[39] Blindness, madness, other terrors

There’s a game I play within my head – when Paul goes off somewhere, I don’t ask myself where. I blot out the question. Instead I wait for him to come back, and look at him and ask myself what he’s seen. He always shows me from the drawings he’s brought back, but I try to guess first.

Yesterday afternoon, in the early dark, just after he left the studio with his glassy-eyed after-work stare, as if he was watching a dream through a telescope, to take his pipe for a walk, Emil visited without any notice, wearing a pale-brown suit, a powder-blue shirt, and a black enamelled stickpin powdered with milk opals. He had been waiting outside for Paul to leave – it’s what he does. He came up the lift and knocked this furtive way he has and waited for me to invite him over the threshold. I opened a bottle of white, which is what he drinks, and before he could start up with anything I talked him into visiting grandfather with me and Johnny. He dreads crossing the canal. This time I can insist he do that soon: being a mother has given me more weight in this world. But I have a little mercy to spare him (in his world, no one else offers him any), so I stop short of naming a day for it. Now I sit in my parlour chair, the softest one down here, and the one closest to the porcelain stove, and let Johnny try to wrench my little finger off with his right hand. The lights are low, the way I prefer, bringing out the warmth of the pale-bronze walls and dark oak floor. (Paul will turn on all the lights when he gets home.) While we’re performing our moment’s civility talk, Emil stares at the books in our bookcase. Staring at books is what he does when he’s nervous and ashamed. Even around me, sometimes he’s both, and around Johnny? Always. We talk about everything except why he’s here. He’s haunted by the birthday party, and he tenses up once he knows I’ve read his mind about the repercussions. Something has shifted, somewhere in my parents’ apartment. Perhaps it was the presence of Johnny, or grandfather, but when my brother looks at me tonight, I see him and not the shadows of the people he brought with him. For once, for a moment, he’s willed those shadows away.

Before he says what he’s here to, he takes a walk around Paul’s studio. Johnny and I climb up there with him to stand guard. Paul doesn’t care who comes in when he’s gone. No ‘but it’s not ready’ protests from him. Paintings tell him to paint them, and once he starts, other people can’t change what he’s doing. My guy got a lot done today and left for his walk tonight with a bigger spring in his step than usual. He’s running out of obsessive preparation to do. I never tell him what I see, I don’t try to parse him out, and besides, it’s too early yet to look closely at the light that always shines through his canvases once the colour work starts. I can tell from the firmness of his charcoal strokes and the paucity of them that he feels confident these days. There’s no struggle here, much, to make the compositions work. There isn’t much happiness here either – more a sense of, not this is what the world is really like, but this is what people really see. They’re statements about that. Art needs to be tragic at some level if it’s to succeed, because the human condition is always tragic at some level. But tragedy can be delayed, or looming, or past. It doesn’t have to be the moment of being painted.

Today he’s been working on his portrait of Charlotte, who came for a second sitting yesterday, then visited me and Johnny downstairs, exhausted from holding still for three hours, changed back to her black daytime dress from the ivory gown she posed in. She stared at Johnny – ha – one alien being to another, without asking to hold him. Then she brewed us some tea (just to see if she could guess how), and served it with currant cakes (that she had brought with her from the Sun Room), and concentrated on making me laugh. She can do that when she sets out to, and she knows better than to make me laugh at Paul. I can still smell her here in the studio – her perfume, her horses – and she’s dented my sunbeam chair. An empty champagne bottle stands on the table by it, one fluted glass. A clay bowl with a pomegranate skin and the stained red knife she opened it with. Paul is folding all of that into the drawing. This one won’t have many colours – when you think about Charlotte, it’s barely in colour, but the black lines of her pose are touched with red. With the background so dark – I can tell it will be – all the light will be emanating from her ball gown, which will buckle and flow like April mountains across the canvas. She’s lying back on a black oxhide couch, a four-legged spider under all the foaming ruffles, head deep in the armrest and looking straight at Paul. All relaxed, but only on the surface – the steam within her is rising, something she’s hiding is about to explode. Any second now, perhaps while you’re watching, she’s going to let herself fly apart and her laugh will be all that’s left of the world. Wheeee … Ha … won’t that be fun, when you’re Charlotte?

Emil picks up a piece of loose charcoal and touches the canvas around her face, like a private stunt. He often does, and this time, while I know he’s watching, I make a note to Paul about where, then mark it with a straightpin. Paul would have noticed the mark tomorrow morning, but I want Emil to see in the same moment where my loyalties are. Now it’s time for me to sit, please.

Downstairs, Emil shows no signs of wanting to stay, but none of leaving quickly either. I don’t mind – I’ll wait for him to tell me what he must, though I won’t make it easier for him. While I change Johnny’s diaper on the kitchen counter he looks out the window at the canal night.

I can tell what he is not thinking about: an hour from now, the homeless people come out, the bench sleepers, the underbridge dwellers. An hour after sunset, the forces of the powers will stop moving them on, and the benches along this stretch of the canal will be packed with them from here to the strip park alongside the Pantheon. By the time I’m done with the lad, Emil has recomposed himself for private viewing. He’s blinded himself to the sight of himself. No one is born a coward, Paul told me once. A coward is the world’s project for you. Cowardice as about giving up, and no one is born doing that.

Johnny smells of milk. I watch him sleep in my arms and light a cigarette and exhale long enough to let the sunlight in and drink a glass of wine and wait for Paul to come back to me. How can I not be happy for a moment, Emil here or not?

It’s his way to say what he long wanted to say just before he leaves you. When his words hesitate, he’s about to say something new.

‘A work of art is revolutionary,’ he tells me, ‘to the extent that it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing freedom and unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified and petrified social reality.’

‘According to you, language was invented in order to align all existence to temporeality,’ I remind him. ‘Unquote.’

‘Yes, and he’ – points at the painting – ‘seeks to free experience for the same. The winner was predetermined centuries ago.’

‘Every time you two meet, there’s one moment where he has you cold. That’s all he wants – one moment. He doesn’t care how many points you score in one night, as long as he can claim one. But you can’t bear to lose one. You keep coming back.’

‘If people didn’t talk about his work, he would be nothing. So why does it bother him that I want to say something about it? Why does he belittle me whenever he gets the chance?’

‘You’re thinking about the party. He’s Catholic. He was taught to justify anything he wants to do or say.’

Here it comes.

‘Mummy wants you to see Mister Professor again,’ he says. ‘She’s made an appointment for next week – Thursday at three-five in the afternoon.’

‘Wait a minute.’ Johnny’s asleep in my arms, and I want to tuck him deep into Paul’s chair, then cover him with one of Paul’s black sweaters for his favourite nap this week –

‘Emil, do this for me. Take Johnny and tuck him into Paul’s chair over there, and put that dark sweater over him.’

He stares at us both.

‘There’s no plot being hatched,’ I tell him. ‘Nothing’s different. I simply don’t want to stand up right now. Please … One hand under his head, the other under his bum from below. Thank you. Just so his face shows from under the sweater.’

I watch him, and then I watch Johnny, who has sunk deep into the crease, where I can watch him sniffing Paul’s sweat and paint, which is his favourite thing this week until he wakes up and screams for mercy. I exhale and inhale until my mind fills with light.

‘Wasn’t so hard,’ I tell Emil. ‘That’s what you’re here to say. Here, you know? In my home, when there’s you and me. This is where I tell myself that one day you won’t be afraid that I understand and predict you. We could remember being children, you know. We could talk about that one day, for you to remember what you once were. But … all right. I expected this was your cause to visit. Tell mommy I won’t.’

‘I was ready for you to say that,’ he says. ‘So is mommy.’ As in, mommy’s always ready. He’s looking out the window again. I know what he sees instead of what’s most there: the quay, the canal’s edge, black water. I can think about the moonlight on my face now that the eastern wind has died for a moment. Does he feel it? The top of the chestnut tree just below the window is silent this evening, the last leaves fallen with last week’s wind. One of those rare moments in the city when life can look beautiful, when the gaiety dies and the lies all stop. The people are beautiful, just for a flash, just in their weathered and ensouled nakedness, and everything is exactly what it is. Paul would say that the only good time to see people as they truly are is when they’re walking home from work. They’ve dropped their work masks and haven’t picked up their home masks. For the moment or the hour it takes them to go home, before the tramps take back the night, they’re walking their dreams. Look at Emil now – even he does that.

‘Will you do it for me?’ he asks. ‘I know better than to ask you to do it for her. And I know that father’s opinion doesn’t count. We only share a tailor.’ For a minute I think he’s just made a joke, but then I see he isn’t – that really is all they share. ‘If you don’t need to see him, there’s no harm he can do to you. If you don’t want to mend fences with mommy, he can’t make you. It’s only after what happened on your birthday – ’

‘After I shit my birthday dress.’

He blushes. ‘Yes, that.’

‘And after Paul and grandfather teamed up on you.’

‘That is something it is not.’

‘You think I wanted grandfather there so they could do it.’

‘I wonder, yes.’

‘I’m sure I know what people would think. But I always try to do what makes sense at the time.’

‘Whatever the repercussions? Those are what Paul seems to have taught you to ignore.’

‘I can never ignore anything, or forget it. But Paul helps the bad memories stop shouting as loud. I’m better off.’

‘If you want a controversy within the family … Another one … You have one. If it’s worth your while to pour oil on troubled waters – ’

Good for him – he listened once. ‘Emil, it’s too late now to mend anything with her, and why would I need to? What are you really trying to tell me?’ This talk about doctors is making me want to be cruel. Someone has to pay, and always better for me if it’s someone else. Yet I don’t want it to be Emil who pays right now.

‘Emma, Emma, Emma. You’re right, mother is mean to you. But she’s still your mother. If Johnny hasn’t reminded you what compassion is, at least let me remind you what politics is. Neither of us chose them, but there they are. You really ought to go see Mister Professor. Tell him all the lies you like, then he goes and tells mommy and daddy that there’s nothing he can do, and you’re no worse off.’

‘You can’t do that with Mister Professor. If you ever went to him yourself, you’d realize that. He makes your head come out to him. It’s all these word games he plays while you can’t watch him listening – he sits behind you, you know? You end up with these … insights into yourself, you start to understand your life … it’s horrible, I tell you. He makes you see this stranger you never imagined you were, and then he dissects it all as if he was a pathologist and you’re a slice of tissue. Even when he’s wrong, it’s so close to the truth that you can’t help seeing the truth he missed. It wasn’t any fun. The problems I’ve got aren’t in my head any more. I can live with my own head. Who cares why I do what I do?  If he could tell me why the world does what it does … but he can’t. He should concentrate on that. Now that would be interesting.’

‘You’re worried he’ll go tell our parents all your secrets.’

‘Do you know what I actually do miss? The couch in his consulting room. So big and soft. One or two more naps on it and I would have cured myself. But he sits behind you, absolutely silent, and just waits for you to talk. If you wonder where all my secrets went, he got most of them, and I don’t even remember telling him any.

‘You touched one of Paul’s canvases. I don’t know why you do that, Emil. He’ll laugh and get the white chalk out. Then he’ll cartoon you again at the Marzipan next time, which I know you dread. So why do you do it?’

The last cartoon, ‘Emil Aaronson at Home,’ and showed him with a twisted collar, a two-day beard, shirt buttoned askew, and one hand down his unbuttoned fly. It was the look on his face – he was staring in a mirror with his eyes popping out with lust, and in the mirror was a statue of two wrestling Greeks. I tell myself, poor bastard, he’d go to prison for showing himself whole. So he’s always having to adjust which half he shows. To me he’s as nice as he knows how to be to anyone. We were once children together, and neither of us can forget that. I wonder sometimes how much he wants to, because in my heart, I wouldn’t remember if I knew how to stop.

‘I just find it hard to care about people. He was wrong about photography, you know. Visions of his sort aren’t any longer the only valid ones. The moment for personal truths is about to end for all of us. I wish I’d told him –’ as in, I wish he hadn’t rattled me into forgetting … ‘– than collective visions comes to the fore during phases of extreme political change like the one we’re entering now. It’s the collective visions that will make a revolutionary politics possible for mankind. Individual projects will lose their currency as people learn to collectivize their world.’

‘You did tell him, at the Singing Swan before … It was … 7 December last year, a Thursday. You said, “You can’t let yourself admit that art has finished serving its purpose and in the coming century, we’re going to have to accede to mechanistic progress for the sake of our own. The developing culture will rely on technology to bind itself together.” Unquote. And he replied, “Any art can be evil, and will be, if it starts coming from a collective vision. It’s acceptable for you if the collective spends the next century figuring out how not to destroy itself with a new toy. If not destroy us all, then distance all of us from the souls you keep insisting we all don’t have.” Unquote. And then I said, “Emil, this talk about the collective power of film is just another variation of keeping the levers of society out of workers’ hands. Because it’s the people who own the cameras who’ll decide what they photograph and tell them what the photographs mean. It’s just one more way for the forces to dominate society indirectly, and the powerless will be worse off than they are now, in more danger than ever from the powerful, because they have even less control over the machines that run their lives.” Unquote.’

I’m thinking about what Paul will do when he returns: drop his portfolio on the side table within reach of me, turn on all the apartment lights, then vanish into the kitchen for the plate I’ve set out for him while I pour him his three-fingered shooter. There’s the chalice on top of his bookshelf – we keep our books separate – his bottle beside it, the carbon steel base polished down by all the decades of the history he’s learned to carry with grace. I don’t want Emil to be here when all of that happens. He can’t be part of that moment of renewing our life together.

‘Do you have a headache?’

‘Yes. No. Thank you for asking.’ I exhale, inhale, stare at the moon till I feel its beams emanating from me. ‘Johnny’s getting restless. Could you bring him to me?’

He carefully lifts the ticking bomb, arms extended, while I pour myself another glass of wine.

‘So I’ll go to see Mister Professor, but only if you promise to visit grandfather.’

‘I already promised you that tonight. You truly care, don’t you?’

‘Care? You don’t have the better word in your vocabulary. Or you do, but it’s only a word to you.’

‘I know.’ He turns his back to the window. ‘I saw him when I was a child. I never told you that, did I? His wife, too – she was still alive. I must have been younger than seven, because you hadn’t been born yet. Daddy took me to see them, without mommy knowing. She still doesn’t know.’

‘I won’t tell her.’

‘Do you promise?’

‘If you need me to promise, of course.’

‘He didn’t tell me who they were, but I remember the shop. It was the same as the one today. I didn’t know why we were stopping there. He left me in the cab and went inside, and they came back out with him as far as the door to stare at me. He was drunk. Perhaps she was, too. He was holding a wine bottle, a wicker one, and he was arguing with her. When she tried to take him back inside, he threw his elbow at her, like this, you know …’ He jerks his shoulder. ‘… and she fell over on the pavement, and when she got up they began to slap each other. All they did was glance at me. No hello, no wave, just, you know, who is this child stranger they didn’t want watching them? That was your grandfather. There’s more, but you get the idea. A few years later, after our grandmother died, daddy told me who those people were.’

‘Twenty-three years ago?’

‘When daddy could still talk sense, when I was in the Gymnasium, he told me some things about them. But my point: Think for a minute that mommy had some reasons for not wanting them near us.’

‘You’re telling me that he changed.’

‘After his wife died, yes, it seems so.’

‘He told me about it, Emil. The dipsomania. He’ll tell you about it if you asked. He doesn’t dwell, but he doesn’t hide it. You’re making me love him more by reminding me he found a way to change. Wouldn’t you like yourself more if you did? You don’t need anyone’s permission, you know. A dose of shock, some honest anger at something, a bit of desperation at the right time – that’s all it takes. Wouldn’t you want that too, if you could let yourself? None of which is the point –

‘He’s a good man. Why would I care how he got that way? He looked for you, eight years ago, and for daddy and mommy. To make amends, to apologize for not being a grandfather to us and to see what there was to say. He hoped there would be something. I’m the one who was ready to listen to him. I needed him, and he needed someone who did.’

‘Do you want me to walk with you on Wednesday, to the Professor?’

‘There’s no need. I already knew, Emil, about his falling into a bottle for years. After his wife died, all the neighbours on his street came to him with the rabbi from Beth Shalom, and sat him down and … said something to him that made him think about his life. He’s told me things about himself that’s he’s not proud of. He knows he doesn’t have to make it up to me, but he wants me to understand him. The better I know him, the better I know myself. It shouldn’t matter what people used to be. Choices are there for everyone. You only have to start making them. People are the sum of their own choices, and then their choices change them in ways that change the world around them. You just have to trust what you want yourself to become.’

‘Who are you to tell me to trust people, Emma?’

‘Emil, why on earth don’t you?’

And there I know why I’m happier now than he can ever conceive. I’m full of demons even now. They never die, and all you can do is knock them on the head so that they play dead for a while. I’ve been suicidal. I’ve been depressed. I’ve been blinded by the sight of myself and deafened by unfocused vituperation. I remember all that. And sometimes when I’m alone, I still weep without reason, and sometimes even when Paul’s beside me, I can’t sleep, and my body most days now is stove on a rock of pain. And I’ve never seen the ocean. So why am I happy? I’ve lived, that’s why, and I’ve died. And I’ve been one person, and I’ve been two, and I’ve been none, and now I’m three, which means I’ve changed the world with my experience, and who can have more power than that? If I could add more to my life, I’d do it, but I wouldn’t want more happiness, I’d want more experience. Emil doesn’t know what life is. He’s terrified his world will change, which means that he’ll never know his as well as I do my own.

‘I mean it,’ I say. ‘Why can’t you trust anyone, Emil?’

‘You, perhaps,’ he says.

‘I’m too easy,’ I say. ‘You’ve never made yourself trust someone. You’ve never made that leap.  You need to find a little fear and learn to live with it. Now you know why I’m four hundred thirty-two years old and you’re still younger than Johnny.’