On an earlier Thursday, Sid Morris circled the class during Friendly Break, his cigarette sharp. If they were to turn off the lights and blacken the windows they would see only the orange glow of its embers as Sid Morris sucks in and breathes out, exhaling smoke. Smokers evolutionary dragons, Helen once said to the two old newcomers; Olympians evolutionary mermaids. Helen’s round glasses are framed in thick plastic, black as her dyed hair. (A cheaper brand, Simone said. The way Helen peered through the lenses as if trying to see in murky water, her eyes exaggerated and a little off, Simone thought—she’s been through something; and did Marie notice how certain times she went so close to her canvas it seemed she might be smelling it? And other times she squeezed her eyes shut like she was trying to paint in the dark?)
One hundred years ago today, Sid Morris said.
Cézanne said, he said.
Nota bene, he said.
He blew the last of his smoke toward the windows though the windows were still painted shut so the smoke lilted and sank like a day-old balloon.
“Painting is not copying . . . it is realizing one’s sensations.”
The boy who does not speak raised his hand but Sid Morris did not notice.I
“Cézanne’s principle of certainty,” Sid Morris continued, “which is bullshit, no? So maybe it’s the translation. Sensations have nothing to do with certainty, more incertainty.”
“Uncertainty,” Helen corrected.
“You certain?” Sid Morris said, dropping his spent cigarette into the coffee can that holds down one of the corners of the cheap Chinese-factory-ed print of Cézanne’s knives and onion and apples scattered across Cézanne’s famously raked table; a half-empty Dunkin’ Donuts box, courtesy of Duane Reade, holding down the other.
Helen nods, blinking. “Yes,” she says.
“The point is,” Sid Morris says. “This. Now. Paint on your brush, wind at your back, my crappy studio. This is the only certainty. Here: your sensations; your body existing for its moment in time. Everything else is crap.”
In the corner, the tattooed model almost dozing on the pile of their soft winter coats lets out a small snort and shifts her position to fetal. Then silence. Snow, again. Tiny flakes like spewed ash swirl through the alley, the air shaft, ticking the filthy windows that later someone, unable to bear the dry heat any longer, chisels open. And from below a burst of laughter seems to set off a raucous scuffle, as if the waitstaff at the Chinese restaurant were chasing a greased pig.
At this Helen stands from her uncomfortable stool, her hand on the back of her canvas as if steadying a nervous companion. She wears a floral tunic, and beads she bought years ago at the old flea market on Sixth and Twenty-First, the amber ones that, if you hold them to the light, set the world in sepia, back a century or two.
“He looked for a new system of representation. Realism was bankrupt, he said—the still life as dead as the pheasants in the composition. He wanted to paint only the impressions of what he saw: light, space, color.”
“My point,” Sid Morris says.
The Thursday group, perhaps inspired by Helen, the art historian, the way she remains standing, blinking, fingering the thick beads around her neck, her floral tunic oddly perfect with the model’s Renaissance scarf and Sid Morris’s beret, as if the all of them, combined, are something out of a lost Vuillard, join her to form a circle around Cézanne’s table. They study the cheap reproduction, considering, and when they return to their collective canvases, they vow to do better.
“Thank you for leading us to our sensations,” Simone says, smiling at Sid Morris.
“And delivering us from evil,” Duane Reade adds, his thin, new mustache, later admired by the prostitute he regularly visits above the one-dollar-slice pizza on Thirty-Seventh and Tenth, dusted with powdery white sugar.
I. What you would find in my house is Mom and Dad sleeping it off upstairs and the rest of us crowded around the television beneath the dog blanket.