WITHOUT SACRIFICE the world would be nothing. There are cardinal principles by which we grow, and we blend them together with the energy afforded us and the enthusiasm at our disposal for the result which is our life. These were the thoughts she was thinking while she was thinking, Where do I go from here? It seemed for the first time as if her direction were really important, for this time it was not learning, and not condoned, but truly her own. No one was watching and nothing was expected. It was simply her life, a life started in the era of rebellion and played that way to the full so that even she was embarrassed by its excess. Underneath, though, she knew she would come through, even if she felt lost and lonely, looking for a way to vent the passion she was afraid had vanished.
Her husband was a painter who painted her. In the latest painting she was standing in a white dress by a white marble fireplace. She could not imagine how he had managed that perfect and balanced fireplace, for in the Virginia countryside where they lived they had nothing like it. Both their families were Washington families, in government. Both had lived graceful lives and been trained with thorough severity in great halls. They were precise. He could produce a rejoinder which made an adversary feel like a fox flushed from a hole. He could shame his enemies, and she inspired impossible longing in most men who saw her, even in the paintings, which were painted with strength and ferocity. They were sure the world would take notice. It did not. They worried, for he was a fine painter and engraved his principles into his paintings in great depth.
He painted her in a white dress standing by a marble mantel of his memory; her face was beautiful and contained, framed by soft red hair and small eyebrows. She was clearly the wife of the painter. Even had she been only his model and his wife were somewhere else she would have gained the true title, for with the love he used to paint her he had effectively married. She was his wife, her every footstep to him something to love, a true love intent upon concert so specific and intense that it could be shown only in a painting of skillful black and defeating white amidst the red smile of his red-haired wife.
He painted her there with flowers, for flowers were something he could also paint. Her pleading was no success and he had allowed her to compete with flowers. She had looked at them during the painting. They changed, they died, but she looked at them throughout. They were flowers from the fields she was walking through, in the midst of an early summer which as setting for dreams is preserved in stormy winters and seasons of emptiness.
She walked slowly, for she was troubled. She did not know if she should believe in her husband the painter and all the flowing idealisms, all the times when he could not paint, the times when everything she held precious and passionate seemed to vanish. That was part of life, she guessed, and only guessed although she was young and part of life she was young enough not to know it too well.
They had wanted to go to a tropical place, perhaps Tahiti, or South America, or even to a non-tropical place like Japan. And then she was reading and had come across the quotation: “New skies the exile finds but the heart is still the same,” and said, “Let’s stay in Virginia, for in Virginia as everywhere else we can find fragments of what is good.”
Dammit, she thought, winding her way through incredible fields that only a writer would write about, the plague of my generation is the plague of all generations, is that we are searching for essences. She, the woman, the young woman of the painting, was now riding a wide-backed courageous horse in sight of a long row of trees, riding and deciding what she would do. Roads there were through this part of the country, dirt roads of brown like the leather of her boots. My husband the painter, his abandonment and the death in his painting, wild, colorful, risk, risk of a thousand men and the courage of a thousand—or the feminine sight of fields in early summer which I see, she thought, what is it—the horse cleared a stream by jumping—what is it, the torrent or the spread green?
A separation was not impossible. He was not a success, but she understood what he was doing enough to occasionally fill her full of love. They had expected a paradise, being from so rich a time. But he had given her great conflict and the burning which can be likened to a prairie fire in the sun. Was it this she wanted or something else? The irresponsible wild crazy burning or a tight set-in shattered life? The burning she would take, like the crashing of the sea against the shore, no craft to that, no skill, just what was artfully raw.
She crossed another stream and started to gallop home, home to a small house, to a husband who painted in falsetto, an intent madman afflicted with the beauty of color.
She spurred the horse across green plains and luxuriant powerful summer fields, summer fields of summer rain and a gray sky which told her that life was short and everything in the simple stroke of a painter's brush. Her husband was a painter. It was part of her choice. What else, she thought, is there in this sober life that makes us good?
She was committed to this man who traded all for essences and captured everything in color. She spurred her horse, over fields, across woods, in the mockingbird spring of Virginia, Virginia of a new world untried and untested like a young woman in white with garland of young hair. Virginia, to her from then on the symbol of courage, the symbol of bravery, the very center of her soul, the first essence she had ever got, true love for the painter.
Everything was a flat field of green bright in the sun, and she rode fast, devoted, decided. She was for him, all throughout. He painted and she loved him, loved him, loved him, as much as he loved her, for the gentle arching of her eyebrows and her mortality made him a man.