Woman in the Field

Caring is the ether of the soul, my dear, and mine is so exhausted now that I'm left to drift about its gaping holes. You having a child to care for is of no concern to me. You can tell your woes to somebody else, my dear woman. I've been down that vanishing road of shrinking expectations to its bitter end. You seem hesitant, my dear, with all this, not knowing whether to smile or frown. Well, like most women, you're assured of your looks, but not your doings and therein lies your vulnerability. I take it you passed as a model or ballerina when you were younger. And before that, I gather, you were a scholarly daughter under tutelage parents who found refuge in their own smug, dilettante airs. I've seen your type before. You didn't have a lot of close friends, but you had your string of ardent lovers each one a loner like yourself. You ended up marrying one of those lonely boys because you actually felt his loneliness. Yes, I'm sure he is, but sadly, you left him because he didn't love you anymore and, well, after all, the fascination had worn out. So now you must scrounge for a living to support your blessed ward. Yes, I've seen this all before. As for me, the only thing I care about now is my work and you, at thirty-three, are too old to suit my needs. I need a younger woman for my painting. A woman with a celestial radiance and such pure and innocent exuberance stirring in her blue eyes that it can revive even the most desiccated soul. That's my desire. My next painting must be my magnum opus, my gift, you see, to this drab world, painted from the bottom of my despair and you, my prosaic creature, mock the very act of my munificence.

Stand here by the light so I can see you better. Yes, just as I suspected. Your hair is more red than brown and its washed-out shade plainly matches your brows and lips. and your face is far too pale and wistful, like a mid-day moon, and your skin is chalky white and thick, like that of a sow. You are more a milk maiden than the blue-blooded lady that I seek. You see, the woman I have in mind has a peachy glow that can warm even the most cold-hearted wretch. You're simply not right, that's all. Your lanky lines and milky complexion remind me more of an egret in the marshland than my voluptuous damsel in the field. You've probably never visited the marshlands, have you? After all, why bother with such desolate spots? They're just lonely bits of lowlands lost between the sea and the mountains. Mud-lined sloughs breathing the steely blue breath of the ocean tides. I use to go there early in the morning for solace and walk among its courtly guard of red-winged blackbirds that teeter atop rust-colored cattails. It offered such an uncanny silence accompanied only by the crunching of peat beneath my steps. I had forgotten just how beautiful it is. Well, anyhow, you need not remind me of it now. I'm not painting a leggy white crane pussyfooting through the wetlands.

Put that down, you nosy minx! That's a gift from a lady friend whose talent was to shrink monstrous spirits down into quaint jade miniatures. Now, she was a true beauty, like a butterfly, with coal black hair and matching eyes and ruby petals for lips. She would come to my studio late at night and wrap us up in her silky robe like a cocoon. She was an angel learned in the ways of the Tao. Now the Tao is a book you should read. It teaches the futility of strife. Have you read the Tao? Of course not. Ling and I attended the Academy together, mastering our art and enjoying the freedom of our genius. I really wanted to do something special for her. I was able to get her a showing at The Cave, a gallery on Eighth Street, through a colleague of mine. It was a tremendous opportunity and would have been an important step in her career. I couldn't imagine anything more important. But she refused my offer, refused to have anything to do with it. She just wanted to work in her studio and give her art away to famly and friends when the mood struck her. That's what she wanted. How can you be an artist and miss the chance to display your art for the whole world to see, I asked her. To be able to outshine all those pompous boors who steal the limelight. The rewards of the gallery always outweigh the joys of the studio, I told her. It's the only true path to fulfillment and immortality. But she sat there on her stool and stubbornly dismissed everything I wanted for her. I was to mind my own business, she'd admonished, and so, of course, after that, we ended up going our separate ways. It was just as well as I was finding her reserved aloofness sorely clashing with my own. There'll be no rice field in my paintings. Too bogged down in the mud. Too static! I need the perennial vitality of wheat fields with their vibrant patterns of grasses energizing and uplifting us to greater heights. You know, a man can choose the seeds he sows, but not his hunger. Oh...nothing....just grumblng to myself.

Disrobe!

Scoot them over there.

Cupping your breast with your hands like a brassiere, my dear, is too modest a look for you. Drop your arms to your side and let them hang there. Your hair is too thick and reddish for my liking and too confined. Unpin your hair and loosen it up so it drapes the sides of your face. I need a fine blonde crown for the woman I have in mind, with such golden tones and textures that people would think they see themselves in its sheen. As for you, you're just another vague form I need to grapple with, a foil in my pursuit of beauty. So what am I to make of your long, shapeless legs and long, narrow waist? I'm not a magician! And those slouched shoulders of yours may reveal your German bent, but I've grown wary of such submissive postures and downcast eyes that only belie a cunning nature.

What's that? No, I wasn't reared on a farm, my inquisitive nymph. Why do you ask? No, I just find wheat fields inspiring and full of sentiment. They offer up such vibrant patterns like a restless sea. I did sojourn in the midst of wheat country for a summer on an archeological dig that a dear friend invited me on. She was truly a lady, a wildflower that could efface the entire meadow. She had shiny strawberry hair and a beaming smile of square, compact teeth. Our time together was truly enchanting and glorious. We were primordial natives rooted in the fertile soil, left to our own devices, our own inventions, creating a world of our own. I would spend the days sketching and painting the enthralling enormity of the open plains while she collected and categorized the many artifacts and relics she'd found in that ancient Indian mound of hers. On Sundays, we'd lounge atop her heap of antiquity, basking in the sun. I would fly a kite as she played her flute. Each day dealt a new impression. I was the lord of creation and she the messenger of my heart. Hmmm...perhaps life was too beautiful back then. You see, we were in the midst of nowhere and left to our own sensibilities and imaginations that played out in us to such fantastic heights. I would listen for hours to her stories about primitive rituals and sacrifices that she wove in such a magical way that they would transport me to another time and another place. Perhaps, yes, I know what you're saying and perhaps I am being too nostalgic, but then again no. What a strange notion you had, but you just don't understand. You see, one day she had dug down to the remains of what must have been a medicine man wrapped in a bedraggled blanket with its skull embedded in the earth. I listened as she praised him in that calm, dulcet voice of hers as being the wisest and holiest member of the tribe. You see, he would bless the unborn child by drawing its spirit on the belly of the pregnant squaw like this or prepare the dead for their journey into the hereafter by painting a ferocious face on them to scare off evil spirits. But as I listened, I became increasingly more resentful of those empty sockets and jawbone that seemed to snicker at me from the grave. I grew enraged at the hoax that was unraveling in front of me and began howling like some wild animal caught in a metal trap. What did this ungodly shaman have to do with life and death? I shouted to her. What did drawing pictures and singing hocus-pocus chants have to do with anything? Nothing! Absolutely nothing, my dear! I wanted to leap down into that grave and pulverize that impostor back to oblivion, but was held back from my morbid plunge by the jostling of my bewildered lover.

After that episode, we tried to make light of my bizarre spectacle, but there was trouble brewing beneath our amity. I knew I had made an irreparable impression on her and I could see the wariness and concern in her eyes. We continued, though, pretending that nothing had happened, but after a while she couldn't pretend anymore and finally felt it would be best for her to leave. I was, sometime laater, finally able to exorcise that demonic spirit that had possessed me so badly back then and now have its painting hanging over there with my other black-and-yellow works. But I will never be able to exorcise that horrible impression I made on her. Irreparable as it is.

Are you cold? Your skin is covered with goose bumps. I do keep the studio on the chilly side, as I've been finding myself dozing off lately in the afternoon. You're too skinny, that's all! Your breasts and buttocks hang from your ribs and hipbones like sacks of grain. As for my emaciated condition, I can assure you it is out of choice. You see, I'm liberating myself from the worldly appetites that tie me here and I'm getting quite accustomed to living without. A bed, a chair, and a hot plate are all that's needed now, and, of course, my art. You know, I've tried to trash my paintings a few times only to be restrained by my own spitefulness. I was, once, quite a promising artist, you know. My Prairie Schooners exhibit met with great acclaim and admiring crowds streamed through the gallery in record numbers to gawk at my work. The blanched tones of the monolithic backdrop and the rich, expressive colors of the yokel pioneers with their trifle stowage impressed them all and earned me great praise for my effort. It was the lack of reception of my next exhibit Inanity that delivered the bitter abyss of disappointment to me. It didn't get the adoration I'd expected, even though it contained my most dearest and powerful works. The art whores scathingly panned it as being too subversive and blasphemous of all that's decent in us. The word was that it was not suitable for the tepid masses that needed on their weekend outings a milder look at their ill-conceived fancies. But Inanity wasn't an embroidered swatch of their mediocrity. It transcended it and catered only to the truth. I should have been worshipped for my bold foray and not chastised like a child for it. It was the curator, in that well-rehearsed guile of hers, who told me that the world was not ready for me yet. I could see her selling me out as she told me that my work would have to make way for that of a rich patron's nephew, who had put together a charming collection of circus memorabilia embedded in elephant dung and coated in shellac. Well, somewhere in the heat of that night words were said and toes stepped on and somehow her glass curio cabinet was kicked over. It was an irreparable deed, indeed, and promptly got me kicked out of the social glee club for, you could say, singing out of key. I became a lemon in their saccharine world. And somy dear madam, let me introduce myself, I'm a washed up has-been, an outcast, shunned by the aristocracy and left alone now to live and work in my own private gallery.

Does my surly demeanor disturb you? A lion cub, huh? It doesn't matter, for soon I'll just evaporate into that roseate realm of undulating waves that will reform this mortal coil you see before you into something grand. You find that amusing, my sweet? Your simplicity beguiles you. The effects cosmic rays play upon our senses only conceal the affects they stir in us. It's all quite beyond the senses, you see. Most people get stuck in the wrong frequency, in the wrong wavelength and inure its dissonance, either out of duty or laziness. Well, I won't tolerate such a fate, knowing there's a perfect wavelength, a perfect harmony, out there that can unite me to the eternal bliss.

Well, yes, where was I? Yes, you have a commoner's head, with a flat, narrow forehead and bony cheeks. Now there's nothing here to get offended at, my dear. I mean, heads are rather amorphous shapes and faces are nothing more than chiaroscuros bounded more by a look than the curvature of the bone. Stop fretting! I just meant that I haven't been able yet, well, to unveil yours. Unfold your arms and relax! You have such a skittish manner about you. It is quite alarming. Do you know your lips flare into tiny sneers when you speak? Well, they do. Let's get on with it. You have a thin line for a nose that runs straight down from your brow and loops around your nostrils. It's the striking of the nose that draws the whole face together. Has yours ever been broken? I see, a proud woman. Do you have your father's or your mother's nose? Most people know where their nose came from. It's the most telling feature of the face. It makes you sweet or sour, kind or mean and needs to come out that way on canvas. Is there some joke beneath all this? You seem to find something humorous here. Someone once told you your nose was like a moth's gossamer wings melded to your delicacies? I don't see anything amusing in that courting tripe. No, I wasn't a boxer. No, my nose isn't both my parents' heaped together. You think so, huh? Sometimes we're made grotesque by the beauty we seek. And since we're on the subject, your flanged orifice is, how should I put it, disproportionate to your other features. And, may I add your vulgar enunciations.... I'm talking about your large mouth. Yes, I thought that was quite clever. And your vulgar enunciations are... my, aren't you becoming quite blunt! As I was saying, your…well, you think so, huh? And your wryly vulgar enunciations are not very becoming, my dear. It's vulgar if I say it's vulgar! Quiet, you impudent imp! I decide what is right or wrong in this world and you need to get that through your head. After all, my little muskrat, I'm the artist here. I decide what fits and doesn't fit.

No, I'm not staring at you. I'm just trying to figure out what to make of that akimbo pose of yours. It oozes with such defiance, yet so corporeal, so appealing. You'll need to compose yourself, that's all. Come over here and have a sip of wine. Do you always use both hands when you drink? Only when you want to, huh? There, a more relaxed mood suits you better. Tell me, who filled you with such pathetic goo? Malcolm Cane? That butcher! Is he still trying to pass himself off as a poet? You know he's a butcher, don't you? And I mean not just with the language. He could have at least come up with something more original, like "Your nose is the refined noblesse of your maiden look" or... or what? "A dust buster for the brain?" "The snoozer's trumpet?" My, aren't you the comedian. What? "Finger warmer for the child." That's silly. You're a silly girl. No, what did he bring you as a gift? No? Was it prime or choice round? And he said it reminded him of you? And you laughed in his face, I hope. Graciousness in the face of absurdity is not a virtue, missy. You should have told him where to get off. You should have told him you're not a side of beef, but a gorgeous woman who demands respect.

Did I say something wrong? It's just that prim smile of yours has sort of thrown me for a loop. You know you have a little crease on each side of your mouth, like tiny parentheses to your lips. It gives you a smugness I can't fathom.

Where was I? Yes, you have an outie for a belly button that means you were born to rule the world. I like the way the slit pulls in the flesh of your tummy from your curved flanks and hipbones. What's that? You're a nurse. You make a living by nursing, but model in your spare time. Well, nursing is a noble profession and I'm sure you're a wonderful mother as well. In a play, huh? And the father? A carouser, huh? Well, some men love their prowess more than its object. No, I'm not making excuses, it's just I know the type. Yes, ungrateful. Yes, demeaning through and through. To have beauty at their fingertips and not recognize it. Well sometimes affections are as shallow as looks are. Those braying asses! Most men don't know what they have. Indeed, most men are blind to their foolishness by pride. Yes, you're beautiful. Yes, you're desirable. Yes, you could make any man happy. You have such zeal in your reassurances. I like the sound of your voice. You're so delightfully prosaic. You saw my exhibit? What did you think? Yes, it was moving. Filled with passion and truth, yes. Which was your favorite? The "Demimondaine of Broadway"? That was...well... the other one. You liked that splotching of grease and soot on her? It had meaning for you?

But now, how about you, my kitten, what intimate secrets can you share? Can you tell me how it feels to be beautiful? How it feels to know the difference between life and death, joy and sorrow? For me, those were always just elaborate schemes I used in my self-imposed exile to fill the void. So what do you want of me, my sultry temptress? I'm just a washed-up artist who knows only too well the limitations and fallibility of my art, and yet I still remain a slave to it. Unrequited, knowing it will never love me back. But you need a servant now to do your bidding and I am here at your service. I'm certain when you are done with me you'll dispose of me as quickly as you had conjured me up. Draw your hair back behind your ear so I can see you better. I know you want your image emblazoned across a canvas for the whole world to see. And it must be unblemished, pure, and ageless. It's your vanity that incites you, my dear, but time is your nemesis. So you need an artist now to capture that alluring beauty before it's gone. Let me tell you now, it's a beauty that will never leave as it goes too deep. There's warmth now in your cheek that betrays your vow of modesty, and the radiance of your scent and the glance of your eyes tell me such a portrait is a gift most desired by you. But the stirring inside of you disappoints me, my love. I find portraits so flat and dull, so empty of the urgency of life. Why a portrait, when you could be the gray eminence of my art? But I understand. We all want to be beautiful and envied. Of course, for me, it must be indelible and permanent, where with you it must be with every click of the clock. So my hands will gladly do your bidding, though they seem to have their own volition nowadays. They can still take a lumpy blob and burnish it into a sleek pool of such inspiration. There is still pleasure in releasing the intoxicating scents of oils on canvas as they go about their task. After all, it's the medium of touch that frees us all. So they will whip this palette up into a sumptuous mix of pink and smear its glow out over your comely shape that moves so sensuously about that nappy bend and exciting grin.

What do you think about all this? Any thoughts or comments? You've been awfully quiet. Nothing, huh? So you are just waiting ecstatically for my pending kenosis? Scoot back a bit. Do you fiddle about this much at work? No, you're O.K. No, it's fine now. By the way, what did you mean by calling me grouchy? Poop-head, grouchy, it's all the same. Is that funny? You need to be serious now. Giggling only betrays the moment. There, that's better. I love your accent. Talk dirty in German for me. I don't have the slightest idea what you said but it must have been funny. It wasn't about me, was it? No, I'm not a child. But wait. It's amazing, but your eyes are illuminating your face. There it is that chiaroscuro I spoke about. It's there; yes I can see it now. It's not there in the bone or flesh or in the curve of the cheek, but in that lovely visage of serene beauty that hovers so tenderly above your face. Yes, beauty is the illumination of love. Shall I whisper that again? Does this please you? I've been working so long lately on my own self-portrait that I had forgotten. I have been so wrapped up in my own distractions, uncovering such ugly…..don't tell me to shush. I was just thinking, that's all. I can't take such haughtiness. Such ridicule. You know you're not right for this. You're too common and too mundane. A mere woman of thirty-three with a child and skinny legs. You're nothing more than a diversion I've concocted to ward off this manqué state. Just another hole I've drifted into. I don't need your pity. I need to deafen your cajoling voice and sultry fumes that keep me here. It's the woman in the field I seek. She is there waiting in a field. Her chiffon dress flows about her womanly form and she turns to me with a remitted smile and outstretched arms. Oh, you wretched creature! Why does your beauty atone for me so, but mock my every deed? The woman in the field will have wings! And we'll soar up through the clouds and burst into that roseate realm of sweet vindication.

Are you listening to me? You probably haven't heard a word I said. Here, you've been fussing with your hair all afternoon. You have such thick hair like a sable brush. I still can't figure out if it's sorrel or chestnut. Why short? Going for that sassy look, huh? Sort of that "damn the torpedoes" look. Now a bob with those long, narrow eyes would certainly be saucy. You could be one of those spunky ice skaters twirling about so sensationally on the ice. Or a no-nonsense executive decked in a sleek business suit, leaving all those financial moguls drooling. You're not going to curl the sides out and have bangs like some vampy Freda, are you? Hey, this isn't a chuckling matter here. It's serious how you look. Do you want some spareribs and honey-baked beans? Barney's is just down the street. We'll have to walk, though. My car's broken and I suppose I should work on it someday. It is a nice day for a walk. Do you mind? I haven't been out of the studio for such a long time. I forget what it's like. Perhaps I'll buy a newspaper. I guess Barney's is open. Here, let me show you. It's not what I had in mind, but I'm pleased with it. I'll call it "Anna of the Wetlands".