After Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings
As she approaches the painter’s house on the day of his wake, it occurs to her that this is the first time she has ever entered through the front door. In its way, this door is like a painting of a door: enormous, imposing, tiny flaws in the wood like brushstrokes betraying the labor of its creation. Opening such a door, as she would any other, seems unthinkable: to simply reach forward and grab the handle would be to allow function to rush out and puncture all that it means for her to enter here. Still, now that he is gone, it is the only way in.
The weight of the door is nearly enough to throw her off balance; she uses two hands to open it and slips inside. She has arrived late on purpose, hoping to avoid the searching smile of whatever eager relative might be tasked with greeting the guests. Finding herself alone in a little mudroom with whitewashed walls, its corners blooming with shoes and coats, vestiges of a life almost entirely unfamiliar to her, she is still for a moment. Breathes.
She starts on the toggles of her coat, its thick, dense wool prickling her fingers. The painter had mentioned the coat once, in an interview, after they were discovered. He was calm through the public uproar, and in the tabloid interviews she had read, he sounded smooth, well trained, a version of himself she had not encountered. There were sordid questions, of course, but he refused to answer them.
She captivated me, he had said. Or something like that. And then he had listed things about her that, presumably, had done the captivating: the color of her hair, the country she came from, the sturdiness of her hands, the heavy loden coat she wore all winter. It was surprising to hear herself summarized like that, rendered as a list of details.
She begins, in the vestibule, to shrug off the coat. The one detail that felt familiar. It had been her mother’s back home; it was ancient, sturdy, unyielding even to the fiercest of storms, the fleetest of years passing.
She was wearing it the first time they walked together, on a winter afternoon not unlike this one. He had been asking her most afternoons for the better part of a year to take a walk with him when he spotted her hurrying past his house on her way to the mailbox at the end of their shared dirt road. And each time, she offered a breathless litany of excuses: The stalls needed mucking; the pigs needed feeding; the bread needed kneading. But that day, a bright, cold December day, the sky wan and foreboding, she had said, “Why don’t you come with me.” Something compelled her — she can’t be quite sure what. At least that’s what she would have said about her reasons, had anyone ever asked.
“I see you like this every afternoon,” he had said, “in a hurry to get somewhere.”
He spoke with the faint trace of an accent she couldn’t then name. It wasn’t until many years later, when her own accent had faded, that she would be able to place the thing that rounded his syllables, softened the consonants, making him sound languid and confident: American money.
“I go to get the mail,” she said. He nodded.
In fact, she does know what it was that compelled her to invite him that day. It was Anton. Their baby had come not two months prior, and still at night her husband looked at her with lust as she changed into her nightgown. Still he reached out to her in the morning, stiff, wanting. She could not stand it. My body is for something else now, she thought. My body is engaged in other things. But the painter just wanted to walk. That was a man’s desire she could handle.
They walked, at first in silence, down the brown ribbon of road.
“You’re Anton’s wife,” he said. “From Germany.” She did not yet know that this was his way: never asking questions, only making pronouncements that she was free to refute or let stand. In the field beside them, a sudden spray of sparrows.
“You live up the road. And you go to get the mail while the baby sleeps. In your big heavy coat. And then, once you’ve gotten it, you walk back home.”
She had no objection.
“He’s a farmer, your husband,” said the painter. “Only met the man a handful of times.”
She nodded. One of her boots sent a pebble careening out ahead of them.
“So: You go home, and you tend to the animals, you feed the baby, you eat supper, you sleep beside your husband. This is your life.”
She stopped walking to look at him. He was at least thirty years her senior, she guessed sixty or nearly so. When she was young, back home, her mother had taught her to read faces: His was etched with lines of joy (spooling like beams of light from the corners of his eyes) and concentration (cracking the space between his eyebrows). He had once been handsome. He still was, she supposed, for men were allowed to retain their handsomeness, carry it with them even into old age.
“And,” she said.
He raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“And I swim.”
“You swim?”
“I swim,” she said. “I swim in river.”
She remembers, now, a fleeting sense of exposure, as though she had let him glimpse her in the place that she felt the most free: early in the morning, river water cooling her skin, her hair gone weightless and kelp-like in the lazy swirl of the current.
He smiled, and they continued walking. Her English was still shaky then, and she didn’t talk to many people. But she felt emboldened by no longer having to look at him.
“You are painter,” she said. “Famous.”
It was his turn to nod.
“Morning, you eat breakfast. Your wife prepares. You paint in studio, you paint all afternoon, you eat dinner, you have wine, friends. You travel. Grandchilds, they come to visit. You paint grass and sky and ocean. This is your life.”
They had reached the mailbox.
“And,” he said, turning to face her. “I look.”
“You look?” she said. “At what?”
“I don’t just render things, I have to observe them first. Painting is only half of it. I look at the grass and the sky and the ocean. And at you.”
The next time she went to get the mail, he was not there. The windows in his house were dark; they must have been away. But when she pulled open the door of the mailbox, there was a piece of paper inside. A sketch, in pencil. Of her. How she had been on that day, her hair in braids, tucked into the coat, its folds and billows represented by furious swirling strokes, as if the painter had been overwhelmed by its movement. That was how it began.
Time now, she thinks to herself. Enough of this, you were invited here. Which she knows is not entirely true. But when his obituary ran in the local paper, it had said, of the wake, in plain ink, Open to the public. And she is a member of the public, is she not? She has just as much right as anyone to remember him.
She undoes one button, then another, then another, and then she frees each arm in turn and sweeps the coat into a bundle. The motion is so familiar that she does it without thinking, the way she braids her hair or, years ago, nursed her children. He noticed it, though — the smoothness of the motion, the way she stepped away from the coat instead of moving it off her, as though in deference to the garment’s seniority — the first time he asked her to take it off.
She interrupts her own reverie, shaking her head in annoyance. This house! She cannot just exist in it, cannot walk in, look out the window, make herself comfortable, occupy it as any ordinary person would any ordinary house. She cannot manage even to remove her coat without the specter of memory intruding.
She approaches a coat rack, which is stuffed already, then a row of hooks, but stops, reconsiders. Wouldn’t it be terribly presumptuous to pad out into some sitting room in her sweater and stocking feet? But then, perhaps it would be just as rude to enter as she is, tracking mud and salt across the floor. She and Anton have led a fairly solitary existence, so much work always to be done; the choreography of arrival is not instinctual to her. Everything she can think to do feels like the wrong thing. She imagines herself in each possible iteration — from fully bundled to totally unburdened.
She thinks, as she has been trying not to, of the painter’s wife. She pictures herself walking into the room, the wife spotting her: creased brow, a friend’s protective hand on a tense shoulder.
She settles on removing the boots and holding them, along with the coat, against her stomach. Somehow this motion, too, is familiar, this mode, crossing a threshold with her garments before her like a shield, and for a second she cannot place why, and then she remembers how she used to return home to Anton after she had been here, with the painter. Tentative, quiet. In the same way, hunched in on herself, she opens the door that separates the vestibule from the rest of the house and goes in.
She finds herself in a hallway. Paintings on the wall, not his, but similar enough in subject matter that an untrained eye might mistake them: open windows, yellowed fields, sunlight falling heavy on empty rooms. But they are lesser paintings: the colors more obvious, the feeling less aching. She suppresses a smile. How like him to surround himself with evidence of his own supremacy.
At one end of the hallway is a grand set of stairs, at the other an entryway, which must lead to warm rooms she has never seen.
Somewhere beyond the entryway, a door opens. A burst of sound, the volume of the crowd of mourners flaring for an instant, like a sudden glint of sun on water, and then the door shuts again and she hears two voices moving toward her. Women’s voices: even, calm. Comfortable in the space of the house. The wife? It must be the wife. And maybe a friend or a sister, someone the wife trusts.
Before she can stop it, her mind again conjures the wife, with her elegant hands (so she imagines) and beautiful hair (so she has seen, in the many tabloid photographs). She sees the wife with creased brow, reading the first magazine piece that ran, when the paintings were discovered and sold. More than two hundred paintings, over fifteen years. And his subject, naked, in repose, neck bared and vulnerable, like a tabby cat that has decided to trust, a secret all those years.
What is a muse to a painter’s wife? The question is easier when she abstracts it. Better to remove herself from the equation, if she can, to think of it as a kind of hypothetical, a philosophical calculation. Is there envy? Does a painter’s wife wish, always, just a little, to be painted? Or has she taught herself to separate his work from his desire?
The voices draw nearer, loud enough now that the words are nearly intelligible. She squares her shoulders, feeling ridiculous with all her things in her arms. She can hear what they are saying in spurts. What was her daughter’s name, I can’t remember. Don’t let me forget to take the ham out of the oven.
She has come here to remember him. At least that’s what she told herself when she sat at her kitchen table, considering whether she should go. But perhaps there was some small part of her that wanted to prove something. To assert, by means of her presence, that they did not understand her bond with the painter the way they thought they did, that it had belonged to her and the painter alone.
Maybe neither of the voices inching steadily nearer belongs to the wife — could it be some pair of attendants she is hearing? (She knows the painter was rich, although the precise extent of his wealth was never clear to her.) Maybe they will fuss, these women, whoever they are, before they recognize her. Insist on taking her coat and hanging it up somewhere, whisk her salt-caked boots off to wherever they belong. Maybe they will be wearing shoes, and she will feel even sillier.
She can hardly bear the thought of it. Of answering to anyone — about what they did together, about what it all meant.
On the wall across from her, a mirror. She looks at herself. She is near the age now that the painter was then; her own face is old enough to be readable. Permanent freckles from years in the sun, worry and care etched like tally marks around her lips. And then, the thought flashes through her body like a sudden fever: It has been many years. She may not be recognizable at all.
Her body working faster than her mind, she walks with purpose to the stairs at the end of the hall and, just before the sources of the voices emerge through the entryway, ascends. Years of physical work have made her husband slow, tired, but not her: She is nimble, her limbs responding quickly and without complaint to the cues of her mind, practiced as they are in doing so, morning after morning. Tending to her husband’s whims, brewing the coffee, baling the hay, phoning the children, who are grown now and wrapped up in other lives, the memory of their childhood imprinted on her home and person: empty rooms, one hip that sits lower than the other from the years she carried them.
The tumult in her body begins to settle as she climbs, without thinking, past the second-floor landing and reaches the third floor, the only place in the house she knows. The main stairs are wide and imposing, carpet spilling down them like a waterfall. The things in her hands are heavy, but she is used to carrying heavy things.
She begins to walk, ducking cobwebs that drape from corner beams. As she passes the alcove under the great south window, she sees the daybed, made up with starched white linen, flat, inert, as if it has gone untouched for years.
The first time she was naked with him it was here, early in the morning. This was after the sketch in the mailbox, a dare and a promise, since a sketch is by definition incomplete, and after he had painted her in the coat, that time from memory, since he could not very well ask her to stand knee-deep in snow all day, and after she had seen the painting and smiled, in spite of herself, and said, I look like a soldier, and he had said, I think you look like a swimmer. Pointed at the snow around her, how he’d painted it swirling like water. That morning they had walked, as they had by then taken to doing most mornings, unbeknownst to either of their spouses. Spring was coming, and there was rainwater on the ground, pooling in the rutted road; they walked a circuitous path around the puddles.
“You will — ” he’d begun, as though to say it like a command, as he was wont to. But he stopped himself, started again, and asked her to come to the house and sit for him. Will you. Her life was moored so reliably to routine, to obligation; it had been a long time since anyone had invited her to do anything, had let her decide.
He never called her beautiful, at least not to her face. Never touched her, as the world assumed he had. When he asked her to take off her coat, in the milky light of that very same window where she now looks out on the field behind the house, there it was again, his small offering, changing the order of the words in deference. Will you. She knew what it meant. And her heart had tightened at it, at the request she was in no way duty bound to grant. The way he had looked at her that day, that was how she got the idea that her youth, her beauty, could be a kind of power.
That’s what she sees when she looks at the paintings. Her younger self, lying on the daybed, curtains billowing around her like waves. Imperious, like a reclining queen. Naked and fearing nothing, as he watched her. Was it sex? Was it the absence of sex? She finds the distinction difficult, in some ways, to make. Others may look at the paintings and see her there alone, but when she looks she sees the two of them. Alongside her body, his reverence hovers, breathing, on the stretched canvas, his way of seeing her.
Now she is in the hall, where she sat on a stool in her sweater, her hair in braids. He painted the ends of her hair flipped upward, which they hadn’t been in life. That wasn’t the only time paintings had surfaced in which he had invented something: In one, for which she’d posed with her hair loose and tangled from a morning chasing chickens in a thick and merciless wind, he had given her a crown of white flowers.
The whitewashed floorboards groan under her careful steps, but somehow their protest seems proof not of their decline but of their formidability. Here is his studio. She has been inside many times, but she hovers in the doorway out of habit, as though waiting for his invitation.
When she does step inside, she has the feeling of having entered another time. She read an article once in which a prominent critic said that the painter “eschewed modernity.” The critic wrote about the way his style never changed, everything cast green and shadowy, rooted forever in the stasis of his authority.
She realizes, as she moves farther into the space, that the wife has not touched this room. He must not have used it in years; he was very old when he died. But the studio looks as though it were vacated mere hours ago: sketches tacked on walls, loose pencils, even half-squeezed tubes of paint, their caps long lost, strewn haphazardly on drafting tables.
All around her, a thicket of things he saw. As she looks, it is as though her body becomes them, one by one. Her eyes are a hazy charcoal of oranges in a bowl, held with painter’s tape to the wall beside the window. Her hips, a barrel, rendered dark and moody in tempera, half done, on a table. Her hair, still long but silvering now, a watercolor river, with gesso gulls flying.
Everyone wanted to hear his side of the story, the famous painter whose most transcendent work lay squirreled away in a closet until well into his retirement. And she could see how it looked, how she looked, in the paintings, a bar of shadow slicing the bareness of her throat; her breasts, still heavy then with milk, lit pale in evening light. But no one ever asked the girl in the paintings what it had been like for her. If they had, she would have said it was a relief to be objectified, as her daughter had called it, telephoning from a college dorm room when the story had broken, admonishing her for allowing it. She did not bother to defend herself, to explain. To sit for hours like that, doing nothing but being looked at, it was easy: His attention asked nothing of her. Those afternoons had felt — and she is determined, even now, to think of them this way — like a collaboration. Like they were making something together.
Two floors below, his body lies as it will forever, or at least until it is consumed by dirt and earth and time. And hers will go on, as she did when his energy began to dwindle, and her children got older, and weeks and months and then years went by when they did not meet at all. Leaving the studio and continuing down the hallway, she knows she will never come here again. That their small and needless planet has ceased to be.
She reaches the back staircase. The blueprint of the house, the top floor anyway, is so ingrained in her muscle memory that she knows she will have to work to forget it. She begins to descend the stairs, past the second floor and then down to the first, and then she sees it. Her door, the one she used to enter and leave through, at his behest. It is just as she remembers: pale blue, the paint chipping, a window in the middle, hazed with waning light.
“When you come to the house,” he had said that first morning, “come in through the back and go right up the stairs. I’ll leave a jar on the step so you’ll know the door.”
“So I can be secret,” she said, making no effort to conceal the sourness on her face.
“Yes,” he said, smiling wide, which he seldom did.
In time, she too learned to find joy in their secret. Opening the back door slowly, so it wouldn’t creak, making her steps light on those old wooden stairs. It was the only way to lend what they were doing the gravity it required.
There by the door, she would know them anywhere: the boots he wore when it rained, so bleached by time that their red has pinked, but still somehow registers as red. As she always has, she drops her own boots to the floor, slips them on. Through the window, she can see that the sun has broken through the clouds and is warming the world, the snow on the ground already slick with melt. She hesitates a moment, then hangs her coat on the solitary hook next to the door. She picks up his boots and turns them around so that together boots and coat look like one person, ready to go somewhere. She opens the door and, unheard, undetected, slips out to make her way home.
