The Feast of Love - Charles Baxter [35]
ABOUT THIS BASEMENT and the paintings residing there, what can I say? I held Esther’s hand as we descended the stairs. I feared that she might stumble. Wasps, likewise, were on my mind. I did not want to have her stung and would protect her if necessary. Bradley had leaned his paintings against the walls, as painters do, on the floor. Each painting leaned into another like a derelict reclining against other derelicts. He had installed a fervent showering of fluorescent light overhead. A quantity of light like that will give you a headache if you’re inclined, as I am, to pain. The basement smelled of turpentine and paint substances, the pleasant sinus-clearing elemental ingredients of art, backed by the more pessimistic odors of subsurface cellar mold and mildew.
One by one he brought out his visions.
This, he said, is Composition in Gray and Black. He held up for our inspection images of syphilis and gonorrhea.
And this, he said, is called Free Weights.
Very interesting, Esther said, scratching her nose with a pencil she had found somewhere, as she contemplated our neighbor’s abstract dumbbells and barbells, seemingly hanging, like acorns, from badly imagined and executed surrealist trees, growing in a forest of fog and painterly confusion that no revision could hope to clarify.
And here, he said, lugging out a larger canvas from behind the others, is a different sort of picture. In my former style. He placed it before us.
Until that moment I had thought the boy, our neighbor, a dim bulb. This painting was breath-snatching. What’s this called? I asked him.
I call it The Feast of Love, Bradley said.
In contrast to his other paintings, which appeared to have been slopped over with mud and coffee grounds, this one, this feast of love, consisted of color. A sunlit table — on which had been set dishes and cups and glasses — appeared to be overflowing with light. The table and the feast had been placed in the foreground, and on all sides the background fell backward into a sort of visible darkness. The eye returned to the table. In the glasses was not wine but light, on the plates were dishes of brightest hues, as if the appetite the guest brought to this feast was an appetite not for food but for the entire spectrum as lit by celestial arc lamps. The food had no shape. It had only color, burning pastels, of the pale but intense variety. Visionary magic flowed from one end of the table to the other, all the suggestions of food having been abstracted into too-bright shapes, as if one had stepped out of a movie theater into a bright afternoon summer downtown where all the objects were so overcrowded with light that the eye couldn’t process any of it. The painting was like a flashbulb, a blinding, cataract art. This food laid out before us was like that. Then I noticed that the front of the table seemed to be tipped toward the viewer, as if all this light, and all this food, and all this love, was about to slide into our laps. The feast of love was the feast of light, and it was about to become ours.
Esther sighed: Oh oh oh. It’s beautiful. And then she said, Where are the people?
There aren’t any, Bradley told her.
Why not?
Because, he said, no one’s ever allowed to go there. You can see it but you can’t reach it.
Now it was my turn to scratch my balding head. Bradley, I barked at him, this is not like your other paintings, this is magnificent, why do you hide such things?
Because it’s not true, he said.
What do you mean, it’s not true? Of course it’s true if you can paint it.
No, he said, still looking fixedly at his creation. If you can’t get there, then it’s not true. He looked up at me and Esther, two old people holding hands in our neighbor’s basement. I’m not a fool, he said. I don’t spend my time painting foolish dreams and fantasies. Once was enough.
I could have argued with him but chose not to.
And with that, he picked up the painting and hid it behind the silly ugly dumbbells growing like acorns on psychotic trees.
WHAT A STRANGE YOUNG MAN, Esther said, tucked in next to me several