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| Shelter Bay | |
 First published in Salt magazine,  |
Paddling through the warm pale gray sand, he got here, flushed and sweating: we knew he was sick, sick with art. In the Big Smoke he'd be called a bum of some kind, in those shreds of cloth; here it was the uniform retired bankers and admirals wore. Now this shack built of knocked-up wooden stuff clattering into the sky, doesn't it remind you of something? Trying to remember him for the cameras, it's like a clumsy picture, the morning that was always fading, receding, the bleached timbers, and the deck weathered. I know how a halftone can blur an image with blue and lend the sky an effeminate breeding, how memories in the photo shop collide with history, the ranks of cottages bright in the empty season, beyond where the ferry boils the water green and white. I went to walk the deck - pale timbers - and saw how it's obviously an invented palette, now the flushed blur of a new job, interiors as pastel as his morals, in tune with the stockbroker city morning, the light glancing off the dazed commuters as they seethed up out of the tunnels where they'd been traveling to arrive at this new, bracing experience, "Shelter Bay". "We went and looked at a place," he said, "a place to get away to." "It's no holiday, we both grew up here," his wife put in. "These people are foreigners." Here he is, a native: a pale, stubby man, gasping with happiness, showing off his rooms with bantam etchings and diagrams but in soaring tanks, cardinal, sable and coral, his dreams banged and collided with the future. "I'll admit the water monitor for a while," he said, "into the silent dark." The buyers came and went with the seasons, like the seasons of bad winds, and the season of rum. "In those days we drank," he said, "my brain lamp blew out most Friday nights, but then I'd married the rain's big canvas," he added. Then a fog-blinded decision to abandon his wife. She was on the floor of the kitchen, damaged but alive, and the room seemed to be full of shock waves. "What I did foundered," the thin voice murmured, complaining about the bourgeoisie. Was he a painter's painter? He slept in his patched rags, compiling, like a clerk with a database too big to handle, booty jerked up from a pocket diary with torn covers, colored splashes and fragments, pencil jottings, faces of old men on the train, in the carriage rattling up from Palisades full of shuttering light wheeling, spokes and blades of glare and shadow, faces that had a story to tell, but here they meant nothing coherent until art had rejuvenated them with its layers of gilt and glitter. His wife, she spoke, ashamed, of schools, gatherings like shoals of fish that broke against the galleries and reviews, some garnering money and huge fame, some not. Her dry and colorless speech upset her guy, impersonating a movie sound-track and reinventing the old times when art was a big deal. "When he was young, full of talent, or maybe bullshit, which counterfeits talent, his eyes were like deep green doors, full of lies," she said. Yet she went and married him. Her third scotch hit the target. "Then his voice said I couldn't disillusion him - we were young, Lord, that wave of aesthetic joy hit us both - he had a blur of a chance," she said, "if he hadn't pulled his gaze away from what was in the frame and turned to the heaps of consumer goods piled up in the shop windows. I'd married a younger person than the one I ended up with. And my pathetic faults and weak virtues, they were held under the lens and examined," she said, "by those boozers, and if I could do no wrong when first introduced to his intolerable greed for success, then I could do nothing right after that." Underneath their life was that whirlpool wheeling, drink, and the people you fall into business with, selling. You have to be as tough as nails or you'll come undone; and beneath the customers, springing from art's possibilities, a strip of drab carpet, fashionable in the forties, hateful in the sixties, now once again drifting up over the fashion horizon like the old devil moon lighting up the foyer between the layers of negotiation, somewhere between the soup and the nuts. He looked across the conversation pit at her and his eyes elaborated - an angel like that was wonderful, but how old are angels, do they have birthdays? And their innocence, is that really the best thing? Not to be tested by life, and age, and the slow growth of acceptance of the faults of others, there's something blank and cruel about such childishness. "I'd remember her kindness," he said, "her leaning down to touch, then anger would get the better of me and I'd forget everything." He was painting the scenery to match his mood. Then a wave of relaxation, and the childhood memories emerging in the gloom.  So, there you are, standing on the shore of Shelter Lake, a child, a chill winter wind blowing out of the north and scattering the purple leaves around your feet, rows of fruit trees stretching into the darkened landscape behind you, strings of migrating birds, high up . . . And there, that faint glow behind the hills, New York City and its stinking accommodations. Where's your sense of honor now, smart guy? Gone down the toilet to stain some distant harbor with your cheating, your betrayals, your greedy hopes. Ragtime, the pitch-black mirror, dealers - "Shark eat shark", say the sharks. Resigning from the obligations of your art and craft like that, it was just a gesture, don't you know the guys are laughing at you, at your foolish pride? Sissy, or prig, take your pick, they can see you waving spitefully from the receding deck, you, hoping to become distant, if success won't have you, hoping to disappear into the deepest water. Photograph courtesy Pamela Brown, copyright © Pamela Brown 1998 |
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