“What He Painted on the Wall in Antigua” by Gregory Byrd
For Mike and Mansie
From the veranda near the top of the mountain, he could see the rain over Falmouth Harbor. Sometimes the rain blew onto the porch where he was sketching so that he moved the little table in towards the bed. All in all, the rain was gentle and unlike the thunderstorms he was used to in Florida. He wondered if there were such storms in Antigua in the summer and he imagined the terror of hurricanes coming across the small island then.
The rain settled like a grey blanket over the mountains nearby and covered the port so that the yachts worth millions of dollars were only impressions of wealth that he had grown so tired of seeing. He thought about that idea for a moment, in the way that he thought of such things—the Impressionism of Monet—in images rather than in words. Foreground of bougainvillea, palm fronds to the right, a grey-blue field in the middle of the canvas with the smudged images of sailboats in the middle, the big tamarind pods hanging down on the right margin. It would not sell. Most of his clients did not like anything that was not clear and well-defined. They would not have liked Monet in his day, though he knew one or two clients who had a Monet displayed prominently because they knew Monet was valuable and the palette fit well with a rug or a sofa.
The arrangement in Antigua was that Karl would get airfare, ten thousand USD and a place to stay for a month while he worked the murals in Keith Wiley’s house. The house itself was still in a state. When his driver—called only “Rasta”—delivered Karl to the house, the grass in front was knee-high. The expansive rear deck was half-collapsed and bullfinches flew in and out the open windows. On the floor of the great room lay two old and empty Cavalier rum bottles. The occasional gust banged the window shutters.
He had known Keith Wiley for a long time, though he couldn’t remember quite how they met. Something in Key Largo, for sure. Keith knew everyone in Key Largo and even some in Ocean Reef. Being the only appliance dealer in the Upper Keys meant everyone with a house visited his shop at some point, to replace a refrigerator, buy a whole kitchen suite, add an air-conditioner, replace a washer and dryer. Karl had a vague memory of painting a mural at a new house in Ocean Reef, something with lots of tropical flowers, and Keith there installing an island-top grill for the big kitchen. Yes, that must have been it. They talked as Karl worked and somehow Karl didn’t find the younger man’s suggestions about his painting to be as odious as such contributions usually were.
“They want flowers, they want tropical,” Karl said. That morning, he had taped a bit of charcoal to a yardstick and sketched out the whole 12-foot-tall wall. The trompe l’oeil effect was of a huge window open to the outside. The sky in the painting was perpetually blue and bright and huge hibiscus blooms leaned into the room. Far out at sea, Karl added a small rain squall. A sleek wooden sailboat with sail recently furled along the boom (a la Winslow Homer) rode gently at anchor in a sheltered harbor that didn’t exist in Ocean Reef. Karl had long since given up on any pretense of painting anything that had much meaning. Art never made anyone money—people only wanted images that helped them believe the stories they told themselves. So he painted what people wanted to see and they paid him well. The Ocean Reef house painting got him twelve thousand dollars, all in cash. In 1978, that went pretty far, especially for Karl, who got by in the trailer at mile marker 96 on the lot he’d bought for a little of nothing in 1970.
After finishing the mural, Karl had loaded his brushes, drop cloths, and paints into the station wagon with its awful fake wood panels and headed back to Key Largo via Card Sound Road. At Alabama Jack’s he stopped and ordered a Manhattan. He was well into this third Manhattan when Keith walked in and sat down.
“Mind if I join you? Just finished with the stovetop. Lady wasn’t happy with the trim, so we worked on that for another hour after you left.”
Karl nodded to the seat Keith was already in, then caught the eye of the waitress who wore the Alabama Jack’s t-shirt knotted beneath her boobs. He held up his drink and two fingers and pointed to his table. She nodded and retreated to the bar. When she returned, Karl had a vague pang of lust and imagined pawing at her braless chest and thrusting into her at what he imagined was her apartment nearby. She smiled tactfully.
“Two more Manhattans—on your bill?”
Karl handed her a fifty from the stack he’d received—the second half of his fee—before he left the fancy house.
“Keep ‘em coming, Liebschien.”
She winked, but he knew it was about the $50 he had given her, not about any attraction. He knew how he looked: salt and pepper beard three days old, his light blue button-down short sleeve shirt stained everywhere with paint, the hairs on his lips stained from smoking, his shorts an old pair of cutoffs he wore fishing, his gut paunchy at 60. Still, he’d take the attention.
How long was it since he’d seen his own Annaliese? Ten-fifteen years? She had come with him willingly in Wiesbaden way back in 1937. He was just a young man then though he had already studied for three years under different painters and at the university. She had seen him on the street where he sold some of his paintings and did sketches for those passing by. It was, for him, a time only of art and models and images and painting. The troubles with Brownshirts and Nazis were just static noise on some untuned radio. A time of haunting the museums with his easel and copying the masters painting after painting. Gott! He had learned so much then. So when Annaliese paused on the street in front of his paintings, she fell into his spell.
“Ah, mein Gott!” He exclaimed. “Sit, Fraulein, bitte! Such a radiant face! And your hair! Please let me sketch you. I will even pay for your time!” Of course, Annaliese sat. And he sketched, his pencil loving the curves of her braids, the arch of her jawline, the bow of her lips. She came back to his little garret, carrying the sketch he had made of her in the little pressed-board folder he used for paying customers. He made coffee and showed her his sketches, the copies-in-progress of paintings in the museum. Arnold Bocklin’s Venus Anadynomene, Jean Delville’s Parsifal. They sipped his bitter coffee without sugar there in the falling evening light of his little room and when he leaned in and kissed her gently, she said
“Oh, you need someone, don’t you?”
And with that, his attempt at seduction melded into something like love and he realized that he did indeed need someone. He wrapped her in his arms and she stroked his hair. They were married that summer, once the term had finished. She worked in a coffee shop down on the Kircheplatz while she finished her studies in literature. Karl sold enough paintings and sketches to pay for their small room, where he brought the occasional seductee when Annaliese was at work or attending classes. He was stupid enough to imagine that she loved him and knew nothing of his dalliances. He wouldn’t know for many years.
Karl was unaware enough of the world outside the museum to be surprised when he was drafted and, after some tests, assigned to the Luftwaffe for training. He wrote to Annaliese that he was a Stuka pilot because he thought it sounded more romantic and that she wouldn’t know the difference. Actually, he flew as a co-pilot in a twin-engined Dornier that bombed London twice and then Essex before the pilot was killed and Karl landed with shrapnel in both legs. He was invalided home and placed on reserve and when he got to their apartment, Annaliese was gone and someone else was living there. He found her living with her family. When the Americans came, Annaliese served as an interpreter and got Karl a job identifying art stolen from France and Belgium. With those connections, they left for the United States. John was born in Cleveland in 1964 and, more and more, Karl worked painting murals. By the time John was eight, Karl traveled to Chicago and New York, harvesting the occasional tryst and when he came home in 1970, Annaliese was waiting on the sofa in the living room in a white dress with her bags packed. Much of the furniture was gone—sold to pay for a new life.
“Karl, you do need someone, but it’s not me. Even all those girls over the years didn’t seem to be what you needed.” She put her hand under his stubbled cheek. “You’re very talented but you spend all of that like an artisan on rich people’s walls. I’ll bet you didn’t notice that I don’t look like that sketch anymore.” It was the one thing she’d left in the living room—the sketch he’d made all those years ago, framed. It was a beautiful sketch, deftly done, spare, hinting at her joie de vivre, but she was right. He still thought that she looked the same. When he looked at her now, he could see how her face had changed. It was older now, with lines in the forehead and around her lips, a little sagging on the jawline he had loved. Something about it made him love her even more and he wanted to reform right then, but he knew all of that had passed long ago when he wasn’t paying attention.
“Okay,” he said. “I guess you’re right. But I do love you. More than ever.”
“Hug your father,” she told John. “We’re going now.”
John reached out his hand to his father and Karl shook it then brought the boy into a stifling hug. “And I love you, too, and always will, my son!” he said into the boy’s ear. He didn’t know what instrument the boy played in his school band. He didn’t know what school he went to. But still, he loved the boy more than almost anything.
After they left, he lived in the house for another week, then sold everything except the drawing and his painting materials and took the next job that came his way. A construction magnate who had helped build Miami and had built a new house in Islamorada wanted a mural of flowers and half-naked women, but only in the best taste, of course. After the job, he spent all of his fee on a small lot in the woods off US1 in Key Largo and had a cheap trailer hauled there. Eight years later, here he was, drinking Manhattans with Keith Wiley, an appliance store owner of all things, at Alabama Jacks.
When he woke the next morning, he didn’t recognize where he was, nor how he got there from the bar. Pecan paneling, green velvet sofas with Spanish-style furniture and a gaudy rain lamp with a naked woman in the middle hanging in the corner. A woman hovered over him with a cup of coffee.
“You’re awake! Keith brought you home last night. I’m Anne. Here, I think you need this. It seemed like you needed someone to take care of you last night.”
“Yes,” he said groggily, “Danke . . . thank you.” And so it went for the next several years. Karl would show up, paint-stained and drunk, having not eaten for three days, sometimes because he was painting copies nonstop in his studio and sometimes because he had painted another mural and was flush with cash. Keith and Anne’s boy, Steven, would listen to his stories about the war and half-believe them. When the store began to really make money, Keith branched out into furniture and bedding. A financial advisor suggested that he and Anne buy a second home. Keith thought of how they had visited Antigua on a chartered sailing cruise, how much they had loved the place, how the people were like those he grew up with in Pensacola. Soon, they had found a place that had been battled in probate for years. Keith hired a Rastafarian carpentry crew to demo and rebuild the deck and to get the place into shape again. And he made Karl the offer to come and paint the mural in the great room.
Keith had imagined his own mural for many years, and he chose this place as much for its huge wall as for anything else. He sourced ships hatchcovers for a bar and wrapped it with three-inch ships’ rope. He daydreamed about pirates prowling these waters.
“So, Karl,” he said. “I’m not telling you your business, but as I’m paying here I should be able to give some suggestions.” Karl nodded. “Think of this—a dark night, lightning rips the sky, and a Spanish galleon and a pirate ship. Both ships have cannons blazing and maybe you can see the captains with broadswords or something!”
Steven had been sweeping up the floor and leaned on his broom while his father talked. Karl looked at the boy, about the same age that John would be now. Karl saw that somehow the boy, despite having watched Captain Blood a dozen times, didn’t quite find his father’s vision to be correct. He winked at the boy.
“I will paint you something you will like,” he said to Keith. Back at his little guest house, Karl thought about the space. He poured English Harbor 10-year-old rum into a scratched whiskey glass and sketched design after design. He thought of John and Annaliese. He thought of how Steven looked at him. He thought of how Annaliese was right, that he did need someone, even though he didn’t know who or what that was.
Rasta knocked on his door at 6:00 a.m. and Karl was already up, the light from the open doors of the veranda waking him before he was ready to rise. He urinated and then came out with his paints and brushes.
“Painting something here, man?”
“A big mural. Mr. Keith will show you when I’m finished.”
At the house, Keith offered him a drink, but Karl asked only for black coffee. He taped charcoal to a yardstick and sketched and sketched. He borrowed a ladder from the workers and sketched the top. By lunchtime, he had the whole thing sketched out and stopped to eat the spicy fried chicken Steven set down near him. He drank his coffee and ate the chicken with coal-stained fingers. Then he set back to work with paints. The workers’ faces appeared in the windows and Steven could see them gesturing as the painting developed.
When Keith got to the house late that afternoon, the panorama was finished and he stood just inside the front door, taking it all in. Karl was asleep in an old stuffed chair and a bottle of bourbon, half-empty, sat near him on the floor. Keith looked at the mural. It was not at all what he had asked for. There were no pirate wenches, no battling ships, nothing dark. Instead, a galleon lay anchored in a quiet bay and Spaniards stood in their shining helmets, their swords sheathed. Topless Arawak maidens offered fruit and perhaps themselves. Tall Arawak men resplendent with feathered headdresses stood nearby. It was a place you wanted to be, even if it never existed this way. Karl knew nothing about the history of Conquest, only about how someone might have come a long way to find a place where he might belong, where he might find someone he needed. Keith’s eyes softened, then a smile came to his face and he nodded.
Steven nudged Karl, who woke and looked at how Keith was taking in his world. For a moment, it seemed that Karl was still in the world of his painting, the dashing Spanish captain with Karl's face smiling at the Arawak maiden with the face of young Annaliese. He looked up at Steven and put his arm on the boy’s shoulder.
“My son, John. Did I ever tell you that you remind me of my son John?”
A Fulbright fellow and Pushcart nominee, Gregory Byrd’s prose has appeared in Louisville Review, Tampa Review, Willow Springs, and Baltimore Review. His chapbook, The Name of the God Who Speaks, won the Robert Phillips Prize from Texas Review Press. Greg attended the writing workshops at Eckerd College and Florida State University and teaches writing at St. Petersburg College in Tarpon Springs, Florida.