Why I Won't Be Going To Lunch Anymore. Douglas Atwill
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“Good idea.”
Morrison turned to leave, but Miss Harkness was not done. “What if I just rearrange a bit, perhaps put a Pueblo maiden in the window?”
“Fine, fine, I’ll just be in the studio.” He went into the back room and closed the door. He had learned never to leave the studio door open, as visitors to the gallery invariably were drawn to invade his workspace. Particularly women wanted to come in and see, and they frequently left an aura that cut right across whatever he was working on. Magnus claimed to be sensitive to an atmosphere left by others in his studio. It could ruin an entire morning of painting.
Miss Harkness busied herself dusting the paintings on the wall as the corner fireplace took hold. She went to the small closet that held the racks of undisplayed paintings and pulled out the next to last painting of a Pueblo maiden. It was a small painting framed with a rococo gold fillet. A young Nambé Pueblo girl lay nude on a striped blanket, baskets and corn clusters filled the outer corners of the composition. Her flat, imperious gaze was as bold as Manet’s Olympia among the savages.
The choice of the Pueblo maiden was an open indication that Miss Harkness, despite her façade of optimism, thought today was going to be difficult. The maidens invariably were well received and would sell out completely if displayed one after another. Miss Harkness devised a scheme to squirrel away the maidens for difficult times, an insurance policy to be rationed out only on the slowest of days. However, the supply was dwindling.
Morrison had never actually seen a Nambé Pueblo maiden. On hot nights one summer the motif kept appearing in his mind, a lithe young woman resting on a red and white striped blanket in diverse poses. His favorite version included the supine maiden with a tablita headdress in her hand, connoting that she had only just a moment before disrobed. Somehow, the impression that she had been loitering there without clothes was not so appealing.
He made no progress in converting his idea into actual paintings, but it took on a nagging intensity in his thoughts. He calculated the girl’s body proportions, making her slightly shorter than art-school guidelines of seven heads tall. Her body weight crept up until he had fixed the vision as an enticing, nubile girl, surrounded by the Indian artifacts he knew from museums and local shops.
Sunlight from the small pueblo window made a line across the canvas in his mind, up and over her body in a golden-white stream. In the final version of his fantasy he included a section of the window itself, with a darkness that caused an indentation in the shadow. Could that suggest that a tribal elder peered in on this unsuspecting youngster? The painting only awaited a model for his work.
Then at lunch one day he saw a young woman sitting alone at an adjoining table who closely matched his mental image. Her body was ripe like a plum, her stove-black hair cut in straight bangs and in a single horizontal line around her neck. She was stocky but not yet fat, her chubby wrists encircled in silver bracelets. He almost saw the marks of the tablita on her dark hair. He could not avert his eyes and after a while he realized his stare had caused her discomfort.
Morrison leaned over and asked her quietly, “You aren’t by any chance from Nambé Pueblo?”
“Of course not. I’m Polish, from Brooklyn.”
“You quite favor the Nambés, you know, your hair and your size,” he said.
“They live north of here?”
“Indeed. I’m a painter, my studio just down the street. If you had the time and the inclination, would you pose as a Nambé Indian for me?”
“Without clothes?”
“Yes.”
“No funny business?”
“No funny business, I assure. I could pay you well.”
“Okay, I’m almost broke.”
That was several summers ago, before Morrison hired Miss Harkness. The woman, named Milla, came afternoons to his studio to pose in the set-up he had arranged by the window. Sunlight streamed in by mid-afternoon and the fixated shapes in his daydream version merged with the real scene in front of him. He was transported to a woman’s chamber in the pueblo for several hours until the light changed.
In a creative passion, he painted canvas after canvas, each a variation on his theme and he scratched out numerous sketches of the scene. He now remembered the time fondly as a sensual feast, not so much of Milla herself but of the pueblo image that she stood for. She was a messenger, an icon to be valued for what she symbolized rather than what she was.
They took their breaks away from the easel in the deep green shade of the orchard. After initial awkward tries at conversation, they both came to an ease sitting in silence under the trees. In summer months that followed, the scent of fallen green apples brought it all back to Morrison.
By the end of August he had a dozen of the pictures finished and several in various stages of completion. Milla planned to leave in September and Morrison asked her to stay on for a while. He suspected at the time that this was his finest hour, that he would never paint this well again. She left, nonetheless. The combination of hand, heart and mind had fused to give him a group of magical paintings as none before.
When he started to display them in his gallery space, Morrison saw the paintings go one after another, usually sold soon after they were displayed. All the framed sketches sold in the first autumn. His interest moved along to other motifs, landscapes of the mountains nearby and gardens from his neighbors’ courtyards. These were subjects that took longer to sell and Morrison felt challenged to make them as attractive to buyers as he could, but they never matched the popularity of the maidens.
Miss Harkness dusted off the next to the last maiden. After centering the canvas on the easel at the window, she adjusted the spotlight to a small focus. Reaching just outside the front door to a pinon pine there, she pulled off a needled branch to adorn the top of the painting. She thought the twig gave emphasis to the archaic nature of the scene and added poignancy to its presentation. From her days in Philadelphia, she knew the importance of display. The pinon’s branches nearest the door were almost picked clean.
The snow outside had shifted from a fine white dust to large wet coins falling with deliberate slowness, sticking on every surface. By three in the afternoon darkness was winning and the few automobiles that drove by had their headlights on.
Morrison at his easel heard the bells, followed by voices in the gallery, but only Miss Harkness’s words were understandable behind the closed door. Sharp syllabic definition was one of her small vanities, but even then only part of the exchange was clear.
“ . . . such a canvas is a life-long (something) . . . both the Metropolitan and the Art Institute insisted that . . . (something) (something) . . . Impeccable taste. . . . The lovely skin tones as only an ethnic Tewa woman. . . .” And then a very long silence. The bells on the door indicated a hasty departure.
Morrison was sure that no sale had been consummated. He painted on, refining the stems and leaves of a large garden painting, a motif he reserved to keep his spirits up on gloomy winter days. He heard the bells on the door again.
Another visitor to the gallery could mean that Miss Harkness’ assessment might be right. This time he heard nothing of the conversation, and he lost interest in eavesdropping and returned to the details of a complicated umbel of yellow bloom.
He worked on for half an hour more and quite forgot the matters of commerce in the front room. Miss Harkness’s knock on his studio door startled him. How was it that she could knock so much louder than men?
“Come,” he said.
“Magnus, can you visit with some sweet people from Indiana, the Piersons? I’m sure you’ll want to meet them,” she said.
The term “sweet people” was their code word for “buyers,” usually very substantial buyers. In this way, Miss Harkness could interrupt Morrison in the studio by saying he must meet some sweet people from Portland or Houston and this meant they had already bought a painting. Buyers of smaller paintings were