Objects of Desire

by Clare Sestanovich

  “Helen?” Tina said.

  “That’s me.” She sounded surprised, or maybe just delighted, as if she had discovered she was wearing socks that didn’t quite match.

  The kitten opened her eyes in alarm when Helen held her out. But then Tina cradled her against her chest—another warm, indistinguishable beat—and the kitten closed her eyes again.

  Helen invited us inside, which was how I found out she was a painter, the first painter I had ever known. Half the house was for working, covered in drop cloths that were covered in color, old and new. There were drawings taped all over the walls and masking tape where other drawings had once been, beige edges bringing a white square into existence.

  It was hard to tell how old Helen was. She might have been about thirty—closer to Tina’s age than mine—but there was something childlike, haphazard about her. She told us she’d been in art school for a few years, but she’d dropped out just a few months short of finishing. There was one strand of white in her hair, tucked behind her ear.

  “Have you named her?” Tina said, changing the subject.

  “I never name them.”

  Tina nodded sympathetically. “No use getting attached.”

  “Oh no, even the ones I keep. They’re nameless, too.”

  Tina gave her a blank look.

  “I just can’t presume to know,” Helen said. She smiled sheepishly at me. “It sounds weird.”

  I shook my head but didn’t say anything. I admired principles like these—it didn’t seem to me that I had any of my own—but I worried that admiration would make me sound stupid.

  While they talked about the cat, I wandered all over the house. The walls were crowded but there wasn’t much furniture. One brown velvet couch, wide enough for sleeping, and otherwise wood: bar stools and footstools, a coffee table with an oblong knot in the middle, a leaky eye staring out at me. Her paintings were all big paintings—nearly as tall as me and sometimes just as wide. The paint itself was thick, forming ridges and waves and globs on the surface. If you looked closely, there was stuff in it, or underneath it: sand mixed in to make a grainy white, leaves and scraps of paper flattened by swipes of grey green. In one, you could make out the shape of an envelope and the crenellated edges of a Forever stamp.

  The only room without paintings was the room for the kittens. Four still left. I sat down, letting them climb over me, because it was easier to think there, the empty walls and the warm animals, the shameless desperation of their claws on my clothes. When Helen opened the door, I stood up and the kittens held on, clinging to the hem of my shirt. Tina appeared behind her.

  “Where to next?” she asked, sounding a little impatient.

  The kitten scrabbled down one of my legs.

  “Oh.” I had vague plans. The friend of a friend. A pullout couch.

  The address was written on a scrap of paper. Helen explained that it was across the Bay, which was how she ended up telling Tina to leave and me to stay. When rush hour was over, she promised she’d drive me herself.

  When Tina was gone, Helen made two glasses of juice from a machine with a lot of parts. There was an enormous skylight in the kitchen, and the room was several degrees warmer than the rest of the house. She fed a whole apple into the machine. The juice was grainy and beige, nothing like the clear stuff from the store.

  “The stuff that looks like piss,” Helen said.

  We drank quietly, bits of fruit clinging to the sides of the glasses, and then I said, “I’d like to be a painter.” I didn’t say too.

  Helen frowned. “You make it sound like a confession.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  She was standing in the middle of the light, sweat beading above her lip.

  “Well, how do you feel now?” she said. “Unburdened?”

  She told me she was from Texas, a smallish city where almost everybody believed in God. Her parents weren’t religious, but they were doctors; they, too, had made a business out of saving people. She’d rejected all that. At first, she thought she wanted to be a ceramicist, maybe even a sculptor, because she liked building stuff, and she even liked destroying stuff, especially if it meant getting back the parts you started with—a twisted heap of mud on the wheel. Even now, what she liked best about paint was its texture.

  “Do your parents wish you were a savior?” I asked.

  She had turned away from me and was looking out the window at the small, overgrown yard.

  “You can be a painter,” Helen said. Outside, the kittens’ mother stalked back and forth in front of a row of ferns. “You can be one right now. You don’t have to wait for someone else to tell you.”

  I started to say something, then stopped. Helen turned back to face me. The dust was suspended—beautiful—in the light between us.

  “I know,” she said, and smiled.

  When I was on the other side of the city—folding and unfolding the couch like an arthritic skeleton, imagining the bridge, the water, the steep streets between that couch and her couch—I heard her say this again and again. What was there to know? I pictured Helen standing in my grandparents’ yard, surrounded by all my canvases, staring at a dozen unfamiliar faces, a dozen pairs of my own eyes. I made a list of everything I wanted her to know and would never be able to explain: my mother, my grandmother, someone else’s bare chest in the middle of a forest. I had tried to make a sculpture once, before giving up—a rough clay shape made and remade until the heat of my fingers turned it soft and unusable.

  I spent a few obligatory nights with my spine against the couch’s spine, and then I took three buses back the way I had come. I walked all the way up the hill, the cars tilted toward me, straining to be released. When she opened the door, her arms empty this time, the broken remains of concentration on her face, I wanted to ask: Did you know this? Did you know I’d be back?

  * * *

  —

  I stayed in San Francisco for a year. My grandmother said I told you so, and I let her have the pleasure of being right. A small, cruel pleasure, like the last acid mouthfuls of a bottle of wine you didn’t mean to drink. I told her I was living with a friend.

  I painted more than ever—my colors next to Helen’s, on the wall, on the floor, on the rough tips of our fingers. We called the cat sweetie or baby or your highness. There was one more litter and four more strangers who came to take them away, happy to put their anonymous heartbeats to use. Eventually, I got a job gardening. The man I worked for was a landscape architect, who wore tucked-in shirts and shoes that didn’t get dirty. I mulched and weeded. I pulled tent caterpillars’ webs from trees—thick, white shrouds, like Halloween decorations left out in the rain. I learned the names of flowers and the names of flower colors: salsa red, infrared apricot, elfin white.

  I worked in the early mornings, when everything was draped in mist, and sometimes Helen worked all night. I painted less and less. I was tired by the time I came home, and shrank away from Helen’s energy. She ate ginseng root and M&M’s by the fistful. She lay on the ground, her hair fanned out like a peacock’s tail, and told me one idea after another. Sometimes she asked me what I was working on and my mind went blank, or else it lit up—not with thoughts so much as flashes, the unnameable color of possibilities—and there was nothing I could do but watch. When I went to sleep, I was relieved not to dream.

  Her show opened on a rainy Friday. I bought a cowl-neck dress for the occasion. Helen laughed and wore a T-shirt. An almost-important critic stood in front of a painting called Self-Portrait, his lips pursed. There were never any figures in Helen’s work, but sometimes I saw them there anyway: the whirl of an ear, the web of interlocking hands.

  The next summer, when she had sold two paintings and thought she might be about to sell a third, Helen announced we were going to Italy. Anyone who loves art, she said, needs to see Rome. She didn’t call me an artist, I thought, beca
use by then I wasn’t one.

  I had never been outside the country. At the airport, the security line snaked back and forth for nearly an hour. The woman behind us suddenly doubled over in pain, moaning cinematically, and was whisked straight to the front. I wondered if she was performing, then wished I had a performance in me.

  Helen saw the man while I was bent over, untying my shoes. He was inside the body scanner, arms outstretched, in socks. When I stood up, they were already staring at each other. He was older than Helen, his hair cut close to his skull and beginning to grey in places, but he was tall and muscular, with posture good enough to notice. He might have been a dancer. Helen raised her hand and held it there, not waving. The machine rotated back and forth around the man. He dropped his arms sooner than he should have, then lifted them back up again. His mouth said sorry to someone we couldn’t see.

  He waited for us on the other side of security, his belt back on, checking his watch.

  “It sounds like an excuse,” he said, “but I really do have a plane to catch.”

  There was a long pause, in which Helen didn’t introduce me. The man told Helen he’d seen the latest reviews. He didn’t say congratulations, but Helen said thanks. She had her hand on her throat and her shoes were untied, their tongues loose.

  I had never heard of the man, but after that I learned all about him. They had been in love for years. He was the one who found the house—bought the house—and he was the one who painted it blue. He was a playwright who won prizes and was always flying to New York. At one point, he had been designated a genius.

  “What do you mean, designated?” I said.

  “Never mind,” Helen said.

  Neither of them had believed in pets. They liked animals—revered them even—but they couldn’t wrap their heads around domestication. There was a mangy tiger cat who loitered around the back door, and one day she deposited three babies at the base of the gutter. They drove to the pet store, the litter swaddled in Helen’s T-shirt. Just a week later, the man left for good, and the first thing Helen did was go back to the store. There was one kitten left.

  * * *

  —

  Rome was hot, and my body clung to me. In the heat, we ate too little and drank too much. We fought. We stayed up as late as we could, since the nights were cooler, which was how we came to know the city’s feral cats. They were everywhere, and it was impossible for me to separate their presence from the man’s presence, as if it were him slinking around corners, approaching then retreating, curious then indifferent.

  I had a cheap, bulky camera with me that I kept forgetting to use. One night, while we were sitting outside a restaurant, at a table with three legs on the ground, an elongated shadow appeared on the wall beside us, a cat’s back arched cartoonishly. We were close enough that we could see the individual hairs in the shadow. I got out of my chair and crouched with my camera.

  “What are you doing?” Helen said, her voice impatient, sharp.

  I didn’t respond. I pointed the camera at the shadow, then slowly turned to face the cat. It paused for a moment to meet my gaze and darted into the street—long legs, gnawed ear, a reptilian hiss.

  “What are you doing?” She sounded desperate now, and something about her desperation liberated me. I took one picture after another. The cat flicked its tail regally.

  When I returned to the table, the bottle of wine was empty and the check had been paid.

  “That’s going to be a terrible picture.”

  San Francisco was drizzly and foreboding when we came back. Within a month, I flew home to Los Angeles. Helen bought the ticket. For the first time in my life, I called a taxi, even though she’d offered to drive me to the airport. Waiting for it at the bottom of the hill, I thought about leaning my easel against the mailbox and abandoning it there. There would have been some satisfaction, I thought, in a dramatic renunciation. In the end, practical considerations prevailed—it wasn’t cheap, what would my grandmother say—and this seemed like a failure of will, proof of just how little my life resembled my image of it. Here were the materials, now where was the composition?

  I had hoped I might forget about the roll of film. I imagined discovering it years later, when I could no longer remember what it was—what I had been trying to capture. The past would be astonishing that way, glossy and new. Instead, I thought about the photographs all the time. The man who developed them was apologetic. Helen had been right: they were terrible. One grey blur on top of another. The cat rarely sat still, but when it did, it looked straight at me, its eyes glowing huge and yellow.

  * * *

  —

  Two years later, Helen’s paintings came to Los Angeles. A new show, her biggest yet. My grandfather had died, and I had moved back into my grandmother’s house. We pretended this was a favor to me: the city was changing, the rents were hard to believe. The truth was that she needed help. She lived on the ground floor to avoid the stairs and coughed noisily for much of the night. The sound kept me up, but so did the silence.

  I had another gardening job, slightly better than the first. My grandmother didn’t like the dirt on my knees and under my fingernails, but she was pleased, too. She told my aunt I was rising through the ranks. I worked for as many hours as I could, as long as it was light out, planting tall grasses and low shrubs on whatever land the city owned: parks, medians, the huge concrete planters outside municipal buildings. The idea was to grow only native plants, to save water and money, to save bees and butterflies. When I got home, my grandmother was always waiting for me. I never asked what she did all day, because I was afraid the answer was nothing. She watched me eat and told me stories she thought I’d never heard.

  “Your uncle,” she said, sounding conspiratorial, “is color-blind.”

  “That’s not a secret, Nana.”

  This offended her.

  “Well, it isn’t good.”

  Her eyes went distant. She rubbed the tablecloth—red and yellow flowers, vivid green vines—between her thumb and her index finger.

  “I may be dying,” she said, “but I can still see colors.”

  “You’re not dying, Nana.”

  Her eyes returned. She looked at me.

  “We’re all dying.”

  I took her to see the paintings just before they came down, when I could be sure Helen wouldn’t be there. I told my grandmother the artist was someone I knew a little—from afar.

  “Helen,” she said, reading the name painted on the wall. She said it with the same kind of amazement Helen did when she came face-to-face with something unknown. In all those months, had she ever heard that wonder in my voice? Part of me, the part that was afraid, hoped that she hadn’t.

  I had prepared myself for what I might see at the show, which I thought might protect me from the assault of recognition. Of course, it didn’t. I recognized the paintings and it seemed as if they recognized me. We stared at one another across the room and I tried to feel triumphant: the paintings, at least, couldn’t turn away.

  The paint was dense and complicated. The reviews, which I had read one by one, made much of this. “Paint so thick it becomes an object.” “Indeed, the paint contains objects.” They wondered aloud what all this meant.

  “What’s in here?” my grandmother said, leaning forward. “It looks like hair.”

  She was looking at the corner of a large reddish painting. She was right. Under thick globs of crimson, there was a tangle of hair, like what you leave behind in the shower. Nearby there was a spray of shorter hairs—flyaways—and a ball of coiled pubic hairs. There were delicate strands that might have been eyelashes. In the center of the canvas, there was a pile of toenails.

  “Interesting,” my grandmother said.

  The toenails belonged to me. One morning, Helen had looked at my feet hanging over the end of the bed and asked if she could have them: ten h
alf-moons. She cradled my foot in her lap and clipped. She laughed.

  I had watched her coat the nails with color. Cadmium red, alizarin crimson, burnt sienna. But standing in front of the painting—Do not touch, the signs said—I began to doubt that they were really mine. They looked like anyone else’s. A woman’s, a man’s. I wondered which parts of myself I would recognize for sure, which parts I could pick out of a crowd.

  The truth is that the paintings were even thicker than the critics suspected. Under each painting there was another one, sometimes two, even three. They were bad paintings—Helen said so—from old phases, covered up with a solid color so that she could begin again. It wasn’t such an unusual way to work; lots of artists, the not-famous ones, saved money this way. So it was a kind of good fortune, she told me, to have paintings you disliked, or disavowed.

  My grandmother wandered slowly around the room, stomping her foot every now and then, which she said she had to do to keep it awake. She stopped in front of the best painting in the room. Huge and blue and hard to look at up close. Helen’s best painting, which contained three more of her worst. I could remember the third, the one just below the surface, but I had no idea what the first and the second ones looked like—perhaps I’d never seen them. Helen said she herself often forgot, and there was no way to find out. The layers couldn’t be peeled back, the way wallpaper can be.

  I imagined chipping away at it, flaking off colors in pieces that might or might not jog our memory. Mine, hers. Eventually we’d glimpse the canvas. A little bit of not-quite white, like hitting bone. But I don’t think we’d want to see that. I think we’d stop once we’d seen that.

  SEPARATION

  .

  He asked her out at the reservoir, where she went skinny-dipping in the summer. Early in the morning, before all the kids arrived, or sometimes late at night, when all the sounds of the water seemed louder: lapping, splashing, frogs. She was toweling her hair when he appeared, and she wasn’t wearing any pants. Her pubic hair was unkempt.