18mm Blues Page 10

  Julia called Maxx down but he ignored her, ordered him down but he still wouldn’t mind, was entirely removed, heeding only primeval genes, absorbed in a kill. Julia gave up on him.

  She went to the front hall and up to her bedroom on the second floor. Having been away for hours she was able to realize how strongly the odors of painting permeated the place. Her intention when she’d renovated the house was to keep her work and living spaces separate. To create the studio she’d knocked down the walls and eliminated the ceilings of the rooms situated in the north half. Then created double-doored passageways to serve as buffer chambers between the studio and the rest of the house. The arrangement would have been more effective had she been less lax about the doors. More often than not they were left wide open, the purpose of those intermediate spaces lost to the synaptic relativity of artistry and ordinary existence. Too, there was the sort of negligence that Julia came upon now as she opened her closet door.

  She saw four pairs of sneakers, so thoroughly and thickly splattered they appeared to be made of paint. Their eyelets caked, laces saturated and so rigid they couldn’t be untied. (She had to shoe-horn her feet in.) Several pairs of jeans and a pair of overalls in the same condition, like stiff tunnels into which she inserted her legs. Time and again she’d reminded herself to leave her messy smelly things in the studio, however, she forgot so regularly the rule no longer had any force.

  She unpinned and removed her hat. Disregarded the plastic bag it had been kept in, tossed the hat up onto the second shelf. It tumbled back down as though protesting. She let it lie where it fell.

  Took off her clothes, everything, hurriedly as though she were removing shackles. Hung up the dress but left shoes, hose, underthings batched on the closet floor. She decided against the old jeans and overalls, even the old sneakers. They’d been faithful and she owed them consideration, but her skin told her it wouldn’t tolerate them today. For the past year she’d often painted while nude. In fact nudity had been growing into one of her conditions for painting. She didn’t entirely believe it had elicited the something extra from her that had resulted in what many regarded as her best work, however neither did she entirely believe in coincidence.

  After scrubbing off her makeup, she contained her hair in a cheap blue cowboy bandanna.

  Went down to the studio. The sparrows were still nervous and chirping but had found a high perch. Maxx, by then resigned to quandary, had reverted to his normal superior forbearance and was sitting by the rear door, gazing up at its knob. Julia let him out.

  The studio was, as usual, a mess. A comfortable, familiar mess. It astounded people, especially the magazine and newspaper interviewers who came there, that Julia was able to compose such impeccably ordered paintings while besieged by such rampant disorder. When asked about that her stock reply was presumptuous but too flip to be taken seriously. “Hasn’t that always been the neat trick?” she’d say, no doubt referring to God’s and her own accomplishments.

  Had she only picked up the newspapers and the plastic bowls it would have made a difference. When she spilled or dripped paint, varnish, thinner or whatever on the enameled hardwood floor, to avoid stepping in it she covered it with a sheet of newspaper. When paint fell on that sheet of newspaper she simply covered it with another. The paint dried, the newspapers stuck. The plastic bowls, shallow, one-quart size, she’d paid less than a reasonable price for at a liquidation sale south of Market Street. Bought a thousand, so she used them indiscriminately to mix in. Colors exacted to her vision canvases ago, so precious then, evaporated, hardened, crackled in those bowls that were everywhere, hundreds of bowls. And nearby just as many mayonnaise and pickle jars and paint cans, gone dry with stirring sticks and forsaken brushes upright in them. Brushes that had been favorites were abandoned or lost in the chaos, their bristles rigored, turned ugly, curled. There were used rags, sponges, silvery gallon containers of varnish and linseed oil, thinner and turpentine, the screw tops of them somewhere.

  The expanse of a permanently placed trestle-type table off to one side was beneath a section of soft, raw pine boards nailed to the wall upon which she stuck-pinned sketched ideas, inspirations, photos, reminders of things she wanted not to forget that she’d forgotten. That table and her larger ten-foot easel were the dominant things. She preferred to work on the large easel, felt it contributed more than functional support with its substantialness and heft, served rather like a steadfast anchor while she floated about in rarer realms. The surface of a smaller table was her palette. It could be rolled about, a willing thing to be nudged this way or that, pushed aside or brought closer. And, when it became too coated and uneven with daubs, swirls and mixes, all that was required to give it a fresh top were a rectangle of wood and a few nails. She often thought of it as her devoted collaborator, and if she were ever being dispossessed and allowed to carry away only one thing that little table would be it.

  She wasn’t sure whether or not she wanted music this afternoon, nevertheless she chose some compact discs and put them into the player, not in any particular order this time. Normally she began with something that had a lot of energy, like a Roxette. What came up first today was some Bach that was entirely wrong, too processional, solemn. She cut it before it could get to her and then it was Van Morrison doing “I’m Not Feeling It Anymore” causing Julia to bob her head and dance her arms and shoulders almost involuntarily as she made her way to the easel.

  She took a good, long critical look at the canvas that was on it.

  Was the background complementary enough? Did it look like a Rothko trying too much to look like a Gaugun trying to look Derain? No, she thought, this landscape of the southern Oregon coast was her looking like no one else. Her friend the little table nee palette agreed. And that was prime enough to start her squeezing cobalt violet from a fresh tube, and from another equally fresh, cobalt rose. She also decided this final go warranted fresh brushes, got them from the cabinet.

  And began.

  She worked practically nonstop for four hours, not even aware that she’d run out of music. She would have continued had the light not been deserting her. Then she put a Wynton Marsalis on the player, switched on the daylight fluorescents and went right back at it, working until close to nine, to finish satisfied.

  As always after such a long, intense stint she felt let down, was all at once clearly conscious of the time, the conditions of where she was and her fatigue. She shoved the sticky-handled brushes into a jar and poured in some cleaner. Used some of the cleaner to remove much of the paint on her hands and, as well, the drips and dribbles that had fallen onto her bare feet.

  She padded into the kitchen and decided against instant coffee, brewed a whole pot of fresh ground Colombian in the automatic maker. She was hungry, so sliced apart nearly half the length of a loaf of Italian bread, upon which she put a slab of Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate. Placed that in the microwave on convection and watched the melt through the little window.

  She took a mug of the coffee and the enormous chocolate sandwich into the adjacent room, which she called her parlor. Turned on a lamp and sat on the edge of the French daybed that was overpillowed and situated beneath the front windows. The chocolate had cooked to a crust and the bread had become crustier and combined they tasted especially delicious. She took big, jaw-straining bites, and after the first few chewed them longer. Counted aloud in a whisper fifty chews each mouthful.

  “Don’t wolf your food, Julia.”

  “I’m not.”

  “For proper digestion it takes at least fifty chews. I want to see you do fifty.”

  “Supper will take all night if I have to do fifty.”

  “I’ll be watching, young lady.”

  That hadn’t really happened to her, Julia thought. None of her before time seemed as though it had happened. She was only connected to it, or it to her by some extremely tensile fiber. Anyway, it shouldn’t have happened and if it had to it should have happened differently. Mother should have been cap
able of more than sporadic fits of cherishing. The cherishing times stood out, held the keys to the locks on their gates in her memory.

  Berry picking was one. Berry picking in that patch of whiplike brambles at the edge of that certain field partway down the road between Amenia and Sharon. Some farmer’s field of wild oats and hay grass with a lot of red-winged blackbirds in it. The NO TRESPASSING signs didn’t apply because unless picked the berries would go to waste. Surely there were more than the birds could eat, mother had remarked. She, Julia at seven years, hadn’t been tall enough to reach the upper brambles where the berries were thickest, so mother had interrupted her own anxious picking to bend down to her. They ended up crawling into the domain at the base of the stalks. Enduring scratch and snag to get to the berries that had so ripened they’d fallen. Sweetest of all. “Not as sweet as you,” mother had said, up close, nearly nose to nose with her in that little prickly jungle. From the crawl and crush the knees and bottoms of their jeans were stained magenta. Full baskets, a full afternoon, one fuller heart and jam making together tomorrow.

  Rare occasion.

  Mother hoarded her words, her smiles and demonstrations of affection, as though she’d been allotted just so many. She expended even fewer on father. He was a malleable sort, who’d shaped his persona to fit, who crept back into the silent remove of himself and could only appear to prefer it.

  At times he was talkative and at times demonstrative. It was as if he’d suddenly spill over. He was a sign painter by trade. A thin man with sparse exceptionally controlled hands. There’d been afternoons and some early nights when Julia was permitted into his workroom and up onto a high stool at his long table. To be with him while he blocked out the letters of a sign on a sheet of metal, or a strip of oilcloth or piece of cardboard. She hardly dared breathe as she watched him fill in the outlines, usually with red or black, amazed at how straight he was able to flow the paint on at the edges. Hers had to be wordless appreciation or she’d be banished.

  Father never made much money. Enough for rented places to live in was all. Even less when FOR SALE and GOING OUT OF BUSINESS and KEEP OUT and other signs began to be mass produced and sold in hardware stores and such. He gold-leafed the names and titles of many far more successful men on office doors for not much per letter. And when times got even slacker he painted names and address numbers on rural mailboxes.

  Julia believed that was as intimate as she’d ever been with him, the closest to sharing. Her with him in the secondhand, ten-year-old Dodge pickup going over the lesser roads of northwestern Connecticut, up into Massachusetts and around Columbia County in New York. Soliciting mailbox work. She wasn’t bashful about going up to a farmhouse front door and asking. And when she returned to the car bringing him an order, what triumph!

  “You’re some girl,” he’d say, “some girl.”

  The both of them were gone now, twelve years gone when an instant on New York State Route 44, a mile out of Millertown, took them. The instant sooner or the instant later wouldn’t have instantly killed them head-on.

  A psychic, a woman in Paris with hair like a mass of rusted steel wool, told Julia that her parents’ deaths were more intended than accidental, the conclusion of the lessons they were supposed to learn in these lifetimes. Julia thought that was bunk, but she regretted having seen the psychic because ever since, that premise had been like a rock in her shoe.

  “Gone is gone forever, over is over forever,” she now said aloud with conviction, and then mumbled, “whatever forever is.”

  She left the daybed and got a bottle of wine from the hivelike rack in the pantry. The bottle of vintage ’84 Chateau Margaux she’d bought over a year ago for now. She uncorked the wine, wiped its upper neck and lip clean, got a delicate crystal goblet from her almost genuine-looking Empire breakfront and went upstairs. To her bedroom and the bedside drawer where she kept her death.

  Actually, she didn’t think she was keeping it as much as it was awaiting her.

  The four amber vials were right there where they’d been for those many months, ready to facilitate, forbearing her ambivalence. By now she felt there was only one vial she could absolutely count on. She’d been meaning to call and ask Dr. Fremont how old sodium pentobarbital could be and still be good, and once a couple of months back she’d gone into a pharmacy to ask that, but there’d been others waiting before her at the dispensing counter so she’d put it off.

  One of the prescriptions went back to when she’d lived outside of Cody, nearly four years ago. Two were around a year old. The certainly potent one was dated April fifteenth last. Those several times when she’d opened the vials to examine the capsules and reflect on their adequacy, she’d been careful they didn’t get mixed. She would dump the capsules from one of the vials into the palm of her hand. How identical they were! Absolute equality! And such a vibrant color, a cadmium yellow, the shade of buttercups, as pretty as candy. They seemed to be promising their effect would be sweet.

  There’d be none of that tonight, no mere flirting with it.

  She poured some wine, took more of a gulp than a sip. That was one regret, that she hadn’t drunk more wine when she’d had the chance in Burgundy and the Rhône and places. Well, maybe next time, she told herself facetiously and ridiculed the thought with a little laugh aloud.

  The promised canvas was done. The will had been willed. Her organs pledged, her request not to be put on a life-support system legally made. Maxx would be cared for. There was no reason in the world to put it off.

  She ascertained that the vial she opened was the recent one. Dumped the thirty capsules it contained into the footed candy dish that was on the nightstand. Brilliant yellow intermixed with the aubergine of Caswell black currant cough lozenges. The yellows outstanding. No way to miss them. Each capsule contained a hundred milligrams. Ten capsules added up to a gram, so three grams altogether. Death commonly occurs after the ingestion of two grams or more of sodium pentobarbital were the words she’d read in the Physician’s Desk Reference the day she was browsing Waldenbooks.

  So three grams should surely do it.

  Especially when potentiated by the grand vin Margaux.

  She wouldn’t, however, stuff all thirty capsules into her mouth at once like just so much popcorn. No, she’d relish the doing, prolong it, experience as much as she could of the transition, so to speak. Like this!

  With a slight flourish and the dilatoriness of ceremony she placed four of the capsules on her extended tongue, and washed them down with the wine that remained in the goblet.

  She wasn’t being dramatic, she told herself. There was no one to be dramatic for. Drama requires audience and she had audience of none. She was on her way to doing it, she was really going to. Her disposition tonight matched her inclination, she thought.

  Emptiness.

  And no outlook, nor trust in the prospect, of fulfilling.

  She downed another ten capsules quickly.

  Fixed her pillows, plumped and arranged them, got beneath the covers, neatened the top edges over and around her. Lay on her back in a corpselike symmetrical position, waiting for the first sensation, which she would accept as the signal to swallow more of the yellows, and rapidly.

  Meanwhile she would enjoy while it was under way the experience of the release from that which so long had plagued her. How long? When had it first overcome her?

  She’d been born with it, everyone was.

  All right, granted, but when had she first become aware of it?

  Through and through.

  She knew, thought back to then, to that day she arrived in the small town of Dinard on the coast of Brittany. She’d had the final falling-out with Jean Luc after telling him her opinion of his paintings, those huge white square on white and blue square on blue monstrosities that qualified him as a minimalist. He’d slap on a layer of white, contemplate it for a month, then, as though inspired to decision, paint on a slightly whiter or less white square. His sycophantic friends at the Ecole des Beaux-Ar
ts would rave, and when their éclat diminished he’d restore it by simply painting another variation, a gray gray or a beige beige.

  Honest admission, the reason she’d stayed with Jean Luc for the second of their two years was the sex. Friction and fantasy, that’s all it was. The fantasy part finally came up blank, and the friction of it desensitized when, in front of everyone at a gathering, Jean Luc used her modest but sincere work as an example of (his words) a so-called artist being victimized by self-deceit. She wasn’t about to take ridicule lying down.

  “Fucking fake!” she retaliated.

  “Con Américaine,” he spat. American cunt.

  Good-bye sex. Better she should do without.

  From Jean Luc she went west into Normandy. Loaded down with nearly all that belonged to her, she stayed in affordable, inconvenient hotels. A few days here, a few there, floating, watercoloring, enjoying being aimless, eventually despising the oppression of her several pieces of luggage.

  The towns where she spent time became smaller and smaller, the accommodations cheaper and cheaper. Crocy, Desertine, La Tricherie. Dinard was not a destination. It just happened to be where she reached the coast. By then she’d shucked off most of her carry, just left things behind. Felt lighter in spirit, more the part of the vagabond artist without a suitcase on the end of her arm. Instead, a blue nylon backpack containing three changes of underthings and socks, one change of all else and her box of watercolors. Her fold-up easel was secured to its straps, a table of watercolor paper under her arm.

  Dinard. In mid-January it seemed to be a town in coma. Still breathing but not animate. The purveying shops and restaurants so dependent on summer were closed. Even the places that didn’t appear closed were closed. The streets of the town had lost their purpose with hardly a car or person moving along them. On the other side of the year they’d be bustling, money would be changing hands, the English would be there, nine hours by ferry out of Portsmouth.

  Julia wandered Dinard’s lesser streets, believing it was there she’d most likely find a place to stay. Dreary old unwelcoming streets. She gave up on them for Avenue George V, the wider main way that ran along and above the beach. The afternoon was turning to dusk. The sun that should have been in the western sky was clouded out. Dampness was invading, the grit of errant beach sand was beneath her steps. It appeared that she’d have to settle for some deep doorway.