[6] I have slept with the lions

Through a frost blossom in this kitchen window, across the snowbanked yard and its wind devils, through Paul’s studio window, I see their forms moving. I lean forward, or try to. Everything is murky over there, for all the light that always floods his studio, but I can tell where they’re standing and what they’re doing. There aren’t many times like that, when I can watch either of them, or both of them, without them knowing it, without my presence being part of their equations. I used to seek moments like that, for the chance to see them in a world that just briefly does not include me, when I can stand alone just like them.

All right, yes, grandfather has lifted away a dropcloth. The third one down – oh yes, I know it. Paul’s working within squares this year, tacking each canvas to an oversized board without stretching it. When we returned here just after the new year from the asylum clinic down the hill where I almost died, this was his next one. The three of us are sitting on a calico blanket, another one cast over Paul’s shoulders. It’s the only painting I ever saw him make that he’s included himself – he’s never made a self-portrait, not even with a graphite. Even when he’s drawing in a mirror, he’ll include what’s behind him but not himself. I’d watched him work preliminaries for this before Johnny was born though Johnny’s in it too now. Paul is squatting with knees apart, and I’m cross-legged between them (cross-legged – what was that like?), leaning back against his chest, with Johnny in my lap head on my hip. Paul tells me sometimes that colours move if you shape them this way, if you anchor them just so. You can train them to fight the stillness the square tries to demand. No fool me, I’ve got a mind for the self-knowledge he can’t for himself articulate – when something he’s done strikes me the way I know he hopes it will others, I ask myself, ‘Where’s the diagonal?’ There always is one under the surface – not hidden, just silent – and whether you notice them or not, you can’t help following their vectors to where his instinct intended you. He hasn’t touched colour yet, but the anchors all are there, sticed into the delicate graphite work, in the touches of charcoal like secret writing waiting to be fixed by tinted glazes that will be the next step, and the anchors to this are the faces, their own pyramid running against the ones our bodies make and the folds of the blankets. There’s something aggressive about triangles, something that aims at the world beyond the square that contains them. Squares hold you still; triangles make you want to kick out; it’s circles that relax your eye, but he rarely uses them when he’s building a composition. After seven years with him, I know he never works with a pilot and that everything he succeeds with might as well have been for the first time. He tries something, and then he tries something else, and when something starts to work for him, to keen for release, he’ll seek out ways to harness what he hears. He doesn’t set out to say or mean anything. He only wants to stop the world for a moment that mattered to him when he experienced it, to bring that energy he sensed to a halt so you can see it concentrated in one place: ‘What must that look like?’ Nothing ever moves in his paintings, but things are always an instant before movement or an instant after they’ve stopped. Look at us now – three on a raft of their lives so far’s own assembly, steadying one another on a universal sea, tensing themselves against one another, huddled inviolate to the world around. The little one too young to name things, his existence still a cloud of wonder and sensations, pure expression without object. Me holding him tucked and looking where he is looking but remembering what he cannot yet, and clutching the father’s arm steady. Me, fear? You can tell I used to feel it, but not here and not now. Fear has been chained deep in me in a place where I can’t sense its weight, my pride too strong and now too old for it to cross back to others’ awareness against my will. And the father the most still, arms draped over my shoulders, hand on breast, hand on tummy, chin on shoulder, looking the same as me direct at the lens – I’ll steal that word for Paul, who would shudder if he heard me use it on him. But there’s always a lens – something in his paintings that is looking back and pulling you in. Once you notice it, that’s what won’t let you go. You can turn away, walk away, but never completely, and that is what you’ll remember – how what you saw looked back at you with an intent that will haunt you. The father holding all three still and safe from you – lost in the depths like his wife and child, and knowing what’s there – you – out beyond the square, and protecting them from it as if his silence was a rock to hurl. More than that, what could this one’s love do? How much farther could he send it? He works on the edge of what he can understand, and looks down from there into places where words fail all of us. That’s where he tries to walk, on the outer edge of what he can experience, to where his intuition can climb no higher and begins collapsing back into the colours and lights that birthed it. When he comes back from that place in the evening, while I’m pouring him his three-fingered shooter, if I tried to get him to tell me what he did all day, I’ll tell you what he would say if he could: no idea – this is no more than what he does, but it’s also all of what he does. It’s something he lives when no one else is there, a walk, and then another, toward a place he can’t stop hoping to see, a life it would end him to escape, a need he has to make sense of experiences it would destroy him to deny. But those are my words. The moment he starts to understand too much, he isn’t working hard enough, and he berates himself (I can tell), and I berate him (with a look), because by now I always know too: when he’s sure for too long just what he’s doing, he hasn’t been close enough to look back from the disintegrating edge of this world.