There were a lot of painters living at Fontana Village. They painted detailed oil portraits of World War II aircraft, still lifes with seashells, nostalgia-brown scenes of shtetl weddings. They exhibited their work in the lobby of the Activity Center, at the annual holiday art fair.
Sally Sichel was not that kind of painter. She had studied at Pratt and taught painting at UC Davis with Arneson and Thiebaud. Joan Mitchell was the bridesmaid at her first wedding. Her work was not well known—my grandfather, whose idea of great painting began with Winslow Homer and ended with Analog magazine cover artist Kelly Freas, had never heard of her—but she was hardly unknown. Her canvases hung in museums and on the walls of collectors as far away as Japan. Back when SFMOMA was still in the War Memorial Veterans Building, they used to keep a small Sichel in a dim corner, where I paid it a visit once not long after my grandfather’s death. Like most of Sally’s work from the sixties, it seemed to be rooted in some dense and private mathematics. Its lacework of parabolas and angles—red-orange against titanium white—confused the eye. Retinal afterimages turned the white regions to jumping blue-green neon.
When she met my grandfather, she had been a widow for less than two months, but she had been alone and grieving for much longer than that. Leslie Port, her third husband, had succumbed, slowly at first and then in a dizzying rush, to an unspecified disease that, my grandfather only later came to realize, must have been AIDS. The disease was poorly understood at the time, and Leslie’s care was a prolonged bout of expensive flailing. Though Les had worked for years at Hewlett-Packard—he helped to invent the screen-and-button interface used by ATM machines and gas pumps all over the world—and made a good living, in time his treatment devoured his savings, along with all of Sally’s mental and emotional resources. Along the road to his death were wild switchbacks in diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription. Leslie’s first wife and three adult children, with their spouses and ex-spouses, formed a repertory company of guilt, cluelessness, and resentment that seized upon each reversal to stage marathon productions. Sally told my grandfather she had not touched a paintbrush in three years. “I haven’t had the time,” she said. “Or if I had time, then I didn’t have the energy. I was too tired. I’m still tired.”
They were lying on their backs in my grandfather’s bed, a queen. My grandfather lay on the side (the left) that had been the haunt of his insomnia, dreams, and cares for all the years of his marriage and then widowerhood. In that long-desert region of the mattress there was now, astonishingly, the warm body of a woman and a smell of amber and cloves. It was their second night together. She had begun with her head nestled against his shoulder, but his shoulder was too bony and her cheek was too hot. The name of her perfume was Opium and he found the smell of it alarming, but he liked the rasp of her low voice in the dark. She had been telling him her life story in scattered chapters with footnotes and asides. Her story was seventy-two years long. He still had not made an appointment with the specialist, nor said anything to Sally about the funny numbers on his blood panel—that was all she needed, another sick man on her hands—but he had a feeling he would not live to hear the whole megillah.
“Do you miss it?” my grandfather said. Sweat prickled on his skin as it evaporated in the air-conditioning. He shivered and moved a little nearer to her.
“Not really.” She stopped talking. My grandfather regretted having interrupted the flow of her autobiography with an unnecessary question. Then she said, “I take it back. I do miss it. How interesting, I didn’t realize until you asked me.”
“Sorry.”
“For what?”
“Giving you something new to miss.”
“That’s all right,” Sally said. “God knows it’s better than missing Ramon.”
The next day he drove her to an art supply store in Fort Lauderdale. She bought an easel, a dropcloth, a roll of canvas, stretchers, gesso, brushes, several tubes of cadmium, alizarin, and cobalt paint, and two cartons of titanium in pots, one bleached, one unbleached. He lifted the cartons out of her shopping cart and set them on the counter for the cashier to ring up.
“What’s with all the white?” he said.
Sally raised an eyebrow. Her hair was tied in a scarf patterned with blue and green Matisse cutouts, and she was wearing a faded shirt with a button-down collar, blue pinstripes on white. The collar was unbuttoned enough to betray the scalloped lace trim of her brassiere.
“Think I’m just going to come out and tell you?” she said. “Just like that?”
It had been years since my grandfather had been competently teased by an attractive woman. This turned out to be a thing he had not known that he was missing.
“Is it a secret?”
“Of course it’s a secret. Don’t you know anything about art?”
“Art Carney.”
“Oy. You promised no puns.”
“I know next to nothing about art.”
“Even I don’t know the reason, why all the white. That’s how secret it is.”
They drove back to Fontana Village and my grandfather helped Sally carry her supplies into her house. The still-unfurnished guest bedroom had a sliding glass door that filled it with morning sun. They put all of the supplies in there in an orderly jumble. Sally laughed her raucous laugh.
“This is such bullshit,” she said. “Come back in two weeks, I guarantee you it will all be sitting there like that. Untouched.”
“So long as you don’t go untouched that whole time.”
“My God, you are such a pervert. Stop. Go kill your snake. No.”
My grandfather put his arms around Sally’s hips and pulled her toward him. She was wearing a pair of loose white pasha pants with an elastic waistband. His hands plunged past that and the lace waistband of her panties. He availed himself of two handfuls of her ass. It was not an inordinately large ass, yet the heft of it seemed to connect him to an immense source of gravitation, one for which he was belatedly grateful, as though for a long time he had been weightless and drifting.
“I was planning to feed you first,” Sally said.
“All right,” said my grandfather.
He reached out with a foot to hook the canvas dropcloth, bundled into its plastic package. He slid it across the floor and eased himself down onto it, kneeling on this impromptu cushion at her feet.
“Good Lord,” Sally said, and then, “Oh, my.”
He pulled down her pants and panties and contemplated the graying hair that thatched her belly. It grew sparse but long and very soft against the fingers. He put his cheek to her belly. The soft gray-blond hair rustled in his ear. The smell of her cunt reached his nostrils, not yet familiar, no longer strange. He tried and failed to compare it to the remembered smell of my grandmother’s cunt. It had simply been too long, too goddamn long.
“Feed me,” he said.
“No puns,” Sally reminded him, lowering herself with a certain careless care onto the floor of the borrowed condominium. “You promised.”