CORNERED, PAINTING
When Gus knew he was dying, he and Clara had been living in a loft in the big city. They needed the space and the big windows were great for painting. No one cared that Clara was at her piano so much. But when the final diagnosis took away all doubt about his cancer, Gus wanted to be in a vast landscape but in a familiar safe place. He envisioned a small Western town, not real but built to be a set for movies. Before he could find such a place, he bought a pile of 8X10 canvasboards and began to paint small details of architecture, construction, and domesticity that he imagined in that town.
“Since I’m in a corner, I’ll paint,” he thought. Diagnosis with Stage 4 cancer is definitely being sat facing the corner with a very short line of sight. But since he was already a painter of Western subjects — that is, not European but the American West — he had the skills. It’s just that now he didn’t have the strength, at least not for the big easel paintings that brought in the money. There was plenty of that money — he and his wife Clara didn’t spend much — so he could paint what he wanted as long as he could.
Small towns in the American West sprang up whenever there was a bonanza of resources, maybe the obvious like coal or oil, gold or silver. Sometimes what was far more subtle until it was gone: water. Clean air. But he didn’t have the energy for major modern environmental issues, so he stuck to Victorian details of the imaginary town that was finally destroyed by the industrial revolution that made settlement possible, the railroads and the elimination of the bison herds, the thirst for resources and boomerism.
He and Clara didn’t talk much but each expressed their understanding of the felt meaning of life through their art and music, the humanities made possible by the dense population of the city, but also sometimes destroyed by materialism, the demand for entertainment, the feverish need to be the best, the most popular. The couple chose to be private, to live sparely but not ascetically because what they chose was carefully acquired and arranged.
Some of their things showed up in Gus’ paintings, a vase or a carpet. But mostly he was after the implied, the shadowy, the feeling that there was a person just out of sight but about to appear in the doorway. Perhaps it was not a person but Death itself, as so often personified. Not skulls and scythes but a sudden gust and then nothing.
Clara didn’t grieve but was completely present, facing whatever came alongside Gus, while knowing that when he was bodily gone, she would hold him inside her in far more than a sexual way. She’d always been a bit stoic except when at the keyboard when it was important to be passionate, but never out of control. It was a displacement that worked.
Gus didn’t just paint interiors like parlors with fireplaces and kitchens with pumps instead of taps. The bedrooms had the ornate brass bedsteads we see in movies. As well, he detailed the empty backsides of the main street buildings that only had enough wood to hold up the facades. Sometimes they looked geometrically logical and neat. Other times they were in twilight, black spectres, windows for ghosts to look out of, jagged propped angles that might collapse.
A few times he put Clara’s grand piano into a room with lace curtains and spread a Spanish shawl over the top of it. He tried several angles but never included the pianist. There were no people in his paintings of woodwork detail, door knockers made to look like woodpeckers, complex door locks and knobs, wallpaper of the time, carefully detailed. But also rooms in houses of the poor that were papered with newspapers that those who could read could enjoy. Rough wooden boxes were nailed to the walls to act as shelves and tin cups hung underneath.
No one ever saw these paintings, in spite of their color and feeling, their summoning up of the duality of domestic life whose luxury and comfort was also a vulnerability to disaster: fire, robbery, disease, floods. Insurance was just becoming common but there is no insurance for death, despite being purposely mis-named “Life Insurance.” When disaster struck, people simply began again.
Eventually their real estate broker did indeed find a movie set town for Westerns that suited Gus, though he died before he ever saw it. Part of Clara taking him into her self was accepting the ownership of the town, assuming that she would figure out what to do in it after she had gone there.
Gus’ death was not a struggle. He was sitting in the north light under the big windows with one of his small canvasboards propped on the big easel he had always used for major paintings of landscapes. It looked a little ridiculous, out of place. He said quietly, “Ah!” put down his paint brush and slipped to the floor. Clara heard — or almost felt — from sitting at her piano that he was no longer breathing nor was his heart beating. She lay down alongside him and held him a long time.
Finally she called the doctor and the mortician, who left with Gus and brought back his ashes in a small plain box. She called their respective agents, responsible people who could handle anything, but there was no family on either side to notify. The agents arranged for storage of all the paintings and helped Clara pack household goods like bedding and kitchen equipment, books and CD’s, computer systems, clothing, and the box of ashes. It all went into a small U-Haul which Clara intended to drive. Her agent ordered a special shipping company to move the valuable piano to the movie town.
Starting out one morning before the city traffic began, with Gus’ ashes on the seat beside her, and her head clear about the route to follow, she drove into the future. It took a day and then all the next night and just as the sky lightened in the moments before dawn, the truck topped the ridge that looked down into the valley where the town had been half-built, which in this case meant it was complete. Then the sky burst into glory as the sun sparked on the horizon and Clara said to the box, “We’ve made it. We’re here. This is what you wanted.”
The piano had preceded her and was set up in the main room of the pretend saloon. It didn’t take long to move her things into the upstairs bedrooms which had been used as a hotel for the principal actors. When the insurance check came, she bought a pickup.
