by Susan Conley
I went to the state university in Farmington, because it was the only college I applied to. Painting had always been something I did. I had a special love for it, and for my high school art teacher, a sheep farmer named Mrs. Henderson who smoked a pipe and wore motorcycle boots and obtained paint for us when the rest of the school was running out of paper. College was mostly a blur, but I made many oils of famous women painters because Mrs. Henderson sent me to college with a book called Famous Women Painters that saved me. It taught me how to copy, and I didn’t know when you copy you reinterpret, even if you don’t tell yourself this.
My painting was concerned with the question of what was beautiful. Was I beautiful? I was eighteen and nineteen and twenty. Was life beautiful? Or dying or suffering? Beauty mattered greatly to me in the unearned way that feels distant now. I wasn’t often inside my body, and I believed it was important to remain unattached. I began trying not to want anything too much and to hold myself apart, though I didn’t see it. I got tattoos, maybe as acts of self-preservation. First on my ankle, and then on my left bum cheek and then on my forearm, and I wish I could say things stopped there.
I met a theatre boy named Cal who walked on his hands next to the creek that runs through Farmington, and he said walking on his hands was an expression of all the emotion he had in his body for me, and I stood in the grass and stared at him and felt something shift in the frozen water of my heart. I wanted to bury myself in this boy, but I couldn’t yet. My sister had only been dead eight years.
I moved to Dublin after college and lived with my cousin Emmet and his acoustic band in a squalid boy apartment, and this is where I became a painter. It’s a longer story that doesn’t matter now, except that I didn’t go back to Maine until many years later.
· 13 ·
Side plank was harder, and Justice said we were supposed to roll over and hold ourselves up on the mat with one arm and the outer edge of one foot. I couldn’t do this for long. Tasmin laughed and fell back down on her mat, but Ulla and Andre’s faces were very serious, and they looked like they could hold side plank for hours. In triangle pose I was meant to stand sideways with my legs about three feet apart and bend down and reach my right arm to the floor to make a triangle with my body. I could get my hand only as far down as my shin after I straightened my right leg, but I was okay about this.
My mind went to Tommy Miller, an American I’d lived with in Ireland, who was on residency for pediatric neurosurgery. He smoked French cigarettes and played English Beat albums in our brick apartment near the lake in the north of the city and asked me to marry him. I thought he was insular like me, and I liked that about him—that he didn’t need me. For about a year it felt like a marriage, though I see now I didn’t know what was called for in a marriage or what a marriage was at all. I think I always knew I’d leave him because I hadn’t known him. It was impossible, because I hadn’t known myself. The sex and the English Beat were enough to keep me with him, until I left and moved in with the owners of the Montessori school where I worked. A vegan couple in their forties who let me sleep in their den on the corduroy pullout couch and said I was crazy to walk away from Tommy Miller, but I knew this was code for walking away from marriage and babies, and I didn’t want either. I wanted to paint.
I took night classes at the local university and did more portraits of women painters: Cassatt, Vanessa Bell, Kahlo. At first I was faithful in my paintings to these women’s faces and breasts and hips. Then I left the portraits and began copying the master paintings I saw in the museums, which romanticized the raping of many women, and the casualness of the rapes confused me. My paintings grew more and more abstract. A woman’s body became a cloud, which became a storm. I stayed up at night painting in the room with the pullout couch and thought it was possible to make the paintings I most wanted to make and that I shouldn’t be afraid of my imagination because it was just my imagination and my confidence soared. In the mornings I was racked with self-doubt and thought I should never paint again.
My teacher at the night classes had a gravelly cough, and when I brought my interpretation of Delacroix into class she said, “And so another master falls, Miss Steele.” Then she lit another cigarette and laughed.
I took three paintings to the galleries the next Saturday in a van I borrowed from the preschool owners. I didn’t know if the work was any good, but I knew it was different from the work I’d done before, less interested in narrative and more about the color and unexpected shapes. At the third gallery, the owner said he’d take the Delacroix and I started to cry. After that I began to paint more genuinely and it took over my life.
· 14 ·
Justice asked us to bend at our waists and hang our arms down to the ground, and when I did this my head weighed a thousand pounds. It was relaxing down there. Quiet. My mind went to the music my husband makes, which I have sometimes imagined is stacked like a Beijing skyscraper with a detachable roof. Lush and fabulous to listen to when I was drunk and painting. We met in 2004 when I came to the capital for an exhibit, and my jet lag was like an opiate, though I’ve never tried opiates. I’d been living alone in an apartment near the University of Dublin, and I’d had a show in Los Angeles and one in New York. Then another. I thought I might always live alone with my paintings.
My first night in China my hosts took me to an EDM show, which is what they call the electronic dance music Lukas makes, and I’d never been to this kind of show before. We were in what was a long rectangular warehouse. Lukas stood on a lit stage with several computers and black consoles, and there were wooden risers on the side of the stage, and this is where I went to stand and watch. He got excited during one of his songs and raised an arm up in the air and danced a little around his computers. He had the thin, boyish features and wiry frame and the same close-shaved beard he has now. His brown hair was longer and moppish in the heat, and he wore dark jeans that appeared to be made of cardboard.
At one point he looked toward the risers and said, “It’s a bit warm up here, you know? Would you mind fetching me a glass of water?”
There were other people on the side of the stage, but I thought Lukas looked only at me when he asked for the water, and my stomach flipped. I cannot overstate how happy I was to get him the water. I didn’t know the word for water yet in Mandarin, but it seemed universal, and when I asked, the bartender handed me a full glass.
It took some time to carry the water back to Lukas. The people around him were like groupies and were what I would call electronic music people who came to see what songs he played. It’s a different world, electronic music. I grew up in the woods on Joni Mitchell songs that tell stories. Lukas once told me he grew up on imported rap music in a block of brick apartment buildings subsidized by the Danish government, but in general he doesn’t like to talk about his past.
The people around me on the risers were quiet. Some had come to the club only to see Lukas, not to dance, but I didn’t understand this yet, or electronic music. It sounded seductive and almost kitschy and reminded me of a different kind of music I used to listen to from the late 1970s. Oozing synthesizers and drum machines, and guitars and bass and brass. The sea of people on the dance floor waited for the waves of sound or swells, and no one really talked while they waited, and it was intimate in this way and also sensual. I couldn’t get over that. How moved everyone was by the music and by being there.
I handed Lukas the glass of water. He had on oversized black headphones like a helmet, and I waited to see if he’d forgotten me. It was important in a way, because I’d made the effort to go to the bar, but it was also going to be easy to make it a throwaway moment. If he didn’t remember I’d gone to get the water, my plan was to walk into the dancers and find my hosts. I was jet-lagged enough to be open to whatever happened. He thanked me loudly because I don’t think he could hear himself well, and when he smiled I knew it was genuine, and in this way I understood an essential part of
him and that he saw me as a real person, so I stayed.
After he was done, we took a cab to his apartment in a mid-rise near the Workers Stadium, and I sat on his formica counter. He pulled my silk tank top over my head and then gently tugged off my skirt, which was high-waisted and tight, so he had to kneel on the floor and slide it off my hips and then my underpants. He’s a considerate lover like that, and we didn’t leave his apartment except to get steamed shrimp dumplings, which we ate in bed while we watched a Gong Li movie. In between the dumplings and the movie we made more love, and I didn’t know that you could make love three times in a night. I mean, I knew it, but I hadn’t done it, and we got no sleep, and I haven’t ever felt that reckless again.
On my fourth day in Beijing he said he wanted to drive me to a lake on the west side of the city near the summerhouses for the Communist Party officials and remove my clothes and swim with me. He was completely generous with his heart, and it was all unexpected and perfectly logical. He drove me to the lake and took off my clothes in his little car in a small wooded area near a teahouse with a talking parrot. I never left Beijing after that. I never went back to Dublin. I had some of my things shipped.
· 15 ·
“Once upon a time,” Justice said, “there was a great Daoist philosopher named Zhuangzi who fell asleep by a river and dreamt he was a butterfly, flitting from leaf to leaf. When the philosopher woke, he didn’t know if he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming he was a man, but he didn’t worry the distinction. This is what I want for you in Shashan,” he said. “To become the butterfly.”
I sat up and nodded, but really I had no idea what he was talking about. I just knew I wanted to be like him. Calm. He said when he was a teenager he’d been a novice at a monastery in Burma, where his teaching involved twenty hours of sitting meditation a day. Now he wanted for us to begin the Talking Circle, where each of us would take a stone from the middle of the rug and say something about our feelings and put the stone back.
I wasn’t ready for this. I thought the Talking Circle might be better for a Saturday Night Live skit and that Lukas would smile to know he’d sent me away for a week to a place where I was meant to speak to strangers while holding a black stone in my lap. I was also afraid if I took the stone, I’d talk about my thyroid surgery, which was pretty easy to do once I got going, except I regretted it afterward, like May Sarton.
Tree went first. “I lived for a year with a guru in the Himachal Pradesh in northern India,” she said. “As far away from people as I could be. I spent six months in silence and felt very close to the ground. At times all I wanted was to sink back into the earth.”
She spoke clearly and quietly and never wavered, and I’m not sure anyone in the yoga house knew what to do after she finished. Most of us looked at our bare feet or maybe at some spot on the plaster wall behind Justice or at the brass cup with the burnt incense sticks. What Tree had said was quite serious and dire, and I decided to block it out, even though this was what Lukas thought was my biggest problem in life, blocking things out.
Mei surprised me by going next, and for a minute she seemed like she was in a daze and stared at the stone in her lap. Then her face became blank. “I did not know how hard the poses would be,” she said. “It isn’t good to smoke cigarettes and try to do the yoga.”
Tasmin stood and took the stone and sat back down. “Seriously?” she said, and locked eyes on Ulla, who was to my mind the best at yoga and could go from one pose to the next while most of us seemed to not understand what a Sun Salutation was.
“I want to do handstands.” Tasmin smiled. “I came to learn handstands and I won’t leave until I do them.” It was pretty much what I expected from Tasmin, because she didn’t seem encumbered by life or to have any real ambivalence.
Justice nodded at her, and more of the horrible waiting began.
At some point I knew I’d have to get up and take the stone and talk, but I couldn’t see how I was going to accomplish any of these things. The acrid sweat I get when I’m extremely nervous started in my armpits. Talking seemed like a matter of adrenaline, and that you got the stone when you couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. When I finally stood, I had no idea what I was going to say.
· 16 ·
“I had to get out of the city,” I said. “Because I think I may have arm cancer.” I didn’t have arm cancer. My God, what was I saying and what was arm cancer? My arm hurt, this was true. But I hadn’t been able to stop myself from saying the lie. This seemed to be part of the problem—my complete lack of control. As soon as I said it, I was sick of myself and didn’t know how I’d dig myself out of my hole. I stood and put the stone back on the rug, and after that it was quiet in the house again.
Then Andre took the stone and said, “I would like to say that I don’t think it was sensitive for Tree to have talked earlier about wanting to die by climbing back into the earth when Elsey is clearly trying hard to live.”
Tree cried and said she hadn’t known, and I defended her to the group and regretted what I’d confessed and asked them not to change what they planned to say in the Talking Circle because of me.
“It’s important,” I told them, “for you to be honest.” And I felt truthful when I said this and a little bit like I was still in the Saturday Night Live skit.
Andre said he came to the mountains every year for four reasons: “One. The day of silence.” He put his right pointer finger up in the air. “Two. Clarity. Three. Self-knowledge. And four. Peace of mind. Because I fly often and always need the peace of mind.” He exhaled slowly and loudly. Four fingers up in the air. I hadn’t seen how well groomed he was until then or that his athletic clothing matched and was made of bamboo or some newer wicking material. “These four things are what my yoga teacher teaches me every year, and I thank you for them, Justice.” He bowed his head to Justice, and Justice bowed back, and Andre walked to the center of the circle and put the stone down.
Tamar took the stone after Andre and said her husband had recently died in an accident in Southern China. Her long, dark curls fell in front of her shoulders, and she showed so much love for the dead man and cried so hard for him that I began crying for him too and for Tamar and then for Lukas. Tasmin was also crying, and Andre. Again I wanted to go home and tell Lukas I was already better, even though part of me knew this wasn’t close to being true. I couldn’t imagine a whole week up there. I thought that I’d miss my children to the point I’d be physically sick and have to drive away.
Ulla picked up the stone and said in her heavy Swedish accent that she was looking for evidence of the ephemeral in Shashan. She talked like she was trying to win an argument the way she annunciated last syllables of words and last words of sentences. “It is like a marriage, how we grow the food and care for the land.” Then she shrugged. “But I come here to the mountains for the faith.”
It had never occurred to me before that Ulla was a spiritual person. I’d always thought she was locked in by the biology of plants, and self-sufficient because she didn’t need anything from anyone.
Maeve, the punkish girl with white hair, went next and said her father had found her in bed with a girl in Auckland when she was eighteen. “They were missionaries, my parents. Spent most of their time in eastern Australia in the blasting desert. Me the only child. My father kicked me out. Haven’t spoken to him since.”
She wiped at her tears with the back of her right hand and spoke steadily, and my heart sort of broke for her. Until then I’d thought she was English and probably entitled. “It’s something I’ve had to make peace with. Justice told me to come here because he said it would help.”
The blond boy, Toby, stood and took the stone from her and talked about wanting to quit smoking while he was in Shashan and how fucking hard it was. He smiled at Maeve the whole time and made her laugh, and in this way you could tell he helped her.
Hunter stood last and talked about his plane ride to a small landing strip near Shashan on the private jet of a friend who was very senior at Pepsi in China. Maybe Hunter was nervous, but it felt like he bragged about the plane. He had thinning hair swept back from his face, and wore Patagonia or North Face and was one of the American men in China who became more confident the longer they stayed in the country.
“I do this a lot since I got here six months ago.” His face looked pinched now, and nervous. “Pick random towns in China to spend the weekend in. But I’ve never done anything close to this before, and I’m not sure how I even got here. I mean, by plane, yes. But it was some friend of a friend at a cocktail party in the city who put me up to this.”
He had a quiet detachment. Almost aloof, and then he changed before our eyes. “Jesus,” he said. “Okay, what the hell. My father sent me here. Not here to the mountains, but to China, to run his business. He is large, my father.” He laughed and didn’t make eye contact with anyone in the circle, so it appeared he was talking to the door. “Not physically large, but punishing. And yes, you could say cruel. Which is probably why the woman at the party thought I should come here.” He put the stone back then and sat down, and I didn’t know what to believe.
I dreaded the week ahead, because I could see how real intimacy would be required, and I didn’t think I was capable of it. It wasn’t like I told myself this in an interior monologue. I didn’t tell myself anything while I was in Shashan. I reacted. What I think now is that sickness does strange, little invisible things to our minds we can’t see.