[46] Johnny’s Long Night

Stories – there are a few I can describe for you, the ones that Emma carries close enough that I always see her wearing them. About the night we mixed Johnny … I know that one from watching her face when I can tell she’s remembering it. If her calendar had a ritual day, that’s one of the few that would be circled. We hadn’t taken any precautions for years, thinking that we’d be glad whenever it happened. With some women, you know from one glance there are kids in them. You can even tell how many. With Emma, I always knew – one for certain, but only one. One is what she was going to have. A boy or a girl didn’t matter to her, but I wanted a son.

It was our second night above the canal, she would tell you, when we were still unpacking. Grandfather had helped us move, with his neighbour’s hay wagon. We didn’t have much, and most of it was on our hill, where we spent most of our time. You wouldn’t think so, but I dread disorder, I can’t live clearly in it. When there’s disorder around me, I retreat into my own mind, which isn’t a useful place for my work to be. So once all our chattels were upstairs, I left Emma to open boxes, and set up the new studio till she was done.

It was already a studio. I took it over from Mravec when he moved back to Prague. You learn quickly not to listen to people who say, ‘I like your work.’ Most people don’t know what they looking at. Most people are trying to get a free drawing from you, or a wave into the billiard room at the Marzipan. I’ll say things I don’t mean for the sake of selling my work, for the sake of showing it, but that has to stop somewhere. You have to know where it stops and remember that better than anything else. I’m saying that I liked Mravec’s work and he noticed I never told him. I just treated him like I did, and besides, it was relief to us both to be able to argue with someone in Czech sometimes. Which is how he made a point of telling me his studio would be coming open. He never made it much big – he drank too much, and he discovered powder, direct to the hands. But when I moved in here, I was glad he was here before me. I liked knowing that someone I respected had already worked hard here. So I gave myself a day and a night to knock down the cobwebs and to paint and to set up my desk and storage cupboards just so. Then I washed the windows so that there wasn’t a streak left no matter how hard I looked. Windows all four sides, the canal that way, the cathedral that way, the south wall false, with racks and shelves behind it. The windows were six-pane, but the light from three sides would wash out the lead shadows well enough.

No one climbs upstairs that night, not even Emma – I won’t let them. I haven’t hung Mister Frog yet. It will go over the door, attached to a string just so, so that it looks … east, I hope. That’s where the light comes from. When it doesn’t rock or spin on its thread, I’ll be having a good day. When I’m having a bad one, I’ll stare at it till it stops moving.

I come back downstairs from a few hours of seeing no one and find a party: a kitchen and parlour, both half unpacked, full of people from the Swan with their own bottles, and a handful from the SilverDome, and their wives and a couple of kids playing bowls in the hallway with wine bottles and oranges. Emma’s looking over their heads at me with a shrug and a smile. She hardly has to do anything to drop jaws the first time you see her. She knows how to carry clothes – not just choose them, but move in them. Offer her a few yards of printed silk, or strip of sack cloth and two lengths of package twine, and she’ll know. She’s wearing a flowing cotton frock that night, cut like a kimono, just on the shoulders, tight at the waist, white silk cami peeking out. Under the hem, emerald slippers are blinking. From the way she’s staring at me, I know what she’s wearing under it: come-try-it stockings and silk pants loose in the right places, tied with a little silk bow. After her third glass, like tonight just then, she smiles like a hawk, slack-jawed, and tuned so that I’m the only one who sees it. A look like do you think this is hungry? Jump me, but not yet. And something else behind it that night. Perfect love, and something else that she herself won’t name yet, for me or even to herself.

I fill a tumbler with wine, but I don’t want to drink more than two that night. With a good Tokay, you don’t have to. Truth is, I’m wishing within an hour that these people would go. Some moments, you know that you’re leaving one place for somewhere else. The air tastes different, and you want that taste. You’d rather get drunk on air than anything else. You’d rather hear wind than voices.

Towards the end, Gus knocks. He still lives with his mother and his sisters. No one I know has been where he sleeps. When you think about Gus, he’s in his studio, or he’s in his breakfast coffeehouse but thinking about his studio. Coffee and a plate or two of pastries at the Tivoli, a fiaker through the Summer Park to his laneway studio with the long, narrow garden, where he works from ten till eight, dinner enough for six at a restaurant that knows his appetite. That has been Gus and always will be. Never mind what I’ve learned from him, he’s shown me how to work hard, how to work time hard without cheating. He arrives tonight with a package under his arm and does his paying court, because by then he has that aura. He’s the empire’s most famous painter by now, the ring you hope he’ll let you press your lips to. He’s generous to everyone with money or time, but not with his blessings – he guards those to keep their value up. He’s the oldest one there except for grandfather, and those two get along at the kitchen table until the others pour themselves downstairs into the March night. Grandfather pulls down his peaked cap and the two of us walk him into the night, and watch him cross the bridge on sprung legs like a bouncing ball.

While Emma’s cleaning the kitchen, I show him the studio. ‘Where is Mister Frog?’ he asks. ‘I climbed all these steps to meet him.’ I take him out of his flannel nest and slot his wings on, and Gus dusts the top of it with his sleeve and gives it a little kiss on its nose. Together we fuss with an eyelet screw and a string, and I climb the ladder and get him to dangle from his hook. We watch to see which way he’ll point.

‘He’s almost right,’ he says. ‘Just left of his nose – that’s where the morning light will enter first. You’re still a skylark?’

‘I wake up the skylarks.’

‘There’s more room for you here,’ he tells me. ‘You want to feel the whole world possible around you. Room for everything you could see. Goodbye, Mister Frog.’ And he tips his imaginary hat and we descend to the apartment.

Emma has wound up the Victrola. She can’t bear pure music, but she can tolerate singing, and Emil brought it over that morning as a gift from her parents, so … once, you know? Once only. In the pile of waxed tubes it came with, she’s found an aria from Il trovatore. No volume control, so she’s shoved the machine into the pantry and shut the door.

‘Open, please do,’ Gus says, and gives his package an embarrassed look. Emma borrows my pocketknife and cuts the strings at the knot. Only Gus wraps things this carefully: razor-creased folds of butcher paper, one layer, two. Another layer of Japanese paper, crimson, and a layer of white batt under the crimson. And under all of that, in a Workshop frame, a colour detail from Water Sprites, the one everyone knows from near the end of his gold-leaf days. I watched him use that study when he was preparing the canvas, and I know that face from before we met – Emma, sleeping, her eyes closed to the dream that surrounds her, burnished hair flowing in an unseen current floating her safely through the core of a perfect dream. Her face at peace with the night, her mind emptied of a lifetime’s pain.

‘I’m returning it,’ he tells Emma. ‘Dream like that tonight, you both.’

I walk him downstairs to the quay and wait with him for a cab to come along. All the quay benches have been borrowed by tramps. The human race is descending, but Emma and I, up there through that window, will hover for as long as time will let us. A warm south wind is blowing tonight over the mountains. It drives some people mad, but not us. Every work of art is a child of its age and mother of our emotions. An age of impending madness is hovering just out there, holding itself still in the wind. No one knows what is going to happen next, but tonight we have stopped needing to know.

Gus points up there. ‘The wind is strong tonight, but the clouds aren’t moving. Is that a new law of physics? It’s something you’ll have to paint when I’m gone. What a century we’re in now. If I stay in the last one, will people remember me?’