Chapter 9

For the next two days Carolyn was delayed in leaving her office, only half an hour, but arrived home each afternoon to look with keen disappointment at the shimmering surface of her empty pool. She could not call—did Val even have a phone?—nor could she go knocking on her door; their relationship lacked sufficient weight.

On Thursday she arrived home at her usual hour; again the pool was deserted. Changing into shorts and a blouse, she reflected dismally that of course she was inconsequential in Val Hunter’s life; how could she be anything else? Val Hunter was independent—look at how she dressed, took care of herself. Val’s life was totally unlike her own. From the stereo Billy Joel rocked into “Uptown Girl” as she restlessly paced the living room.

There was a tapping at the front door, followed by the doorbell chime. She switched off the stereo and then peered through the peephole. With sharp gladness she saw it was Val.

“Missed you the last two days, Carrie. Would have been here earlier, I was out sketching today, I don’t know what was wrong with the Ventura Freeway, never did see any accident. Thank God I drive a Volks or I’d be out there still, waving a towel over my radiator.” After a brief survey of Carolyn’s white terrycloth shorts and light cotton blouse, Val looked down at her own clothes: paint-smeared jeans and a sleeveless V-neck gray T-shirt. “Sorry, I look like hell.”

Carolyn was looking at her admiringly. “You look terrific. Like a working artist. Come in, let me get you something to drink. You look hot and tired. And thirsty.”

“No, I—well, just for a minute. But not in the living room—I don’t want to smear ochre over your blue carpet.”

Carolyn led her into the kitchen. “I’d be grateful if you’d do that to the sofa.”

Val leaned against the sink and drained a glass of ice water, refilled it from the tap. “Why did you buy that sofa if you dislike it so?”

“Paul thinks it’s elegant and I suppose it is. I thought I could get used to it. I don’t think he really likes it much either, but we won’t do anything till we get another house. A bigger and better house,” she added with more than a trace of sarcasm.

“With a bigger and better pool for you not to swim in.” Grinning, Val poured her remaining water into the sink and rinsed the glass. “Why don’t you come over today? To see some of my work?”

She followed Val down a narrow concrete path, moss growing between its wide cracks, to the small house of yellow stucco overhung by two date trees and surrounded by patches of thick ivy and many broad-leaved plants encroached upon by weeds. Ferns crowded the shade along the fence that divided this house from Carolyn’s backyard. The whine of insects permeated the quiet. A few white butterflies darted among sparse marigolds poking their heads out of the weeds that reached into the path and brushed at Carolyn’s ankles as she picked her way along, careful of her footing in her wedge-heeled sandals.

“It’s very private back here,” Carolyn offered.

“I’ve learned why privacy is so prized by the rich. Most of us in our entire lives never learn what true privacy is—never experience it.” Val opened the unlocked door of her house.

The living room would fit into less than half of hers, Carolyn estimated. It smelled of paint and turpentine, and was dominated by two huge abstract paintings of red and green hues covering virtually the entire expanse of two walls. A bay window with useless gauze curtains tied to its sides allowed dappled light to wash the room. Beside the window, on a battered and paint-smeared table, was a large canvas propped against a box, flanked by a chaotic jumble of paint tubes, brushes soaking in glass containers, cans of oils, sketch pads, pencils, and other paraphernalia Carolyn could not identify. The room was furnished with a worn tweed sofa not much larger than a loveseat, an equally worn armchair with a minute wooden footstool, a scarred bookcase overflowing with paperbacks and topped by a small television set, a card table covered by a vivid red print cloth and apparently serving as a dining room table. The only source of artificial light appeared to be a pole lamp in a corner, its metal shades aimed downward at the armchair. Sketch pads and sections of the Los Angeles Times were stacked on a coffee table which was a simple square of pale, flimsy wood.

“There’s not much to see,” Val said. “It’s pretty small, especially the kitchen—which could be even smaller, as far as I’m concerned. Look around if you like.”

Carolyn glanced into a room the size of her own walk-in closet, its flooring buckled linoleum, and crammed with a small refrigerator and stove and sink, a few cupboards.

The bathroom was tinier, with a shower and no bathtub. Bright blue shag covered the floor. Two thin, gaily striped towels hung from metal rings.

“Neal has the big bedroom,” Val said with a chuckle. “I don’t care where I sleep. I think it’s important for a youngster to have privacy, don’t you?”

“It was important to me when I was growing up.”

Neal’s room contained a single twin bed and a dresser, a small desk of gray metal which looked freshly painted. Sports posters and banners festooned the walls. The room was immaculate, almost austere in its neatness.

“He’d kill me if he knew I was showing anyone his inner sanctum.” There was warmth in Val’s husky voice. “I create such havoc wherever I go; I think he’s overcompensated by being a neat freak. This is my room, Carrie. It wasn’t meant to be a bedroom, but it’s good enough.”

The narrow room, which was surely meant to be a closet or for storage, was filled entirely by a twin bed and a two-drawer nightstand with a gooseneck lamp, and by canvases that sat on the floor along the walls.

Carolyn walked back into the living room with Val and stood beside the worktable. “I like your house.” Seeing Val’s amused smile she protested, “I really do. It has a nice feeling, a warmth. A…comfort. A casualness.”

“Casual we are,” Val said cheerfully. “I’ll show you the work I have here, which isn’t much. Mostly work that’s drying or that doesn’t fit in with what Susan’s showing right now.” Carefully she took the canvas leaning against the box on the table and placed it along the wall.

“Can you tell me what that one’s going to be?” Carolyn eyed faint jagged lines vaguely suggesting intricacy, the tones sand colored.

“It’s one of a series of figurative paintings I’m doing right now. Neal and I took a trip into the Mojave and found just wonderful things. This one’s a fascinating plant, it looks like green-red mist on the desert sand. The tiny flowers and fine tracery of stems make me think of the human body with its connections of veins and arteries and blood vessels—the sand holding it could be human skin. I’m laying film over film—I’m looking for an opalescent glowing effect and I want the brush strokes to show. It’s still taking shape in my head and very interesting to think about. I can’t do anything more till it dries.”

“I see,” Carolyn said. Until this moment she had thought it possible that Paul was right—Val Hunter might be a dilettante. She said, “I thought all painters used an easel.”

“Never had one. A box on a table works perfectly well as long as it holds the canvas still and you have the best light on your work. I get good strong morning light through this window—it’s the best kind. Besides, any extra money, there are always so many other things more important…Neal’s been wanting to go to day camp every year and I’ve never had the money till now.” She shrugged. “I’ve been painting this way for years. He’s a boy only once.”

Carolyn surveyed the jumble of supplies on the table. “Looking at a painting, you never imagine all the things an artist has to buy. Canvas, paint, brushes, a palette—”

“No palette,” Val interrupted. “This is my version.” She reached to the end of the table under paint-stained cloths and unerringly fished out a piece of plate glass with beveled edges, the underside painted white. “I just scrape it off when I’m finished. It works beautifully, I’d never have any other kind. And except for watercolors I buy the basic ingredients and make my own paints. I really prefer to now. But there are a thousand other things you always need. I use a lot of sketch pads and good pencils; I do a lot of sketches to make color notes. And frames and turpentine and varnish. I sometimes use a palette knife—that means quantities of paint that would put a house painter to shame.” Carolyn picked up several tubes of color and examined them curiously.

“I’m still learning things about color,” Val said. “Different approaches, techniques, ways of emphasis. To this day, as well as I’ve learned the discipline of preparation and concentrating fully on a concept, sometimes an entirely new idea takes over and I have to begin all over again. And starting over costs money and time. Quality materials are so very expensive…not like when I was first learning and could afford to experiment with student-quality paint and cardboard for canvas.”

“I had absolutely no idea,” Carolyn murmured, running her finger-tips over the soft pliant bristles of several paintbrushes.

“A few years ago was the worst, when inflation was so bad. Prices just skyrocketed. I didn’t have Susan’s gallery then and I was scrounging to have my work shown anywhere—laundromats, anywhere. For a while I even had to stop working till there was a little money again…Either that or sell my body for paint, which believe me was a temptation. Imagine me down on Hollywood Boulevard—a six-foot hooker.”

Val lifted a large canvas that leaned against a wall facing into the light and propped it against the box. “This is another in the series I’m doing. It’s finished.”

Carolyn felt enmeshed in the painting, as if she were caught in the multitude of tiny shapes tinged with pink and green against a riotous background of wiry dark green. The detail of the painting was dense, the images covering the canvas from edge to edge without break.

“Manzanita,” Val said, frowning at the painting, chin between a finger and thumb. “This particular kind grows along the California coast.”

Carolyn said faintly, “I feel like I’ve fallen into the bush.” She was frustrated by her inability to articulate her perceptions.

“You do? That’s wonderful.” Val looked genuinely pleased. “Susan likes this entire series and this one in particular. She says it’s like a Pollock, and I guess it does have that barbed-wire effect.”

Swiftly, Val removed the canvas and replaced it against the wall. Her upper arms in the sleeveless T-shirt were lighter tan and large, the muscles firm and smoothly working as she pulled canvases away from the wall. “Here it is. This one’s almost finished.”

Carolyn blinked at the feast of color—red, yellow, blue, and white hues and tones. “It looks so…joyful,” she managed to say, again angry with her inadequacy, her eyes drawn to the rich yellows and blues, following and exploring the color patterns.

“I like how you react to my work,” Val said immediately. “This is a fusion of desert flowers. It was very hard to do. To me the desert has always been like a starving entity that goes on an incredible binge in the spring, as if to compensate all at once. I wanted to show the profusion, the sheer extravagance.”

“Warm,” Carolyn murmured, “the painting is warm.”

“Thank you. That’s what I was hoping to achieve with the reds and yellows. But balance was such a serious problem with so many color tones…Color is energy; colors act and react with one another. There were more decisions than usual about composition. I do love the red flowers,” Val said, smiling and indicating a section with blossoms shaded rose to reddish purple, the stamens long and white and tipped with scarlet, the branches profligate. “It’s called a fairy duster. Remarkable, isn’t it? And this one with the brilliant leaves and inconspicuous flowers is Indian paintbrush.”

“Did you…do you paint from memory?” She wondered if the question was foolish, if any question she might ask would be foolish.

Val hesitated, “Well, when my work isn’t representational, actual color isn’t relevant—it’s just one of the many elements you synthesize in creating a painting. I usually sketch and make color notes and then let things percolate in my head till it feels right to begin. But for this series I took pictures. I have a terrible camera but I matched my snap-shots with high-quality photos in books about desert flowers. That’s how I learned their names. I want to do more of these paintings, focusing on light and shadow. I’ll need to look very closely at the actual flower for those, too.”

She pointed again. “This flower’s called blue sage. This one’s baby blue eyes. Aren’t the names marvelous? The white with the bluish band down each petal is a desert lily. See the ruffle-edged leaves? And this lovely yellow is a woolly marigold. And this is desert sienna.”

“It’s wonderful. It’s a wonderful, wonderful painting.” She could think of nothing more to say.

“Thank you. It does need more work but it’s almost there. The yellows come forward too much, the blues need to be brought up a bit. Now I’ll show you a real change of pace—from an artist who ordinarily loves bright color.” Val came out of her tiny makeshift bedroom with a painting perhaps five feet long and three feet high, and propped it against the box.

A succession of gray tones lay across the canvas, beginning at the top with deep gray which was not opaque but seemed somehow impenetrable, and dissolving into successive bands of lighter grays which became a pearl mist that ended abruptly at bold gray-black brush strokes of solid squarish shapes. Thin needles of color knifed down through the gray bands, into the gray-black, the needles of silver, blue, blue-purple.

Carolyn stepped closer to the painting, needing to shut out her surroundings, and in the stifling heat of Val’s house rubbed a sudden chill from her bare arms. “I don’t know the first thing about art,” she finally said. “All I can tell you is I truly love this.”

“What is there about it that touches you? Can you tell me?”

“I don’t know…” Looking at the painting, searching for words, Carolyn answered slowly, “The peaceful quality…the way the grays combine. It makes me feel mellow. Like I do on rainy days.”

Val’s smile was intense with pleasure. “You do know about art. Rain—our rain, Los Angeles rain—was exactly what I was trying to convey. The distinctive way it rains here, how it doesn’t cloud up but grays over, darker and darker, then lightens and rains.”

She indicated the gray-black shapes at the bottom of the painting. “This is the horizon line with the suggestion of our endless, mostly flat city. Susan likes this one but won’t take it, it’s too much of a departure to hang with my other work.” Val chuckled. “She’s hoping I haven’t gone into what she calls a gray, uncommercial phase. She’s not enthusiastic about a series of paintings I’m working on at the beach house either, but—”

“Beach house?”

“Her parents have a small place in Malibu. In exchange for checking things out every week while they’re in Europe, Neal gets to play volleyball on the beach and I get to work on a series of ocean paintings.”

“Seascapes? How wonderful.”

“No, not seascapes,” Val said with a grin. “Sorry to disappoint you. Better talents than mine have tried to capture the ocean. I don’t think anyone has—at least not enough of it. I’m painting the effects of ocean—surfaces of rocks, the scouring of high tide, things like that.”

Carolyn was staring at the painting. She asked impulsively, “How much do you charge for your work?”

“It’s negotiable, like all art. Whatever the traffic will bear and depending on Susan’s opinion, and the size of the canvas. Most of my work is fairly good size and Susan asks in the four to six hundred dollar range, before gallery commission.”

Carolyn closed her eyes for a moment. She said recklessly, “I want this one. I want to buy it. I love it. I want to own it.”

“It’s yours then. But I won’t sell it to you.”

“What? I want to buy it. You know I can afford it; you can’t just give your work away—”

“Of course I can. I can do anything I want with my work. And I refuse to be any more in debt to you than I already am. I’ve been using your pool for months. Your air conditioner is a lifesaver, it’s making it possible for me to work better and longer.”

Carolyn sighed. This was crazy. “Anything I’ve given you isn’t that much and isn’t important to me at all.”

She continued to argue, but Val parried her points with good-humored grins and shakes of her head. “All right,” Carolyn conceded. “Can you tell me a good place to have it framed?”

“I’ll do that—don’t argue. It doesn’t cost much. I always make my own frames. It’s not difficult and I enjoy it. Besides, who better than the artist knows how it should be framed?”

Carolyn asked in resignation, “When can I have it?”

“It’s finished drying but needs to be varnished. Let’s say Monday.”

Val glanced at her watch and was startled. “I haven’t even thought about dinner. And Neal’s due home. I want you to meet Neal. I think you two would like each other.”

Carolyn was pleased, as if she had passed an important test. But she hesitated. How would she explain this to Paul? Any of this? “Of course,” she said. “Soon.”

“How about some evening?”

“Sure.” She wanted to flee, to sort through what she had done before Paul came home. She changed the subject, not wanting Val to pin her down before she had time to think. “I’ll have the painting Monday for sure?”

“I’ll varnish it in the morning when the light’s good. I see no problem…Yes, Monday.”

“Good.” She edged toward the door. “I’ll see you tomorrow in the pool?”

Val smiled at her. “Monday. Neal and I are going to the beach house, then backpacking in the San Bernardino mountains.”

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 594