[74] Naught but their primordal begetter

I come home from dinner shopping, soaking wet from a March rainburst, to wait him out in his studio before a walk to Gerstl. But with two hours of light left, the studio door is gaping open, and Paul is sitting on the couch, reading the neighbourhood paper, with his feet and a hunk of bread-and-cheese on the coffee table (no plate for either). He’s smoking his indoors tobacco with a beatific smile on his face when I come in. The light looks different.

‘Come and see,’ he says. ‘Stand right here, look that way.’

He’s stripped the onionskin from the studio windows and set up an easel perpendicular to it. Outside – I’d stopped thinking about the view – is a gnarled tree two storeys below us, its trunk twisting like a corkscrew into a quilt of spindly branches. It hasn’t regained its leaves from the winter, and now I see its bare branches clawing the wrought-iron fence that shields it from the street, and the grey stone buildings across the lane with their black windowsills still clotted with lingering snow. I see all of that through a window clouded with mist and streaked with drops of the afternoon’s freezing rain.

‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

‘You’ll see when I’m done. Leave your coat on, okay. There’s two hours. You hair …’ He pulls down my flowered scarf and lifts his fingers through it. ‘Okay.’

By dark, he looks down through the rain and waves to me that he’s done. Four days later, when I’m half out of bed again, he’s brewing tea for me and has brought me a third blanket and a new dishtowel for me to blow my nose. He’s turned the painting to the door so that I can see it from our bed without getting up. All right, I tell myself, at last, he knows what he’s doing again. I haven’t seen him work with a subject for months – it’s all been exercises and tests. I’m not very good at being sick, I tell you, but at least he caught me, down below, at the moment before I was. I’m looking up, almost straight up, at the window where he’s working, from the middle of the tiny garden, under the bare dark branches that hold me, the rain drizzle in my face and my hair covering my shoulders. I don’t look like that, yet it can be no one but me. That much expectable, but the perspective at my feet and beyond me has been broken in countless places, with the buildings and their lighted windows leaning over me, closer than they should be, and the ironwork fence tilting to the left as if racing toward a vanishing point. Everything is toppling angles, but so subtle that seen whole they lose their sharpness. He’s taken the point of view out of his equation. There is no light in this painting, no source to be sure about, but you can tell there is light behind it. He’s worked mostly with black and white on an ivory undercoat, but look closer, the black and white is always anchored in colours, and those are where your eye dwells – on my face, on the windows, on the glittering streetlamps he has added outside the fence where the street would be. There is no ground here, no sky, I looked hemmed in, trapped. He’s caught at an expression I’ve never showed him, as if he took two of my moods and layered them over each other. Am I happy? Am I afraid? Discuss that, do, and then wonder what I must be seeing and how I must be feeling about it to hold those two memories at once. It’s only clear that my face is the brightest thing in this world just then, while he’s working, and that the light the painting shows is an expression of the light within me.