No suitcase to speak of, yet still breathless after two blocks. The luggage that is being sent on ahead, with the cab I chose not to ride in, may as well be carried on my back I am bent so; my head has dropped to my chest for how hard I am made to push for breath. There have been flashes before: running through the meadow to find my errant sitter before the sun disappears; a light-headedness that outstayed its welcome on descending a ladder while fixing a canvas. This, however, is the first time the force of my lungs seems beyond the realm of my control. I have no power over its efficacy; must simply stand and wait for the tightness to pass; to be patient and not fight myself; to override panic and fool myself that I will be somehow rewarded if I can accept these shallow breaths as a trail to more substantive function. Shallow will lead to deep. Warmth shall radiate through my chest if I stay calm and allow it.
What comes to me is an exchange between you and Vishni before the paintings were finished, an exchange that I blocked out. Words that can disappear all too easily if I pull harder on the charcoal that glides across the page, or turn the faucet open a fraction more. Except my ears never close completely. The desire for knowledge is too great, both inside the house and out. In these years, curiosity can be the strongest rope you have in keeping you alive.
– She gets tired, in case you didn’t notice. Needed help to lift the canvas the other day. That’s never happened before.
– She was being difficult because she couldn’t get her own way. Playing with us because I spent an hour shucking corn when I was meant to be here.
– It seems more than that. The rest she’s talking about is as much for her as it is for us. She wants to hibernate.
This is the moment I can pinpoint, when I realize that my body has changed.
You are having a drink at the hotel bar as I arrive. Still framed by your country trek, your face is sunburnt and hair wiry from bathing in the river, but there is no trace on Vishni, as if the physicality of the week has been an act of the imagination. Her skin remains pale, hair swept back into a bun as if it had never been uncoiled the entire trip. My impulse is to shed my coat and join you; that if I pull up a chair I can talk, and have my blood-ways washed through with alcohol, I can make good a body that has let me down. Resetting the system without having to make a declaration or medical visit of any kind.
I have never been so interested to hear about camping. To hear about things that have nothing to do with the room I trap you in. But instead comfort comes here, as I stand in the lobby and watch you. Easier to watch; waiting for my chest to settle and the redness to leave my face. Never realizing that I would fear the things that used to make us strong.
FLUID, ALL THAT FLOWS between us. How we share the same surname and allow people to assume. How we share the same hotel room and allow people to assume. We believe it ourselves sometimes. Country marriage: no paperwork; only the evidence of your eyes. Matching rings, bought on a trip to California. This closeness that cannot be challenged.
Our marks are interchangeable; flitting back and forth like moths across the cracked night-light. You are more likely to rinse your cup after you have used it, but we both leave it in the same place, on the left side of the table rather than on the drainer. We are both guilty of taking food in the night, usually that which Vishni has determined be eaten the next day; hefty, imprecise shapes cut from pies; legs torn from a chicken carcass.
– You’re animals. I should leave you to eat from cans and pull vegetables from the mud and horseshit.
In the same way, your hand has crossed each painting, as if it is my body depicted on the canvas. These brushstrokes are shaped by your will, especially those days when I feel that I have directed nothing; that I am merely a cipher for your control. My hand moves repetitively, as paint is layered thickly to hide your secrets; tears streaming from the stench of turps, unable to breathe or think. It is only as I clean up afterwards that I see the way you look at me and realize my mistake. For you it is the other way around. You understand that your position is to sit and surrender everything. The guilt is in my mind.
How often does our perception shift? On which days does who blame whom? For this reason I no longer recognize paintings in chronological terms. All I see is mood and balance: which of us held the greater power over that particular painting; who was victorious.
You were restless in Santa Ana, wanting to move with the winds. The day indulging our hosts at the museum was a torture for you, still learning to understand that the paintings followed us everywhere, and how to lodge them in the back of your mind. Once our obligations were over, before the warmth of their parting handshakes was yet to leave us, you pulled me by the elbow and ran.
You drove us into the desert to escape the town. You had latent energy to expend from holding your tongue, so you filled the car with talk as we sped across asphalt into shimmer and rust.
– They were in a spin about those casts, weren’t they? You’d think they’d never seen metal rings before. One of them actually squeaked when you praised them, did you hear? Like an excited little mouse waiting for his Art to arrive. Then they were all at it, because each had to demonstrate their enthusiasm in some way. An orchestra of mice. Rushing about your casts as if they were cheese.
Even with the roar of eee eee eee pounding your ears, a cacophony of rampaging mice, you still allow yourself room to think; somewhere to sit and block the smallness of it all, and smile graciously when eyes stray back to you.
Relaxed as you were, your shoulders fell softly as you held the steering wheel, creating a line I often found hard to achieve in the studio. The desire to stop in the dust, for you to hold that pose was overwhelming. I thought of grabbing the steering wheel or pulling the keys from the ignition. It was perfection that could only be briefly held. Nor could I draw your attention to it, how perfect you were, for the afternoon was yours. I had no right to ask anything.
– I sat thinking about the sun rising this morning; how I saw it cross the arc of the hotel garden before settling across the town’s skyline. I misjudged how long it would take. At home, dawn is a flash, as fast as a blind being pulled up. Shop’s open; time for work. Here it seemed to take for ever. Everything in the garden revealed so slowly, like a mystery unraveling, until finally both it and Santa Ana became clear. Now there’s no difference to how the sun draws back and illuminates us. Any fool can tell you that, the inevitability of the sun falling and rising again. But this morning, I felt so insignificant in its scale. A snail tracing a path across the damp paving; me standing in my underwear on the hotel balcony. No difference. These are not great discoveries, but this was how I felt, and no matter how small that was, it was still something greater than when I stood in front of those metal rings. It was clearly the artist’s idea of a joke, yet they accepted it as something real. They hide from life, these museum people. Something has happened to each of them to have built a barrier where they can redefine the world. They are good people, some of them, but two days in their company is enough. A vacation from our life.
There is no getting away from what a desert town is: poorly lit, over-hospitable, melancholy. You checked us into the highway motel, threadbare but clean, with color TV and a kidney-shaped swimming pool out back, clouded emerald with chlorine. The chemicals in the water were stronger than exhaust fumes from the highway, its scent coated the back of our throats and settled into the lower pockets of our lungs. We could taste the swimming pool for weeks afterwards.
You took my hand and walked up Main Street – the day was defined by your hand pulling mine – confident of your navigation, following a self-devised trail that led past a stream of clapboard stores that needed our window study: the general store, a bookstore and a jeweler’s. Your eyes set off sparks in a way that made me want to stop you in your tracks again. Even a photograph could not have done justice to the smile across your face; how you glowed, so sure of yourself.
While ham and eggs were frying in the diner, you disappeared, claiming to have dropped your silver co
mb in the store. Your movement was sudden and definite as you stood to check your pockets, interrupting the waitress attempting to sell slices of a muddy pumpkin pie that sat on the counter. The food arrived, cooled, and then congealed. You were retracing your steps, going back further than the store, taking in the gas station, the church; the meandering dust trail that lay between them and the motel. Coffee became my meal, and when I was too hungry to wait, a fresh plate of food. The waitress was nonplussed. This wasn’t the first husband she’d seen who ran out on his wife. Whether eaten or not eaten, every scrap she wrote on her order pad was billable.
I was eating when you returned; the ceremony of waiting had long since passed. We share these peasant tendencies, for when I’m hungry, I eat. Complex needs best solved by simplicity: bread, for hunger; paint, for everything else. This is what makes sense; the route I’ve always taken. People can never lose themselves this way. Running on the same logic, you took your opposite seat in the booth, a bread roll in your hand and a small square box on the table: two problems solved.
– You’re not the only one who was thinking about rings today.
– What’s this?
– John Brown. Anna Brown. We just put them on before we leave. Easiest thing.
– You want to stop their questions.
– How they look at you, in the museum and elsewhere. They should be looking at the paintings. Nothing else.
Bravery masked your fear; the tools of your tender age. You sat solidly, but your eyes darted with nerves, a fine trail of sweat framing your cheeks and hairline. I was old enough to warn you away, push you toward something better, for a tie, even an imaginary one, would take hold and tighten, choke; once the ring had been taken for granted by those on the outside, we would still be bound. If I held your gaze for longer I might have discerned that this was precisely what you wanted; for me to put a stop to your impulsiveness, dismissing it as the indulgences of a child. But your body was not that of a child, nor the determination that had settled upon your face. These were your rules to lay down. Everything was decided.
The chink of metal touching metal as your hand covered mine across the diner counter. How that made me feel. The way I bit my lip to stifle any sound. In turn we nodded at the other before settling back to our cold eggs and dinner rolls; something of a Pioneer or Quaker arrangement, where tacit agreement – trust – were the only things needed in the absence of God. Your way of celebrating: chatting with the waitress and asking her to turn up the radio. Benny Goodman followed by Kay Starr. You patted your fingertips against my knee, happily in time, knowing that I could not be pulled onto the floor. The tapping of palms and fingers, mine slowly following yours, was a wedding dance of sorts; harmony through music; still tender as if recovering from an electric shock, but a degree of light-headedness and abandon. The waitress brought out a slice of pie with a candle slipping to an angle in its center.
– Explains why you were looking so sad, earlier. I get like that myself on my birthday. No one to share it with, unless those useless children of mine remember that they have a mama.
We did not feed each other, but the pie was shared: dry at the top and damp at the bottom; an imperfect cake to mark our imperfect wedding. The rings, the dance, the cake: from these barren elements our marriage was created. We ate for real this time, hungry, muddled, pleased with ourselves. Later, back at the motel, further allowances were made. You carried me over the threshold; a country boy, bringing all his traditions to an alien environment. Motel thresholds and gas station flowers. A sense of leadership as the celebrations continued into the night; the husband owning his wife; possession that could not be replicated elsewhere. Muddled from drink and the rush of the day, both thinking of the alternative life: homesteader and bride performing the duties required of them while their wedding party heckled from downstairs. To grow crops and to breed, becoming strong members of their community as their parents had before them. Stifled by duty and a sense of propriety. An assured voice that could never be as strong as the husband’s. Lessons drummed into me at the kitchen table as a child. What I had walked away from, for one night I entertained: a dangerous combination of happiness and curiosity, all because you had bought the rings.
YOU’RE AWARE THAT the animals are being mistreated, but are able to do little from your bed. Nothing you can see, but recognizable sounds; agitation and distress. The kindness they have shown after you collapsed at the truck-stop café, offering their home because the bus driver refused to take you (that it was the responsibility of this couple or the police, because the woman who ran the café refused to wait for you to come round); how attentive they are in their ministrations, how quietly they move around you, the softness of their voices, depletes the energy and care that should be given to the cows in the shed. It is less the animals’ vocal protest, more their relentless movement that disturbs your fitful sleep; hooves stamping in the barn, a collective strength that pushes against the walls of the flimsy wooden house in waves; the stench of piss that travels with them.
– Are they happy out there?
– Happy enough. Ignore their hooligan tendencies and rest. We’ll see to them shortly.
Whether they are eventually seen to, you are unaware; their lowing sharp and relentless; their feet unable to rest. Surely it should be the other way around – you in your delirium, while they swish their tails in contentment, settled back into their cycle of feed and milking; that even if they are simply cared for rather than loved, there is the certainty of routine that quiets their noise. Instead, you lie in a cot across from the kitchen fire, tender but lucid, while the sway of their bulk in that limited space increases in force.
Your hosts are Haley and Peg, middle-aged and childless; their bodies twisted out of form by the rigors of intensive farming. Symptoms you recognize from closer to home: the overdeveloped shoulders and neck, morphed from years of leading cattle; hands browned and calloused from twice-daily milking; deafness, medical and otherwise. Two decades younger but somehow looking closer to you in age. Their farm sits on Idaho prairie, an undeveloped patch flanked by commercial potato-growers. Your eyes were unable to settle on the landscape as the bus rode through the night; azure and shadow being all that reflected through the glass. Your thoughts were only of Washington and what you would find there: a painting of interest in the Dutch Embassy. One that you don’t remember seeing finished, or that your memory blurs with another painting; one sitting shifting into the next. There was a series with fish ten years ago: you with a string of catch pulled from the water that same day; diamond-shaped river trout from whose silver-coal skin light poured as if from a scatter-gun; your hands tight at each end of the line as if they had that same value, precious as jewels. Another: asleep, with a fly poking from your closed fist; part talisman, part comfort blanket. And the last: arriving home at sunrise after Edwin’s boy, Wendell, lost his footing in the undercurrent and drowned; showing how, in the space of moments, ten minutes of frantic rescue, and another ten on the bankside, pumping a heart that refused to yield, how a body can be drained of hope.
You are uncertain which painting the Embassy owns; whether its purchase was motivated by an underlying fixation with life or death. Whichever the case, there remains an element from that time which draws you there; paintings that record how you were not yet jaded by your vocation here – that even after the death of the boy, whether standing on crumbling soil or the damp studio floor, life was everything you wanted it to be. So you must locate the painting in your mind, somewhere between what is real and imagined, as you lie at Haley and Peg’s. The chances of you reaching Washington are remote. Energy reserves can be replenished; sleep, whatever comes, can do its job to nurse and erase. The problem lies in your frame and what it can take. Twenty hours on a threadbare bus is more than you can withstand; for although your eyes feed on every inch of the country passed, your body absorbs every inconsistency on the road; each pothole and crack in the asphalt. An airport is to be found three hours away, but this brin
gs more officialdom than you have the patience for. Discomfort will be felt however you journey, it is down to you to equate this with your need to find what needs to be seen; to keep warm and drink plenty of fluids, to remember to eat, and find some way – any – to sleep.
– Boy’s Own Adventure, with a Boy’s Own mind.
Peg, in summary to Haley, when they assumed he’d fallen to shut-eye.
– Traveling alone with barely a thing on him. I thought they were raised with more sense in the East.
– He can conduct hisself any way he likes, woman. A coat and some good shoes are all you need to get by. He’s proof. Men reached the far ends of the country with much less.
– Younger men.
– Not always. When a man has nothing, or needs to provide, he will search and find.
– He doesn’t need to provide. He has a credit card. Could stay anyplace.
The card is put under some scrutiny, familiar in these parts, but mostly unwanted. In the mind of Haley and Peg, its owners are primarily showmen and crooks, although not entirely different in disposition to farm people, who can be ugly as the nature they are enslaved to and take care of. The card makes them mistrustful, paying more attention to how much food is eaten and how far you stray into the rest of the house. The bag with the remainder of the money not left for Chuck is sitting in the trunk of the Greyhound Bus that left you behind. The camera is gone too; the thing that hurts the most. This would have been explained to Haley and Peg if they had asked. Instead they took you on sight: a man who traveled without excess weight; his past jettisoned at an earlier destination, along with his luggage.
All the Days and Nights Page 12