The Rothko

The house comes with furniture. When we move our own stuff in, we throw out the former owner’s belongings— except for the paintings. The paintings go into the garage and then return after a few weeks. Most of them are placed where they hung in the house previously. The walls haven’t been painted in so long the paintings fit into faintly visible outlines like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Only one of the paintings stays in the garage because it isn’t clear to any of us where it is meant to go.

The house was a deceased estate so all these paintings seem an invitation for ghosts. After three years we’ve repainted and refurbished, naturally. Within a few months we forgot what we had on the walls at our last house. So the paintings stay where they have always been. And our family is as it was before. Even so we rarely look at the paintings. When we do, we’re glad we have them but it’s our home, after all, not a gallery or a museum.

One day there’s a knock at the door and we’re surprised to see it is Frank Sinatra. There’s none of the stage presence one would expect. He’s not particularly big. His blue eyes aren’t striking. Lots of people have blue eyes. And his voice is a regular Jersey voice—though, of course, he’s speaking, not singing. Frank Sinatra explains that one of the paintings on our walls belongs to him and it is worth millions. It’s an incredible stroke of luck until I remember that Frank Sinatra is not only a famous singer, he is also a ruthless man with mob connections. When Frank Sinatra says something belongs to him it’s not easy to argue. He shakes his head and doesn’t speak when we show him the contract for the property and its contents. He won’t enter our house. He continues to stand in the doorway looking at me and my family with an implacable determination to get what is his. It’s impossible to close the door on Frank Sinatra.

When he leaves, the evening falls and we prepare dinner. We eat in silence, wash the dishes quickly, pass by the painting Sinatra says is his without glancing at it. After the children’s teeth are brushed and we have read them a story and they are in bed, my wife and I sit in the lounge and look at the painting. We intended to throw all the paintings away and changed our minds. They came back from the garage and we like them. We were never art lovers in the past. Even so, all the paintings have become essential aspects of our home—our windows into landscapes of the soul. They offer us perspectives we have never seen before yet they have not changed us for the better. After a few years of living with them we still don’t know what a soul is or what the paintings mean to us.

We talk about selling the painting and what that might entail. We don’t have connections in the art world. We don’t know who the artist is or what Sinatra’s painting is called. There isn’t an authorial scribble in the corner of the canvas which we might endeavour to decipher. And there are no historical moments, mythological motifs or bowls of fruit. We’ve never before attempted to describe any of the paintings. Rough images with no hard lines, slowly dissolving shapes and colours; immense smudges of mood, warmth and homecoming, finally revealing finer perceptions and visions, a vast interior of spirit. Wordless, we shake our heads—that these hallucinations might fetch such fantastical numbers from the bank accounts of the wealthy.

After a long while we go to bed. I listen to my wife’s breath change to a rhythm of sleep and I blink in the lightless bedroom and know there’s no way for me to make sure she’s safe or to keep my daughters from harm. I can’t follow my children to kindergarten and primary school and my wife to her job, and I am myself easily destroyed.

I ease out of bed and get dressed in the dark. I don’t need to switch on a light to move through the house. Enough illumination is coming through from the moon outside. I take the painting down from the wall and I walk out onto the street. I make my way to the hotel that Frank Sinatra is staying in while he’s in Melbourne. The elevator takes me up to his floor. I knock on the door. I wait and I knock again.

The Jersey voice tells me to enter but he isn’t around once I’m inside. The room is brightly lit. Glass walls to the north and east reveal a hundred towers with the wide river below, dead still, perfectly reflective of the billions of city lights ceaselessly moving or flickering. The empty room has flowers beginning to wilt in vases and fresh American newspapers on the bed. An unmade bed and a packed suitcase. An airplane ticket on a coffee table with a vibrating phone that is ringing on silent. Down a darkened hall there’s a bright light below a door. I hear the sound of a toilet flushing. Sinatra saunters towards the painting humming one of his popular tunes—“Fly Me to the Moon”, I think. He notices his phone illuminated by another incoming call. Sinatra waves me out of his room as though I were a porter bringing him up a present from one of his fans.

I pass the taxi stand outside the doors of the hotel. I don’t want to go home, at least not straight away. I need to walk. I want to leave as much of the fury and humiliation behind me as I can. I’ve never walked from the centre of the city out to the bay, where we’ve been living since the kids were born. I move past parts of the world I’ve seen only through the windows of a car until I’m walking along streets where I’m used to the air coming in off the water.

I go to the garage instead of my bedroom. The light is busted. Three times I’ve replaced the light bulb at the end of the cord dangling down from the ceiling at head height. It always burns out within a few minutes. I suspect it must be old wiring or a bad fuse. The garage has a few small cracked windows that run high along the wall. I wait until they begin to evidence the morning. The darkness of the garage is relieved so slowly it’s almost imperceptible—yet I’ve never been so still and patient in my life as I wait for the sunlight to enter through the open door of the garage and those small windows high along the wall. The shape emerges, leaning against the wall. I have left it uncovered so the light turns red when it reaches down into the frame. Or it’s a deep orange. Soon after, I’ve lost the words to name what I see.