“I will.”
“Good. That’s the speech. Or sermon. Or whatever it is. I won’t tell you to go your
way and sin no more, I’ll just say ‘over to you.’”
Although he had filled in the OCCUPATION blank on his income tax return with the
words FREELANCE ARTIST for the last twelve years, Sifkitz did not think of
himself as a particularly imaginative man, and he hadn’t done a painting (or even a
drawing, really) just for himself since the year he graduated from DePaul. He did
book jackets, some movie posters, a lot of magazine illustrations, the occasional cover
for a trade-show brochure. He’d done one CD cover (for Slobberbone, a group he
particularly admired) but would never do another one, he said, because you couldn’t
see the detail in the finished product without a magnifying glass. That was as close as
he had ever come to what is called “artistic temperament.”
If asked to name his favorite piece of work, he likely would have looked blank. If
pressed, he might have said it was the painting of the young blond woman running
through the grass that he had done for Downy Fabric Softener, but even that would
have been a lie, something told just to make the question go away. In truth, he wasn’t
the kind of artist who had (or needed to have) favorites. It had been a long time since
he’d picked up a brush to paint anything other than what someone commissioned him
to paint, usually from a detailed ad agency memo or from a photograph (as had been
the case with the woman running through the grass, evidently overjoyed that she had
finally managed to beat static cling).
But, as surely as inspiration strikes the best of us—the Picassos, the Van Goghs, the
Salvador Dalís—so it must eventually strike the rest of us, if only once or twice in a
lifetime. Sifkitz took the crosstown bus home (he’d not owned a car since college),
and as he sat looking out the window (the medical report with its one line of red type
was folded into his back pocket), he found his eye again and again going to the
various work-crews and construction gangs the bus rolled past: guys in hardhats
tromping across a building site, some with buckets, some with boards balanced on
their shoulders; Con Ed guys half-in and half-out of manholes surrounded by yellow
tape stamped with the words WORK AREA; three guys erecting a scaffold in front of
a department store display window while a fourth talked on his cell phone.
Little by little he realized a picture was forming in his mind, one which demanded its
place in the world. When he was back to the SoHo loft that served as both his home
and his studio, he crossed to the littered nest beneath the skylight without even
bothering to pick the mail up off the floor. He dropped his jacket on top of it, as a matter of fact.
He paused only long enough to look at a number of blank canvases leaning in the
corner, and dismiss them. He took a piece of plain white pressboard instead, and set to
work with a charcoal pencil. The phone rang twice over the course of the next hour.
He let the answering machine pick up both times.
He worked at this picture off and on—but rather more on than off, especially as time
passed and he came to realize how good it was—over the next ten days, moving from
the pressboard to a piece of canvas that was four feet long and three feet high when it
seemed natural to do so. It was the biggest surface he’d worked on in over a decade.
The picture showed four men—workmen in jeans, poplin jackets, and big old
workboots—standing at the side of a country road which had just emerged from a
deep stand of forest (this he rendered in shades of dark green and streaks of gray,
working in a splashy, speedy, exuberant style). Two of the men had shovels; one had
a bucket in each hand; the fourth was in the process of pushing his cap back from his
forehead in a gesture that perfectly caught his end-of-the-day weariness and his