Archive for category: Chapters

I hadn’t planned this; her walk decided me. How she moved, how she didn’t stop when she could, how she shed her skin with the city, and how I could tell she’d never done that before and how she wanted to.

She’s watching me kindle the stove. Your first time with a woman, you should go at it every way you can think of, twist each other into pretzels, make her give up everything she has and do the same yourself. That way, if there isn’t a next time then you’ve already had each other. So I don’t know why I’m taking my time. I don’t touch her until after midnight. I must be waiting to see if she’ll run. I would let her go, I would help her get back. I must want to be sure she won’t, because I tell you, I don’t for once want to frighten a woman. I’ve always wanted too badly to see the future, and I’ve already begun to wonder what she’d look like there. Not while we were in Gus’s garden, or crouched by the fire, but while she was walking beside me. I’m already seeing her there. When I saw her walk, I saw us doing that together.

‘Why have you brought me here?’ she asks.

I look up to give a sight to the words. She’s brave within her fear.

‘For your hair in that light,’ I tell her. And I open the stove door to let the woodfire’s light flood out, bathing her face from the side. ‘That’s the best light there is for drawing. It moves.’

‘I’ve never seen.’

‘Here,’ I tell her, and hand her a pocket mirror. I’ve always got one.

‘Really?’

A year in the hussars teaches you how to forage. I mound the hot coals over the potatoes wrapped in corn husks, I roast the maize in the flames. I draw water from the well and heat it in a paper sack I’ve scarfed from my drawing case – you can do that, boil water in a paper sack. That was the first thing I taught her, when I think about it, the thing she watched me do before anything else. When I look up she’s still staring at herself by the firelight, looking entitled and self-absorbed, which I learn soon is her happy look. I take the maize from the fire and we eat two cobs each. I build a bed of pine boughs and hang a blanket behind us to keep in the warmth from the hearth. I don’t speak to her. There are ways to learn people, and here’s one – say nothing, then watch what they do. When she looks like she’s about to tell me something, I just put a finger to my lips and shook my head. Then I wrap her in a blanket. I go out to find better-seasoned firewood – the pile inside has gone too soft – and when I come back she’s still there, hasn’t moved, blanket around her shoulders. I get out my drawing tablet and sharpen a graphite, polish the edge to a point with my fingertips. When I look up, she’s opened her blanket, and there is her body again, dress gone tucked away somewhere, her lines leaning forward and legs tucked under. Her hair has flowed in crinkled waves down her neck almost to her waist. When you want a woman, it’s the first thing you ask yourself – what do her nipples do? I stare into her eyes and wait to see, and feel her shiver and her face’s edges go soft. And when I look down, I see them standing out, coral, pyramided, hard against her soft skin.

I turn the tablet to show her and get a smile from her. I make four more drawings.

‘Skin to skin,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll be warmer tonight.’

I touch her then. I wrap her up, my arms around her back and her elbows against my chest, and we sleep for a while. When I wake her knee is locked between my legs, I can feel it in the dark, and the fire has gone out. That makes her feel even warmer. A damp kind of warmth that smells like the sea but richer. Rich like silver.

‘Reach down for me,’ I told her.

‘What time is it?’

‘The time?’ I looked out at the moon. ‘It’s about two o’clock.’

‘I know what it’s supposed to be like,’ she says. And she at least knows where it is. ‘I’ve never touched one, but I know.’

‘It gets hard when you touch it.’

‘Silly …’ she calls me. And soon it does. She squeezes it until I go yipe. ‘What now?’

‘I’ll get on top. This way. It’s your first time.’

‘My first time with somebody else there.’

She moves her hips around until I take her knees and held them open and still and show her, there, there.

‘It’s going to hurt,’ I tell her. ‘You might bleed.’

‘I don’t care,’ she says, but her hand is trembling while she holds me. ‘Like there?’

I gasp. But she’s wet inside, and warmer the closer. She doesn’t know where to put her hands and keeps looking for the place.

‘You’re deep,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll drown me.’

And then I kiss her. She’s never been kissed before either. And we kiss each other everywhere our lips can reach from that place, until her body stops shaking and she can hold her palms still on my shoulders.

‘What do I do?’

‘This time, hold still and … I go in and out. Don’t let me hurt you.’

‘It already hurts. When does it feel good?’

‘The third or fourth time.’

‘Hurry. No, slowly …’

I feel her hands teasing my chest. Then she draws my face down to hers and I lick her tears from her cheeks.

We fall asleep. I wake up hard again, and she wakes when she senses that and begins to twist under me, as if she’s trying to escape, but when I rise up too high she pulls me back down and springs her legs out and open till I’ve groaned myself still and she lets them fall to the ground. She’s crying again, but instead of turning her face away, she’s rubbing hers against mine until I can taste her tears. Until her tears stop.

‘Was that the second time?’

‘Yes it was.’

‘So next one’s the third? Really?’

‘Wait …’ I fumble for my pants.

‘They’re folded under your boots,’ she says in the dark. ‘Why do you need them?’

I find them where she says, fumble for matches, strike one. Under the blanket, we’re sharing, her face has lost its paleness, her eyes are staring up at the light in my own, her lips are open and sighing into mine. I lift up slightly and feel her hips rising, her legs seeking a grip.

‘I don’t need four,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t want to move, my hips are just right like this. What else can you do?’ I scrape her nipples gently with my fingertips. ‘Ohhhhh …’ Lean back and press, sip at her nipple between lips and tongue. ‘Three …’ she sobs. ‘Do that again.’ And she tries to shake me off, and cries and cries, and something liquid flows from her into me and keeps us from trembling apart. She cries out, and reaches for something to grab, and keeps missing me, and lets her hands fall like weights to the ground.

‘I thought I knew,’ she says, wiping her face against my chest. We wrap ourselves around each other with my soldier against her belly and sleep. Except we’re not – we’re both pretending to. I see embers in her hair, dancing ghosts on the walls. It always feels like surgery, being a woman’s first. Once was enough, I’d decided long ago after the first few times. One virgin was enough to know what they’re like. Except I don’t know why, this time, I’ve ended up trying to remember when I was one.

 

I’d rather have the east wind. So would Paul. The east wind means sunlight for him, and then the west one moves in for a few days and the sky goes crash. A city like this, you can almost touch the sky on days like that, and it’s lead-coloured and ocean-thick, which is no good for anything. Then twice every winter the south wind comes up and melts everything and people go mad and sad. Not me any more – I’m immune now. There’s a promise for you – the south wind will never find me again.

So the east wind is better – a whole continent out that way. You can hear voices in it sometimes, though you can never tell whose. You just know they yearn to make themselves visible one day and that you’ll be helpless, tossed and pinwheeled, for the rest of your life when they get here. So you’d better grab hold of something before they come and before anyone else.

Stories … Paul’s no good at telling them, he cares too deeply about the moment at hand, and I wonder what that’s like. Lucky guy, and to be with him I have to find ways to be within his moment. We try to make them visible and accessible, so that … control. You want to control time, don’t you? Stories are us trying to pretend we can control time. We want to think that we can do that, as if we can make sense of our lives that way. No wonder Paul can’t tolerate them. The stories the world actually tells turn back on themselves, yet they never repeat themselves … they’re too contingent for that. It’s people’s minds that try to fix them and make them run permanently straight, and what’s the point? We end up turning the world into stories that don’t exist. The impulse for that kind of certainty is something humans invented, which is what makes them dangerous.

Eight years together, each year a lifetime, the way we go through them, and we’d tell you different memories of each day of them. I’m old enough now that time doesn’t feel stopped. Paul doesn’t look back much, so he’s never going to tell you how we met. This is the last hour of my life before we do that, and I’ve just heard his name spoken for the first time. Fate slips silently, fate runs us over. I’ve heard about fate but I’ve never seen it before. While we’re waiting for him in the studio garden, Gus is sketching my face, my sun hat, my bare shoulders. The Flöge sisters have lent me to Gus before the after-lunch ladies arrive, and I’m wearing one of their sun dresses, tiny ebony buttons down the front, ivory with crimson squares and florets of his own design. Pear tree branches are bucking in the wind above us, the grass is fluttering at our feet. I keep having to pin down the skirt. Between us is a small table, a bowl of apples, and an empty chair. Gus turns his drawing board to let me see. He has also drawn the empty chair beside me, and my dress is trying to fly off with the wind.

He’s spent the hour before lunch making studies of me for one of his mythologies. Now, at the table, he’s slicing an apple for me with a knife that could skin an elephant and he’s telling me about a protégé of his who needs models though he won’t be able to pay.

‘You want to pose for him,’ he’s telling me. ‘He needs your look – he doesn’t study enough beautiful things. You’re beautiful but something else that he’ll want from you.’

‘What’s his name again?’

‘Paul Karsch.’

‘Karsch like the steelworks?’

‘He is the steelworks, his family.’

‘Guns, cannon, railway tracks, them?’

‘That family, yes.’

‘Then I’ve heard of him. Is it true about the horse?’

A look-away grin is all I get. ‘His parents died when he was a lad, and his uncle disowned him later, so now he’s fabulously poor. He did a year in the hussars and then a year at the Dresden Academy. Now he paints scenery for Roller at the opera house. A Catholic, but don’t let him go on about it. He visits me once a week for graphites and chalks.’

I know nothing about men. The only ones I’ve ever met, outside my family, are my grandfather and Gus, and I’ve hardly begun to start trusting my judgment. I know what the world is, but that’s inspired generalities – don’t ask me for particulars. I’ve only heard about the world – don’t ask me for experience. I’ve only just begun to understand that some people act happy – for example, not like me – and I wonder what it’s like to pretend. I’m used to learning about happiness from books, like the end of those long English novels where the heroine walks off the last page with some guy and she’s happy to do it. Is happiness always the end of something? I know what pleasure is, but pleasure’s more about forgetting something worse. Pleasure is mostly about intensely personal forwardness. I’m not old enough to know that I’m cynical. Most boys my age … wrong. How can I know? The ones my age, they’re like Emil, breaking their backs at school, dressing and acting to pass for old men, while I’m living in a boarding house with grilled windows for rich people’s daughters whose mommies can’t tolerate them any more, though mine drops by the Flöge shop twice a week to make sure I haven’t fled, except into the models’ dressing room. So when Paul opens the gate and walks up the path to us, I’m ready to see the world through someone’s eyes but my own. Grandfather has shown me it’s possible to do that. He’s the first one to treat me as if I’m my own person, which is the same as telling me that so is everyone else. Around grandfather, my world can’t be all about me, and I’m still getting used to that and calculating the benefits.

Since leaving home, I’ve made stranger observation down to a system. I ask the same two questions about everyone: What will they want? And what will they do? This guy, when he walks up Gus’s long walk, is older, but everyone is. Twenty-three, twenty-four? I can’t wait to be older, which makes him lucky from the start, show me how, daddy. He’s dressed in mahogany brown: a thin wool sweater to tame the wind, faded work trousers, leather half-boots. Slightly bowlegged, so he rides. Hair cropped short and standing straight up, military-style. He walks like a whip, arms and legs slowly coiling and uncoiling. This one never has to run. A long, pale face with nothing extra to it except thick, straight eyebrows and a coarse two-day beard. And molten grey eyes that he might have stolen from his uncle’s factory. He smiles quickly at Gus and says hello to him and then gives me a look that says look back, now. I feel like a piece of meat. His eyes won’t let go. Finally they travel up to my straw boater, which matches the dress, and down once slowly through every curve I’ve got to my bare feet.

‘Nice feet,’ he says. ‘Don’t step on anything sharp.’

I blush and tuck them under me.

‘Who’s the carrot-top, Gus?’

‘This is Emma,’ he says.

‘Fresh-looking. I kiss the hand,’ he tells me with a slower glance this time. ‘Water Sprites II, isn’t she? The second from the top. But her hair’s more gold in that one.’

Then he’s staring again, as if he breathes through his eyes. Through my dress, he takes in my shoulders, breasts, waist, legs, calves, until I feel his eyes licking through the cotton, and he says, ‘Stand up and do this.’ And holds his arms off to the sides, palms down, fingers dangling. It’s the line of my outspread arms he wants to see, I can tell. I see red and blue paint caked to the backs of his own hands, simple colours. My hands are clean, his make me feel naked. He throws me a leer, to see how I’ll react. I’m not going anywhere.

‘Turn,’ he says. ‘Any way you like.’ The wind catches the hem as I stand, and I stumble when I do a quick spin to wrap the skirt around me. He’s taken out his drawing tablet and sharpens a graphite with an oversized claspknife until his eyes tell me hold still. He exhales, and graphite touches paper for a count of three, suddenly as that. He passes his sketchbook to Gus, who nods his head and turns it to show me. One line, that’s all. But in one line, he has the wind and the buckling trees and the ground at my feet, and has made the day a moment.

‘Again,’ he says. And I turn for him. And with the next line he has caught my dress and hat and they’re all of a piece with the rest.

‘Open the dress,’ he says. ‘Hold it like a sail against the wind.’

‘Do you like what you see?’

‘It’s a start. Tilt your hat to make a halo. The pants go, sorry.’

I step out of them tuck then under my chair cushion so that they won’t blow away, and open my dress, shoulders down and back, one hip cocked to the side. I know what he sees, I like it even if he doesn’t. I’m not supposed to like mirrors but I do. Small high breasts, shaped like lemons, with a strange density to them. Slim hips and smooth tummy. Skinny little mouse the same colour as my head, thin lips tucked in. The wind kicks at the branches while he stands with his sketching book pinned between fingers and elbow. He stares at my face, looking for an expression of fear, worry, degradation. He’s not going to see any. I just stare back hard, willing him to look at my eyes instead. He raises his left hand, graphite held like a Japanese brush, nods for me to hold the pose, and lets his hand dart. Within thirty seconds, he is finished.

‘That’s all I want,’ he says, and turns the book to show me. I’m standing as solid as the tree, lightly but rooted, my arms holding my dress like the ends of a cape, the wind catching both them and the branches. The world is in motion, me and the tree trunk the only still things. Somehow, he has found a silent place in me, a place I’ve sought for years, in the middle of a gale that will never cease blowing after this moment.

‘Keep that one,’ he says. ‘The first one the model keeps.’

‘You should sign it, then,’ I tell him. ‘Or it’s worth nothing.’

He blinks at me. ‘Ha.’

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?’

‘I’m cruel to everyone but you,’ Paul says. No, he doesn’t say it but I can hear him thinking it. No, he isn’t thinking it, but I can tell he’d accept that thought if it occurred to him. In fact, probably none of that. I’m saying that when I first saw him, and saw him look back, I knew he was capable of cruelty, but not towards me, ever. That’s a gift, I tell you. I’m the one he picked to be gentle, out of everyone else – he somewhere told himself, she’s the one, and on bad days, when I wonder whether I’m giving back as much, I still don’t know why. He must have needed to say it to himself one day, to hear himself think so, to envision himself as capable of being like that, and I was there looking young and beautiful and lustfully available, besides vulnerable under the face I was wearing. It must have just been time for us both, and time brought its own luck to the show. The universe isn’t a wheel for nothing. So, to be afraid of what he might do or say or feel – it can never happen. He wants to be able to tell me that but he doesn’t know how. So he just acts likes himself, honestly even when it hurts, and it’s enough proof.

He paints astonishing portraits, and people know that side of his work the best. Astonishing is an imprecise word for what people see in them. Well, it’s a word, you know? One of those. How can your own face astonish you? It will by the time he’s done with you, and I say that as the person he draw/paints more than anyone else. He takes the notion that a portrait is meant for the sitter, not dinner guests, not clients or bankers. A portrait is for the sitter to learn who he is. So, Paul never paints his own portrait – it’s because he doesn’t have to learn that, since he’s already certain. I wish he’d accept more commissions, because the sitters would buy his other work later, his allegories, his cityscapes, his landscapes if he ever does more of them. Most of his paintings have people in them, from his need to humanize his outlook that way, but they aren’t about the people in them. Allegories are what he gravitates most towards, and he has a way of injecting everything with one of those. I don’t press him one way or another – he’s been smart with his career so far. Except for clapping and cheering from the balcony, and flashing cleavage at his patrons (from where it would be if I had any), he doesn’t need much help from me. To succeed the way he does, you have to be out there a lot in the right places, walking up to the right people, working the right crowd, making the authorities see you for what you do, making them expect what you are, and he has that knack.

I don’t want this discussion with Paul, not this spring, but Emil is half-right and I want to help Paul realize it one day: he must know this one day – there’s a limit to two dimensions, and there are two others he’ll have to face one day. The plastic intuition that’s his life is going to have to adjust. Never mind that film isn’t in him: hardly the point. It’s out there in the not-him, and what will he say about it? How is he going to respond about what it’s doing to us, to the people and places that he can only survive by intuiting? Art forms can be revolutionary, they can break the world open, but that doesn’t make them bad in themselves. Yes, sometimes the world needs to be broken, then other times the world breaks without anyone’s desire or volition and you have to find a way to reassemble it to your own purposes. Collective actions don’t have to be a death kiss as long as someone can understand their power. That’s what you have to learn to tell people, Paul. That’s the world you’re going to need to learn to express back. And how are you going to do that? And the cinema will bring its own honesty along with its own dangers if people ever learn to feel the invisible hand of it, understand its impact on their lives, which is something Paul is going to have to confront if he wants to grow for his whole life. Sometime in the future, his life’s going to hurl him into that wall. He’s still finding ways to make things that have never existed before, but if he wants to keep expressing the world he sees, he’s going to have to understand what film is going to mean next year, the next ten, twenty, fifty. He’s going to have to face those authorities and argue as hard as he has to the way he does with oils on canvas. He has it in him to do that, but until he does, he can’t bear to align himself with the people who abuse film out of ignorance of its power. He’ll tell you his work isn’t political, but with a name like Karsch and a family like his, he’s going to reach the moment of no choice sooner than he thinks, sooner than he’ll want. He doesn’t want to pick up a camera or watch other people do that and wonder about the harm he might do. When he finds a way to understand the social-chemical reaction that’s facing us all, he’ll do it.

I count eleven canvases tonight and know that’s going to be all. Four of them were completed last fall, turned against the wall, and three were in various stages before Christmas. Never twelve – he’s superstitious about twelve, something about the apostles. And never thirteen, because it’s even worse than twelve, he’d start worrying that in one of them he was painting the Christ. A weekly celebrant like him, he still says his prayers every night. That must be what he’s doing. He doesn’t kneel and clasp hands, but he strips down and piles his clothes on a chair and stares out the bedroom window every night looking at … for two minutes? ten? twenty? and I just hold breath, an open book in my lap, and wait. God – all right, he’s up there. Paul grew up believing in Him – badly, but still … – and I wonder what that must have been like.

He’s been out to the moonmaidens again. He’s been going to them for years, the same ones in the same house, a trope he needs to revisit. He’s been using them for groups since his purple days, before The Prague Years, and I recognize Cassie’s body now. Her hair will be ripe-banana yellow though she’s changed the shape of it now, or he’s changed it for her. He never shows more than a corner of her face, so you notice her body more than you would – flabby but posed to show an earthy kind of strength. There are four in the group this time, and though the canvas is square, he’s arranged them like they’re all clinging to a vortex you can’t see, coiled around one another, hands and arms elongated, two of them looking away, two of them looking at each other, and one of the latter is a child, and the other almost is. I make them sound contorted, but somehow they’re not. And in the lower-left quadrant of the ground, he’s written in the hand he usually reserves for his signature square, but bigger: dead love. He’s never named his paintings except after the sitter, or the view if it’s of someplace concrete, but he’s also like everyone else in town these days: he works on his signature until it’s parcel of every painting he makes. So, something got to him yesterday. He’s left two-thirds of the painting for the ground, which is never empty – he fills it with abstracted motifs, and I can see where he’s started to faint them in. There are musical notes, okay. So the figures are singing, that tells me. Or maybe they’re hearing music. Or there’s music around them that they don’t hear. And I know the kinds of songs they’ll be by the time the colours are there, all the motion locked in place. Children of a collapsing universe – he’s tilted the four of them so that you can sense them falling. But by falling, are they escaping? I can’t tell whether they’re screaming or smiling. Paul has his own language on good days, like this one was, which I learn one word and one rule at a time.

I’ve learned that from Paul – life starts out there. Experience is what you make yourself see. And one day soon, Johnny will remember something for the first time while he’s with me out in the world, and some day he’ll tell me what it was, and I yearn for the day he can do that. Yearn till my heart almost breaks. That’s a life for you. How did I learn to love like this?

I’ve got insight into my condition, what they called it, the doctors. As if getting better was about getting their approval. Basically, you feel bad, and then you feel worse about feeling bad, and then you feel even worse about feeling worse, and so on down into the spiralling pit. Then your mother belittles you for not liking yourself, though half of you is acting miserable just to show her she’s right that you’re worthless, in case you can earn her love that way, which never works, though she never tells you that. There’s no way to let the poison out. But sooner or later, maybe, you get tired of grinding yourself in that mill, and stumble onto happiness despite yourself. A taste of it, one drop on your tongue, and another if you’re lucky, and another now that you recognize it, at some point if you remember clearly enough those moments – I’d never thought that happy memories could save me as easily as the bad ones could ruin me – and start to draw lines from dot to dot, if you’re very lucky you start to understand that every individual you fear, which is all of them, is at least as mad as you are most of the time, and that there’s nothing unique about being afraid, and that happiness exists, but you have to know it before you can look for it. Happiness is unique that way, and you don’t need anyone’s permission to seek your own resources. Getting angry is helpful, as long as it isn’t at yourself. If you’re going to strike, better out than in, but it’s the hardest thing there is to learn. You feel this need to ask someone’s permission to be angry, when the whole point of being angry is that you don’t ask permission. You really have to believe you have nothing to lose – that’s the only way to start learning it. If you grow up rich and cossetted and sheltered, like I did, like Emil did, anger is something you don’t have much reason to practise. Money buys a lot of safety, so that in the end, you learn to buy your way through life instead of having to reach for it. Sometimes being deranged is the only power a person has in the world, the only leverage they’ve got over the crowds, the dark forces, them. It’s the poor, the shell people, who have that kind of nerve – they have no choice but to find it, because we’ve goaded them into … you know … find it or die, you lumps. It’s how they survive. So when half the Inner World leaves this city on May Day, and the police and the cavalry come out to protect who’s left, and the marchers from the Factory Outlet in their leather aprons and red ribbons form their lines and take control, I almost have to laugh. I’m one of the hated ones to they. But what they show on May Day is better than being silent and alone, like most people are, no matter how much money they’ve got.

Misery isn’t much fun any more. The past month and the next couple have to be about Paul, and as long as he’s working hard and well, my life is complete. My life is basically about him. When he surfaces at dusk, I’ve got his attention, and so does Johnny, but when he isn’t there, I’m alone and that’s all right too. He’s in the studio before daylight. I go up there at dawn to pose for him and to just be where we both want me to be. Then I go on Johnny walks if the wind is down and the ice isn’t bad. I still don’t trust myself on ice, I’m still walking too much like an old woman. Some afternoons, Johnny and I go to grandfather’s and eat cabbage soup and read his books together and listen to the shop bell ring. That, or I have my mystery errands – the ones that are a mystery to Paul, anyway. He has 24,532 kroner in an accessible savings account at 3.25 compounded, but perhaps, the teller yesterday says, your husband would prefer to transfer it into a closed account at 3.75 percent. Is that one year closed, good sir? I rub my forehead for a quick minute, think that’s 412 extra kroner next New Year, and show him the proxy that Paul signed last year when we came here for him to open an account I could reach. That chore depressed him for three days – direct to the hands. Paul dreads touching money. I’ll put a couple of coins in his pocket in the morning for tobacco and a great brown one, but not the folding kind – he can’t bear to feel it on his hands. It was the same when we had four kroner between us and no roof. I buy cheese and rolls and a chicken and spices from Rotman’s down the street for evening delivery. I stop at the Singing Swan for a slow hour, and drink rhum coffee and gossip with Josette and her penguin husband. And then back upstairs at five, when I know Paul will still be out for his ten thousand metres. Dinner on the stovetop for him to light, a bottle of red open to breathe. And I take Johnny to the studio for the evening inspection, Paul’s profane garden.