bed after they made love and she looked wildly disheveled, flushed and with her
hair all over the place and her eye makeup smudged and her lips swollen, and she
went off into the bathroom to pee, he would follow her there and lift her off
the seat after she had wiped herself and look at the two of them together in the
bathroom mirror, and she would be taken aback as much as he was, not simply by
how beautiful she looked, how beautiful the fucking allowed her to look, but how
other she looked. The social face was gone—there was
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Dawn! But all this was a secret from others and had to be. Particularly from the
child. Sometimes after Dawn had been all day on her feet with the cows, he would
pull his chair up to hers after dinner and he would rub her feet, and Merry
would make a face and say, “Oh, Daddy, that’s disgusting.” But that was the only
truly demonstrative thing they ever did in front of her. Otherwise there was
just the usual affectionate stuff around the house that kids expect to see from
parents and would miss if it didn’t go on. The life they led together behind
their bedroom door was a secret about which their daughter knew no more than
anyone else. And on it went, on and on for years; it never stopped until the
bomb went off and Dawn wound up in the hospital. After she came out was when it
began stopping.
Orcutt had married the granddaughter of one of his grandfather’s law partners at
Orcutt, Findley, the Morristown firm that he had been expected to join. After
graduating from Princeton, he had declined, however, to accept a place at
Harvard Law School—Princeton and Harvard Law had for over a hundred years
constituted the education of an Orcutt boy—and breaking with the traditions of
the world he’d been born to, he moved to a lower Manhattan studio to become an
abstract painter and a new man. Only after three depressive years feverishly
painting behind the dirty windows over the truck traffic on Hudson Street did he
marry Jessie and come back to Jersey to begin architecture studies at Princeton.
He never relinquished entirely his dream of an artistic calling, and though his
architectural work—mostly on the restoration of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century houses out in their moneyed quarter of Morris County and, from Somerset
and Hunterdon counties all the way down through Bucks County in Pennsylvania,
the converting of old barns into elegant rustic homes—kept him happily occupied,
every three or four years there was an exhibition of his at a Morristown frame
shop that the Levovs, always flattered to be invited to the opening, faithfully
attended.
The Swede was never so uncomfortable in any social situation as
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he was standing in front of Orcutt’s paintings, which were said by the flier you
got at the door to be influenced by Chinese calligraphy but looked like nothing
much to him, not even Chinese. Right from the beginning Dawn had found them
“thought-provoking”—to her they showed a most unlikely side to Bill Orcutt, a
sensitivity she’d never seen a single indicator of before—but the thought the
exhibition most provoked in the Swede was how long he should continue pretending
to look at one of the canvases before moving on to pretend to be looking at
another one. All he really had any inclination to do was to lean forward and
read the titles pasted up on the wall beside each painting, thinking they might
* * *
help, but when he did—despite Dawn’s telling him not to, pulling his jacket and
whispering, “Forget those, look at the brushwork”—he was only more disheartened
than when he did look at the brushwork. Composition #16, Picture #6, Meditation
#11, Untitled #12 … and what was there on the canvas but a band of long gray
smears so pale across a white background that it looked as though Orcutt had
tried not to paint the painting but to rub it out? Consulting the description of
the exhibition in the flier, written and signed by the young couple who owned
the frame shop, didn’t do any good either. “Orcutt’s calligraphy is so intense
the shapes dissolve. Then, in the glow of its own energy, the brush stroke
dissolves itself… .” Why on earth would a guy like Orcutt, no stranger to
the natural world and the great historical drama of this country—and a helluva
tennis player—why on earth did he want to paint pictures of nothing? Since the
Swede had to figure the guy wasn’t a phony— why would someone as well educated
and as self-confident as Orcutt devote all this effort to being a phony?—he
could for a while put the confusion down to his own ignorance about art.
Intermittently the Swede might continue to think, “There’s something wrong with
this guy. There is some big dissatisfaction there. This Orcutt does not have
what he wants,” but then the Swede would read something like that flier and
realize that he didn’t know what he was talking about. “Two decades after the
Greenwich Village years, Orcutt’s ambition remains lofty: to create,” the flier
con-
322
eluded, “a personal expression of universal themes that include the enduring
moral dilemmas which define the human condition.”
It never occurred to the Swede, reading the flier, that enough could not be
claimed for the paintings just because they were so hollow, that you had to say
they were pictures of everything because they were pictures of nothing—that all
those words were merely another way of saying Orcutt was talentless and, however
earnestly he might try, could never hammer out for himself an artistic
prerogative or, for that matter, any but the prerogative whose rigid definitions
had swaddled him at birth. It did not occur to the Swede that he was right, that
this guy who seemed so at one with himself, so perfectly attuned to the place
where he lived and the people around him, might be inadvertently divulging that
to be out of tune was, in fact, a secret and long-standing desire he hadn’t the
remotest idea of how to achieve except by oddly striving to paint paintings that
looked like they didn’t look like anything. Apparently the best he could do with
his craving to be otherwise was this stuff. Sad. Anyway, it didn’t matter how
sad it was or what the Swede did or did not ask or understand or know about the
painter once one of those calligraphic paintings expressing the universal themes
that define the human condition made its way onto the Levov living room wall a
month after Dawn returned from Geneva with her new face. And that’s when things
got a little sad for the Swede.
It was a band of brown streaks and not gray ones that Orcutt had been trying to
rub out of Meditation #27, and the background was purplish rather than white.
The dark colors, according to Dawn, signaled a revolution of the painter’s
formal means. That’s what she told him, and the Swede, not knowing quite how to
respond and with no interest in what “formal means” meant, settled lamely on
“Interesting.” They didn’t have any art hanging on the walls when he was a kid,
let alone “modern” art—art hadn’t existed in his house any more than it did in
Dawn�
��s. The Dwyers had religious pictures, which might even be what accounted
for Dawn’s having all of a sudden become a connoisseur of “formal means”: a
secret embarrassment about growing up where, aside from the framed
323
* * *
photos of Dawn and her kid brother, the only pictures were pictures of the
Virgin Mary and of Jesus’ heart. These tasteful people have modern art on the
wall, we’re going to have modern art on the wall. Formal means on the wall.
However much Dawn might deny it, wasn’t there something of that going on here?
Irish envy?
She’d bought the painting right out of Orcutt’s studio for exactly half as much
as it had cost them to buy Count when he was a baby bull. The Swede told
himself, “Forget the dough, write it off—you can’t compare a bull to a
painting,” and in this way managed to control his disappointment when he saw
Meditation #27 go up on the very spot where once there had been the portrait of
Merry that he’d loved, a painstakingly perfect if somewhat overly pinkish
likeness of the glowing child in blond bangs she had been at six. It had been
painted in oils for them by a jovial old gent down in New Hope who wore a smock
and a beret in his studio there—he’d taken the time to serve them mulled wine
and tell them about his apprenticeship copying paintings in the Louvre—and who’d
come to the house six times for Merry to sit for him at the piano, and wanted
only two thousand smackers for the painting and the gilt frame. But as the Swede
was told, since Orcutt hadn’t asked for the additional thirty percent it would
have cost had they purchased #27 from the frame shop, the five grand was a
bargain.
His father’s comment, when he saw the new painting, was “How much the guy charge
you for that?” With reluctance Dawn replied, “Five thousand dollars.” “Awful lot
of money for a first coat. What’s it going to be?” “Going to be?” Dawn had
replied sourly. “Well, it
ain’t finished … I hope it ain’t___Is it?” “That it isn’t ‘finished,’”
said Dawn, “is the idea, Lou.” “Yeah?” He looked again. “Well, if the guy ever
wants to finish it, I can tell him how.” “Dad,” said the Swede, to forestall
further criticism, “Dawn bought it because she likes it,” and though he also
could have told the guy how to finish it (probably in words close to those his
father had in mind), he was more than willing to hang anything Dawn bought from
Orcutt just because she had bought it. Irish envy or no Irish envy, the painting
was another sign that the desire to live had become stronger in her
324
than the wish to die that had put her into the psychiatric clinic twice. “So the
picture is shit,” he told his father later. “The thing is, she wanted it. The
thing is she wants again. Please,” he warned him, feeling himself—strangely,
given the slightness of the provocation—at the edge of anger, “no more about
that picture.” And Lou Levov being Lou Levov, the next time he visited Old
Rimrock the first thing he did was to walk up to the picture and say loudly,
“You know something? I like that thing. I’m gettin’ used to it and I actually
like it. Look,” he said to his wife, “look at how the guy didn’t finish it. See
that? Where it’s blurry? He did that on purpose. That’s art.”
In the back of Orcutt’s van was his large cardboard model of the new Levov
house, ready to unveil to the guests after dinner. Sketches and blueprints had
been piling up in Dawn’s study for weeks now, among them a diagram prepared by
Orcutt charting how sunlight would angle into the windows on the first day of
each month of the year. “A flood of sunlight,” said Dawn. “Light!” she
exclaimed. “Light!” And if not with the brutal directness that could truly test
to the limit his understanding of her suffering and of the panacea she’d
devised, by implication she was damning yet again the stone house he loved and,
too, the old maple trees he loved, the giant trees that shaded the house against
the summer heat and every autumn ceremoniously cloaked the lawn in a golden
wreath at whose heart he’d hung Merry’s swing once upon a time.
* * *
The Swede couldn’t get over those trees in the first years out in Old Rimrock. /
own those trees. It was more astonishing to him that he owned trees than that he
owned factories, more astonishing that he owned trees than that a child of the
Chancellor Avenue playing field and the unbucolic Weequahic streets should own
this stately old stone house in the hills where Washington had twice made his
winter camp during the Revolutionary War. It was puzzling to own trees—they were
not owned the way a business is owned or even a house is owned. If anything,
they were held in trust. In trust. Yes, for all of posterity, beginning with
Merry and her kids.
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the big maples, four cables forming a rough parallelogram against the sky where
the heavy branches opened dramatically out some fifty feet up. The lightning
rods that snaked from the trunk to the topmost point of each tree he arranged to
have inspected annually, just to be on the safe side. Twice a year, the trees
were sprayed against insects, every third year they were fertilized, and
regularly an arborist came around to prune out the deadwood and check the
overall health of the private park beyond their door. Merry’s trees. Merry’s
family’s trees.
In the fall—just as he had always planned it—he’d be sure to get home from work
before the sun went down, and there she would be—just as he had planned it—
swinging high up over the fallen leaves encircling the maple by the front door,
their largest tree, from which he’d first suspended that swing for her when she
was only two. Up she would swing, nearly into the leaves of the branches that
spread just beyond the panes of their bedroom windows … and, though to him
those precious moments at the end of each day had symbolized the realization of
his every hope, to her they had meant not a goddamn thing. She turned out to
love the trees no more than Dawn had loved the house. What she worried about was
Algeria. She loved Algeria. The kid in that swing, the kid in that tree. The kid
in that tree who was now on the floor of that room.
The Orcutts had come early so that Bill and Dawn would have time together to go
over the problem of the link that was to join the one-story house to the two-
story garage. Orcutt had been away in New York for a couple of days, and Dawn
was impatient to get this, their last problem, resolved after weeks of thinking
and rethinking how to create a harmonious relationship between the very
different buildings. Even if the garage was more or less disguised as a barn,
Dawn didn’t want it too close, overwhelming the distinctiveness of the house,
but she was afraid that a link twenty-four feet long, which was Orcutt’s
proposal, might impart the look of a motel.
· 326 ·
They ruminated together almost daily, not only over the dimensions but now over
whether the effect should perhaps be that of a greenhouse rather than of the
simple passageway first planned. Whenever Dawn felt that Orcutt was trying to
impose on her, however graciously, a solution that had more to do with some old-
fashioned architectural aesthetic of his own than with the rigorous modernity
she had in mind for their new home, she could be quite peeved, and she even
wondered, on those few occasions when she was outright furious with him, if it
hadn’t been a mistake to turn to someone who, though he had considerable
authority with the local contractors—guaranteeing a first-class construction
job)— and an excellent professional reputation, was “essentially a restorer of
antiques.” Years had passed since she’d been intimidated by the snobbery that,
fresh from Elizabeth and the family home (and the pictures on the wall and the
statue in the hallway), she’d taken to be more or less Orcutt’s whole story. Now
* * *
his credentials as county gentry were what she was most cutting about when the
two of them were at odds. The angry disdain disappeared, however, when Orcutt
came back to her, usually within twenty-four hours, having alighted on—in Dawn’s
words—”a perfectly elegant plan,” whether it was for the location of the washer-
dryer or a bathroom skylight or the stairway to the guest room above the garage.
Orcutt had brought with him, along with the large one-sixteenth-inch scale model
out in the van, samples of a new transparent plastic material he wanted her to
consider for the walls and the roof of the link. He’d gone into the kitchen to
show it to her. And there the two of them remained, the resourceful architect
and the exacting client, debating all over again—while Dawn cleaned the lettuce,