Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 (13 page)

All of that was surprising enough, for like most eight-year-olds, I had no particular patience for classical music, much less Romantic chamber music, but then, as the shifting light continued, I felt a shift within myself, a visual transference, and as I watched, the hillsides ceased to rely on photographic verisimilitude and became instead a wash of subtle paints, an impressionistic sweep of gorgeous, blended oils. Most astonishing of all, I could see—no, I could feel—precisely which strokes were required to make each vision form. It was as if each image were already finished and drying on some unrealized easel deep inside my person.

The music ended. The stylus lifted. The record ceased to spin. I realized that I had closed my eyes only by opening them.

Gran and Grandpa stood together, studying me. Grandpa held one arm lightly around Gran's shoulders. The gesture surprised me, for while I understood perfectly well that Gran and Grandpa were married, I had never considered that romance was in the least involved. They rarely touched, they could go for hours without speaking to one another, and they slept in separate beds. At that age, had anyone asked, I would have said that they were married simply because they were my grandparents.

"Tomorrow,” said Gran, in the sort of voice that, for all its serenity, brooked no argument, “I will give you your first lesson. After breakfast. We will work until lunch. We will continue the pattern every day of the week, breaking only for church on Sunday. Do you have any questions?"

"No,” I whispered.

Grandpa burst out laughing. “So serious, the two of you,” he said, shaking his head. “If you think painting's hard work, just wait until you try full-time gardening. Because that's what you'll be doing all afternoon. Digging and weeding and mulching and endless watering and snipping. Your Gran likes her gardens just so."

He paused and sucked on his lower lip. “You're not afraid of a little hard work, are you? Of roots and soil and dirt?"

That night, after I'd brushed my teeth and spat twice into the rust-stained sink and kissed both Grandpa and Gran good night, I found a sheaf of papers lying next to King Arthur on my pillow. It was a sort of story, typed on crinkled, smelly carbon paper, and laced with dabs of White-out and penned-in corrections. I recognized the author's name as my Great-Aunt Gertrude, long dead. She was Gran's older sister, and a prolific diarist. This, however, was another beast entirely.

The story of Joy ought to be a simple one. Once she was an artist, a painter, and of course it is tempting to speculate about why she stopped. For now, suffice it to say that one morning, after breakfast, with the children bundled off to school, Joy did not shut herself away in her studio as she had for so many, many years. Instead, she reached inside just enough to grasp the small round door handles, and then she pulled the doors closed.

She spent a full hour carefully covering over the doors’ French windows with wood-grained contact paper. That evening, she asked her husband to install a lock and hide the key. Lonnie consented to her request, but only after subjecting her to a barrage of numbing questions. Like you, he could not accept that the why did not matter. Only the stopping. Only that.

To the general public, the world at large, she knows she will always be Joy, but in her private life, she now thinks of herself as Paints No More. She enjoys this self-conscious appellation, full of movie-Indian directness, and she wonders why more people do not rename themselves. Partly to make up for this, she has taken pains to rename all of her neighbors, each as correctly as possible. Across the street lives Banker With Paunch, also his wife, Limps With Groceries, and their solitary, pale child, Eats Nothing. Next door, by the row of white roses—called Peace, a fitting name, except for the thorns—live Mr. and Mrs. Weed-Be-Gone. They spend all of their free time manicuring the lawn, often sitting down and trimming one errant blade at a time, as if Japanese blood ran thick in their veins.

Yells At Baby lives on the opposite side, to the east. Yells At Baby stays at home and lives up to her name three times a day, often more; her sometime boyfriend, Up Early Drinks Much, does his share of the yelling whenever he makes an appearance.

Joy tunes them out by wearing headphones around the house; the headphones connect to a Discman clipped to her belt. She listens primarily to chamber music, the more meandering the better, one instrument intertwined with the next like vines. She believes that classical music shrugs off easy identifications, that it resists being named, and so she does not care about which piece she chooses. She knows she ought to abandon composers as well—just another naming—but Lonnie has a fondness for Schubert, and so, of course, does she.

Even so, what matters most is the fog of silence that the music provides. Silence helps her lose herself in time. Certain markers, such as Lonnie's comings and goings—departing for work at eight, returning by six—they upset her sense of stasis, although not, to be sure, as much as they once did. The diurnal cycles of the world fall away from her a little more each day, and she thinks she would forget them entirely were it not for her two remaining devotions: her children, whom she deals with almost as an afterthought, and gardening.

Paints No More gardens so dutifully and for such long hours—she has not worked at a paying job in years—that sometimes she wonders if it is she and not her neighbors who should bear the name Weed-Be-Gone. The yard is big, a quarter-acre, and she has six separate plots, all of which she knows by name: The Big One, Under the Rose of Sharon, Birdbath Circle, the Briar Patch, Tomato Road, Sunset Point.

Innumerable other plantings surround the bases of the trees, edge the sidewalks, and hang in baskets from the hooks on the porch. Gardening feeds her as once the painting did, by reminding her of process, of change, and her own place within a larger frame. Tending a plant, starting a seed, watching the seasons. These are the only activities that keep her sufficiently grounded to know time at all. Without them, she would atrophy completely, just as her husband already thinks she has.

The years pass. Her children have grown and flown, and with them, her remaining sense of schedule.

Joy is a large woman, not fat, but big-boned, strong. Once she was forty, but lately, birthdays have been hard to pin down. Her eyes can be piercing, or so others have told her. They are certainly almond, very light, and match the freckles on her skin. Her fingernails are perpetually chipped and dirty from the endless days spent in the soil, and she forgets to wash her hair until Lonnie demands that she remember. Chores of any kind, even basic hygiene, depress her; they smack of repetition, a tacit acknowledgment of the future. So great is her disdain for time that she no longer gets her period. Mind over matter, she used to tell herself. She could stop if she wanted to. And she did.

Lonnie—whom she now calls Man of Great Patience or, sometimes, Annoying Old Goat—has stood by her from the beginning. He is sympathetic and performs little niceties that he hopes will reconnect her, like a plug, to life. When work allows, he makes tea and bakes bread. He joins her in the garden. He claims that he especially likes raking, and his efforts always bring a smile to her face. She takes pleasure in the fact that he has learned to cope, to continue his own life despite the implosion of hers. He continues to design and build the jewelry that keeps the both of them clothed and housed. He goes out, he sees friends. He never invites them over.

Sometimes Joy sketches in the dirt with her finger, making crude little tracings of Art with a capital A, copies of the Great Masters and, sometimes, originals of her own. Then she smoothes them over or digs them up and goes back to picking aphids off the peaches. When the mailman—Afraid of Dogs—delivers the mail, she waves happily and throws the entire pile away, knowing that Lonnie will rescue the bills and maybe a letter or two. If there's something of interest, he'll read it out loud once they're in bed. She will pretend to listen, but she will really be mulling over pigments and hues, the perfection of tone she could never quite achieve.

She knows that the studio pines for her. It's hiding just downstairs. Lonnie says that when the previous owners had it built, they always called it their sun room. In the winter, when the house contracts and the air grows chill and there's almost nothing to do in the garden, she can hear the sun room call for her, sighing through the heating vents, moaning for her hand.

And that is the incomplete story of Joy, a woman lost in the outskirts of life, marooned by a tangle of stubborn old weeds. Her painting awaits her. So does her family. Paints No More wishes that she could explain—she wishes this with all her heart—but she has yet to trap her problem with the arrow of a name.

After finishing the story, I waited until I was certain that both of my grandparents were asleep, and then I stole downstairs and approached the studio doorway, ajar as usual. I did not know then what French windows were, but I did know contact paper, and it took only seconds of inspection under the light of Grandpa's swiveling desk lamp to detect what I was certain would be there: a sticky, stubborn fringe of wood-grained contact paper still clinging to the inside rim of virtually every glass pane the old door had to offer.

Upstairs, Paints No More shifted in her sleep, as if searching out the proper path to go back to being Gran.

My morning lesson was, as promised, daily. She was traditional, my Gran, and she forced me first to sketch out objects, to rough in the shape and textures of an apple, a green wine-bottle, a lady's hat hung from a hook. We moved on to copying, mostly horses.

"The form of the horse contains everything that is human,” she stated. “If you doubt me, you will find your proof in the centaur."

I asked her why she never painted people herself, and she smiled, thin-lipped.

"I'm no good with centaurs,” she said. “To paint the human form is to indulge in a particular kind of fantasy. A kind I don't appreciate. But that is no reason,” she went on, “that you should not out-do me. Stretch the limitations of your teacher. Challenge yourself."

We moved on, first to single plants and trees, and then to landscapes, still working only with pencils or charcoal. And then, one morning some five weeks into my punishment, we shifted into paint: oils, right out of the gate.

"What will you do?” Gran asked. “What story will you tell?"

Were paintings stories? I didn't need to ask to know what Gran's answer would be. She talked almost constantly while she painted, narrating the legend of whatever it was she was working on, giving it both background and foreground, a verbal and sometimes dramatic history. All art, she claimed, was the art of story. The history of story was the history of art itself.

"Gran,” I said, “why did you stop painting?"

Gran set down her brush—she'd been working on a red-walled barn and a set of sunny haystacks—and she peered at me over her shoulder. She said, “I stopped because I was afraid of what I was starting to see."

"What did you see?"

"What do you think I saw?"

I shrugged. “But those things aren't real."

I knew I was right. No matter how many afternoon weeds I ripped from the garden, I had never seen anything more shocking than a slug.

"Ah,” said Gran, and she peered at her haystacks. “The important thing is, I started again. I picked up right where I left off. Now. Let's return to you, and your blank canvas. What will you paint?"

"A cabin,” I said. “In the snow."

"Nothing else?"

"No. A cabin, a safe one, lost in the snow."

Gran thought for a moment, then stood up and pulled a jacketed book from a small case wedged into the corner of the room.

"Snow,” she said, “requires careful handling. What color is it?"

"White."

"In shadow, it is blue. Or cerulean or chimney black. In low light, it can turn yellow. Does that mean that snow is really yellow, or cerulean? Be careful how you answer."

She opened the book she'd chosen and showed me snowscape after snowscape, in all styles and periods. Delicate brushwork seemed to make certain sunlit snow banks almost shimmer, while the blunt approach of the twentieth century turned the snow to chunks, like soot-laced ice blocks. I knew I didn't have the skill yet for the former, but the choppy swatches of snow in the book's last few pages—those I decided I could manage.

I chose a page for inspiration and placed the open book on a music stand off to my left. I reached for a brush.

It took days, of course. Many days. But, with the deliberate slowness of a spreading, seeping stain, my painting shaped itself and grew from a paltry child's-hand sketch into something considered and designed, more statement than picture. I practiced the art of mixing pigments and oil; I learned to keep my brushes slick and wet. I memorized the different tips and widths, and I came to know firsthand the gentle ache that comes from holding your arm bent at the elbow, adding stroke after not-so-delicate stroke. The drifts billowed and grew, and the skies drew together with threats of more snowfall to come. I was in Heaven.

Of course, by any objective standard, the results were far from good. And, because I was just old enough to see my work's deficiencies, I was violently dissatisfied. Still, I refused to put aside this first attempt and start fresh. The paints and I were in a battle to the finish, and I was determined to end with something better than outright retreat.

Gran clearly approved of my stubbornness, and when I began to rough in the cabin, relying on umber and a half-dozen rotten-looking brownish blends, she paid ever closer attention.

"I know you, Nathan,” she said, on a morning when an early thunderhead had left the studio so dark that we had the overhead lamps switched on a half-hour before noon. “I know you better than you know yourself. There is something about this cabin that frightens you."

"Maybe,” I said, needlessly churlish, “but you're afraid of the garden."