All the Days and Nights

by Niven Govinden

  The concession begins in the journey to the station. In the traffic, you thaw. Your paranoia that St John is updating Ben or myself – whether he has or not – ceases to be important. The warmth of the car reminds you of where you were found, in the draftiness of the Y. How spartan it was. You recognize that thanks must be given, even at this late juncture. St John intuitively knows what is happening but does not accelerate anything. His neck is flushed with expectation but he quietly breathes it away. That is the mark of the man who has rescued you; of the respect he holds you in. You have no idea of how you are seen, do you? Even now. Of the talent you have.

  – I hope that you’ll pardon me if you have found anything wanting in my manners. I have guests so rarely I’m never entirely sure what is expected of me.

  His turn of speech moves with the traffic, slow and hesitant, as if these are neither the right words nor direction, but something nevertheless that he has committed to. All that spares your embarrassment is the absence of direct contact, the pair of you keeping your eyes on the road.

  – In the bank, nothing is beyond my capabilities. There are surprises and pressures that can push me to my limit – that’s what being responsible for money does: stretches you to breaking point – but I am never at a loss. A customer we’ve had for many years, who’s now losing his mind, comes in and demands we open an account for his dog. I call our printer and arrange for a checkbook to be made with a box for a paw print instead of a signature. This is my role. Anything outside my realm I amass and learn. It is only at home that I can be uncertain. I guessed from your condition that it was quiet that you needed most. When I found you in that place, you looked like a ghost. Tell me if I did right, bringing you here. I need clarification in this area.

  Of this you are capable.

  – It’s all to do with the hands. They teach you this in school. Strong posture is necessary for people to have confidence in you. You’re the flagpole that they flutter against. Chest out and shoulders back; feet spread a sensible width apart. Not one leg hooked over another like a Broadway dancer. And the hands: firmly, but not rigidly locked behind your back. It means that you give your full attention to whoever’s speaking with your entire body. In employing any other posture I have a tendency to daydream. I feel looser. Not as alert or capable. Is it an issue of standards? That is what I’m thinking has brought you to New York. Is it the filth you wanted to see? The greed? In which case, it’s not the YMCA you need, but the dining room at the Plaza, or the basement offices at some of the museums your woman has dealt with. Away from artists and executors, these people hide nothing; their faces are filled with the hunger of acquisition and ownership. This is how they breathe. Anything you want to tell me will stay between us. It’s always been that way, even if your body language believes otherwise. I take my friendships as seriously as I do my other responsibilities. If money is what this city chooses to worship, then think of me as your priest. If family can emerge not from blood but loyalty and attention paid over decades, then think of me as your brother. Whatever you say won’t leave this car.

  There was an afternoon more than ten years ago when you were alone together and he was similarly insistent. Drunk on your summer blondness; how sunshine had created something that incandescent. Something feral in his glance to suggest he was close to grabbing your arm; forgetting the much-boasted posture to plead. With carnality rejected, the pursuit of knowledge, your mind, is all he has to reach for. It never strays far from your thoughts that he is a financier by profession. One who hunts opportunities the way you track game in the fields. You will not be encircled like a deer or rabbit intended for table. You are all too aware of those tricks. But his kindness stops you from being hard. You have fallen back on this all your life. You wouldn’t have stayed with me otherwise.

  – The doctor says things, and his words hang in the air. Feels as if we’re offered an unwanted gift. Something we’d rather not touch or acknowledge. Except, it comes for her, whether or not she wants it.

  – There are second opinions. Other avenues. Doctors can be changed if their manner is too brusque, although I always thought that plainness of speech would be something she’d appreciate.

  – She’s dying. Something that I can’t mention or acknowledge in her presence. It’s easier to take myself away. Easier for her. She shouldn’t be distracted by my face and what it betrays.

  – Even without looking at you, your worry swamps the car. It must’ve been tough in the house. Knowing your body can betray you, the way hers is betraying her.

  – In the time that’s left, I’m seeing all there is to see. I want to study things, paintings, the way people study me. It’s a curiosity I have.

  Your hands rest firmly on his shoulder. A fraternal gesture; momentary but wanted. It’s as much reassurance as you can give to a worried mind.

  THERE IS NOW FORM to Ben’s body but little in the face. What I see there seems to change at each sitting, as if he too is unsure; both of us in apprenticeship. He has settled into the routine and understands what is required of him: to sit, stretch and sit again. His life in this house is to be under my command, but still the process relies on what he willingly gives. Neither of you fought in the war. Ben was stationed in Arkansas and never posted; your ineligibility for combat. It makes me wonder whether this element was missing in your life: the marking of time as a foot soldier, whether in the army or not; the ability to be a drone and follow orders without thinking. Except, in the absolute stillness of the moment, standing in front of me in the studio, the submissive argument crumbles. There is only enough energy to concentrate on being who you are. For all the staginess in coercing your body into the shape that will best work, nothing is artificial. Nowhere to hide.

  Ben’s interest grows. After mealtimes, in the hour during which Vishni forces me to rest, he returns to the studio and studies the canvas. Aside from the progress made, he notes its height and depth, wondering as much about the possible home for it, as what it will eventually capture of him. His mind races, making up for the time lost when he sits before me, blank as a cipher. The phone calls he makes in his room after dinner relate only to the work. He describes in detail the physical progress of the day; the scores that have marked the canvas; how much color spent. He pauses after every note, sometimes at length, suggesting the effort of an assistant on the other end of the line, accurately recording his words. What purpose does this record hold? Where will they go? Ben has seen paintings in progress before – no different to thousands of eggs on a battery farm waiting to hatch – but never has he been so forensic in what he observes. His sharpness, that which Vishni and myself overhear from the corridor, is refreshing. But we are also wary. What else does he notice?

  On his instruction, the gallery sends a lithograph of the painting, the one that’s in our minds. We never speak of it, recognizing a mutual understanding of why Ben is posed the way he is; why he still wears your striped sweater for his time in the studio. There are others who think there are better paintings: the one of you with the farm dogs that made the front of the New York Times; another of Vishni sitting on the same sofa where Ben now sits. ‘There,’ they will say. ‘These are the definitive works. These are the portraits that made her name. What we will remember her by.’ Almost all the paintings they think of feature you, although not in this jumper or pose. Maybe it’s forgotten because it was bought so quickly at its first show, or possibly because that particular show featured predominantly nudes; its naturalness lost in the stampede for flesh. There are no favorites in painting, only those that you think about, learn from, are haunted by. This is one of those.

  We are not meant to know about the lithograph. It is hidden at the bottom of the chest of drawers in your room (where Vishni discovered it). Every night we hear him pull it from its cardboard sleeve and unwrap the tissue that protects it. Sometimes he does this while he is talking on the phone. It appears that the person on the other end of the line also has a copy, and in these sessions they compare vario
us details: the degree to which a head is tilted; how the leg was raised to give that degree of definition without stretching the calves to breaking. It is one of the older assistants that Ben trusts. One of the women who live and breathe the business; understanding the extent of his capabilities. He wouldn’t be so collaborative otherwise; bouts of silence in the room as he listens to counter arguments to whatever he suggests. In the studio, Ben remains as insular as he needs to be; outside, he makes clear his need to document it, requiring his assistant to conspire, bear witness. His bookshelves in the Provincetown house are lined with biographies and diaries belonging to artists and their muses. Is it his experience being recorded, or mine?

  Vishni would cry after her early sittings. Tears falling into her soup. The cumulative effect of posing over an extended period of time is intensive and draining. Everything you have to give has been squeezed out. Everything you wanted to hide will come to the fore. I study the walk of those sitters as they leave the studio; a previously sturdy gait broken down into something softer; defeated. A funereal shuffle to the nearest bed. The stagger of an exhausted workman who has expended all he has during his shift. You were always tired. It was natural for you to be that way. But you were never truly empty. You slept, it’s true. Stayed quiet as you ate your food. But there was still something in reserve; a look in your eye that suggested you were far from being worn. It came from the same store of determination that made you half-cross the country, bringing you to me. Ben’s account – whatever he is doing – is an attempt to build his own reserves. By observing as much as he can, taking in every detail the way I do with him, he creates a parallel picture; one that may be preferred.

  – The eye is there. The pace is there. It’s unbelievable what she’s doing. That she would think of doing this. The energy she has when she’s in the room. The concentration. You could heat a stove for a month with the energy that comes from it. No. She looks unwell. Shockingly so, since I last saw her. There’s strength there. She’s still moving the canvases around and won’t accept any help with them. Something in that room brings her to life; the work itself; the need to complete it. When we’re away from there, though … I look at her in the kitchen sometimes and I … It’s been three years since I last saw her. How does the body do that in three years? She knows, I think, but doesn’t acknowledge it. All that matters to her is getting it right. This.

  YOU’RE REVIVED; THE SPEED of the train under your feet doing its work, but also pulsing from the bag you hold to your chest, packed with the bills counted with care by St John. ‘Money makes everything fizz,’ you once said disparagingly, as we sat in a Manhattan auction house and watched the work of a Master be reduced to goods in a fire sale; painting after painting streaming by, as if they were nothing more than pallets of white goods to be cleared.

  – Look at them waving their paddles. Congratulating each other on how civilized their greed is. They might as well be blowing bubbles, for all the care they take in throwing their money around.

  You despise yourself for the amount of cash you hold and the ease with which it was given. It partly explains the barrier that holds back any real honesty with St John. For all his helpfulness and loyalty, he remains our enabler. A reminder of where this money has come from, how it was earned.

  The train carries you out of the city and past the garden states, turning southwest toward the plains and wilds you never thought you would see. Excluding our house and the farms, the city is all you’ve ever known: the place of your birth, and those cities I have taken you to where what we do is in demand. The accepted knowledge is that the dust-bowl towns with their homeliness and limited horizons hold nothing for us; that the reticence shown by some of our neighbors to the paintings and the way we live is heightened, where intolerance becomes decisive action. That if we set up shop in any of these one-horse places, we’d be run or burnt out of town. Alone, the outcome differs. You can roam and blend. One small town after another will fall to your charms, your ease with strangers, the fact that you are naturally friendly and not suspicious the way I am. You will leave your mark on those places, if that is what you wish. The creek that runs between our house and the trio of farms that border the meadow now carries your name, a sign of the affection you are held in. What is there to stop this from happening elsewhere?

  If this comes to mind, it does not do so until you have seen what you needed to see in Kentucky and are back on a vehicle rolling well beyond the state line. From the moment you set foot on Kentucky asphalt, you are only concerned with finding your bearings and reaching your destination. It is one of the larger towns: one that can soak up the pangs of the city for those who can only measure life in bricks and mortar, restaurants, cabs. The tea parlor off Main Street with its lace curtains covering the lower half of the windows suggests an owner who may have read about – or visited – the Russian Tea Room in New York. The three-story department store brings all the fashions and modernizations from the outside world. You can have your sophistication legitimized via the Art, Literature and Poetry Society; your otherness confirmed by the dances between men that take place in the hardware store basement every quarter month. Despite the clement weather, a woman hurries from her car in a short fur of a dull, muddy luster. Only the patent leather of her shoes reflects in the storefront glass as she crosses the road. A tractor heading out of town slows to allow her safe passage. There is something that makes you feel at home: the familiar and rarefied (although your clothes would not pass muster in the department store; similarly at the diner, where your duffel bag and coat are indentified as a hobo uniform, until the waitress sees your shoes and the camera strap hanging around your neck).

  The museum is built on a corner plot, a block west from the farthest end of Main Street, where the road reduces to a trail in both directions, as if to span what is the true heart of the town. An imposing Italianate building that as recently as twenty years ago was more congruous to its neighbors as a residential home. Only the wrought-iron railing, almost as tall as the eves, and the stone steps leading from the wide front door to the bricked path give the building its civic air. Not grand as such, but intended to demonstrate something greater than homespun, in the same way that a school or church sets itself apart from its neighbors to signify that value and respect must be placed here (and if that is not possible, fear). The museum and what it stands for has joined this trinity. You expect to have the building to yourself. Your impatient pull of the door, the fast walk along the hallways and into the first of a series of linked rooms that houses the small collection, suggest this. The next train is six hours away. You have not traveled this far to rush, but that first sight, the one you have in your mind’s eye from the moment you left St John, weighs heavily. It pumps blood around your body and leaves your head swimming with sweet anticipation. The rooms themselves are sparsely furnished, arranged in no particular theme or logic, bar the taste of its curator. For all the space afforded by lack of tables and benches, the first cases are intensely packed with miniature terracotta sculpture and cameos; China and Regency England sitting in close proximity. The low positions of the spot lamps ensure that you walk in partial gloom, making the house seem much older than it is. The small windows, with their meager allowance of light, count for nothing here. The intention is to enter a treasure cave, leaving the tribulations of the wheat field or textile mill behind. A noticeboard between the second and third rooms advertises a guided tour that is yet to be taken up. Its lined space to accommodate the names of interested parties is bare; the notice itself yellowing at the edges. A plaque displaying an unnamed coat of arms is nailed beside it; a wooden shield that bears the colors of a racing team you once admired. Though it is not intended as such, this is the first piece that you stand before and contemplate; thinking of home.

  What triggers memory can never be clearly divined. You look at those colors and think about watching junk-car racing with your brother on Coney Island. Hot dogs slicked in your hands, shouting yourselves hoarse as you cheer yo
ur chosen car to smash the hell out of the others. You haven’t thought about the track for years; the dust that got inside your shoes; the heat and noise of the men around you. The plaque imbibes the smell of petrol filling your teenage nose; the grease from the hot dog sitting in a thick film across your lips and palm. Your brother. His face. You cannot remember when you last brought him to mind, for his face is yours. It is all the reminder you need. As you continue to walk through the rooms you are aware of the taste of bacon on your breath from the diner, a further blanket of memory that sits on your shoulders; that keeps back the draft. Boiled bacon and potatoes in your mother’s kitchen. Your brother and yourself eating dinner before your father returned. The nervousness you all felt. A flood of forgotten feeling coming from a badge.

  You question the wisdom in what you are doing. In satisfying your curiosity you wish to pick and choose. The possibility of other long-forgotten or repressed memories coming to the fore is not a welcome one. It is not chronic unhappiness that you have known. You are not troubled by melancholy. Never have been. But I have changed you, and even if your temperament remains constant, you do not wish to be reminded so minutely of what you were before. You only wish to recognize the innate, not the accumulation of knowledge; how far you have come.

  There is a bench in the second-to-last room where you sit and rest, more tired than you realized. The heaviness in your legs has returned; the muscles are tight; feet, numb. In your eagerness to get here you have lost track of the miles you have walked from the station; the blocks circled and turned back upon to find your way without help. The paintings are here; yours hanging over a defunct, tiled fireplace. Your memory of the expression you held has been hazy until you see it. You think of a photographic negative being washed in a chemical bath. How details come forth in waves: sharpness suddenly appearing, before blurring back into the red light of the dark room. Now you can recall the distant look on your face and some of the thinking behind it. You were wishing yourself out of the studio. Hating me; wishing my death. We didn’t argue when this portrait was painted – something that began as a commission that eventually fell through; an office trophy for an industrial executive who decided to move on to a more fashionable artist – but you were angry with me for putting you through these movements, and with yourself for complying.