Looking at Life
by Kenneth Radu

She painted many pictures after the death of her parents. Angelica sat in their bedroom, now the studio, peering from behind the easel to catch another glimpse of the remaining grey stone townhouses across the street, overshadowed by high-rise apartment blocks. She wondered if her parents had any notion at all. Were they looking down? She couldn’t imagine them looking any way but down. The light was best in this room.

Auctioning off the antique furniture brought in much-needed extra money. Father’s will saw to their comfort, provided they remained in the house. Painting materials, though, were expensive: good-quality rag paper and water colours, the finest brushes which did not leave behind minuscule hairs with every stroke. After paying for household maintenance and the charladies who came once or twice a week and “did” for them, they lacked disposable income.

Their bedrooms were on the third floor, next to the play room where Mother had admonished them to be quiet, especially Angelica who often fell into fits of temper when frustrated. Their parents’ quarters occupied the front half of the second floor, their father’s airless study the back with shelves of books behind glass doors. Permission was required for Angelica, the reader in the family, to take one down and read it.

They had spent a year in a Swiss finishing school to improve their French and cleanse it of Québécois impurities. They had been allowed to travel to parts of Italy to see the museums and galleries, always chaperoned by a reliable, unfailingly correct relative. Art classes had formed part of their curriculum in Switzerland. All the students could eventually produce a watercolour of rosebushes or teapots or blue bowls of apples and oranges, natures mortes.

Although they were not entirely discouraged from painting at home, it shouldn’t continue “at the expense of more important things,” Mother warned. Too much became foolishness. “A pretty picture, my dear,” Father would say, staring over the top of his newspaper. “Perhaps Cook would like to hang it in her room.” They spent their allowance on tubes of paint which Héloise, one of the maids, agreed to buy for them at the art supply store. And the rag paper purchased by the sheet accumulated: unobtrusive, easily hidden in bundles or trunks or at the back of their closet, under the maid’s cot in the room her mother never entered. They couldn’t of course devote all their time to art. Felicity and she had to wait for the opportunity, rest content with images in their head, with ideas appearing like great swatches of colour in their dreams, sketching when Mother was not paying attention to them.

One year their parents left for a tour of Europe. The daughters old enough to stay home under the guardianship of two aunts, enrolled in day classes in watercolour and drawing offered by the Musée des Beaux Arts, only a fifteen minute walk from their residence. The painting Angelica was now working on, a bonfire on ice which she remembered seeing with her family on the Rideau canal in Ottawa years ago, had reached a point where she must decide. Did it look real? Was painting from memory as good as painting the thing itself, in the present moment? Completed or not? That had always been a difficulty—many a painting ruined by not knowing when it was truly finished. The colours were perhaps too opaque, verging on the muddy. The flames too watery, their ferocious energy washed away. She ripped the paper off the easel, tore it to shreds, even using her teeth like a weasel eviscerating a rabbit, as she had so often done in the past. Pausing to let fury subside, she began again.

Felicity took to painting as if possessed of natural genius, knowing instinctively how to mix water and paint to the desired consistency and colour. As Angelica struggled for months on end with one picture or another, ruining expensive rag paper, no longer needing to hide from her parent’s condescension or disapproval, she felt her ability had attenuated. She had reached the end.

“Angelica, come down for tea.”

To capture the colour of Darjeeling or the insubstantial greenness of green tea: a colour was more than the thing itself. The very roundness of the pot changed the colour, the shadows of curvature, the hues of porcelain, the tints of courtesy. How was it possible to achieve Felicity’s sky and leaf, fruit and bowl? Felicity painted as if breathing in the colours through her fingertips, reproducing the shades of nature without muddle or murkiness, without laboured contemplation or contrivance. Everything had always come easily to her sister.

Like Marcel whom she had loved from a distance while he courted Felicity, after a fashion. He taught drawing classes at the museum, spoke French with a Parisian accent, smoked gauloises during class and insulted his students, calling them bourgoises, pauvres petites, demoiselles perdues. Grabbing charcoal, chalk or pencil, he often scratched over their sketches to express his contempt, the smell of his unwashed woollen sweater and armpits overpowering. At times his thigh pressed against their shoulders or back.

“Isn’t he handsome? So daring and original,” Felicity often exclaimed as they walked home.

“He is very rude and should remember who’s paying his fees,” Angelica sniffed, not knowing what to do with feelings that exploded in her dreams, imagining she was the only student whom Marcel pressed against.

For as long as their parents stayed in Europe, the sisters concentrated on their art, the guardians oblivious to their activity as everyone kept decent hours and observed dinner time. After all, the girls were past twenty, well-brought up and responsible, despite the occasional row with Angelica who at times perversely demanded her way to the point of irrationality. Angelica worked for hours on a single drawing of a pear, erasing and rubbing, ripping the sheets of paper off her sketch pad, crumpling and piling them around her feet. With an effortless and elegant movement of the wrist, Felicity accomplished the most rhythmical, softest, truest lines. “Ah, c’est beau,” Marcel sighed over her sister’s sketches, and passed by her own work without comment.

“Marcel has asked me out, Angie.” That day was particularly blustery, another Montreal November sky heavy with grey and damp.

“The nerve! I hope you put him in his place.” Felicity said nothing. Feeling the chill, Angelica grabbed her sister’s arm and bent her head into the wind.

Their parents returned home the day after Angelica confided to her sister that Marcel had kissed her in a little café on rue St. Denis. The girls received white kid gloves. The aunts received sachets of Chantilly lace. Mother and Father had not brought souvenirs home for the servants. Héloise was upset enough to reveal secrets, if properly encouraged. The next day Angelica listened outside her father’s study door and heard her sister cry.

“Do not raise your voice, child,” Mother said.

“This is for your own good,” Father said.

Felicity did not notice Angelica on the window seat at the end of the hall, partially hidden by the draperies, when she ran out of the room, sobbing up the stairs to the third floor. The next day Angelica was given instructions to inform the art teacher that Felicity and she would no longer be attending classes. Distraught, Marcel whispered in her ear, begging to be allowed to speak with her in private. They would go in a taxi to a café.

“Where you took Felicity?”

“Oui, si tu le veux.”

“Et mon dessin, monsieur, c’est beau?”

He covered her hand with his.

“Plus que beau, juste comme toi.”

She felt his fingers, blushed over the familiarity of his choice of pronoun, and allowed her imagination to be guided by his.

“I cannot stay long,” she said at the café.

He smoked several cigarettes, confessed his love for her sister even as she admired the unshaven cheek and was dizzy from either his smell or her own unspoken desires. He gave her a letter which she promised to deliver to Felicity.

Angelica read the letter. How long had they been confabulating? Time and place, means and assistance all arranged. If only Felicity, with her sister’s help, “serait courageuse” and “suivrait l’amour,” they, Marcel and Felicity, would be happy together. Instinctively, Angelica reached for her absent sister’s arm, to huddle close to her against the now biting early December wind. She had never shivered so much, despite the wool coat and fur hat.

Felicity was not allowed to see or say good-bye to her sister in the hurried departure for Winnipeg where Father’s sister kept a household run along the lines of military precision. Marcel, Angelica learned through Héloise who always had admired her brooch and which she now wore to visit her own mother, departed for France. She never heard of him again.

Felicity returned home, surprisingly cheery, as if Marcel had never existed, with a portfolio full of sketches and watercolours. Sitting on her sister’s bed, Angelica was astonished. The lightness of touch, the elegance, the rhythm, the lovely use of colour: where had it all come from? She herself had spent that dreary, snow-laden winter reading and drawing, running through pads of drawing paper as if they were tissues on which to blow her nose. Her stomach muscles cramped and her fingers hurt from clutching pencil and brush, but nothing came close to Felicity’s airy, convincing and yes, even beautiful, art.

Angelica read improving books and believed that talent alone was nothing without application and persistence, so she clutched her pencils and brushes, determined before she died to produce work at least comparable to her sister’s. Hearing Felicity call for tea, she realized that she had reached the end of time. There was no time left to speak of anymore, nothing against which she could measure accomplishment and worth, except for Felicity’s wondrous, inexplicable art.

Perhaps, if she had gone out more often instead of viewing life through a palette. What purpose did regrets serve anyway at her great age? She did not choose to paint because she had nothing better to do. Painting chose her the way Jesus chose girls to be nuns. As it had obviously chosen her sister. Just look at Felicity’s achievement, framed and hanging on the walls of the studio, the living room, the hallways. Angelica rolled her finished products or laid them flat under the table linen in the dining room china cabinet.

“Don’t you wish we had gone out more often, Felicity?”

“No, I haven’t felt the need, really. Are we not happy together? We’ve had all the time in the world to paint and read and enjoy our tea. Drink yours, dear, before it gets cold.”

Even at eighty-one, Felicity looked years younger as if age itself were merely a patina of colour, her facial wrinkles delicate brush strokes laid on by a master of the Flemish school. Angelica imagined what one of Vermeer’s young women standing by a window would have looked like, her face suffused with golden light, if he had painted her old.

Somehow, news of their painting got around. They were no longer secretive about their art, although they did not court attention and publicity. Felicity received invitations to show her work, which she had always declined. A gallery owner came to tea and commented on her sister’s watercolours, alluded to Homer Winslow and Mary Cassatt. Angelica allowed him to flip through her own paintings, even to undo a few of the scrolls. He praised their “sturdy character,” and “consistency of effort.” In front of Felicity’s framed watercolours, he paused and stared. His silent praise so evident that Angelica hurried away as quickly as her arthritic legs would manage. She tried to contain her rage in the kitchen, kept clean by the new charlady, the last one having quit during one of her employer’s tantrums.

“Your sister must show her work in public. The gallery would be honoured to host a vernissage. Her painting, the drawings, too, are remarkable. And, of course, we’d be delighted to include the best of your own work.”

She had been reduced to an afterthought.

***

“I shall be visiting the gallery first thing tomorrow morning, Angelica, if I feel up to it. I’ve decided to let them show my work, yours too, if you’re agreeable to the proposal. I think it’s time at last to let the world see, don’t you?”

Felicity drank her tea slowly, her arm shaking from the effort. How she continued to hold her brush, Angelica did not know. And how skinny and mottled Felicity had become in her old age, although her hair, once black, still retained its fullness and curl. Angelica noticed her sister’s fingers, almost permanently bent into the shape of a hand holding a brush. Today, Felicity had chosen to wear the ruby tear drop earrings given to her by their parents on her fortieth birthday, for which she still envied her sister. On her own fortieth birthday, a year later, she had received the complete works of Schopenhauer.

Felicity painted in her best dresses, like the deep rose silk with the lace bodice she now wore, and which she never stained with paint. Her own smocks were splattered with great daubs of colour. Felicity had once remarked that her sister splashed more paint on her smock than she did on the rag paper. Angelica still remembered the word splash.

“Are you sure, Felicity? He means well, perhaps, but so many charlatans lurk about in the art world.”

“He’s not a charlatan, Angelica. He’s a reputable art dealer, the author of several monographs and three highly regarded books on painting. He teaches art history at both McGill and l’Université de Montréal and also runs his own gallery. Why would you think he’s a charlatan? He’s not after my money. None of the works would be for sale. I don’t care to sell them. The expenses of the vernissage will be borne by the gallery.”

“You hardly need to accept charity, Felicity.”

“Your own work will also be shown, Angelica. Why do you object?”

“Just nerves, darling. We have never shown our work, do you think it’s good enough?”

“Of course we’re nervous about it, but it’s rather exciting, don’t you think?”

“Yes, to be sure. Whatever you think best. Would you like me to go with you?”

Felicity didn’t answer the question as she slipped into one of her absent-minded moments. They both did now and then, one of the curses of old age. Angelica often suspected Felicity of manipulating the moments when it best suited her. She woke up the next morning, accustomed to sleeping much later than Felicity who was always at her easel by sunrise. Under her duvet, she listened to the sounds of the house. Felicity had already departed for the gallery, not even troubling herself to wait for her sister. The duvet weighed like a shroud on Angelica’s brittle body.

Would you like me to go with you? Angelica kept repeating the sentence throughout her morning ablutions, slow and burdensome, worse now that she felt her thin blood begin to rise.

Felicity could have wakened me and asked. By the time she reached the kitchen for her morning tea, it was past nine. Whenever had her sister offered unstinting praise of her work? This is quite good, Angelica, but do you think the yellow is too heavy? I wonder, Angelica, if you’ve rushed the cloud in the corner here? A charming storm scene, but, I’d like to show you what I mean. And Angelica remembered how Felicity with a few brush strokes dipped in purple and white had dramatically altered the furious, unmediated black of Angelica’s raging storm, making it more energetic, real and threatening. There, she had said, it’s not just a dark splotch anymore is it?

“They don’t really want to show my work at all. They’re only doing it because Felicity asked that I be included.”

Angelica poured hot water over a tea bag and dropped the kettle on the counter when she splashed herself.

“Merde!”

She threw the porcelain cup against the refrigerator door. It was part of a good set used by their mother. Only two cups and one saucer remained. What colour would the scream swelling in her head be if she could paint it?

“They think my work isn’t as good as hers. I’ve worked as hard all my life. My whole life. My whole life. All that time. In this house. Painting with Felicity. In this house. They don’t want my work. She never believed I was as good as she. They want hers.”

She saw the pieces of china on the floor as if they had been deliberately arranged for a still life, nature morte, she remembered from her Swiss finishing school. An appropriate term. What did Felicity know about life? But she would show them. Tolstoy produced Resurrection in his old age. It was never too late for natural genius to manifest itself.

After dressing, not too hurriedly for she wished to conserve energy, Angelica listened for the weather report on the radio. Satisfied that the day would be ideal for painting, she hauled her easel and box of paints down the stairs, out the front door, and across the street. Traffic was light, and it did not occur to her that, once set up, anyone would steal her equipment. This was a respectable neighbourhood, development notwithstanding, and Sunday painters were always to be found dabbing and daubing in the park down the street.

She did not think the owners of the townhouse in front of which she opened the easel would object to her presence. Winded and a bit shaky from aching bones, Angelica returned to the house. The climb up to the second floor studio made her pause at the landing. No time to waste, but she didn’t want to exhaust herself before she had begun. Slipping her small canvas of skaters whirling around a bonfire on the Rideau canal in a pillow case, she made the return journey to the other side of the street and secured her painting on the easel. The light was good, she thought, traffic negligible and no pedestrians in sight.

When she emerged from the house a third time in the early afternoon, the fire had taken hold. She had started with Felicity’s bedroom, using several matches to set the goose-down duvet aflame. The newspapers, rolled into logs, soaked in turpentine and placed against the wall under Felicity’s paintings in the studio, burned well and the flames were beginning to do their work. Downstairs, she set fire to the lace curtains and draperies in the living room, which made whispery sounds as they curled upwards towards the ceiling, then fell away in fiery flakes from the window. The smoke stung her eyes, but she was prepared to leave in any case and shut the front door behind her.

With two black leather portfolios containing her best pictures and several scrolls under her arm, Angelica struggled to descend the ten stone steps. On the fourth step, she grabbed onto the balustrade to catch her breath and to ease the pain in her legs which threatened to topple her over. She heard little explosions like glass bursting and a general low rumble as if fire and smoke were carrying on a heated dialogue about art and philosophy.

Her box of paints and the easel stood exactly where she had placed them on the other side of the street. Too much to carry at once, she crossed the road with one portfolio and a few scrolls clutched to her breast, and placed them among the hostas behind the iron fence of the front garden plot belonging to the townhouse. Her neighbours, lovers of art, she was sure would not mind. A young man paused in front of her easel, looked at her, then sauntered away. She waited for a florist delivery van to pass before she crossed the stretch for the rest of her things. Looking up the stairs towards her house, she could see the tops of flames leaping like dancers behind the windows. It wouldn’t be long now. She would amaze the world. Felicity, indeed!

She regretted not bringing a chair for her legs hurt and it would be nice to sit down and catch her breath. But the demands of art took precedence over comfort. Arranging her palette, Angelica stood in front of her easel and looked over it to the flames that had cracked through and shot out the upstairs window of the studio. At first obscured by explosions of smoke, she nonetheless could see the difference between the living fire in front of her eyes, and the dead fire on her canvas. Concentration was everything. Now, how did Felicity do it? The sounds of the road were as nothing compared to the colours she would capture in paint.

If people were beginning to crowd around, encouraged by their admiration and astonishment, she would paint even better, if only they would give her elbow room. She could not tell the difference between an ambulance and a fire engine siren, but she wasn’t here to chase after sirens like a child. The sound did distract, though. Amazing, the skaters appeared to be whirling around the fire in vivid arabesques. A fire that virtually leaped off the canvas and seared her eyes. Breathing in short gasps, she saw patterns in the flame she had never seen before. No wonder her painting had not come alive. Memory was nothing compared to immediate experience.

She would have to hurry, though. People had gathered and the smoke in the air was beginning to burn her eyes although she did not avert her attention from the flames. And the noise. So hard to focus. But... just one more daub.

“Blue,” she said to a police officer who, mercy, appeared from nowhere, and began speaking to her. Her legs felt as if they were beginning to buckle. What she wouldn’t do for a chair right now.

“There is so much blue in a fire, officer, but you need truly to look at a thing before you can paint it.”

 

KENNETH RADU has fiction appearing or forthcoming in Spilt Milk, Thirst for Fire, Eclectic Flash, vis a tergo, Four-Cornered Universe, Lacuna, and elsewhere. A fourth collection of his stories will be pubished by DC books of Montreal. When not writing obsessively in the winter, he does so in the spring and fall, giving it a rest in summer.

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