How did we get here?
We were once such a happy family but now I am left alone with only my memories as a comfort to the love we once shared and the child we had borne. When did you start to drift? I think about this daily trying to pinpoint the moment that our relationship fell apart. I recall that it had started before the unthinkable had happened but after the police found Jenni, everything became a fractured mess.
I am no longer a mother, a wife or a lover. I am now completely alone in this world; my life torn apart by sickness, evil and hate. Why her? Why did he have to pick her? It was not just her life that was destroyed by that act of wickedness that will always haunt. I pray for our child and I still pray for our love. Despite everything you have done, I still live in hope that you will return.
When I first discovered you had left, I fell to the floor, finding security only in cradling my own body. I was at the edge of a precipice; frightened by the cold isolation of the faded and dried colors imprisoned in the splintered flesh of your wooden palette. From where I lay, it resembled the skin of a man: experienced, mature, damaged and covered in age spots from where the darker chemicals had absorbed into the grain of the wood. I was surprised that you hadn’t taken it with you when you left, because it was of no use to me. I was once your muse as well as your lover and mother of our child, but now, I was no longer a stimulant to the physiological depths of your artistic temptation.
I was nothing.
As much as I wanted you to leave after I had found out about your infidelity, I also wanted you to stay, even though I knew it was for the wrong reasons, and that it would be a mistake. I had once thought that I was stronger than that, and would have been able to put aside the faded hope that I had clung onto and move on with my life.
You had left me a hand-written note. It was penned steadily and was unfeeling, with structured cold sentences. Things had now gone too far, you said, and I remembered how pithy you could be when I disagreed. You must have dropped the letter through the mail slot of the apartment when I wasn’t here. By avoiding me, you made me feel like I had done something wrong, that it was me who had violated our sacred bond.
That act alone made you a coward.
I didn’t see the note at first. It was hidden underneath an unopened moving box, whose tough corners were wilted at the seams because of the rain that had leaked from the roof.
On the night before you left, I thought that I heard you rustling about for your brushes, the ones that you used to keep in the antique hutch. That hutch still remains, timid in the distant corner opposite the kitchen, in the living room beside a bay window, with its shelves in need of care, and its unattached glass doors resting against the window. I no longer have the desire to finish restoring the hutch. To devote myself to such a task and to breathe new life into some old furniture makes no sense after all that has happened. Decay and death is the natural order and it is futile for me to resist it.
At night I sit alone in the dark. Sometimes moonlight pours through the cold glass, and spills across the floor, like milk from our child’s table. I miss cleaning up after her, our beautiful and innocent little girl. I miss all the things that, at one point, had made me angry and irritable as a mother. I miss our daughter and the family unit that we once shared.
***
It’s odd, the situations you long for, and the circumstances that you wish you could endure again and again, no matter how cursory, and no matter how painful. Part of me wishes to be arguing with you again, just so that I can put my hands on your chest and feel the intense heat of your opinions tearing through your flesh. And when one of us finally submits, anguished and possibly regretful, our different chemistries can react with each other in a collision of eroticism, audacity and selfishness.
The last time I remembered your hate washing over me was when I walked away from you while we argued. I had never before walked away, but instead, would be like a boxer who despite being punched repeatedly, would refuse to lower their hands and not fight back. I remembered walking into your studio and tearing away at a blank canvas. I should have directed my hurt at a finished creation, but I wanted to destroy the uncreated mural that might have eventually graced its skin, and to blight your inspiration and creativity. You then came in behind me and ripped that Prussian blue sweater I adored so much at the shoulder. It ripped from the seam, and exposed my skin.
I wanted to hit you, pound hard at your chest with desperation and torment, but instead, I grabbed a jar of brushes and threw them at you. Each one collapsed to the floor after striking the wall behind you. When I turned to run out of the room, we collided and I fell. The color can I landed on spilled across the drop cloth. It was a tone I had never seen before, and against the paleness of my hands and wrists was somehow exhilarating.
You also noticed this, and I saw that look you would get when you were struck with inspiration.
I instinctively removed the torn sweater and stripped down, watching you grab your brushes. I smeared some of the color across my abdomen and hips. You spun around my body, telling me not to move, then to move quickly, then not to move again. Hold. Please. I’m sorry.
Sorry. I think it might have been the only time you ever said that to me.
God, I loved you so much.
You grabbed more of that exquisite color and as I bent over at the waist, my leg stretched across the end of the table, you poured it over my back. It felt cold and dense. I spun around and slapped you. You responded by licking my throat, perhaps the only region on my body that by now was not bathed in that pigment. I watched you drop to your knees, and then closed my eyes when I could no longer differentiate between the cold color and your brush washing over me ...
***
Despite being apart now for four months, I still recognize you in everything I see. You taught me how to study angles and lines, and I notice how they change in differing light and shadows. It doesn’t matter where I go. Sitting in our unfinished dining room, I find myself folding and assembling my napkin to understand its texture and possibilities. I can, at times, hear your voice telling me not to focus on the object directly, but on spaces between the dark and the unseen.
Often it didn’t matter what you were telling me, I just wanted to hear your wisdom echo its way through the dark. I wanted to be lost in your certainty. But at times I thought that when you painted me, you never really noticed me at all; just the atmosphere around me pressed up against my curved, naked body. You wouldn’t have known I was even there if it wasn’t for my pulsing chest, or my beads of sweat that sometimes dripped to the floor.
You once painted me in the living room, naked, my extended belly bulging like ripe fruit toppling from a basket. That was such a very long time ago. At the time, you said that my skin tasted like peaches. I remember how the dimmed streetlights outside corrupted the light, and bathed my shape in a salmon tincture. You stopped to turn my body towards the left, and while guiding my shoulders, let your fingertips warm and gentle trail against my swelled breasts. Your hands moved across the plain of my rounded stomach. It paralleled a pumpkin, a yellow-orange squash seeking comfort from the sun under a patch of darkened leaves. I remembered that was when I first realized that I loved you, when I watched you picked them - the pumpkins that is, as you stretched their vines, and gently pried their tired stalks from the secure comfort of their dirt womb.
I used to love fall. I loved the smells, and the arrogant attitude of Nature, who with the security and confidence that she possessed, passively allowed the entropic destruction of what made her beautiful. During that time of year, the McIlheny’s would welcome the township onto their farm. Large, decorative hay bales were sold out of the back of a rusted pickup truck. Children would stand at the banks of a small lake at the far edge of the property, looking for small frogs. A pair of empty overalls was given substance with mulch and leaves that spilled from the wrists and ankles like unkempt hair.
There was an older man who gave children slow rides on an enormous tractor, his large wicker hat casting shadows against the stalks of corn. If he hadn’t moved, he would have looked like a withered scarecrow, an aged protector of crops and vegetables, that stood propped against two cracked and uneven pieces of wood. The tires of that tractor were so tall compared to the children, that when the more mischievous ones would try to give them a kick, they would have absolutely no effect on the hard, compressed rubber.
I remembered passing a display of gourds, and feeling sympathy for their sometimes grotesque appearance: maligned and twisted, like the unwilling victims of a degenerative disease. They were like lepers; separated from the beautiful, the elite, and cast aside by others as stricken denizens of a once close community.
I also remember you seated on a fragile wooden crate, turned on its side behind a picnic table, with a row of small glass mason jars highlighting different colors laid out in front of you. One by one you painted unique characters onto a child’s pumpkin, flicking your brush patiently over its sturdy rind. I picked up a misshapen gourd, a golden piece of deformed fruit, and held it in the palm of my hand.
“I feel sorry for them,” I said aloud, not expecting you to break your concentration and listen to me. I don’t know what made me say it.
“For what?”
“These poor, misshapen gourds.”
“Why?” You asked, setting the tip of your paintbrush into a small jar, full of water. The pale blue color escaped from the harmless clutches of your brush and swirled majestically in between the molecules of that delicate, life-giving balance of hydrogen and oxygen. I never saw anything so beautiful, but perhaps I was searching too hard at the time for someone who would love me. Droplets of water hung at the edges of your fingertips. It caused me to notice your nails. They were smooth and rounded, like a woman’s.
“Because no one seems to care about them, except when the leaves have fallen. They are merely cultivated to be a slave to our fortunes during fall. And tomorrow, we’ll just clean up the remains of their bodies like soldiers fallen in battle: who they were and what they could have been will be left behind as colored stains on the cement of sidewalks and front porches,” I said.
They had my sympathy.
No, my pity.
My childish pity for the sad fruit had brought a tenderness to your eyes, and drawn to them, I could no longer hide myself from you. I could no longer hide myself behind the layers of my emotional blanket, nor behind the language and thoughts that hid me from the diseases of emotional uncertainty and consequence. I should have retreated then, and receded back into the isolation of my career and remained alone. Instead, I allowed myself to move closer towards you, towards your existence and polite apprehensiveness. I was hopelessly lost and in your control.
I wondered if you looked through the window of the front room when you dropped off the letter, and saw the remnants of our life. The instruments of your art no longer took up space: the set of palette knives, the different length and style of brushes scattered around the lip of a cracked and stained coffee cup. The only thing that occupied the solidarity of the unfurnished, stuffy room was the distributed pieces of our truncated marriage, and the now pathetic, colorless silence that accompanied them.
I turned on the faucet and watched the stream of water rise to the rim of the glass. When I held the glass up to the light, aged, colored swirls showed through. I guess I hadn’t washed it so well. Maybe I had done it on purpose, to keep some semblance of your existence behind that could be measured and cherished.
I had to unwrap the glass. It had already been packed, and I stepped on the newspaper that had been used to wrap the glass when I sat down at the kitchen table. One of the articles mentioned your upcoming retrospective and auction in New York. The advertisement had been placed some months ago. The rustling sound of the paper seemed to echo throughout the vacancy of an achromatic existence, a place where honest colors became emaciated, starved of their nutrients by the cruel event that had passed. Everything after that was lonely, and every morning that should have heralded a new day and a new beginning was stillborn.
I stared into space. I had pinned your note to the wall with a pushpin. It stated that your attorney would contact me when the divorce was finalized, and that you had already signed the papers. You had made arrangements at the bank to have fifty percent of the funds raised at the auction from your works, to be placed into my account. I didn’t care about the settlement. Somehow you knew that I wouldn’t be there for the auction. Somehow you knew that I wouldn’t go to New York. I hated your presumptive arrogance, and I despised myself for having opened myself up so much that allowed you to know how I thought.
***
Alone at the high school’s art department, I am unable to even glance into the sullenness of my own reflection, or examine any of the paintings from past students that adorned the sterility of the dressing room. I shudder as I realize that our daughter will never be able to walk these halls and experience the highs and lows of being an adolescent, a young lady, a woman, a mother. It’s hard to trace back and understand where things started to bend and finally fracture between us, where passion and pride shifted against the immobility of my own sense of reason. I felt like I had disappeared into the collective ravine of forgotten objects, like articles of clothing in a “Lost and Found,” or a damaged painting, deliberately ripped to represent an unprofitable body of work.
Placing my robe over the small dressing screen behind me, I struggle to unfasten the white buttons of my blouse. I pull down on the delicate straps of my bra, and slid each one over my shoulders, exposing my breasts as if I were going to be alone with a lover. I raise my legs slowly and step out of the shelter of my intimates. I then touch the deserted wasteland of my stomach and sense my daughter and her loss, through the retrospection of her legs struggling to kick at the comfort of my insides. I remembered your hands rushing to feel her through my body, and take part in our joy.
My skin is now so insulated, and no longer soluble to the supple pressures of the esoteric yet didactic movement of your hands. I rub my shoulders as if they were unfamiliar to me. I notice some blue ink on my neck. I moisten a cloth and wipe away the unwanted flaw from my skin. Should I have left it there? Was the small, foreign imperfection a reminder that everything beautiful will inevitably collapse into a cold chasm of ruin and extinction? Was it not a perfect example of disillusionment? No, it is up to them out there to baptize me in the colors of the corrupted.
The hue that I am saturated in from the fluorescent lights of the dressing room roll across my shoulders and trickle down to the edges of my water-colored anatomy. I had been undressed by your actions and the actions of others, abandoned and pulled down unwillingly into the most unprocessed of emotions. I had felt raw and scared, like a child missing in a blinding winter storm. I remove my wristwatch and set it down on the edge of the sink. I then realize that your art auction is scheduled for later this evening in New York. I’m not sure if I can bring myself to see you one last time. So much has happened. You have tortured me in such a way that is unthinkable, unspeakable.
You have tainted our love by the savageness of your infidelity. But I can’t forget you so easily. We once shared so much. I remember how you painted me in a room like this one, before I had showered after jogging. There should have been nothing spectacular about it: a simple woman, baptized in her body’s perspiration, undressing after running outdoors. I saw that it wasn’t listed in the catalogue of your retrospective which I had absentmindedly brought with me. Tossing through its first few numbered pages, I struggle to understand who the woman in those pieces is, and why I can’t recognize the characteristics of her face and cheekbones. However, it is the painting that is first listed in the catalogue which surprises me most. This work represented more of our ending for me, but perhaps it was the beginning of what you may have honestly wanted all along.
Page 3.
It was easy to see your cutting discontent for our life together in what you had painted. The paint had been placed unevenly and with the subtlety of the leaden colors, insinuated a cruelty and brutality in the matter-of-fact commonness of the winter landscape. I always thought that the painting looked incomplete, that there was more that you wanted to say, but didn’t. Perhaps I never gave you the chance.
I remembered that day, the morning after that violent snowstorm. It was so cold. Everything you painted onto that canvas was so dark, so raw, and with complete apathy and indifference. The bleak unhappiness that you must have felt because of me reached the outside edges of the withered canvas. Your mood had not have been driven by only the season. We had, after all, experienced some of our happiest times during winter, such as the time our daughter licked her first icicle. I remember you were helping her build a snowman. Even now I can recall with some clarity how blissful you both looked. I wished you had instead captured her excitement at the first time that she had seen snow. God, I wish I could see her again, her wide-eyed innocence and sheer glee as she played in our yard. I am at a loss at how I will cope when the next winter breaks with both of you gone.
Bit by bit you had helped her mold the snowman’s shape, but did not build it so tall that she couldn’t reach. You tried to teach her how to shape it perfectly, to use proper technique and distance, and to not just put the old carrot straight in for his nose, but to maintain the right lineage, so that people could see what he was feeling by the way the shadows moved across his face as the sun passed over his differently sized button eyes.
Jenni had taken the buttons from my sewing basket, spilling them across the floor of the living room. It didn’t matter to her what color she had picked, but I watched you crawl beside her, and talk to her about what size and shade she should use. I shamefully remember being irritated by the mess. The purple scarf she later pulled out of the closet that belonged to me was way too big for her. But she took care not to let it rest on the ground before she wrapped it gently around the snowman’s neck.
As I remember these happier times, I am left shaken to the core, realizing that I will never again experience the emotion of being a mother.
The tips of the trees in the painting look like indistinct fingers, extended and yet stunted, giving them strength to endure the brutality of the oncoming seasons. Never once do I remember you sculpting flowers with your fine brush. And this painting is no different. There is nothing to give hope to the landscape; that change would come, and that our purpose could endure.
I wondered if you had felt this way through the entire aggregation of our marriage: misplaced and disinterested among the impetuously arranged debris in an incomplete foreground. You painted our loss so casually, so matter-of-factly. You portrayed the sudden evaporation of our family with such simple discernment, that I could feel your scorn and belief that our lives together had been a misguided emotional waste. I felt that I would be forever immured in the fragile mythology of your silent winter.
Although I do wonder that if Jenni was still here, whether I would look at that painting differently.
***
A bell was chiming in the empty hallways. It sounded distant, like a ship lost at sea, trying to find its way back to the shores of a loved one. The first art class will start soon. I am not really sure what I am doing here. But after so much loss, I need to feel beautiful and at least in some way, wanted.
I open the door to the classroom studio, and walk into the center of the room. I feel cold, even though sweat is forming in the small of my back. I shouldn’t feel nervous. I exhale heavily and pulling on the sash of the robe, let it collapse against the top of my feet. The material slightly irritates the skin on the side of my ankle. I raise one leg and stand on a small pedestal, a wooden box that has been draped with a satin cloth that is cut too long so that it spreads wildly across the floor like a beautiful, raging weed in one of Monet’s paintings. I stretch my torso and briefly admire the definition of my stomach as my hair spreads across the crest of my back.
I raise my eyes slowly and study the artists, who with their concentrated expressions, are trying to elucidate the pensive sultriness that I am desperately trying to convey. They shouldn’t be able to look at me and look into me this easily. I should be a privilege for them, a rare discovery.
I look down at my body and fixate upon the scar that adorns the small, round bone on my ankle. The color always seemed pretty to me, a light pink lemonade shade; the color of bubble gum. My bubble-gum ankle I thought. It always started to itch though when I remembered how it happened, when I saw that trail of blood flow across the fleshy skin between my toes and underneath the front porch.
I break from my statuesque position and arch my body back, my arms reaching towards the light coming in through the window. This movement gives my breasts a more defined shape, tightens my abdomen, and allows my ribs to become visible beneath my skin.
“Hold it!” The teacher tells me to stop and hold the pose.
“Look at the hope,” she instructs the class, as she traces her hands across my stomach.
It feels like what they are painting is a forgery, a clever reproduction concealed by untold truths and silence, no matter how pure the intimacy of the representation turned out to be. However, I remember how you had the rare chance to experience the full fragility of my undertones, to see the characteristics of who I really was, and who I had been, but would never be again.
I close my eyes and allow the recollection of your touch to overtake my thoughts. It is as if you are standing behind me, tugging on the material of the sash around my neck, trying to understand the perspective of my body, your chin nestled in the small pocket of my collarbone, gently taking hold of my wrist and passing it though the soft space between my breasts. My train of thought is quickly disrupted by the teacher who has got up and flicked a light switch behind me. Suddenly, the room falls into darkness, apart from a small spotlight that is trained on my upper body.
As the artists study me in the muted darkness, the teacher asks them to examine the contrast of the shadow and the light upon my body. I close my eyes and feel the short hairs of your paintbrush stroking the inside of my thigh. It makes me want to taste you, there in the dark. The seconds pass beside me, behind me, underneath me.
As the seconds pass I convince myself that I can see you trying to hide amongst the neophytes, critiquing their work, the light on your face changing continuously as you move around, each time more arousing, each time more sensual. However as those seconds pass and the vibrant paints dry and scatter like pollen, I feel alone, save for the image of your face that is all at once beside me, behind me, and inside me.
I notice that it has started to rain outside.
***
After posing and being studied, analyzed and painted by several different classes, I finally left the classroom building feeling tired and sore. I sat down against wall seeking shelter from the rain and saw the brazen color of your eyes staring out from the catalogue. A few students walked past me, not noticing the light tears that were gathering in the corners of my eyes. As I watched the students walk past, I was struck again by the thought that I would never see my beautiful little girl grow into a teenager. I wondered what those students would see if they looked long enough and close enough while they painted me; savage beauty or violent imperfection? I wondered if they could see my loss. I wondered what my daughter would look like if she had lived and was their age? When I had earlier dressed in front of the mirror my reflection had a haunted look, a look of isolation and collapse. In the catalogue, that look was referred to as the theme of “gentle ruin.”
Wrapping my arms around my thighs, I pulled my legs closer towards my body. My black dress slacks rose higher up my calves, and I again noticed the imperfection on my ankle, my little pink scar. I breathed the heavy air into my lungs and held it. I felt as if my insides were going to collapse under the weight. There was a smell that hung in the air that reminded me of the rotting fruit that had been left inside a wicker basket that summer, when I first hid underneath the front porch of my childhood home.
***
I had only gone there that afternoon, to try hide from the lies and the secrets, the struggling ambiguity, and the betrayal of adolescence. I had slid my slender body under the loose sideboard, and pressed my flushed cheeks against the arid soil. There wasn’t much room to move around. It looked as if no one had ever been under there since the house was built. There was nothing underneath me except an unknown history of soil, decay and some stones.
I wondered if my father knew, or even cared where I had disappeared to.
The temperature rose and I sweltered in the intense heat, listening to the transistor radio my father had, the jazz music echoing through the floorboards. It played some contemporary selections, but mostly pieces from another era. The man on the radio said the names of the artists after each song. I had never heard of them. The salt from my sweat moistened my lips. Through a crack in the floorboards, I could see my father holding the glass of lemonade that I had poured for him. He took a long sip from the glass, the ice cubes sounding like church bells, and placed it across the gap between the boards. Some of the condensation on the glass dripped through. I reached out my hand, balancing the momentary coldness on the tips of my fingers before placing it to my lips. It tasted lonely, like the bitter, hard taste of metal.
Even with the consistent radio static and the distant hum of neighboring farm equipment, my father appeared quiet and tranquil. Under that porch, I hoped that he would whisper his secrets out loud. There were so many things that I never learned from him. He never talked to us much, my sister and I. He never talked to us as young women about our intricate and delicate biology, and he never talked to us about our mother, who we felt had abandoned us when she died.
Whenever we tried to talk about her, he would simply sigh and politely change the conversation. People called him stoic, and as I didn’t understand what they were talking about, I went to the library to look it up. It meant indifferent or unaffected by pleasure or pain.
After that first time I would often wiggle under that porch, sometimes for hours, so as to be close to him in some way. I always hoped that at some point that he would need me, need us. But he never opened up. During those hot summer days he rarely even moved, and if he did, it was to casually sip his lemonade or to occasionally step out of the rocking chair to water his pansies. He took exceptional care of them and really nurtured those flowers. My sister said that our mother had originally planted them before she died and I think that’s why he gave them such unadulterated care, it was his way of trying to keep a part of her present and close.
Once I inched closer to the opposite end of the porch, just below the window leading into my older sister’s bedroom. There were sounds coming through the break in the glass. All I could hear were slight moans and I couldn’t tell if she was in pleasure or pain. Her boyfriend had snuck into her room again. There were times that I know that he abused her, but he said he would never hurt her again. I heard him murmur that he loved her. She said she didn’t want anyone to hear them …
Let’s run away! Shh! I don’t want to talk about it here ... Let’s leave right now ... We can’t, but I want to be with you … But what about your father? ... He doesn’t care about me … We could be careful, leave when he’s at work … I don’t want to talk about it right now … What is keeping you here?
I wanted her to say that it was me, that I was the one person that mattered to her most. However, the words I wanted to hear never came. Instead she parted her lips and kissed him. All I heard her say was that she loved him, and nothing would change.
She was four years older than I was, but was more immature than me in some respects. I was only fourteen at the time, but I wanted desperately to become a woman, and have her help me become worldly and mature. I felt so much anger towards our mother for dying and not being there to guide me on the path to womanhood. I was afraid that if my sister left, that I would become incommensurate as a woman, and be unable to differentiate between love and contempt, intimacy and distance.
But a person should never hope to grow up suddenly.
***
I started to thumb through some more pages in the catalogue. Throughout the catalogue there were explanations about your work on topics such as your use of lighting and shading, and what brought about the themes that were either hidden behind the colors you chose, or seen more easily in the bold, often pained images that you depicted. Things that I would have never told anyone were casually mentioned, as if they really possessed no deep meaning for you. You told the world our secrets, and instructed them on how to gain admission to the most private and intimate parts of me. Although my name was never attached to any individual painting, I was there, visible in the stunning cobalt blues and tender grays. Tears started to well in my eyes as I read your words describing to strangers our most intimate, private moments. It made the tiny hairs rise on the small of my back. I resented you for this betrayal but I soon hated you after I turned a page and saw the next image that confronted me in the catalogue.
Page 8.
You never showed this painting to me! I immediately recognized the distant trees that grew behind my childhood house and how they looked like thin colored pencils pressed into the ground. There should have been a small wicker basket on the corner of the porch and although you omitted it, it could never change what happened. I could see the bleached areas within the paint of where the porch structure was attached, right above the front door. I wished that I could have asked you why you failed to include the basket. It wasn’t until now that I regretted telling you what had happened. I quickly turned over the page, preferring to look at the images where your brushes captured the failures in our relationship, rather than the pain of my more distant past.
Page 10.
Hearing the rain dripping onto the edges of the concrete and grass around me sounds like a thousand fishing lures suddenly breaking the surface of a lake, which seems apt as I look at one of the images of the fishermen who you painted off the coast of Maine, at that secluded boathouse we purchased before our daughter was born. I remember how you would scrutinize the fishermen every morning while steam rose from the cup of coffee at your feet.
Those mornings when you went out to paint them, sometimes before dawn, were so tranquil and still. I would watch you through the open window, the curtains drawn slightly, trying to entice you to come back into our bedroom, and make love to me. However you never wavered, you always put your work first. If you had broken just once and turned around, you would have seen me standing there barely dressed, the breeze coming in off of the lake, nudging aside your favorite red shirt and exposing my breasts to the warmth from the sunrise.
There is nothing left at the boathouse now, maybe just some dried out art supplies, spoiled groceries, the toys she used to play with, and the clothes that she once wore. You appeared to punish me for what happened by taking most of her things there so that I could not touch them after she died; so that I could not handle them easily and remember her gentle laughter and curiosity. It appeared that you wanted me to forget about her.
My memories of the boathouse are also tainted by our failure. I knew when it first happened, hardly sleeping during those nights, even after you had made love to me, because I could sense that your body was holding back slightly. Sex with you had begun to make me feel alone and insufficient, but I never stopped you from entering me, because I wanted to be loved by you, by someone, to be needed. A lover always knew what the truth actually was, especially a woman. There wasn’t a need for me to question it at all, or deconstruct it internally. I simply needed assurance … but your body was unable to give to me.
I wondered when that other woman had first touched you, if she had discovered the complex substance of your canvas, your fingertips still stained with the resins of the paint’s base.
Page 14.
In the third painting in the series you stretched out the tree line from a stranger’s perspective, distancing yourself from the obscurely detailed background. And I was lost there, somewhere in the relationship between the bay and the stone at the base of the lighthouse. I didn’t remember it in proportion to the boat that you said we needed, but sat abandoned, tied to the edge of the dock like a wanted criminal. In your note you said that I could keep it. There was little that I knew or cared about boating.
I will probably return to the boathouse one final time, clean the property, scrub the molded edges of the walkway to the dock with bleach, and let everything drown.
Page 18.
I stare at the bones and muscles in my naked back, strands of my dark hair cutting the tender plane of alabaster skin of my right shoulder.
I clearly remembered posing for that portrait. Our daughter was still a baby. Water stuttered from the brass faucet into the cast iron tub. I was physically and emotionally exhausted and barely had the strength to remove my own clothes. However your work always came before my needs. The tight, black slacks that I had been wearing, had been discarded in the corner of the room but still cradled the shape of my hips. I slowly removed my bra and stood in the doorway, moving closer to the tub.
I undressed further and raised a leg and placed it into the water. It numbed me but it shouldn’t have. I sat on the rim of the bathtub, and cupped some water in my right palm and dripped it over the right side of my neck and collarbone. The water was clear, but you later added small pieces of black cinders into the painting, especially around my face, as if were my tender fingertips that had destroyed and scorched everything.
It was as if I was a pestilence.
Although it was late in the evening by the time we finished, you left our house without bothering to tell me where you were going or when you would return. I was left alone with our daughter. Feeling used and unwanted, I pulled the plug from the drain, and listened to the circular waves of dull water collapsing through the metal screen and rushing into the pipes. The sound was hollow. For some reason, it made me feel impermanent.
There were no words spoken when you first arrived home in the early hours of the morning and woke me. I had fallen asleep, calmed by the light breathing of our daughter. I wished that I could sleep as deeply as she did; close my eyes so effortlessly and dream. The pressure from your body shifted me closer towards you.
Although I tensed initially when the fine fibers of a small, detailed horsehair brush traced across the curves of my back, I couldn’t help myself and soon asked you what color you were using. As you answered you kissed my shoulder blade and spine. You told me that it was ashen; a hue you often used to symbolize failure and fear in your portraits. I asked you if that’s what I reminded you of: pain and loss; the harborer of your uncertainty and declination. You placed the brush in another spot, harder, and roughly hissed across my burning, lustful flesh that I was beautiful but fragile, and that inside me hid a woman who was weak, terrified and afraid.
So that is what you saw in me, your lover, and the mother of your only child: apprehension; aversion; timidity. Despite what you said, I still opened my body to you, uncovered my breasts and stomach, and turned towards you, my slender legs rubbing against one another.
However I remained untouched by your body.
***
As I walked towards the edge of the road, I saw an approaching bus. I knew that I shouldn’t go to New York, but I had to see you, just once more. I could never let go of you, or our daughter. The bus stopped, and I watched as another man stepped cautiously in front of me, not wanting to be rude or intrusive but unsure of my intentions as I hesitated.
Finally, I place a foot onto the first step, and check with the driver if he was going to the intercity terminus. The colors from your paintings seem to be noticeable everywhere. I see it in the dingy shade of the gray tires and rims covered in brake dust and oil. They stream and pour down the sides of the smeared windows, clashing with the clear raindrops, and spilling onto the black street. The morose tones invade the broken branches and bleached curbsides, masking the colored chalk the kids scratched hopscotch numbers with, destroying all evidence that innocence was ever there.
I suddenly realize how dangerous seeing you again could be, and that as much as I want to rebuild my life by never seeing you or hearing your voice again, I also want to be ruined by it all as well.
There are only a few other passengers inside. A few of the overhead lights are broken. My footsteps sound hollow on the metal floor. I notice a disabled man, and see another man gazing through the window, absently running his fingers across the inside of his elbow. The interior feels humid and uncomfortable, with condensation forming on the bus windows. I touch it with my finger, and immediately think of your sweat, and suddenly long to kiss the salt from the back of your neck as you paint the plush, endless green acreage behind our home.
Page 20, upper right.
That painting seems out of place in the collection. It wasn’t as detailed and intense as I once remembered. It was also the only painting that you hadn’t titled. I remember it was nearly 5 a.m. when I discovered you alone outside, as you tried to capture the sun imprisoned; your interpretation of morning’s early struggle. The grass was high and the blades touched the sides of your ankles, dampening the bottoms of your shoes.
I wished that you would come inside and leave tracks on the kitchen floor again so that I felt I had a purpose, your purpose.
Despite knowing about your infidelity for years, it still plagued me. At least at the start you tried to be discrete. But there was no hiding her from me, as much as you tried to. When was the first time that you saw her with that much passionate detail, that you wanted her and to forsake me? Did she model for you and lie there on the floor in front of you as I once did, her flesh and body agitated but aroused by the placement of your hands across her breasts, molding her into what you wanted her to be? Or did she seduce you with gentle promises of passion?
The thought that she finally stole you completely from me after so many years of trying by exploiting your weakness and vulnerability continues to crush my soul. You left so hurriedly after our daughter’s death that I never got to share in your grief and heartache. Instead, I sat pathetic, alone and pitiful among the ruins. Did she let you sob on her shoulder, your tears of misunderstanding and disillusionment flowing in a river along her?
It seems unlikely.
No, you ruled her from the start, like you wanted to rule me and everyone else around you. I am sure of that. With your persuasion and your exoticism she broke in the presence of your will and your persistence; satisfying that innate need you have to recreate everyone you come in contact with. How many times did you paint her, tell her how stunning and alluring she would be on that pale white canvas, surrounded by various pigmentations that only spoke one thing, the truth; the truth about the emancipation she would feel, apprehensive and raw on a drop cloth, watching you reconstruct her lines and her lips?
When you used me, there was always criticism behind each depiction, each direction. It lingered on the back of my bare shoulders. It affected me, your judgment in how I moved, or how I pulled my hair across the nape of my neck to expose my shoulders. I jealously wondered whether she moved correctly, slid her body across the areas you wanted her to, and turn her head at the proper angles so that her eyes looked like pure pools of blue liquid?
You never painted me privately or intimately without severe analysis. You never just opened up my blouse to discover the geography of my body, and paint me with love and compassion.
Although the distance between us started to develop more than ten years before our child’s death, that distance was pushed out further, once the last thing that connected us was shattered when she passed. You withdrew completely from me. The morning after I admitted that I had seen you with her and you finally admitted that you were having an affair, you left in such a hurry. You saw no more point in pretending anymore. You didn’t even stay long enough to allow me to descend feverishly into indignation and doubt. I should have been allowed to become angry, been given the respect to grieve.
However what was worse was the guilt that you caused with your judgment about my culpability in our daughter’s death. The blame you laid upon me was completely disfiguring. I wondered, if the artists saw it in that classroom, as I lay nude and effortless before them, motionless among their questions and their criticism? Was my once indelible, tender body now wretched and poison to their erect canvases, causing their vision and colors to hemorrhage?
Page 20, bottom right.
I always admired how this small painting resembled a worn photograph, with the small scratches at the bottom of the viewer’s point of view, contrasting with the advection of the morning atmosphere concentrated over the sagging shoulders of the foliage. However, I deeply resented the representation of the isolation in the work, knowing that you had chosen to exploit my pain and instability, as your inspiration for the work.
As the bus stops and idles at alight, I visualize you on the opposite side of the street creating that painting, sitting on an overturned wooden planter box at the edge of that foreclosed property, the mailbox tilted and rusted over your right shoulder, as you dip your paintbrush into a vase full of water. You then stand and move beside the incomplete canvas to change your perspective, and I see that woman emerge from the woods, our daughter chasing behind, her fingers fumbling helplessly to gain access to the inside of her palm. Jenni then grips her hand tightly, as if she were terrified of abandonment and insecurity. Our daughter then turns towards me for a brief moment, her eyes sullen, disconcerted,and ashamed.
Mercifully, the lights then change and the bus lurches off.
I remove a pin from my hair, allowing it to drop down across my shoulders and protect me from water falling steadily from the open window. It is quiet sitting alone on the bus; desolate like walking through a desert or a silent film, broken by the jerking mechanics of the bus starting and stopping. No one else had gotten on at any of the last few stops. It feels as if no one cares that I am here – or even exists.
That was all I want, for someone to care that I have ever existed. I would like to be remembered as something more than some images in some watercolors and paintings; images that no one but you and I would really ever understand. Our daughter was supposed to be that testament to my existence. She was my greatest achievement.
I turn over the page in the catalogue.
Page 21.
I rub my shoulder remembering how much I hate that particular painting and the truth it beheld. The rain coming in is getting heavier, so I stand up and shut the window. I notice the disabled man close his eyes as if he is in pain when, in the distance I see the side road leading to the site where innocence and inoffensiveness had been so cruelly destroyed by brutal, sickening aggression. My hands began to tremble as I picked up the catalogue and sat back down.
For some reason, the intensity of the undertones in the painting made me feel sad as I realized that I would never have any more children after the accident. Maybe that was something that we should never have called it: an accident. Everyone knew that it wasn’t. But no one really knew for certain what had exactly happened until a few weeks later when her autopsy results were released. Then, when we were told the specifics of how she died, I was sickened with grief as I thought of how Jenni had suffered at the hands of that man.
And for some reason you blamed it all on me.
The passage of time has only served to make those events clearer in my mind and make the memories more painful. You had come home late and I selfishly tried to ignite the spark in our relationship by trying to seduce you with a romantic dinner and had sent Jenni out that afternoon to stay over at her friend’s place. Although you seemed distracted by your upcoming art show, we ate our meal and for once our conversation had been civil, even if it had been superficial. We then made our way to the bedroom.
Throughout the night, I tried several times to reignite some of the fire that we once felt for one other. But each time was met with hurried moans and desperation. In the morning, we were both distracted; you because of the opening of your exhibition at a local gallery, I because I longed for the intimacy and eroticism we once shared. However I still rode you with wild abandon, but as you rose to your climax, you moaned in a way that I didn’t recognize. Were you thinking of her? After you came, you brushed me aside saying that you didn’t want to be late for your exhibition.
As we got ready, I started to feel anxious that Jenni had not yet come home. However you insisted that she was ‘fine’; and that she hadn’t bothered to come back because she would be staying at her friend’s place again because the gallery was hosting a New Year’s Eve reception in your honor. Instead of calling her friend’s house to make sure, I selfishly asked if you wanted me to join you in the shower. You said that we were already running late and had to leave.
When we arrived home the next day, Jenni was still out, so I called her friend’s home to ask if they could ask her to come home. When I spoke to her friend’s mother my stomach dropped, Jenni had not stayed over either last night or the night before. I was hysterical. You coldly told me to calm down and to stop being dramatic. We didn’t know where our daughter was and you told me to stop being fucking dramatic. You convinced me not to call the police but that I should call around and see if she had stayed with one of her other friends.
Each time I called around, I became increasingly more panicked as each parent told me with a certain air of judgment that they didn’t know where my daughter was. After another two hours had passed, you finally consented to allow me to call the police. However, before I could place the call, our phone rang. Hoping it was Jenni calling us to say that she was safe, it was the police.
From that moment onwards, the cracked foundations of my existence finally crumbled and my entire life fell away. I was the last person to have seen her alive, after sending her away to stay at her friend’s. I had sacrificed my role as mother and protector of our daughter so that I could desperately try to win you back from the strengthening grip of another woman by the only way I knew how – using my body and sex. And now I had lost everything.
***
When the police came around to take our statements, I could see your counterfeit regret as you loosely held my hand. I had desperately wanted you to clutch it tighter, and for you to provide me with some inherent meaning to your actions. Instead, all you responded with were words that just bled hollow, and ran down the contours of your arm, across your fingers, and onto the street. You truly loved and trusted the canvas more than us. Everything would eventually be washed away, and it angered me that you found encouragement and even artistic inspiration during this time, as you sort to exploit my pain at our daughter’s death for your art.
There was nothing more that we could say to each other after the police discovered her body in that pool. What was I supposed to do now? No one told you what to do, not the police or their psychologists, after your child was brutally raped and murdered. In place of anger, I embraced guilt and culpability, which you exploited in the details and shades you painted, especially the perspective, and the distance between the far edge of the street and the camera’s eye. The leaves on those trees were insulting and irresponsible.
Did you even think to include her memory in your work?
At least there was no mention of her on any of the pages of the catalogue. And for that, I was relieved. As much as I missed her, I could never have looked at her upon a canvas, and seen her innocence and grace corrupted by your need to seek out the pain and vulnerability in your subjects.
I pass the street but am unable to look as the bus continues down the road. Instead, I close my eyes, trying to protect myself from the memory of falling to my knees when I was told that she was no longer with us; the pain of trying to breathe and gain some strength inside me, only to be smothered by the feeling of insensibility that found its way in through every pore of my body.
When the police asked us to come and identify our daughter at the morgue, you looked at me as if I was the villain. Although you came with me begrudgingly, you had fallen short of the man that I needed. You seemed distracted. I wasn’t sure if it was because it caused a mild distraction from your selfish craft … or if it was because you didn’t care about her – or me. You were negligent in your duty as husband and father.
We drove in silence to the morgue. I longed for the comfort and protection of your embrace, but you steadfastly gripped the wheel of the car. I had never felt so alone. As we approached the morgue, I shuddered. Even though you took my hand as we walked towards the building, you were silent, aloof; your grasp feeling cold and unfamiliar. As we were led into the dark room and your gaze seemed far-away and lost. I desperately hoped that the body was not our daughter. I looked to you for reassurance and support, hopeful that it had all been a huge misunderstanding but your eyes failed to comfort me. I hoped that she was safe … someplace.
The sheet that covered the lifeless body that lay on the cold concrete slab was pulled back. I gasped and my fingertips cut deeply into your hand. I heard you moan but I wasn’t sure if it was from the pain of the cuts from my nails or whether it was from seeing our beautiful daughter lying naked, lifeless, gone. Her innocence washed away by the brutality of the inhumane. I was no longer a mother. I was lost. I was barren and afraid. I looked to you as my husband, lover, friend – but you had moved away, dropping my hand – moving further away from our daughter and from me. I often wonder whether you made up your mind to leave me right then.
A police officer lightly touched my back and asked if we were okay. I fell to my knees in desperation, but you still remained stoically silent as you kept looking straight past me. It reminded me of the emotionless form of my father looking out at the horizon from his chair on the porch.
***
Looking out from the bus, I saw the wind carry a small shawl from the front porch of a house onto the grass. In a matter of moments, it changed colors from the transparent blue of a robin’s egg to the shade of a pale winter frost. With time and gently cleaning, the stains would fade over time. I imagined that it belonged to a young girl, given to her by her grandmother. She was supposed to save it for her wedding day, so that she could place it gently across her shoulders to keep off the early spring evening chill.
But somehow the girl had misplaced it, allowing it to be swept away from the front porch. It made me feel sad. I turned in my seat and watched as the blanket tried to move, weighed down by the soil, wind and the rain. My fingertips pressed deeply against the glass and let out a sob. It was as if everything that was once beautiful had been destroyed by the actions of that man. It wasn’t just the destruction of my life, but the entire town. However it hadn’t been caused by a short, explosive blast, but rather, was a slow, grinding process of slow decay, punctuated by the almost routine discovery of another poor child. The cumulative weight of each tragedy was crushing what life remained. If this went on any longer, our town would soon cease to breathe altogether.
The sound of wet splats caused me to look down at my lap and at my tears falling upon the open catalogue. I turned through the pages in search of some distraction.
Page 26.
I recognize the lighthouse in this painting. It was the one erected less than a mile from our house by the bay.
I once climbed the old steel ladder that led to the summit of that lighthouse. I sat there for hours without really thinking about anything but just watched the way the shape of the water changed when the winds moved across the bay. Looking at the painting in the catalogue, I think you should have brought the definition towards you more when you painted it. The way you cast the light across the rungs made them look immaterial, fragile like tissue paper, so that if I were to climb its heights, I would have fallen helplessly into the arms of the water and the jagged rocks below.
I had remained at the top of the lighthouse well into the evening. I wrapped myself in that old quilt that your mother gave us on our wedding day. Do you remember? She had said that it belonged to your grandmother. I sat there unsure of what to do. Even though it was you who had betrayed us, I felt like my skin was damaging the delicacy and simplicity of the hand-woven fibers of the old heirloom.
Your mother tried several times to call me after she found out what had happened, but I just let the telephone ring through to the answering machine. The last time she called she left a lengthy message. However, the phone reception must have been poor because all that remained were fragments of a message. However, I could imagine the rest of what she had said based upon the parts of the message that I was able make out.
I thought she was careful, but deliberate with the words that she chose, being careful not to lay specific blame, but also never absolving me from my responsibilities as a mother and wife. When she spoke about our daughter, her voice changed to a more delicate tone. I hoped that she spoke the way she did, because she didn’t want to offend or hurt me. Perhaps she was right when she expressed her concerns over the differences in our backgrounds and upbringings.
Four days later she expanded her thoughts in a letter.
I am so sorry for what has happened between you and my son. You know that I never made any secret about you being from different worlds and that I thought he never thought of you as anything but a beautiful creature for him to paint. But I can only imagine how you feel now.
When we lost Jennifer, it broke our hearts. She shared your beauty and my son’s spirit and intelligence. Her passing, if I can call it that, was so sudden and unnecessary.
I am sorry that I didn’t made time for you in the last few months. As you would expect, I have been focused on my son and how he has been coping. Besides, I thought that you would have been strong enough to cope without needing us. I can only imagine how you feel as a mother. I haven’t spoken to my son in a couple of days, but it’s hard for a parent to not stand by their child; right or wrong. It doesn’t matter if I express who I think is at fault, it won’t help change the outcome of anything. It is such a difficult thing to do; to be objective when it comes to somebody you love, especially your own flesh and blood. I wish I could tell you that everything will be okay. I did try to visit you recently, but you were out. There are more things to be said about what has happened, but that is a conversation best saved for after you have had time to grieve.
You can reach out to me if you want to, but I will understand why you may not. All I can say again is that I am sorry for your loss.
Slumping back in the bus seat, I closed my eyes as I thought about that letter and all that had happened and chills passed over my body, numbing my senses. The sale of your paintings should have unburdened me. In their place, each one’s disappearance suffocated the independence I desperately thought I could sustain.
When we were together you had tried so hard to maintain a dictatorial hold over the shape of things around me. You measured yourself as a color alchemist; an intelligent handler of chemicals and dyes. Now, the very oils and resins in those paintings felt as if they enshrouded my existence, choking my warmth, and blanching the colors of my now fragile existence. It had become clear to me that I was merely your map; a place where you could live; a place you could conquer.
I turned another page of the catalogue and let out a gasp. In the painting was the small, white house where her body was found.
Page 27.
What made you revisit the tragic surroundings of her murder so soon after what happened? Was it an act of catharsis? Were you unable to deal with your grief and hoped that you could rid yourself of that emotionally violent purgatory?
I had wanted to touch upon the doors of that small white house in the months after our daughter had gone. I wasn’t sure how many times I had walked along the deadened silence of that street, waiting for our daughter to come running out of the trees, shouting with excitement that she was fine, that she was just hiding, and wasn’t really hurt.
At first, the police were unsure of the details of the accident. Following their investigation, it turned out that someone had placed her body there after the fact. I had never before feared for her safety because you were always with us. Our daughter adored you. When she was young and woke in the middle of the night, even if I went to her side, she would always want to hold your hand, as if I was feeble and ineffective. Although it was wrong of me to be jealous and to resent you for that, it was the way that I felt.
Despite all that had happened, your painting was so sterile. The wires and tress were all in their places. Nothing was even slightly disturbed. It was as if nothing had happened there, and that innocence and joy were still living in the freshly cut grass. But in reality, nothing that existed there that was happy. I couldn’t find any resemblance to the peace that you had portrayed in the stillness of the almost colorless milieu.
Suddenly my thoughts were broken by the sound of raised voices on the bus. The disabled man was standing up, holding a gun over his head. A moment later, he pulled the trigger. As I tried to cover my head with my hands, the catalogue dropped from my lap onto the floor.
Why did God continue to punish me?
***
Ever since the hijacker let the driver off the bus, the passage of time was interminable. Despite the unbearable heat, the hijacker had not opened any of the windows. The glare from the lights of the emergency vehicles, along with the stagnant heat inside the bus, reddened my eyes. Each one itched, but I was terrified to close them, even though I was feeling exhausted from crying. I could just see the police standing behind a makeshift barricade in the fading light.
I wished that the police knew who we were, inside here. Someone on the outside might have called you, told you what had happened. But I doubted it. I wasn’t sure if I would have wanted them to have called you. The risk that you wouldn’t have come regardless of knowing I was in trouble, would have been too much for me to bear.
After they had discovered our daughter and we saw her lifeless body at the morgue, you started to spend increasing amounts of time away from our home. On the occasions when you did call because you needed something, I could sometimes hear her in the background. That broke me. You didn’t even respect me enough to try to hide that woman from me anymore, nor did you care about how difficult it had been for me. We had lost our daughter. It was our daughter’s fragile body that lay on the cold slab. You should have had the decency to have left me completely alone, or at very least to call me without her there, where I wouldn’t be able to trace the scent of her traveling past your lips.
I leaned back against the window and wiped away some of the condensation. But then I quickly lowered my hand. I didn’t want the hijacker to think that I was trying to signal someone. It was hard to make out what people were doing outside. There was so much movement, and all of it seemed scattered and haphazard: no shapes, no substance, a sad crisis of circumstance. There were fire trucks, two ambulances and other emergency responders. I thought I could make out a local news van. The man holding us here just sat towards the front of the bus, his head bent forward, tapping the tip of his gun on the floor. The sound scraped in my head, like grinding car brakes. He had been in that position for almost a half an hour.
Dropping my head, I saw the opened catalogue on the floor.
The edge was covered in blood. It came from one of the men sitting behind me, with his head buried in his hands. His hands were also covered in blood. The hijacker had struck him above the right eye on his temple. I felt bad because the man was just trying to convince the hijacker to let me go. A siren bellowed beyond the trees behind me. I looked down again and could still just make out the image on the opened page.
Page 28.
The colors on that page dripped our anguishing history across the floor of the bus, revealing when I first learnt the truth about who you really were, and the time I remembered feeling even more hopeless than right now. Seeing the image in the reflected glare of the lights from the emergency vehicles, I could recall the glare of the fire and the smell of the chemicals, and how their stench overwhelmed the normally sweet smelling evening air down on the bay.
Before the death of our daughter, we used to frequently go to stay at our boathouse in Maine. Yet despite the amount of time that we spent down on the coast, it wasn’t often that I could get you to sit on the beach and ignore your work. However, there were occasional evenings when you would indulge me, and we would sit together, alone on the beach while we listened to the whimper of the dying waves pour out across the cooling sand. The footprints of children, who had been making castles during the day, had long been digested into the stomach of the sea.
At that time in the evening, the restaurants were all closed except for one place, Norah’s, a quaint cafe where they rented out blankets and picnic baskets. On the occasions when you agreed to meet me down on the beach after your work, I would go the Norah’s and order a bottle of wine and a late dinner that we could enjoy on the sand.
Sometimes we would stay on the beach all night and watch the sun rise. It was nothing extraordinary. The sun rose everywhere, but I loved how you would comment about how you would interpret the changing colors on the horizon, as if you were trying to capture the scene on canvas.
Waiting for you once, I stood at the top of a dune and took in the atmosphere of the beautiful twilight. A new hotel was being constructed about three miles in the distance. To my left was a handcrafted furniture warehouse, built in the 1940s, that still prospered. I shielded my eyes and turned to face the water. It was then that I understood why you painted so much, and why it was hard to get you to focus on little else when there was so much around to inspire you.
It made me sad that our daughter rarely joined us. You said that her presence would interfere with your work and being able to paint me freely when the need struck you. Looking back now I wonder if we had spent too much time away from our daughter, selfishly nurturing our own needs, and whether our daughter’s loss was Fate’s cruel punishment for our selfishness. However at the time, your mother was always happy to have Jenni stay with her.
A couple of months after Jenni’s death, you said that you had a commission to paint a mural near the boathouse that would take several weeks to complete and that you would need to be away for a while. The idea of being out of the house appealed to me and I suggested that we should go together. You had seemed hesitant at first, claiming that I would cause you to lose focus on work. However, you finally, albeit begrudgingly agreed to let me come with you after I begged you to take me with you because the thought of being left alone terrified me.
It was a few weeks before that fire, and despite it being cold outside, we sat close together under a cobalt blue blanket and watched the stars turn on and stun the blackness. They punched through the night sky like a gifted featherweight boxer jabs at the body of a larger, slower opponent. Since coming to the boathouse, I had hardly seen you. You had been busy, even by your standards. If you weren’t closed up in your studio, you were working away at the site for days at a time. We quickly finished our bottle of wine and we were tipsy. As we went back home, it reminded me of happier past days when we would walk home a little drunk, hand in hand along the thin sidewalks, wishing that the evening would never end.
Once home, we barely made it through the front door before I had to touch you. The light was still on in your studio. Tall racks held dozens of colors of paint and brushes, some were thick and hairy, others thin, like an underdeveloped moustache, or the hairs on your forearms. White tables housed discolored jars of water and newspaper. Half-empty tubes of paints rested on a smaller table, and a huge roll of butcher paper stood ominously in the corner. The faint smell of turpentine mixed with the wine made me feel slightly light headed. On top of one of the shelves was the pumpkin that you had painted for me when I first met you. You were more beautiful to me now than when we first met. There was no question.
I stopped you from turning off the light.
Still numb but certain, I let you embrace me tightly and lay me down onto one of the large tables. It was where you had started on the design of the large mural that was to be painted onto the wall of an elementary school. Local kids had sprayed graffiti on that wall, but instead of just whitewashing over it, you thought that if the wall was made to be more beautiful, that people wouldn’t abuse it and make it ugly or unapproachable. The outline was drawn in pencil and parts of it were filled in. None of the paint on it had completely dried.
I pushed your jeans down to the ground and removed your underwear. There was paint on the inside of your ankles. It had been months since we had been like this, and I wanted your stench all over me, soaking into the pores of my hands and lips. I took your swelling into my mouth and cleansed you with my tongue. You fucked me there, my naked body absorbing the colors of your spectrum. I was a beautiful stencil. I grabbed your open hands tightly and told you that I wanted another child. All you did was lean in closer and kiss the side of my neck.
Then the fire happened.
The intensity of that fire burned so much that for days afterwards, I could lean against the balcony frame bordering our deck that was some 300 yards away and feel the heat of the smouldering ruins against my flesh. The air was suffocating if I took too deep a breath. I touched my fingertips to the charred wood on the balcony railing that had been scorched by the blaze. Pieces of it broke loose like artist’s charcoal. It got deep into the lines on my hands and stained them. I must have washed my hands until they were blistered, but my body always felt dirty after that fire.
I had spent that afternoon alone at Norah’s, waiting for you to come home from finishing that project at the school. The air was bitter because of a cold wind coming in from the ocean. However, even when I was alone, I adored coming here. The flames of the candles fixed inside tin lanterns on the counter stuttered in the early twilight. You had been gone since the previous day, working on that elementary school project about an hour and a half away.
When the explosion happened, it sounded like a loud collision. Looking out the window, I could see spouts of flame rising above the tree line where the furniture factory was. I extinguished the little candles at the restaurant and watched in horror with the other patrons.
When the local radio station announced the impending evacuation less than an hour later, all I wanted to do was find you, clutch desperately to the tendons in your forearm, and feel your lips through the woven masks the medical personnel were placing over everyone’s mouths to protect their lungs from potential contaminants. The factory stored stains, paints and other materials which could be considered hazardous if inhaled in large quantities. The luminescence burned on the current of the water like a napalm sunset. I felt so alone at that moment. I could not lose you as well.
I walked down a side street with other people, past that bakery where you could smell the bagels every morning. Police had begun to block off entrances to the oceanfront and some of the streets. Some people remained calm, while others ran by, reaching for the fleeting hands of their children. My stomach knotted as I thought of Jenni. Another fire alarm sounded. I turned around and watched the factory burning, the thick, black smoke blanketing everything.
And then I saw you.
The anxiety of seeing you in the embrace of another woman as you were escorted out of a local apartment complex blighted the already decaying forest of my ego. I didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time. A paramedic stopped and handed you one of those white masks. The woman clutched at the side of your arm above your elbow, her body supported by your embrace. People bumped into me as they hurried by, and a man knocked me over completely. Bruised and hurting, I raised myself up and leaned against the window of a closed store. At the end of the driveway, you grabbed her hand and started running away from the chaos, running away from our life.
Looking now at that image in the catalogue, I noticed that you even possessed the artistic and emotional audacity to personify her there, in the lower right-hand corner of the painting, giving her mystery by concealing her, cloaking her in privacy and excluding the intricacies of her countenance.
***
The hijacker’s cellular phone rang out from inside his pocket. It must have rung at least ten times before he answered it. Considering our circumstances, I assumed that it was probably a hostage negotiator. In a way I felt sorry for him, sitting there wondering if there was someone reaching out to him, like I wanted to reach out to you. He studied the phone for a minute and then held the receiver up to his right ear. The caller only said a few words and I couldn’t hear what the hijacker was saying in return.
I stole a quick glance in his direction and saw him place the gun across his lap. Any emotional sympathy that I felt at that moment was lost. The sight of the weapon brought back the interminable tension that made my skin pale and unattractive, and caused beads of perspiration to trickle down to the small of my back. It was difficult to tell what he was feeling because he remained nearly immobile, the muscles in his face never wavering or changing.
The hijacker closed the phone and set it on the seat next to him. No one else was moving. Although we appeared to be united by our circumstances of this ordeal, we were each sitting alone and isolated in our different seats, with our own disparate thoughts, waiting for something to happen, or perhaps for someone to be killed.
The hijacker rubbed his shoulder where his arm was missing. I wondered what had happened to him and why he had taken us hostage. Could it have been for something noble or was he merely a criminal, preying on the prosperity and emotional philanthropy of others, bound to torture with impunity and malice? I imagined how you would have painted it, seen what you would have wanted to see in his movements, cautious to represent his unblemished guile while respecting flaws without ridicule or scorn. I wished you had given me the same respect.
In one image he may have been an aged soldier, running through the chaos and tenacity of battle to save several men in his company. However I was sure that selflessness was a color that you couldn’t ever recognize. Being naïve, I hoped his condition had been the result of a romantic tragedy, his body forever changed as a result of some gallant or noble act.
After our daughter’s murder, you never really talked to me except through what you could say in your work, whose culmination was now lying bloodied and slightly out of my reach like our child. But she was never helpless, even as an infant. Even when lying in the security of my forearms, she wanted to be on her own. Her tiny muscles often struggled to get away from my protection, willing her to break free and to be independent, even when independence was a concept she couldn’t even begin to understand.
Looking out the window, I thought I could see her running up the street along the side of the bus. Her hands moving in front of her face, a button falling loose from her dress. I would have to sew it back on. As she came nearer, I stood up from my seat and closed my eyes. When I did, the hijacker told me to sit down. But my daughter is here, don’t you see her? Can’t you see her curly hair bouncing upon her shoulders? I stepped back into the space of my current canvas and pressed my hands against the window.
Abruptly, I realized that there was no one running along the side of the bus, the streets were vacant of people and possibilities.
I felt like I was a muse again, regardless of the circumstances; brush or gun, I was sitting there, exhausted and thirsty, moving my body left then right. No, raise your head just a little and tilt it back. Put your hand up, like that. Please cup your breast with your hands. No, just use your fingertips.
That’s all people could ever see.
It made me hate myself.
I was delicate, fragile, flawed and torn. I wanted to wail as loudly as I could. I wanted to live in a place of no structure, no color, an achromatic landscape where the beauty in everything would suffocate and collapse.
The catalogue was now farther away from me. I must have sat back down in a different seat. It caused me pain, but I desperately needed to hold it, to search through the pages of your work and perhaps find my peace in one of them. The hijacker had been studying me since I stood up. He made me feel uneasy. With apparent interest, he came closer and kneeled down a few rows in front of me. He picked up the catalogue and sorted through some of the pages, balancing it against his chest. He didn’t even seem to notice all the blood on the back corner. At one point, he paused and looked up searchingly at me. I couldn’t help but wonder where he stopped. Surprisingly, he closed the cover and handed it to me.
All that he said to me was sorry.
The hijacker sat back down in his seat and placed an earpiece connected to some kind of recorder back in his ear. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The cassettes were larger. When he placed the gun across his right thigh, he closed his eyes and exhaled deeply. He didn’t remain that way for long, just a couple of minutes. Slowly, he raised his head and moved his hand up to his face. It looked as if there were tears in his eyes, but I wasn’t sure. I wondered if he too shared the type of loss that I was experiencing …
I wiped off some of the blood from the catalogue on my jacket. Some of the pages were sticking together because of the drying blood. I pulled them apart. I looked out the window beside me and watched an ambulance turn down a side street. Still, no one stood within several hundred feet of the bus. I again grew weary of all the continuous, flashing lights. It was now dark and everything looked like it was trapped under water.
I now studied the catalogue intently angling the pages towards the spotlights, waiting pensively to be released from the suffocating confines of my grief and turmoil. I wanted to be killed.
Page 30.
You always said to me that you hated most parts of winter except for the tranquility; the muted voice of the grass and the dirt, muffled under a light coating of cold and ice. Here you painted a school, the grounds virginal and devoid of any children or life. It wasn’t our daughter’s school though.
I always wondered if her children played there, in that field obscured in the arcane background that you had washed on with such personal and private gentility; as if you had been there, and held them against your chest? What did you tell them? What promises did you make to them? Had you already crossed that uncovered passage into their playground, trapped in the vertiginous echoes of their unblemished innocence, disappearing into the patterns of uncertainty that disestablished direction from what should have been our one principal obsession?
I thought of all those times at Jenni’s school parent nights, where I would turn up alone to talk with her teachers about her dreams, and what she wanted to do when she was older. However, I never knew what her adult aspirations were, nor will I ever have the chance to find out. Suddenly, I began to quietly sob, stricken by guilt that I did not know what our daughter had wanted to do with her life. It was something that a mother should have known.
Had I taken enough time away from being with you to really understand her, and to listen to the things she had to say? Was I so greedy with my own hunger to be touched and to be consumed by you that I had pushed her aside? I tried to suppress my self-loathing by turning towards the window again and placing my fist over my mouth.
I glanced back down at the catalogue. I wanted to prove to you how much your paintings were a lie, where your recreations were flawed and unfair.
Page 32.
Sweat was dripping from my forearms onto the pages. I wiped my palm across the page. However nothing was as close nor as stifling as hiding underneath that porch, not even waiting here, waiting for the disrupting and indistinct colors of death to enshroud me.
When it had happened it was actually a beautiful day out. However you had painted a raging storm of clouds and rain instead, a reckless and blind array of charcoals and lead, which dripped down the slope of the roof and poured into the rusted gutters. There was no place to absorb the flood of water, so it formed reflective pools of pale silver. But that wasn’t how it happened at all.
I remembered the sky being bolder, ablaze with alternating lines of umber and scarlet. The heat was oppressive, bullying its way through the day and well into sunset. I must have slept for hours underneath that porch after pulling tomatoes from their stems and delicately examining their ruddy flesh for imperfections. They were ripe, exquisite pieces, and I pressed my lips and tongue through their skin, the small seeds invading the spaces between my teeth. Yet you had crafted them as pale, inexperienced children, incapable of existing without the guidance of their elders. Was that how you saw me? Was I a blind, infantile woman, who could not speak, and was incapable of forming the words to express the images that haunted me?
I was much more than you ever understood, or could ever paint in the common colors of your misguided spectrum.
I awoke in my hiding spot after hearing enraged voices coming from the house.
“I want you to leave.”
“That’s not happening.”
“I don’t love you anymore.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Please leave.”
It wasn’t long before someone stepped out onto the porch. I pressed myself deeper into my private darkness and held my breath. You tried to mimic the tension that I felt in the obstructed background and barn, to hide what I witnessed behind a blurred glare and the absence of detail. The imprints you left in the soil were too small to be his. In your colors you left no evidence than anyone else had been there, as if I had covered up a crime, as if I could silence the perspective and voice of nature, and suffocate its cruel intelligence and vision. It had to be her; my sister. Would you have crafted her as she was, or how you thought I saw her? Again, your painting told people that I had been alone.
It wasn’t fair to her, the woman who should have helped me become someone else, assured and resolute. You should have helped her become, through your brush, a figure of elegance and fortitude. Instead, you chose apathy and promiscuity. You never painted her stepping off the front porch, her jeans ripped behind her left knee. Weighed down by anger and uncertainty she struggled to regain her balance. Sweat dripped from my lips as I recessed deeper near the house.
“You said that we were going to leave here together, and that you loved me.”
“I can’t leave.”
“What is it? Your father?”
“I don’t owe you anything anymore.”
“The hell you don’t.”
“Fuck you!”
You didn’t show her turning and running into the vacant barn, obscured again from my vision. Timidity moved with the streams of perspiration across my arms and legs. No one saw her hide behind some kerosene barrels. I could see him going after her.
“You can’t leave me.”
“Stop!”
You never painted him as I saw him, running into the barn behind her, slamming the old pine door. When I heard her scream, I closed my eyes, waiting for him to leave.
We were alone, and I wasn’t sure what to do.
I started to slide my awkward body out from underneath the porch. I was wearing one of her sundresses, and I liked the way that it clung to my body, even though it was a size too big. I was dragging so much dirt out with me that I would have to wash it before putting back in her drawer. I had almost extracted my slight frame from under the house when I felt something grab at my ankle. A steel nail had gouged the patch of skin that covered my ankle bone.
It hurt so much that I had to bite down on my lip and tongue to keep myself from crying. The blood trickling down across my toes felt oddly ticklish. I rested my head on the hot ground and sobbed. You could never have made what happened beautiful, no matter what colors you applied to your canvas.
The only nobility you displayed in the lines and colors of that painting was your vagueness, and the absence of specification and circumstance of what happened next. Although you knew what had happened to her inside of that barn, you chose to leave it off the edges of the canvas. I had confided in you what I felt, the feelings that I encountered while hiding underneath that porch. We had been drinking at home, our daughter was with your mother. I allowed the mixture of wine, guilt and regret to assimilate in my bloodstream. When I pulled up my jeans to scratch my ankle, you asked me how my delicate ankle could end up with such a nasty scar. If you would have asked me that any other day I would never have answered. I had never told anyone else. But at the time I still thought of you as my husband and lover, not my foil.
Putting as much pressure on the wound as I could, I slithered out from underneath the porch. There were no sounds coming from anywhere, not the shifting of the structure of the old house, nor even the faint buzzing of equipment from the neighbor’s field. It was dreadful, listening to such vacancy and emptiness.
I stepped carefully towards the barn, shifting my body to try and see through the small spaces between the wooden walls and doors. All I could see was the light coming in from the other side. There were no voices. You should have painted me perhaps a little farther away from the barn than I was when the door slowly opened and my sister staggered out.
Her body moved as if all of her bones had been replaced with those from another, a sad sampling of disjointed and discarded femurs and shins. Less than fifteen feet from the entrance she fell to the ground. When she raised her head her lips were smeared with blood and dirt. I covered my mouth and wailed. She lifted her eyes, watched me start towards her. I looked down upon her.
Her jeans were missing and I could see her bare legs. One of her legs was bent abnormally at the knee and a long trail of blood decorated the other. I fell to her side. Thankfully you did not create her in color, collapsed in my arms, with her underwear pulled down her knees. I remembered running my hands through her hair, the smell of kerosene being absorbed into the ends of my fingertips.
God I missed her. But it also formed my view of what I thought love was: intense, passionate but nevertheless imbalanced and full of oppression and hate. And you reinforced these misguided views as you intertwined your passion with infinite abomination.
***
The hijacker had been talking to someone on his phone. I wasn’t sure how long I had been distracted by my thoughts. I noticed that an ambulance had taken up a position some 300 feet behind the bus. Things appeared bleak. I would have expected the hijacker to have surrendered by now or for the police to have stormed the bus. There was nowhere to go and he hadn’t even made any demands.
The remains of the catalogue sat on my lap, ruined. The only page that wasn’t steeped in blood and grime was one of the last pages.
Page 39.
The inclusion of this canvas frightened me. I hated the way you made my body look so blemished, and disguised my emotions in pockets of blacks and grays. It was all just another lie; another fabrication. Did you tell anyone what really happened, or was I made out to be the one who betrayed you, your sensibilities and our vows? I was surprised that you wanted to recreate that failed moment of emotional restraint; the only time that you had hit me in our marriage. We had fought so many times during our relationship. However, you took great effort to create a façade so that none of our friends ever knew. You hid the bruises well in that painting.
It was a couple of days after that fire when I had seen you with her arm in arm fleeing from danger without any thought of my well-being. I initially kept what I saw to myself but became so reticent in my behavior, that you eventually asked me what was wrong. I finally broke down and I told you what I had seen. Once I had made my admission, the anger and pain that I had fought to suppress for so long poured out of me. I said such horrible things to you. Although I might have had cause, I never should have said those things. In my heart I knew them to be out of character, but it felt like you were trying to blame me for your actions.
When you moved closer towards me I began sobbing. Suddenly I began slapping you, pounding my clenched hands against the breadth of your chest. I kept asking you what was wrong with me. You didn’t say anything for a couple of minutes. You just stood there and let me pound upon you. You then closed your eyes and said that I was unlovable. I begged you to take that back. Despite what you had done to me I said that I still wanted you. All I wanted was for you to love me. I desperately wanted to have another baby, and hoped that this could somehow rebuild upon the ruins of our daughter’s death and bring us back together.
Instead, you grabbed my wrists and nestled closer to my neck so you could whisper to me. You said that you hated fucking me. You were never going to leave her and you said that she was already pregnant. It was going to be a girl. I tried to pull away from you, but you grabbed my forearms tighter and pinned them behind my back. You whispered that no man, no artist could ever make me beautiful again. You pressed your lips against the small area of flesh underneath my earlobe and said that it should have been me who was found dead hanging inside that barn, instead of my sister.
***
I should never have started this journey. I wondered if it was because I wanted to see you one last time that I was enduring this punishment. I finally recognized the hard truth as I watched the streams of sweat roll down the hijacker’s forearm, connect with the barrel of the gun and drip steadily from his fingertips and onto the floor of the bus. I should have never allowed that note that you left to lure me. Everything was now directed at me, his anger, his seclusion, his despondency, your hubris, your brush, his gun. I felt suffocated.
The hijacker walked towards me. He leaned over and asked me to stand. I hadn’t moved for so long that when I did, I stumbled and nearly collapsed. The hijacker grabbed my shoulder in an effort to support me. When he did, the gun pressed hard into the soft tissue underneath my arm. He then directed me to go towards the front of the bus and to stop at the door. The tip of the gun was pressed against the small of my back, brushing across the ridge of my vertebra.
The hijacker said that he should have let me go hours ago, and that I had been through enough already. I didn’t understand what he meant. No one else but you had examined the wreckage left behind, like an investigator studies a plane crash. You searched underneath all of the structured frames and architectonics for reason, for cause, for probability. Yet there would be no findings, no reports, no conclusions that would ever allow me to discern our loss, our suffering. I had tried so hard to change, to be the woman and the lover I thought you wanted. Maybe we all see things in one another that just aren’t there, including ourselves.
“I am sorry about your daughter.”
The words he said hit me hard and made me cold. Through them I could smell the turpentine you used to clean your brushes. I never had a chance to stretch and pull at his words, to mold them like warm clay into the shapes that I wanted them to take, because at that moment, the injured man at the rear of the bus had rushed forward and was reaching for the gun. How I wished it had been you, driven by that fractured sense of nobility that I thought existed in your gifted hands.
The gun discharged through the small of my back.
My body lunged towards the stairs and slammed violently against the door. I landed on my stomach, my face flush with the top step. Blood seeped from my abdomen. I wished that it was that brilliant vermilion shade you used in your paintings. All of the colors of your world suddenly became an amalgam. It was as if you tipped your palette allowing your carefully segregated colors to mix into a random and indiscernible array of blues and olives, alabaster and umber, colliding with the cold steel frame of the bus.
I was nothing more than a failed restoration, a now undesirable piece of unattainable art that was once priceless and original. I felt so cold. I finally understood what the hijacker was listening to. The earpiece he used was pulled from the recorder, and I heard a woman’s voice. I wanted it to be your voice asking for my forgiveness, trailing through the deteriorating whispers of promises and hope that passed over my skin.
Your colors are gone and I am alone on a bleached canvas, frightened and neglected.