The artist walked in front of him through the rainforest path of the property. Costello stayed close, carefully observing his gait. Banyan trees and palmettos twisted forward on the path, bowing to them like sacred Gods.
The nurse was hesitant to let him leave the house. “Just mind him. His balance is not perfect,” she told Costello.
The artist’s words came in rambling form, with occasional outbursts of clarity, neurons that sparked an ancient memory. For every cohesive phrase, Costello was grateful, though he failed to remember him.
His mannerisms were the same. The still boyish face that seemed to wink at you as he spoke, the way he transferred his weight to one side, the southern drawl that dipped into entreaty to get his ideas conveyed.
His ideas. His eyes were still flooded with concepts and shapes and colors about the world.
He watched the artist’s careful baby steps as they approached the studio, the spine bent forward helplessly to gravity, how he still gestured with his hands, pointing out the geometrical shapes and colors of plants and architecture.
The artist pointed to the corner of the lot and lifted his clawed hand toward the sky, squinting into the sun. Costello knew he was recalling when he built the bungalow and studio. The bungalow, in its small intricate playhouse design, the low ceilings and hidden doorways, had now become his prison. The artist’s towering frame was never compatible with its design.
They entered the mammoth, Byzantine door of the studio the artist had created himself — sixteen inches thick and beveled to match the circular design of the studio — filled with whimsical brass and mango wood ornaments of sun and crescent shapes.
Costello waited for the familiar sawdust air to envelop his pores. As an apprentice twenty years before, he spent hours sawing wood frames to house the paintings.
He recalled standing behind the artist to watch him paint. He would never master the delicate feverish strokes of color, the eye for perspective, the way the shadows filled the perfect faces. Shadows and light.
When the artist painted Princess Grace, how he captured her — that kind of beauty he could never paint. His drawing teacher in college used to tell him, “You can’t paint beautiful women. It cannot be done.”
Costello had studied Biggs, Rockwell, Gibson, and all the rest, trying to put himself in the Saturday Evening Post Era, hoping to strengthen his painting.
Walter Biggs was his favorite, the slashes of paint that became eyes, delicate hands, dark folds in a wind-blown dress. He’d sit in the dimly lit studio after sweeping the floor and leaf through the ancient Post covers, the smell of turpentine and paint and sawdust sifting through his senses.
Then there were the bits of paper and cardboard or Masonite at the artist’s desk on the middle floor, filled with intricate drawings of birds, fantastical animals, buildings, and caricatures of the artist himself.
He got those trinkets every year around Christmas, handmade postcards — sometimes pieces of wood — created especially for him and notated with witty and sentimental scrawls in the artist’s black marker handwriting. Next to his sketches, he would ask Dr. Seuss-like questions.
How big is the sun today? What did the seagull have for breakfast? Do children wonder where their toes go in the sand?
The years had deteriorated the railing around the studio and Costello stood following the rotted wood around the walls. Then he was catching Claire again and he felt her weight on his chest.
Sometimes she came to the studio after the day had finished. Her fearlessness. The way she teetered along the outside railing on the second floor giggling like a child, her long arms flailing in the air like graceful butterfly wings, taunting him to catch her. He’d clumsily perch under her, arms extended, moving with her in cautious steps. Suddenly she would leap off the railing and he nearly lost her as she fell into his arms.
They collapsed to the floor, Claire still giggling as she sat on him, and he looked up, lost in the paintings all around the walls, the dazzling pastel colors suspended in the velvet light of the studio.
Seven-foot-tall unfinished paintings of Princess Grace — mere practice pieces spun from Masonite board he always used — hung from the walls and scenes of children flying kites on a beach. The artist would later ignite another genre painting nudes, using the lagoons around the studio, the models posing among the mangroves and Great Blue Herons.
“It’s not safe anymore.” The artist was next to him, staring at the railings.
Costello was startled. Did he know Claire used to do that? That she often came to the studio late at night?
He moved closer to see the palate, easel, paints, and brushes still full of dried chunks of color. Thick cobwebs had settled over them. The brushes soaked in thinner that had long vanished and a jar of gesso stood open and caked from the air. Everything was still, captured like a piece of film from the day the artist stopped painting.
“I painted six pictures of Rosalynn Carter and they paid for every one of them!” the artist said suddenly. “Amy, too.”
Costello looked at him. “Yes. I remember.”
The artist had trusted him to frame one of the Princess Grace paintings. He recalled the first time the artist had shown him how to cut the wood and seal the back of the paintings with thin rice paper, the way he became so involved with the demonstration that he had framed three paintings himself before pushing his thick glassed up on his nose and saying, “There. The rice paper must be placed with great care.”
“And Jimmy Carter? I must have done twelve,” the artist said now. He pointed to the far wall. “That’s one of them there,” he said. “They didn’t care for that one. His teeth.”
The light gauzed the artist’s face, made the white, thick coiffeur sparkle, and for a moment he looked like he always had — the ramrod posture and large hands and impeccably tailored clothes — standing next to his easel.
The artist brought his left, stroke-numbed hand to the blank white Masonite canvas still perched on the easel and stroked it lightly with his fingertips. The forward slant of the artist, his chest collapsing into memories, the clumsy hands twitching as he strained forward to the easel as if to cradle it and reach for the brush one last time to make one more stroke of insoluble beauty, created a stilled reflection.
After a moment, Costello said, “Do you recall we used to eat lunch on the veranda?” He gestured to the open door to the patio overlooking the garden.
The artist slowly angled away from the pallet of paints and squinted at Costello. “Why, yes. Yes. Lunch you say? I can have Madelaine bring some sandwiches.”
He had remembered her name and this surprised him. Madelaine had died years ago but she used to make sandwiches for them. He recalled her ebullient smile, how she stood there holding the tray of sandwiches and glasses of tea and handmade clay bowls filled with star fruit and mango she plucked from their trees.
Perhaps more than anything it was the lunches with the artist he treasured most. Costello had shown him his sketchbook from figure class and the artist would trace his finger above the charcoal drawings and nod his head. He puffed his lips and tilted his head and Costello was afraid to say anything or hear nothing at all.
Here was a master — a man as famous as Norman Rockwell, John Clymer or Richard Sargent, a man who designed book covers for John D. McDonald — casting his eyes over primitive, first-year art school drawings.
“You must draw all the time. Draw everything. Shadows and light. All form materializes from shadows and light.” He closed the sketchbook and rested his hands on it palms down.
His young son, Timmy, had been below the window that day playing with the garden hose. The artist turned his head to the side. “Maddy! Get Timmy away from that hose. I told him before, enough.”
Then he had turned back to Costello. “I never thought I was as good as Norman. That’s what made me paint every day.”
He never forgot that.
Now the artist called out, “Maddy! Bring us lunch, will you?”
“Madelaine is gone. I wish she were here,” he said.
“She’ll be back.”
Costello saw the unfinished painting in the corner under the enormous stained glass windows the artist designed. He almost missed it. A painter’s rag covered part of it.
He leaned over and picked it up. Clair’s eyes stared out from the white gessoed background. The eyes that once reflected his face, that once projected the molecules and flesh of her being, that were now pigments of dried, cracking oil and gesso, teased him.
“It’s unfinished, isn’t it?” the artist said.
Costello closed his eyes.
“Shadows and light,” he said.
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