Resting there like a wetted corpse, next to this particular lover—who has always looked a little like a Nabokov nymphet to him, her pale taut skin, her pointy tits and hip bones, her girlboy frame, one of those women with an eternally twelve-year-old body—he thinks of his life as a series of women’s bodies. Women’s bodies in every room he enters, every country, every gallery, every bar, every store or post office or restaurant. Married women and single women, professional women and working girls, women in therapy and women with money and women who barely spoke English, junkie women and artist women and famous women and skid-row women and all-used-up women and somebody’s-daughter women. Women of every age. Riders on the storm. He drinks.
He has a memory of his ex-wife. The body of her, the devouring wife love hole. He thinks of the day he left her, remembers thinking something like, It’s easy. I can leave the room, the house, the country. I can stop pretending to like Miles Davis and Nina Simone and Frida fucking Kahlo and Marguerite Duras. I can go to another house or state or country, and women who are not American might come sit on my face.
Faces are what he paints. Abstract faces, over and over and over again. He thinks of something someone said to him at his last show, entitled “I Am Cross with God: Intimate Portraits,” a series of abstract faces, eight feet by eight feet. The person had said, “Why do the faces look like they are in pain?” It’d been half an hour into the opening, and he’d had seven glasses of wine. And he’d said back, “The next time you kiss someone you love, open your eyes. Think about what their face looks like. That close. That familiar. So familiar you can’t bear it. Distorted.” Then he walked away, grabbing two of the wine bottles on his way like a cowboy with a pair of revolvers.
His ex-wife’s face comes again. But this memory, it’s not like other people’s memories. It’s not a vision of the past. It’s not a flashback. It’s all inside a now. Because that’s how he lives. Inside a now. Like dreams work. An image becomes a story becomes a life becomes a man and then it’s now. The now of wine, the now of sex, the now of painting. So even though the now of her is far away, in a little white hospital room, he sees the used-to-be-them in a now.
The writer. The painter. She used to wear his pants. He used to wear her skirts. She had a half-shaved head. His hair went down past the middle of his back. She liked it in the ass. He liked it on his back. She made the money. He cooked the food. Still life with wife.
He sees his wife’s face. In the kitchen of their then-house. He sees the features of her face, in color and brushstroke. He walks through their then-kitchen, out the back door, on his way to his backyard studio. She turns from the sink to say, “I love you.” He thinks: How can you love me? That’s some fucked-up love. That’s mother love. Relentless and all-consuming. Then he thinks: love is an abstract word coming from a face hole.
In his mind’s eye, then, her face becomes formless. He watches himself moving away, out of the wifehouse. Closing the door. Walking into the then-studio behind the house of her. Closing a second door. A room not the house, not her. A room of himself. The room of his art. And then the image of his self overtakes all the images of women.
Inside the then-image of himself, he sits in his studio in the dark. His hand travels his face, a face unmade from the dark, the hand desiring, fingers longing for form. Five holes: Eyes. Nostrils. Mouth. His face. He has entered this room hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. He always leaves as if he has fallen out of reality. What is a man in the face of art? A little cartoon.
He knows what is happening back inside the house. Inside the house it is night. Sitcoms and cable news and commercials repeat themselves aimlessly. People are dying, commentators narrating. Food sits hiding inside the dull hum of the refrigerator. Marriage objects make sounds and images: the refrigerator and stove and television and bed. Wifehouse. These thoughts are killing him. If he cannot eject them, he will die. Certainly he cannot paint with even their faintest echo in his mind.
In the then of him, he pulls a joint from his pocket, lights it blind. The end glows red for an instant as he inhales what he hopes will be a nothingness. Within seconds things get simpler. If he can just inhale the nothingness and dark around him and breathe out the light of the wifehouse behind him, he won’t have to kill himself. Then he can turn the lamp on. Make his way to the table of brushes and thinner and linseed and tubes and layers of color more familiar than hands.
The ritual is always the same. Hours of pacing and lulling the skull to knock out the thinking. Going liquid. Wine. In bottles and jugs and half-filled jars. Wine and wine and wine and more wine. Lose the mind. Lose it. Jim Morrison. More wine. Thought begins to leave, the joint diminishes to nothing, as if there is still a god, merciful and intimate. He waits for even his teeth to feel mysterious to him.
Comfortably lost inside this image of himself, he keeps following it. His then-self drinks a bottle of wine in about the time it takes to utter a few of her carefully crafted sentences. It pours down his chin and jaw. It burns a bit in his chest. He decides to remove all of his clothes. He squirts a wad of indigo into his palm. He crosses the room abruptly. Thoughtlessly. He assaults the canvas with a handful of indigo, mudlike. Then he retreats, returns to the table. He doesn’t need to look down. His hands read like Braille the piles of tools and cylindrical thick tubes of color, the varying hairs of brushes, jars filled with thin liquid or liquid thick as the jelly of an eye, until his hand unburies a fat half-squeezed tube of onyx.
He consumes another half bottle of wine in the space of time most people would say they were considering an idea, or looking at an object with interest. He removes the pinch-small plastic white lid between thumb and forefinger, throws it on the floor with its fellow refuse. He fills the palm of his hand with onyx. Squeezes his two hands together. The room is a pierced aroma of turpentine, linseed, and pure color. He closes his eyes and paints his face. He smears out the searching of his eye valleys, makes a prayer shape around his nose, gives his mouth a wide black swipe. He stops. He has de-faced himself. He laughs. He drinks. Then he smears the color farther down his neck, to the bones between his shoulders.
This image of himself—it’s turning him on in the present, like it did in the past. Into this house we’re born. Into this world we’re thrown.
Reloading, his then-him hands move down his chest and gut in wild circles toward his dick. A face peering up, a single eye, grotesquely animal. He squeezes as if his dick were a tube of paint. A small ooze of fluid pearls up. He cups his balls. He squeezes another tube of paint and covers his cock, cool thick wet, and makes hand-dick friction sliding up and down, cold to hot. His hips are animal, his head is almost too heavy to hold up. His teeth clench his eyes close his skin sweats his spine nerve and muscle flex break down meaning. Near release he moves his free hand to his asshole and slides a painted finger inside himself. His ass makes sucking noises and his dick hand handles the coming sticking like oil and water, these fluids out of whack and slicked together. His asshole contracts in budding juiced thrusts until his cock, speechless, handless, faceless, dissolves into paint and cum.
His breathing slows. He reaches out to the painter’s table and feels. A knife is closer to his hand than a brush. This is of no great consequence. He cuts. Not at the wrist. At his own jaw, from the ear down some, like a quote. Warm fluid eases in a stream down his neck, like the pool at the tip and the tiny stream down the shaft of his cock. His face is open. His mouth fills with saliva. His teeth calm and drown.
Then and only then does he move with real intention to the canvas. There is nothing wrong with this picture. There is nothing wrong with him. He presses himself against the canvas and pieces of a body smudge random chaotic forms onto white. He paints wildly, physically, with his body, his hands, brushes, oils, fluids, blood. For this is part of his claim to fame—his use of bodily fluids mixed with paint to paint giant abstract faces. He paints with the fluids of a self outside language and thought, he paints in barbaric attacks of color on the canvas of wh
ite—fight-back black or blood-born Alizarin crimson, Prussian blue, burnt sienna.
It is only inside abstraction and expression and chaos that he is alive.
In the vacuum left from his spent body, he has again painted an abstract face. Eight feet by eight feet. It might be a man’s face and it might be a woman’s face. Or both.
In the image of his past-him—he remembers—he passes out. But in his present he keeps watching that man all the way to morning.
Morning finds him smoking a cigarette, spent and hunched over and thoughtful. He’s supposed to go back into the house. The house of the writer and the painter, husband and wife. Still life with wife. If he goes back inside the house, he thinks, he will die. It doesn’t matter what love is. If it even exists. If he goes back inside domesticity, he will die. For him it’s this: wife or death.
In the image of the then-him, he stubs out the cigarette and pinches the skin at the cut near his jaw until it bleeds. He half-assedly wipes himself down with a hundred turpentine wipes and puts his clothes back on. His skin stings like fuck. He looks like he’s been in some kind of fire or explosion. If he lit a match right now, he’d burst into flames. He bites the cork out of a jug of wine, holds its mouth to his, and drinks. He tastes blood and wine. He wishes its mouth would drown his. Tears happen hot. Then evaporate against his turpentine skin.
That is when it happens. He looks at the painting of the face. It might be a man’s face and it might be a woman’s face and it might be both. He walks not back into the house, but to the car. He drives not to the store, not to some familiar and ordinary place in their lives, not the corner bar, not the park, not the hills. He drives downtown and gets out of the car and walks to the door of the apartment of a woman less than half his age, half his life. He knocks on her door with his wounds and smeared with paint and smelling of shit and semen and oils and morning wine and she opens the door. He walks into a room away from his wife life and into the drama of women’s bodies. Again. He places his hands on her breasts. Her twat. Her ass. He does not look her in the eye. His gaze is drawn elsewhere. When they embrace, and it is the embrace of carnal excess, hips ground together, chests pushing for breath, he is pulling her head back by the hair, he is turning her face to animal, he is looking at the white wall behind her. Its blankness. He presses her against it and fucks and fucks her. He sees it and sees it on the wall behind her—the image of the face. The last face he ever painted.
His ex-wife’s face abstracted beyond recognition.
I love you, I did, I loved you to death.
Then he hears the performance artist snort out of her snore and murmur something and it’s tonight again, and he turns to the current nymphet woman’s body, which is all of their bodies, and puts his hand between her legs. Jim Morrison. Wine. A woman’s body. Sex. He wakes the performance artist. Fucks her. He’s himself again. Yes.
The Playwright
Night. Interior. Living room. The playwright, the poet, and the filmmaker are together in the filmmaker and writer’s house. They all have a glass of scotch. It’s midnight. The poet has a plan. She’s laying it on them.
THE POET. Look. It’s a direct action. We have to go get her.
THE FILMMAKER. Right. Let’s spring her from that hell. Just what she needs. Hospitals are death houses.
THE PLAYWRIGHT. Oh my god. You’re not talking about getting her out of the hospital. Are you?
THE POET. No. I’m not talking about her at all.
The playwright’s circle rubbing between his thumb and forefinger seizes up, interrupted. The filmmaker jerks his head up.
THE FILMMAKER. What? Then what are we talking about?
THE POET. I’m talking about the girl.
THE FILMMAKER. What girl?
THE POET. You know what girl. The girl in the photo.
The filmmaker stands up the way a man stands up when he’s thinking, Wait just a goddamn minute here.
THE FILMMAKER. Wait just a goddamn minute here. That’s crazy. What are you talking about?
THE POET. I said, we’re going to go get the girl. I know people. Just-this-side-of-criminal people. We can track her down. We know what town she lived in. We know what happened there, and when. And we have a photo. And we know the photographer who took the photo. I’m saying I can find her.
THE FILMMAKER. That’s insane. You want to fly back to Europe and steal a human?
THE POET. Oh, I can find her.
THE FILMMAKER. Oh, really. Fine. Right. You’re just going to go pluck a girl we don’t know from a war zone and . . . Whatever. This is ridiculous. Okay, let’s say you go all the way to Eastern Europe and you . . . you find this girl. Which is insane. What then? What the hell happens then?
THE POET. What then? We bring her here. To live with us.
The filmmaker and the playwright both start speaking at once in great incredulous waves of objections. She backs up a bit and looks at them. She crosses her arms and waits for them to peter out.
THE POET. Are you two finished? Okay, then listen. Think about it. What kind of life does this girl have there, anyway?
THE FILMMAKER. Remind me why I care? She’s got nothing to do with me. With my wife. I’d rather just go get my wife.
THE POET. Listen. I know what I’m talking about. It’s about the girl. Her family’s atomized, she’s probably living some corpse life in some pocket of hell. I mean, shit, remember how they tracked down that green-eyed Afghan girl? And she’s now a leather-faced crone? Because her life went from misery and shit to more monotonous and meaningless misery and shit, while her famous photo went ’round and ’round the world making that McCurry guy famous? I say we do it.
THE PLAYWRIGHT. Do what, precisely?
THE POET. We do what our rising-star photographer failed to do. What all photojournalists fail to do. We go get her out of that death of a life before she dies.
THE FILMMAKER. For the love of God. What does this have to do with my wife?
THE PLAYWRIGHT. Whatever. This is crazy. So let’s pretend it’s even possible to pursue this fantasy. What does it accomplish? What is the purpose? How does it speed my sister’s recovery from wherever she is?
THE POET. Listen to me. This will matter. To your wife. To your sister. I don’t expect you to understand. Either of you. But you are just going to have to trust me on this. It’s a . . . (She searches the ceiling.) It’s a woman thing. If we get this girl out of her deadly circumstance and bring her here and give her a chance at a real life, it will help your wife. Your sister. The only friend I’ve ever given a damn about in my entire life.
THE FILMMAKER. You’re serious. You are being serious?
THE POET. Look. Did you ever hear of Kevin Carter? You know, Kevin Carter. The South African photographer who took the picture of the vulture stalking a starving girl. He won a Pulitzer for that picture. Two months later he connected a hose to the exhaust pipe of his pickup truck and quietly suicided. They say he’d come back from assignments and lapse into bouts of crying, drinking, drugs. Sometimes he’d sleep for days. After he shot his prizewinning picture, they say he sat under a tree and cried and chain-smoked and couldn’t get his mind away from the horror of what he saw. He checked out. People referred to him as “gone.”
THE PLAYWRIGHT. Yeah. I remember. He was universally condemned for not helping the girl in the picture. He caught all kinds of shit. Said he was haunted by memories of killings, corpses, starving or wounded children, and trigger-happy madmen. So he offed himself.
THE POET. Exactly. So you get it?
The filmmaker stares at her blankly and the playwright’s eye twitches.
THE POET. Don’t you get it? They had a BIG argument. She said someone should have done something to get the girl out of the war zone. Your wife—your sister—told our friend the photographer that the prize had blood all over it. I don’t think they’ve spoken to each other since. Didn’t she tell you?
THE POET. (Shooting for authority.) We’re going to go get that girl.
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sp; THE PLAYWRIGHT. Right. Got it. I’ll finance the whole thing. The trip, the papers, whatever it takes.
THE POET. We can go to Prague first. Then on to St. Petersburg. That’ll be the easy part. I know a counterfeiter in Berlin. And I know who else we’ll need to get from there to Vilnius—I have people—
THE FILMMAKER. Hold on. Stop. Just . . . WAIT. What the . . . HELL are you talking about? What “people”? This isn’t real. The picture. The story. The girl. None of this is real. Except . . . except that my wife is trapped in some hazed-out dreamland in a hospital and I want her back. And if I don’t do something, I’m going to lose my mind.
A phone rings offstage. The filmmaker reluctantly goes to the kitchen and answers. His voice sounds low and muffled, almost as if he is underwater. When he returns to the living room, the blood has drained from his face.
THE PLAYWRIGHT. What? What is it? Is she all right?
THE FILMMAKER. Barely.
The three figures—filmmaker, poet, playwright—stand together for a long minute, staring at the floor. The light in the living room brightens, until they look hot and lit. The three of them look at one another.
THE FILMMAKER. You’re not going to finance the whole thing. I can’t let you do that.
THE PLAYWRIGHT. It’s not a problem. You know I can handle it . . .
THE FILMMAKER. No, you don’t understand. I have something— (Exits stage left.)
Sounds of a man thundering downstairs. The poet and the playwright hang in the air like inverted commas, waiting for the filmmaker. They hear pounding and something like destruction sounds, like he’s down there killing something. Then they hear him coming back up the stairs in some kind of alpha-man overdrive. When he finally reappears in the living room, it’s not a man’s body at all. It’s a giant canvas, eight feet by eight feet. Once their eyes adjust, they see that it is a painting of a giant abstract face. They hear a voice behind it as if the painting is speaking.
The Small Backs of Children Page 7