Thin Ice

Loyal collectors believed that Russell Kern was due for a revival. His dealer had kept faith; the right curators showed interest. But this was still the bad year that dear friends whispered about, the year Kern lost his wife in a car wreck, discharged a load of bird shot into a threatening shadow, burned a pile of drawings, unplugged the fax, and let his beard grow in a ragged, grey nimbus which was the first thing locals recalled about him—the silent fellow from down the road who forgot to leave his summer place when the leaves fell.

In truth, it hardly mattered where the painter resided that winter. Kern moved in the globe of his own despair, his sole detour to the Blue Moon Tavern—a swaybacked hall whose neon beer signs winked across an arm of the frozen lake. With trees bare, he could see the tavern from his hilltop studio. He was drawn there whenever the sun set—as much a fixture as the ripped vinyl stools and the pool table.

Most nights, a TV newsman mouthed silently in his box above the bar: a specter to counter the specters that the painter conjured at home. Kern needed such distractions. He needed them as much as he needed a drink, for in the months since sending his wife on her final errand—in the months since her car rolled, struck broadside at a rural crossing by a van full of bow hunters—in all that time, Merrill had clung to him, more now than in life. On that last day, he hadn’t bothered with farewells. He hadn’t turned from the canvas. Now he found Merrill everywhere: in the aria still cued on her CD player, in the blond strand he frantically brushed from his jacket, in the scent of her hand-milled French soap, accidentally pulled from a cluttered shelf, bathing him in the foulest regrets.

If Merrill never spoke, that only confirmed her presence, for she had always been quiet—cowed might be the better word—listening to Kern’s many theories, to all those views that now seemed as pointless as painting. Just a few months ago, he would have shared his opinions about the night’s news—and the newsman’s haircut; would have bitched about the bar room smoke and the stale beer smell of the carpet; would have tuned out the bartender’s Army stories and his chatter about the winter’s interminable length. But Kern kept things simple these days.

“Self-medicating,” he said, addressing the bartender. Kern repeated it nightly—the drink and the phrase—for he preferred the ritual to the beverage, sought the weight of the shot glass clasped in his bony fingers, and always returned the gaze of the barman, a blubbery Swede who crossed his arms and waited while his patient took a first sip.

“That’ll fix you, huh?”

Kern nodded and that was all, safely seated amid beeping poker machines and the bluster of pulp cutters and small-town mechanics. Left to himself, he studied the mirrored bar back as though it were another unresolved canvas. Why didn’t the welder notice when his wife squeezed another man’s arm? Who was the girl in the fake rabbit coat who ran to the bathroom in tears?

Kern looked at everyone: the drunks and big talkers, the women who frowned and those who displayed silver fillings whenever they laughed. Silent as bears, the Peterson twins padded around the pool table, calling shots by pointing their cues. A weasel-faced boy with acne scars jostled past an elderly birder, but the old man never spilled a drop, maintaining a posture as ramrod as the binoculars at his elbow. “Don’t let the door hit your ass,” he said. Beside him, three helmets held stools for downstate strangers—snowmobilers who had promptly hoofed to the jukebox in wet boots and coveralls.

After one such evening, after last call and a zigzag walk through the snow, Kern acted like any wounded animal. He slept through the March night in his paint-spattered studio chair, never stirring to note the dust that settled over him, the drool on his chin, the steady tick of the antique clock that had restarted without Merrill’s hand to wind it. Inured to all things mysterious—except sleep’s mysteries—Kern was spared the heart-thumping visits that so often woke him: the dreamy weight of Merrill’s warmth rolling against him in bed, the imagined creak of the hallway’s plank floor as she paused at the studio door.