The vanishing point, p.1
The Vanishing Point, page 1
Epigraph
A great calm stole over him. Great calm is an exaggeration. He felt better. The end of a life is always vivifying.
—Samuel Beckett, Malone Dies
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
The Vanishing Point
Hawaii Nei Dietrologia
The Fall
Adobo
Love Doll
Hawaii Sugar
A Charmed Life
Elsewhere Headmaster
Navigational Hazard
Father X
Home Cooking
A Couple of Bottles of Moxie
Aide-Mémoires Camp Echo
Stop & Shop
First Love
The Silent Woman
Ghost Fest
Finitude
Note
About the Author
About Mariner Books
Also by Paul Theroux
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Vanishing Point
In the bewilderment of being an only child on his parents’ failing chicken farm in Maine, his face fixed in a scowl for being nagged at, Guy Petit experienced the day of his greatest happiness. He was nine.
“We have to drive to Waldoboro for Sarah Strunk’s funeral,” his mother said. “You’ll be okay on your own.”
Then they were gone, the house was still, its odors stronger in its emptiness. He sat as though bathed in light, serene in the stillness, smiling at his luck, in the rapture of solitude. It was as though he had been swallowed whole.
He did not want anything more than to be contained by that bliss, spared the disruption of the human voice. You couldn’t see the future, so there was no point looking. For some years he waited for a return to such happiness. After high school, other boys got jobs as sternmen on lobster boats, or in the paper mills or other farms; and the girls got married or worked the cash registers at Osier’s. Guy joined the navy, to be far from home.
His father died in the barn with a hayfork in his hand while Guy was on maneuvers at Subic Bay. The man was a smoker and asthmatic and had always coughed in choking and suffocating fits; coughed his life out was how Guy imagined it.
In the navy Guy learned pipe fitting, and later deep-sea diving—underwater repairs on ships’ hulls. His ready “Aye, sir,” his willingness to take on deep dives, several with faulty gear, led to a ruptured eardrum, a diagnosis of serious hearing loss, and an early discharge. Disability payments allowed him to earn a degree in history in Orono; but preferring to work with his hands, he opted for a job as a carpenter and a welder. He kept his mind active by reading, mostly biography and military history. During the day he wore a hearing aid in the damaged ear.
When his mother moved with Bud Strunk to a trailer park in Bradenton, Florida, Guy relocated to Water Street in Ellsworth, where he lived as a lodger with a woman called Mrs. Semple and her three children. He traveled each day to work full-time in the Bar Harbor studio of the artist Elliott Stanger.
Stanger had hired him as a carpenter. Guy made frames, stretched canvases, built crates for shipping pictures to galleries, and now and then manned the paint sprayer, drenching the canvases with color, Stanger looking on, usually squinting through his own cigarette smoke at the images he had planned now soaking and swelling on the cloth.
“This is my handyman,” Stanger told visitors who came to see his work. The studio’s interior, as big as a barn, was once the Elks Lodge and had been renovated by Guy under Stanger’s direction. It was now a great, warm, yellow-painted space, with a cathedral ceiling and skylights, Stanger’s latest finished paintings hanging along two walls, drying.
The area occupying one corner some visitors mistook for a partitioned parlor, or den, because of the old sofa, and easy chair, and a one-armed bandit, with a slot for nickels, that rang when its arm was yanked, sometimes delivering a clatter of coins into the cup in front. But just out of sight, beyond a smeared and spattered curtain, a steel frame, the shelves of paint cans, the sprayer, the spools of masking tape, and on another rack, the thick roll of pale raw canvas.
“So this is where you work your magic,” visitors said, when Stanger suggested his method of painting, adding that it was too emotional a process for him to go into any detail.
Stanger’s thick hair was tousled as though in defiance. He usually wore a spotless, untucked shirt, blue jeans and espadrilles, while Guy would be standing by with Mack Spinney, the other assistant, and it was they who were spattered, their aprons stiff with paint, streaks on the toes of their shoes.
The only secret to carpentry, Guy said, was having the right tool. “That’s a five-sixteenth,” he’d say of a nut, selecting a socket wrench. He was proud of his assortment of tools, which he kept in trays and steel chests and on hooks in Mrs. Semple’s garage. If he found a broken object, he could always devise a way to fix it.
What he knew of modern art was what Stanger had told him, that figurative painting was obsolete, Picasso was a con man. Only pure color mattered, Stanger offering his own work as an example, his horizontal stripes and perfect circles—ribbons and targets.
Guy told the facts of his life and his work—family, navy, diving, deafness, college, carpentry—to Tony Semple, who was sixteen and full of questions, because Tony was wondering what his own life might be. And Guy, though still only twenty-nine, was like an uncle to Tony and the younger children, too, Adreth and Small Bob, less a lodger than an affectionate friend to the family.
Guy paid rent and had his own room upstairs in the Water Street house, his window facing the river. Six months into his renting, Mrs. Semple knocked on his door. He was in bed, a biography of Joshua Chamberlain propped on his chest. Mrs. Semple grasped the book and said, “You’ll ruin your eyes.”
Surrendering the book, Guy said, “What time is it?”
Mrs. Semple latched the door. “The kids are in bed. Tony’s with his father. It’s raining. The tide’s up.” With these pronouncements she seemed to put herself in charge, but Guy (his hearing aid on the bedside table) had not understood a word. His deaf, questioning look was always a smile.
She sat on the edge of Guy’s bed, her hands in her lap, and shimmied closer, slightly crushing him. Then she reached for the lamp and switched it off. She was naked when she slipped under the covers.
“Hold me, Guy. Just a cuddle.”
He was soothed by the sight of the rain on the window, diamond-like in the light of the streetlamps, and—though it had been years since the navy—he remembered the young woman with fragrant hair in the hotel bedroom in Olongapo, kneeling to help him untie his shoes. With Mrs. Semple he was reminded that a woman’s buttocks, no matter how smooth, are always unexpectedly cool to the touch, a different temperature from her lips.
The pleasure, the relief, the satisfaction that he was useful helped Guy overcome his nervousness with Mrs. Semple that first time. She was out of bed as he lay gasping and gone before he found the nerve to speak. The next day, stammering to thank her, she shushed him and turned her back. But there were more times, always late at night, sudden, brief. She clapped herself to him, and he returned the embrace with gusto, as though saving her from a bad fall.
“I’m getting fat,” Mrs. Semple said, one morning in the kitchen, seeing him off. The children were at school, but even so Guy approached her cautiously as though they were being observed.
Guy said, “I’ll love you as long as I can get both my arms around you.”
Instead of replying, Mrs. Semple made a pushing motion with one hand, indicating that he should go, and covered her face with her other hand, tears seeping from between her fingers.
He was privately strengthened in ways that shocked him. In one dream he stood, his feet apart, his hands on his hips, and wore a pistol, saying to a reporter, That man believed that he could break into my house, terrorize my wife, and intimidate me, and still leave my house alive.
“I don’t do op art,” Stanger said in a scolding way one day when Mack Spinney used the term.
And Guy, relieved that he had not said it, listened carefully, because he had wondered what you’d call what they were making.
“It’s color-field painting,” Stanger said. Seeing Mack Spinney squint at the words, he added, “It’s flat. It’s meditative.”
When Spinney murmured later, confiding to Guy, “Everything’s got a name. Even this flat stuff we do,” Guy went hot with guilt, as though he’d been disloyal.
Earlier that day, Stanger had said, “This one’s no good. Get rid of it,” which had provoked Spinney saying, “I guess you’d call this op art.”
Wearing masks against the fumes, they toiled in the big studio, spraying between the templates on the stretched canvas that lay tightened on the upright rack, Stanger issuing orders. They used wide paint rollers, too, pushing color between measured lengths of tape, saturating the cloth.
Linear painting, bands of color, some thick, some narrow, some pencil-thin, none intersecting, none overlapping, sprayed over an off-white background.
Target paintings, concentric circles, different combinations of color, separated by the pale background, always with a bull’s-eye, a round clot of color.
Chevrons another year, slanted stripes meeting at sharp angles, different colors, some of the stripes with a hairline margin of gold as a highlight. These Guy loved to make, because they reminded him of navy badges he knew, a petty officer’s red chevrons, master chief’s gold ones. Chevrons were like rafters, t
“Circles sell better,” Mack said, another murmur, and Guy, flustered, wished he hadn’t heard. But who bought them? What did they cost? What did people do with them?
“I see spatter,” Stanger said. He demanded hard lines. “Get rid of it.”
Guy, who never threw anything away that he thought might come in handy, rolled the rejected canvases into tubes and took them home.
“What’s it supposed to be?” Small Bob would ask, and Tony, too, would wait for the answer.
“A painting,” Guy said. “It’s a Stanger.”
“More like a drop cloth,” Tony said. These days he was an apprentice in construction down the coast.
“A work of art,” Guy said.
“Why are you laughing?” Small Bob said.
“Because I did it. Or most of it.”
An illustration on an oil-company calendar in the studio depicted a young man in a suit and tie waiting for a train on a railway platform. Guy had often stared at the picture, trying to imagine from his posture, the mood of the man. Going home? Going away? He was alone, his duffel bag at his feet, the sort of bag Guy had used when he’d joined the navy.
Mack drew Guy’s attention to the railway tracks, the way they narrowed in the distance.
“That’s your vanishing point,” Mack said, putting his blue-paint-splashed finger on the uppermost part of the tweezed-together tracks. “Gives you some idea of depth and perspective, which the boss”—he glanced behind him—“don’t approve of.”
“It’s a point,” Guy said, reassured that Stanger had left the studio. “It doesn’t really vanish. It’s just that you can’t see what’s beyond it. It’s not invisible. It’s unreadable. A mystery.”
“Anyway it’s a real picture,” Mack said later, when they were stretching one of Stanger’s canvases. These canvases they stacked against the wall, in various stages of saturation.
“Could be a mystery to this one,” Guy said of some chevrons. “Something coming that we can’t see.”
They worked longer hours these days in the studio, to keep up, because Stanger was away more often, in New York, and left instructions for Guy and Mack to prepare canvases for his arrival.
“The assembly line,” Mack said.
As always, Guy glanced around, fearing they might be overheard in their mockery, though it was always Mack who was the mocker.
On one of his arrivals back in the studio, Stanger had Guy and Mack gift wrap a big painting in sparkly paper and a red ribbon. “This is a first,” Mack said. They crated it, sending it to an address in New York City of a catalog company.
“Boss is going to be in a catalog,” Guy said.
“You don’t read too good,” Mack said. “It’s going to Babe Brickman.”
“Brickman Catalog it says.”
“She’s the catalog. See? ‘President and CEO.’ Stanger’s on the hunt.”
Stanger began shaving, though he kept his hair tousled. He was sixty-seven, an old man to Guy, but that he might be wooing a woman made Guy hopeful and happy. Stanger’s wardrobe improved, silk shirts, a cravat, a Panama hat on warmer days.
One Friday in late spring Stanger arrived in Bar Harbor in the driver’s seat of a sports car, a convertible, a woman beside him. She was small, child-size almost, and wore a large blue hat the blossom shape of a lampshade, and goggle-like sunglasses. When Stanger pulled up in front of the studio, Guy hurried out to help. He saw the woman struggling with the door handle, hitching herself forward in her effort.
Guy extended his hand.
“Don’t touch me,” the woman said from under her hat.
“Grab the bags,” Stanger said.
“They’re in the boot,” the woman said.
“Like—all of them—in a boot?” Mack asked. He laughed at the image in his mind.
But by then Guy had lifted the trunk lid to find the bags crammed into the small space.
Now the woman had managed to jiggle the door open and, stepping out, she tipped her head back to survey the building, piercing it with a possessive gaze. “Those curtains have to go,” she said. Her scrutiny of the building revealed the uplifted face beneath her hat brim. It was a girl’s face, but crumpled, a painted-on mouth fixed in a frown, severe in concentration, and when the woman tugged down her sunglasses to see better she widened her deep blue eyes and Guy thought, Lovely.
“This is Babe,” Stanger said in his friendly drawl.
“But you can call me Miss Brickman.” She turned her back and hurried into the building.
Stanger lingered to say, “Like the car? Babe gave it to me for my birthday.”
“Wicked nice,” Mack said.
Stanger and Miss Brickman spent the weekend at his house overlooking the harbor. Although Sunday was his day off, Guy agreed to drive over from Ellsworth to the studio, to slide finished paintings out of the storage racks for Miss Brickman to see. The larger ones he propped against the wall, the smaller ones he put on easels.
Miss Brickman sat on a sling chair, murmuring in approval, nibbling an earpiece of her sunglasses.
“This is one of my personal favorites,” Guy said. “Chevrons.”
He wanted to say more—what chevrons meant to him, the navy, rafters, the bones of a house. He also wanted to convey to Stanger and the woman newly in his life that he had not minded leaving Mrs. Semple and the children on a Sunday to drive over to Bar Harbor.
“You might have one of these in your future,” Stanger said.
Before Stanger had finished speaking, Miss Brickman stamped her foot and sighed, folding her arms in impatience.
Guy smiled, thinking, I’ve already got thirty, the ones I was told to get rid of.
That was the first Brickman visit. On the second weekend visit a month later, to show his goodwill, Guy indicated the broken strap on Miss Brickman’s handbag and said, “I could fix that for you. I’ve got just the right size awl. A five-ten, fine point. I use it on bridles.”
Miss Brickman clutched the bag and held it to her chest, as you would from a thief. The leather was like soft rich cloth in her anxious fingers, with the pebble-grain of orange peel. The bag was a remarkable color, lime green, and the broken strap its only flaw.
“This bag is probably worth more than you make in a year.”
Elliott Stanger and Babe Brickman were married that September, four months after “Don’t touch me.” The service was held on Stanger’s lawn, the reception at the studio, which was converted to a Stanger show, the walls covered with his paintings. Mack tended bar, Guy was a waiter in a suit borrowed from Tony, one with shiny lapels he’d bought for the Ellsworth Prom’s Grand March. Guy offered trays of hors d’oeuvres, tidied tables, emptied bins, and assisted the caterers who said they were shorthanded. He said nothing; he listened to “hottest restaurant” and “Her third—possibly her fourth. She’s buried two of them.”
The people widened their eyes as they chewed, showing their hunger, like monkey hunger in a cage at feeding time. Watching them killed Guy’s appetite.
“You’ll be all right,” Mack said to Guy after they arrived back from their honeymoon. “I heard the boss saying how much he depends on you.”
“Who was he talking to, exactly?”
“The little woman.”
Probably, Guy reasoned, because they were preparing for a show in New York, at a new gallery: a lot of paintings to stretch and frame, crates to be made, late nights, making Guy eager for news of the show. But when Stanger returned, the two men met on the front stairs. Without any preamble, Stanger said, “I’m going to have to let you go.”
Guy thought he’d misheard—often the crackle in his hearing aid misled him. So he smiled, hoping for clarification.
Stanger was tearful. He snatched at his hair and in an anguished voice said, “I don’t know how I’m going to manage without you.”
“After all you’ve done for him,” Mrs. Semple said.
She held him in her arms. But her caresses went no further.
