Читать книгу Cumberland - Megan Gannon - Страница 13

Six

Izzy’s temperature is down to 100˚ so I give her two more aspirin then wander town for a few hours, hoping I’ll run into Everett. When I finally walk back into the house that evening the first thing I hear is Izzy crying. I bolt upstairs and through the door to where she’s bent close over the heavy art book, her tears raising measles on the slick paper. She looks up at me and heaves, the book so heavy it hits the floor beside her bed with a ceiling-rattling shake. Then Grand is calling up the stairs and Izzy’s screaming and scribbling on her notepad, tearing pieces off and handing me bits of sentences.

Hiding this from me

You have been telling didn’t tell me

All of this for how long years

And years all these long gone dead

They knew how to see beneath

surfaces I thought only I knew

Have to see everything have to now

So far behind hurry hurry

She lets out little shrieks as she writes, and all I can do is take the scraps of paper, watching the snot running into her mouth as she rips and keeps writing, gauzy hair standing out from her scalp, the walls all around us retracting. The book will hardly shut when I pick it up for all the bent and twisted pages, and Izzy holds her hands out so hungrily I shove it at her then take a few steps back.

She flips to a page and jabs her finger at a painting and flips again so fast the pages tear. “This painting, Izzy?” She nods and flips again, jabbing a finger and flipping before I can see and pointing, flipping, pointing, riffling through the pages like she’s lost something and then she wraps her arms around the book, hefts it to her chest and rocks. I sit on the edge of her bed and put my arms around her but she pushes me away, then shoves the book off her lap until it crashes to the floor. The house shudders and when I put my arms around her again she’s limp in my arms for a second, then starts pinching and scratching and shrieking. “Izzy, calm down—you’ll make yourself sick,” I say, grabbing her hands and holding her tight until the fight goes out of her and she sags against me. Her hands drop in worn-out heaps and she sobs into my shoulder.

“What on earth is all this racket about?” Grand is in the doorway, her eyes blazing.

“It’s okay, Grand—I’ve got it.” She stands there for a minute as I’m rocking Izzy then flashes me a disgusted look and slams the door to our bedroom. “Izzy, show me again,” I say, when she settles into sniffling and deep shuddering breaths. “Can you show me again?”

She sits up and I set the book back in her lap. She wipes her eyes with flat palms, turns through the pages and points at bright lines of ocean-tumble swirling color. “Van Gogh,” I say. “Okay, what else.” Taking little hiccupping gasps, she flips a few pages deeper into the book and points to more neon noxious color and little light dabbles. “Derain. Got it.”

She reaches for her notepad and carefully prints, And all the other wild beasts.

“Like who?” She turns the page and jabs her finger at magenta old lady wallpaper and a turquoise window escape. “Matisse.” She nods. She keeps flipping and points to Picasso, Braque, Dali, Chagall, then shuts the book and looks at me. “All right, Izzy.” I run my hands down her arms. “I’ll get everything I can.”

I’m thinking she’ll smile at me now, but Izzy fixes me with a hard stare like she’s trying to bore some sentence into my skull. I wait, and listen, but nothing comes, and Izzy’s mouth twists into a grimace. Holding the notepad out to me like a police badge, she’s written, You get everything.

“Okay, Izzy, I’ll do what I can.” She shakes her head and shrugs my hands away and suddenly she’s still. She’s looking at me so dead center I think she might bite. You get me everything—you owe me all of it.

I stare at the words you owe me, you owe me all of it as Izzy’s eyes bore into me. All my days of wandering downtown, breathing sunlight in through the pores of my skin and running, swimming, wandering as far as my legs will carry me, days when I walk and walk against the worry of Izzy’s fever climbing higher and higher, stretching the tether between us so thin my chest feels tight with the constriction, all these days rise like an oily bubble beneath my ribs, bob up and lodge in my throat, and I turn, run, pound downstairs and out the door, outside.

All I can think is keep going farther, past the hotel, farther, until there’s a hidden beach I hardly ever go to, my legs rubbery as I pick down the cliff between sharp rocks to the wide sand. I take off my shirt and shorts and run in, swimming then beating against the water until I’m so far out everything is silent and I can just float, the ocean holding me up so steadily I hardly even feel I have a body.

Sky and black water surround me and my ears fill with rocking waves, with night the color of a hole I can drop down into, and none of it, nothing is with me. I let the dark erase me, push my mind over maps and pictures of far-off places. I’m hovering above the narrow walled streets of some Moorish city but somewhere distantly Izzy’s shrieking so I push further into the dark, the old stone permeated with smoke rising off of lit embers, the clank clank of a metal smith echoing between women swaying past in long caftans. Like the eye of the filmstrip I watched in World Cultures class, I swoop down in between the women and brush past bolted doors where the sounds of children bounce around like voices down a well and I round a corner and swoop up again. Up above the stacks of square, whitewashed houses, then down to the cobblestones: smoke, clank clank, language I can’t speak.

It’s cold and I can’t tell where the sky begins and the water ends. My eyelids, my whole body is heavy so I kick back towards shore, working against my loose limbs. I slog a little ways up the sand then drop and roll over, the moon icing my goose-bumped skin, erasing my brain like a blind eye.

Only fitting she should bring this book on the day she’s first riotous inside. Flipping through the different artists’ movements, classicism and realism—why always this obsession with what can be touched and measured, all this silliness of breasts and beauty and brawn. How they delight in surfaces—the whisk of fabric, the gloss of bodies—but never the misty swirlings of the inner eye. Something here that implies feeling in Cassatt’s little whale-white belly of a daughter, mother spreading her chubbed toes to water in the white-bellied bowl. The silent workings between them, a something that can’t be seen. And here, what they called fauvism, vision the eyes alone can’t see, sight of deepest speaking, color for a true mood. She wasn’t even hang-head or blowing over how she’s been keeping all these paintings from me, never telling, never teaching me, she never told me—what her whole body can’t know, only I. Cubism, how the seams and turnings in a person, the many seen and hidden versions, overlap—yes, they know, they can see beyond the bodies, these painters. How long ago—fifty, a hundred—I am a hundred years behind.