[57] Carious teeth that cannot spit

Art is a description without a place. I can handle a portrait easily enough, because the subject has to hold still, and I can sense what he would do if he moved, and that shows if I’ve painted him well. And I can handle an allegory, but that’s as close as I can get to a story. The problem, I just can’t get a grip on time any other way but with a graphite in my hand. The minute I start becoming aware of myself in time, it stops. Maybe that’s why it’s so important to me for my paintings to move somehow, so you can tell something was moving, visible, invisible, neither matters. I can’t see time, I can only imagine it. Time – what is it like, anyone? I can only tell it was there when it vanishes and leaves these traces.

A frame – it’s a prison where I get to scream all day. I don’t mind adding one later, but I’m likely to trust other people to choose them.

I’m smoking too much these days. In the studio when things are going well, I can almost forget I’ve got a pipe between my teeth. In the evening, when we take Johnny for a walk along the quay in any weather, I’m always stopping at a park bench, saying, ‘Let’s sit for a few minutes.’ She never objects. I don’t want to tell her, but she’s losing her jump the past two weeks. We have to talk about that soon. I’m telling myself, ‘Next time she throws a tantrum,’ because after one is the best time for talks like that. But when we’re holding hands, and Johnny’s gurgling bubbles in her lap or mine … I’m ashamed, but I need those moments more than a discussion about something we both want to still wait.

She told me she didn’t want a maid, then she hired one. No problem. The more people play with Johnny, the happier he looks. Around the Aaronson house, maids do whatever Mrs Aaronson says. That’s the kind Emma must have expected. She’s starting to learn that most maids aren’t like that. Most maids operate you, like ours does her. And having one that speaks Czech is like having two of them. When I talk to myself in the studio, it used to be in German, but now that the maid is down there, I’m beginning to do that in Czech. I’m starting to hum folksongs to myself.

Emma’s never told me her story, do you know? Not the complete one. The same way that I haven’t told her mine. But we both leave a trail of these pieces behind us, the loose ones, and over the years, there’s enough of them that we’ve learned most of each other’s just from picking them up, a blue piece of mine here would be somewhere in 1901, but that bit of green leaves, that must be from her 1904. No one can see them all. Stories – they’re all straight lines, and the lines only run one way, through time. But the ones in your head, they’re outside of time. That’s why you kill stories by telling them – they turn into fragments of truths at best, the minute you drop them into the stream.

I’m saying that I know about the dream that almost killed her (that nutter Wolfie is somewhere in it), but not really, the same way she knows about the horse, but not really. If we knew each other’s stories, if we pulled them out of each other’s head, they’d look like what we see on our faces anyway, because faces are the stories people have lived.