the lift of her breast and torso, the veined hands and delicate fingers — was an intricate matrix of lines, some razor thin, some bold, all delicate, and all as sensual as the Song of Solomon.
Together, the features and line strokes created a technically precise, ethereal composition.
The beauty of human flesh, “fearfully and wonderfully made,” radiated from the frame.
The drawing was done on gray bristol board, paired perfectly with a wide ebony frame.
The frame.
How is it, Theo wondered, that a piece of paper — a letter, a photo, a ticket stub, a sketch, a painting — is suddenly transformed by placing it in four bits of wood beneath a pane of glass?
What does it mean that we place permanent boundaries around transient moments?
What does it say of humankind that we take such trouble to freeze specific memories, that we devote such energy to capturing and preserving the “minute particulars” of our lives?
Theo could hear Asher’s muffled voice behind the closed door of the office, but he paid it no mind.
He was immersed in all that was before him.
He intended to move along, to see Asher’s other works, but he remained at the drawing of the woman, obedient to his conviction that it was better to see one thing well than many poorly.
He became conscious of a sound down the hall — a chair sliding on the floor — and could tell from the intonation of Asher’s voice that the phone call was winding down. Moments later, the office door opened.
“Theo, I’m sorry that took so long.”
“Oh, I could not have been more pleased. I feel like I’m swimming in an ocean of stories, even if I don’t know what they are.” He nodded at the feather, the page with the single word circled, and the others.
Asher chuckled. “Well, you’re right; they all do have a story, even if I’m the only one interested in them.”
Theo said, “Ah, my guess is that many would be interested. The mind of the artist is a place of fascination to most of us, you know. All that mystique and all those visions. But maybe some of the stories are best kept in the vault of secrets, yes?”
Theo knew that vault well.
“Sometimes I wonder about all that talk about mystique,” Asher replied.
“The artistic temperament and such. I mean, I know there’s such a thing, but if an artist has a family, he learns that art has to wait its turn sometimes.
Housework and skinned knees and soccer games do wonders for keeping one’s feet on the ground around here.
There’s not much mystique to being a member of a family. ”
Asher chuckled. “But I do have to admit, mystique, even if it’s a pretense, can be helpful for business, can’t it?
I think sometimes that serious art buyers aren’t very interested in paintings by someone as ordinary and unmysterious as me.
Maybe if I were a little more brooding, buyers would take my art more seriously. ”
Theo grinned. In such a short time, the elderly man and the young artist were talking like old friends. They remained standing in the entrance hallway.
“I don’t mean to be impolite,” the gentleness of Theo’s voice dispelled any chance of that possibility, “but would you tell me about these?”
He nodded and gestured toward the painting of the lone tree in the field and the four framed letters.
Asher nodded. “I’ll try. The letters are easy.
When I was a little boy, I told my mom I wanted to be an artist. Somehow, she got the addresses of these famous guys and helped me write letters to them.
I can’t imagine what I said, but those three responded.
The fourth is from her father, my granddad.
He didn’t give much credence to the notion of artistic temperament and could be pretty hard on my mother at times, but he was really nice in his letter to me.
“My hunch is that she wrote cover letters and put them in with mine.
She was a great encourager. I think every obscure artist, which is most of us, needs at least one of those.
Anyway, she had these letters framed for me when I graduated from art school.
It feels a bit like name dropping to have them here, but, really, they say more about her than about the artists who wrote them.
“I had the idea once that, if I ever made a mark in the art world, I’d write those guys to tell them how their letters helped me. I’m not even sure they’re alive anymore, and I surely haven’t made a mark in the art world.”
“Asher, I’m sure they would be very pleased with what you’ve accomplished.”
“Thank you for saying so.”
Theo pointed to the painting. “And the tree in the field?”
“Yeah, that one is a bit of a mystery. It was one of Mom’s favorites, but she would never tell me much about it. You see the inscription here? ‘Me, painting you, painting’? I don’t know who the ‘me’ or the ‘you’ are, but it’s nicely done, don’t you think?”
Theo nodded. “It is. Do you think she might be the girl at the easel?”
“Funny you should say so. That’s my theory, but whenever I asked her about it, she just laughed and said she would neither admit nor deny the allegation.
Once when I asked her, she pulled her dress above her knees and said, ‘Do these legs look like those?’ So who knows?
It was certainly like her to stand in a field painting.
I just don’t know the when or where or why of this one.
The two men stood for a matter of seconds studying the small painting.
“How about another cup of coffee?”
They returned to their chairs and, for the next couple of hours, shared a sprawling, meandering conversation, in which a random word or phrase would trigger another story and another, ad infinitum.
Theo offered more than once to leave so that Asher could work, but the artist asserted his independence, claiming that, as his own boss, he could work whenever he wanted.
“This conversation is my work today,” he said.
As part of that work, Asher tried to learn details of Theo’s life.
But, just as Shep and Tony and Minnette had discovered, the old man proved to be an artful dodger.
It was Theo who continued to ask most of the questions, and it was the young artist who was somehow lured into giving long, revealing answers.
For instance, “Asher, how did you settle on portraits as a specialty?”
Asher nodded. “Well, I had just gotten out of school; undergrad, master’s, doctorate. I had lots of education, but I didn’t have any customers.