PURPLE

Purple haze all in my brain
Lately things just don’t seem the same
Actin’ funny, but I don’t know why
’Scuse me while I kiss the sky.

—JIMI HENDRIX

Purple is richness beyond measure, the sensuousness of wine-stained lovers’ lips and the quenching sweetness of grape and berry. Purple is also injury and death: the florid purple of a bruise, the darkening face of a choking victim, the opalescence of rotting flesh.

The term “purple prose” was coined by Horace, referencing the pretension of sewing bits of purple into garments to feign wealth. It is fussy, overwrought, and nobody’s falling for it, anyway. Purple dyes were more precious than gold at that time, so faking it in this way was the ancient equivalent of dripping in cubic zirconia and gold plate. There’s a double layer of humiliation. That it’s fake, and that you’re working so hard to appear to be something that is false to begin with.

Purple is royalty, a connotation that has everything to do with the extreme value of the pigments available for cloth-dying in antiquity. Tyrian purple was the original purple dye, created from tiny, snail-like mollusks. Only the super-rich royalty could afford such expensive stuff. It was the true holy grail the pigment-making alchemists worked toward—the gold created from the “philosopher’s stone.”

Though found in nature both in flora and precious stones, purple was the most difficult to reproduce as a colorant. Thus purple as a moniker persists to this day in its air of rarity and oddness, per purple cow.

Some theories hold that the earth was once more purple than green, that a purple-appearing, light-sensitive molecule called retinal was more commonly found than our familiar green chlorophyll. Could this explain the “wine dark seas” of the Odyssey and the many other confusing color terms in ancient languages? Perhaps this explains the more intricate delineation of indigo and violet after blue in our essential, and older, breakdown of primary colors in Newton’s R.o.y. G. B.i.v. spectrum as opposed to the more current-day color wheel’s triad (red yellow blue) and hexagonal wheel (adding the complements orange, green and purple), with it’s one simple “purple” now comprising the stretch at that end of visible energy.

The Greeks described colors ranging from dark to light, rather than hue to hue along the rainbow. Was this simply a matter of descriptive terms, of translation? Like the proverbial dozens of words the Inuits use for snow compared to our own single word? Perhaps we are color Inuits, lovingly distinguishing shades where ancient peoples just didn’t see meaningful distinctions. Could we have evolved out of color blindness over the millennia? Or did our color sensitivity just shift toward another end of the spectrum?

Left over from the days when the river and then the train were the only reasonable modes of industrial transport in the Hudson Valley, the riverfront still sported oil yards, abandoned factories, chain-link fences and unusable super-fund sites al along its banks. Even as economies picked up, many of these sites were slow to be transformed into waterfront beauties, though a few spots are notable exceptions: the old Nabisco factory in Beacon, now home to the fabulously minimal and grand scale Dia:Beacon; a number of green spa and condo sites in development and the ever-increasing number of “open space” projects reclaiming river properties as their prior stewards die off and their heirs can’t afford to maintain them.

This type of economic fluke had allowed James Morrow, grandson of founder James Birch Morrow, who had brought the works over from England in the 1920s, to inherit and resuscitate the business his father had failed at so desperately. Morrow still owned a little property around the small factory building, but in the thick woods immediately surrounding Highland Morrow were properties his grandfather had collected, and his spendthrift father had sold off, including an insane asylum (erstwhile rehab clinic now uninhabited), a defunct monastery and no fewer than five churches. Watching his father fall dangerously close to losing the business, James finally quit college in England, married and brought his young, beautiful, Norwegian wife with him. In 1964, at the tender age of twenty-two, James took the helm of the foundering little company and all its mysterious recipes and equipment. The land was nearly all sold off by then, only the small caretaker’s house remaining, and the new country estates were beginning to pop up in the woods around them. James, his wife and father installed themselves in the little house where James’ father set about drinking himself to death with a good deal of efficiency.

James was young enough to have been a part of the hippie generation, but his father’s destruction of everything his beloved grandfather had built made him uncharacteristically practical and unsentimental. Rather than wallowing in the utopian ideals of a better world, James’ energies were honed and focused on keeping alive a centuries-old craft and business. Even through the sorrows and tragedies that dogged his young life, somehow James managed to make the business a success.

Gwen and Rain stood in the kitchen of Gwen’s loft. Even though Rain’s father lived there with Gwen, Rain stil thought of the place as Gwen’s. She had owned this cavernous and exquisitely decorated loft since the earliest days of Soho’s gentrification in the early 1970s. Gwen and John had dated for several years before marrying ten years ago, at which point Rain was already on her own.

Gwen’s loft blended outsider art objects with sleek, modernist furniture and, of course, her own artists’ works were peppered throughout. The narrow hallway into the kitchen was crowded with portraits of Gwen by most of them. Gwen sitting demurely in Henry Chilton’s distinctive elongated style. Gwen laughing in Rip Goulding’s dark, splattery markings. Gwen’s hands by Jacob Houseman, her lover for many years. And Gwen dancing with John by Stephan Carr, her youngest artist who was most like a son to her. In it, Gwen looks directly at the viewer, her chin raised proudly and her arm crossing possessively in front of John. He holds her passively, his arms wide to her and the viewer. His demure smile and his downward gaze give his expression a kind of benign satisfaction. Rain always loved this portrait of her father and Gwen. It spoke so lyrically and gracefully of the happy and evenhanded aspects of their relationship.

Karl sauntered into the kitchen having let himself in. “How are the gallerists?” Karl said. He took Rain’s head and gave it a possessive peck. Karl seemed to think a slight sarcasm was the same thing as easy-going flirtatiousness.

Gwen grimaced slightly with her back to him. “Karl, you always know just what to say to cheer me up.” She busied herself opening boxes of crackers for the party she was throwing that night.

“Ah, come on, Gwen, if anyone can make the art bubble last, it’s you,” he chuckled.

“You’re lucky I adore your wife or I don’t think we could be friends,” Gwen said in a chipper voice.

“Don’t worry, Madam, you may have seen the last of me for a while. I’m off to London—the academy calls.” This was a fellowship they both knew well. A tiny flicker of appreciation of what this meant flitted across Gwen’s face, but only Rain caught it.

Gwen set her face into a natural smile and turned it toward Karl. “How wonderful for you.”

Turning her back to him again, Gwen muttered, “How convenient…”

Karl shrugged, finished with his mission, which was simply to let Gwen know this piece of his good fortune. He picked at an hors d’oeuvres platter and left the kitchen, passing John Morton in the doorway. Karl watched the older man enter the kitchen, seeming to want to turn back. But then he appeared to think better of it, choosing the effortless, breezy exit over the awkward double back.

John gave Rain a warm smooch and, passing around Gwen, took her hand and sat down on a kitchen stool just behind her. He played with his wife’s hand lightly while the three of them talked, ignoring the dozen or so people out in the living room.

“So Dad, I was thinking about what you said at the opening about artworks and books and I just really don’t see it. Unless you’re talking about those massive, storytelling, narrative, formal paintings with troops and generals or tableaux…or maybe diptychs, triptychs…”

“No, no, no,” John said. “I’m not talking at all about how they’re read, or how they’re received…or, or their literary content for God’s sake. I’m talking about the experience of making the thing. The discovery and the pleasure I’m talking about is the artist’s.”

Rain was stopped short by this, realizing that she approached her work acquisitively. She painted what she liked to see, shapes she found appealing and mysterious to look at. She painted like she was shopping.

John watched his daughter and twiddled Gwen’s fingers.

“And what will you be doing this fall?” Gwen asked.

Rain sighed and looked away again. “Yup,” she said, gathering up a tray and poking at the crackers on it. “That would be England. That’s what the man said, Gwen.”

“He’s going. I’m asking YOU.”

“Well, Gwen, we’re married—remember that whole thing?”

Gwendolyn took a long, quiet look at Rain. “You come see me on Tuesday,” she said. “We’re going to order lunch in and we’re going to talk.”

Rain looked past her. “Daddy…what is she up to?”

“Good job tonight, girls,” John Morton said innocently. “The show was fantastic. It looked great.”

“Are you on her side?” Rain asked.

“I don’t side. My single priority is happiness. And love. And trust. And another scotch.”

He held out his empty glass.

The storage warehouse of the Museum of Modern Art in Queens was made available to scholars, critics and historians both for viewing art and for reading the impressive collection of papers—not just letters and journals of the artists, but those of important collectors, curators, critics and contributors as well.

Rain had developed the habit of coming along with Karl when he had access to places like this. Even though his paternalistic teacherliness had eased up over the last couple of years, the habit had remained and it was an easy partnering they played out in this space. A nice relief from the progression toward the matched judgmentalism and rebellion they’d begun to develop.

They stood before a great, looming Frank Stella. All neon colors and cartoonish black outlines, it was sculptural and dwarfing. Karl was checking notes, distracted and only glancing at the artwork. Rain was respectful and transfixed.

“It’s just so huge,” she said.

Karl closed his eyes to cover an eye-roll. He pinched his brow and said with a sigh, “Very insightful.”

Rain was nicked by his sarcasm, but pressed on nonetheless. “No, I mean he’s almost doing something with the sheer size of it. I feel like it’s a dare.”

“There’s plenty written about Stella,” Karl said impatiently. “I can lend you some Danto if you like.”

“I know that stuff,” Rain defended herself. “It’s just occurring to me looking at it. Being swallowed up by it.”

“‘All that stuff ’,” Karl quoted her with clear exasperation. “‘ All that stuff ’, yeah…”

Rain was taken aback. “Jesus, you’re mean lately.”

Karl let the arm holding his notebook flop against his leg.

“Well how else do you expect an art critic who is about to give a lecture this evening on Derridas and the End of Millennia Politics of the New to respond to a comment like that?” He picked up his prop again, studying it as though in a pantomime. “Honestly, Rainie,” he said, shaking his head rather dramatically.

Rain walked away from him momentarily, then returned to the enormous painting. It was monstrous, bright, jutting out at the viewer aggressively, while the sloppy expressive brushwork and cartoonish forms maintained a degree of humor. It was almost slapstick, on an aggressive scale.

Rain cocked her head. “It’s just…I can’t articulate what I’m thinking. I’m just not getting it across.”

“Uhm-hmmm.” More note taking. “The most famous novelist of this century for a father and she can’t put her thoughts into words,” Karl looked up at her and grinned, happy again. “Poor kid.” He chucked her chin with his notebook.

Rain gave a little crumple, like a slight release on a marionette.

Karl had her back where he felt most comfortable. Rain slightly self-conscious and embarrassed, himself jocular and generous toward her.

“Just keeping you honest,” he said, unable to suppress an enormous smile.

“Okay,” Rain assembled her thoughts. “Okay. It just makes me think about how art…making the physical objects that are art... and then valuing them in the way that we do in museums... It all seems such a stab at immortality. Such a gut response against obliteration.”

“I mean, Stella being important enough to be in the Modern and the Hirschhorn and wherever else—even when he’s wrapped up in plastic and shoved into the sub-basement, his work is something formidable. Something somebody is going to have to deal with. Do you see what I mean?”

Karl’s smile had shrunk almost imperceptibly. From the inside. “Sure. You’re concerned about the janitors around here.” Back came the smile.

“Know what? You’re an asshole lately,” Rain turned away from him and started walking toward the door.

Karl laughed. “Now that was articulate,” he said, lunging toward her. “Jeez, what happened to your sense of humor, Rainielee?” Reaching her, Karl gripped her shoulders and jiggled her out through a side door into the next room.

They passed into an enormous gallery in the display area, a room presently filled with a monumental Franz Klein.

Rain stopped in front of it and whispered, “Oh, I adore this. It makes me so jealous.”

Karl’s expression turned professional. “Yes, well, your little, sloppy, dark tracks, those are… You keep at those, make a few important ones, flesh out the ideas you’ve been stabbing at and you’ll get your first real show at Shuldenfrei.”

“You think he’d give me a show?” Rain turned. “Really?”

Karl nodded. “Black, scrubby, angsty, maybe a little bigger. A BODY of them and sure…”

“It sounds pathetic, but I really want that, you know?” Rain said. “My own show.”

Karl took her by the shoulders from behind. “Just don’t go this big.”

“Are you speaking as an art critic?” she asked playfully.

“I’m speaking as an art critic who has to live with this stuff. You are my Frank Stella…” he intoned, nuzzling her, “and I am that janitor!”

Rain finally joined him laughing.

If you had asked Rain why she switched from representation to abstraction in her artwork, she would have described a process of distillation, a feeling of discovery and fresh attention that the abstractions provided her, and just plain liking the results. She might have even dug around for some theory and history depending on who you were and how much you were aware of the conversation of art and the continuing progression of it through time.

She would never have mentioned her husband’s response to her work, never would have acknowledged the extremity of her reaction to him when they first met, particularly since she had excused herself with the fact that she’d alighted upon abstraction just before she met him.

Rain had gone directly from college to art school the following September after her graduation. It seemed like something she’d always meant to do. The next step. Her work was good. She had built a decent portfolio in college even though her major was philosophy, not art. She just moved on to the School of Visual Arts after college as though following elementary school with junior high. It was just what happened the next year.

Some of the classes were good, and she was glad to have the opportunity to get in a little bit of art history and theory that she’d missed in college, not having wanted to sully her direct experience of art-making with too much academic tooth-gnashing quite yet. So of course, partly in response to the truly naïve and almost charmingly blind enthusiasm of manifestos like the Futurists (Number 1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness. Number 2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.), which actually made her feel that she should bring a little more courage and audacity and less irony and sly wit to her art. There had been too much of that rebellion among her peers in school, she thought, it being the basis for all their humor and the way they dealt with each other. In that art-school-mobius-strip kind of logic, Rain took what she knew, inverted it, laid it up against the past, inverted both and then indeed inverted the inversions until she’d emptied content and emotion and the human hand from her work. All this reading and critiquing and looking caused Rain to revisit the whole question of what she’d set about to do with all those brushes and paints and flat surfaces.

What resulted, rather than the very competent and increasingly individualistic portraiture she’d been engaging in previously, was a nesting instinct, hiding the unprotected open portraits she’d produced while in high school and college and painting in utterly unrepresentative feeling-texture and dehumanization. An insectification, if you wil , of her results on canvas. At first she knew that it was a matter of hiding, of trying to be more cagey, more opaque than the slightly vulnerable faces she used to paint. It was during a show called “floors and ceilings” to which Rain had submitted two large works involving a great deal of impasto and encaustic on corner-shaped triptychs, that she caught the eye of the very cultish professor of Post-Modernism. His field was of course the faddish perpetually “new” European philosophy, which was satisfyingly tricky enough to make it the perfect mainstay of art philosophy in academia.

Karl Madlin was thirty, about the same height as Rain. He wore his hair long and bound in back. His tiny, wire-rimmed specs played against the athleticism of his body to sign intellectual. He liked to play the nerd with his students and frequently broke into very pleased smiles to reward the most imitative thinking. But he graded hard, which, bad-mommy-style, just deepened his students’ attachment.

Having Karl Madlin show up at your group show and spend a lot of time in front of your work was, in that very sealed and particular society of art school, the precise equivalent of stumping the physics professor. It was impressing the unimpressable. And it gave all of Rain’s formerly uninterested colleagues a slow, shocked head-turn toward her, metaphorically speaking.

Meeting Rain finally, later in the evening (Rain had fervently avoided that side of the room at the opening), Karl took her hand in his and looked deep into her eyes saying he just wanted to see what was in there. She later thought he might have been high that night, or possibly being sarcastic, or both, even though he smoked very little in the time she knew him. But he invited her along with some of his doctoral students to Cedar Tavern, the famous abstract expressionists’ bar, saying that he wanted to see what she soaked up out of the place.

Rain knew, of course, that this Cedar Tavern, while furnished with much of the same worn-out looking furniture and bar as the old place, was actually a few blocks away from the original Cedars where deKooning and his wife fought, where Pollock was banned from the place for tearing down the men’s room door, and Kerouac likewise for peeing into an ashtray. But she kept this close to the vest, watching the acolytes fawning desperately and feeling grateful she didn’t need to impress Madlin for grades so that she could freely appreciate his unusual manners and sharp mind. There was a lot of studiously relaxed art banter that evening, Rain purposefully opting out of it. The excuse of being an art maker and not an art talker being eagerly swallowed by those theory students who believed artists were rarely regular, living, breathing human beings, but rather historic figures. That is, dead.

Madlin, on the other hand, kept trying to draw out her opinions. Rain knew he was flirting with her, but she couldn’t tell whether he was really interested in what she had to say, or was just trying to tease her among all these well-rehearsed, walking art encyclopedias.

“So Rain,” he said, ignoring some or other pithy remark aimed at him by his worshipers, “I want to understand what your piece was saying, why I was so drawn to it.”

“‘Why not try to understand the song of a bird…?’” Rain quoted with an embarrassing directness.

Madlin widened his eyes at her. Although he knew this was a quote and remembered that there was something charmingly mischievous about it, he did not recall that this was how Picasso had impishly insulted a critic, while elevating art to a natural phenomenon. Nobody else knew the quote, and would not have been able to place it, this being before the days of Google and wireless PDAs. They didn’t dare actually ask, and since Madlin ran with it, they all nodded knowingly as though they knew it well, too. This marked a turning point in the evening. Madlin would later tell her it cemented his attraction to her, but perhaps it was his slight discomfiture in not knowing the source on the spot that linked him to her so tightly that night.

“Indeed,” Madlin said. “Indeed! ‘We love the night and flowers without trying to understand them…’ something like that, right? Mmm-hmmm, very good. Tell that to the astronomer and the botanist!”

“I agree,” Rain said, smiling down into her beer, a watery lager in a thick, heavy mug. Madlin poured her some more. “But their equivalent would be the academic critic, wouldn’t it? Not the artist?”

“Touché!” Madlin bellowed. “But why, oh, lord, why,” he intoned, very Orson Welles at this point in the evening (it was getting late and there had been a number of pitchers and as many defectors), “why would anyone want to mark canvas without a thought as to why they were doing it? Really, I want to know.”

The most fawning of the students, a guy named Thom who left the program soon after Rain and Karl hooked up, sat forward and continued on that line. “Honestly, the horror of the everyone can be an artist,” he sneered. “The disservice it metes on the world. I’d like to take every high school art teacher and force some Derridas down her delicate little throat. Just a taste. One little taste, dearie!” He ground a fist into his other hand sadistically, and Rain noted that he failed to meet her eye every time she spoke.

“I’m not sure what’s wrong with that,” Rain said. “Why not let the infinite number of monkeys keep on typing if you might get that one Hamlet?”

“That’s what I’m saying! You’ll never find it!” he exclaimed, literally hopping in his seat but speaking to Karl rather than to Rain.

“Again, that’s your problem, isn’t it?” Rain asked, also directing her comments to Karl. “That’s your job.”

“That makes no sense,” Thom continued, whining now. “No sense at all. You cannot possibly be part of the conversation of art if you have no idea what you’re saying.”

Rain plunked her heavy mug down, empty. “Okay there,” she said. She’d been there a long time too. With the bang of the glass, everyone at the table focused on her, and Rain plowed on ahead bravely.

“I mean, yes, I want to join in that conversation, that’s who I’m listening to, that’s who makes sense to me, it’s them, the artists from history that I’m aiming toward in a way. But think about it. There you are at the table with Rembrandt, Titian, line ’em all up, all up through Picasso, there’s Pollock, deKooning, Schnabel! for God’s sake, whoever, the shark guy, you know, earthworks, all of them, and suddenly it’s your turn to speak,” Rain paused dramatically. “All heads turn to you. Burning gazes, the whole thing. But to have it count, to actually make a meaningful contribution at that table it would have to be original, wouldn’t it? And honest? Something you were brave enough to blurt out, all your own, coming from what makes you original and unique…and so if you succeed… If you succeed, wouldn’t it have to make NO sense to them at all? Wouldn’t it have to be new in some sense? So it’s really not up to them or the people who study them to know if what you’re making now has any relevance or matters or ranks…with them, you know?”

“So, then nothing matters, whatever goes, whatever you want to slap on a canvas…” Thom began.

“No, no, no,” Rain was saying, finally having to raise her voice to interrupt him. “NO! Honesty and originality are the most essential qualities a human being can muster! Those qualities make us human, provoke passion and awakening and when they are first articulated, they are invariably…” she cast around, sputtering, “insipid and false to the establishment!” Rain was practically yelling now, the bottomless mug of beer finally having gone to her head. And she couldn’t have cared less what these people thought of her, that she was lecturing basics to Ph.D. candidates. “Every loosening in art that we value with millions at auction today was seen as utter dreck when the paint was still wet. It’s whoever was honest enough to hear you, it’s whether THEY put you at the table or not. Whether anybody then has anything to say to YOU.”

“Relativist bullshit,” Thom was muttering, but Karl was smiling at her charmingly.

It was just the three of them left at the table now and Karl turned to Thom pointedly and said, “Well, I’ll be seeing you tomorrow, then,” and just waited for him to leave. His leaving, of course, being a little more thorough than Karl meant it to be, but no less than he intended right at that moment.

It wasn’t long after that night that Rain dropped out of art school and moved in with Karl. She’d found all she needed in terms of art instruction and support from him. His fierce narcissism and self-centeredness widened to include her for many of their years together, so she mistook his self-regard for support and his snobbiness for belief in her. He made her dizzy with his attention and his passion, but in front of her friends and other people who loved her, he was always a bit strange and jealous.

The very fact that Rain rented a studio outside her home was an enormous luxury. Even its marginal neighborhood and ugly five-story walk-up couldn’t mar the over-indulgence it represented. Most artists in the city lived in their studios, with the more successful ones perhaps earning walls between the bed and the easel, sometimes only a few more feet of space.

That she had one was enviable enough, but that her father paid for it was something that Rain would never admit, even to her closest friends, though most of those who knew about her studio suspected it. Few of her friends even knew about the place since she never brought people there. It wasn’t that Rain was shy to show her work; in fact, she brought most finished pieces back to the apartment she shared with Karl and even hung some of them there. It had nothing to do with the state she kept the studio in or the unfinished works. It was simply a sense of proportion. To most of her friends, it would be have been like screeching to a stop in a Lamborghini right in front of their lopsided old ten-speeds. They would have been impressed and complimentary, but some part of her suspected they might wonder if she deserved it.

The studio rental was a wedding present from her father, arranged by Gwendolyn, who could always perfectly carry out whatever her husband conceived. John Morton knew Rain’s fiercest wishes. Though Gwen disliked Karl from the very beginning and held dark and pessimistic ideas about pursuing any aspect of art as a career—art-making darkest of all—she dutifully found and stocked Rain’s first studio magnificently. She thought it would provide a soon-to-be, much-needed escape from the controlling and small-minded man Rain insisted upon marrying so young.

Though Gwen had told Karl that the gift was really just for Rain, he was emphatic about coming along to see it. The appointment at the courthouse was still days away, but Karl and Rain had both taken time off from work to get ready and have a few small gatherings in preparation for the big day.

John’s heart condition counter-indicated the five-floor walk up, so he waited for them in the car while Gwen led them to the over-painted glossy black door. It and the jamb were bejeweled with odd buzzers, locks, a tiny camera lens and a peephole.

As Gwen pulled open the door to the tune of its soon-familiar metallic sigh, Rain took close note of the air. It was a smell she would come to associate with working there. A fragrance that would unknot her stomach and loosen her shoulders. It was clean and faintly aromatic and yet had a kind of fresh antiquity to it. Like an opened pyramid, the small entry and stairwell suggested untold riches inside maybe this chamber, maybe that one.

Gwen pointed out a mailbox.

“Why would she need that?” Karl asked.

“I’m sure it just comes with the place,” Rain said.

“That’s right,” Gwen said, heading up the stairs at her usual quick clip.

It was the first door on the fifth floor. The flight above was just a small landing and a door onto the rooftop. Gwen worked her way through the array of keys and pushed in the door to the freshly painted space. It smelled of spackle and latex and looked like a miniature of a Hitchcock set. One of those north-facing, slanted walls of paned windows with a narrow balcony outside it. The view of the airshaft was nothing to speak of, but the wall of windows itself was breathtaking. The interior space was tiny. About ten by twelve feet. There was running water, a small counter over a cabinet, and a bar-sized refrigerator.

“Gwen!” Rain breathed as she walked into it.

Karl followed silently.

“Gwen, it’s so beautiful!” Rain exclaimed.

Gwen walked over to the easel that Rain hadn’t even noticed yet. It reached right up almost to the top of the ten-foot ceiling. Well oiled and substantial, it had a metal rack arching overhead with three spotlights fixed on it. A high tripod with a board atop it and an adjustable padded stool stood with it. “It’s used,” Gwen said, smiling. “That’s good luck.”

“Oh, my…” Rain stammered, struck speechless as she examined the complicated workings of the easel, taking in the impossible perfection of this little space. A tall set of shelves stood by the door on a short expanse of wal , but the other two wal s were left bare. Another bank of spotlights dropped down on wires from the ceiling in front of the easel, which could be swiveled in any direction. Rain tried the light switches. “Gwen!” Rain said again.

Karl shook his head.

Gwen opened the little refrigerator and retrieved a half bottle of Veuve Cliquot from it. The little fridge was stacked tight with water bottles, this thoroughness being a Gwen trademark. Two plastic champagne flutes stood on the counter. “You two can share one,” Gwen said, working the wires on the top.

Karl let out a little laugh. He sat on the stool, swiveling back and forth. “Don’t you think she should be sure this was what she wants first?”

“I have no idea what you mean, Karl,” Gwen said dryly as she handed Rain a glass of champagne.

“I mean, she quit art school to work for you and suddenly a studio? Studios don’t make the work, artists do.”

“Karl…” Rain said.

“No, Karl,” Gwen said. “Artists who are more than just conceptualists, and even sometimes those, need space in which to work. They are, after all, dealing with the corporeal. Objects take up space.”

Rain interrupted them. “It’s more than I ever dreamed of, Gwen. Thank you so much!”

Gwen didn’t look at Rain and said, “You do good work in here,” with a pleased smile on her face.

“Is there a bathroom?” Karl asked.

“In the hall,” Gwen replied.

“I just hope it doesn’t jinx her,” Karl said.

“The bathroom?” Rain asked.

“The big, intimidating studio,” Karl said, mock innocently. “It’s like the prize before the work has begun.”

“These are tools…” Gwen began, in a tired voice.

“I’ll be fine, Karl,” Rain interrupted her. “You’ll see.”

Much to Karl’s pressed-mouth surprise, Rain worked long hours in her studio. In a strange way that she didn’t like to acknowledge to herself, Karl’s disapproval fueled her focus and perseverance. It provided something her father’s uncritical and constant approval didn’t; motivation and a desire to prove herself. Really, she thought she was trying to prove herself to her father who so unwaveringly approved of everything about her, that she almost felt selfish in her push to achieve this.

Karl’s charms were reserved for Rain alone. He was abrasive and contrary with other people, but could be quite unabashedly loving and worshipful when they were alone. Their intimate life was a lazy game for her, Karl’s passionate enthusiasm doing the work for both of them. The fact that her friends found Karl prickly and uncomfortable provided Rain with the perfect barrier between herself and the entertaining assortment of good friends she adored. It was a way to separate herself and give herself the time and devotion her art demanded, without having actually to make those claims about her time’s value herself.

Rain found Karl’s irritability merely curmudgeonly and amusing and only very occasionally did his condescension touch her at all. Sometimes she wondered if this meant she was hugely egotistical, but she knew that her friends (and probably most strangers who encountered them together), saw her as a victim to his superiority and control.

Years of work had left Rain’s studio filled up and richly messy. The shelves were piled high with supplies, the fridge held a more motley assortment of food and drink and the walls were covered with images ripped from magazines, postcards collected from museums, her own sketches, fields of color taped up next to each other.

Though she’d known about it for several months, the reality of the end of this studio was fast approaching. The building had been sold and was slated for destruction. The entire block had finally been purchased by a single developer who had patiently fought years of rent-stabilized apartment dwellers and a little old tiny sliver of a building whose owner wouldn’t budge for decades, leading him to consider incorporating the little shoe repair shop’s building into the plans for his high-rise. The old man had finally died heirless, and the plans fell into place quickly afterward. It was part of the reason Rain had so readily agreed to go to England with Karl for the fall. She would move out of the studio, take the few months in England and then deal with finding a new space when she got back.

Now there was an air of tragedy around her studio. This place she’d been most herself. This home.

The smells: turp, mineral spirits and the earthy-nutty scent of paint glopped straight from the tube, along with the high note of linseed oil that lays over all the others—these were home. Even when Rain was low and uncertain and sure that she had nothing whatever to offer to the world, there were seventy-five things she could do in her studio to soothe her and make her feel like she was doing something right.

If she was not already in the middle of a piece, there was the pleasant busy work of stretching a new canvas or gessoing. Gessoing was Rain’s favorite. The craft elements of the work were so satisfying. They had built-in and easy-to-achieve goals. She knew with certainty whether she’d succeeded at her task. Bubbling and rippling were failures. Slack fabric, off-square corners, missed spots—all these were clear failures. Success became humbly invisible, but once achieved, gave her a sense of a proper arena within which to freely take risks.

This started with simply gathering up her materials; poking at the hardening lumps of paint on her palette with the palette knife, adding fresh dollops of whatever colors were low or too dry, picking this and that brush, round tapered filberts, flat square brights, tiny rounds and riggers, pouring out solvents and supports into little metal cups, adjusting lights or angling the canvas to catch the daylight from the big windows, changing the music. This last was key, a big part of creating the mood of whatever piece she was working on. She could still hear what she was listening to when she saw her old paintings. She’d typically crank up all the albums that Karl couldn’t stand when she was alone in her studio. King Crimson. The White Stripes. The Tom Tom Club. La Traviata, extra loud. The Sugarcubes. All her yell-along music. Music she rode during the hours she worked.

When she felt intensely anti-Karl, Rain got out the series of small self-portraits she had continued making over the years she had known him, despite his deep disdain for realism. These, especial y, she knew he’d have hated, paintings of herself looking odd, dark, angry and lopsided. Somewhat Lucien Freud, with a bit of Ralph Steadman. Not quite Francis Bacon, but getting there. It was something she considered a peculiar little habit, for those days when she needed to exert something individual and independent. Paintings of a woman no one would want to own or control. Paintings of a need-free quirky character, each on a six-by-six inch block of wood, each one created wet, in one session, with little planning beyond whatever gush of emotion she might have been coping with that day, they were beginning to add up in the drawer where she tucked them away to dry. Rain didn’t consider them any part of her “real art” so she didn’t allow them to amount to anything; they were more a kind of diary.

On the wall behind her easel, Rain had tacked up the encrusted paint she occasional y peeled off the glass of her palette. In the three years she had inhabited her studio, she had produced eight such constructions and they told the story of her materials. Alizarin Crimson, True Ultramarine, Cerulean Blue, Hansa Yellow Deep, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, Viridian Green. These were arrayed along two sides of the rectangle and then blended, bent and zagged toward various browns and blacks in the center and toward the larger globs of Ivory Black and Titanium White on opposite ends.

They were abstracts, worked in an honest, time-consuming and organic way. Rain sometimes stared at them in wonder. There was a kind of perfection in a palette. A purity of potential and intention unsullied by intelligence and effort. Free of the ruin of concept or affectation but full of the richness of human touch.

Once on her “real art” canvases, Rain’s colors all tended toward mud. She worked the paint like a sculptor, adding, shaping, pushing, contouring, adding some more. So the palette had something she tried to achieve in her intentional work. An honesty and a purity that her hand ruined.

The work was not going smoothly. She was distracted thinking about Karl and the fall. Heading off to England. How she’d do there. Rain never liked England, though Gwen and John went almost every summer and she had visited them there often.

From home Rain loved England and all things English. She had watched the Royal Wedding at two o’clock in the morning with one of her nannies when she was only five. She loved tea and biscuits, Jane Austen, all the BBC shows and British movies, loved Shakespeare and many of her favorite authors were British or at least partly so. But somehow every time she went to England she found herself speaking her American accent with a self-conscious exaggeration, flinching at the derision that seemed to flow toward her from even the most charming of citizens. Brits she met had such a good-natured way of delivering their condescension, like they just wanted to watch how well you could bear it. Not well in Rain’s case, it turns out. Rain never particularly thought of herself as an American—it just wasn’t high on her list of self-modifiers—but abroad she found she took it on as a fierce mantle. More abhorrent to her than the way Americans were treated in Europe, however, was the smarmy, effete denial many of them affected regarding their own ingredients while they were there. Like they had baked up a lobster with eggs and flour.

Rain liked the French better. They were less interested in Americans and more interested in all things American, which added up to a grudging respect with a cover of utter disregard. This contrasted wholly with the disdain masked by teasing attention usually dealt her by Brits, especially during her teenaged tan-and-blonde years. France was a much more comfortable arrangement as far as Rain was concerned. Having grown up in New York City, she found a similar gruff positivity in their manner and treatment of tourists.

It had been almost eight years since her last trip to England. And really, she wasn’t sure she wanted to experience that treatment while being there as the Mrs. It seemed wrong to stay in New York while Karl spent months away in London, though, and too depressing to deal with the end of this studio. But the more she thought about it, the more she grudgingly admitted to herself that Gwen might have been right.

Rain was washing out her brushes. It was no use trying to work when she was feeling this out of sorts. It was too sad knowing this would be one of her last days working here.

But four months without her husband? That seemed awful y long. She wasn’t sure if their relationship was strong enough to put up with that stretch. They’d been together now almost eight years and yet she still found Karl attractive. He had an itchy pull on her; she was not sure what it was. His needling and then the sudden odd and unexpected throes of passionate attention were some kind of addictive combination to her. He was a skilled and purely attentive lover, but he kept her guessing and often played games with her expectations. Rain wondered whether this was maybe a formula for a long-lasting, healthy intimate life. However passive her friends might have considered her role, had they known anything about it, there was nothing formulaic about her and Karl’s connection. Nothing boring or predictable.

Karl, bare-chested, half covered in a sheet, his twinkling eyes large and strikingly blue without his glasses, his lips full and moist, like fat plums.

Rain covered her palette with a sheet of waxed paper, screwed on the tops of a few open tubes of paint, dried off the brushes she’d left in the sink with paper towels. She checked and buckled up her leather backpack.

Karl smiles and rolls on top of her, going in for her neck.

Rain tugged her bag up over one shoulder and strolled through the West Village. Their apartment building was at Lafayette and 4th Street. Just about equidistant from Parsons where Karl taught and the School of Visual Arts from where Karl had plucked her, had directed her work, narrowed it, taught her so much more than art school could have, challenged her, pushed her, gave her passion and focus and clarity without the suspect motivation of running a business—art school being, he always said, useful for graphic artists, il ustrators and technicians at printing companies (oh, his disdain for his employers ran pretty deep) but pointless for someone with something real to contribute to art history.

Karl strokes the curve of her waist, down along her jutting hipbone…

As she pushed open the door to their apartment, Rain could hear a rustling from the bedroom. She dropped her keys on the table by the door and her bag on the floor underneath. Maybe the sound was coming from the back elevator next to the kitchen. It was an old building and the back elevator still worked for half of the apartments. It was used mostly for trash and deliveries, but otherwise not very often.

“Hello? You home?” Rain called out, heading toward the kitchen.

Karl groaned from the bedroom.

Rain turned back toward the bedroom. There Karl was, lying all rumpled in the bed. He rolled over huffily as she entered the room. He wasn’t wearing his glasses.

“Oh, you poor thing…” Rain said. She leaned in to touch Karl’s face and he turned crankily away.

Rain was used to his behavior by then. He was such a baby when he got sick. She smiled at him, anyway. “Do you need anything?” she asked him.

“Where have you been? I’m dying here,” Karl said, invoking the blame-equals-innocence effect.

“At the studio,” Rain said, giving him a look. “Was that the elevator?”

“I thought you were supposed to have lunch with Gwen today,” Karl said.

“I am,” Rain said. “I’m heading over there in a few minutes. I just couldn’t concentrate this morning—I’ve got this strange feeling. I’m anxious or something. I can’t think why.”

As she sat down on the bed next to him, Karl rose abruptly. “I’m going to take a bath,” he said.

He stood naked from the bed and tromped into the bathroom. His rubbery, aging behind stayed in her mind. Images sometimes sparked their meaning in ways she didn’t grasp immediately—little things like Karl didn’t normally sleep naked—but the image bestowed itself instead simply as an image: an aging man whose work was not physical, his yellow ass cheeks heading south, darkened unpleasantly with black hairs between them, but the graceful beauty of still loving the man who bears them. Wasn’t that the contradiction? It was an image of multilayered subtlety and Rain wasn’t raised to see the obvious. Karl slammed the bathroom door.

“You know London?” Karl said, shouting from behind the door to her and then he was silent. Rain thought the air in the room was musty and close and started to straighten the bed.

He hadn’t said anything else, so Rain shouted back, “Yeah?”

Karl poked his head out of the bathroom. “I was thinking London was going to be a huge bore for you. Maybe Gwen’s right: maybe you should just stick around the States and set up a new studio this fall.” He watched her as she smoothed the sheets, looking around for the top sheet. “You know, get that show ready?” he said.

Rain stopped and straightened up, looking at him. He’d said magic words. Her show. But she asked, “You don’t want me to go?”

“No!” Karl shouted in exasperation and slammed the door. And then he opened it again. He paused and said, “I thought you wanted to be an artist.”

He must real y be sick, Rain was thinking. He wasn’t usual y this frustrated without some precipitating event. Every little thing was irritating him. This was what his intense involvement in her career had come to. No longer pulling but pushing. The challenge of hope he created in her morphing into a threat now.

Rain grabbed up a pillow, turned her back to him and muttered, “I guess that I thought what I…”

Karl interrupted her. “I mean, how much work can you get done in London, anyway? And here’s your last chance to be in the studio and instead you come home…” Karl left that one hanging, playing with the door handle. “I just need to know, are you real y going to be an artist or do you just like talking about it.”

He may have purposefully been trying to start an argument, and with this he succeeded gloriously. Even though Rain knew he was stomping on all her triggers, she had been kicked in her most sensitive spot now.

“YOU talk about it,” Rain said, turning back to face him.

“Yeah, well, Rain, criticism is my job and what you talk about is making art and that is just not the same thing, is it?” Karl took hold of the door again, ready to shut it, a tight smile gripping his face. “Honestly, I’m just trying to help you. Most artists would gnaw off their left arm for a summer group show at Gwendolyn Brooker. If you’re just going to let this show drop…”

“Look, just SAY if you don’t want me in London, alright?” Rain threw down the pillow she was holding. Just as it hit the floor, the phone started to ring.

Rain was momentarily confused by the sound. She didn’t usually fight back with Karl and it gave her a terrible feeling of vertigo. It was as if the pillow hitting the floor had burst into rings. The second ring snapped her out of her daze and she grabbed the phone.

The little green screen on the phone read a familiar number and Rain purposefully plastered a smile on her face as she answered it, “I’m on my way! I’ll be right there…”

She listened.

“What happened?”

Listened.

“When?”

Listened.

“Well, what did they say?”

Listened.

“How long?”

Listened.

“I’m coming. Which hospital?”

Listened.

“Sit tight, Gwen, I’ll be right there. Do you need anything?”