Читать книгу All the Days And Nights - Niven Govinden - Страница 6

WHERE WERE YOU when the sky collapsed; rain falling in pinched sheets, but constant, and the mist descending as if gravity was its master, until it settled on the front step and the path? Was the sky in collusion? Had you conspired with the elements to stay hidden from me; not satisfied with withholding so much of yourself, now your physical body had to be hidden too? Your intentions have brought the mist. You have unsettled nature. The swallows nesting above the window fret over what is to come. They scratch the roofing felt with urgency and speak their fear with a caw that rises from the pull of their guts. How instinctive their talk is, how deeply felt. The cassette spool from the answering machine in the hall hums and burrs more audibly than before, making me think of a hornets’ nest under the bed; each creature whirled into a fury and ready to break out. Everything is angry. But what signal is ours? What cry or call will reach you, muffled by cloud, lost in the mist? The dank has whitewashed the landscape, reducing you to a wisp, a dot in the meadow. Is this where I have driven you: into the chill of first light, to be soaked to the skin, slipping on the edge of the path as gravel gives way to mud as you walk toward town and the store that is not yet open, but the rail station that is, and the incoming train that will take you away from me, if you have decided that this is the day? There will be nothing in your pockets bar the silver-edged comb that belonged to your father and your frayed notebook, wedged in the back and struggling to be held. There will be no metallic clink as you walk, keys left behind and no money to speak of, but if you have decided, woken from the bed on the other side of this wall and filled with the determination you’ve previously threatened, you will find a way to be on that train, through charm, or theft, or an attempt at forced entry. Reviving the same hobo spirit that brought you here. If this is the day.

But it isn’t, is it? I know you too well to be crippled by surprise. You forget how I hear your footsteps as you creep down the stairs. Even in your stealth I can read you; the difference between the tiptoe to the doorway of the outbuilding where you punch your frustrations into the hay bales stored there; the steps that lead to the liquor cupboard in the middle of the night, when you believe that I am asleep, and not numbed enough to follow. A man, seventy years old, with the furtive steps of a teenager. Then those that take you to the bottom of the path, where you stand in your shirt and jeans, the same as when you arrived, hesitating at the gate before turning back. Innumerable times I’ve seen you at the gate, a shadow filling the cleft in your chin, the rising motion as your face twists southward to take in the house, deciding whether you have had enough of it. When you no longer lift your head, when there is no pause, fingers not drumming on the latch, where the echo of flesh pounding metal falls flat against the window and culls the ringing in my ears, I’ll know. Until then, we’ll carry on as before, in our spurts of comfort and unease. You will continue to sit and I will continue to paint you, because that, John, is why you are here.

VISHNI BURNS THE COFFEE. She is distracted by the thickness of the rain and the absence of you. Usually she would wake to find the fire in the kitchen lit, the stove light on, possibly some voices in heated argument on the radio; whether Carter can hold his own against Reagan; new anger for a new decade; one of the few things from the outside world that interests you. She expects these things and today they are not there, disturbing her in a way she had not anticipated. She stands in the darkness of a barely broken morning for several minutes, wondering if there was a note mentioning a business trip she had forgotten, or whether she had paid scant attention to the clock before leaving her room. She wrings the excess bathwater that has soaked her plaited hair into the sink before re-coiling it into a bun, all the time, thinking. An epoch of wondering passes until I hear the rip of the light cord as the rise and fall is pulled. You never sleep late, nor leave the house without some kind of welcome for her. She is undecided whether to march or creep up the stairs and so manages a little of both. The door of your bedroom is opened in the same confused manner and then closed again within seconds, the final crack of the handle pulled hard against the door frame and ringing through the hall. This is Vishni all over: covert but ultimately clumsy. Bureau drawers not entirely closed and overdue bills stuffed roughly back into envelopes are typical of her handiwork. There is nothing to see there: the bed will be made, the curtains drawn. If I had the voice I could save her the futility. At our ages, we think of economy in all things. She is breathless with exertion, her heavy lungs punishing her for this impulsiveness. As she stands outside my room, more hesitant than before, her wheezy rasp seeps through the gap under the door. She knows it is unlikely that you will be here but wishes to be thorough. The door handle rattles with her uncertainty, to wake me with a knock or ease the door open to spy on someone who despises being watched, who has made a career of being invisible.

– What is it?

– I was looking for John, Anna.

– I sent him to the store. We ran out of one of the oils last night. Had to finish early because of it.

Lightness appears in Vishni’s voice – relief – betraying that she too shared the same thoughts.

– Let me get the fire going. I’ll have breakfast ready for when he returns.

She is only here for you; enjoys your company and pandering to your needs. Coffee is served how you like it, breakfast and other meals to your whims. It’s why we often eat like children: franks and beans, macaroni with everything. On those mornings when your presence at the table is shortened because of the need for firewood or household repair, the tone is quite different. The radio is mostly switched off. She will not sit and watch me eat. No teasing passes between us. The offer of second helpings when the plate is clean is only made the once, both of us understanding that mothering cannot be applied here. We are left as two women thinking about their respective work, aware of the other’s presence, but still in our separate spheres.

When you first moved here, I warned you of my need for silence and space. You warned me of your need to eat something that was not raw or burnt. Vishni has been here almost as long as you, following barely a month after your arrival. See how quickly I acted for you back then! Your every intelligent suggestion was my command. I wonder if you even remember the nights I spent away from my work to call people I knew in the town asking for recommendations; people who were alarmed at hearing my voice at the end of the receiver, having been aware of my long-standing reticence toward the telephone, and believing that I would only be calling in a case of dire emergency. But then they remembered that you had arrived and their panic, if not irritation, softened to indulgence and finally warmth. If I pressed you on this now I am certain you would not even recall it, so taken were you with the meadow and the scattering of macadamia trees that flanked the drive. Out of New York for the first time in your life, you were full of wonder and mischief; running back and forth the length of the meadow with one of the yard dogs from the neighboring farm, each trying to exhaust the other, pulling yourself up the first trees you had ever climbed that were not in Central Park and swimming the river that divided the house from the village, not minding the rain or mud, nor the stones on the river bank and bed that bruised and cut your feet.

– I’m looking for work. Anything you have.

– Can you build a fence? Knock down a wall?

– I’ve little experience, but I can try. I’m strong and can work hard. Been asking at the other farms, but they’re having the same problems as those I left behind in the city. All of us, scrabbling around like mice.

The bulk of my work, what they will remember, sprang from those words. You; sitting on the veranda steps while I fetched you some water, returning to see how the light treated your face; how everything changed during that minute I was in the house.

On those first afternoons I sketched you, you were restless, wanting to be anywhere but indoors. Instructed to keep your eyes forward, you constantly deviated, looking past the window to the garden table where Vishni had promised you that she would serve all meals. Those twin pulls have never changed: someone to put home-cooked food in your belly and the need to feel your feet in the grass. This is why I know you can never leave, not entirely. Something will always bring you back. Inside and out, you have made roots here; from pushing your fingers deep into the earth when you thought no one was looking, as if the feel of soil between your hands and under your nails made it real; and from your face being in the paintings. Whether you are aware of this or not, you have created invisible roots capable of dragging back the unwilling. Once they are unfurled they will recoil. In the meantime I have my work to keep me occupied and the smell of Vishni’s coffee burning on the hot plate to jolt me when my attention slips.

WE ARE HUSBAND and wife. Some run a shop or diner together. This is ours.

You once said that the darkness of the studio was my comforter, having watched my first minutes or so there each morning, when I seem wrapped up in its closeness before rolling back the shutters from the skylight.

– It’s like the dark is some kind of magnet. Pulling away all the shit that’s amassed since you were last here. Everything about you is different. Another person.

In those days you were referring to a myriad of things. Attention, wanted and unwanted; the demands that often pulled us away from work. Now our problems are more localized, to do with ageing bodies and various worries about the condition of the house. We have both had recent spells in hospital, which each will not talk to the other about; the magnet’s main area of concern. You were amazed that I could cut off mid-sentence as soon as I reached the studio door; how my face would change, the hold it had on me. It is true that the moment often feels like a shrug, something similar to walking through disinfectant before diving into a municipal pool, or the long, measured exhalation of a yogi’s asana. I need this ritual in order to feel ready; precious seconds to right wrongs and clear my mind. The day ahead feels unbalanced if I do not begin by walking into black.

Vishni’s sixes and sevens have rubbed off on me. I stand in darkness for longer than I should, imagining the lump of rags on the floor to be your prostrate frame, twisted into the shapes I long made you hold. I have often started the day without you being in the studio. This part is normal; a series of corrections and progressions that can be made without the model present. There may have been many periods of days, months even, when I wished for it to be more that way; when the sound of your voice riled me, or simply the sound of mine. If only then I had the ingenuity, the confidence to believe that working alone from a mere set of photographs rather than using a sitter, could reveal a truth. But I needed you. If you were not here to start, at my request or otherwise, you were always nearby: somewhere in the house or on the land. At your most petulant you still responded to my call when it came. You had various stages of wonder and resentment of the process, sometimes hating it to the point where you were ready to happily destroy the paintings, but still you came when I called. Your claim to this room, where you have stood every day for the past fifty years, is greater than mine. I gave my eyes, but you readily gave up your soul. And again. And again.

You are coming back. I know it. You are probably minutes away. The work can continue. Vishni’s fears shall be allayed. But still I stand at the door, unable to move closer to the painting. Do you remember how I told you about the house I was raised in, how there were crucifixes in every room, but that the largest one was above my parents’ bed; terrifying in its expansive iron cast, the face writhed in pain so lifelike, the gaze itself inexplicably direct, that as children we were unable to go past that room without breaking into a run, so determined were we not to look at it. Without realizing it, we trained ourselves to look downward whenever we were in that part of the house, because to catch even the briefest glimpse of His tortured face frozen in acceptance would be to turn to stone. Many summer days were cast over for one or other of us by making that mistake. It was only later that I understood what my mother must have gone through, having to make love and give birth on that bed with a grotesque Christ hanging over her. This wasn’t an icon of a loving God, but something else entirely: a wedding present from my paternal grandmother who disapproved of the marriage. And slowly something from that face seeped into our general behavior. We still ran around and played like other children with our mischievous, secretive ways, but in the house, at table and before our parents, we were mostly quiet, our heads often bowed. My father put this down to God-fearing, from his teaching and that of others, and was pleased. It was once I had left home, that I retrained myself how to see, how not to be afraid to look at the face of anything, that the act of looking propelled me like no other. And when he saw my first paintings exhibited he understood that it was not God that I was ever fearful of, merely the propaganda that dictated the Art around Him. He could not bring himself to comment, or even come close to me, only to seek out the gallery owner and shake her hand before leaving. That was the last of my work he looked at. He never saw my paintings of you. I haven’t thought of my father in a long time, but seeing the easel now shrouded in half-light, the back of the canvas facing me, I am reminded of him and of the crucifixes. How I cannot bring myself to look at the painting as it was left yesterday. Essentially, it will appear no different than it was the day before, but I will start looking for cracks, a gesture in your eyes or hands I might have unwittingly captured that explains where you might be. Was the river in your eyes? The beach? What was it I missed that now prevents the painting being real? What have I been looking at, if not you?

And it is that fear above all others which keeps me from the easel: that I have seen something with false eyes, added something that was never part of you. I have left work unfinished before. All around this room are canvases of ideas that have not worked, missteps that cannot be repaired. Everything starts with past failures in mind. It is one of the cornerstones I work from. For those paintings that navigate beyond that, the finish point is to be satisfied that I have done everything I could and no more. For the moment, I cannot decide where this current work sits. Your absence makes the decision ominous. All I can do is take the blanket from the floor, where you were sitting last night, and throw it over the easel, at last shrouding your face and neck. Only your hands are visible, crossed in your lap, your index fingers pointing outward as if in the direction of what went wrong.

I AM LYING ON the daybed when Vishni appears for a second time. She came earlier, tense in her posture; the oxygen tank pulled closely behind her frame, as if I could not hear the creak of the trolley that carried it. The clumsiness made me angry and I sent her away before I could taste what was actually needed: slow inhalations of sweet gas to give me strength and clear my mind. They say I should use it as often as needed. I ration that advice and its practice; hateful of both. Sleep will not come, neither work, but by now I have opened the skylight and placed a sketchbook on the small table next to me, knowing that pencil can be more comforting than paint. Even without you the day must end with progress being made. Vishni’s face is dappled by patches of light breaking through the cloud; something from both this and the coyness of her gaze make her appear ten years younger. It makes me think about one of the pictures, labored over beneath this skylight, now hanging in one of the ambassadorial residences: Helsinki or Buenos Aires. At this age, not every work I remember, and this rarely troubles me. Lists and chronology are best left to collectors and other documentarians. When I do remember, especially if the work was good, it is mostly worthwhile. I think of the sweat, the processes and the mistakes. The fear of not knowing what I was doing, of falling into an abyss of banal movement, can be looked upon with fondness. In those days I was always so quick to be angry with myself. Nowadays I still hold myself to task, but I have learned to be more forgiving. These are not the hands or eyes of a twenty-year-old, or forty-year-old. I have learned to work with what I have. Vishni’s posture is similar to now, bent forward and conspiratorial, momentarily glancing backwards at the door, wary of being overheard.

– Who’s here?

– Ben. He said not to disturb you if you were busy. He’s on the porch, reading the newspaper.

– But why is he here? He usually calls beforehand. I didn’t hear the telephone.

– You asked me to disconnect the phone last week. The hospital chasing the appointment you missed.

– Tell him I’m working. I can’t see him now. Ask him to stay and have lunch with John. They always find things to talk about.

– He’s not back yet.

– He’s not back? Can you give Ben some lunch anyhow? He’s more likely to leave once his belly’s full.

For a moment you had become one of the old paintings: your absence forgotten. And then to suddenly remember, like the shock of waking from a sudden sleep; chest beating with guilt. Vishni will not be fooled for long. Her face is studious as I recover myself, processing every gesture. She has learned too many of my tricks. Alone, I open the sketchbook and shape some lines from memory. You, leaning over the fence toward the meadow, pondering a comment you made to which your walking companion, Ben, is laughing heartily. I have always admired that about you: your ability to make strangers feel welcome, not just to do with hospitality, but with ease. You are always comfortable, unshaken, willing to be open with everyone. I remember how you charmed and subsequently became brotherly with those stubborn farmers who refused to sell us firewood because of how we were dressed, and also disarming the ladies who gossiped at the store. They are still untrusting of me on my rare trips to town, my demeanor varying from hesitant to brusque in my inability to make even a chink in their stony faces, but you they have time for. You have become like family, celebrating the birth of their children, their marriages, and paying your respects at the burial of their dead. My friends from the city too, when entertaining here was as important as work, all initially suspicious, waiting for you to trip yourself up with your story, until they realized that they loved you more.

That afternoon with Ben was languid; the midsummer heat imbued you both with uncharacteristic sloth while I carried on working at the back of the house. Your masculine laziness was a wonderful thing to see: burnished, and in Ben’s case sunburnt, limbs stretched over chair arms and the edge of the kitchen table once lunch had been cleared. You drank beer with lemonade and read each other the oddest classifieds you came across in month-old editions of the New York Times, which Vishni saved to wrap up food for the trash. Patti Labelle and the Bluebelles were playing on a low volume, Ben joining in on ‘I Sold My Heart to the Junkman’ because, as he kept telling you, a girl had once sung it into his ear as they made love. You played dominos and waited for me. Boyish laughter rang through the house making me want to leave my work and join you. The piece I was working on was somehow dead in my hands in the face of so much life outside my door. You and Vishni often laughed together, giving the front of the house a lightness the back lacked. But there was something different, more vital in this chorus of masculine joking. It pounded deep inside my head and groin, intense and pleasurable.

I was reminded of being a teenager in Jersey Heights and sitting on the promenade railings with groups of boys, pulsing with the joy that comes from seeking attention but also fearing its strength when it finally came. However much I wanted to crash your boys’ party, though I was aware that you were both waiting on me – that the shape of the day was dictated by my needs and working patterns, and how powerful that made me feel, made overt by a thumping in my chest – I could not intrude on your intimacy. You had the closeness of siblings, the way you shared the pitcher of spiked lemonade and bickered over whose turn it was to get up and flip the record. You talked about everything but me; the World Series, whether a horse can belch, the women in Hawaii. Paintings were the business of both of you and these were never mentioned. It was an unspoken rule between you. Outside the studio we all talked about other things. There were too many other things to talk about. A mixture of longing and envy kept me going through the day. Also, stubbornness, because I didn’t want either of you to think I was cutting my day short on your account. You were young men with egos. You would have dined off it for weeks. When I finally had done all I could, on a painting that was going nowhere and shortly after abandoned, I joined you. I planned on playing the martyr for your simple amusement, and to prove to myself that I had not been forgotten. Dinner was close to being served but you were nowhere near the table, instead fooling around at the paddock. By now the pair of you were softly drunk, taking it in turns to feed vegetables to the donkey you had recently rescued from one of the farms, where his age deemed him ready to be made into animal feed or glue. The wonder of this as yet unnamed pet illuminated your face. Ben’s too. You were as timid as children as you patted him and stroked his face. Other men, similarly inebriated, would have taken it in turns to ride him or some other juvenile cruelty. But you were both cowed by its docile nature and the depth of feeling that seemed to emanate from its lowered eyes. The beast, still wary but sated, moved his head away from the carrots, radishes and celery after a time, preferring instead to nuzzle your fingers. As you turned with delight to share this with Ben, the light hit the side of your face and your neck. You were bronzed and smooth, flaxen and happy; it was as if the last days of young manhood were making themselves known. I was blinded by the beauty of it, from the way you smiled to the trail of mosquito bites on your lower arm and the redness of your lips from all the beer. Ben was boyishly loud in his exclamations, vital and alive. I wanted to shout at you both to hold your pose because something from that moment needed to be kept. You were perfect. But I held my voice, because to explain it would be to kill your naturalness. You did not need to be made aware of how the sun had blessed that seemingly random moment and made it golden. Maybe you were both aware that something special had occurred, that had nothing to do with light or Art, but only with friendship. My visions of your impending age were not to be shared; wishing for crow’s feet to form and a coarseness in your hair’s texture to emerge so that I would have more to work with; that in my impatience for your youth to fade I was willing your decay. It was left to Vishni, whose voice carried overhead, calling us to the table while berating the boys for feeding the vermin what had been set aside for the salad.

THOUGH BEN AND I spoke regularly, we had not seen each other for over three years. I was not ready to hold another show and he had other artists to attend. The Thanksgiving parties we held at the house were a thing of the past, and neither you nor I were particularly keen to spend the summer roasting in his clapboard house in Provincetown. Your remark after one of Ben’s many invitations arrived (Independence Day gathering, Memorial Day gathering; an endless list) never left me.

– Beach parties hold nothing for you. Me neither. I can’t see you wearing funny hats and sipping on Rob Roys with sand up your ass. The fire will be the only thing that keeps you there; how it moves and what it shares.

You could be overly protective then, taking pains to avoid those social events where I might be expected to sing for my supper. Ben’s entertaining never quite fell into that category, but his address book was a varied one and even in the most informal setting, an expectation to perform could still be felt. Your smart-aleck comment perfectly described my feelings toward seasonal laziness, though something in what you said only rang half-true. You were born and raised on the banks of the Hudson. When you felt suffocated and near violence, from arguing parents and the high, airless rooms of your cramped apartment, you jumped the subway to the Ellis Island ferry, where you looked out at the Atlantic. Being close to expanses of water, ocean waves rolling and crashing far beyond the horizon, rebalanced your shaken equilibrium and helped to make sense of your half-formed world. But you rarely spoke of it. They were stories that occasionally came out while I was painting; fragments of a past life that were left for me to piece together. A father, a brother in the navy; connected stories told years apart. When we traveled to London for my first retrospective over twenty years ago, we took almost all our meals at a restaurant you found near Chelsea Bridge. I took for granted that you wanted to look across the river at the landmarks, not realizing your interests were more localized than that; the trail of solitary rowers that passed, the water lapping the bank at our feet. Back home, the stream wasn’t directly in sight from the porch, a meadow and a dip in the hill away, but we could hear its gentle rushing as we ate; opened our windows and allowed it into our bedrooms at night, its hypnotic quality more powerful than the ticking clock in lulling us to sleep. In London, your anxiety was such that, at your instigation, we changed hotel rooms several times and then finally the hotel itself, until we found one that gave the view of the water that you desired. At the time, your basis for complaint was due to noise, how you didn’t want my sleep disturbed by the roar of traffic and passers-by. I had several important meetings with museum trustees, interviews with newspapers and dinners with long-standing patrons cultivated through Ben. You wanted me to be as relaxed as I could be under the circumstances. But now I see how agitated not being near the water made you. You were on edge for much of the trip. We argued constantly. Could I have taken the sting out of our frozen winters by accepting some or all of Ben’s invitations? What internal development was halted by keeping you away from the sea? What was it about these things that you cannot bring yourself to explain?

– You look tired. Have you not been to bed?

I feel Ben’s moisturizer rub off on my cheek as we kiss. The scent of something tropical lies thickly between us, the bitter intensity of lemongrass, mixed with citric acidity. As ever, he is immaculate; although he looks after artists, he is not interested in looking like one. This never brings out any self-consciousness about my own appearance, only a reminder that a more refined presentation exists for those that have the energy to invest in it. If anything, his narrow-fitting suit tailored in New York by English expatriates and shirts with their thick navy stripes, his pastel linen shorts cut above the knee and Breton tops are another kind of uniform. Your clothes were different, far removed from city fashion; most often an overcoat one of the farmers gave you. Yet the two of you together still look like kin.

He tries again, his eyes gentle with teasing:

– Getting a little old for all-nighters, aren’t we? Seventy-five is when you start to behave.

– I was old when I did them first time around. Now I’m a fossil with a paintbrush.

– Vishni’s making her chicken and potatoes with saffron. I forgot how the living’s good in the country.

– So long as we can still afford saffron. The kitchen will fall into a slump otherwise.

– John’s out, I hear?

– I sent him into town for paint. I think he had some other errands too. He lets things accumulate.

– You should have let me know. I could have brought whatever you needed from the city.

– Almost everything we need is here.

– Let me rephrase that: I would have asked you if there was anything you wanted had I been able to get through on the phone. After two days of getting the busy signal I actually called the phone company to check whether there was a fault on your line. When they told me that it was more likely that you had disconnected the phone I didn’t know what to think. It’s never bothered you before, has it? And considering so few people have your number; I couldn’t understand the reasoning behind it.

His eyes shine with no let up. His lips redden, making the promise of their rosebud shape real; then the red spreads across his cheeks, as the blood rises through his face. The wisps of air that trail his last sentences suggest an exhalation of something that had been saved up since that time: frustration, bewilderment, worry. Ben is Manhattan-bred, used to having his questions answered. An open-ended mystery is fine for the work, but outside of that, there needs to be a concrete order of things. The artists he best represents are those who do not live their lives in total chaos; itself an exaggeration left for those of poorer talent who are only appropriating the role.

– I thought about sending a telegram but was wary of its theatricality. Drawing you out from wherever you were with the painting. A four-word missive from New York, designed to jolt you to your senses. A joke and a nuisance rolled into one, delivered by a sweet-natured, breathless boy, whom you would have to tip handsomely for cycling all this way. I knew you would despise the rigmarole as much as me. That you would hold it against me once the paintings were finished. So the easiest thing was simply to take the train and deliver the message myself: Plug your telephone in!

– It wouldn’t happen that way. We’re too old to be holding grudges.

– You’re also too old to be turning yourself into a hermit, Anna. The telephone’s never bothered you before. You have all the solitude you want out here, without these gestures.

– Takes too much energy, gripes and feuds. It should be left with the young where it belongs.

– Do you understand how people can worry if they don’t hear from you, are unable to contact you?

– People, as you call them, know where to find me. I’m always here. As for those that care, two of them are in the house as we speak. The other is buying paint.

– I also hear that you’re not taking the oxygen as you’re supposed to.

– I have as much as I need. Ignore what you hear.

Ben pours tea and holds out a cup. I take it, well aware that I am still glaring at him; understanding also the heat generated in my body as I bat his invasiveness away. Something in our altercation makes me feel more alive than I have been for these last few hours in the studio. Always the boys who tap my spirit; one at the table, the other buying paint.

THERE IS A SOFTENING over lunch; the saffron that colors and infuses the chicken and potatoes mellows me somewhat, until I feel as light and flyaway as one of those dark-red threads of spice. We share the wine that Ben has brought from one of his father’s vineyards, and he talks happily about what is happening with his other artists. He knows, as I do, that there is no sport more torturous than gossip relating to the heightened work rate and success of other artists. In my younger days, those that felt like being under an apprenticeship of sorts, such talk would drive me from the table, so sensitive was I to the perception of my work and how it measured up to others’. Now there is something pleasant about its buzz. I swat it toward and away from me as if playing with a fly. As insects are a reminder of the summer seasons, so too is Ben’s talk, reminding me of the existence of other artists in the world. Jealousy can be just as deeply felt at this age as any other. You of all people understand how jealous I can become. What kills this is ultimately down to personal resources. Energy is finite, and you have to decide how to spend it wisely. Working on canvases taller than either of us, the strength to push a rolling ladder, or climb up the scaffold, can take everything I have. Time spent mulling over professional jealousies would deplete everything.

– Are you going to show me the canvases? It’s half the reason I came here.

– What happened to my welfare? You were concerned about so many things.

– That was on my list too.

– Wouldn’t you rather say hello to the donkey first?

– I’ll feed the old boy his favorites before I go. Let’s see some paintings.

– Nothing’s ready, Ben. I’m not prepared.

– That’s not what I’ve been hearing from other parties. They suggested you have several ready to go. That it’s been the case for almost a year.

– And how do you get to hear from other parties, I wonder? This house might not be clapboard like your place in Provincetown, but the walls are just as thin. I can hear when the telephone rings, as hard as they try for me not to.

– Like I said, there are other ways besides the telephone. He sends letters from the post office. Collects mine from there too.

I think about where you must keep those letters. I would never search your room, but something tells me that they are not in the house, that you probably throw them away as soon as they have been read, the way you do with other more mundane correspondence that reaches the house. Maybe even in the trashcan outside the post office and store. You are agents, of a kind. Your friendship works independently of me, which is how things should be. So why does it jar so, this desire to know what you have been writing?

– Show me. Just the ones you’re happy with. Bring them out. Take me to the studio. Anything.

I try to visualize what Ben will see; what the paintings will make him say, how he will feel. I think of your responses when each of the last pieces was finished. The sigh that came from your mouth; something that could be read as a mixture of wonder and satisfaction. Equally, of disappointment. It is not Ben’s dissatisfaction that holds me back. I will drag him by the wrist to the studio if I am guaranteed that reaction. It is something that I already feel about my work of the past few years. Disappointment I can understand. I live with it, working daily on canvases that resolutely do not bend to my will, capturing the light differently to what I see. My fear is that he will love it. That he will see the larger works and feel that you are in the room; that the real essence of you, your quietness and sense of wonder about the world, has been made permanent. It will make me question what is deficient in his eyes, and again, in mine. What is it that Ben sees, what insight does he have, what has he shared with you that makes sense of these pictures. That I am capable of capturing something I no longer recognize.

– We’ll have to eat some fruit first, otherwise Vishni will be angry with us.

Vishni stands on the kitchen steps holding a bowl of quartered peaches and a jug of cream. Who knows how long she has been there, studying us in our reverie, both light-headed from the wine, induced to sloth from the crisp potatoes. Neither of us seems aware until the moment that our plates have also been cleared away and dirty glasses replaced with fresh ones. I am incapable of seeing anything, I want to tell Ben. Vishni is the one who sees. But I do not want him to leave thinking I am in a depression, because that will only come back to you from another letter left at the post office. Instead I do as I’m told and eat the dessert placed before me, listening as Vishni scolds Ben that he is not eating enough.

– TRY EITHER OF THOSE jackets on the chair. Perhaps the darker one. It looks like it will be a better fit across the shoulders. Yes? It’s comfortable? Right, let me see your shirt. Stand by the window there, please. It doesn’t work together. There’s too much fuss with those stripes. Sorry, Ben. It’s a beautiful shirt, just too distracting. It doesn’t work … How about something a little softer … there’s a blue here, or white. The white would be perfect, I think. Unless you would be happier in a color? There’s a purple T-shirt on the shelf but it will drain your complexion. What was that phrase you used to tell us they drummed into you at art school: ‘We add, not subtract’? There you go; algebra in action. You’re about the same size so it shouldn’t feel tight on the collar. Oh, whatever you prefer, but maybe the top button open, and also the one after that. Let me see. Two buttons are definitely better than one … but not three. That’ll be too much.

We are in the room behind the kitchen where Vishni does the laundry twice a week. I cannot bear to take Ben into your room, so pulling the clothes nearest to hand is safer. Your scent is not here, the overwhelming smell of detergent banishing all ghosts. We have swum together in the past, shared a bed for sleeping purposes more than once, making Ben not embarrassed to change in front of me. He has posed before, of course, many years ago, shortly after we first met and before the appearance of you. Ben’s painting was one of the first that got me noticed, but you know all about that; what attention does. It is this past history combined with his taste for Provincetown nudist beaches that has schooled him in his lack of self-consciousness. I am sifting through the pile of clothes that Vishni has ironed, looking for further options, so at first I miss an opportunity to note the differences in his body to yours, bar the firmness of his stomach suggesting his continuing loyalty to calisthenics. As he turns around, I see more: the muscular V of his back, the square-packed shoulders and how, despite being as tall and rangy as you are, there is neatness to his frame. He seems so compact. Time is etched on his face, of course, and clings with honor to his neck, but the body is a monument to someone decades younger. He remains smooth and mostly hairless, the other marked contrast to you. Something about his physicality and yours marks you as family, one from either end of blond’s spectrum. Ben is dressed, still in his Italian trousers, but the rest is yours, a white T-shirt instead of the shirt, and your navy fishing jumper. I don’t know how this is chosen, but somehow we both gravitate toward it, hanging from the door hook. You have worn it for years. Sacred clothing. I think about the darker recesses of the studio, areas where the light does not reach: in the corner opposite the sink, where one frame leans against another; the shelved recess that houses the paint. I think about Ben standing there and how, with his face turned away from me, it could almost be … We are both aware of it. His posture changes in your clothes. Now he slouches against the wall, hands in pockets barely wide enough to hold credit cards. Nothing about this is caricature. He is not making a joke as he curves his shoulders inward, lips pursed, arms loose and gangly as if an overgrown boy. He wrinkles his nose.

– This stinks.

– He went fishing last week. You were the one who pulled it down. When he hangs it up there Vishni knows not to wash it. It’s one of the quirks he has.

– Doesn’t he just! What was he fishing? Are there still trout in the river?

– Brown trout. He has to go where the river passes town these days. Further away from the hills as less seem to travel upstream. He did pretty good last week, though. We were eating for a couple of days.

– Worth coming back for? It’s been a while since we went fishing.

– Worth coming back for. You know he’ll be only too pleased to take you.

– Maggots running everywhere, plenty of beer drunk, but not much fish, as I recall.

– He’s better at it, these days. Has the patience, I should say. You’ve got a good month or so ahead of you, if you want to take him up on the offer.

– So his letters suggest. Our boy’s become quite the country sportsman.

– Something of that kind. Are you going to be happy in that jumper, Ben? You realize that once I start you’ll need to keep wearing it.

– That I am aware of.

– And that we won’t be able to wash it, less we lose any of the marking?

– I can overdo the cologne to compensate. This is how you want me, isn’t it? I can see it in your face. Your eyes are lighting up.

– They are not.

– I know your game. The observer doesn’t want to be looked at, ad nauseam. Well, tough luck! We’re going to be staring at each other for a while.

– Not if I have you looking down at the floor.

– And you will, too! Now I understand why some of your subjects were posed the way they were. That little nugget never made it into the notes, did it?

– Stop teasing, Ben. We need to make a start if you want to catch your train tonight.

– I thought I might hang around. At least until John gets back. Shoot the breeze. If he’s only in the city, he shouldn’t be too much longer.

– I wouldn’t have thought so.

– I can take the overnight.

– Don’t be silly. Riding the rails through the night like a teenager! Stay over. We’ll make a bed up. I’ll go and speak to Vishni now because I’m not sure what she had in mind for dinner.

There is an ease with Ben’s decision, built on confidence, and from years of having had beds made in countless other artists’ residences, from poolside guest houses in California to squats in the wrong parts of London. There are some gallery owners who can barely bring themselves to shake an artist’s dirty hand, let alone sleep on a concrete floor; solely interested in the finish. Ben is not one of those. For all the comforts the success of his gallery has brought him over the years, he is still governed by a sense of adventure and an undying fascination in the process. He will spend the night in a tree if he is sure a good painting will come out of it. I hold him still and roll up each trouser leg; tight, narrow rolls that show his ankles. He stops talking now, knowing that he will have ample time to fill during the long studio hours ahead. For now, he is a cipher, who must ready himself to be prodded and pulled. Jumper sleeves are pushed up until they reach the elbow. I point to your shoes that sit by the door.

– Take your socks off, too.

– Sure. Anything else?

– Your jewelry. Watch and ring.

These are slipped off first, but there’s something slow in the way he moves now; these last moments where he morphs from friend and house guest to subject. From articulate to voiceless. Even though he still wears his trousers, removing his socks seems to erase the final remnants of who he is. He pulls on the shoes and follows me to the door. His shadow and soft steps are yours.

In the studio Ben moves instinctively toward a row of canvases leaning against the wall. All the care that is given to paintings in the homes they finally end up with is not shared in their places of origin. A sheet protects them from dust, but at various stages they have been handled roughly; marked, nicked in places and painted over. Before perfection – truth – comes digging, dirt. Each canvas bears sign of this excavation, before being hidden by frames and glass. I am a mother bear who carries her cub by the teeth.

– Look at those afterwards. Let’s get you in the chair first.

His eyes scan the rows hungrily, calculating how many have accumulated since his last visit. It is clear that he had not expected so many. The eyebrows that frame his widened eyes seem to tremble with the discovery.

– All these?

– Yes. But you can only see some of them. After you’ve worked for it.

Nodding in affirmation, he moves to the center and waits for me to push the chair toward him. The curiosity for pictures overrides everything, even this house, and his friendship with you. He will not leave without seeing what is under the cloth. Having pushed, dragged back, and pushed again, I motion him to sit. Again, his nod is one of compliance, brisk and sharp, knowing that he will wait patiently, for as long as it takes, until he gets what he wants.

THE EMPTY PLACE set at the table makes the lightness of our dinner talk a fallacy. We sit tightly as if listening to the band on the Titanic after receiving premonitions of our doom. The meal is good but there is sadness in the atmosphere, dulling taste buds and tampering with digestion. Ben does his best to play along, his easy manner and ability to keep the conversation going eventually relaxing us, so that at certain moments it feels like a replication of previous dinners, when the room was filled with the simple pleasure of friendship, and the absent place could be explained away by your fetching the wine, the watermelon, the cheese. It is only at the end of the meal, when interest in Vishni’s rose cuttings and my redundant gossip about other artists can no longer be tolerated, that Ben’s manners evaporate and he becomes testy.

– Why the hell isn’t he back yet?

– Soon. I’m sure it’ll be soon.

– He should be here by now.

We jump as his hand slaps the table, its echo as hard and flat as his palm. Our eyes meet momentarily before taking them elsewhere, both stabbed with sudden hurt as the realization dawns that you are not there for us. All this had only been a way to pass the time. He has waited all day for you. The world has tilted in your absence. After dinner everyone goes to bed, as if an early night will somehow speed up the process of your return. The table is left uncleared, kitchen detritus left to soak. It is the earliest in years that the house has fallen to darkness. With Ben and Vishni sleeping downstairs, one in the guestroom, the other in her room behind the kitchen, adjacent to the studio, the house feels lopsided. In bed especially, I feel poised to tip; how little it would take to tumble me: a gust from the open window, the telephone’s ring. Before I draw the curtain, I stare up at the stars and wonder whether the city’s neon would hide the bear and the scorpion from your sight; whether you would use the constellations to guide you from Penn Station to Hell’s Kitchen. Remember when you first moved here, you taught me how I could navigate my way home after dark by following the scorpion’s tail from rear end to tip? Imagine being born and raised in the country and never having learnt these skills; what a wonder you were! Every day, there seemed to be a wondrous new discovery to be made about you: setting traps behind the refrigerator that caught the kitchen rat, mending windows, your ability to recite any number of poems from Leaves of Grass that a well-meaning teacher had forced you to learn by rote as punishment for a litany of youthful misdemeanors. All this on top of the paintings. But navigating the stars was a party trick I never tired of. It was like leaving the world behind for the celestial. You made the walk so often from our country station, nothing grander than a platform and a sign thick with dust; you may as well have been blindfolded.

In the city too, where the steps that lead home are ingrained in your memory, you walk from Penn Station without sight: along Sixth, heading downtown. You pass the fancy shops, virtual museums of aspiration for tourists and office workers, always closed to the likes of you; affordable yet still overpriced; and finally past those less desirable, stores that only stand because it is cheaper to open than shut up completely. Below Avenue A you hit your stride: deep down into the city’s unfathomable bowels. Then, nothing. A hinterland of boarded-up warehouses and tenements, long since abandoned, that now shelter only hobos and the spoils of local crime, theft and drugs. Though you are several blocks away from the Hudson, its dank fills your nostrils. You gorge on a nourishing stink that gives your aching muscles life. It is the closest you will get to milk now you are decades past weaning; now that your parents are no longer here to fight over and nurture you. What you are looking for no longer exists, and yet, there you are, standing outside an apartment that is now a laundry, on a street where life as you know it has vanished. I know this is where you will end because it is the one place you have never showed me. I had to find it for myself during visits to the city. A piecemeal search: riding subway lines and roaming every back street until I could be sure. If you feel the weight of the tenements across your shoulders, find some space among the stars. Drop all that you have carried and let the lightness of the night take you. If you are no longer angry, look up and let the sky speak for us. Take your photographs so that clarity comes from your anger. At the very least, one good picture should emerge from the black mist that marks your mourning for everything you left behind. All that you missed, the funerals of your parents, your brother’s homecoming, the rapid decline of the tenements, how your neighborhood vanished into a ghost town, will be captured somewhere in the roll of film you carry in your pocket. That is one thing I can be sure of.

– Whatever happens, no matter how long I have to sit in the studio or sand down and creosote the fence? Whether I have to help James birth his dairy cows, or shell a bucket of peas for Vishni, I must take one good photograph a day. Just one. I’m not greedy, Anna. I only want one to lead to another and then the next. It’s like crossing the mountain river when we go fishing. You take the pass one stone at a time.

Where did those photographs go? Developed at the drug-store and then placed in a box at the bottom of your wardrobe. Sifting and poring. The bad photographs bundled together and burned with the trash. The examples deemed good sometimes shown to me and Vishni, most often not. You were not secretive but your photos were a private undertaking; something you started over the last few years to make sense of the practice I had committed you to, when you were probably too young to understand what it truly meant. Your interest in photography began shortly after we last saw Ben, a Halloween party high up East, when Provincetown’s tourists had long since returned to the city and the cobwebs you had sprayed in all corners, combined with the creaky walnut floors, gave his house a feeling of the Marie Celeste. We were a party of eleven almost groping in the dark for other signs of life, the spirits of those who had lived and partied here during that long summer. You and Ben talked alone for much of the night, or that is, Ben spoke to you. Your faces were mostly serious, none of the fooling around that Vishni and I were so used to. His mouth so close to your ear, your neck craning into his, you were a hair’s breadth from a kiss. When he remembered his manners as the host, you flicked through the monographs in the upstairs room he used as an office. I found you crouched over his albums, oversized books the size of table tops, filled with giclée prints from artists he was interested in. You were looking at photographs of crumbling diners and abandoned gas stations deep in the country; of families of hobos dressed in found hippy clothes riding the freight trains. The gloss from the prints reflected in your eyes and back onto each plastic sheath that held them.

– They’re amazing. Why has he never shown us this stuff before?

– Probably because we never asked.

– All this time it’s been sitting in his house. All this time.

In your wonderment you soaked everything up, as you used to do when you first saw my paintings. You still had interest in those, but not the sense of wonder as now overtook you with Ben’s photographs. I knew, because something similar had happened to me many years before. I saw a Modigliani portrait hanging in an alcove of a Chicago museum during a college trip and I felt my mind unlock. It has felt as if the last three years has been a slow period of unlocking, of opening yourself up to new possibilities and closing your mind to me. I do not say this from a sense of jealousy. I have often lain awake wondering how this life would ever nourish you, how sitting like a statue day in and out could ever be enough. I took you at your word when you said it was; took heart in how fast your legs ran around the meadow; how rosy your cheeks had become from eating good home-cooked food; the pride you had in being known and respected among the community, whatever they may have thought of me; but most of all because of the trust you had in my hands as they posed you and the nodded appreciation at the end of each day when you saw the progress made on the canvas; how even my stolid snail’s pace still felt like some form of magic. You have spoiled me over the years with your patience and blind faith; whether this was something I encouraged in you or that simply lay inert in your personality, waiting to be drawn out. Either way, it has made me fat and somewhat complacent. I was like a suburban wife who believed she was enough for her husband; that he would never stray elsewhere. Now I am suspicious, mistrustful, as she might be after being wronged; bitterness staining her tongue. You have given yourself up so readily and for so long, I don’t know how else to be. Your face is puffy with all the secrets you hold, the lining around the eyes tight as you hold them all in. When I am cleaning up I sometimes catch you out of the corner of my eye, staring at the paintings as if you want to burn them. Who planted the seed for that, Ben or I? I move as you do, by stealth, forcing lightness into my heavy legs as I tiptoe across the floorboards so as not to wake those below. The room is dark but never completely black. Black is for those who refuse to see color, even the red of their eyelids as they close. The hook on the back of your door where the camera used to hang is unadorned. I feel it as I push it open, hearing nothing knock against the wood on the other side. For most of the day I had been caught up thinking about your clothes, forgetting that if you left carrying your camera you would have all you need. So much about today has been about remembering and forgetting. The rigor of the studio shields me from the worst of it. Only at night do I lapse. Even as I open your wardrobe and pat my hands along its varnished floor, I know that my fingertips will find no resistance; that your slim box of photographs will be gone. The only picture left in the room should be where it always was, in a frame on your dresser. There were never any paintings here, only this. Still feeling my way, I pat up and around until I find it, hoping that this will have been taken too; that there is room for this one photograph in a stack of many. But as I stand by the window and shake the frame open, I see that it is still there, a happiness you no longer wish to remember; of us in our evening finery taken at the reception in London.

I WATCH THE DARKNESS fade shivering on the porch, wrapped in two of the thickest blankets we saved for winter. I think of the bachelor party they threw for the farmer’s son not so many years ago: how the lot of you raised hell over three towns and the outskirts of the city before a chastened return on the first morning train. I remember hearing of you all stumbling down Main Street at sunrise; an army of penitents. And then a memory of you alone, walking with uncertainty through the meadow toward the house. You were benignly drunk, the strengthening sunlight pushing through your greasy hair and making an angel of you. How you slept where I am sitting now, on a love seat no bigger than a cot, because you did not want to wake the house. It is foolish of me to expect you to reappear in the same way, as night rescinds and morning beckons, but I do so. Like a young woman I rehearse how I am going to look and what to say. In reality, of course, we will have nothing to say to each other. A look will pass between us, something that can reassure the other that there is no animosity, and then only sleep, from which your cheerfulness will return.

– You should have seen the size of them. Twenty in all, and of a height to make our farm-bred boys look minute. Fed on bad manners and smog, thighs for arms from all the lifting on the docks. Put one of them next to one of us and we looked as unstable as a skittle. And boy were they ready to knock us down! Didn’t like the look of us or the way we spoke. That we could be drunk and still be mindful of our manners. They weren’t used to so many smiling faces in that miserable place. I can’t recall how we even ended up there, save the neon sign calling us, with its promise of beer and can-can girls. The only thing that saved us getting a beating outside that bar was that our legs were not solid like hams. We could run faster. One of us – I can’t remember who, but it could have been me just as easily as the next man – tipped up a table to give us a head start, and we piled through that tiny door and out into the street as quick as we could. We were like anchovies being pulled from a jar; as ungainly. The air was salty, thick with our sweat. The sound of glasses and bottles masked their threats toward us for a merciful few seconds. And in one of those, at least, they were cut silent, the sudden move surprising them more than they could articulate. They had not banked on Hicksville country mice using their wits. We ran through the docks, fast in our pack, pounding hard until our feet were sore and chests fit to bursting with effort. Their voices carried past the few warehouses but their feet didn’t follow. They didn’t have the energy for it, not when there was still beer to drink, and stony-faced women to heckle. Which reminds me, the neon did not live up to its promise. These were definitely not girls. Faces and necks crisscrossed with lines, powder and lipstick thickly lodged in every crevice; breasts and bellies sagging from bearing children; eyes as dark and hard as flint. They were nothing like the girls we were thinking of, which was a sign of our ignorance of what such a bar should be like. Even though you have made me see things as they really are, when I was with the guys all I could think of was the ideal. How funny is that? The only thing I’m sure of is that you would have wanted to stay if you had come along. You would have painted every single one of them. In the midst of our running, I emerged at the front, escaping that fear I have of being hemmed in, I suppose. I found myself leading the boys past one warehouse after another until I got a rough sense of direction from the lights far up on the Lower East Side glittering on the Hudson. That too became something to run from, another place I only wanted to remember as an ideal. My heart was beating fast, both from the running and the fear that one of the guys would ask why we weren’t running uptown, where drinks and girls would be plenty. The double-rush of adrenaline made me feel drunker than before. I was dizzy with it, so light-headed, to the point where I thought my brain would float away, leaving just a pair of running legs and this urgent heartbeat. But nothing was said. We were all overtaken with running; the strength and enjoyment of it. Our feet and breath became harmonized, and if someone had suggested we run all the way home, we were all of the presence of mind to possibly attempt it. Once we left the dockside, uncertainty sat in the air, but I was still at the front, still being followed. I kept my eyes ahead. We passed the factory where my father worked his whole life but I stayed fixed on the street. I didn’t turn my head at the chimneys that used to fascinate me as a kid. Nor at the gated entrance where I would wait for him at the end of the day and where the vans delivering raw hides from all over the city passed. I never stopped. They all ran with my fear on their shoulders. Their muscles ached with it. Only as we reached the bridge did I slow, relishing in the boundary before me; knowing that once I was in Brooklyn I could not be touched. I could drink in Brooklyn. Breathe, and be my own man. Feel that he wasn’t standing over my shoulder. So I spent the last money I had getting the boys even more drunk and ridding myself of that feeling. With every glass I felt lighter, lighter.

I stayed in the cot and kept lookout.

BEN REMAINS PERFECTLY STILL, though his restlessness shows in his eyes. They roam. Vishni has given him a plate of eggs, followed by fruit; a menu designed to banish tiredness and prevent bloating in morning subjects, and it would please her to see how he ripples with energy. The tremors across his eyebrows crackle with it. He hesitates to speak, not wanting to disturb my concentration, a mood I silently encourage. Unhappy with the previous day’s work, I fix him in a variety of poses until I find something I am happy with. The easy chair is dragged back to the corner. Now he is naked on the blanket, lying on his side, his knees pulled halfway toward his chest, as if he is in the process of curling or uncurling; paralyzed by sleep were it not for the strength of his eyes. He makes no complaint about the discomfort of his position. The thin foam mattress under the blanket is deeply pocked in places, so that the floor’s chill can be felt. The draft from the open window ruffles his hair and the thin tangle of curls across his prick and balls. At the completion of each sketch, where line and form takes precedence over other details, I have him up on his feet to regain his circulation. I use the exercises that you are so familiar with, and at various times, contemptuous of. Body stretches from top to toe, followed by a couple of minutes’ jogging on the spot, as much as my condition will allow. He does as you used to at the beginning, laughing heartily and with some disbelief as I join in with him; someone who notoriously showed little interest in most physical activity.