Trompe L'Oeile

When Lothar Sturmhund died Tina Druce painted her first ugly thing.

The painting had begun as a beautiful landscape in her mind, an articulation of the folding hills and clefts, forest-swept, up near where the American River wends back and forth under Highway 410. She imagined herself situated on some peak nearby with her easel and painting the opposite ridge. And what appeared at first was, indeed, a faithful and gorgeous replication of what that scene would have been. Except that midway through its execution, she had a mind to rape the landscape with a gaping clearcut wound. A timber company, she reasoned, would have ripped across the virgin hill an opening of stumps and fallen branches, seeking the wood for timber and paper pulp, and leaving a "reforested" but glaring scab across the land. She painted the defilement at the center of her canvas with exactness and precision, and when she was finished she wept. It was, to her mind, the most faithful art that had ever flowed from her. It was a testament, this ripped hymen of the land, and she believed that all that had flowed from her brush before was a lie.

Her mother found her in the little studio they had cobbled onto the back of the house where Tina could look out the window and see a tree-topped bluff below Cleman Mountain beyond her mother's satellite dish. Weeping before the truth.

"My God, child, what's the matter?"

Tina looked up from her finished work. Tears coursed around spatters of oil paint that dotted her face like odd colored freckles or teenage acne. "Oh Mom," she whispered. "It's so ugly. Look at it." She gestured at the still-drying canvas. "Look what I have painted."

Jacqua Druce beheld the gaping wound on her daughter's painting. She misunderstood immediately her daughter's grief as that of a naive teenager bent on changing the world in an environmental sort of way, as a sort of green concern over the raping of land by timber magnates. A sort of anti-ozone-depletion, anti-salmon-killing, anti-old-growth-forest chopping, spotted-owl-iconicizing sentiment.

"Honey," she said. "Honey, it's all right. It's just the way things are."

"I know!" Tina leapt from her painting stool. It shot from under her and clattered on its side. "I know! And think of all the lies I have painted." And with this statement she flung her palette at the canvas with such force as to rip out its center, at the location of the faithfully rendered clearcut, a gaping tear--a wound upon a wound--so that the painting was ruined. She stormed from the room as her mother stooped to gather the mess.

* * *

Of all the colors God's palette comprised, of all the hues and shades and timbres with which He chose to drape the eastern Cascade foothills and wash across Tina Druce's eyes, she liked best those she thought of as "local."

She had once, as a small girl--aged maybe six or seven--disappeared from her mother's house at the fork of Mud Lake Road and Benton Drive. After Tina had been absent for some number of hours, Jacqua collected some of those who had gathered at Lowell's for an afternoon beverage with the promise of free drinks for all later that night. She formed them into a sort of search posse and deployed them in teams to reconnoiter the deep woods about town. Salt Lick's thirsty residents found Tina in no time, at the head of Sanford Canyon, a good mile from her home and up past Lothar and Magda's place, up past Ivan's, even further up the road than Stoneway Pouring. The little girl--whose eyes were the color of the undersides of broadsword fern fronds--sat in the chair of a fractured cedar stump, a giant that had gone over in a windstorm some years back and left, in its rooted base, a throne for nature to carve. In her small hands was an open notebook and a pencil whose nib she had worn down to a blunt stub.

When they asked where she had been, what she had been doing all that time, Tina Druce spoke not at all, but simply produced her notebook. She held the pages open for them to see. As the pages furled and unfurled in the light breeze, members of the search party gathered around to read her encolumned notations, entered there very bookmanlike for a girl so young and petite. They were amazed that the lettering was so precise. Where they would have assumed penmanship would not yet have gotten hold of her, they had to admit that instead the design of her writing--the curls and loops and straight lines--was fashioned in a lovely and intentful manner. A penmanship of grace, one of them might have observed, had the words come.

But nevermind the medium, nor the mechanics of its execution. The content: now there was a marvel. For Tina Druce had filled her first column with the invented names for all of the hues and shades for what a boorish person would have simply called "green." The list included such fanciful notations as fernish, pineneedle, sapcurl, mapleafy and mosshair. On another page she had scribed a list of what those with more limited imaginations would have pronounced "brown." This list included barkscore, rockbrown, woodsdirt, mushroomskin, conecase and fawn's hide (that last: two words, which seemed to run counter to most of her appellations--single words formed from two poetic components--so that her notebook of the forests colors read like a volume of poetry set in a typeface of refinement.) There was a page for grays: ironflint, granitedust, bleachboard, fogblanket, cloudsky... there were more than four pages of columns for this tedious color. The notebook was filled with hundreds--maybe thousands--of names for the earth-, plant- and skytones that were, indeed, indigenous. Enough so that the town knew from that day forward Tina Druce possessed an eye for color, a heart for the artistic, and could in fact, some day, become an artisan of some importance.

Forrest and Jacqua Druce had settled in their home back in the mid-1970s, shortly before the arrival of the Sturmhunds. Forrest had been the sort of fellow who jumped out of perfectly good helicopters. There was a word for the particular color of the terrain his military-booted soles impacted when he landed. The name of that color: Vietnam. Leaping from a Huey into a paddy in that far-off conflict, Forrest had straddled a color fancifully called anti-personnel mine, a color whose characteristics not only included a bright, fulminating burst of orange-yellow energy but also had this crazy property: it blew body parts off whomever trod upon it. (He was lucky it hadn't taken more of his leg, or both legs, or both legs and his nuts and cock--or unlucky, from some perspectives, because it hadn't taken his life and left him maimed. If anything, unpredictable, not to mention temperamental, was this color, anti-personnel mine.) Forrest Druce drank heavily from the moment he returned to the United States with an honorable discharge, bought cheap land on the eastern slopes of the Cascades in an unincorporated part of Yakima County the few locals called Salt Lick, and settled there with his young wife. She had a baby by him ten months later. They named her Tina, and she turned out to be a neat kid, so it turned out to be a pretty all-right thing that the anti-personnel mine had only blown off his foot rather than ankles, calves, knees, thighs, reproductive equipment, and so on.

No one remembered much of Forrest Druce. Jacqua did, of course, as if it were yesterday. But Tina could have been only three or four when he up and walked. Or, rather, limped away, on his one good leg and his bloodless prosthesis. Tina remembered her father only in snatches and unformed incidents, in shadows at the core of her mind. For instance, she knew her father was fond of uttering a colloquialism involving a certain Dick's Hatband. Tina remembered he would say, "That's uglier than Dick's Hatband," or, "This is sweatier than Dick's Hatband." He would invoke comparisons between objects or situations or people with Dick's Hatband continually--and randomly, it would seem to those within earshot--substituting "dirtier" or "as hideous as" or "greasier" according to no apparent algorithm except as Forrest Druce's moods struck him. Jacqua hated this. Especially when he started to use it to refer to her decisions, ideas, cooking, and so forth. In these instances he would say this or that--her creamed corn or the way she kept house--was as "fucked up as Dick's Hatband." Of course, he rarely used this foul construct within earshot of Tina. She may have heard it once or twice, though.

Tina also remembered that her father used a cane and walked with a limp. She remembered being enfolded in his arms, cuddling in his lap a couple of times. Every once in a while, she would collect a scent from something nearby that would remind her of him, or of an incident in which he was present and involved. She saw washed out, poorly focused photos of him any time she liked in one of her mother's old scrapbooks. He was handsome. At those moments, Tina ached for her father. But her mother never volunteered information about Forrest Druce, and offered only monosyllabic answers to Tina's questions about her dad, so that eventually Tina got the idea and stopped asking them. Because what Jacqua could not reveal in answers other than those uttered monosyllabically was the detail and mood of the last night she and Forrest cohabited Salt Lick, when he raised that cane and swung at her as if she were a pitched hardball. How that cane felt clattering across her brow. How she ran him from the house with a leveled shotgun and how, God only knew by what miracle, she had refrained from triggering it.

All this hidden from her, Tina wondered about the man and once commemorated him in this way: at the elementary school in Gleed, on the occasion when one of her spelling words was forest, she insisted on spelling it forrest. With two Rs. When the paper came back and the word was red-checked as an error, she brought it forward to the teacher to explain that this was her way of spelling the word, and that it would continue to be her way, and whenever the teacher saw it written in the manner--double-R'd--in future, she could anticipate this and not hold it against Tina. It was all very matter of fact, rendered, almost, as an act of commerce. Oddly enough, Tina found her teacher in fascinated acquiescence with this arrangement. Must have been the penmanship. And in follow-on years, Tina would simply arrange a private meeting early in the semester to explain this uniqueness she possessed, this compulsion to honor her dead-beat, dead-limbed dad, to commemorate him in the word for vast tracts of fir, salal, mosquitoes, pine, cougar, ravens, cedar, lichen, elk, spruce, mushrooms, bobcats, aspen, stone, moss, hemlock, deer, vetch, bear and the forbs of the understory. God's most beauteous, cycling creation.

It became apparent that Tina was exceptionally bright. She understood concepts immediately, memorized the dates and places of her history and social studies lessons as if she had been there, as if she had personally taken part in the Lewis and Clark expedition, had been among the frightened soldiers storming Normandy, had witnessed the first sparking of Thomas Alva Edison's bulb, had handed Jefferson the pen when he purchased Louisiana with all the ease and alacrity with which he purchased Negroes. Geography offered no challenges--she could find on any globe at any time of day Benin, Bhutan, Baghdad, Belorus, Beijing, Bern, Bangor, Bogota, Bradislava, Bimini, Boston and Botswana. She excelled in mathematics, conquering geometry and algebra two grades before her contemporaries. Music was an easy thing for her, the reading of staves and the grasping of challenging chords. She played on the elementary school's poorly tuned piano six pieces: Mozart's Allegro in B Flat Major, four Brazilian folk songs arranged by Mary Verne, and Türk's Rondo. She played them without error tunelessly in the small school's gymnasium. The keys echoed and bounced from laminated floor to beamed ceiling. Her penmanship continued to appear set in type.

If it can be said that one subject appealed to Tina Druce above all others, it was the subject of art. Jacqua encouraged this, enrolling her in special courses at the suggestion of her art teachers. "We can only do so much for her here," they said, "teaching this curriculum. Our resources are limited with the levies falling left and right. She really needs a stimulating challenge in this area. A private art tutor could do this." Jacqua, who barely made ends meet at the Pie Apple store, had had a notion to begin stocking videotapes for rental. This, she thought, might provide added income so that the artist that dwelled not-so-deep in her daughter could be brought forth and encouraged to a full bloom. Jacqua received tutor referrals from the teachers, developed her video-rental idea, began to stock the tapes, and found that the videocassettes found a receptive, Hollywood-thirsty and supremely bored audience in little Salt Lick, with its poor reception from Yakima's limited TV fare.

Tina's tutor, Mrs. Gideon, cost her mother twenty-five dollars a week. Mrs. Gideon operated a small gallery in east Yakima and held the awe-inspiring credential of having displayed and sold paintings at Seattle's annual Bumbershoot arts festival. It was Mrs. Gideon who encouraged Tina to experiment with various media--painting in tempera, watercolor, oils, drawing in charcoal and pen, assembling collages of found materials, diorama-like in their presentation and bas relief. Mrs. Gideon taught Tina to appreciate the curves of the human form properly drawn, and to consider perspective issues such as vanishing points and the proper casting of shadows. She taught her how to hold the brush lightly, but with intensity and purpose. Most of all, Mrs. Gideon taught Tina passion for the articulation of her ideas, to bring forth that which lay at the core of herself and expose it to the viewer. To offer what was inside her mind to the entire world. Tina, before long, in a single brushstroke before her mentor, could produce a handclap of rushing praise. She discovered that her favorite medium was oil paint upon canvas. And at this point her mother invested in an easel, a palette, scores of paint tubes and various-sized horsehair brushes, solvents for brush cleaning, and blank canvases, which she procured at an art-supply shop in west Yakima, and would visit frequently and exchange her take from video-rental sales for Tina's accoutrements.

The products of Tina's painting possessed the same fidelity as if she were exposing film for photographs. Her favorite subjects were the ubiquitous things around her--hillocks, trees, wildlife, fences, logging roads, cattle, the people and places of Salt Lick. Her landscapes were exact replicas of what the eye saw. Every detail was there in precise replication. Tina was no fan of schools of art such as Impressionism or modern, pop art--although it can be said that she truly appreciated the skill behind such creation, she simply preferred to replicate unwaveringly what she saw. She would record on canvas faithfully from her surroundings--a pine stump with the jigsaw bark sloughed at its base, sprouting a clump of orange amanita at its first cleft, with a Parkinson's squirrel shouting forth like a little preacher at its hewn rim. All of this she would execute with stunning detail and perfect alignment, leaving nothing out, the perspective exactly on and shadows falling perfectly where they belonged, so that the viewer believed he or she was standing in a woods glen witness to this scene. And she would execute paintings such as this quickly, often in less than an afternoon, without any predrawing or templating, with simply the rapid execution of brushstroke on brushstroke, the mixing and application of mapleafy and ironflint and barkscore, or fernish and fogblanket and mosshair, or every color that split from white light through the prism of her creativity and leached from her brush onto the bare cloth surface. She would lose track of time, and time would race past her, so that her attention to other demands--chores around the house, for example--would fade in her earnestness to complete the current canvas. In this her mother was supportive, and never uttered an admonishment of any sort, that is, until Lothar Sturmhund died.

Then it was like Tina Druce was taken over by a fever. Over the short course of weeks she whipped through three-dozen canvases and countless tubes of paint and paint solvent. Straining her mother's purse, she sent the Pie Apple's proprietress on several jaunts to Yakima for new supplies. Tina's paintings became simpler, the objects in them more representative. She overthrew old forms in bloodless coups, investing her time with brush and canvas in pursuit of the new. She started to embrace elements first of Impressionism, combining styles. For instance, she would render a perfectly faithful forest glade and place at its centered a hare executed Impressionistically. Or on another canvas, a photographically rendered salmon leaping from a stream of vague flowings and bluish-green hues dappled in small, dabbed strokes, so that it was like a large, vague pixelation surrounding the perfectly comprehendable fish. Her work devolved from Impressionism to Symbolism. She did no research, studied no art books, looked up no techniques nor read any biographies of the great modern artists, yet her work seemed to migrate along the shifts and changes of her century, the different movements, so that she rediscovered Art Nouveau and the Nabis, Fauvism, Cubism and the Dadaists, Futurism, Expressionism. Metaphysical painting, Surrealism. She dripped wristwatches over windblown limbs in a desert of clearcuts. She painted the Town Hall's facade, and where the white, lit clockface would have synchronized the town in Lothar's day, she painted a Cubistic rendition of Lothar's face, a countenance recognizable as only his, but strangely unformed and stern. As if a god of new angles now ruled Salt Lick.

She ignored everything, including the comings and goings of the school bus that collected Salt Lick's children in front of her mother's store and distributed them according to age at Gleed's elementary and high schools. She simply stayed in her studio all day, and painted. She slopped her oils on the canvas, neglected brush cleanings in between, swirled the hues together until she had no name for them. She replicated the color of Old Man Weesle's putrefying skin--that corruption of plum-purple--recalled from when she had found him a year and a half back, dead and baking and gaseous in the double-wide now inhabited by the MacNaughtons. She named this color bloatstench. She began to splat gruesome colors such as this on without brushes, flinging them watered down with her bare fingertips, or splunted them from the orifices of their tubes like toothpaste onto a toothbrush directly onto the bare canvas, or atop the unnamable colors she had sloshed there moments before. She went through four and five canvases a day in this manner.

Until one day in late November she returned to, at least, a semblance of order. It was a bitter cold afternoon at the height of hunting season, three weeks before Thanksgiving. She saw low clouds threatening another snowfall outside her studio window. Already dirty snow had gathered and fallen in melting and refreezing clumps in the satellite dish, and at its base. She heard, every so often, intermittent rifle blasts from the hills, crossing even the threshold of her closed studio window. She thought of deer and elk falling, red blood pouring out onto virginal white. She thought of how the hunters were artists too, painting the canvas of snow with animal guts as they carved into the shot-through, fallen beasts with giant silver buck knives. She thought of steaming entrails slopping forth from those giant, hewn cavities, of stomach sacks and organs spilled in a rush of metallic odor. She had a picture in the eye of her mind of a hunter severing the penis of a royal bull elk and holding it high in the frigid air like a loving cup.

And this led her directly to ruminate of Lothar Sturmhund. Of something in the tilt of his blond head, the Germanic cast of his features. Something that put her in mind of debasement. Tina Druce was, at seventeen, a virgin. She realized in that moment that Lothar Sturmhund could have been the agent of her deflowerment, that she had wasted her time with all this fucking art, this goddamned fucking painting, these ridiculous shit-ass lies, while she could have filled those moments by filling herself with Lothar, with his thrusts, his breath, his cock in her, his slaps and beatings, his absolute rule.

She painted the dead in her mind. In this, not a small part of her wanted to paint a composition of decomposition, to add the purpling Old Man Weesle to her oeurve. Instead, she painted what she always knew she must one day, eventually, paint. She took the image of Lothar Sturmhund from her mind, and translated this to a clear pure canvas. She painted him as she saw it, a perfect articulation of his goddishness.

* * *

Jacqua arrived home after hiking the ice-slippery quarter mile from the Pie Apple to their house with two paper sacks of comfort food. She opened her unlocked front door. "Tina? Tina, honey, I'm home, sweetheart."

She paused in the quiet. A light snow had begun to fall halfway up the hill, evolving to fat, wet flakes by the time she'd reached the driveway. She stamped her boots on the throw rug in front of the door, hung her parka on a peg on the back of the door as she shut the cold out behind her.

"Tina?" Silence.

She stepped across her living room, down the hall to her daughter's studio. Tina sat like a statue, a canvas erected between her and Jacqua in the studio's doorway.

"Sweetie?" Jacqua said, "Are you O.K.?"

"Oh yes," Tina said, from across a wide, alpine field. It sounded as if her voice were under layers of water or some other milky obscuration. "I'm great."

"Have you been painting all day again?"

"Yes--come see." As her mother approached, Tina slid from the stool and grasped the canvas and easel in both hands to turn it to meet her mother. Jacqua gasped.

The canvas was large: four feet by three feet, longer longitudinally, the three-foot side to side. At the core was a perfect filled circle. It was fifteen inches in diameter, and green--not mosshair or fernish or pineneedle, but exactly green. Around it, from each of the four sides and each of the four corners of the canvas, was a field explicitly and only brown. Brown, that is, as only brown can be described, not any of Tina's notebook shades, but brown. It terminated precisely at the border of the green circle. It looked oddly like a flag hung from its lanyard straight to the ground. Jacqua asked if that's what it was, a flag of some sort.

"No mom." Tina smiled, and her smile was like something proffered across a universe of regret, wan and grim, not a smile of joy. "It's a picture of everything that could have been, but never was." She was silent then, an encouragement for her mother to speculate.

"Everything that could have been, but never was."

"Yes."

"For instance?"

"Oh yes," Tina said, as if from the piano chords of a discordant dream. "Such as Lothar Sturmhund and me."

"Lothar," her mother echoed, cowlike.

"Yes, you know... Lothar doing it to me, mom. He never did. He could have. I would have let him. But he never..."

She received her mother's slap, a vicious blow that mashed her lips against her teeth and dug deep lacerations in the pulp of them. Her blood tasted like nectar, and she shouted it now, grunted it, screamed it into the November stillness, with snow falling outside--"See, I'm green and fresh, Mom, just waiting there for him. See it?" Jacqua chased her around the room and art supplies flew in the maelstrom. "See it! See Lothar all around me, he's brown, he's throbbing!" She grabbed a tube of white oil paint, squeezed forth a dollop into her hand and flung it at her mother. "See his come? See it! Lothar's semen, all over me!" She shrieked, wiping the paint onto her face as they danced, licking the paint from between her fingers. Tina slipped in paint and fell down.

Jacqua dropped to the floor next to her, collected her weeping daughter. "My sweet baby," she said. "My sweet baby."

* * *

Jacqua destroyed her daughter's painting, threw the canvas on the burnpit out back, poured some gasoline she kept on hand for the generator on the disgusting object and flung onto it a lit match. It roared to a brief conflagration, settled and began to slowly consume itself. She had an odd thought she was immolating a grandchild.

She turned to enter the house and saw Tina at the back door, bracing herself in the half open doorway, leaning on the knob with one hand for support. As Jacqua approached, she saw that Tina was crying again. "Tina," she said, "it's for the best. Trust me on this one."

Jacqua turned with her arm around her daughter. They watched the canvas curl as flames ate the edges, watched the glowing ashes separate and lift, float up in oily smoke and land on the snow-covered yard. Pieces of ash fell in Jacqua's bootprints. The oily smoke blotted, for a few moments, the ironflint sky. "I wish you would paint me a nice picture again," Jacqua said. "Something I could recognize right away. Something I wouldn't have to ask you what it was. Could you do that?" She asked, then turned, lifted her daughter's wet chin with her fingertips so that eye contact was inevitable, inescapable.

"Could you do that for me, baby?"

Tina nodded.

Tina returned to her studio, sat down in front of a fresh, virgin canvas measuring 38 inches by 52 inches, set it on her easel horizontally, and executed a perfect rendition of the way the gauze part of a bandage looks when it has been removed from a suppurating cut, dried nasty maroon and deep blood red, with browns and ochres and siennas and scab hues. The tinctures of a cicatrix ripped open too soon. "DICK'S HATBAND," she painted in bright yellow block letters at the base, and signed her name in pink. Tina Druce.

The dot of the "i" in her first name was a pink heart.

You can email Brian at tendollardog@charter.net.