[68] Predicting ruins, fulfilling dreams

Any secrets Emma has had till now, they’re ones from before she met me, and she keeps those from everyone. Sometimes I trip over the mute signs when she doesn’t think I can see them. For example, she had a nightmare once, I can tell. I know because it’s the last thing I know about that she won’t tell me about. She’s told the rest, I’m sure of it – the torture cures, and the water hose, the madhouse lockdowns, the talking cure, which must have been more painful then than it would be to her now. But she’s never told me the nightmare. That’s the last of her secrets, and maybe, if I knew there were other secrets and it wasn’t the last of them, I’d have tried to learn what it was. But the last one? No, you don’t take someone’s last secret, because the last one is the story they tell themselves and it needs to stay their own. Except now that one is threatening to vanish too, because of that guy she ran into at the Rosemeyrs’. A lumpen like him was part of it, and the last secret she keeps from me is all about how that could be.

Emma asked me once how it is that I never paint shadows. Why I draw so many of them but never paint them. I told her: it’s too easy somehow, to paint something that people can’t see. I don’t want people to look at a painting and see something they can fill in their own way. I don’t want them to escape what I’m showing them. I don’t want a place for them to hide like that. The shadows I draw? Those are the stories I heard while I was drawing the light. They’re my own notion of time.

When I most want the world to hold still, there’s whatever studio I’m keeping. Peace of mind is most possible there, so I’m glad Emma’s spending more time here with the lad, where I can share what I have with them. I’m not used to being happy at work, but this winter … okay. I’ve been doing this so long that my work’s almost become part of time, joined that stream, and I never expected that. But then downstairs I look at my portfolio cabinets – I don’t open them much, I just look at the cabinets – I think about what’s in them, what I’ve done up until now, and I almost get scared, because suddenly I can start to look back, which makes me look forward. And I think of the people I’ve sold work to, and the rooms where my paintings are already in show, and the frames they’re in, and suddenly the world and my work are connected, and none of that was ever part of my thinking until recently.

I’m going to be ready for the SilverDome. I long ago stopped getting aggravated when Emma was right sometimes. Okay, I work more quickly now. But I tell her, you know, that you still have to know why you’re working. Freehand, experiment, plunging, they’ve all got their uses, but at some point you have to be able to look at your process and be able to answer why. You have to make time in your mind sometimes to do that. At some point, every brushstroke needs a chapter and verse you could call out if you had to, to yourself if to no one else. There’s a limit to what more you can tell me about it, Emma. And if she tries to talk me beyond it, I find something to say to back her down.

Out of the house, out of the house. I know why she insists even though I’m tired. Days like these hollow me out, and I can never fill myself in here. It was easier before Johnny, but it’s just as important now. When I’m really, really tired at night, while she’s pouring my three fingers, that’s when it’s especially important, because I tell you, sleep never did much for me. Sleep never caught me up much. As long as the hands are steady in the morning, I’ve had enough of it. I just never learned anything from sleeping.