The Riverhouse (2 page)

Shane Bellamy awoke with sunlight streaming in through the sheer curtains and needling at his eyes. He sat up, feeling groggy and thick-headed from sleeping in an unfamiliar bed, and realized, with a mixture of trepidation and excitement, that he was officially beginning the second chapter of his life.

Take two
, he thought with some bemusement, squinting into the early rose sunlight.
Do-over
, like they used to say back when he was a kid on Brush Street, playing horse in Stevie Burkett’s driveway with a beat up old Spalding basketball. It was as good a term for it as anything, even after the months of sessions with Dr. Taylor, who tended to dismiss easy answers as “mental red-herrings”. Shane was getting a do-over, that’s all. Not everybody did. It was a little frightening and totally unexpected, but it was also teasingly hopeful. Despite everything, despite all the ugliness that had led up to this moment, Shane decided to make the best of it. It wasn’t like he had much of a choice, anyway. After all, there was no turning back, even if he wanted to; the one bridge he hadn’t deliberately burned had ended up collapsing entirely on its own.
Structural failure
, he thought, and grinned bitterly to himself.

It was a morbid thought, and it pained his heart a little, but it also seemed like a good sign.
If you can grin about it
, he mused,
then maybe you’re beginning to own it
. He knew he’d never look back on the previous year of his life and laugh, but a rueful grin was probably close enough. It was easy enough in the morning, with the dawn sunlight streaming in and the thought of percolator coffee rattling around all by itself in his head. Later, things might look a bit different. Shane decided to enjoy it while he could.

He started the water boiling on the little gas stove and showered quickly, wondering if he’d get dressed at all that day. Why should he? No one was going to see him. He was home alone in the small river cottage, completely hidden from sight within the dense trees of the bluff. In the past, he’d always been very jealous of the artists who worked from home, spending the entire day in their pajamas as they painted in their private studios. He’d never admitted it to the people in the office, of course. The staff at Tristan and Crane had maintained a sort of amused scorn for “starving artists”, even though they contracted them regularly enough. Despite their nickname, the starving artists never actually seemed to be all that hungry. Granted, they were usually thin and squirrely-looking, but Shane was fairly certain that being thin was just part of the mystique. Whenever the contract artists showed up at the agency for client meetings, they invariably wore black and had some combination of creative facial hair, rimless glasses or indecipherable tattoos in interesting places. Compared to them, Shane barely qualified as an artist.

Not that he wasn’t good. Shane was very good, and he knew it. It was just that, to him, the act of drawing and painting was like any other manual job; like laying bricks or digging a trench. He knew that art required skill and talent, but so did operating a bulldozer, and Shane approached it in much the same way. Like any other manual worker, he preferred to work a shift, putting in his time at the job site and then being done with it for the rest of the day. This meant that he’d never had to rely on the quirky vagaries of inspiration to get the job done.

Unlike the starving artists back at T and C, Shane preferred to bypass the legendary artist’s muse, which could be fickle and temperamental and prone to long vacations. Instead, he relied on a sort of foreman in his head, one who had the blueprint for any given job and knew exactly where the marks needed to be. The foreman would call out the orders, and Shane’s hand would simply obey. Shane himself barely had to pay attention. He may have been a teensy bit jealous of the starving artists, with their auras of quirky eccentricity (which the rest of the world seemed to think of as the mark of the “true artiste”) but he didn’t envy the way they worked. For Shane, sitting around and waiting for inspiration to strike was both silly and unnecessary; he had long ago learned the way down to the well of creativity, and figured out how to dip out whatever he needed all by himself. For him, waiting on the muse was a sucker’s game.

While the coffee percolated, he went to get dressed. Starving artists might be the kind to lurk around their apartments all day in their underwear, but Shane was too used to the routine. This would be his first shift in the cottage, but there was no reason things should be any different. The movers had been very thorough and Shane had officially unpacked his studio yesterday afternoon, setting up his easel, art board and work table exactly as it had been at his apartment. He’d decided on the little upstairs room with the canted ceiling on one side and the single window on the end, positioning the canvas so as to take full advantage of the morning light. In many ways, the new studio was even better than the big studio back in New York. Maybe, he mused, he should have done this years ago. It had never crossed his mind, of course, and if it hadn’t been for the lay-off, the divorce, and… well, everything else, it certainly never would have. As bad as all of that had been, at least it had led to this.

He looked at his watch as he climbed onto the stool before the huge canvas. It was two minutes before eight. He was a little early, but that was fine. He set his coffee mug on the side table, in the little cleared space on the corner that wasn’t cluttered with paint tubes, brushes, magazines and CD cases, and looked up. The sign on the wall over his easel had come with him from his office back at Tristan and Crane. He’d hand-lettered it himself. It read:

“I often seem to have more in common with mathematicians than with my fellow artists.” – M. C. Escher.

He read it as he rolled a brush head between his thumb and forefinger, absently shaping the bristles, and then he looked down at the canvas before him. It was only half finished. The top half showed a nearly photorealistic castle in the distance, blue with haze against an almost absurdly dramatic, stormy sky. There was supposed to be a forested foreground scene as well, full of huge, ancient trees—“loaded with personality” the art director had instructed—with a winding, curving path cutting through the middle. It was a matte painting, intended for use in a television movie that was currently being produced for TBS.

Despite his skills, Shane was not particularly creative. He couldn’t invent. He could, however, mimic, and this had made him very good at finding resource material. There were magazine clippings and computer printouts taped all around the edge of the canvas, and dozens more tacked to the art board below the M. C. Escher quote. The images showed a dizzying variety of forest scenes, mountainous vistas, stormy clouds, tree close-ups, sprawling redwood canopies, and ancient castles. Shane had cobbled all of these elements together in the original sketch of the scene, and that sketch had been enough to get him the contract with the production studio in the first place—his first contract since being laid off from the agency early last year. Now, his original sketch was mounted on a smaller easel next to the canvas. Shane looked from the sketch to the various reference materials, connecting the elements in his head, and then began to paint.

It was better today, but not great. Progress has been slow lately, and this was slightly worrisome to Shane. The problem wasn’t that the inspiration wasn’t there, of course; that wasn’t the kind of artist Shane was. Instead, the problem simply seemed to be one of focus. The foreman in his head still told his hand where the marks were supposed to go, filling up the white and bringing the image to life, but for some reason he had gotten a little lazy about the schedule. Shane would find himself getting bogged down in the details, spending far too much time on minutiae and forgetting the overall scene. He’d lean gradually closer and closer to the canvas until the brush was barely inches in front of his eyes, teasing out some tiny, insignificant detail that wouldn’t even be visible in the final film.

He’d been working on the painting for almost two weeks, back in the old apartment, and it was due for delivery to the production studio in Los Angeles in four days. Normally, he’d have been easily finished by now, the painting leaning in the corner and drying while he milked the deadline, reading paperback novels and playing Sudoku on his computer. Instead, it looked like he’d barely be done in time, and he’d had to start mixing his oils with an alkyd gel so the paint would dry soon enough to ship. It worried him, partly because he needed this contract, needed to prove to himself and his clients that he could still produce, even outside of the world of Tristan and Crane. But it also worried him because it made him feel like he wasn’t in control of the art anymore. After all, he wasn’t like the starving artists, the ones who wore black and had coke for lunch and sat around moping while the muse flitted around like an unfaithful lover, refusing to land and put out. Shane was used to going down to the well of creativity and sending down his bucket all by himself, drawing up whatever he needed, dismissing the muse for the fickle whore that she is.

Now, for the first time in his adult life, Shane found himself nagging at the foreman in his mind, reminding him that there was a deadline to meet, and that he couldn’t afford to fritter around on a tree root or a butterfly or some damned bluebird on a branch that no one was ever going to see. Maybe the foreman was just out of practice. If so, Shane couldn’t blame him. Before this project, he hadn’t painted anything for months. Probably, the foreman in his mind had been off on vacation during those months, getting tan and lazy somewhere, and was just now getting back into the swing of things. Shane hoped that was all there was to it. He strongly preferred the foreman in his mind to the muse. After all, anthropomorphic visualizations aside, the foreman in his mind was really just Shane himself. He could control the foreman, make him do the work. The muse, however, was different. She was her own, and she was capricious.
Screw her
, Shane thought as he painted, and not for the first time.
Screw the muse and the paintbrush she rode in on
.

Metaphorically, of course.

He caught himself focusing in on a boulder by the path, spending way too much time sponging on a layer of moss, dark forest green on the bottom, bright lime green on the top, where the sun was hitting it. He sat back, blinking and shaking his head. How much time had he wasted on that? He refused to look at his watch. Instead, he reached for his coffee, took a sip, and then grimaced. It was stone cold.

Damn.

Two o’clock came and Shane clumped downstairs for some late lunch. Steph had always told him that he needed to take a snack with him when he went to paint. “Take a banana or a muffin,” she’d say. “Quit starving yourself. You’re telling your body to pack on the fat, like a bear getting ready to hibernate.” Sometimes Shane did bring a snack with him, but once the shift started, he’d forget all about it. For whatever reason, the foreman in his head allowed the occasional sip of coffee, but never any snack breaks. As a result, once the mental whistle blew promptly at two o’clock, Shane always found himself ravenously hungry, ready to eat whatever was in sight. Today was no different.

He slapped together a ham sandwich and ate it standing by the sliding back door, looking out over the patio and the river below.

It was a grand view indeed, even if the Missouri wasn’t going to win any Most-Beautiful-River-of-the-Year awards. It was still swollen high in its banks, nearly opaque with mud. It looked thick enough to walk on, and the effect was only increased by the amount of flotsam slogging along on the slow current. Uprooted logs and broken branches of all sizes mingled with a colorful variety of trash and debris, all greedily collected by the river during its most recent flood.

It had been a big year for floods in the Missouri river valley, but the people who lived there had grown accustomed to just rolling with it. Shane had always marveled at the attitude of the locals toward the river, at their shrugging resilience in the face of such a huge and unpredictable neighbor. Much like them, though, he had recently endured his own fairly devastating flood, albeit a uniquely personal one. In the aftermath, just like everybody else, he’d simply had to suck it up, muck out all the stinking mud, decide what was salvageable from his old life, and try to move on.

Shane had contemplated suicide, and more than once. Not because he was depressed (or so he truly believed) but because he was just so tired. Dr. Taylor had helped—probably more than Shane was willing to admit—but it had been a near thing. Moving on was such damn hard work. He’d thought that he’d had his life all put together, patted down and comfortable by the ripe old age of thirty-three. It hadn’t been a particularly exciting life, but it had been his, and it had looked more or less the way he’d always hoped it would. He’d had a decent job doing what he liked to do, a good-looking and fairly pleasant wife, a nice apartment just across the river in New Jersey, and a new Saab that was still, on the day that everything had begun to go neatly to hell, smelling a bit like it had just rolled off the lot.