Read Online The Painter: A Novel by Peter Heller - Free Book Online Page A

against something barnacle sharp and ugly. Dellwood Siminoe, swinging the club against the little mare like she was a piñata. The candy spilling, and I knew the candy for him was the pain and terror of the other. Clotted and dribbling, then pouring onto the road in a shiny gush. How many terrified horses like that? Enough to make a business of shipping those broken to Arizona. What Bob told me.
    Fuck it. I pushed it away. Pushed my nose into the warm mass of Sofia’s dark hair, breathed it, pushed everything else away.

    I made omelets and we shared a trout, fried in butter with a little salt and pepper, lemon. Made another pot of coffee. Sat on the ramada.
    She said, “I thought of doing that a few times.” She smiled, her hand curled on my thigh. “Doing
you
.”
    “Really? When?”
    “When you were painting me.”
    “Workplace harassment.”
    “I know, that’s why I didn’t. I knew on some level it would have made you mad. I almost didn’t care.”
    We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heat, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating, and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting. And this time as we lay quiet and listening, our pulses coming through now and then like the drumming of a distant village, this time I kept the boat of my thoughts sailing along from one tack to the next on a course I could control.
    Somehow the day passed like that. We made more food, went for a walk to the far pond, I read her the lines from the
Four Quartets
I had copied down and stuck into the breast pocket of my Carhartt barn coat:
    You are not here to verify
,
    Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity
    Or carry report. You are here to kneel
    Where prayer has been valid
.
    I don’t know, it made me feel better. Another way of saying, Keep it simple. You don’t even have to pray, just kneel where there’s prayer and I’m beginning to think there is prayer everywhere. I had written down another bunch of lines and tucked them in there, too—about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been. That too rang bells for me in this new place, trying to paint something good. Sofia’s cell phone buzzed a few times and she finally picked it up and I heard her telling Dugar she wouldn’tbe coming home for a couple of days, he could move in with that hippy chick from the orchard he’d been banging for who knew how long, she didn’t give a shit, and I stared at her, checking the checklist, was any of that okay with me, I mean she hadn’t said she was staying
here
, had she? But come on Jim, this is not your first rodeo, you know exactly where she’s staying tonight, but she hadn’t telegraphed or acted in any way like she wanted anything more than this, not one inch past what I could give freely. Right? Why don’t you try trusting her for a second?
    She rummaged through the fridge, the cabinets, began putting together a spaghetti dinner. Said her mother was half Italian. I took a small pre-stretched canvas from the stack against the wall, about two by three, and propped it on the empty easel. Picked up a piece of fiberboard and taped a flipped for sale sign over it and squeezed out turquoise, cobalt violet, white, a stiff white close to the lead white I can’t get anymore. Yellow. I wanted cool yellow. My favorite lemon yellow was used up, so I put out cadmium yellow light, which is not as sharp or cold. Good for now, maybe better. Terre verte, cobalt blue. Joyful colors.
    While she chopped garlic and heirloom tomatoes, while she hummed and sang, I painted a house. A small adobe house on an ochre hill, like this one, like mine. I painted a blue pond and sailing glad clouds, and I mixed the terre verte with cobalt violet and tinted it in half