Night Blue

by Angela, O’Keeffe

  As the man looked at me and brushed away with his gloved hand an invisible speck of dust, I sensed that his baldness worried him, that he carried, folded up inside a pocket in the briefcase he took to work each day, a brochure for a hair clinic in Kingston. Each day he planned to ring the clinic at lunchtime when there was no one else in the office, but each day when the time came he lost the courage.

  I had looked forward to their visits. My world was narrow in that room and their visits were an influx of space and light. Without words, and without their knowledge of it, the two visitors gave me news about the outside world. A photograph of a man standing before a giant sequoia tree in California. A cyclone all but flattening the city of Darwin. Forty-three people killed in a train crash in London. The end of the war in Vietnam. Gough Whitlam pouring sand into the hand of Vincent Lingiari, the sand from Lingiari’s people’s own lands. The tender blue of the earth as seen from space.

  I don’t want to give the impression that I could read the minds of anyone who came near me – it has never been so straightforward. There were times when Alyssa and the man visited – in fact, it was most times – when I received nothing from either of them, no matter how much I longed for it. If anything, longing got in the way of it. I received their thoughts more often when I was distracted by my own, deep in some memory of Jackson’s, or drifting in a sort of pleasing emptiness.

  Over time I noticed that Alyssa looked at me more than she looked at any of the other paintings, her gaze moving carefully over me, almost methodically, as if she were searching for something. There was a detachment, a circumspection to her gaze that almost belied its intensity. It was as if she didn’t care, and more importantly didn’t want to care about whatever she was searching for, yet she could not help but be drawn to search. That kind of gaze has an unnerving power; it can make you aware of your own shortcomings; I wanted to know what she was looking for, and as she went on searching, over weeks and months, I started to wonder if it was something that I myself had overlooked.

  Towards the end of 1975 my visitors brought a young man with them. He was tall with brown curly hair. He stood admiring one of the other paintings, then came to me.

  ‘Christ, it’s big.’

  Alyssa smiled. She wore her hair out that day. It was long and wavy and was the same orange-brown of a rock that, I knew suddenly, was on the headland at Mossy Point on the south coast of New South Wales where her grandmother lived. As a child she was once trapped on this rock as the tide came in, the waves lapping all around. Her grandmother had waded out and lifted her to safety in her strong arms, and whenever Alyssa thought of that rock now she was torn between being scared of it and ferociously wanting it as her own.

  She took her boyfriend’s hand. He looked pleased as she ran her lips across his knuckles. The bald man was at the other end of the room with his back to them.

  ‘He should have bought an Australian painting, there would have been less fuss,’ the boyfriend said, his gaze moving from her lips to me.

  ‘Whitlam likes a fuss.’ This from the bald man.

  ‘He won’t last,’ said the boyfriend and Alyssa said, ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘I’m only saying what everyone else is.’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ she said, and gave him back his hand. She stepped closer to me, her eyes growing wide; she drew a breath and brought her hand out to almost touch me. I felt the energy of that hand.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Nothing?’ He laughed with soft exasperation, and I knew that there was something about her that he wanted to understand, something he perhaps felt it was his right to understand.

  He took her face in his hands. They gazed into one another’s eyes. He smiled, but she did not.

  ‘I thought it was something, but it’s nothing,’ she said.

  10

  On 11 November 1975, a shadow crept into the storage room. I couldn’t tell its exact shape, only that it was vast. Only that it had arrived.

  You may guess I am referring to the dismissal of the Whitlam government by Governor-General Sir John Kerr. You may know this as a major event in Australian history. But if you don’t, allow me to sketch the details as gleaned from the tour guides.

  Whitlam was elected in 1972 on a strong mandate for social reform. He introduced free medical care and no-fault divorce; he pulled Australian troops out of the war in Vietnam, he took the first steps by government to introduce Aboriginal Land Rights. He committed to a record spending on the Arts – for example, if it weren’t for Whitlam, the National Gallery of Australia would not have been able to afford my purchase.

  Whitlam began to come undone about the time he arranged for a government loan from a Pakistani banker called Khemlani; the loan never materialised. The opposition blocked supply, meaning there was no money. The opposition leader, Malcolm Fraser, approached the governor-general, who approached the Queen. The result was that on 11 November, Remembrance Day, the country’s democratically elected government was sacked by the representative of a monarch residing ten thousand miles away. The event became a rally cry for the Republican movement; Australia’s head of state was not simply a ‘figurehead’, as people had been lead to believe, but wielded real and demonstrable power.

  Now back to the day itself. A warm afternoon. And that shadow, creeping into the storage room, pressing in. A painting thrives on light. Even in a room as dark as a storage room there is light, or the idea of light, but this shadow challenged the very idea.

  Perhaps out of habit, perhaps out of a sense of survival, I turned to my memory of the night Jackson started me. The darkness outside the window and the way the smoke of his cigarette had drifted out to it, had drifted easily, trustingly. And before long I found myself drifting, like that smoke, and all fear of the shadow vanished and I entered the events of that day – or they entered me. In any case, I saw Whitlam on the steps. The steps of the long, white building that I already knew was the Australian Parliament. The glare of the sun coming off the wall behind him. A microphone before him. And a crowd gathered below. People holding up their hands against the sun, shouting, ‘We want Gough.’

  He stood staring at the crowd. There was his lustrous hair, his pointed top lip. A single word pelted down in his mind, over and over, like rain – sacked, sacked, sacked – and he wondered what to do, what to say, how to gather his resources, how to gather himself. He’d been given the news only hours before by the governor-general and since then he’d carried it in his heart, a knife, a brick, a slithering, headless thing. And now the crowd knew it too.

  These were the steps he’d stood on in triumph just three years earlier as he was photographed with his new government. It’s time had been the words of his election slogan, and the day that his new government was sworn in he’d known it really was time – time for changes to health care, to Aboriginal Land Rights, to the Arts, time to address the issues that would shape a new Australia, a more just and culturally alive Australia.

  Now, as the crowd cheered not in triumph as it had three years earlier, but with a kind of mad dread, as if it at once expected him to give it a miracle and knew that he could not, Whitlam thought of me, a fleeting image in among a clutch of others, which merged like migrating birds. And migrate they did, as his mind cleared and he found the space to decide what to say and what to ignore; as he found the space to position himself. He knew that from beginning to end politics was about this, positioning yourself; it came from practise, it came from instinct, it rose in you, a kind of dance that was both joyous and destitute. He saw me in among the images that were leaving him: the colour of the sky the day the war ended in Vietnam, a pale, delicate blue that seemed to announce that none of it had ever happened; him as a young boy talking to his near-deaf mother as she stood at the sink peeling potatoes, something proud about the curve of her back as he made his voice right for her, knowing that volume wasn’t the only thing important in speech, that tone and intention also made a rounded th
ing, a shining thing. The wild confusion of me the day he first saw me, my blue poles like flags, like telegraph poles, yet neither of these; they were utterly themselves. Art would never be the same in this country. This was a new beginning.

  But this—this was an end.

  He leaned towards the microphone and words came now, words that he realised he’d been saving for a moment such as this, had been saving all his career, perhaps all his life, ever since childhood when he’d learned to speak with great clarity, inspiring words, words streaked with irony and bewildered hope, all gathering momentum. If this was the end, he would make good of it.

  ‘Maintain the rage,’ he said at one point, and the crowd gave a great cry and the cry was carried along the streets and into houses and cars, it hung in the trees and on the surface of the lake, it clung to people’s hair and to their clothes, it found its way into the crevices of open books, it lingered at the fire outside the tents at the Aboriginal Embassy, it brushed against the tiny fists of children digging in sandpits and soon it reached the building in Fyshwick where we paintings had been stored.

  It thundered down the corridor and came in under the door, and it chased away the shadow, for it was streaked with light, and it was part of the future and already the past, and I remembered what he’d said to me on my first night in Australia.

  ‘Prove them wrong,’ he’d said, as if it were my destiny, and I felt sorry that I had not, and would not, for I had no idea how.

  11

  The National Gallery of Australia opened in 1982 and immediately attracted a steady stream of visitors. From the beginning I was one of the most popular exhibits. I wouldn’t say people liked me any more than they had when I’d first arrived in Australia eight years earlier, but they liked the idea of me more. They liked the fact that I was now worth a great deal more than the gallery had paid for me. They were impressed that I’d become a national icon and a testament to the Whitlam era – an era that was already being looked back on by many as extraordinary, exemplary, in the areas of the Arts and social reform. Tours were running and people came in increasing numbers, groups of school children, tourists from Europe, the United States, Japan. I often thought back to Whitlam’s entreaty to prove them wrong, spoken as if he’d believed this was my destiny. But destiny is particular. It is the child that doesn’t like broccoli: no amount of coaxing will make them eat it. On the surface, I had proved the critics wrong about my purchase, but it was not through any effort or concentration on my part. Instead something quite different had taken my attention.

  My years in storage had taught me it was people I craved – and now it was people I got. In all shapes, speaking every kind of language. Each day I observed the human body, the beauty in the angle of limbs, the face a moving landscape from which thought floated and sometimes became snagged in me. A vast variety of thought: from what to cook for dinner, to how to break up with a girlfriend, to what to write in a eulogy, to how it might feel to jump from a building, to the gritty wrongness of sand in a suitcase. Yet over time a pattern emerged. I noticed that the thoughts that came to me most often had to do with parents and children. A woman fretting over her child’s school report, a man unable to sleep because his elderly father had recently been diagnosed with dementia. A woman mourning a stillborn baby whom she had named Stephan. I came to understand that the pattern went deep in me, that it spoke to an inchoate sense of my own existence that had started perhaps even before I began, even before Jackson had turned from the window and made his way across the room to his tins of paint. There is potency in a beginning, the idea of a beginning, a birth; it fascinates. One moment you are not, then you are.

  Or that is how it seems. But birth is as much an end as it is a beginning; the real beginning takes place long before. For example, this:

  Jackson stood in his cot in Arizona, through the window an ash tree, its shadow swaying against the yellow grass; it had life in it, that shadow, as much life as was in the tree; somehow he knew this, or wanted to know it, or felt drawn to knowing it.

  A painting begins before it begins. Part of me is in that shadow, moving, swaying on the yellow grass.

  12

  One day in the early 1990s, I overheard a tour guide mention Jackson’s death. A brief description of the circumstances – he was drunk-driving, his girlfriend, Ruth Kligman and her friend Edith Metzger were also in the car (Lee was not mentioned); Edith and Jackson were killed, Ruth survived – followed by the date, 11 August 1956.

  He’d been dead for over thirty years and I hadn’t known it. He’d died well before I left America, well before I’d gained the confidence and the desire to reach like the trees towards open space; he’d died while I was still living in my first home, the beautiful house in which I’d felt that I myself might die.

  You may wonder why his death had not been mentioned in front of me until now; I can only assume that in all likelihood it had been mentioned, but that I hadn’t been able to hear it. Words are not my forte. To take on meaning, in me, they must match some inner timing to my existence, that erratic clock that ticks, ticks, ticks undetected, and every now and then sets off its alarm.

  My shock was like a burial. The world reverberated far above me, reverberated with the tread of life, the tread of some old hope, for the world never gives up. I was in the thrall of that hope, I felt it beating, beating far above me, and eventually I rose to meet it, and what I arrived at as I surfaced was the date of his death. 11 August.

  Number 11 was the name he’d first given to me. I had the wild thought that as he’d climbed behind the wheel of the car he’d wanted to acknowledge some connection to me, some longing or desire, for me. In my grief I kept going over this scene of him climbing behind the wheel in order to meet with me. Then I would relive the night he’d started me. Somehow the two were connected, my beginning and his end; the night when he turned from the window and knew me, while at the same time was yet to know me, the turning itself a kind of magic, yet ordinary enough.

  I use the word grief, but it is not quite accurate. There was something else besides grief in the way I felt, something marvellous, a thrum, a sense of connection; perhaps all grief has this in it, though it is seldom acknowledged. I’d always believed that I would see him again, that one day he would stand before me and gaze at me, letting me into his thoughts and memories once again, but now I knew I never would. Now I was like Jackson in his dream, running towards his mother’s open arms but never reaching them. Now I only had myself.

  That was what thrummed in me. That was the marvellous thing.

  13

  I am telling you my story, but it is not the whole story. You must have already guessed this. There are parts that remain untold, parts that fall to the ground like shavings from a wooden table being carved; they fall and are swept away, their potential an offering to the table itself.

  For example, in the years I lived in New York, I was taken to be exhibited in a number of galleries in the United States and Europe. You may wish to know about these experiences; I can’t deny that they shaped me, I can’t deny that I think of them often. But when I focus on the story I am telling you, this story, the prospect of speaking of them is like the prospect of crossing a vast plain.

  A vast plain is not a boon to every explorer. This explorer carries a map the size of a postage stamp; the map is for me, and it is also for you. Move closer; fall into the rhythm of my step; we have already come a good deal of the way.

  I was free, for a time. Free of Jackson. I watched, I listened, I became, in as far as is possible while still being part of the living world, a witness rather than an active participant. I continued to observe those who came to see me, transfixed by small details: the light on a girl’s cheek, the bleary eyes of man with a hangover, the hem half down on a woman’s dress. But I felt surprise when someone mentioned Jackson’s name in front of me, as if they’d been mistaken to link him to me, for I was outside him now; he was a piece of history while I was not, I was merely an observer of histor
y.

  I did not know that it is impossible to step outside of life in this way.

  But the separation felt real. I’d been made from his gestures; now I’d slipped beyond them. I was on my own, a renegade, a transgressor of some natural law – for through it all some inherent force was calling me, calling me, and it took all my strength to resist it.

  Looking back, I can see there was something not quite whole or even real about that period of freedom. Being free of something is not the same as being free.

  For I still thought of him, often. Through my very detachment, I grew curious. Who was this being who’d given me life, who’d moved around me like some gangly bird, feeding me, sometimes disparaging me, fussing obsessively, occasionally laughing at me? I no longer drifted haphazardly on the sensations of his gestures; now there was a distance between me and those gestures, a distance that brought with it a sense of my own direction. In me, there is no horizon, this is how he painted me; yet now a horizon spread itself, unseen but felt. Luxuriant, mysterious; I moved towards it.

  Around this time, I underwent a thorough cleaning. Paintings accumulate a lot of grime. I wasn’t old, yet I was ancient; I’d lived a sheltered life, yet I was weathered. A person merely coughing near a painting can leave detritus that does not bear describing. I was taken to a room and over many days two women wielding tiny brushes gently cleaned off years of that grime. As they worked they spoke to one another in hushed voices as if I were a child they didn’t want to wake. Afterwards I felt revitalised, fresh.