The Burnt Orange Heresy

I nodded. "Yes. A short book entitled Art and the Preschool Child, and I'll mail you a copy. It explains, in part, why men who are psychologically suited to becoming painters turn out so much bad art. It isn't a theory though, it's a fact. A neglected point that I made is that such people are not lost to the world as artists. If their problem is recognized, they can be rechanneled into other artistic activities that do not call for great manual dexterity."

"Like what?" Debierue appeared to be genuinely interested.

"Writing poetry, composing electronic music. Or even architecture. The late Addison Mizner, who couldn't draw a straight line in the sand with a pointed stick, became an important South Florida architect. His buildings in Palm Beach-those that remain-are beautifully designed, and his influence on other Florida architecture has been considerable, especially here on the east coast."

I stopped before I got wound up. Debierue was pulling on me-on me!-one of the oldest tricks not in the book, and here I was, falling for it, just like the rawest of cub reporters. It is a simple matter for the person who is wise with the experience of being interviewed to learn the interests of the interviewer. Then, all he has to do is to keep feeding questions to the interviewer and the interviewer will end up with an interview of himself! Naively happy with a long and pleasant conversation, the interviewer will leave the subject in a blithe mood, only to learn later, when he sits chagrined at his typewriter, that he has nothing to write about.

The toilet flushed. Debierue waited politely for me to continue, but I swirled the juice in my glass, sipped the rest of it slowly until Berenice rejoined us, and then excused myself on the pretense that I also had to use the facility.

I still carried my camera, of course, and I quickly opened the door on the left of the hall, across from the padlocked door. I closed it softly behind me and took the room in rapidly. If one of Debierue's paintings was on the wall, I was going to take a picture of it. But there was only one painting on the wall, a dime-store print in a cheap black frame of Trail's End-the ancient Indian sitting on his wornout horse. In the 1930s almost every lower middle class home in America contained a print of Trail's End, but I hadn't expected to find one in Debierue's bedroom. Either Cassidy, in his meanness, had hung it on the wall, or it had been left there by the owner of the house. But I still couldn't fathom how Debierue could tolerate the corny picture, unless, perhaps, he was amused by the ironic idea behind the print. Of course, that was probably the reason.

The bedroom was austere. A Hollywood single bed, made up with apple-green sheets-and no bedspread-an unpainted pine highboy, a wrought-iron bedside table with a slab of white tile for a top, and a red plastic Charles Eames chair beside the bed made up the inventory. There was a ceiling light, but no lamp. Debierue was a nihilist and stoic in his everyday life as well as in his art, but I felt a wave of sympathy for the painter all the same. It was a shame, I felt, that this great man had so few creature comforts in his old age. There was no need for me to slide open the closet door, or to search the drawers of the highboy and paw through his clothing.

I took a nervous leak in the bathroom, and turned on the tap to wash my hands in the washbowl. I opened the mirrored cabinet to see what kind of medicines he kept there. If he had any diseases, or an illness of some kind, the medicines he used would furnish a valid clue, and that might be worth writing about. Except for Elixophyllin-KI (an expectorant that eases the ability to breathe for persons with asthma, emphysema, and bronchitis) and three bars of Emulave (a kind of "soapless" soap, or cleansing bar for people with very dry skin-and I had noted the dryness of the painter's hands already), there was nothing out of the ordinary in the cabinet. A pearl-handled straight razor, a cup with shaving soap and brush, a bottle of blue green Scope, a half-used tube of Stripe toothpaste, a green plastic Dr. West toothbrush, a 100-tablet bottle of Bayer aspirin, with the cotton gone, and that was it. There wasn't even a comb, although Debierue, with a bald head as slick as a peeled almond, didn't need a comb. As bathroom medicine chests in America go, this was the barest cabinet-outside of a rented motel room-I had ever seen.

I returned to the living room in time to hear Berenice say, "Don't you get lonely, Mr. Debierue, living way out here all alone?"

He smiled, patted her hand, and shook his head.

"It's the nature of the artist to be lonely," I answered for him. "But the painter has his work to do, which is ample compensation."

"I know," Berenice said, "but this place is a million miles from nowhere. You ought to get a car, Mr. Debierue. Then you could drive over to Dania for jai-alai at night or something."