All these procedures and hospitalizations had made him a decidedly lonelier, less confident man than he'd been during the first year of retirement2. Even his cherished peace and quiet seemed to have been turned into a self-generated form of solitary3 confinement4, and he was hounded by the sense that he was headed for the end. But instead of moving back to attackable Manhattan, he decided1 to oppose the sense of estrangement5 brought on by his bodily failings and to enter more vigorously into the world around him. He did this by organizing two weekly painting classes for the village residents, an afternoon class for beginners and an evening class for those already somewhat familiar with paints.
There were about ten students in each class, and they loved meeting in his bright studio room. By and large, learning to paint was a pretext6 for their being there, and most of them were taking the class for the same reason he was giving it: to find satisfying contact with other people. All but two were older than he, and though they assembled each week in a mood of comradely good cheer, the conversation invariably turned to matters of sickness and health, their personal biographies having by this time become identical with their medical biographies and the swapping7 of medical data crowding out nearly everything else. At his studio, they more readily identified one another by their ailments8 than by their painting. "How is your sugar?" "How is your pressure?" "What did the doctor say?" "Did you hear about my neighbor? It spread to the liver." One of the men came to class with his portable oxygen unit. Another had Parkinson's tremors9 but was eager to learn to paint anyway. All of them without exception complained — sometimes jokingly, sometimes not — about increasing memory loss, and they spoke10 of how rapidly the months and the seasons and the years went by, how life no longer moved at the same speed. A couple of the women were being treated for cancer. One had to leave halfway11 through the course to return to the hospital for treatment. Another woman had a bad back and occasionally had to lie on the floor at the edge of the room for ten or fifteen minutes before she could get up and resume working in front of her easel. After the first few times, he told her she should go into his bedroom instead and lie down for as long as she liked on his bed — it had a firm mattress12 and she would be more comfortable. Once when she did not come out of the bedroom for half an hour, he knocked and, when he heard her crying inside, opened the door and went in.
She was a lean, tall, gray-haired woman, within a year or two of his age, whose appearance and gentleness reminded him of Phoebe. Her name was Millicent Kramer, and she was the best of his students by far and, coincidentally, the least messy. She alone, in what he charitably called "Advanced Painting," managed to finish each class without having dripped paint all over her running shoes. He never heard her say, as others did, "I can't get the paint to do what I want it to do," or "I can picture it in my mind but I can't seem to get it on the canvas," nor did he ever have to tell her, "Don't be intimidated13, don't hold back." He tried to be generous to them all, even the hopeless ones, usually those very ones who came in and said right off, "I had a great day — I feel inspired today." When finally he'd heard enough of that, he repeated to them something he vaguely14 remembered Chuck Close's having said in an interview: amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work. He didn't start them with drawing, because barely a one of them was able to draw, and a figure would have set up all sorts of problems of proportion and scale, so instead, after they'd finished a couple of sessions going over the rudiments15 (how to lay their paints out and arrange their palettes, and so on) and familiarizing themselves with the medium itself, he set up a still life on a table — a vase, some flowers, a piece of fruit, a teacup — and encouraged them to use it as a reference point. He told them to be creative in order to try to get them to loosen up and use their whole arm and paint, if possible, without fear. He told them they didn't have to worry about what the arrangement actually looked like: "Interpret it," he told them, "this is a creative act." Unfortunately, saying that sometimes led to his having to tell someone, "You know, maybe you shouldn't make the vase six times larger than the teacup." "But you told me I should interpret it" was invariably the reply, to which, as kindly16 as he could, he in turn replied, "I didn't want that much interpretation17." The art-class misery18 he least wished to deal with was their painting from imagination; yet because they were very enthusiastic about "creativity" and the idea of letting yourself go, those remained the common themes from one session to the next. Sometimes the worst occurred and a student said, "I don't want to do flowers or fruit, I want to do abstraction like you do." Since he knew there was no way to discuss what a beginner is doing when he does what he calls an abstraction, he told the student, "Fine — why don't you just do whatever you like," and when he walked around the studio, dutifully giving tips, he would find, as expected, that after looking at an attempt at an abstract painting, he had nothing to say except "Keep working." He tried to link painting to play rather than to art by quoting Picasso to them, something along the lines of their having to regain19 the child in order to paint like a grownup. Mainly what he did was to replicate20 what he'd heard as a kid when he started taking classes and his teachers were telling him the same things.
He was only called upon to be at all specific when he stood beside Millicent and saw what she could do and how fast she got better. He could sense right off that she had a knack21 that was innate22 and that far exceeded what little gift some of the others began to demonstrate as the weeks went by. It was never a question with her of combining the red and the blue right off the palette but rather of modifying the mixture with a little black or with just a bit of the blue so that the colors were interestingly harmonious23, and her paintings had coherence24 instead of falling apart everywhere, which was what he confronted much of the time when he went from easel to easel and, for lack of anything else he could think of, heard himself saying, "That's coming along well." Millicent did need to be reminded "Don't overwork it," but otherwise nothing he suggested was wasted on her and she would look for the slightest shade of meaning in whatever he told her. Her way of painting seemed to arise directly from her instincts, and if her painting didn't look like anyone else's in the class, it wasn't solely25 because of stylistic distinction but because of the way she felt and perceived things. Others varied26 in their neediness27; though the class was largely full of good will, some still resented it when they needed help at all, and even inadvertent criticism could make one of the men, a former CEO of a manufacturing company, frighteningly touchy28. But never Millicent: she would have been the teacher's most rewarding pupil in anyone's amateur painting class.
Now he sat beside her on the bed and took her hand in his, thinking: When you are young, it's the outside of the body that matters, how you look externally. When you get older, it's what's inside that matters, and people stop caring how you look.
"Don't you have some medication you can take?" he asked her.
"I took it," she said. "I can't take any more. It doesn't help but for a few hours anyway. Nothing helps. I've had three operations. Each one is more extensive than the last and more harrowing than the last, and each one makes the pain worse. I'm sorry I'm in such a state. I apologize for this."
Near her head on the bed was a back brace29 she'd removed in order to lie down. It consisted of a white plastic shell that fit across the lower spine30 and attached to a web of elasticized cloth and Velcro straps32 that fastened snugly33 over the stomach an oblong piece of felt-lined canvas. Though she remained in her white painting smock, she had removed the brace and tried to push it out of sight under a pillow when he opened the door and walked in, which was why it was up by her head and impossible not to be continually mindful of while they talked. It was only a standard back brace, worn under the outer clothing, whose plastic posterior section was no more than eight or nine inches high, and yet it spoke to him of the perpetual nearness in their affluent34 retirement village of illness and death.
"Would you like a glass of water?" he asked her.
He could see by looking into her eyes how difficult the pain was to bear. "Yes," she said weakly, "yes, please."
Her husband, Gerald Kramer, had been the owner, publisher, and editor of a county weekly, the leading local paper, that did not shy away from exposing corruption35 in municipal government up and down the shore. He remembered Kramer, who'd grown up a slum kid in nearby Neptune36, as a compact, bald, opinionated man who walked with considerable swagger, played aggressive, ungainly tennis, owned a little Cessna, and ran a discussion group once a week on current events — the most popular evening event on the Starfish Beach calendar along with the screenings of old movies sponsored by the film society — until he was felled by brain cancer and was to be seen being pushed around the village streets in a wheelchair by his wife. Even in retirement he'd continued to have the air of an omnipotent37 being dedicated38 all his life to an important mission, but in those eleven months before he died he seemed pierced by bewilderment, dazed by his diminishment, dazed by his helplessness, dazed to think that the dying man enfeebled in a wheelchair — a man no longer able to smash a tennis ball, to sail a boat, to fly a plane, let alone to edit a page of the Monmouth County Bugle39 — could answer to his name. One of his dashing eccentricities40 was, for no special reason, to dress up from time to time in his tuxedo41 to partake of the veal42 scaloppine at the village restaurant with his wife of fifty-odd years. "Where the hell else am I going to wear it?" was the gruffly engaging explanation that went out to one and all — he could sometimes woo people with an unexpected charm. After the surgery, however, his wife had to sit beside him and wait for him to crookedly43 open his mouth and then feed him gingerly, the swaggering husband, the roughneck gallant44, with a spoon. Many people knew Kramer and admired him and out on the street wanted to say hello and ask after his health, but often his wife had to shake her head to warn them away when he was in the depths of his despondency — the vitriolic45 despondency of one once assertively46 in the middle of everything who was now in the middle of nothing. Was himself now nothing, nothing but a motionless cipher47 angrily awaiting the blessing48 of an eradication49 that was absolute.
"You can continue to lie here if you like," he said to Millicent Kramer after she had drunk some of the water.
"I can't be lying down all the time!" she cried. "I just cannot do it anymore! I was so agile50, I was so active — if you were Gerald's wife, you had to be. We went everywhere. I felt so free. We went to China, we went all over Africa. Now I can't even take the bus to New York unless I'm laced to the gills with painkillers52. And I'm not good with the painkillers — they make me completely crazy. And by the time I get there I'm in pain anyway. Oh, I'm sorry about this. I'm terribly sorry. Everybody here has their ordeal53. There's nothing special about my story and I'm sorry to burden you with it. You probably have a story of your own."
"Would a heating pad help?" he asked.
"You know what would help?" she said. "The sound of that voice that's disappeared. The sound of the exceptional man I loved. I think I could take all this if he were here. But I can't without him. I never saw him weaken once in his life — then came the cancer and it crushed him. I'm not Gerald. He would just marshal all his forces and do it — marshal all his everything and do whatever it was that had to be done. But I can't. I can't take the pain anymore. It overrides54 everything. I think sometimes that I can't go on another hour. I tell myself to ignore it. I tell myself it doesn't matter. I tell myself, 'Don't engage it. It's a specter. It's an annoyance55, it's nothing more than that. Don't accord it power. Don't cooperate with it. Don't take the bait. Don't respond. Muscle through. Barrel through. Either you're in charge or it's in charge — the choice is yours!' I repeat this to myself a million times a day, as though I'm Gerald speaking, and then suddenly it's so awful I have to lie down on the floor in the middle of the supermarket and all the words are meaningless. Oh, I'm sorry, truly. I abhor56 tears." "We all do," he told her, "but we cry anyway." "This class has meant so much to me," she said. "I spend the whole week waiting for it. I'm like a schoolkid about this class," she confessed, and he found her looking at him with a childish trust, as though she were indeed a little one being put to sleep — and he, like Gerald, could right anything.
"Do you have any of your medication with you?" he asked.
"I already took one this morning."
"Take another," he told her.
"I have to be so careful with those pills."
"I understand. But do yourself a favor and take another now. One more can't do much harm, and it'll get you over the hump. It'll get you back to the easel."
"It takes an hour for it to work. The class will be over."
"You're welcome to stay and keep painting after the others go. Where is the medication?"
"In my purse. In the studio. By my easel. The old brown bag with the worn shoulder strap31."
He brought it to her, and with what was left of the water in the glass, she took the pill, an opiate that killed pain for three or four hours, a large, white lozenge-shaped pill that caused her to relax with the anticipation57 of relief the instant she swallowed it. For the first time since she'd begun the class he could see unmistakably how attractive she must have been before the degeneration of an aging spine took charge of her life.
"Lie here until it starts to work," he said. "Then come join the class."
"I do apologize for all this," she said as he was leaving. "It's just that pain makes you so alone." And here the fortitude58 gave way again and left her sobbing59 into her hands. "It's so shameful60."
"There's nothing shameful about it."
"There is, there is," she wept. "The not being able to look after oneself, the pathetic need to be comforted…"
"In the circumstances, none of that is remotely shameful."
"You're wrong. You don't know. The dependence61, the helplessness, the isolation62, the dread63 — it's all so ghastly and shameful. The pain makes you frightened of yourself. The utter otherness of it is awful."
She's embarrassed by what she's become, he thought, embarrassed, humiliated64, humbled65 almost beyond her own recognition. But which of them wasn't? They were all embarrassed by what they'd become. Wasn't he? By the physical changes. By the diminishment of virility66. By the errors that had contorted him and the blows — both those self-inflicted and those from without — that deformed67 him. What lent a horrible grandeur68 to the process of reduction suffered by Millicent Kramer — and miniaturized by comparison the bleakness69 of his own — was, of course, the intractable pain. Even those pictures of the grandchildren, he thought, those photographs that grandparents have all over the house, she probably doesn't even look at anymore. Nothing anymore but the pain.
"Shhh," he said, "shhh, quiet down," and he returned to the bed to momentarily take her hand again before heading back to the class. "You wait for the painkiller51 to work and come back in when you're ready to paint."
Ten days later she killed herself with an overdose of sleeping pills.
At the end of the twelve-week session virtually everyone wanted to sign up for a second one, but he announced that a change of plans would make it impossible for him to resume giving the courses until the following fall.
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decided
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| adj.决定了的，坚决的；明显的，明确的 | |
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retirement
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| n.退休，退职 | |
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solitary
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| adj.孤独的，独立的，荒凉的；n.隐士 | |
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confinement
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| n.幽禁，拘留，监禁；分娩；限制，局限 | |
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estrangement
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| n.疏远，失和，不和 | |
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pretext
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| n.借口，托词 | |
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swapping
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| 交换，交换技术 | |
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ailments
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| 疾病（尤指慢性病），不适( ailment的名词复数 ) | |
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tremors
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| 震颤( tremor的名词复数 )； 战栗； 震颤声； 大地的轻微震动 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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halfway
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| adj.中途的，不彻底的，部分的；adv.半路地，在中途，在半途 | |
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mattress
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| n.床垫，床褥 | |
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intimidated
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| v.恐吓；威胁adj.害怕的；受到威胁的 | |
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vaguely
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| adv.含糊地，暖昧地 | |
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rudiments
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| n.基础知识，入门 | |
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kindly
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| adj.和蔼的，温和的，爽快的；adv.温和地，亲切地 | |
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interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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misery
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| n.痛苦，苦恼，苦难；悲惨的境遇，贫苦 | |
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regain
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| vt.重新获得，收复，恢复 | |
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replicate
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| v.折叠，复制，模写；n.同样的样品；adj.转折的 | |
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knack
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| n.诀窍，做事情的灵巧的，便利的方法 | |
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innate
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| adj.天生的，固有的，天赋的 | |
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harmonious
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| adj.和睦的，调和的，和谐的，协调的 | |
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coherence
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| n.紧凑；连贯；一致性 | |
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solely
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| adv.仅仅，唯一地 | |
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varied
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| adj.多样的，多变化的 | |
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neediness
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| n.穷困，贫穷 | |
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touchy
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| adj.易怒的；棘手的 | |
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brace
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| n. 支柱,曲柄,大括号; v. 绷紧,顶住,(为困难或坏事)做准备 | |
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spine
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| n.脊柱，脊椎；(动植物的)刺；书脊 | |
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strap
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| n.皮带，带子；v.用带扣住，束牢；用绷带包扎 | |
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straps
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| n.带子( strap的名词复数 )；挎带；肩带；背带v.用皮带捆扎( strap的第三人称单数 )；用皮带抽打；包扎；给…打绷带 | |
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snugly
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| adv.紧贴地；贴身地；暖和舒适地；安适地 | |
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affluent
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| adj.富裕的，富有的，丰富的，富饶的 | |
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corruption
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| n.腐败，堕落，贪污 | |
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Neptune
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| n.海王星 | |
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omnipotent
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| adj.全能的，万能的 | |
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dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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bugle
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| n.军号，号角，喇叭；v.吹号，吹号召集 | |
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eccentricities
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| n.古怪行为( eccentricity的名词复数 )；反常；怪癖 | |
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tuxedo
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| n.礼服，无尾礼服 | |
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veal
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| n.小牛肉 | |
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crookedly
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| adv. 弯曲地，不诚实地 | |
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gallant
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| adj.英勇的，豪侠的；(向女人)献殷勤的 | |
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vitriolic
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| adj.硫酸的，尖刻的 | |
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assertively
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| 断言地，独断地 | |
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cipher
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| n.零；无影响力的人；密码 | |
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blessing
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| n.祈神赐福；祷告；祝福，祝愿 | |
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eradication
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| n.根除 | |
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agile
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| adj.敏捷的，灵活的 | |
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painkiller
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| n.止痛药 | |
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painkillers
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| n.止痛药( painkiller的名词复数 ) | |
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ordeal
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| n.苦难经历，（尤指对品格、耐力的）严峻考验 | |
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54
overrides
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| 越控( override的第三人称单数 )； （以权力）否决； 优先于； 比…更重要 | |
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annoyance
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| n.恼怒，生气，烦恼 | |
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abhor
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| v.憎恶；痛恨 | |
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57
anticipation
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| n.预期，预料，期望 | |
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58
fortitude
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| n.坚忍不拔；刚毅 | |
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sobbing
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| <主方>Ⅰ adj.湿透的 | |
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shameful
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| adj.可耻的，不道德的 | |
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dependence
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| n.依靠，依赖；信任，信赖；隶属 | |
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isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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dread
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| vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧 | |
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humiliated
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| 感到羞愧的 | |
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humbled
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| adj. 卑下的，谦逊的，粗陋的 vt. 使 ... 卑下，贬低 | |
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virility
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| n.雄劲，丈夫气 | |
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deformed
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| adj.畸形的；变形的；丑的，破相了的 | |
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grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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bleakness
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| adj. 萧瑟的, 严寒的, 阴郁的 | |
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