Night Blue

by Angela, O’Keeffe

  And no other child, I thought, had drawn that line in chalk.

  22

  I arrived at an old brownstone with generous windows, grand but not ostentatious. I rang the bell, heard it resound deeply, pleasingly inside. A woman of indeterminate age answered dressed in a suit, her hair pulled back in a severe, chic bun. She smiled in what I can only describe as a methodical way.

  ‘Can I help you?‘

  ‘My name is Alyssa. I’m here for the interview.’

  She gave no sign of comprehension.

  ‘The interview with Helen Frankenthaler,’ I said, my accent flat and boring as the road across the Nullarbor. I regretted it, pilloried it – it was this accent that made her unresponsive, I thought.

  Now she looked ever so slightly surprised.

  ‘But Helen is not here.’

  ‘Our appointment was for ten,’ I said, glancing at my watch, wondering if I had neglected to change the time on it correctly, although I knew I hadn’t neglected anything so important; my watch was my lifeline – my watch and my passport. If I lost everything else, even traveller’s cheques, I believed I could survive with these two things. The hands on it said two minutes to ten.

  ‘She’s in Paris. She won’t be back for a couple of weeks.’

  The news hit me in the gut, right where the Qantas macaroni cheese from the flight still sat. With shaking hands, I drew from my bag the letter I’d received from Frankenthaler. It was dog-eared and limp from being carted around, from being read over and over, not simply because of the wonder the words instilled in me and the fact that they proved I’d been accepted into the rarified air of a Frankenthaler interview; it was the writing itself, in Frankenthaler’s own hand, its long, beautiful loops and stark messiness, its regard for the space of the page, a loving, disciplined regard. It was a work of art in itself. There was a strawberry jam stain in one corner as I was in the habit of looking it over at breakfast, and it had a number of distinct, worn creases from being folded and unfolded. Despite its bedraggled state, its presence boosted me.

  I turned it towards the woman, her frame placed strategically in the middle of the doorway. I was still outside the building. Sunlight fell on my bare neck.

  She glanced at it; it only took a glance – it was, after all, just a few lines.

  I’m happy to meet with you to discuss my work, and what I

  know of Lee’s. Come to my house on 9/8 at 10 am.

  Sincerely,

  Helen Frankenthaler

  ‘You are supposed to be here on the eighth of September,’ the woman said, turning the letter towards me like a teacher bringing attention to a student’s bad mark. ‘Today is the ninth of August.’

  It took a moment to sink in. Such a simple thing, a devastating thing. In my reading of her letter, I had failed to transpose the numbers for month and day. Her intended 8 September had become in my reading 9 August. I was a month early.

  Silently, I blamed the Americans. Who the hell did they think they were to go changing the order of day and month, an order that I was vaguely adamant, though by no means sure, had started with the British, whose empire was way older? Then I blamed the Australians – what dickheads we were to follow the British and not the Americans in this.

  I burst into tears.

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ She sounded genuinely sympathetic.

  I nodded, I couldn’t speak.

  I followed her through the doorway and down a hallway of Frankenthalers. It was like walking through a forest, a sea, and a piece of my own heart; they were magnificent, even through my tears. There is a forthright tenderness about her works, their slowly creeping colours give a curious impression of weightlessness. They exude a dazzling confidence as well as an almost shy humility – she once said that as she paints she isn’t interested in saying anything at all, only in making a beautiful picture.

  My husband had not understood my need to make this trip. Now I must tell him it had all been for nothing.

  A marriage is a work of art.

  Was that work of art inside me now, as I passed by Frankenthaler’s paintings? Or did I exist inside it, a tiny part of a whole that stretched invisibly, irretrievably beyond me?

  At a white porcelain sink, handmade I suspected, looking like an exquisitely hewn piece of soap, she stopped, filled a glass and handed it to me.

  I drank, little sobs escaping between sips. Somehow I managed not to choke. Through a window at the end of the kitchen stood two trees in a small, spare garden. I watched their branches reaching into the space around them. That is what living is, that reaching, I thought.

  But you already know this.

  ‘Thank you,’ I whispered as I put the glass down in the sink and thought of my plane ticket; I could ring the airline and change it, go home later than planned so that I could still be here in a month for the real appointment. But I couldn’t miss work for that long, and even if I could – even if I quit my job – I wouldn’t have enough of my grandmother’s money to live in New York for a whole month, not even in the most pathetic hostel, not even on the street.

  If I’d known then what little importance money and work would soon have for me, what strange reversal my need for both would take, I might have gone there and then and made my bed on the street.

  23

  I made my way back to my hotel. I walked like a dog that’s been kicked, with a combination of shame and despair, but also a desire to make amends. In my room I lay on the bed, looked through the window, the next building so close I could make out the texture of the cement between the bricks, like a gritty icing. I imagined the sweat of the workers who’d put those bricks together.

  No, not sweat, that was a lazy metaphor. It was their thoughts that were real to me, as I studied the mottled red surface of the bricks. Thoughts of dinner, thoughts of sex, thoughts of sunlight on skin, thoughts of dragging on a cigarette and looking up at a half moon, thoughts that drifted into my own. Like smoke in a still room they hung, a still room inhabited by the failed interview with Frankenthaler, a room inhabited by regrets, the waste of my grandmother’s money and the messiness of my marriage and the child that never was. A room of unfinished starts.

  Outside the traffic hummed, punctuated by honking horns; it was hot, the air conditioner was noisy and inadequate, and no breeze made its way in through the open window. I got up and turned on the shower, removing the clothes of my shame: a pair of white Capri pants and a close- cut blouse I’d bought in DJs just before I’d left Canberra, paying way more for the blouse than I’d intended to but somehow bolstered by its expensive price tag. It was made of a floral polished cotton; it fitted my body like a song. I’d expected much of that blouse – I thought it would impress Frankenthaler and make her submit to my questions, even the questions I knew she wouldn’t want to answer, the ones that prickled her about her experience as a female artist in the upper echelon of American artists; an echelon that was even now, though especially in the nineteen fifties, dominated by men. Of course, this had been no more than wishful thinking that had come over me as I’d handed over the cash, enjoying the allure of the wish while knowing, like any seasoned consumer, that the item would fall far short.

  After a shower, I threw on a loose shift I’d had for years that had been crumpled in my suitcase and stepped out into the sweet furor of midtown Manhattan. I made my way down, down into the cool, elegantly dingy subway; I bought a ticket, the train pulled in.

  Once the passengers were off, the crowd on the platform pressed neatly forward. I watched the couple in front of me. He was tall and gangly, she thin and short with a stature something like my own, and she wore a loose T-shirt that on the back stated, Art for art’s sake. Their arms touched, and as the breeze from the arrival of a train on another platform whooshed through, I sensed that the arms spoke to one another, and what they said was central to who these two people were and what they wanted to create.

  You already know some version of this.

  24

&n
bsp; I made for the Museum of Modern Art. I wanted to see the Krasners and Frankenthalers on display there, among others. Stopping at a kerb to study my map I noticed that the Guggenheim was just a few blocks away. A sudden breeze blew my hair in my eyes, and as I swiped at the strands and wished I had worn it up, I decided to take a detour, and arrived at that marvelous building, its squat elegance somehow defiant after the tall structures I’d passed on the way. I went inside.

  There, at the top of its famous spiraling corridor, I came face to face with a Kandinsky. Do you know Kandinsky? He is well-known for his experiments with perspective, horizons slanted at will; he was a huge influence on the Cubists and in turn the Abstract Expressionists. (Though I must point out that a woman artist, a Swede named Hilma AF Klimt, pre-dated and some would say out-classed Kandinsky in her groundbreaking work with abstraction.)

  As I stood before the Kandinsky, with its disconcerting perspective, some sense of perspective was restored to me. Or was it faith? A certain kind of faith, that was? There was nothing solid or reliable about this faith; it was open-ended, made less of belief than of possibility. I’d read somewhere that the spiral of the Guggenheim widens as it makes its way up to signify, according to its architect Frank Lloyd Wright, ‘infinite possibility’. Was it the building itself that spoke to me just then? Whatever, my shame fell away, fell and rolled like a marble down that smooth spiral, and I was left with nothing but a great and pleasing tiredness. The bed in the cramped and stuffy hotel room with the neighbouring building slammed against the window was suddenly inviting. I turned to leave. Down the spiral went my awareness – down, down – to the head of a man walking up. Thick grey hair, something familiar about the way he moved, about his aquiline nose and his prominent top lip. He looked up, our eyes met.

  I almost fell.

  I held the railing.

  I knew him. But he did not know me, even though I was in the crowd that day years ago, that warm November afternoon when he spoke to me and me alone, his words redolent with disappointment and with hope; they’d made me cry. I’d cried for him, I’d cried for me, I’d cried for the sky and for the yellow sun. My tears were full of poetry – I couldn’t help it.

  ‘Whitlam,’ I whispered and sped down the spiral, having a flash of regret that I was not wearing my new blouse but this old shambles of a dress. That I was not at my best. As I went, others came up the spiral: a man, a woman and two children; an old man with a walking frame, another with a large hat; a woman with an umbrella; a child on a scooter; a group of teenagers carrying hockey sticks. I swerved around them, between them, this way, that. What a ridiculous barrage! And soon I could not see him, he’d disappeared in the thicket of limbs and unsuited-to-a-gallery objects they carried. When I reached the bottom, I looked up.

  Not a soul on that spiral now, empty as an orange peel. How could that be?

  For a moment it had been just him and me.

  Whitlam, who could have had another term as prime minister if the public hadn’t abandoned him; if so many hadn’t believed what the papers were saying, that the loan from Khemlani was a disastrous misstep that would leave the country broke. Not that you’d know anything about the Khemlani loan – or maybe you do, maybe you know more about it than I do, you who are so dear to Whitlam.

  Whitlam. And me. I could have met Frankenthaler if I hadn’t got the dates wrong, a stuff-up in its way far worse than the Khemlani loan. Because this had left me broke and with no interview, while Whitlam did not leave the country broke, not flat broke, anyway, despite what the papers said.

  That crowd on the spiral, where was it now? It had swallowed him. It had almost swallowed me.

  Am I mad? Is it the heat? Jet lag? Give me my bed, just give me my bed. I made my way towards the exit. Paused in a restroom, splashed water on my face, my poor face. I glanced at it in the mirror and laughed; there is something homeopathic in gazing at your own despondency.

  On a little table near the swinging doors at the exit was a pile of brochures. I took one and tucked it in my bag like one might a tissue, in case of future need. Then I was out in the bright sun, which beckoned, repelled, and I made my way back, the hotel was home, the hot, cramped room with the view of bricks. Home is a relative thing.

  Lying on the bed somewhat recovered, I studied the brochure. And came face to face with you. This is what I have been making my way toward, swimming through the flotsam of detail to arrive at. This is the turning point, not quite the denouement, still a way to go for that, but now the direction is clear – or becoming clear.

  Let us continue.

  A reproduction of you. My first thought was, You looked good. My second was that you you’d followed me, stalked me, all the way from Canberra to New York.

  My third thought was less reactive, more reflective. I remembered reading something the painter David Hockney had once said about a reproduction of a painting on a postcard or a bookmark (in this case, a brochure,) still carrying the spark, the life, of the original.

  ‘It’s you,’ I said, without speaking but speaking just the same. ‘It’s really you.’

  As you know, I had distanced myself from you since my days of visiting the storage room. And during my research for my PhD I had come to learn more of the details about Jackson’s behaviour, the violence against Lee that she denied all her life, even though friends attested to the bruises. Gradually you had become Jackson to me; I could not think of you without thinking of him. After the National Gallery of Australia opened, I never went to see you; instead I went to the see the Krasner and the Frankenthaler there, hanging in the next room to you. Now, face to face after so many years, face to face with the essence of you, my life changed.

  Of course, that is a cliché. Still, there is truth in it; it rings of truth like a struck tree. What I mean is that words were taking shape in me as I looked at you in that crumpled brochure, perhaps these words had been taking shape for years and only now had I become aware of them. I didn’t know what words: for now, they were mere shadows that would soon reveal the shapes that formed them. People think that writers take whatever words they want from the world, but it is never like that. The world must offer them first.

  I read the brochure. It was for the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center on Long Island, just two hours from Manhattan by train, comprising the house and the barn/studio where Jackson and Lee had lived and worked – and where you began. It was the first I’d heard of the centre. In all my research into Lee’s work, I had not come across it. I had read about the barn in Springs that had been Jackson’s studio, and later Lee’s studio. But it had never occurred to me to find out what had become of it after her death. The studios of dead artists had never interested me. What had mattered, to me, was the art that came out of them.

  The brochure claimed that Lee had made provisions for the centre in her will. It made much of the barn in which Jackson had painted, the floor that showed remnants of some of his best-known paintings, including you. The emphasis on Jackson put me off. I knew that Lee had painted in that barn for far longer than he had. Yet it was presented as his barn and his floor. I crumpled the brochure and threw it aside. I heard it land softly on the carpet.

  I slept, the deep surging sleep of jet lag, and when I woke you were crumpled beside me on the sheet; I don’t know how you got there, I’d thrown you on the floor, but there you were.

  I rose on one elbow. I reached out to you and flattened you out as best I could, my movements slow and tentative, as if you contained some magic, some mystery I might arrive at only if I proceeded with great care. When you were flat as I could manage, I studied you, the blue poles like the masts of ships, the skeins of colour around them a kind of sea. I thought of Jackson’s footprint, and how I’d searched for it in that sea, searched for it on every one of my visits to the storage room, searched with a kind of cold precision. I’d never once found even a hint of it. I’d always left that room feeling I’d seen nothing.

  Now, all at once, I saw you.

 
I took a breath.

  Once, when my husband was away in another city for work, he called me and asked me to find some contract he had been working on. I went to his study, the light coming in from a streetlight and shining into the room, the faint smell of paper and coffee, a certain tightness in the air as I observed his neatly stacked books and the placement of the waste-paper basket, the pens in a row on his desk. I opened the drawer and went through each of the papers inside, but I could not find the contract. When he came home the following morning, there it was, in the very drawer in which I’d searched. He strode to where I sat reading in my study; I could hear the fury in his footsteps. He stood in the doorway and held the papers out to me with a look of wounded triumph.

  ‘They were right where I said they were!’

  I looked across at him, the book I’d been reading curled in my lap like a cat – I have noticed this about books, they lose their angular shape as you read them and become living, rounded, warm. Some feeling shifted in him as he looked at me, his eyes brightened. He shook his head and laughed with a sort of pleading exasperation.

  ‘You’re so dreamy sometimes,’ he said.

  I had not seen those papers, even though I’d searched for them with a specific image of them in my mind – was it this that had caused me to pass over them?

  Was it the same when I’d looked at you? Had I been so busy looking for what I’d expected to see, thought it my duty to see, that I’d failed to see you?

  25

  I sat on the train to Long Island, passing through the backs of The Hamptons townships, the train rumbling beneath me. Love in retrospect is the deepest of loves. Time tugs at it. I remembered my visits to you in storage, that still, dull room. I remembered my search for the footprint and how I’d believed that finding it would be a kind of irrefutable proof. Proof that you and Jackson were inseparable, one and the same, proof that a work of art can never exist free of the artist who created it – something like that. And yet knowing in some deep part of myself that there was nothing but space ahead of me as I searched, that nothing was foretold or preconceived, that it was just space I was reaching into, nothing more.