[44] Celestial forces strike the earth

‘I’m cruel to everyone but you,’ Paul says. No, he doesn’t say it but I can hear him thinking it. No, he isn’t thinking it, but I can tell he’d accept that thought if it occurred to him. In fact, probably none of that. I’m saying that when I first saw him, and saw him look back, I knew he was capable of cruelty, but not towards me, ever. That’s a gift, I tell you. I’m the one he picked to be gentle, out of everyone else – he somewhere told himself, she’s the one, and on bad days, when I wonder whether I’m giving back as much, I still don’t know why. He must have needed to say it to himself one day, to hear himself think so, to envision himself as capable of being like that, and I was there looking young and beautiful and lustfully available, besides vulnerable under the face I was wearing. It must have just been time for us both, and time brought its own luck to the show. The universe isn’t a wheel for nothing. So, to be afraid of what he might do or say or feel – it can never happen. He wants to be able to tell me that but he doesn’t know how. So he just acts likes himself, honestly even when it hurts, and it’s enough proof.

He paints astonishing portraits, and people know that side of his work the best. Astonishing is an imprecise word for what people see in them. Well, it’s a word, you know? One of those. How can your own face astonish you? It will by the time he’s done with you, and I say that as the person he draw/paints more than anyone else. He takes the notion that a portrait is meant for the sitter, not dinner guests, not clients or bankers. A portrait is for the sitter to learn who he is. So, Paul never paints his own portrait – it’s because he doesn’t have to learn that, since he’s already certain. I wish he’d accept more commissions, because the sitters would buy his other work later, his allegories, his cityscapes, his landscapes if he ever does more of them. Most of his paintings have people in them, from his need to humanize his outlook that way, but they aren’t about the people in them. Allegories are what he gravitates most towards, and he has a way of injecting everything with one of those. I don’t press him one way or another – he’s been smart with his career so far. Except for clapping and cheering from the balcony, and flashing cleavage at his patrons (from where it would be if I had any), he doesn’t need much help from me. To succeed the way he does, you have to be out there a lot in the right places, walking up to the right people, working the right crowd, making the authorities see you for what you do, making them expect what you are, and he has that knack.

I don’t want this discussion with Paul, not this spring, but Emil is half-right and I want to help Paul realize it one day: he must know this one day – there’s a limit to two dimensions, and there are two others he’ll have to face one day. The plastic intuition that’s his life is going to have to adjust. Never mind that film isn’t in him: hardly the point. It’s out there in the not-him, and what will he say about it? How is he going to respond about what it’s doing to us, to the people and places that he can only survive by intuiting? Art forms can be revolutionary, they can break the world open, but that doesn’t make them bad in themselves. Yes, sometimes the world needs to be broken, then other times the world breaks without anyone’s desire or volition and you have to find a way to reassemble it to your own purposes. Collective actions don’t have to be a death kiss as long as someone can understand their power. That’s what you have to learn to tell people, Paul. That’s the world you’re going to need to learn to express back. And how are you going to do that? And the cinema will bring its own honesty along with its own dangers if people ever learn to feel the invisible hand of it, understand its impact on their lives, which is something Paul is going to have to confront if he wants to grow for his whole life. Sometime in the future, his life’s going to hurl him into that wall. He’s still finding ways to make things that have never existed before, but if he wants to keep expressing the world he sees, he’s going to have to understand what film is going to mean next year, the next ten, twenty, fifty. He’s going to have to face those authorities and argue as hard as he has to the way he does with oils on canvas. He has it in him to do that, but until he does, he can’t bear to align himself with the people who abuse film out of ignorance of its power. He’ll tell you his work isn’t political, but with a name like Karsch and a family like his, he’s going to reach the moment of no choice sooner than he thinks, sooner than he’ll want. He doesn’t want to pick up a camera or watch other people do that and wonder about the harm he might do. When he finds a way to understand the social-chemical reaction that’s facing us all, he’ll do it.

I count eleven canvases tonight and know that’s going to be all. Four of them were completed last fall, turned against the wall, and three were in various stages before Christmas. Never twelve – he’s superstitious about twelve, something about the apostles. And never thirteen, because it’s even worse than twelve, he’d start worrying that in one of them he was painting the Christ. A weekly celebrant like him, he still says his prayers every night. That must be what he’s doing. He doesn’t kneel and clasp hands, but he strips down and piles his clothes on a chair and stares out the bedroom window every night looking at … for two minutes? ten? twenty? and I just hold breath, an open book in my lap, and wait. God – all right, he’s up there. Paul grew up believing in Him – badly, but still … – and I wonder what that must have been like.

He’s been out to the moonmaidens again. He’s been going to them for years, the same ones in the same house, a trope he needs to revisit. He’s been using them for groups since his purple days, before The Prague Years, and I recognize Cassie’s body now. Her hair will be ripe-banana yellow though she’s changed the shape of it now, or he’s changed it for her. He never shows more than a corner of her face, so you notice her body more than you would – flabby but posed to show an earthy kind of strength. There are four in the group this time, and though the canvas is square, he’s arranged them like they’re all clinging to a vortex you can’t see, coiled around one another, hands and arms elongated, two of them looking away, two of them looking at each other, and one of the latter is a child, and the other almost is. I make them sound contorted, but somehow they’re not. And in the lower-left quadrant of the ground, he’s written in the hand he usually reserves for his signature square, but bigger: dead love. He’s never named his paintings except after the sitter, or the view if it’s of someplace concrete, but he’s also like everyone else in town these days: he works on his signature until it’s parcel of every painting he makes. So, something got to him yesterday. He’s left two-thirds of the painting for the ground, which is never empty – he fills it with abstracted motifs, and I can see where he’s started to faint them in. There are musical notes, okay. So the figures are singing, that tells me. Or maybe they’re hearing music. Or there’s music around them that they don’t hear. And I know the kinds of songs they’ll be by the time the colours are there, all the motion locked in place. Children of a collapsing universe – he’s tilted the four of them so that you can sense them falling. But by falling, are they escaping? I can’t tell whether they’re screaming or smiling. Paul has his own language on good days, like this one was, which I learn one word and one rule at a time.

I’ve learned that from Paul – life starts out there. Experience is what you make yourself see. And one day soon, Johnny will remember something for the first time while he’s with me out in the world, and some day he’ll tell me what it was, and I yearn for the day he can do that. Yearn till my heart almost breaks. That’s a life for you. How did I learn to love like this?