[22] Prophecies of the moonmaidens

The first few mornings back, Paul doesn’t blink or stare when I bring Johnny to the studio. We’re there till lunch. He doesn’t notice us much unless Johnny starts to cry, and then he flips a drool cloth over his shoulder and carries him, bounce bounce, clicking his tongue and pulling faces with him, until Johnny starts to belly-laugh and he stops and hands him back to me. He used to carry me like that, around the bedroom, around the kitchen, down the hall, bounce bounce … Otherwise … The window sun in my hair, a thread of winter breeze on my left shoulder, and a shawl around me and Johnny so that we both can look out. Paul would tell us if we were hardening his work. From my soft chair, under Mister Frog, the next canvas is facing away so that I can watch his face while he moves around in front of it, and only Johnny could turn him from what he sees when we leave him alone. I make sure Johnny’s watching him instead of me. There are moments that he, I can tell, forgets I’m there and I feel like myself again. But when Paul’s there, I’d better be holding him; he looks sad when I’m not. Yes, Paul, seek to collapse the past and future into an eternal present. Inject the world with dreams of unseen truths. But at this stage, when the canvas is at its whitest, he’s in how mode, not his what or why mode. There are a dozen drawings of Charlotte on his desk, from yesterday and months past, but he doesn’t study them yet – the act of drawing them will have been enough for today. He has a knack for keeping things out of his head when he needs to, please dear God never me. Because that would be a nightmare look.

There are things he never does twice, and there are things he almost always does. No joke, he’d paint with tinted water on white glass if he could find a way. You’d think he had one pot of each colour to last him the rest of his life, the way he thins it. (In The Prague Years, where we still were three years ago, he’d paint horizontally, on his desktop, because it was the only way he could control the weight of his paint on the hard surface he always prepared for it. They were the first paintings he sold, and they were special, but … enough, he knew he’d go mad working like that too often.) One day perhaps that ‘light’-ness will stop being his signature, but for now, no one’s else’s work looks like his. For that, and for the shiny snow-white undercoat he always starts with, which hides from the start all traces of the weave and makes what he does an exercise in achieving a third dimension in a multitude of hard ways. Most of his Marzipan buddies soup their canvases a lot darker than this so that whatever they paint on top pops out. But Paul doesn’t want people to notice the paint or see brushstrokes when they look at him. And then he draws in the figures with a graphite so lightly that only he can see them, and then he moves to charcoal, black or red or in combination, with as much care as with his paints, because he means for you to see those lines through the colours. He always cared more about line than colour, but tell that to the subjects who sit for him. Really, most of his sitters want something that will look impressive in the dining room, and it’s his glowing colours that do that. He’s always scanning his surface for build-up, and when he sees any he’ll buff it down with a chamois. He works with a cloth-wrapped fingertip as often as with a brush. And when he wants dark, he doesn’t darken the paint, he adds another layer, then another, of the colour he first thinned, using a flat or curved edge to bring out the veins between each. It’s maddening to watch. He works faster than he used to, but only because he’s practised so long. You think he’d have found shortcuts by now but it’s as if he’s never looked for them. This is how slowly he has to work to be sure he’s getting the effect he wants. And after that, as many layers of varnish as he needs to make sure the painting glows. When the light is right, you can look at one of his paintings once it’s hardened and see your reflexion on it. He isn’t trying to express his technique, but there’s always this subtext by the time he’s finished: not, ‘This is who I am’ or ‘This is why I am’ – no, he’s saying ‘This is how I act.’ If you want to know his reasons, get a sense of his whys, you need to hear him argue with our painter friends, because that’s when they come out. Not that he would ever declare them, but you can piece them together from listening to him when he’s got a few in him and he’s rejoinding someone else. That’s what I tell myself when I’m not watching him. When I am, I only see him working. I see his competence, how he works as hard as he must at something he knows how to do, and I see that he has reasons though I don’t know what they are.

This morning, when Johnny and I left the studio he was roughing a three-quarter portrait of Charlotte in her loosened ball gown, spread across a dark leather couch with a blazing fire in the hearth at her feet, swept hair dangling back, one hand spread casually on her tummy where a corset should be, long slim fingers splayed out, the other hand cupping a half-consumed pomegranate. That’s Charlotte, right – eating a pomegranate in an ivory silk gown, and getting away with it. That’s what a predator goddess would do, with the money she was born to and the time she’s got on her hands. I can’t read her face yet, but those hands? I can see where they’re going unless they were just there. Paul used to tell me that the saddest sound, the only sad sound, he ever heard, is the wail of his sister when she’s coming. He can’t know, really. A dark place, hers – heaven’s supposed to be brighter than that. You want to shake her back to earth and tell her cheer up, girl, life can’t be as bad as that. Do you want to talk about it? Look at those hands he’s drawn and then picture her when she rises to it, and listen – a shaking apart of the infernal damned, a cacaphonic damburst of Charlotteness, pummelling darkness with howling white crests, the lash of a superheated wind expulsing a final contortion. In other words, it’s sure to be something like what Paul sounds like but he’s usually looking down, not up. Now, in that pose, her liquid mirror has shattered, her body slid down, the moons in her eyes are about to reassemble themselves. I know those moons, the same exactly. When he fills out her face – and will he know this? – she’s going to be asking me, ‘Do you catch the signal, Emma?’ No secret between us three – she’s wanted me to touch her like that and send her there since the day we met and has been waiting and waiting for me to want it too. No, not for me to want it – for Paul to want it, good luck you, girl. There’s one piece of him you won’t score from us.

Paul has a deep distrust of the collective voice, the voice you can’t see, I realize that now: he trusts everyone to have a truth in him that he would want to hear. That’s the problem with truth, that everyone has their own. So people reject one another’s, and in the end people have to lie en masse to get themselves believed. He despairs that it’s only lies that people can ever agree on, can accept as a societal whole. So his work is about – I’ll say it for him – telling his own truth in ways that people will believe. He trusts people (or doesn’t) one on one, and he trusts himself the same way. But the crowd? He knows he’ll survive in it but it tires him out, thinking of everyone at once and sorting out the confrontations among people he’d never otherwise have to heed, maintaining the barrier that will still let him see clearly. He doesn’t think much of the world generally, but he loves whom and what he does and swims through the rest. The rest is what fuels him when he needs to be fuelled. He’s sociable, his manners perfect (they’re the first thing rich people buy their children) and his interest passing but genuine, once he’s pared the world down to the person in front of him.

And things he needs to be good at, I help him do, like bat my eyes at the commissioners and keep his schedule clear, or not. I get him out of the house or into the sack enough when he’s working hard, so that he doesn’t live too much inside himself. He’ll have to live mostly there, for the next three months, but it isn’t his natural state. I know he’s going to have to stay in there for weeks at a time until after the SilverDome opens for him, so it’s up to me to pull him out sometimes, even when he says don’t.

I function just fine, thank you, for a reformed lunatic. I’ve learned to live in the present even if I haven’t let myself forget the past. That guy, that guy in Rosemeyr’s shop … just as I was finding my footing after Johnny’s Big Day, and preparing myself to look at the world over Johnny’s head, that bastard shouldered me back into the pit. I don’t have it in me to murder anyone, but whoever he is, I yearn to hear that he’s dead.

I surprised Paul last night. He asked me why I didn’t get a maid, and I told him I didn’t want to and that I wanted to get by on my own if I possibly could. It was a difficult conversation, for a minute. How well is Emma going to be again? We’re both asking ourselves that, and acting as if we’re not, and waiting to see what we see through the settling dust before we begin discussing what may never be there again. Mostly, I worry that if we hired a maid, I’d turn into someone who has a maid. I grew up in an apartment with seven of them, eight in the winter, so not having one is another way to avoid turning into someone who lives in that past. I don’t want to have nightmares about that. I want to see how much I can do without one before I think about it. I haven’t given up on feeling normal yet, I still want to hope and have the energy to hope. I don’t know what normal will be from now on, that definition isn’t clear yet, and until it is, I want to give myself every chance to find out.

All right, so it happened, the fifth afternoon of our return from our hill. Paul left for his studio after a quick lunch, I was alone in the parlour with Johnny. This whole eye contact thing, I wasn’t ready for it, so as soon as he tried I totter-marched into the bedroom until I figured out what to do next. At least in there there was only one of me. One of me I can still manage, though I always end up thinking about Paul instead. And wondering how he succeeds to live without looking back. Because it’s when you look back that the world gains ground on you.

Right now, this afternoon, Johnny’s sleeping, which is when we both seem happiest, so I close the bedroom door behind him and lie down on my side. Love sticks are out, these days and forever, which is really too bad, because I’ve got a nice collection of them. Paul used to carve me one from cherrywood every day-we-met anniversary, just like I’d buy him a new pipe from the smith he goes to who knows what he needs (fossil brier, rusticated oxblood, 6-centimetre bowl, long shank with a seventy-degree lacquer mouthpiece. He has to be able to hold it comfortably between his teeth while he’s working.) On my tummy is no good any more, because I can’t bend that way, and on my back is too much of a strain – we don’t have enough pillows. So I lie on my side and think about Paul spooning me, the way we always fall asleep, and this rich, earthen smell that always throbs from him – all of the sight of him mixed up in it, like paint and old wool and fresh burley and sweat and heavy red wine. I cup myself and breathe the blankets and summon the moon and the wind to rule me. And I lay there afterwards and rest, licking the rain from my face and thinking, ‘I’m a water sprite.’ I block my ears and imagine Paul watching me, our eyes almost touching, one great and unsubdued heart. Johnny is still sleeping – I could have taken more time – and I begin to hope he never wakes up. I don’t mean that cruel. Sleep is the most beautiful thing in the world. Why haven’t people learned to sleep forever? It must be because people also dream, and you have to wake up to escape those