Carver’s Dog

A city scene. A cracked asphalt staircase with no hand railing hugs the western portion of a paved urban hillside, a stretch of road that leads to a tree-lined street above. What is supporting the staircase, with brown and green weeds flourishing in its cracks and fissures, is uncertain because the object cannot be seen.

At the foot of the city hillside, paused in mid-stroll in a pedestrian intersection that is all hers to occupy, is a young girl with soft brown hair in pigtails. She wears a black-and-white plaid skirt and a simple white blouse. The hem of one sleeve is being lightly lifted by a breeze. Her small feet, almost child-like, are tucked into ankle-length socks and a pair of Buster Browns. Her face is turned from us as she contemplates the long, decaying sidewalk that traverses the hill.

The road at the top of the hill where the staircase ends — or begins, if one is descending the hill — is devoid of any life whatsoever. No cars. No pedestrians. Dark brown trees sprout pale yellow lemons the size of basketballs, the boughs of the branches bent and prepared to break. In this grove of brooding lemon trees sits the haunted remains of a child’s lemonade stand, complete with hand-lettered sign and a glass pitcher on the counter that has been sealed over with opaque cobwebs.

This is the picture that Melanie painted in her mind’s eye when the doctor told her that the lump in her breast was malignant.

Savannah placed an ad in the Help Wanted section of the L.A. Weekly classifieds:

PROFESSIONAL ARTIST SEEKS NUDE MODEL

Experienced Only. Portfolio Required. $20.00 per hr., Ongoing Position

Reply Box 7654239

Within two days Savannah was sifting through a landslide of replies. She telephoned the respondents personally and requested coffee shop meetings with every one of them to view their portfolios. She chose the Starbucks at Pico and Robertson, a brisk ten-minute stroll from her house and artist’s studio.

She liked Rosemary, a wispy blonde who had done some impressive work for a renowned photographer, but Savannah couldn’t get past the coiled snake tattoo on her left ankle. Evelyn was a possibility but there was something in her eyes that Savannah did not trust. Portia was beautiful, although a bit on the zaftig side. Her modeling portfolio was unfortunately limited to obscene spreads for Busty Beauties magazine.

The eleventh interview was the charm. Kimberlea. Auburn hair to her shoulders. Deep-set almond-shaped eyes. Her portfolio revealed a slender body sporting small, pert breasts, sturdy shoulders, devilish long legs, and a thick patch of dark, swirling pubic hair. Her complexion was slightly sallow, leading Savannah to speculate that the young model was an alcoholic. That was okay. She knew her way around alcoholics. Her ex-husband was one. All writers are drunks, she never tired of explaining to her mother, The good ones anyway.

Savannah would never allow Kimberlea to lay her eyes upon the canvas she was posing for. Every day, from ten in the morning until one in the afternoon, Kimberlea was posed in an overstuffed armchair, right leg crossed over left knee. There was always an unlit cigarette clutched between the middle and index finger of her right hand and in her left hand she held open a book. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. This was the image that Savannah stared at for three hours a day, paint brush in hand, occasionally dabbing and stroking at the canvas. And she demanded that Kimberlea remain fully clothed.

“I thought you wanted a nude model. That’s what the ad said.” Kimberlea was confused. She didn’t like being confused.

“I’ve seen your portfolio,” Savannah calmly explained on the first day. “I already know what you look like nude.”

Sixty bucks a day, seven days a week, was $420 that Kimberlea otherwise did not have, jobs had been very slim lately, so she gladly assumed her fully-clothed sitting every morning at ten o’clock sharp.

On a mild Sunday afternoon in May, three months into the assignment, Savannah suddenly announced that the painting was finished. She beamed at Kimberlea from behind the canvas, an unsettling grin on her face, little smudges of oil paint on her oval cheeks, brown and blue and green and red. She appeared to Kimberlea as a demented clown. Kimberlea hated clowns.

“Do you wanna see it?” Savannah said as though to a child. “Take a little peek?”

Kimberlea rose on unsteady legs and approached the painting in a long, slow march across the studio floor. She could feel every second ticking by. She had never felt like this in her life, this dread, this apprehension, and when she laid eyes upon the canvas she knew why. A scream rose in Kimberlea’s  throat at a pitch loud enough to set off car alarms on the tree-lined street. She stumbled for the door, arms groping and flailing in the air like a blind man’s, and ran as fast as her feet would carry her.

She never collected her final paycheck.

Meredith burst into the den. She was breathless from her sprint down the hallway. “Come … watch … CNN …” She panted. ”Breaking news, an attack on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem, eight reported dead so far.”

Ed did not look up from the watercolor he was working on, a rather crude impression of the fabled Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz. “Send the envoy,” he sang, adding a dab of color to the little Gothic towers and grand arches

“What?” Meredith loomed in the doorway, a racehorse at the gate, the blaring plasma TV restlessly awaiting her return to the living room.

“It’s a Warren Zevon tune, The Envoy.” He was disappointed with the painting. He considered burning the canvas in the fireplace and starting over.

“Never heard of it.”

“Whenever there’s a crisis/The President sends his envoy/Guns in Damascus/Whooooa, Jersusalem …”

Meredith blinked and frowned. “Uh-huh. Well, sorry to interrupt your precious painting.”

“Sometimes you take the world far too seriously, Meredith,” Ed called out to her retreating shadow. Not once had his gaze wandered from the canvas.

Ed gently removed his glasses and dabbed at his moist eyes with the pale blue silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He absently stared out the window at the rose garden, his labored breathing falling like footsteps in the quiet of the den. 

Ed’s hand was shaking as he reached for the steak knife resting on the small workbench next to the easel. He plunged the sharpened blade into the canvas and began his butchery.

Woodrow believed that for art to have any everlasting value it must be challenging and unsettling and take time to absorb; for this reason he believed Moby Dick to be perhaps one of the greatest novels ever written and Edward Hopper the most masterful storyteller with oil on canvas ever. Woodrow found Hopper’s desolately real urban and country settings, his painful attention to detail, to the hidden anguish and the dead vacant stares in the eyes of the occupants of his paintings, to be something almost heartbreaking to consume, whether in a gallery or museum or between the glossy pages of a coffee table art book.

When Woodrow first conceived The Poet and the Pistolero over coffee one fog-encased morning at a sidewalk snack shop in Venice Beach, an Edward Hopper image instantly came to mind. He would approach the painting as a European Romanticism window scene but with a twist: along with the outer view into the inner psychological scrutiny of the subject in the foreground, perhaps a young woman with a soft woolly head of hair in a drab gingham dress on a beige carpeted floor, the background action through the window just over her shoulder, with luminous shadows that reflected yellow light, would be the actual story he was telling with his artist’s brush. That’s where the drama with the poet and the pistolero would be playing out. He also noted to give the girl on the carpet a book or a magazine to apathetically leaf through while horrors are happening outside her window; with that notion he knew he had seized upon one of the key themes he wished to convey in the girl’s face, that look of reserved ennui as important events happen behind your back.

Woodrow always sketched in charcoal before committing brush to canvas. Over the course of two weeks he feverishly rendered hundreds of samples of the girl’s face, the room and the small bed in the corner with the white stone pitcher of water on the bland wood nightstand, and then the complicated segments, the violent, flame-fueled apocalypse occurring outside of her frame of reference. By the time he wore twenty charcoal pencils down to the nub Woodrow intuitvely knew that the European Romaticism window scene was not the method to convey his drama. He lamentably returned his sketch pad to the top right desk drawer and determined to meditate on this momentary detour in bringing his tale to life.

The idea came to him one night while listening to NPR and drinking an affordable bottle of Pinot Grigio from Trader Joes. Gone was the woolly-haired girl on the beige carpet. He would reverse the window scene, as Hopper had done in New Haven and Hartford and many other paintings, and reveal the outer view from an unknown interior perspective. The eyes of an unseen stranger cast upon the carnage.

It was time to open the tubes of paint.

The brush couldn’t convey the paint to the canvas with enough haste and fury. Woodrow captured a fleeting glimpse of a railroad landscape as seen through a train window, introducing movement in the work. There was a track in the foreground that ran parallel at the bottom edge of the painting. The central figure was a tall man walking along the railroad tracks in his bare feet. He wore a slate gray suit that was shredded at the shoulder pads and thin whisps of smoke hissed from blood-soaked bullet holes in his white shirt, visible as the wind flapped the hem of his coat in a heavy breeze, evidenced further by the fine granular sand blowing around his naked feet. His eyes are cloaked behind dark glasses, symbolizing the hidden inner life that can only be hinted at in brushtrokes. Woodrow sometimes grieved that he had no talent for writing.

A railroad track in a desert in Mexico. No one peering upon the painting would ever know that Woodrow gave the man a name and a backstory. He chose the name Trace and discovered in his dog-eared dictionary that it served his subject well: a surviving mark, sign, or evidence of the existence of something that has long passed. A trace element. A bullet-riddled man in a combat-scarred suit walking barefoot along a railroad track in the Mexican desert. In one hand he clutches a book. A garish red cover and in black script the words COLLECTED POEMS can be discerned.

Trace, Woodrow’s fantasy informed him, was a writer from L.A. who met a young, exuberant Hispanic poetess in a coffee shop in Los Feliz. God, she was beautiful, with eyes as dark and mysterious as Trace’s own tainted soul. They became romantically involved and when the young woman — Woodrow named her Yolanda — was compelled to return to Mexico on suspicious “urgent family business”, Trace doggedly pursued her across the border, learning to his horror that she was being married off to a low-level gangster to satisfy her father’s extravagant gambling debts.

On Woodrow’s canvas, at Trace’s feet, her dark knees sinking in the sand, is Yolanda. The veil of her white wedding dress hovers behind her in the wind like a white flag of surrender. Her olive-skinned cheeks are wet with tears and she is pleading with him to go no further. On the other side of the railroad tracks there is a roadside taco stand and behind the taco stand bright magenta flames are dancing in the azure blue sky. A careful observer of the moment would note the vague outline of a handgun in Trace’s waistband.

In the upper right hand corner of the canvas is a car engulfed in flames, a silver ‘57 Chevy Bel-Air, the driver hanging out the open door in deathly repose, mouth agape, frozen in mid-scream, a neat crimson bullet wound in his broad forehead.

“It’s violent and it’s surreal,” the gallery owner said with a thin smile when Woodrow presented the paining for exhibition. “And it tells a story, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so.” Woodrow stuffed his hands in his pockets and scuffed the soles of his tennis shoes on the hardwood floor, eyes warily cast downward. He was uncomfortable discussing or analyzing his work.

“Don’t worry, kid.” The rotund man clapped a hand on Woodrow’s thin shoulder. “It spins a good yarn with spare details, just like a Hopper painting. Isn’t that what you were aiming for? Looks like it to me. Listen, people love a good tale in this town in any form they can get it, it’s the whole creative inspiration thing, you see, movie people and all that, always looking for the next great idea, whether they get it from a painting they can stare at for hours or a late night lap dance at one of those strip clubs out by LAX. Not that I’ve ever been but that’s another discussion. Empirical knowledge. I’ve got a lot of it. But like I said, don’t worry. This beauty’ll get your rent paid next month. It’s good. It’s garish in its own poetic way. That’s what you were shooting at, right?”

“I wasn’t shooting at anything,” Woodrow mumbled. “I was just trying to tell a story.”