I worked on six portraits that year in order to be ready for the show. There was no time to do anything else. The house fell into disrepair for several months. Dirt spread. We ate bread and raw food, drank coffee and cold water straight from the outside tap. Both you and Vishni sitting. The three of us, a factory that burned day and night. We were all exhausted. It is not the expression you remember, but the understanding of what your life is: to sit and be painted. How nothing else could stand before or against it. There was no argument more pressing or greater obligation to be fulfilled. You were required to hold your bladder and your tongue, being yourself all the while and somehow reflecting the interests and loves that were temporarily withheld. So as you look at the painting, you discern the shimmering creek in your face, its glint both welcome and cruel in the sun shining through the window. Your forehead and cheeks were brown from working the fields in the evening; a three-hour break during which Vishni took your place. Dust from the fields settles in the deep grooves across both knees, from when you were following the plow in the neighboring field; a detail that sent me raging at first until I realized that it was there to be used. You are sitting in a chair looking away from me. Your brow is thick; your lips pursed, deep in thought. The palm of one hand grips the knuckles of the other. You are ready to spring from the chair and attack whoever is looking at you, if the look or words are not to your liking. The moment when life as you knew it changed; the understanding that what we did here was truly seen. What you did in the fields of no importance to anyone who saw this in the gallery. You are here to be studied, commented upon, and sometimes loved. This is when you understand.
Memory acts like a trigger again, so that you find yourself resuming some of the old postures. From the center of the bench you hunch your shoulders and cross your legs, pushing forward on the balls of your feet as if to spring. There is nothing relaxed about the position; the intention is to see the definition of your body pushing through clothes; a similar strain flashing across your face. Everything about the painting is the moment. You are not in the habit of photographing yourself, but for once you wish to mark the correlation. You recognize the rarity of opportunity, knowing that you will never visit this town again. You trust that you have left the exposure where it should be, as you stay perfectly still and take your pictures. Camera held at arm’s distance, a surge of heat rushes through your body, as if only the popping of the flashbulb allows you to admit that this is something pleasurable. That, for all the uncertainty, you can always find solace in how you were trained. There is something comforting about pushing your body this way. Often you find yourself doing it unconsciously: the stretch of your leg into the carriage aisle as you traveled to Kentucky; the triangle formed of elbow and arm behind your head as you sat upright in bed and awaited the arrival of St John. Shucking corn from the fields at harvest time: the expansion of your hands as they threw sheaths onto the collection truck as it drove back and forth. The way that you hold your coffee cup and fork eggs from a steaming hot plate. The division between movements is blurred between what is natural and what is staged.
You place the camera on the arm of the bench and take several more pictures, both of the room and yourself. The partial darkness of the room, the space it affords, is familiar. The unrelenting cold of the floor as you lie on it is no different to being in the studio; a blank space where precision is favored over comfort. The poses you worked toward and rejected until you reached the final piece; those where you stood atop the chair and then underneath it. Cobwebs blooming from the corners of the ceiling, the shadow from the doorway cast upon the lower half of the painting. All this you record. Everything that goes through your mind.
YOU ARE UNAWARE of how the time passes until you are gently awoken from the bench. It is almost dark and a woman stands over you.
– I was wary of disturbing you, looking so comfortable there. But it’s six o’clock and I need to close the museum otherwise I shall miss my bus.
It takes you several moments to recognize the short fur coat, glossy for the most part but matted at the sleeves and hem; the woman you had seen earlier that afternoon. She is in her late forties, compact and neat like a doll, her hair, pinned back, of a similar candied luster to the coat.
– Have you been here all this time?
– For the last hour or so. I leave the place open while I run my errands. The old man who owns it doesn’t seem to mind.
– Even in a town like this, that doesn’t strike me as particularly safe.
Her laugh is dry, unoffended.
– There’s very little here worth stealing. Detritus the old man’s picked up and hoarded over the years. I’m not sure he even knows what half of it is.
– I would be inclined to take more care.
– Folks know one another in this town. Thieving’s restricted to cattle and what grows in the fields, or sometimes a neighbor’s wife. Nothing more.
She loathes this town. Her look is one of disdain, but as with others in whom home-soil has settled in their blood, clogging their arteries, she will fight with all comers in its defense. You think of your parents and the gloom of the muddy Hudson in their eyes; damp air sticking to their chests and the interminable scratch of rodent claws against brick as they ran between walls. They couldn’t live with or without their surroundings.
– You look disorientated.
– I’m OK. Slept very deeply, is all. I find this bench comfier than a bed for some reason. Product of a Depression-era childhood.
– The old man has the same tongue. ‘An honest man with nothing to hide should be able to sleep on nothing more ornate than a plank of wood.’ ‘A poor background shouldn’t equal a poor mind’ is another.
– He sounds interesting.
– On a good day. The rest of the time he’s a taskmaster.
– Plantation owner with a Botticelli?
– One and the same. Why don’t I make you some coffee before you go? You’re still looking beat. I have an office across the hall. He says it’s for staff only, but I guess he wouldn’t disapprove, seeing that you shared a Depression and everything. I’m Laurel, by the way.
– John.
They are just words to her: Depression, Crash – historical anomalies that belong in this room. She speaks them as if reciting a list of foods to be avoided, the corners of her mouth tightening with every syllable.
As you sit in her office – as much a storeroom as it is administrative – you watch her shoulders drop, mouth and chin losing some of that earlier rictus. She grows more comfortable with you as the coffee brews, suggesting her testiness with men of your age isn’t as set as she’d like it to appear. What starts as a hardened act of charity – she can never be entirely sure whether you are one of the old man’s friends, one who neglected to mention the fact – warms into something easier: the glow of a good deed performed well. After a day of hardness, supervising an exuberant school group on a short tour who quelled their boredom by spitting on the banisters, arguing with a girl at the lunch counter over being short-changed, nagging the old man to pay a handful of bills, most of all the electricity, she is as much in need of kindness as you are.
The mouth of the desk holds two chairs, one empty, another stacked with 24-month calendars; the old man’s thrift rather than hers. She has the air of someone who’d blow all the money in an instant because she’s so sick of the crumbling place. Turning the building into something else, anything, and razing all the contents, everything old or connected to that much-despised word antique.
She perches on the edge of the desk and starts sipping her coffee before you do – prefers the scalding sensation reaching her teeth and lips rather than anything remotely tepid. Thrill, as much as impatience. She understands that you are slower; in a glance registering that you don’t touch your cup until she has long since set hers down. This is the meaning of hospitality: allowing for differing ingestion regimes; knowing that she needs to employ every fiber of patience she has to wait for the drink to cool a
nd watch you consume it. All her self-control not to shout or fill the mug with cold water, as she would do for her employer.
You want to ask whether the old man is still around. Whether he is who you think he is. Seeing the painting remains the most important thing. There is no marker to register how seeing it again has changed you, other than you now feel both older than you did but at the same time younger, as if something of the painting’s essence has been imbibed. If the woman does not recognize the correlation in eyes, he is bound to. Something in the face will resonate, even if your body fails you as you sit exhausted in the chair.
– I’m guessing you don’t have a hotel room or anywhere to go if you’re spending the afternoon sleeping in the house of horrors.
– It’s a beautiful place. There are some great things here.
– To me it holds everything but beauty. All that is dead and unwanted. Can’t you smell it? The sourness of age that sticks to everything here?
– I come from that place. This is my smell.
– I wasn’t being personal. I get angry with this stuff. No one has any idea what it takes to keep the place going. The money poured in to keep the leaflets printed and the lights on.
– I’m teasing you. But I understand what you mean about paintings. If they don’t speak to you in some way, they may as well be dead for the value they have.
– I work for a sleep-deprived old man who’s not above ringing the house at two a.m. if he has an idea that needs to be sounded out. Improving the numbers. How to present myself better. You still haven’t told me where you’re staying, by the way.
– I’ve just got here. I have no idea where I’m staying. If I’m staying at all.
– I have an image of you walking alone at night. I’m not sure where that came from.
– Your old man keeps similar habits, I’m guessing.
– He doesn’t take to the street, that’s for sure, but the restlessness is there. He’s at the stage where he’s too scared to close his eyes in case they don’t open again. I guess this is what awaits most of us in old age, that we become sleeping experiments. My grandmother was the same.
– Zombies cursed to live.
– That’s the spirit!
– I don’t live on the streets.
– I wasn’t suggesting that.
– I’ve lived on the streets, briefly, when I was very young. A period of hand-to-mouth when I was trying to find my way in the world. There was no money in this country for a long time. It should paralyze you, but actually it does the opposite. You’re unable to sit still. Looking. Always looking.
– I won’t joke about the glory days, but this isn’t what you’re doing now, is it? Because the road doesn’t suit you. You’re exhausted.
– I’m traveling for as long as I need to. Seeing all there is to see. For any peace to come, you must discover whether your life has had meaning. I heard a Holy fellow preach this once. Always stayed with me.
– The old man isn’t scared of a row. There’s no one he fears in this town, but he knows that I live alone most of the time. That there won’t be a man who answers the ringing phone at two a.m. to give him hell. Clearly, it works both ways. I’ve called him a couple of times too, when I’ve been upset by other things. In return, this is what I have to put up with: the ghost house. Mostly free of visitors, bar the twice-weekly tours for school brats. The town, on the whole, isn’t interested in what we have here.
– Except me.
– Except you. That’s why I’m giving you coffee. Every act of curiosity needs its reward. If you were younger, the reward may have differed. They give out fancier prizes in other towns, I’m sure, but dime-store coffee from the ghost house is as good as any. Who knows, you might find something in the bottom of your cup, if you’re lucky.
– Such as?
– A stained bottom dating back from the poor excuse for tea drunk by the Pilgrims. Cracked porcelain, because he won’t let me buy cups that are better made. That’s the best I got.
She stares at you now, as though she is the man in the car and you are the one walking with care along the street; hunger in her eyes for knowledge. She studies your face and hands, your clothes and bag. They fall onto your good shoes and stay there for a while. She knows.
– I don’t pay attention to what the old man brings into the place. He won’t come during opening hours because he doesn’t like to mix with people. Can’t stand their ignorance, he says, which is a funny thing to say for someone so keen on educating the town. The school visits, the buses taking the brats to and from, the lunches that they must have, the tour books with stories about some of the paintings and artifacts, of which they are all given a copy to take home. All this comes from his pocket. The schools couldn’t care less one way or another about these tours or stories. They only get worked up about algebra scores and football scholarships. He had to fund building a new football field and locker room for them to get interested. He restocked the library too, but they took that for granted. Only a landscaped pitch, with shiny aluminum bleachers and a boiler tank for the heroes of the field to soap themselves down in style, would grant him respect. This is the other reason why they hate him so: for making them do what they don’t want. Having to pay their regards in their lunch hour. Send their wives over with cakes the maid has baked, or the last of the good chutney they were saving for Christmas. For making his money into a whip or a gun held above their heads. He plays the tune, not the other way around. He’s not beholden to the dancing mice. He comes after I’ve closed up, or later. Some of the late-night calls I’ve taken have been made here. ‘I’m moving the furniture around,’ he says. ‘It’s getting too stuffy. I’m adding some brightness’ – meaning a new painting to greet me in the morning, or a cracked vase that looks like it belongs in the trash. He’s none too agile in his later years. In the winter, when the cold seizes his joints, he has to use a stick. There’s a man in the house, Oscar, who does all the driving and repairs, so I guess that’s where some of the muscle comes from. If he doesn’t call in the morning when I open up, I’ll find a handwritten map of the new layout and copies of the mounting cards that he’s had printed and placed. Everything is thought of. All to his timetable.
It’s the talk of time that makes you shift in your chair. Your train has been missed but that is not the chronology you think of. It is the calendar of tissue and bone, blood flow and organ function; of age. The old man is in control of all timetables but this one. Age will not be paid or quietened.
– I read the cards but don’t pay attention to the exhibits. Not in the detail that he wants. I’m the only one who can put up with his horse-crazy rituals. If he could find another woman fool enough to deal with him, I would have been fired long ago. I memorize what he’s written and recite it on the tours. It’s the tone of my voice and the rhythm of my delivery. I might as well be singing a song to them for how smooth and musical it is. They walk around in a daze as if I’m singing them a lullaby. Either that or they’re wondering how to spend their 25 cents in the shop. He gives them spending money too. No one looks at anything, not really, just the sound of my voice and following my footsteps. ‘Anna Brown. Born 1905. American portrait painter said to show the changing heart of the country conveyed through two life models. Her work is found in collections worldwide including her only self-portrait, one of her earliest works, in the National Library in Washington. Rug 52 depicts her model of choice, John Brown, a decade into their working relationship, and is a good example of her naturalism and tone.’
– Very good. I’ve no complaints.
– Is there anything you’d add? He welcomes feedback if it’s constructive.
– Something more about John Brown. ‘Born 1910 in New York. Lived with the artist for most of his adult life. In later years, he built a portfolio of photographs depicting a similar way of life that Anna explored in paint.’
– That I can do.
– Not so much for the model’s vanity, but just some concrete details
to show that he existed. That he wasn’t imagined on that canvas.
– More words to memorize, is all. Put them in their right place. Means nothing to me other than that. I don’t think any of the rascals I take on the tour give a hoot whether that particular painting once hung in our embassy in Toronto or a movie star’s bowling alley.
– They don’t ask questions?
– Yes, but no one who visits has any greater knowledge, aside from some smart-alecks who turn up once or twice a year to study that particular painting and a couple of others. I won’t tell you which ones they are. You’ll have to guess them.
– I do?
– Though I suppose to someone like you who must know something about this stuff it’s glaringly obvious, like a prize bull standing in the midst of a group of breeding heifers.
– You only say that because you’ve had your fill. It’s not what you believe.
– As far as this town is concerned, we’re the bulls and they’re the heifers: simple creatures that breed and shit, and then trample the grass.
All the Days and Nights Page 9