This is taken from my second novel, Small Gods, in which Luca, dying as an old man in the year 2074, recalls 2017, a year that came to define his life.
I’m looking at the Twombly book again, at one of the white paintings, which isn’t the white of these sheets, this ceiling, or any other white I can see in this small sterile cube that’s draining my sons’ modest inheritance, but a living, talking, white. A conversational white. I remember a story that I’d forgotten, and it’s so much sweeter and more astonishing for having been forgotten then retrieved. Like a fifty-dollar bill in an old winter coat, or, better than that, let’s not bring money into this, because that’s the point, isn’t it, literal pricelessness, or, rather, something beyond money. Nonquantifiable currency.
In Avignon, in 2007, a French woman stood before one of these white paintings, maybe even this very one I’m staring at in reproduction, whereupon she was so overcome with passion that she kissed the canvas—pressed her moist and lipsticked mouth right up against the whiteness and left her mark there. She called it an act of love. “I stepped back,” she was quoted in newspapers. Or at least, these were the words translated from the French. I’m sure they were more beautiful in the French, everything is. “I found the painting even more beautiful,” she went on. “The artist left this white for me.” Imagine the delusion and rapture of believing a priceless painting to be a canvas left for you! I envy her terribly. I’m trying to embody that solipsism, specifically the moment of stepping back. I want to feel her ecstasy of consummation, which in everyone else’s eyes was vandalism. Funny that news reports used the word “defaced,” when in fact she gave it a face, or at least, a mouth—that stamp of red, parted lips, a mark of desire, ravishment. She was apprehended soon after, the red stain remained. I can’t remember if she was charged or not, and I prefer not to know. I still can’t imagine kissing a painting. It seemed to me then, as it still does now, a wildly romantic act, a wilder shore of love. What if I were to kiss this page? To bring this heavy book up to my face and press my dry lips against the high gloss page? I’d be a bad actor, pathetic.
I didn’t understand Paula’s paintings. I could tell you this—they were large and abstract and the brushstrokes tended to be fat and crosshatched. Sometimes they struck me as vibrant, dizzying. Beyond that, I don’t really know. When I saw them for the first time, in real life I mean, rather than the Google Image mosaic of them on a web browser, I didn’t know what to say, didn’t know if saying something stupid and wrong would be worse than saying nothing at all. Please remember, I was so young. The truth is, the paintings seemed to me accents for the studio itself, which was so much more readily enchanting than the works within. The bursts of wildflowers in glass jars, the rugs on the floor laid at angles, the table of animal skulls, a fire-engine-red Anglepoise lamp, its head bowed to a prettily cluttered desk in an attitude of tender attention. Even the most utilitarian corners—the stacks of blank canvases or shelves of paint—looked suggestive with possibility. Wooden crates of ’70s soul and ’80s pop and the old yet functioning record player which legitimized them. All the postcards from traveling friends sending love and witticisms and exclamation points from Rome and Istanbul and Quintana Roo. The handwritten notes of thanks or congratulation in large, confident scripts, pinned to things. Boxes of treasures everywhere, her own world of Joseph Cornells.
This, to me, seemed like the greater artwork: Paula’s life, the way her life looked. The style of her life.