The Fruit Pickers

The man walking up the gravel drive looks to be in his fifties, sixties when nearer. Anton slides the bucket of cherries from the ladder’s top step. “You must be Tom,” he says, displaying a stained palm to turn away the one Tom offers. “Let’s go up to the house.”

It’s strange having Tom here. Unlike most of Nora’s other clients, Tom never sat for her in her studio. Instead, she was invited to his place in the south, summer after summer, for decades. Old school friends. Nora didn’t want Anton wasting his vacation days watching her paint, so he always remained behind. When Anton retired, she said he would be bored in the south and become a pest—which would probably have been true had he ever joined her. Still, her being away for two or three weeks nearly every summer made him uncomfortable.

Anton sets the red bucket of cherries into the kitchen’s deep sink. With Tom here, Anton notices that the sink could use a scour, the counter a wipe, the floor a dozen sweeps with the broom. “Coffee?” he asks.

“Only if you’re having some,” Tom says, removing his shoes in the entryway.

“Wasn’t planning to.”

“That’s fine.”

“This way, then,” Anton says, leading Tom to Nora’s studio and to the portrait the man has come to collect.

When Nora’s dementia took over last year, Anton put a lock on the studio door. She still managed to find paint. Artists always do. While he slept, she’d go off in her nightgown and paint the bark of trees. A neighbor mistook her for a ghost. Anton still comes upon spots of color on the pines in the woods. He’s wondered how she managed to make it so far and yet also find her way back. He’s also thought how much easier it would have been for both of them if she’d never returned, instead transforming into pure abstraction, like a flash of bright color.

Anton is telling Tom a version of this story as he unlocks the door—about the paint, turpentine, razors, and other dangers found in any artist’s studio.

“I’m sorry to have missed the memorial,” Tom says, following Anton inside.

Anton nods. He wasn’t good at advertising the service. Memories of the paltry turnout still pain him. All those empty pews. Still today he has to tell people that she passed, acquaintances and past clients who he senses feel slighted at being late to the news.

Nora’s studio is warm and bright. She craved southern exposure, not northern. Anton gestures to the large canvas on the sturdiest of the room’s easels.

“As I said on the phone, she didn’t have a chance to finish it,” Anton says.

Tom takes in the painting from a distance, then up close, then from a distance again as he draws alongside Anton. “I think it’s as complete as she meant it to be,” Tom says. “She always called me her never-ending project.”

The painting depicts two nude men; Tom is the one on the right. The figures stand without space between them, the other man’s chin resting on Tom’s half-painted shoulder. The work is both naturalistic and not, with faded colors and a heavy light that seems to shine through the canvas. It reminds Anton of the Møller reproduction that Nora hung in their bedroom, a depiction of tree trunks and broad leaves rendered in gold and ochre, conjuring the sun’s glare as it shines upon the viewer. Nora’s painting radiates that same quality, delivering a glimpse of a pair of sun gods.

“The other man?” Anton asks, for he’s wondered.

“Eric,” Tom says. “He’s in the van.”

“He could have come in.”

“He’s making his calls.”

Anton pulls off the reference photograph taped to a corner brace on the back of the canvas. Nora took the photo through a pane of glass, her reflection just visible, though she omitted herself from the near-finished painting. He hands the photo to Tom.

“She was generous to us both,” Tom says.

“Was she?”

Tom waves the photograph and Anton realizes what he means—she was generous in her omissions: a fold or two, a paunch, wrinkles.

“I’ll wrap the painting,” Anton says. “Give me ten minutes.”

Left alone in Nora’s studio, Anton cuts swathes of butcher paper. He sets a dozen tongues of tape against an easel leg that’s bare when he’s done packaging the canvas. He wraps bubble wrap around his work, then ties it with twine. He scores and cuts scrap cardboard to make caps which he fits loosely over the four corners and tapes in place. He’s done this hundreds of times for Nora’s other commissioned portraits, but never for a work so large, and never with this sacramental solemnity, his last favor to Nora and her art.

Anton carries the bundle into the kitchen. A stranger sits at the table. Eric, presumably. Anton sees that the cherries he picked have been washed and placed in the bowl Nora used for large salads when they had company. A smaller painted bowl that often held squares of chocolate now holds a single wet pit. Eric stands and introduces himself. He takes the wrapped painting Anton hands him, then pinches a pit from his lips and drops it into the smaller bowl.

“Where did Tom go?” Anton asks.

Eric points to the window. “Picking.”

Tom, on the ladder, is partly concealed in a cherry tree’s canopy. Had Tom posed here for Nora over the years, she might have once painted him as he appears now, half-seen rather than half-finished.

“I’ve been meaning to get out there for weeks, but with all the rain…”

“It’s been a wet summer,” Eric says.

As they put on their shoes in the entryway, Anton asks what Nora was like when she was down at Tom’s place.

“She was serious when she was painting,” Eric says. “You couldn’t talk to her.”

Anton nods, familiar with this Nora.

“But afterwards, in town, or out in the boat? What a hoot.” He laughs at a memory. “Was she different when she came back?”

Anton is unprepared for the question. The last time she returned from Tom’s, Anton was pollarding the trees down by the road. She paid the taxi driver. She did not see him wave. That night in bed, he nestled close to her and she turned to him. He could taste salt on her skin. If she was changed, she always hid it well, staunching her stories, downplaying the trips’ successes. The next morning was like any other morning—she to her studio, he back to work in the garden.

“I think it was good for her to get away,” Anton says, to be generous.

They walk down the drive to the cherry trees. Eric carries the wrapped painting.

Tom descends the ladder and offers Anton the red bucket, filled again with the almost black fruit. “Grab another bucket and put Eric to work. Our ferry doesn’t leave for hours.”

In the kitchen, Anton tumbles the cherries into the colander. He returns with two buckets and the kitchen stepping stool. Eric has lodged the wrapped painting between several branches to keep it off the wet grass.

As they pick fruit, Tom and Eric tell him about the surprise exhibit they held in their town’s main gallery that last summer Nora came down to paint. The show was called Narcissist and featured Nora’s then-seventeen portraits of Tom. Mirrors were hung in the spaces between each painting, but at an angle that prevented the viewer from seeing a reflection of their own face unless they practically went down on their knees. The mirrors had been Eric’s idea. Nora approved. They tell him about long summer evenings discussing art and literature and music. They tell him how Nora would go skinny dipping if painting wasn’t going well, to shed what she called her “knots.” They tell him about overnight getaways she never mentioned to him; about the week they tended to her when she came down with a terribly high fever; about Nora cutting Tom’s hair, and then Eric’s, and both of them having the damage repaired hours after she left—they can tell this story now that she is gone, Tom says. They tell him about the one visit when she sprained her ankle while dancing; he and Eric conveyed her about like a pair of palanquin bearers. Anton recalls Nora blaming a misstep onto a train station platform.

Anton appreciates the memories that Tom and Eric share, but what is he to do with stories of a Nora he doesn’t recognize? He pushes away the bitterness nipping at his thoughts and turns to the fruit, to the buckets that he empties again and again. Eric and Tom suggest Anton make preserves or cherry liquor from the fruit, not understanding that their labor is an added burden for Anton. He planned to only pick enough for himself, leaving the remainder to the birds. He understands that Tom, in picking the cherries, is trying to be helpful—not to him but to his memory or obligation to Nora. But that only makes Anton feel robbed of the nearly cumulative year of pure summer Nora spent down south.

Anton puts most of the cherries into plastic shopping bags and sends it off with Tom and Eric when they leave. He puts away the ladder and wipes dirt and grass from the feet of the stepping stool, then rinses the buckets and sets them upside down to dry outside.

Anton wishes he hadn’t called Tom about the painting but had kept it as a reminder of Nora’s unfinished view of the world. Also to deprive Tom of one last glimpse of himself through Nora’s eyes. Anton has Nora’s sketchbooks and studies going back decades, but her only remaining paintings in the house are portraits she made of the two of them. He looks deeply satisfied in his, but that’s not how life was. The portraits make him feel he has forgotten a past filled with contentment. Nora stares from her self-portraits with penetrating concentration—an artist’s necessary gaze. He took the paintings down after Nora died, wrapping each in the usual manner and storing them in the cellar.

Anton sits at the kitchen table and begins eating cherries, pulling out the stems between his lips, nibbling the flesh around the pits. The cold summer has left the fruit tart, but he finds a sweet one. Maybe it grew higher in the tree, grabbing a bit more sunlight and warmth. He doesn’t find another.

He considers the Nora who visited Tom and brings her here. He pictures her setting a cup of tea down at his elbow, kneading his sore shoulders, dancing with him in the kitchen, pulling him into the bedroom by the tips of his fingers—comforts that occurred so rarely that Anton feels ill pretending they were commonplace. He appreciated the demands of art, but not as something to give nearly one’s entire life to. If Nora could return for an hour, would she say that all the time and energy she gave her painting was worth it? It’s a question her days minced so finely that the question wasn’t even visible. Anton senses that she would make him feel like he didn’t understand, leaving him locked out, never bohemian enough for her. He couldn’t tell Tom that the lock on the studio door has always been there.

Theirs had been a practical marriage. In the beginning, she had mistaken his raw gruffness for strength and independence. He represented a foundation that permitted her to devote herself fully to her art without giving up the cloak of domesticity she’d come from, that he represented, that surrounded her for all but a few weeks every summer. And when she no longer needed him in this way, or recognized her mischaracterization of him, she kept that to herself and pretended that they understood one another. He had never seen her cry.

When the little painted bowl is filled with pits, Anton rises from the kitchen table and empties it, then places the bowl in the sink. From the kitchen window, the fruit trees look simpler, lighter, their branches less burdened in their now-purposeless season. A state to aspire to, he thinks. There’s a pale square of color on the trunk of one cherry tree that looks like paint in the fading light, but Anton knows it’s only lichen. Rain begins to fall, drumming on the empty, upturned buckets outside that won’t be dry now until tomorrow. He listens to the drumming, then goes out into the rain and brings them in, towels them dry, stows them under the sink for whatever their next purpose might be.