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Of all possible worlds this was the one in which I had landed. I wondered how years passed for parents who lost children, how these parents navigated birthdays. Thanksgivings. Would my imaginary daughter grow older in my dreams? Would she graduate from high school and go to college? Have babies? Would my imagined child sit beside my deathbed and allow me to thank her for completing my world? However brief the time we shared. My daughter came to me in every nighttime dream, and I anticipated the self-loathing and guilt that would come years later when one night she would fail to appear, or rather, I would fail to conjure or summon her.
On Wednesday I glanced out the window and saw a shadow. It was high noon and sunny. A young bear had come down from the mountain. He had found the red sugar water of a hummingbird feeder and was sitting on his fat ass, lapping it up. The sight was a joyous one for me; it was the bear that Sarah had been looking for her entire life. I pushed her chair to the window. I looked at my daughter's empty eyes. I looked at the bear. It was so big, so real, so alive. I put my arms around my child and cried. "Please, see the bear, baby. Please."
I WILL BEGIN WITH DIMENSIONS. As one should. I had a mathematician friend tell me once, perhaps twice, that dimension is concerned with the constituent structure of all space and its relation to time. I did not understand this statement and still I do not, in spite of its undeniable, obvious poetic charm. He also tried to tell me that the dimensions of an object are independent of the space in which that object is embedded. It’s not clear to me that even he understood what he was saying, though he seemed quite taken with the idea. What I do understand is that my canvas is twelve feet high and twenty-one feet and three inches across. I cannot explain the three inches, but can say that they are crucial to the work. It is nailed to a wall that is twenty feet tall and thirty-five feet across. The opposite wall is the same and the adjacent walls are but fifteen feet wide. And so the square footage of the space is five hundred twenty-five. The volume of the building space is ten thousand five hundred cubic feet. I am six feet tall and weigh one hundred and ninety-two pounds. I cannot explain the two pounds. I prefer that numbers be written out as words.
amazing opening
She was lying. I felt like an old fool just talking to her, though I had no designs. I would have been less of a cliché if I had had some designs. I would sound like less of one now if I admitted to having had designs, but I was what I was. As much as it pained me to admit, in a moment of reducing myself to an artistic expression, I resigned myself to a kind of Greenbergian complaint about surrealism, my present cliché being just that, surrealistic, that the picture fails because of an appeal to the anecdotal. An equally painful admission was that I believed, as much as I did not want to, that the medium was everything. Canvas and paint, that’s all there was, all there is. The medium there, in that museum, of my cliché, was two bodies. And sad as it made me, and excited as well, I knew that the two bodies would find each other. It wasn’t male fantasy; I was never confident enough for that. It was artistic prescience, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn’t, that’s what it was.
The drinking too much was quiet in its way and yet, without causing physical disturbance, was violent enough. I would start around midday, innocuously, with a glass of wine and graduate pre-dinner to scotch or bourbon. It was a problem I didn’t know I had until I was nearing the bottom of a bottle and so to avoid that feeling I would buy several bottles at once. The new complexion-challenged boy at the corner liquor store asked if I was having a party. I got into my car and started crying. But I didn’t stop drinking. Instead I spread my purchases over a wider area, knowing the while how pathetic I was.
What was wonderful was that the sex was tender, that we kissed, that we were slow, that we were a little clumsy, a lot clumsy when it came to the condom, my clumsiness and the object itself making me self-aware, embarrassed, a bit ashamed. But that faded when she kissed me. I imagined in the middle of it all that I would be less ungainly, a bit more graceful in bed the next time. I loved being inside her and somehow felt I was not experiencing it fully, that the moment was getting away from me, that it was all rushed, but it was not, time was what time is, its own pace. She moved and she didn’t move, every sound was sweet to me. I didn’t know where her hands were most of the time, but I did know they pleased me. She might have had an orgasm, but I didn’t care.
interesting change of tense in that quote
I heard her move around the room, but I kept my eyes closed. She told me I could open them and I did. Against the wall pinned to a foam-core board that leaned against the wall was a watercolor. The paper was about twenty by thirty inches. The work was green, green leaning into blue in places, edged with blood in the southeast corner. It was abstract, stunning. It was so unlike the country scenes and cityscapes of hers that I had seen before. The painting was rich, dense, and deep. Too deep, I thought, for a work on paper, no matter how heavy the stock, too rich to be anything but oil colors, but it was surely watercolors. I was surprised by it, confused by it. I began to cry.
“Do you like it?”
“Did you make this?” I asked.
“You think a young, pretty French girl cannot paint this picture?”
“I don’t believe anyone could make this picture. How did you do it?” I wanted to get up and walk over to it, to get right up on it, but I also did not want to end the experience I was having with it. “I love it.”
It was either in the yard, the kitchen, or the car, but Linda asked me a question so disturbing that where it was asked was unimportant. She asked, “If you could keep something like this from me, what other secrets are you hiding?”
Let’s say it was in the car, because there is no escaping a conversation made in an automobile. “I have no secrets,” I lied.
“No?” She laughed. “You’ve got one the size of a building in our yard.”
There was nothing I could say to that.
“I never asked you about Paris,” she said.
“That was ten years ago.”
“What was ten years ago?”
“Paris,” I said. “What are you talking about?”
“Why did you have to be there?”
“That was ten years ago.”
She looked out the passenger side window. She hardly spoke to me after that. There were no accusations, there was no screaming, there was nothing, not even sighing. She yawned. The kids noticed the distance between their mother and me, but didn’t address it. How could they have? I thought that my, in my mind, ancient, infidelity had finally come home to roost. Metaphors are like oil paints: when you work wet they can get away from you.
I toyed with the idea of
The secret that I held closest, the secret that I never told anyone, that I shared with no one, was that I had married Linda without loving her. I wanted to love her. I liked her immensely, thought the world of her, respected her, but I could not then say that I loved her. I probably came to love her. I certainly shared life with her enthusiastically, happily, willingly. I was pleased that she was the mother of my children, but my heart never ached for her, my skin never longed for her touch. I had in fact used her. I had used her to feel whole again, normal, to feel like a good man after what I had done in El Salvador. She held my head and stroked my temples when I was depressed without knowing the cause. She considered me the moody artist. And that I was. The irony, of course, one of them, was that my depression actually fed my work, made my art better, gave it a gravity, a depth that it hadn’t had before. A certain amount of guilt came with that truth, a guilt that never went completely away, a guilt that became easier to live with and yet more profound.
There is a cruelty in abstraction. It cuts into flesh. It relies on our fear of mortality for its meaning. The way it disturbs, distresses is meant to undermine some illusion of duration, of time controlled, even simply perceived. My paintings were abstract and splashed with guilt as much as paint, scratched with shame as much as with the knife or spatula. Back in Philadelphia I discovered bad dreams and fitful sleep. I locked myself away to explore those abstractions. My isolation wore well as I was an artist and artists were supposed to be moody and at least occasionally reclusive. The paintings I made I could just barely look at. I drank. When I emerged from my bed, so to speak, and went to my studio and revealed my paintings at my review, no one said a word. My professors, one after another, quietly, privately gave me nods of approval, then backed away as if something was wrong with me. They had no idea.