Fiction: Painting Eggplants

Richard had always envied those artists who had been driven mad by their art. Naturally he preferred those who snapped in the direction of erotic frenzy to the suicides, but any madness was to be wished for if the alternative was a lucid equanimity. He considered himself invincibly level-headed, so any thought of some psychic aurora on his own part was entirely theoretical, like speculations about the shape and age of the universe. But, as the director of the graduate writing program at Indiana State University in Muncie he had had plenty of opportunity to witness poetic madness at first hand.

In a sense any student who came to Muncie to study to be a writer had to have some kind of mental defect to begin with?either a simplicity of soul bordering on challenged or else a problem with liquor or hard drugs. The latter had become increasingly common during the 80s and 90s to the point where half of each year's new crop of apprentice fiction concerned the joys and sorrows of addiction or spousal abuse or neglect due to alcoholism. The drop-out rate was phenomenal, ditto expulsions for felony crime. At last count Richard knew of five students from the program serving major time in Indiana correctional facilities. One of them?indeed, the most promising would-be poet to have attended Muncie?was still pursuing her MA in Creative Writing by way of Indiana's pioneering prison-to-university electronic link-up.

But now, without warning and in happy conjuction with a sabbatical he had intended to spend, literally, in Burgundy, divine madness had lighted upon Richard Muldoon, and he was transformed. He had become a mad painter like van der Weyden or van Gogh or Goya. Every day, every hour, was a new rapture of beauty. The on/off switch was broken and he was always on.

It had all begun with the advice of Marc Jaffe, an Israeli painter who taught at the Spring Workshop in Tuscany, a program that Muncie ran in conjunction with Cincinnati's Koch Music Conservatory. 1986: Richard had been there to sail through his usual summer-school special, "Beginning Your Novel," a course guaranteed to earn high grades with little exertion and no risk of failure that couldn't quickly be shrugged off. Every student was guaranteed to be sent home with a portion and outline of a botched novel to be tucked away in a file and thought back on in more mature years with fond regret, the literary equivalent of a semester spent abroad for the purpose of losing one's cherry while learning French or Italian.

Richard had used his free time in Arezzo to sit in on Jaffe's workshop in oil painting. Bliss it was in those summers to smooth a brushload of frothy peach pigment across a ground of palest, creamy yellow. He hadn't painted a thing since his brief mid-life crisis in 1974 when he had a fling with the Art Students League in New York City, right after getting his PhD. In the course of discovering what he finally decided was his irremediable mediocrity as a painter he had filled all his own and his parents' storage space with canvases in the manners, more or less, of Derain, Nolde, Hofmann and a dozen other B-menu painters who seemed within his reach. But weren't. Which, finally, he was ready to admit and so took Indiana's offer. For years the canvases decorated his various rented premises in and around Muncie, never garnering more than a guarded "Interesting" or, at best, "Nice." Gradually "Interesting" and "Nice" were displaced by museum prints and tasteful lithos by faculty members in Muncie and Arezzo.

What Marc Jaffe had told him, passing Richard's muddy still-life of a pot of rosemary, late on a Tuscan afternoon, was, "Paint eggplants." Richard had smiled and nodded and went on daubing his muddy olives and viridians, thinking Jaffe's remark had been just a passing sarcasm, as who might say, "Paint it black." Because there was really no saving the mess taking shape on the easel. Not until the farewell dinner, with all the students' opening chapters read and graded (four A's, two A-minuses, two B's and one B-minus) and his own four keeper canvases already boxed and bound for Muncie, did it occur to Richard that Jaffe might have meant it literally. "Paint eggplants" had not been ironic, but straightforward, practical advice, though advice, admittedly, with some flavor of a koan.

But then he re-thought that possibility and decided that, no, Jaffe had been mocking Richard's poor pot of rosemary, only that and nothing more. Too late, then, to have a look at the thing, since it had not been one of the keepers. For years Richard gave the matter no thought, though every time he was in the produce department at the Stop 'n' Shop he would look at the massed eggplants in their brightly lit bin with a special regard, such as one affords a local celebrity. And he would hear Jaffe's voice in his head, with its wet plosives. Perhaps he even began to buy eggplants more regularly at that time, though surely it was Julia Child who was responsible for that, with her demonstration of how to bake slices of eggplant smeared with tomato paste to be tasty as potato chips and much less fattening than eggplant parmigian. In any case, Richard began to let eggplants alternate with fruit and acorn squash and zucchini as table decorations when he was too cheap to buy cut flowers.

Never did he think of them of them as aubergines, although "aubergine" was the official name for their color, while "eggplant" was linguistically inexplicable, at least in a visual sense, since neither in form nor in color were eggplants at all egglike. They didn't taste like eggs either, nor were they eggy in consistency when cooked. That was just one more mystery of the eggplant.

The primary mystery, of course, was why Jaffe had told him to paint them. Was it just a way of putting Richard off, like one of the tasks set for the guileless, disinherited prince in a fairy tale to keep him busy and forever uncrowned? Or simply a challenge to his color sense, his ability to splice together the right two or three pigments that would mirror one particular eggplant and no other? The darker hues were the hardest to get, the shaded sides of treetrunks, an asphalt road, mahogany furniture. The skin of eggplants.

For years he had pondered these matters, and then on the day before his birthday in 2001, during his first summer session in years away from the dolce vita of Arezzo, UPS pulled into his driveway with a present from his sister Pat. A beautiful ceramic bowl, shallow but not so shallow as to be a platter rather than a bowl. His favorite celadon green, and the perfect place to put the two eggplants already waiting for the Julia Child treatment.

Seeing them side by side in eggplant heaven he knew the time had come to paint eggplants. He brought in the easel from the garage and got down his paintbox from the shelf of the closet in the spare bedroom. The brushes were stiff and the tubes of paint not as yielding as one might wish. All that remained was to decide which of his dinner plates to sacrifice for service as a palette.

And then, opening the second tube of paint, phthalocyanine blue, the spirit descended. As at Pentecost; or when Danae receives Jove's golden showers; or Callas singing "Casta diva." A light shined in the darkness, and this time the darkness comprehended it and grappled it to its eggplant heart. When he was done he could not remember the details, who had kissed what and for how long, but there were the two eggplants in their birthday bowl, round and luscious, a hymn to all harvests, to Eros, to Psyche, and there on the table, looking as smug as two Dutch burghers, were their originals. Well, who isn't pleased with a flattering portrait? But there was no help for it, their fate was fixed. He flayed them alive, paring away their aubergine skin to expose the pale Caucasian flesh beneath. Then egg, bread crumbs, a sprinkle of oregano, and into the olive oil. Not Julia Child, not this time, but a proper eggplant parmigian.

A Medoc would have been nice, but not at the price of a drive to the liquor store. He made do with the Heinekens in the refrigerator. All the wine he really needed was there before him on that oblong of canvasboard, and he gazed his fill.

His subsequent paintings were not concluded with a similar sacramental symmetry. His digestive enthusiasm for eggplant was finite. But he painted eggplants from then on. In groupings of two or three. In mounds. Solitary eggplants. In bowls and in baskets, on tablecloths, and playing on the lawn. In the ocher sink in the bathroom and in the kitchen's squared-off stainless steel sink. A very difficult painting and not entirely successful the first time, but splendid when he got a bigger easel and painted it much larger than life. An eggplant four feet in length?just think! And that was only the first three weeks of June.

Before eggplants became a personal mission he had tended to have a low regard for painters who had one idea that they rode to death, like Noland with his stripes and chevrons. But did God get tired of making pebbles for the beach? Each one a perfect specimen of the universal ideal, each as different from any fellow pebble as the proverbial snowflake from every other snowflake.

All that was theory, a task for Clement Greenberg. In practice Richard painted his eggplants because it afforded him an inexplicable and abiding satisfaction, serene and self-sufficing. He painted as a yogi might do yoga, less and less troubling himself with questions of motive or purpose. His purpose was certainly not ambition. He foresaw no career for himself as The Master of the Muncie Eggplant. One might aspire to a Renaissance-fair renom as a painter of rustic scenery or as a flower painter, but not doing eggplants. In any case, though the heart undoubtedly has its reasons, Richard just wasn't that curious what his might be. It felt good: wasn't that enough?

He'd been the same with his three novels. He'd never thought to ask himself why he'd written Submissions of a Catholic Boyhood. Or why he had written it. To emulate Mary McCarthy? To revenge himself on the Christian Brothers and Trinity High School (where, in fact, he'd been tolerably happy and surely better educated in most subjects than he would have been at the public schools available to him)? To cash in on the pedophilia scandals already springing up everywhere? But the beatings his hero had received at the hands of Father Bill hadn't been sexual in character. They were part of a simple context of wills, and test of faith. So, all of the above "reasons" had probably been factors, but basically he'd written the book because he could, because the idea had dawned on him, and the prose arose. Just the way, really, these eggplants had come to him.

And still were coming. On through July and into August. Always a good record-keeper, he'd been keeping a systematic inventory right from the get-go, and there were now 78 paintings of eggplants, large and small, not counting the botches and the false starts. The earlier ones were mostly oils, but it was easier to deal with the cleaning up if he used acrylics. And painting on gessoed plywood panels and masonite was so much cheaper. (There were also a couple of lovely large tapestries painted on plastic tablecloths that had been on sale at Wal-Mart's.) They looked as Italian as cans of olive oil, as Canalettos! If he continued in spate, using stretched canvas or canvasboard, he could bankrupt himself were the madness to last much beyond his sabbatical. Of course, he didn't envisage the muse continuing her daily visits beyond, at the furthest stretch, September. But who would have supposed it could go on this long? It is in the nature of passion that one doesn't budget one's time. Mad love doesn't make plans.

?

Just before Labor Day, Sarah, his ex-wife and his agent still, went off to London and other literary cities in Europe, leaving her Greenwich Village apartment in Richard's hands. No entrails could have yielded a more unequivocal omen, for Sarah's apartment was not 100 feet from that part of University Pl. where every year, at Labor Day, there was a street fair at which vendors sold the wares bohemia was famed for?ceramics, candles, silver jewelry, t-shirts and fine art. For whatever reason, wares in the latter category had come to take up less and less exhibition space in proportion to more practical items like socks and underwear. But that relative dearth made it easier for Richard?and other throwbacks to the Beaux Arts era?to be licensed to set up a display and sell his paintings. He did have to show a sample of his work to the curatorial committee?a single eggplant, life-size, in that celadon bowl?and he explained to them that his other works were also still-lifes. Their one comment was, "Nice."

So there he was, on the first Saturday morning of the show, in his assigned space on E. 12th, around the corner from University, sitting in front of his harvest of eggplants, waiting for the compliments. There were 44 paintings hanging from three "walls" rigged from PVC piping and canvas-backed chicken wire. He hadn't priced any of them yet, since he'd wanted to check out the competition first. The very cheapest pictures?sad clowns, drab flowers?fetched $50 to $75. Larger sizes and more careful execution doubled those figures, and the asking price for full-size, over-the-sofa oils suitable for a dentist's waiting room was anywhere from $250 to $500. But the higher price tags were always attached to landscapes. The priciest still-life?a really nice watercolor of tiers of bouquets outside a deli?was going for $300, but that was from an artist with an impressive track record and lots of ribbons. Richard tagged his largest offering at $250?an eggplant inflated to fill a 20-inch-by-24-inch panel of masonite in a tasteful gold-leaf frame (optional for $50), and priced the smaller pieces proportionately. He didn't expect to sell a thing, but pricing his wares seemed an essential civility.

The pedestrians going by did sometimes slow down to take a look. Mostly they seemed to do a double-take on the fact that all of the paintings were paintings of eggplants. Some took that in, and gave a smile or nod of recognition and walked on, perhaps after inquiring, "Eggplants?just eggplants, nothing else?" And he would nod and smile. A few times he reaped his familiar reward of "Nice" or "Interesting," usually from someone who seemed not to find his exclusive focus on eggplants remarkable. But only twice did anyone ask the price. "It's on the flip side," he told them, and they turned the picture around, nodded, and walked off.

All that was between 10 a.m. and noon, and already he was getting bored. This side of the vie de boheme was not the stuff of operas. But it was too late now to back out. He'd bought his ticket and he was on the plane; he would just have to go to the appointed destination. His neighbor vendor, an elfin woman who did cameo-size paintings of tv personalities, agreed to look after his table while he went to get slices of pizza from Stromboli.

And when he came back he'd sold his first painting! To all his questions about the purchaser his neighbor had no more to say than that she seemed like a very nice lady, was well-dressed, and had carried off her painting (a 10-by-12-inch acrylic on canvasboard notable for the single long brushstroke defining the highlight along the eggplant's flank) in a Balducci bag. Balducci's, his neighbor explained, was where the best eggplants came from in New York City. "Though at this time of year," she went on, "you can get great eggplants at the Greenmarket. Or almost anywhere..."

It pained him to think that he would never know what was to become of his painting, whether it was hanging in the home of the woman who'd bought it or if it were meant to be a gift. And where would it end up being hung? In someone's kitchen? Or in a hallway, among other paintings? And what would those other paintings look like? Once he fantasized a restaurateur who'd embellished every booth in his establishment with one of Richard's paintings. But he'd never imagined not knowing anything about his paintings' destinations, that they might be sent off into the world like messages in bottles. Yet wouldn't it have been just the same for Matisse or Hopper? And what of the models who'd posed for them? Did they ever wonder, in their old age, what had become of the pictures they'd sat for in the nirvana of a painter's gaze?

But the possibility that nagged him most annoyingly was what if his neighbor had bought his painting herself just to be nice, just to bolster his morale? And if she had: How would that be any less humbling than what he was doing here all day long, hour after hour, sitting with his begging cup, asking for alms? Wasn't that, finally, the secret meaning of the whole undertaking of art?

His neighbor had finished her slice of pizza and returned to her Times crossword. The sidewalk traffic became heavier, and more of those going by seemed to have come on purpose to look at the paintings. There were more nods and remarks of bland approval and even a vivid thumbs-down from a fat black teenage girl who thrust out her huge gut and announced, "Eggplants suck!" Richard declined to argue. He smiled and tilted his head and she went away with a glare of vindication.

A little later another naysayer appeared less easy to shrug off, a dour squinty-eyed fellow who came to a full stop in front of the triple wall of eggplants, dismissing each in turn with an emphatic shake of his head. "You've got a problem," he told Richard. "A big problem." He waited for Richard to take his bait and ask what his big problem was, but Richard would not oblige.

"You know what it means if you dream about eggplants, don't you?"

Richard remained mum.

"What they symbolize?"

"Cancer," said Richard.

His critic looked at him dumbfounded. "What?"

He'd only said it as a form of psychic jiu-jitsu, but now that the word had been uttered, he wondered if there might be some truth in it. There is something sinister about an eggplant. Was he exhibiting his own dark cloud of forebodings? Was that what had prompted his unknown patron to plunk down $150 for her own slice of death-wish?

"Well, you sure knew how to take care of that one," said the lady at the next table, folding up her Times and slipping it into her tote bag once the fellow had gone away.

"Maybe it's true," said Richard.

"I doubt it. Actually, they're kind of cheerful. Everybody likes pictures of things they like to eat. Did you see the Chardin show at the Met?"

"Oh, for Chardin it was the fur and feathers."

"For sure," she agreed. "No one could do fur better than him. But for eggplants? You got no competition."

"Thank you," said Richard. He couldn't think of a nicer compliment.

In the course of the weekend he sold seven more paintings, but he must have done something to offend his muse, because when he went back to Muncie, the impulse was gone. There was not another painting in him. Up in the attic he had a lifetime supply of Christmas and birthday presents?and not a clue as to what had made him start or what had made him stop.

Art is a mystery.