[40] The sublime and final city

Colours are something the world demands you see. If I was making the world, it wouldn’t be in colour. But it does have them, so I stare them down, and then for the relief, I work in black and white and add a touch of colour as if it was medicine or something.

There are days Emma insists on telling me things. Her inner life must be too painful, too volcanic, sometimes to keep inside. Horrible thoughts flee to her mind with horns and cloven feet, hurling molten lead and boiling oil. Deafening, I tell you – you don’t expect someone who looks like her to start sounding like that. By now I’ve guessed most of the old secrets, and she’s reached the ones she’s kept since she met me, which at least are easier for me to follow.

I do what I do when I return, which is pull off my boots and place my tablet on the kitchen table for her to open, and look down at napping Johnny, hoping he’s let her some rest. She’s in her chair, with the Goya aquatints on her lap – they’re always on the sidetable – and Johnny in the next chair under my studio sweater. She pours me my brandy shooter in the steel chalice before she says a word and glares and smiles while I drink it back. She can do those two at once. I tell her someone’s been here, and she tells me who it was. When I’m here, I’m always glad that he’s not, and I’ll be watching for the rest of the night for the mood he’s left her in. She has an ancient need to hold out hope for him, and she will never see me questioning that.

I can never think of any stories to tell about myself. But Emma has one, and I’ve learned to tell hers sometimes by watching her live it, nights like this one. She was one person, then things happened to make her someone other. She wants to know who she would have become if those things hadn’t happened. But I’m not the thing that happened – I’m the one who knocked her out of the story the world would have her tell. Somewhere are her mother and father and Emil and other people whose names she doesn’t know. She wants the story she’s inhabiting to release her, and she thought it had. She wants an eternal present, which sounds like a happy place, because that’s where Johnny lives. And nowadays I can see it when they’re together that she wants to protect him from the stories the world would make of him. She wants him to stay off that train, but first she needs to stay off it herself.