Archive for category: Chapters

And this morning I’m going to Gus’s studio, which means another fiaker, on another day that Paul’s gone out to his models. It drops me and Johnny at the mouth to a narrow lane off the High Street of the Seventh Quarter, the carriage district behind the Imperial Folly. You have to know the lane is there or you’d look forever. I walk down it and push open the gate and step into a long, narrow garden in winter, with snow hummocks where the peonies will be again and a row of tall fruit trees whipping their last brown leaves, a lunch table below them half-buried in a new drift. I peer under the berber cloak, the warmest thing I’ve got, and watch Johnny dreaming. Is there something inside him already that’s not about me? His right fist is pushed into my breast. I’m hungry too, Johnny. In my right hand a leather portfolio that I can’t put down because I couldn’t bend to pick it up. It was a rough journey through the previous night’s fresh snow. I exhale once, long, I inhale with my eyes closed and think of the sun. I kick at the door with my leather boot instead of knocking.

One of Gus’s sweet maidens answers and draws me in from the cold. Another model is sitting up straight on the sofa, knees locked together and hands crossed on her lap. Both are wearing long cassocks, like monks, wine-red and forest-green. The standing one, Ephie, is smiling at a joke she won’t share, the sitting one has a look of inchoate dread. He places ads every few months, auditions them, culls them out. Some have sat to him for years. Five or six have fathered his children. I have met Ephie before, but not the other. He would have chosen this new one for her pale-gold hair, which is tied above her neck a little too neatly with a blue ribbon. It will tumble soon enough.

When the door closes, I can hear the source of her dread. His work table is squeaking. In the past eight years he has never troubled to tighten the loose leg, or perhaps the sound inspires him, like a brass bed does Paul. Through the wall, grunts mingle with keening sighs. The table is pounding the other side of the wall, making the framed Japanese woodcuts jump on this side.

‘Don’t worry, dearie,’ Ephie tells the new one. ‘He’ll have a pillow with just your name on it. Hello, Emma. That’s Paul’s brat you’ve got?’

We share a bitten-back smile wait for the woman through the wall to let herself go. It’s happening soon, we can tell. Paul told me years ago that every woman has her own song. He thought he was telling me something new, but I already did from my sessions at Gus’s studio. There she goes. This one’s a Catholic babbler, it sounds like a prayer must. She keens for Jesus and God, Jesus and God, and then, suddenly, trills as if they just doubled-teamed her, and the trill morphs into a deep and powerful laugh.

The new one looks petrified, the old one smirks.

‘Nice one,’ she says. ‘Gus says it’s a boy. Healthy, you two?’

‘He ripped me up pretty bad,’ I tell her.

‘The first one’s the worst.’

‘I can’t have a second.’

‘You won’t miss it, you have any sense. My mother screamed out seven, then died of the eighth.’

‘Ephie,’ he calls through the door.

She and I nod agreement, and I go in instead. He takes a moment to turn from his window, where a squall has begun to cloak a pear tree. ‘Oh,’ he says, and his hands dart to pin down the tent in his robe. He’s dressed like them, in a cassock, but his is silk, and silvery blue. His model is lounging on a horsehair chair, one foot tucked up, the other trailing on the ground, her face still tightening back. While his soldier falls, Gus turns and fusses with his desk, straightens a ruler and moves a bowl of apples to one corner. He turns to me again and points at Johnny, and I let him hold him. A bear going bald, two tufts of curly black hair above the ears and a beard that nothing can rule. Bricklayer’s shoulders, innkeeper’s paunch. Is that an angel smiling? A devil? He lets Johnny squeeze his finger and winces in pain to make him laugh. No luck – Johnny never laughs. He lifts him to his nose and inhales the baby smell of him.

‘The cap,’ he says. ‘You like it, then? Is it warm?’

‘Beautiful,’ I say, and I turn slowly to model it for him. Unlike Paul, beauty is in his vocabulary. Paul never thinks about beauty much. Though his paintings can be that, beauty is always a side-effect for Paul, instead of a key point, the way it is for Gus.

‘And you?’

‘I hurt,’ I say. ‘He really ripped me up.’

‘Arrrrgggch. Doctors, eh? But you’re glad to be alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did Johnny just do?’

‘He doesn’t cry,’ I tell him. ‘He does this other thing.’

He looks down at the little guy, and snarls back.

‘We mustn’t let him be hungry. Would he like some lunch? We can put him just here. And if I put his bottle on the stovetop, will that make it warm enough?’

‘That’s what we do.’

‘And apples and some cheese for us. The doctors tell you to eat?’

‘They left me a stomach,’ I say.

He glances over his shoulder, just enough for his model to approach him. I inhale the smell of sex and watch her shoulder tilt under her smock, the sliding cant of her hips, and she glances at me with a stuffed full expression, and I think: ‘That was me once.’ He hands her three apples and three thick slices of cheese, chops a cannonball loaf of rye bread in three and places all of it on three sheets of linen paper from his desk drawer. Then he takes a bottle of decent red wine from his utility shelf, uncorks it, and shoos her out. I’m looking around the room. Under the window he has two canvases in progress. The uncovered one is a landscape from the Salt District, his summer home, of a beach forest and alpine flowers at dusk. Decadent art, some of the reviewers are calling his work these days, though in contrast to what comes next, no one can know yet. As if Gus was the end of something, and perhaps the reviews are right, except for their tone – sensual is as honest a result as anything else a painting can be. Gus is doing variations on things he did long ago. That isn’t a bad thing – any painting he does is a glorious example of what he knows how to do better than anyone, and I don’t see why it matters whether these were done in 1901 or 1913. But I know that the next steps this world takes will be towards a place he won’t have it in him to find.

The floor is cluttered with sheets of drawing paper and roaming cats. Johnny is holding a piece of blue crayon, trying to fit it in his mouth. Gus points at the leather portfolio I’ve placed beside me, and I open it while he peels and cores two apples and slices them into quarters, cuts cheese into strips with a Damascus knife.

I show him the sheets one at a time, a new one for every nod he makes. These are working sketches for Paul’s SilverDome show. Graphite with touches of white chalk and watercolour.

‘That’s Paul,’ he says. Then to me: ‘I go, “drip, drip, drip,” and he goes, you know, “woosh …’’’ He presses his palms together and shoots them apart. ‘I’ll come and see him soon. I’ll tell him, “That effect is one part yellow ochre and two tyrrhenian and three turpentine.” And he’ll already know, after a month of figuring out what I could …’ He winces long.

‘Tell him?’

‘Yes, tell him, exactly that.’

Yesterday in the studio I watched Paul daub away at an edge of free canvas, testing one blend, then another, turning it to the light. It’s his mad scientist mode, and I always think he’s avoiding the real effort when he’s doing that. But I’m not the one who could tell him.

‘He gets frustrated when colours don’t come to him,’ I say. ‘Not the colours, but the …’

‘I know what you mean. As if he’s painting with light. He wants people to see through his work, not bump their heads on it. I see what he’s trying to do. There’s a difference between technical skill and communicative skill that he hasn’t sorted out yet. Skill is only a tool to put down when you’re ready for the next one. Tell him that for me, will you? I know these don’t come as easily to him as his drawings. The energy people see in his work – that’s his effort poking through, no? His paintings will relax the more he knows. He won’t be able to stop that. I don’t see any edges to these.’

‘He isn’t using stretched canvases this season. He’s pinning them to a large board to work out the borders later.’

‘That works, too. The next one?’

I turn the next sheet over. He waves me to continue. Seven, eight, nine.

‘Four of these he finished last autumn.’

Almost finished.

‘And the others make only nine.’

‘One sketch he only made last week. It’s his sister, so it will be easier. And the eleventh he’s starting today.’

‘Good, good, good. They’re portraits but they’re not. That’s Paul, too. He still goes out to his models?’

‘He has one more trip to make.’

‘His sister asked me to sit her portrait last year. Did she tell you?’

‘She tells Paul everything, and then he tells me everything she says.’

‘Something in her was too dark. I would have used her as a model sometimes, for allegorical work. Oh, she was beautiful enough, in that cruel way that’s so difficult to carry. She wanted me to paint her in gold leaf and flowers and sunshine and so on. “The full Gus treatment,” she put it. But … what’s the word. Not a joke, but … when everything would have meant its opposite. She wanted me to tell that joke. I didn’t think about the money she offered. Isn’t that a wonderful thing to be able to say? The secret of happiness on earth – “I don’t think about money.”’

Gus lets himself be voluble around me. I’m one of the few.

‘Portraits but they’re not,’ I say. ‘He can’t stand not painting people. There was that landscape last summer, do you remember?’

‘He painted a forest crowded with people, and then painted the people out, and he had a landscape, just so. Johnny, he was an experiment, too. Did he work?’

‘The crucible exploded,’ I say. I meant him to laugh – I’m still angry enough about what happened, and I don’t want company for that – but instead he squeezes his eyes shut. There is too much kindness in him to ever get out. When he forgets to express it, it leaks out under pressure.

‘Is there anything I can do for either of you?’

‘He wants the central court of the SilverDome. The light’s better. It would change his colours if he knew which space he was filling.’

‘Anybody would want it,’ he sighs. ‘But Emma, for his first room? Not this year. The centre court to himself in, say, two years, at this pace. Let people come this May and see him, and say, “He deserved the skylight, not Prokop.” Most people will, and he knows it. So let him be impatient. These figures …’ He points with a slice of apple. ‘Are they doppelgängers? Gosiç will be showing a couple of them next month in the same hall as Paul gets. He wouldn’t want to look like a junior Gosiç, not that that should stop him if he needs.’

‘I don’t think they will be. Since Johnny, he’s seen people in twos.’

‘Not the ages of man, I hope. Another theme that’s too easy. I don’t see Johnny in these, except one.’

‘That’s not Johnny. He was drawing babies for it when I was still carrying him. On the street? Hundreds of drawings, but he …’

‘… waits for them to turn into two or three before he’ll paint them. I must go back to work. Sophie will probably hope for your company if you can stay. She’s the new one. This will be the first day she took off her smock for me. Those perfect teacup breasts.’

‘I noticed. You could move the table a little from the wall.’

He smiles. ‘If I had a wife, you would have been too much like her. No, you’re Paul’s notion of a perfect woman. You weren’t stupid enough, or simple enough, and you had no clients to bring me. But sometimes I tell myself, “I need Emma’s colour.” Let me show you.’

The landscape is aligned just so to the afternoon light. The sun dapples the forest floor, the wildflowers are blooming, the flowers carpeting the earth making a bed for eternal sleep. Another act of senseless beauty, the promised sleep of happy thoughts.

‘The trunks under the beech bark,’ he tells me. ‘That’s what I need you for. There’s just a hint of a colour where the bark has shredded. So I tell myself, “Emma’s hair.” Yes, hold Johnny, of course – its all right.’

He has placed a stool for me in front of a dropcloth that hangs from the ceiling, neutral grey, splashed with colours that follow the wrinkles. When I tell him my problem, he bats his head with embarrassment and pulls a horsehair armchair to the middle of the room, placing it just so. I sit and let the windowlight soothe my neck, take off my cap and loosen my hair from its pins and my dress from the shoulders. I’m facing the dropcloth, where he has pinned sketch after sketch of dreaming women, tacking them to the shelves. The air is streaked with colour.

‘Paul is the sun,’ he says, ‘and you are the moon. I know where you are this moment. When neither of us can see him, where is he?’

When I walk, where doesn’t Paul see me go? I can make the hundred metres to the tram stop without stopping to rest. Then the tram takes me across the river down the Grand Artery to grandfather’s shop on the Isle of Jews. Yesterday afternoon Johnny and I spent the day there, on a crooked lane off a side street in his rooms behind his shop. Nothing much to those but a screened bed and a table and three chairs and the shelves where he keeps his books and the trunks where he keeps his papers. And through the little window across the little yard, Ostara’s stable and the cabbage bins. I can’t read the Hebrew books, but I can the French and Russian ones besides German. If he had any books in Czech, Paul and I could read them together.

And after his wife died ten years ago, he taught himself Latin and Italian both, though he’s warned me not to look at his papers in those tongues. He had to learn them so that he could read one hundred years of Cività Catholica, the Vatican newspaper, and now he’s working backward in time from there. He’s told me what’s in them, though. He wants to write a history of the blood libel. It has a history, he says. Humans invented it, God never would have. History is something people make, a responsibility we share with all the strangers on earth. You think the story has always been around, but no, it’s the Catholics that started it, in the Papal States, two hundred years ago when the popes were looking for excuses to keep the Jews in their ghettoes. Then it seeped across Europe from there. Documents about that he keeps in the stable, in a wooden crate in the harness room. He knows he won’t have time to finish his work, but he’s cataloguing what he’s finding, and he’s going to leave the papers to his friends on the Isle, hoping that someone else will continue. (Paul, a Catholic? Celebrant, no less? At our cottage he is. I found a hard guy for grandfather to trust. He’s never told me how hard it must have been, but really … it worked out.)

It’s dark at his kitchen table, which looks onto a crooked lane, so you need a lantern even in the day, but every kind of light has its own warmth and a horse blanket and soft cushion makes it warmer still. That room is the only place where he wears a yarmulke, though he says it’s only to stay warm and to succor some of his customers when they come in the front. When outside bell rings, I recognize the voices of his customers, and some of them recognize me with a cooing grin, show the baby. Sometimes a cart of cabbage backs into the yard, and he drives a deal with whoever and they unload it together into an empty bin. Then at one o’clock grandfather joins me for cabbage soup with caraway and paprika and dense black bread and mugs of black, black tea. I feel enclosed here, but not by anything cruel. I don’t often just visit like this, so why does it feel so normal? Why does feeling loved feel so normal? It isn’t as if I was ever a child here, yet here I am, feeling safe the way every child likes to be, and when I hold Johnny, he’s safe in my arms the way I’m safe in this room. Sometimes lately I feel overwhelmed by the desire to protect them both – the lad and his grandfather. It’s frightening how little else I want to do except that, even when I remember and miss how much larger my own world used to be.

I was meant to always negotiate my life, coming up to it sideways on soft soles in conditional mode: would, could, should, ought, a function of everyone else’s desired whims. I’m only glad my teachers were a bad example, or a reverse good example: yes, Emma, one day, if we’re unlucky, you’ll learn never to be what we are. So I’m steeled for that world if it ever catches up to me. But I do all right in the parallel one I’ve engendered with him.

I’m always practical when Paul isn’t there. I’ve trained myself. Grant you, he almost always is there: in person (which is my preference); or coming back from somewhere, which he does once or twice a day. When I picture my guy, he’s usually in the mode of coming back from someplace, stepping through a door or coming round a corner, our emotional vectors honed on the same point, never quite parallel (though parallel ones connect too, if you travel them quickly enough – that’s the new theory this year). Or in the marks he’s left behind on all I see. I’ve learned to step around those – he leaves space for that.

Besides me being mad for him, and knowing (from the sight of him coming back) that he’s mad for me, these seven years have been good. The gods have spoiled us beyond reason. My guy, you need to see what he looks like when he isn’t there, when it’s just me there and he’s filling my head. He injects himself into the world – he’s got the walk that tells you, he’s got the long stare when he needs to throw it. He’s brave without having to reach for it; he can scare people whenever he knows he has to. The world angers him, but in the part he can affect, he knows what he needs to do next, so there’s no bitterness to his nature, no sense of loss, no existential grief at being half-alive. Almost everyone else I’ve ever met has been half-dead compared to him, so who else could I want to be near? And he shows me every moment we’re together without thinking to that it’s me he wants. Besides, a name like Karsch, there’s going to be a lot of success out there for him, for us, in the crowd – not the family money (which he won’t touch), but the entitled kind that he knows is just as much his birthright – which means we can play together for lots of extra happiness now that we’ve brought our own to the table.

I know that periwinkle-eyed bastard is out there, so it can’t matter to me whether Paul finds him or not. It won’t stop him from being out there, whatever Paul’s thinking of doing about him. It’s the darker side of pride that’s making Paul want to find him (it’s what he’s thinking, of course), and nothing to do with me. Don’t, Paul – I told him right when he came back from the Rosemeyrs’ with the canvases – don’t look for him. I’ll surmount this on my own. I already know I will. I have too much at stake not to do it myself. That’s what I told him. Which means he’ll do it without telling me, out of a faulted notion of what’s good for me. When you love a guy, and he completely misses the point of you sometimes, you just have to accept how love starts out as an overpowering truth before it turns into a mystery you’re never going to solve.

Our second week returned, the Friday after dinner, Paul would be playing with the little guy at home, but instead we’re going out farther than the Singing Swan (where we all can be seen every two nights or three). I need to pretend everything is normal. I mean, pretend in front of more people than we’ve seen yet. So we pack up the tiny one in his sleeping robe and blankets and little scarf and little wool hat and socks, which takes half an hour, the way he rejects our advances, and I slip the Duclos tin in my coat pocket, because I’m going to break the seal tonight, and we go by fiaker to the SilverDome for Kopsky’s opening (Paul will be two more cranks), and later across the square between the minarets to the Marzipan, where the afterparty always develops. Nothing’s organized about that – it’s more that of course every insider at the Dome is going to end up there all at once tonight. When there isn’t a table free for us, the owner steers some strangers’ party out of the tarok room and brings me seven pillows for us to hold court on the long couch.

This is our first appearance since Johnny’s Big Day, and all we expected is there: a crowd of publishers (but hardly any journalists), a gang of Roller’s set painters from the Court Opera, sundry dealers from the Turkish Circus, and this room, which is a clubhouse for the Dome crowd from across the way. It’s always the same people, and how far can a single impulse extend? They clap and jeer when we enter, the way they do, to see if we still take it the right way. I don’t know why (though I can guess), but the first time Paul brought me here seven years ago, they all played together the same joke to him: a deliberate howl of mockery, a standing ovation of catcalls and whistles that Paul acknowledged with a straight face and that click bow of moneyed entitlement he’ll never scrub off or forget how to summon. This isn’t a crowd, it’s a pack – big difference. It’s a small world, not The Big One. A place like this, people come to stay in training for The Big One, to learn new tricks to play on the powers and to practise old ones on the authorities. Tonight, Paul raises Johnny over his head like a trophy and they unleash the lad one for his own so that he wakes up and howls back at them. The boldest artists attack the pillars of society, Johnny, they tremble before no enemies. Then someone gives up the long couch to us, many thanks kind sirs, it pleases us very much.

Gus rarely comes here – too far from his studio, and he prefers the Berliner in the Eighth Quarter – but Gus’s Dome friends are here. The ones he sends, you can always tell who they are by how they watch you enter and the way their whispers in ears reach across the room. Around the people here, Paul can stop being the only exotic beast, and he can talk to them in exotic beast language, about money and wall space and who’s entering the market to buy or sell.

Yellow table lanterns lick the crimson walls and soften the chairs and tables. The air is liquid with smoke and wine fumes and the fug of paint-stained clothes. The room, when I think of it, smells like Paul, like the crucible he formed his life within, and Johnny in my lap is bubbling and drooling while I watch the circles people make towards us and wait for the handful of women here to take turns wanting to hold him. People pay court to the new mommy, and the handful of wives hover to giggle and coo, but Johnny doesn’t pay any attention to them. All he wants to look at these days is me, and there’s no way for me to hide from that. What does he know? What is he telling me? I flash the Duclos tin and people clap hands and go ooooh … Paul breaks the seal for me with the claspknife he’s always got and twists the lid, and people crowd around, the waiter bringing each comer a semidemitasse spoon. I take the first turn and wait for the crowd to thin a little so that I can shiver and soar in the arctic glow of peace. When materialist beliefs are shaken, man turns his gaze inward. Art is where the spiritual revolution is first felt. There’s never any music at the Marzipan – just a roar of arguments over small things, and sometimes a shoving match. Hardly any fistfights here. Show the baby. Someone’s wife wants to hold him, and I let her go off with him a few steps. So that’s what it feels like to be un-Johnnied for a moment. I wonder if that’s the first thing I ever forgot. Johnny enjoys all of it for the first half-hour, and when it starts to wear him out, the owner’s wife hands me the key to kitchen pantry, which is soon full of people following Duclos and his brain sugar.

I sit in a soft chair they bring in for me surrounded by stove and body warmth and baking smells with a glass of medium-red in my hand and take visitors two or three at a time. When Paul comes in to visit me, he’s broken his rule about not drinking during the week – good for him, rule breaking is the point here, and I’ve reminded him well – and that means one bottle of red. Not Count Freddie’s Élite Tokay, but a near miss to hand. Paul doesn’t let himself get drunk during his colour days – direct to the hands – but he lets it relax him when the night calls for it, and relaxing releases him from his working energy and changes how he looks at people. They stop being animated things and he can talk to them without always having to plunder them. One bottle of anything is always enough for him. Paul never has to play himself at the Marzipan – he is himself. He watches me get powdered and smiles at his shared memories of our madder days. The stuff lifts the world off your shoulders, I know well enough, and simplifies it in a good way. Johnny, over there in the corner in a waitress’s arms, cackles to me as if he and I know something the rest don’t, but what is it?

Art must destabilize vision so that people are compelled to imagine alternatives. Okay, Emma loves to watch me move. The way she looks at me now, with that hopeful heat in her eyes, I don’t mind that she loves it. Big bones – that’s what she likes. She still loves to trace them on my skin some nights, from head to toe. Sometimes she used to mimic the way I walk, to crack up visitors. She’d take these long, heavy strides, chin strutting, arms akimbo, legs bowed a little, feet slapping flat on the ground. Will she ever do that again? My hands – she plays with those, too, like she is tonight. She can never get over their size. All right, so big you think he won’t know what to do with them, but then he picks up something, or touches me, and the energy pours through out his fingertips, every ounce of it, and his soul after that. Same with his eyes – when he can relax from the studio, he makes himself see into things, into you, with this deliberate gentle power. Okay, I’m happy tonight, and you can see the relief on her face, that it’s what she wanted to see in me. Of course I can be happy with you, Emma – your worry? Wasn’t reminding yourself the point tonight? I collapse beside her on the upstairs sofa so that she almost sails through the air. Over there, the waitress has passed the little guy to one of the cooks, who wants to offer him a spoonlet of jam and looks our way for permission. I point to Emma – her call. She looks up. Johnny spreads his arms and legs towards her like a flying squirrel just as Emma is prying open the Duclos tin again. Just then she looks up and glares for a moment, then drops the tin and howls –

‘Release … that … CHILD!!!’

The room crashes silent except for Johnny, who’s gurgling at the spoon, trying to pry it from the cook’s hand with the fingers of his right, his left hand tucked into his sweater.

‘Here, here, HERE! Bring him to me! Oh, Johnny,’ she gasps when she’s holding him again. ‘You really do love me, don’t you? And so soon! You! That spoon, bring it now!’

The room has fallen silent to stare. The cook tiptoes up and hands the spoon to me, and me to Emma. With one hand, she holds Johnny sitting up in her lap. With the other, she dangles the spoon in front of him. Johnny stares entranced for a moment, leans his head to the left while she holds her breath, then leans his body towards the spoon, pressing his left hand to his sweater and reaching with the other.

‘Oh Johnny … Your momma teach you that? Here, have some.’ And she releases the spoon to him. He’s blowing bubbles with his dinner, and kicking her thigh with his little sock feet, and smearing the jam on his forehead with the spoon clutched tight in his walnut-sized right fist.

‘Oh, Johnny, that’s right. Look at momma. Who taught you that, little Johnny? Was it your mother, hmnh?’

The first few mornings back, Paul doesn’t blink or stare when I bring Johnny to the studio. We’re there till lunch. He doesn’t notice us much unless Johnny starts to cry, and then he flips a drool cloth over his shoulder and carries him, bounce bounce, clicking his tongue and pulling faces with him, until Johnny starts to belly-laugh and he stops and hands him back to me. He used to carry me like that, around the bedroom, around the kitchen, down the hall, bounce bounce … Otherwise … The window sun in my hair, a thread of winter breeze on my left shoulder, and a shawl around me and Johnny so that we both can look out. Paul would tell us if we were hardening his work. From my soft chair, under Mister Frog, the next canvas is facing away so that I can watch his face while he moves around in front of it, and only Johnny could turn him from what he sees when we leave him alone. I make sure Johnny’s watching him instead of me. There are moments that he, I can tell, forgets I’m there and I feel like myself again. But when Paul’s there, I’d better be holding him; he looks sad when I’m not. Yes, Paul, seek to collapse the past and future into an eternal present. Inject the world with dreams of unseen truths. But at this stage, when the canvas is at its whitest, he’s in how mode, not his what or why mode. There are a dozen drawings of Charlotte on his desk, from yesterday and months past, but he doesn’t study them yet – the act of drawing them will have been enough for today. He has a knack for keeping things out of his head when he needs to, please dear God never me. Because that would be a nightmare look.

There are things he never does twice, and there are things he almost always does. No joke, he’d paint with tinted water on white glass if he could find a way. You’d think he had one pot of each colour to last him the rest of his life, the way he thins it. (In The Prague Years, where we still were three years ago, he’d paint horizontally, on his desktop, because it was the only way he could control the weight of his paint on the hard surface he always prepared for it. They were the first paintings he sold, and they were special, but … enough, he knew he’d go mad working like that too often.) One day perhaps that ‘light’-ness will stop being his signature, but for now, no one’s else’s work looks like his. For that, and for the shiny snow-white undercoat he always starts with, which hides from the start all traces of the weave and makes what he does an exercise in achieving a third dimension in a multitude of hard ways. Most of his Marzipan buddies soup their canvases a lot darker than this so that whatever they paint on top pops out. But Paul doesn’t want people to notice the paint or see brushstrokes when they look at him. And then he draws in the figures with a graphite so lightly that only he can see them, and then he moves to charcoal, black or red or in combination, with as much care as with his paints, because he means for you to see those lines through the colours. He always cared more about line than colour, but tell that to the subjects who sit for him. Really, most of his sitters want something that will look impressive in the dining room, and it’s his glowing colours that do that. He’s always scanning his surface for build-up, and when he sees any he’ll buff it down with a chamois. He works with a cloth-wrapped fingertip as often as with a brush. And when he wants dark, he doesn’t darken the paint, he adds another layer, then another, of the colour he first thinned, using a flat or curved edge to bring out the veins between each. It’s maddening to watch. He works faster than he used to, but only because he’s practised so long. You think he’d have found shortcuts by now but it’s as if he’s never looked for them. This is how slowly he has to work to be sure he’s getting the effect he wants. And after that, as many layers of varnish as he needs to make sure the painting glows. When the light is right, you can look at one of his paintings once it’s hardened and see your reflexion on it. He isn’t trying to express his technique, but there’s always this subtext by the time he’s finished: not, ‘This is who I am’ or ‘This is why I am’ – no, he’s saying ‘This is how I act.’ If you want to know his reasons, get a sense of his whys, you need to hear him argue with our painter friends, because that’s when they come out. Not that he would ever declare them, but you can piece them together from listening to him when he’s got a few in him and he’s rejoinding someone else. That’s what I tell myself when I’m not watching him. When I am, I only see him working. I see his competence, how he works as hard as he must at something he knows how to do, and I see that he has reasons though I don’t know what they are.

This morning, when Johnny and I left the studio he was roughing a three-quarter portrait of Charlotte in her loosened ball gown, spread across a dark leather couch with a blazing fire in the hearth at her feet, swept hair dangling back, one hand spread casually on her tummy where a corset should be, long slim fingers splayed out, the other hand cupping a half-consumed pomegranate. That’s Charlotte, right – eating a pomegranate in an ivory silk gown, and getting away with it. That’s what a predator goddess would do, with the money she was born to and the time she’s got on her hands. I can’t read her face yet, but those hands? I can see where they’re going unless they were just there. Paul used to tell me that the saddest sound, the only sad sound, he ever heard, is the wail of his sister when she’s coming. He can’t know, really. A dark place, hers – heaven’s supposed to be brighter than that. You want to shake her back to earth and tell her cheer up, girl, life can’t be as bad as that. Do you want to talk about it? Look at those hands he’s drawn and then picture her when she rises to it, and listen – a shaking apart of the infernal damned, a cacaphonic damburst of Charlotteness, pummelling darkness with howling white crests, the lash of a superheated wind expulsing a final contortion. In other words, it’s sure to be something like what Paul sounds like but he’s usually looking down, not up. Now, in that pose, her liquid mirror has shattered, her body slid down, the moons in her eyes are about to reassemble themselves. I know those moons, the same exactly. When he fills out her face – and will he know this? – she’s going to be asking me, ‘Do you catch the signal, Emma?’ No secret between us three – she’s wanted me to touch her like that and send her there since the day we met and has been waiting and waiting for me to want it too. No, not for me to want it – for Paul to want it, good luck you, girl. There’s one piece of him you won’t score from us.

Paul has a deep distrust of the collective voice, the voice you can’t see, I realize that now: he trusts everyone to have a truth in him that he would want to hear. That’s the problem with truth, that everyone has their own. So people reject one another’s, and in the end people have to lie en masse to get themselves believed. He despairs that it’s only lies that people can ever agree on, can accept as a societal whole. So his work is about – I’ll say it for him – telling his own truth in ways that people will believe. He trusts people (or doesn’t) one on one, and he trusts himself the same way. But the crowd? He knows he’ll survive in it but it tires him out, thinking of everyone at once and sorting out the confrontations among people he’d never otherwise have to heed, maintaining the barrier that will still let him see clearly. He doesn’t think much of the world generally, but he loves whom and what he does and swims through the rest. The rest is what fuels him when he needs to be fuelled. He’s sociable, his manners perfect (they’re the first thing rich people buy their children) and his interest passing but genuine, once he’s pared the world down to the person in front of him.

And things he needs to be good at, I help him do, like bat my eyes at the commissioners and keep his schedule clear, or not. I get him out of the house or into the sack enough when he’s working hard, so that he doesn’t live too much inside himself. He’ll have to live mostly there, for the next three months, but it isn’t his natural state. I know he’s going to have to stay in there for weeks at a time until after the SilverDome opens for him, so it’s up to me to pull him out sometimes, even when he says don’t.

I function just fine, thank you, for a reformed lunatic. I’ve learned to live in the present even if I haven’t let myself forget the past. That guy, that guy in Rosemeyr’s shop … just as I was finding my footing after Johnny’s Big Day, and preparing myself to look at the world over Johnny’s head, that bastard shouldered me back into the pit. I don’t have it in me to murder anyone, but whoever he is, I yearn to hear that he’s dead.

I surprised Paul last night. He asked me why I didn’t get a maid, and I told him I didn’t want to and that I wanted to get by on my own if I possibly could. It was a difficult conversation, for a minute. How well is Emma going to be again? We’re both asking ourselves that, and acting as if we’re not, and waiting to see what we see through the settling dust before we begin discussing what may never be there again. Mostly, I worry that if we hired a maid, I’d turn into someone who has a maid. I grew up in an apartment with seven of them, eight in the winter, so not having one is another way to avoid turning into someone who lives in that past. I don’t want to have nightmares about that. I want to see how much I can do without one before I think about it. I haven’t given up on feeling normal yet, I still want to hope and have the energy to hope. I don’t know what normal will be from now on, that definition isn’t clear yet, and until it is, I want to give myself every chance to find out.

All right, so it happened, the fifth afternoon of our return from our hill. Paul left for his studio after a quick lunch, I was alone in the parlour with Johnny. This whole eye contact thing, I wasn’t ready for it, so as soon as he tried I totter-marched into the bedroom until I figured out what to do next. At least in there there was only one of me. One of me I can still manage, though I always end up thinking about Paul instead. And wondering how he succeeds to live without looking back. Because it’s when you look back that the world gains ground on you.

Right now, this afternoon, Johnny’s sleeping, which is when we both seem happiest, so I close the bedroom door behind him and lie down on my side. Love sticks are out, these days and forever, which is really too bad, because I’ve got a nice collection of them. Paul used to carve me one from cherrywood every day-we-met anniversary, just like I’d buy him a new pipe from the smith he goes to who knows what he needs (fossil brier, rusticated oxblood, 6-centimetre bowl, long shank with a seventy-degree lacquer mouthpiece. He has to be able to hold it comfortably between his teeth while he’s working.) On my tummy is no good any more, because I can’t bend that way, and on my back is too much of a strain – we don’t have enough pillows. So I lie on my side and think about Paul spooning me, the way we always fall asleep, and this rich, earthen smell that always throbs from him – all of the sight of him mixed up in it, like paint and old wool and fresh burley and sweat and heavy red wine. I cup myself and breathe the blankets and summon the moon and the wind to rule me. And I lay there afterwards and rest, licking the rain from my face and thinking, ‘I’m a water sprite.’ I block my ears and imagine Paul watching me, our eyes almost touching, one great and unsubdued heart. Johnny is still sleeping – I could have taken more time – and I begin to hope he never wakes up. I don’t mean that cruel. Sleep is the most beautiful thing in the world. Why haven’t people learned to sleep forever? It must be because people also dream, and you have to wake up to escape those