The Artist | CLEO AUKLAND

The Artist

CLEO AUKLAND | VERMONT In the hazy morning, the plane bobs and dips, small enough to be buffeted by pockets of air. The artist stands at his bedroom window, watching; the clouds are pulled wool blushing pink and gold, and the plane slips between them as it putters toward the island. The artist yawns, closes his curtains which are in dangerously close proximity to his smoldering cigarette, and turns away. They’re early.

He has been called moody by many people: reporters, fellow artists, spiteful photographers, neighbors, stylists, his mother. He broods on this: moody. Capricious is a word he likes better. He’ll sit and look out of the window with a burnt out cigarette dangling from his lips, feet in worn slippers, his hair unkempt. He’ll squint in brilliant blue sunlight, ponder depths of night skies. All on purpose. All with a very specific aura, of course, but also because it’s comfortable and what he likes to do. None of them understood why he wanted to go to the island in the first place, so he spent a lot of time squinting at them through his sheen of hair, shuffling. It gets very cold in the winter, they said. You’ll be cut off from the mainland a lot. You know you and your isolation drama, his mother had told him, rattling her bracelets.

His apartment is one of twelve on Main Street in the village, and he lives on the top floor in a building which houses an ice cream shop on the street level. From his window, he can see the harbor, cupped in an inlet and pocked with lobster boats. Sometimes he wakes up early enough to watch the fishermen motor to their steers, start engines, yell greetings over the wake. They follow one another out of the harbor and the water froths for minutes after as though a myriad of angry monsters has been awakened. Or so the artist would like to think. He doesn’t understand their hardiness, the fishermans’. He can’t stand the cold that they know in their bones, mapped like constellations into their genes while he feels like a child when he layers sweaters and long underwear and scarves and vests and cashmere and things that seem too fancy, superfluous and insulting to the rudimentary port. You are lavish, the artist tells himself, sweeping one arm of the scarf over his shoulder and staring at the water with petulence. His cheeks redden in ugly patches and his hands crack, and he is careful to think that he should not become bitter. He has chosen this, after all. Capricious. Moody.

He’d come to visit for the first time during the summer, not a surprise, then, that he’d fallen in love while the ocean wasn’t choked with craggy blocks of ice, when lilting trees sang sweet words to him and he liked leaves falling on his upturned face. He liked the quiet dirt roads, the wildflowers which he cut and arranged into vases, Queen Anne’s Lace, lupins; the sound of the sea. He liked thinking of the town across from his island as “the city” though its population hovered around 7,000 and all but shut down during the winter too, save for bars and the ferry terminal and the public school and library. He liked the people on the island, kids who jumped, shrieking, into the quarry, the kind parents that gardened, the bearded men.

But it was the coast. Those jagged outcrops of land, tree, stone, water, and he spent hours studying the pines giving way to the curve of sandstone to the ocean, slimed with algae and seaweed before it met the saltwater. It looked like the pines were lopped mid-sentence, their secrets vulnerable and close to the edge, in danger of spilling into the water and the artist wanted to press them back into the lines of sentinel firs, into pine beds and mossy boulders. He painted stretches of Maine coastline hundreds of times, sometimes reminding himself of Marsden Hartley with bold, bordered shapes, sometimes sketching, sometimes using the lightest of watercolors. He set up canvases on the most precarious of rocks, fitting the legs of his easel into grooves and ruts in the boulders. He’d balance palettes on the crook of his arm and worry at the shape of roots, at the serpentine curve of seaweed studded with pearly pockets but was careful to not spill any paint on the rocks.

And then, when that siren summer grew frost in the evenings and the landscape he’d studied gathered thin layers of ice and snow, he floundered. He was sullen, irate with himself that he’d been fooled by the seasons. His mother had crowed, told him she knew he wouldn’t do so well outside of that sticky Floridian town, and he’d wonder why the snow, gentle snow floating in unhurried twisting winds, pausing outside his window, made him so wrathful. He knew about the seasons, obviously. He wasn’t a dolt. He’d known that his new residence would put him in drastic changes in temperature and a departure from the stagnant palms which spattered his first successful paintings, but it was an irksome surprise how much it angered him. He felt silly at first, journeying to the water’s edge to make sense of the seascape shrouded in white, feeling lost at the ocean which, when it hadn’t frozen overnight, lapped at the edge of snow-covered stones and a wintery forest. He’d pause in the moment, couldn’t figure out where to go next. How strange to be lost in a landscape he knew so well.

It reminded him of a moment, years ago in the era when the artist’s head only just reached the top of the bathroom sink and ate pickle and mayonnaise sandwiches for most meals, a thing that happened when he walked in the kitchen on a Tuesday. The woman, a mother, his mother, had just paused in movement, and the artist saw; he saw disturbances in the atoms hovering by her elbow, reverberating off the sink, off her bony hands, off of the broken plate, and the artist wondered whether she’d thrown the plate on purpose. The air settled around her and her hair was shoulder length, dark brown. He read the uncertainty, the rash action, her almost imperceptible guilt, and it was the most vulnerable he’d ever seen her. She looked so lost. The artist wondered how it was possible to get lost standing still. He thought about forests in his mother’s mind, her thoughts winding through boughs and over roots, around trunks and suddenly pausing, uncertain. He wondered if anyone would answer if he knocked on the door in her head, whether he’d pause in the doorway, vulnerable in waiting, whether she’d recognize him.

He does like the seasons though, he has decided. They break up the monotony of waking each morning to a bright blue sky, plastic happy, though occasionally steely and steaming as though left by some rumbling piece of machinery. He finds that he is able to structure his mind, divides it into quadrants and habits necessitated by each season. Summer: garden, dry. Fall: boots, leaves. Winter: more clothing, inside. Spring: squinting, planting. How good to divide the brain in such mechanical ways, in large sweeps which change without our go-ahead so that we are rushed along with them.

It’s summer: garden, dry. And summer, this summer, the one when they are here. For a wild moment he thinks of the plane crashing, nosediving into the sea and thinks it’d be a shame to bother the barnacles and sturgeons and harbor seals. They never asked for anything as unpleasant as his sister and brother in law. Or, or, his mother.

There’s a paper bird flying outside his window. He looks closer at the kite which swoops and wings over town, a bald eagle, perhaps, though it’s brown, but the only eagle he knows is the bald one. He sees the little family below, the ostensible mother and father flying the kite to the delight of their child, who leaps. Quickly, he thinks sourly, how quickly his island has turned to a pack of cards.