The Departure

The day had been long for Martha. Days are always long when they hang about in idle confusion. Martha had wondered if she should tell Jim. The day had brought her to her wit's end, and made it all the more necessary for her to tell someone. And besides, Jim had to be told. It was Jim who had commissioned him. The artist was to beautify the new home. 'The large house was really quite bare,' she had thought, 'and a big landscape would help out the front room.' But now in the small room where he had done his work there was only uncertainty.

"Don't be ridiculous!" Jim said. "He couldn't have; it's not possible. You'd think we were living in the dark ages, the way you're carrying on. Now once more, if we go through it very carefully and slowly, we can find out how he tricked you,"

"He didn't trick me," Martha said. "He wouldn't—"

"Will you stop that! He did trick you! There's no way of getting around it. They're all alike, the goddamn self-centered artists—all they wanna do is . . . Oh, damn it! They're just self-centered."

He stopped abruptly and gritted his teeth and then started again somewhat more composed.

"Now please, let's start again slowly . . . right from the time I commissioned him." He turned and looked at the painting. The paint was still tacky. "Right up until now," he said, frowning—grimacing with disbelief.

Martha gripped the arms of her chair. She looked around the tiny room that she had spent so much time in for the past couple of months. It now seemed vacant, despite its clutter of paint tubes and stained rags. Everything was just as it was yesterday when he was there with his back to her and the big easel before him. But now it was different somehow, and he was gone. The easel was still there, and the painting. 'The painting—so beautiful,' she thought. 'Why couldn't Jim have been satisfied with it? Then it never would have happened . . . It . . . That thing did happen though.' She began to tremble again. 'Oh why, why did it happen?' she thought. 'He was so . . . so . . .'

"Remember," Jim said, "that day I was showing him this room? When I told him that this was where he'd work he seemed a bit disappointed."

"No he didn't," Martha said. "I mean it didn't seem that way to me."

"Martha, if we're gonna find anything out, we're gonna have to agree on something." Martha didn't respond; she was still thinking about it. It had just happened last night—so short a time, but already it seemed unclear.

"Okay, Jim, okay . . . We gotta figure this out. Where do you want me to start?"

"Well . . . like I said, when I commissioned him. What did he say after I went upstairs?"

"He didn't say much of anything . . . You had to push him into talking. I asked him if he only did landscapes. He looked at me and . . . Do you remember how his eyes were? . . . Well, anyway he just looked at me . . . but it seemed like he wasn't. I mean it seemed like he was looking past me. He was thinking or something and he didn't answer right away. It made me feel kind of funny. He said that he did other things sometimes. I asked him what, but maybe he didn't want to tell me. Anyway, he was pretty vague about it. He said that he painted reality. I told him that that was good because you wanted it to look real. But then he kinda frowned and he looked at me real hard and said, 'We'll see.'

"He confused me then. I didn't understand him at all. It was just that he didn't seem to make much sense—not at first, anyway. After a while, I think I began to understand him a little. You see, when he spoke, some of the words didn't mean exactly what you thought they did. Do...