Orchard by Larry Watson Page A

a pinch of sand from the spot where Sonja had lain, and he would mix the grains into the swirled paint on his palette. If he were moved to work on a watercolor, he would use lake water as a wash and as a rinse for his brushes.
    The night before, as Weaver lay in a cool bath drinking gin and trying to soothe his sunburn, he decided that Sonja had somehow crossed a boundary. Without either of them willing it to be so, the model had passed from inspiration to control, and Weaver would not be controlled—not in society, not in his marriage, and certainly not in his art.
    Therefore, the work that Weaver began that day—an oil, as it happened—was of a stretch of sand without a human being on it.
    And yet as empty as that beach was, the completed painting is full of—is there any other word for it?—presence. Those wide, flat, sun-bleached and waterworn stones seem to be waiting for the next bird to land or for the next foot to step down to the lake’s edge. The sand is as rippled and scalloped as water on a windy day. But look again—wouldn’t some of those dents and impressions in the sand conform themselves exactly to the concavity of a woman’s breasts or thighs? The brushstrokes themselves seem to shimmer, a perfect joining of subject—the sun scorches almost all the blue from the cloudless sky—with emotion; certainly the artist as he painted blazed with more than the sun’s heat.
    The only tranquillity in the painting comes from the lake itself, so calm that any boat that might once have stirred the surface has drifted far from sight.
    The work is titled “Absence and Desire.”

14
    Harriet Weaver was not allowed to enter her husband’s studio unless he brought her there, and that he was likely to do only when he had new work he needed her help with. Harriet had learned over the years that when he showed her a painting it meant it wasn’t finished, not quite, and it would not leave the studio until Weaver was certain he could do nothing to make it better. A completed work he might bring to the house before shipping it out, but by then he was generally indifferent to her opinion.
    Harriet, however, had reached the point where she no longer trusted her ability to see a painting for the first time and instantly offer an assessment, at least one that might truly aid her husband and not enrage or disappoint him. That was why for years now she had been sneaking into the studio, not only so she could prepare her critical response but also so she might see into the life he walled off from her. She always waited until she could be absolutely certain he would not return for hours or perhaps even days—a business trip (or so Ned termed it) to Chicago usually, but also to London, Paris, New York, Santa Fe, Minneapolis. Ned enjoyed attending any new exhibition of his work, if for no other reason than to needle the critics and charm the patrons, and he used the same rough-edged, plainspoken, prickly persona for both purposes.
    On this sunny afternoon in late September, Harriet decided to visit the studio as soon as her husband climbed into the station wagon to drive into Fox Harbor. She knew she had at least two hours. At the end of a workday, Ned liked to drink, and he preferred to do his drinking in the company of other men, talking about baseball or fishing, mocking the tourists, complaining about the weather. He had a few favorite taverns, though Harriet doubted it was known in any of them that Ned Weaver was an artist of international reputation. At the Lakeside Tavern they probably thought that the short man standing at the end of the bar drinking gin was a housepainter or a carpenter, and that suited Ned just fine.
    Ned’s studio was forty yards from the main house, up a slope lined with lilac and spirea bushes, their white and lavender petals in spring strewing the artist’s stony path as he walked to his work. The studio itself, a century-old, rough-hewn, chinked log cabin, was snugged up against a steep hill