As we pulled into a station, I watched the sun on the white walls of buildings. The smell of fresh bread came from a platform and I remembered I hadn’t eaten. I wanted to leap off the carriage in search of that bread, but the train pulled away and went smoothly onwards towards the town where you began, to the room where you began, the place that this story is leading, to the end, to the beginning.
I thought of my husband. My love for you and my love for him were somehow linked as I sat on that train. His messy hair, the way he looked up from a book and opened his lips to speak.
Marriage was a script forever on the verge of being spoken. Through the window were trees, close and rushing.
I said the words inside myself, ‘Our marriage is over,’ and I imagined his face, a blankness coming over it, a blankness made of disbelief but also of certainty – as if he’d already known what he couldn’t have known – one inseparable from the other and forming together a strange ambivalence.
Words themselves were mute – I gave this thought to the rushing trees. My grandmother knew this. She never spoke of the words in her books, yet those words had lived in her and in the books themselves stacked in twisted piles and in the beat of her heart against mine. Perhaps the true life of a word lay in its silence.
Love was an undertow that pulled at me as I stepped off the train at East Hampton Station; I was caught in it, taken by it, drifting away from a familiar shore, a shore that until now I’d always considered home. How lovely to leave such a shore, to know that home was made less of the familiar than of what was new and unknown.
In the cab on the way to Springs, travelling along Fireplace Road, the very road on which Jackson was killed. The trees magnificent. The cab hugging the arc of the road, the same arc that must have been part of Jackson’s mind; he’d driven that road many times in the eleven years he’d lived there. A map in his mind. The trees flicked by and I approached the place where you were given life. I approached it, I have to admit, with barely a thought for Lee. How was that possible? I still don’t understand, except to say that now my thoughts revolved around you.
And, briefly, around Whitlam. As I took out my wallet and paid the driver, I remembered how he had enabled your purchase. But for him I would not have known you, I would not have visited you in the storage room, I would not have been standing here now in the sharp scent of pine trees. I remembered him as he’d been at the Guggenheim, looking upwards, his gaze holding mine. And then, as the cab pulled away and I walked towards the unassuming two- story house, set against a backdrop of trees and grass and the glimmer of water far off, I wondered if indeed it had been Whitlam at the Guggenheim. The whole experience at the museum, in fact my whole experience since I had arrived at Frankenthaler’s house the day before, had taken on the quality of a dream. It was as if I’d crossed some line as I stepped across her threshold, a line that I’d been inching towards ever since I began the search for the footprint. Or even earlier, ever since I was rescued from the red rock. Or earlier still, ever since I lay in my grandmother’s arms as a child and felt the words from the books she’d read beating in me. It is a dream I know I must wake from one day, and I will cry, I think – and if I don’t cry I will somehow manage to kiss you, just once.
26
I walked down the drive. It was a warm day, though cooler on Long Island than in New York. I passed the house, the windows looking at me, looking with the eyes of Jackson and Lee. Yes, now thoughts of Lee came; a flash of her painting in her upstairs studio, her gestures cramped, a longing in her to spread out.
I now knew that visiting the home of an artist is never to start from scratch; there is the life that was lived there, the art that was dreamed into being there. Buildings remember.
Passing down the side of the house, the barn came into view. There it was, grey-shingled and with a broad, crouching stance. You must know the smell of the summer grass, the trees so green, the glimmer of the creek just a little way distant. On the stretch of ground between the house and the barn, where the ground drops, sloping towards the rushes and the creek, stood a deer gazing at the house. It started when it saw me and ran off, its stride magnificent, effortless.
I entered the barn. I know you must be nervous now, perhaps you are trembling, although I can’t see it in you as I sit watching you; as I sit writing for you. You have such composure, a spectacular calm – no, calm isn’t quite right, you are not and have never been calm. Is it grace? No, you don’t have that either. I will come to it, or it will come to me, or else it will not and I will leave a gap. There is nothing wrong with a gap in a story, or a gap in a painting for that matter, a sense of completion can be a limiting thing, a choking thing.
Before I go on, I must tell you a little history about the floor of the barn. Again, this is not a digression.
Soon after you were painted, Jackson decided to have the barn lined so that it would not be so cold in winter, a season during which he’d barely been able to paint. You, apparently, were an exception, started on a freezing night, an unlikely night.
The walls were lined, the ceiling too, and a new floor had been put in over the old wooden one that let the cold up through its cracks. You know the cold I am talking about; you felt it on your own back.
Then, before Lee died she had the new floor removed, revealing once again the floor on which Jackson had worked.
Just inside the entryway, I changed my shoes for a little pair of green foam slippers which visitors must wear so as not to destroy the remaining paint on the floor. I padded into the room. Spread around me were the colours of you – white and orange and yellow and blue, and others besides. But these were the main ones. I must mention here that there was a guide who pointed all this out to me; I would not necessarily have known the exact colours of you besides blue, given all the years and miles between us, although there had been that reproduction in the brochure, the reproduction that contained the essence of you, that I’d crumpled and thrown to the floor, but that had somehow found its way back.
It was an odd feeling to look at these parts that didn’t make it into you, the parts that were left behind, the beginnings and ends of Jackson’s gestures that landed somewhere beyond you. It was then that I noticed the footprint. Jackson’s footprint. It was blue, the blue of you.
‘We love to contemplate blue,’ Goethe wrote, ‘not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.’
You drew me after you, over years, over an ocean.
His right foot. Seeing it there on the floor of the barn at first confused me, as I remembered my long-ago search for it in you, and then a feeling of luck swept through me, luck and incandescent irony, that I’d travelled all this way to find the very thing I’d searched for at home.
It was long and curved; from its narrow middle, I guessed he’d had a high instep. I felt a twinge of tenderness; there is something vulnerable about a high instep: it towers like a cliff, yet is delicate, tiny bone stacked on tiny bone.
The sun had gone from the window, the day receding, contracting, drawing back smoothly, almost as if it had never been. Have you ever noticed this about some days? They desire not to be showy or demonstrative, they slide away without so much as a sigh. Yet invariably they are the days most cherished, the very days you want to remember. Do they resist drawing attention to themselves so that some spell remains intact?
You loved him; I knew it then. Knew it as I stood in that room with the fading light, the floor made messy and alive by the remnants of you, tucked around his footprint like a blanket, a nest. You loved him. And it didn’t matter how I felt about him.
You loved him.
I loved you.
You were between us.
Through the window the light sank, the sky lost its sheen. I thought of my PhD, my reason for coming to New York in the first place; I thought of Helen Frankenthaler and of Lee Krasner, both of whom had stood in this very room looking at Jackson’s paintings, watching him paint – and in Lee’s case, making paintings of her own
for almost three decades. I thought of the notebooks stacked in my study at home, each filled with references and ideas, with the details of Lee’s life, and Helen’s life, with lines drawn from these details to theoretical notes in the margins about art and life. About feminism. And I knew that what lived in those notebooks would never see the light of day, I knew that what lived in them only lived to bring me here.
And that was when I laughed; that was when I sat on the floor and wept, that was when I fell down dead. Of course I didn’t do any of these things; just did them in my head while I stood staring at the print of Jackson’s right foot, the footprint made of you, the blue of you, and it came to me; how to go on, how to proceed. The PhD was no more. It was a story I had arrived at, not a theoretical argument. It was a story, but I would not tell it, for it was not mine to tell. It was yours and you would tell it.
Yes, you.
27
We are not collaborators. I would not go so far as to call us that. We are voices that find ourselves in the same room, this room, the capacious high-ceilinged whiteness of a public space. I can’t be sure, even now, exactly how I got here, let alone how you did. These words I write miss the mark, they fall like paint aimed at a canvas, their shape in the air perhaps more true to their meaning than when they make contact with the page, and there are some – many – that do not make it, that are half-formed, that carry a new idea and a certain promise, but then explode. The walls are riddled with their shrapnel.
My time with you is short. Now that I have told you this story, I am no longer a part of it. I recuse myself. But lastly, this:
Today the writing is over. I leave knowing I will not return, yet it has not yet happened – I write towards it.
It is a quarter to five, the little bell has sounded, I close my rose-gold notebook, the notebook that is in fact the last of a dozen or so that all look the same. I smile at the guard, he smiles back; I have never known his name and now it doesn’t matter.
No, let’s not be melodramatic. It has never mattered.
I turn away from you, from him, and I walk towards the escalator without a backward glance. It is crucial that this goodbye looks like all the other goodbyes, that this goodbye is disguised in the general series of goodbyes. This particular goodbye. I do not want to alert you to it.
But, there, I’ve written it, and now you know. Writing is a secret told before its time.
Outside, the sun is sinking. I pass the gum trees near the door and breathe their aroma, as I do every evening, as if it is a return to life.
It is a return to life.
I walk home through the streets lined with winter oaks, the sharp cry of cockatoos, smoke drifts from chimneys. I walk towards something that I have decided to do. My husband will be there, I know it, standing in the kitchen with a beer and a pleased look on his face. His work gives him much satisfaction.
To live is to know. I am the one living, I am the one walking past these thinking, feeling trees. I am the one who knows.
I reach the house and mount the steps, just three; in the nineteen fifties, when much of Canberra was built, there was a great levelling in what constituted a home. I open the door to a sea of white carpet made of fine wool in an intricate weave; it cost a bomb. We were mad to put it in, my mother said so, his mother too, but we were both sure. It cries out to me like a blank page. Perhaps that’s why I was sure. I don’t know why my husband was sure; he has never said. We are careful around it with drinks and food, and would never dream of owning a pet. We had it put in when we knew there would be no child; it was a kind of sealant on that hope.
I pause in the entryway to take off my shoes. A buffer of time, of space; I hear him in the kitchen, the clink of glass on the granite bench.
‘Darling?’ he calls.
I don’t answer, I am still in the buffer, no need to go beyond it; I remember Frankenthaler’s hallway, the magnificence of the paintings and how in those seconds I walked by them they carried me, lifted me. This entryway is empty but for two photographs. The first is of my grandmother propped up in bed, reading, her face blank with concentration, sunlight coming in the window behind her obscuring the title on the book.
I love this photograph for the presence of my grandmother and the absence of a title, an absence that suggests possibility, promise.
Next is a photo of my husband and me on our wedding day, looking happy; we were happy; we still are, but then we were happy without awareness. Awareness is a curse.
No. Awareness is a wonder: to see, to feel, to experience the crash, then walk away from the wreck.
I think of the words I must say in the kitchen, the words I am walking towards, the words I rehearsed on the train to Long Island. Our marriage is over. My legs tremble, my throat is dry.
The hum of the fridge.
I see my grandmother, dead, skin settling against the bones of her face.
Where is the ruthlessness I discovered as I looked at that face? Is it only for art that it lives?
Soon, any moment, I will enter the kitchen, I will see him, the man who wishes to understand me; he has always wished for this, ever since that day in the storage room when I searched for the footprint and he looked into my eyes with quiet exasperation.
‘What is it?’ he had asked.
‘It’s nothing. I thought it was something, but it’s nothing.’
I told the truth, yet it hid the very thing he wanted to know. I’ve never been able to grant him his wish.
Through the doorway a chair, its back bent. I go over to it and sit, and feel it thinking, thinking beneath me.
He stands at the bench holding a beer. I meet his gaze, his eyes bright; they are brown, with thick lashes.
All the months with you, I never considered the ruthlessness once; there was no need. It was there for art, available as air.
‘A drink?’ he says.
I don’t answer.
He pauses.
‘Alyssa?’
I remember how once he singed those lashes when smoking a bong. It had been years ago, we were camping in the bush, the bong sparked and he cried out, sprang to his feet, fists against his eyes, and I reached frantically for the bucket we’d kept aside for the washing up. I hurled the water at him, and he swayed as if it might topple him, and after a few drenching seconds he took his hands from his eyes, which were smaller and somehow brighter without the lashes, and we laughed until we cried, we laughed as if we could overcome anything – we laughed, gulping at the clear bush air, as if all at once we were certain of this.
Now words come, but they are different words, not those I had rehearsed. Perhaps they come from the place of ruthlessness after all, a place that brings forth what is unexpected yet inevitable, a place where rehearsed words can’t live, a place where the unknown constantly reveals itself to form some shape, some vessel, to hold life.
‘Pour me a beer,’ I say. ‘I finished the book.’
Part Three
Blue Poles
Don’t will it, don’t force it.
Let it come through in its own terms.
Lee Krasner
28
Of course, I knew it was the last time; I knew it because she wrote it. I knew it as she turned from me, her long hair tangled, catching the light that slanted in the tall window, weak winter light.
That was years ago. I have not seen her since. I don’t mean to sound cold or dismissive. I mean to get to the point, which is that I gave her this story, and she gave it back to me; it is a kind of breathing, in and out. I don’t know what she does these days, or if she even still lives.
What I do know is that after she left for the last time and night fell there was an unusual atmosphere inside the gallery. The paintings were restless; we murmured, grumbled – not to one another, as that was something we never did, but to ourselves as if in a troubled dream. The bulb in a streetlight outside flickered and cast shadows through the long window. Then something appeared in those shadows.
Hunched, with rasping b
reath it came. Triumph in its step, its eyes shone like dark pearls. It made its way across the room and turned towards me, and I knew, as it held my gaze, that here was the being that had badgered Alyssa, dogged her for the past year, the being that until now had never fully shown itself, the being that I had come to think of as Alyssa’s writer-self. It bore the same discontented splendour as Alyssa herself. Its clothes were ripped and ragged, though made of silk, and it carried something in the folds of these garments that it drew out and placed before me. I had no chance to study this thing, for now the being leaned closer, ever closer, and soft lips touched me and I knew the life in them. Then it turned and was gone.
I studied what it had left behind. A package. Wrapped in the same tattered silk, it moved – evidently, it was alive. I watched it all night, squirming beneath the silk like a kitten, until the morning crept in.
When the guard arrived he saw the squirming package immediately and went straight over to pick it up. Then he paused, gazing at its silk wrapping in wonder. There was embroidery around the edges – only then with the morning light could I see this – it was embroidered, in fact, with the same line of flowers as the handkerchief his sister had cried into the day he’d left home. He went and sat in his chair with the package in his lap, his cheeks flushed as if some wish or dream were hurrying in him. He pulled the silk loose from its contents and cast it through the air, letting it float back and forth, back and forth, watching its soft trajectory.
Night Blue Page 8