Night Blue

by Angela, O’Keeffe

  The cleaning loosened something in me. To call it an uncovered memory is too simplistic because it did not arrive whole, nor did I find it particularly compelling, at first. It began as no more than a tiny bright thing, a thing I might have dismissed, for how many tiny bright things are we made of?

  Yet I found myself circling it, the way I imagine one circles a tree when out for a walk, for no reason other than a vague dreaminess, and the more I circled the more I felt drawn in. I watched, I listened, inching my way around as the earth inches around the sun, a natural circling, instinctive, until one day the tiny bright thing glimmered in an odd way, a new way. I drew closer; the glimmer suddenly dimmed, like the dimness of a doorway; I went in.

  And there it lay. A piece of something forgotten. Catching the light – and now gathering some inner momentum.

  It moved, it breathed. Though it had the feel of the other memories Jackson had given me, this memory was fundamentally different. Firstly, it was not a single memory but a group of memories that each followed the same theme, the same basic storyline: he got drunk and pulled a tablecloth off a table at a friend’s house causing the roast turkey, plates and wineglasses to crash spectacularly to the floor; he threw a chair through a window, pieces of glass scattering like stars. Years later, I overheard a visitor say that when an artist friend of Jackson’s, Franz Kline, was told of Jackson’s death, he declared, ‘He painted the whole sky,’ and I thought of that glass; it was as if he’d wanted to see inside the sky, to understand it in the moment it shattered.

  Guests shouted at Jackson, lipstick-mouthed women swore; men held him by the shoulders, told him to fuck off. Lee berated him, her skinny arms pounding him, while at the same time defending him, turning her large, burning eyes on the host who stood aghast at the roast dinner she’d spent hours creating decimated on the floor – ‘Leave him alone! You know he doesn’t mean it.’ Jackson took another guest’s hat from her head and tore it to pieces.

  These are stories you may have heard before. They are part of the legend of Jackson Pollock, brilliant artist, hard drinker, violent, troubled soul. You might find it impossible to believe that I did not know of these stories. In retrospect, some of them must have been narrated, or thought about by people who stood in front of me across the decades. But other than the word drunk, I’d taken in none of their details. Even the violent way he’d ripped me from my frame after the exhibition in New York hadn’t prepared me for what I might later hear. People refer to ‘selective hearing’ as if it were some aberration, but hearing is never otherwise.

  For a while, I could rationalise these memories. I could assign them some place in the arc of my life, a place that I knew instinctively was located on the floor of the barn on the day Jackson finished me, when he lay the plank of timber against me with that strange absence of feeling, an absence of feeling that had dogged me, puzzled me all my life.

  Some years earlier, I’d heard a conversation between two art critics who came to see me.

  ‘He didn’t know how to finish it,’ one said, as he scribbled in a notebook.

  ‘The poles were a kind of exit,’ said the other. ‘A solution to something he couldn’t solve.’

  I thought back to that final afternoon. How he’d left the barn and returned with the plank of timber, how he’d kicked off his boots for what would be his last dance around me. The blue poles now became imbued with meaning for me: he’d painted them as a kind of wall or sealant on these very memories.

  And now they’d broken free.

  I will relate one of the memories in detail here, for it is crucial to what follows in this story. I was with Jackson in the house where he and Lee lived, just thirty or so feet from the barn. The house was wooden, two storeyed, and on this particular day it smelled of a lemon pudding that Lee had cooked and left cooling on the sideboard. It was late afternoon, the sun slanted in through the windows. Jackson stood in the kitchen before an open drawer. He was tall, the drawer far below, he almost had to stoop to reach the handle. He took something out, it glinted – I wasn’t sure, at first, what it was.

  He turned. The room was large, open. He’d knocked down the wall between kitchen and dining room himself a few years earlier during a period of no drinking, some days with the help of a hired labourer; he’d remodelled the place with his own hands, his own sweat – he was proud of that.

  ‘Jackson, you could have been a builder,’ the labourer had said one afternoon over a cup of tea and a sandwich, in a tone that suggested Jackson had missed his calling – or that the calling he’d responded to fell far short.

  Jackson had laughed and mumbled, ‘Maybe you’re right.’ He was painting well at the time, and saw no reason to take offence.

  On the smooth oval table was an assortment of newspapers, magazines, a stack of books where, on the spine of one, was printed, Picasso, fifty years of his art. Jackson flinched. He hated Picasso, chiefly because he loved him. He remembered once saying to a friend, ‘That bastard Picasso has already done everything.’ Which friend he could not now be sure, maybe a friend who was no longer a friend; there were plenty of those.

  On the wall beyond the table was a painting stretching some twenty feet, predominantly black and white, a painting he remembered Clement Greenberg declaring, in his carefully modulated tones, ‘One of your best, Jackson, it is perfectly flat, there are no illusions.’ High praise from one who held ‘the exploration of flatness’ and the ‘absence of 3D illusion’ as keys to good painting. He couldn’t tell Clem that he didn’t think in those terms when he painted; that rather the canvas drew life from him, through him, and life was never flat. What critics saw, and championed, was not how painting was arrived at, but critics had influence and so you let them think they knew. It was some time ago that Greenberg had said this, years, months, he wasn’t sure. When he couldn’t paint – like right now – when it just wouldn’t come (not good painting, anyway), when that happened the gulf between what he’d once done and could no longer do was immeasurable.

  He made his way past the painting pretending not to see it, dodging it as he might a boring acquaintance on the street. He reached the bottom of the staircase, hand gripping the rail he turned and ran up, taking the stairs two at a time. At the top he paused, his legs shaking like those of a newborn foal. Being drunk made him like this, like he was about to stumble yet his whole life was spread before him, new.

  He drew a breath. And looked down at the knife in his hand.

  It was one he used to fillet fish in the backyard. Long and narrow to reach the delicate corners. He did the filleting where the ground dropped away towards the creek, hauling a little table out there in the sun. It was in the same spot that once, in the early morning, he’d seen a deer emerge from the trees and stare at the house and the barn. He’d watched it from the kitchen window as he filled the kettle, his head throbbing and oversized from a hangover, the kettle shuddering as the water went in and making his head worse; he’d watched it stare and stare, as if buildings were a puzzle that could never be solved.

  But here, now, at the top of the stairs.

  He called his wife’s name. It came out wrong, it wasn’t her name, but it didn’t matter, the word didn’t matter, it was tone and intention that mattered, not a word; tone and intention told the story – it was how he painted, too.

  He listened. She was quiet, like a line of paint that must hide behind the other lines. She was quiet in that way.

  He broke into a run along the hallway, rooms beckoning either side. He passed the studio where she painted, where she copied him, or tried to, he thought, the room too cramped for her to really spread out, for her to work to his scale; she copied him and it embarrassed him, yet he knew she had something, something beyond his grasp.

  His footsteps thundered in his cheeks as he ran, but he was careful, hearing his mother’s voice in his head; she always knew the right thing, his mother.

  Jackson, be careful of the knife.

  He entered the room where he knew she
was. Her silence told him, her silence brought him, a force of nature, like the silence of birds telling the night to come. His slippers at the end of the bed side by side. On the bed a quilt made by his mother, the shapes of sewn fabric sharp, decisive. He bent, reached under, his wife’s flesh soft as a fish’s, but warm. He dragged her out.

  Grunting, she was out of place as she came up, ruddy- faced from some exertion not apparent to him; he was not the cause, he was simply here, the flesh of her upper arm in his hand. She blinked, her eyes bright. He pulled her close so that he did not have to see those eyes that saw everything, knew everything. Those eyes were her secret; his own secrets he could live with – just. He had ways of letting them live on the canvas, hiding them in among the lines, yet they shone like eyes in a forest. He drew her to him, her cheek hard against his ear, an odd angle, a crooked embrace. He was careful of the knife, the tip near her ribs, he didn’t want it to touch her heart; he feared her heart, its dark red pulse. He could never start a painting with red. He squeezed her to him, his arms strong; knocking out the wall downstairs had done that – he could have been a builder. She let out a moan. When would she realise that her own strength was greater, not brute strength but the strength of her eyes, the strength of her heart? When would she know that she could crush him from those very places?

  Looking down, his gaze rested on the slippers. Something tender about the left one, a slight lump in the tartan fabric where his big toe went – and now a whole landscape shifted in him, sliding sideways. You could never predict, no matter how sure, no matter how careful; it was like the fall of paint, a thing of mystery, a holy thing. He let her go, sat on the bed and sobbed.

  ‘Jackson.’

  Her breath on his head. She took the knife from him, as if it were a whistle or a sweet, a thing a mother might confiscate, and then his hand was empty and strange, his right hand, his painting hand; it dangled by the bed, and he stared at it, just stared.

  14

  I experienced a period of numbness after this. Of course, I felt something but numbness is the closest word. Words are inaccurate, words miss the mark; they stand in for what is elusive. I am not, in fact, good with words, words are not my forte – certainly they were not Jackson’s. Stories abound of his inarticulate drunkenness, but even in sobriety he was often silent, unable to express himself. He’d make a start, then stumble, abscond. Or so I have heard from the people who come to see me – from the guides and some of the guards, from those who speak and think and breathe before me and who give me a different kind of life to the one Jackson gave to me. It is a life of ongoing-ness. Or, they do not give me this life but rather give me the opportunity to take it. Opportunity – now, that is living.

  The days turned around me. In the morning, the first influx of light and visitors with their hushed and shuffling contemplation; sometimes the running, or the cry, of children; sometimes the cough of an old man. At the end of the day the emptying, the gallery like an upturned vessel, and the quiet, grey-toned night holding sway.

  I must make it clear that I was not shocked by, nor even particularly disapproving of Jackson’s behaviour as witnessed in these memories. I am not in any position to judge. In fact, I lack judgement. I am made of feeling that constantly shifts, a continuum, an endless sentence. While judgement, as far as I can make out, is a full stop. Nor am I suggesting that judgement is a bad thing – often I wish I possessed it. But for some it is an easy thing, and perhaps ease is its downfall.

  What concerned me was that Jackson had kept these memories from me, that there’d been something withheld; withholding is a kind of leaving, an abandonment, don’t you think? I had not forgotten how he’d shut me out when I’d returned to the barn after the exhibition at Janis Gallery. How he’d circled the next painting as if it were the centre of his life, and not me.

  Yet there was a centre to my own life. I knew this. And I knew that there was a brightness to that centre. The brightness towards which this story draws.

  The story is a moth; its destiny is light.

  The period of numbness passed as the rhythm of the days reached into me, a rhythm brought to me by the visitors to the gallery, brought through their gaze and through their thoughts and through their very breath, brought like water or sunlight to an ailing plant. As all this took effect on me a sustained sense of feeling returned – and with it another memory.

  The artist, the one I’d heard spoken of, the one said to have been with Jackson the night I began. There he was coming in the door of the barn. I was with Jackson at the window, still in that timeless place. He came in the door and I saw he had a beard and pale eyes. He glanced at me then looked shyly away. Now both men stood over me, the smell of cigarettes and beer. I hovered beneath them, hopeful, uncertain. The shy one held a brush.

  ‘Show me how you do it,’ Jackson said, and the man pressed his lips in concentration and made a mark. I barely felt it. It lay there, apologetic; it was not a part of me. Jackson laughed. He picked up a tin of paint, staggered towards me, stopped short.

  ‘I’ll show you,’ he said. ‘I’ll fucking show you how it’s done.’

  Now I knew what I had long suspected: that the past was changeable, unfixed. This was not a memory that Jackson had withheld from me, but a memory of my own that I had overlooked.

  Or had I merely invented it? In an attempt to match what I had witnessed in Washington before I left America, Lee Krasner’s pause before answering the question, ‘Was it painted by anyone besides Jackson Pollock?’ To match the stories I’d heard ever since arriving in Australia, stories that claimed I’d been painted by a couple of drunks? I didn’t know. I still don’t.

  What I did know was that none of it mattered except in relation to what might happen next. I was in thrall to the future.

  15

  There was a guard who sat in a chair beside me wearing a suit as dark as his hair. His gaze was strong, his lips tender. He rarely looked at me. His job was to not look at me, his job was to look at those who looked at me, to make sure they didn’t step too close. There have been many guards over the years. Like most, he had little interest in me; to him I was simply a part of his job, yet unlike most he was open to me. He opened himself as one might a window. And I came to know much about him, or actually not that much. Rather, I came to know the things about him that mattered to him. Which were magnificent, and few.

  He came from a country far away, I never knew its name. His family still lived there, above a beach on a craggy ridge where squat, large-leafed shrubs grew. He often thought of that place. And of his sister standing on the ridge the day he left, the blue sky behind her softened by long swathes of cloud. She was not aware of the sky’s beauty, she was busy sobbing into a handkerchief.

  The handkerchief was edged with flowers their grandmother had embroidered, the same grandmother who’d died the year before he left that country, and whose old voice still lived in the house on the ridge, in the same way that it still lived in the flowers on the handkerchief, in their colour and shape and in their small, pointed happiness. He could tell no one about this; it was not a sane thing to say out loud. But he could think it. Thinking was the great freedom.

  His is a story of longing. I don’t know what he longed for, only that he longed, only that longing shone from him like light from a baby’s eyes. I don’t even know if he himself knew. Perhaps it is not necessary to know our longings but merely to sense the shape of them. What was strongest in him, as far as I could tell, was the image of his sister crying on the day he left – or, more precisely, the sky behind her as she cried. He thought about that sky as he sat for hours at a time in the gallery, and gradually, over the days and weeks, his longing seeped into the space around him. It unfurled on the floor like a cat. It drifted in the air like a scent.

  A longing for home? For family? For a certain slice of sky? Or for something else that merely contained the essence of these things? I don’t know. What is important to this story – and you see here there is a dogged selfis
hness to a story – is that his longing spread across the floor of the gallery and it tipped this way and that, and I gazed at it as it tipped, gazed at it lazily, day in, day out; gazed at it like it was nothing to me, a mere distraction, which is the surest way to let something in.

  Soon after, I was visited by a woman – the she who is central to this story. You know her slightly already; by the end, you will know her well. She came to see me at the right time and in the right frame of mind for the job she had to do. I emphasise the timing deliberately. She arrived when my longing was awakened.

  A longing for what?

  Again, to specify longing is perhaps anathema, but I will try – for you I will try. A longing for Jackson? Let’s say it was. Or let’s say that whatever it was came out of a longing for Jackson. This whole story, after all, has been spun from a single night.

  She arrived early, just as the gallery opened, her long, ochre- brown hair wild and uncombed. Right away she looked familiar, but it took me some moments to place her. It had been twenty years since we’d last met.

  Alyssa. The woman who’d come to the storage room, the woman whose grandmother had rescued her from the rock, the woman who’d searched for something in me.

  Her gaze travelled over me with delicate intensity; she looked at me the way I imagine people look at the sea, like there was something calm and vast taking shape in her. I observed her hair with its thin streaks of grey, I observed the lines on her forehead and her cheeks falling softly, loosely; she was young but she was old. She was at the age when women, some women, begin to live.

  She sat on the wooden bench before me and from her bag took a notebook and a pen. The notebook was bound in rose gold, a thing of beauty. She opened it and began to write. She wrote for some time, every now and then pausing to gaze at me, then going back to the notebook. Sometimes she crossed out words furiously, other times she sat and wrote nothing, gazing at me and then at the floor, at her foot, at her hand. Once in a while she got up and stretched, her arms graceful, impossibly thin, then she sat and took up the notebook again. I wondered what she was writing and, more pertinently, why she was writing it here in front of me. There’d been others who’d sat on that bench and written in notebooks, a few had hauled in the latest writing device, a laptop. But none had sat for a whole day.