Amateurs and the Color of Blue (novel excerpt)
(15 December 2010)
1.
[Lucy] People expect me to have a favorite painter, as if influence is that simple.
I oblige them when they ask though. Sometimes I say Picasso. Sometimes Rembrandt. Van Gogh. I like Van Gogh because of the leaps he takes in translating the world we share to the world he sees. He filters out everything that isn't unique to his imagination's eye, everything that isn’t beautiful. If I'm in the mood to make people roll their eyes, and I often am, I'll say, 'Zora Neale Hurston because she paints with words' or 'Wagner because he paints with sounds.'
None of it's true.
Painting is like being a prism. Into the painter shines the same bland, white light that touches everywhere else in the world. My job is to transform it to something multifaceted and beautiful. From there, the refracted light bounces back into the world. Mostly, it's misplaced. It's absorbed into fabrics and buildings until it's lost and gone forever. But sometimes it finds its way into an appreciative mind, which is both lucky and rare.
You're probably rolling your eyes at this. Don't worry, that's a perfectly normal reaction. I'd be doing the same if the observation weren’t coming from me. I don't limit it to painters. We all do this; we're all creative. We all reshape the world with our imaginations' eyes in the same way Van Gogh did. For some people it's sports. For some people it's fashion. Politics. Religion. For some it's family. I wish mine were family. The only family I have left is Ellie, the lady I grew up next-door to, she used to baby-sit me as a kid. So mine happens to be called art, the most pretentious description for creativity ever uttered. But everyone does it. We all touch the same world with our fingers, the shared world. And that touch changes it. Our own perspective makes it all beautiful to someone or someone else. At least everyone who is awake does this.
I'm less idealistic than I used to be. Some people, I now realize, it’s not that they’re uncreative. They’re simply not expressive. I don’t mean they're boring either. I mean they're in the audience. But, even being in the audience member you transform the light that shines on you. It's inevitable. Unavoidable.
That’s why I liked Sebastian. I wasn’t a professional painter yet, and not even that much of an amateur if you count the previous year or so, but still: I was a painter who just needed to paint. Sebastian was nothing of the sort. He’s an audience member.
Painter and audience, myself and Sebastian, we were the perfect symbiotic relationship. That was my theory anyway. In practice, we were something else entirely.
I had a good job that, in theory, should have supported my ambitions. I had money for supplies. I didn’t construct my own canvasses any more. My color palate was bigger even than it was in college. I could afford my own two-bedroom flat, one room for sleeping, one for painting. The room for painting, at least according to the landlady, was haunted. I even had time. I sat in there in front of a canvas five, six, seven times a week. I had a stack of bulk bought, plastic-wrapped canvasses leaning against the back wall of my studio. The only one that wasn’t blank was the one on my easel. Far from it. It had been painted over so many times that I was on the verge of considering it a sculpture.
The night before I washed myself of Sebastian, I was sitting at my canvas when he called and asked me over to watch a movie. I wasn't actually painting and really didn't have the desire to start. So I said yes and got on the 71 bus to his place.
[Sebastian] We watched one of my favorite romantic comedies. It was the one where the girl and the boy end up falling madly in love with each other.
Of course, the story didn't work out quite so simply, it never does. The two hated each other at first. Complete opposites. Nobody thought they could work as a couple. All they had in common were their staggeringly-charming-girl-and-boy-next-door good looks. She took a job in Texas to get away from him, for Christ's sake! But he undertook a heart wrenching recalculation of his life, raced to the airport (where he bought a ticket for that day, very expensive) and made her love him.
I loved romantic comedies. Absolutely true. I used to coddle that information close to my chest. It was my secret pet. I'd let it out to play with my closest friends and people who I wanted to impress, but no one else. One’s quirk is only endearing if you try to keep it a secret. I figured that standing up for uncool taste in films made me into some sort of anti-rebel against hipster malaise in favor of genuine pleasure. I knew romantic comedies (never call them “rom-coms”) were shallow, but the idea of love inspired me, what's wrong with that? It showed character, I told myself.
They’re not chick flicks, and I resent anyone who claims they are. Romantic comedies are for anyone who has ever dared to dream that love might be his. Last time I checked, that’s all of us. Just because women are allowed to be open with their feelings doesn't mean men don't have them. I most certainly have feelings. Big feelings. Overwhelming feelings. I probably have more romantic hopes than most people. Sometimes it’s crushing.
Do you know what? I’ll go further. Romantic comedies are secretly made for men. I think they are. Men as a whole are more romantic than women. Think about how the different genders choose a partner.
Women choose one man and believe in him against all odds. They work at the relationship. They try to change their man. Mould him, craft him, shape him into some model of perfection to show off to their friends. And they think it’s achievable! It’s not romantic in the least. That's pragmatism and an inconceivable way of thinking. Women read about relationships in books, for Christ’s sake. Books!!
When was the last time you saw an 18th century Romantic crack open a book about meteorology? Never. Romantics stand on a cliff and anxiously await the coming storm. Romantics have despair. They’re overwhelmed. Helpless. And that is exactly what men are!
We fall in love with dozens of women in a second. Nearly every woman could be The One. I can't walk down the street without falling in love at least twice. That's why we never say 'no' to sex. It's not because we're secretly perverse animals in heat. We're complex creatures. If a woman wants to have sex with us, even if it's just fucking, we can't say no and potentially disrupt destiny. It's an opportunity to make love, and love is all any man wants. We must be ready at a moment's notice. We stay emotionally detached from our girlfriends so we can break it off fast if we ever have to follow our hearts.
Men are Don Quixote. Women are Sancho Panza.
As you can see, my years of obsessing over romantic comedies eventually crystallized into a solid theory. My obsession grew to the point that I stopped renting romantic comedies. I would just walk into a video store and buy whichever ones were on sale. I’d even watch them alone sometimes.
Watching them alone can be depressing. I'm not totally naive. The feelings are relatively plastic and when the movie ends, it leaves you in an empty apartment with nothing but dishes to clean. You’re feeling all bloated and jowly from the tub of cookie dough ice cream you ate. If you’re alone when you watch them, you really feel it.
Luckily, Lucy and I were able to have a quick fuck before she headed home. So the movie left me feeling affirmed in my life.
[Lucy] I'm not a fool; I knew what I was getting myself into. Sebastian gets stoned on Thursdays. On most days really. So I knew he'd have pot. That's fine; we smoked it and then watched his movie. After that we ate junk food and had sex. The evening was pretty par for the course.
Once in a while I would sleep over, but not very often. Certainly not as often as I did the dishes while he stood in the kitchen and blathered on about how, “defining our relationship might stifle our feelings, you know?”
That night, I didn't expect how good the movie would be. Years of Art had turned me hard. I loved Sebastian as the audience member. He was the one who got excited about movies and things. That night, it reminded me of who I wanted to be and why I liked him. I could never quite explain it to my friends. I struggled to enjoy other people's work. I was jealous or judgmental or rude, but I realized I had forgotten to be an audience member. Sebastian was the anti-painter. He's simple and beautiful. Instead of being a prism, he basked in the rainbow. He genuinely loved to look at art, something I'd come to disdain after all those years of constantly comparing myself to anything remotely good. Sebastian was the quintessential audience member. I realized I had no idea who I was.
The movie's plot was so predictable that I'm not even going to spend my time explaining it to you. I didn't care about the plot. The plot had been produced by 15 year olds on an assembly line in China, stuffed with cotton and sold to tourists at Pier 39. The plot was a humming, white light from a florescent bulb. The plot didn't impress me.
The characters, alternatively, they were magnificent.
I was 24. I never claimed that was old; I was smarter than that. But I knew my purest years were behind me. The time of single-minded obsession had passed. The years when love was everything and then gone in an instant. Where life brimmed so high with potential that sometimes it wasn't worth living. The mind of a teenage girl is like that of a monk in meditation: a mind of utter focus and determination. The characters in the movie simply wanted what they wanted and they wanted each other in a way I've never wanted anything. Desire brings with it self-sacrifice and drama. Finding and having each other was their personal revolution, to be won at all costs. The characters in that movie believed in a way I had forgotten and never really knew. I never wanted Sebastian like that. I never wanted myself like that. I never wanted painting or art like that.
Ironically (and to my great excitement) I wanted to express this, I wanted to paint. I saw the shapes and the movements of my brush. I saw the textures and I saw the colors reflecting in my imagination before me, but my canvas was across town. It was too far away. I went through the motions with Sebastian, hardly speaking, hardly listening as he waxed on about love and I waxed off the dry ketchup from his dirty plates. I felt like I'd never be allowed to leave. The night wouldn't end. It was a slow escalator climbing to where the oxygen was thin.
By the time I got home, the impulse had passed. I didn't even go to the spare bedroom, my haunted art studio. I put on my pajamas and went to bed. I didn't even have the energy to brush my teeth.
[Sebastian] The next morning, I woke up and felt completely affirmed in every choice I had ever made. I was affirmed in the shower. I was affirmed when I skipped breakfast. My life was affirmed when I got a seat on BART during rush hour and affirmed as I walked into work to prep for my big interview. The feelings were prompted by Hollywood stars and pop music, and so were underpinned with desperation and regret. Still though, life was good. Love exists. It was only a matter of time before I found it.
The interview, by the way, was for a position that had opened up in my company and they were considering me. I was to be a Regional Marketing Director at the tech company I worked for. I had been waging a campaign to get them to consider me for months. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I was sleeping with Lucy, who was the boss’ assistant, but ultimately I earned the opportunity on my own. Finally, that day of all days, the day of affirmation, I gave my mock presentation for my company's directors.
I nailed it. My PowerPoint kicked ass. All my jokes landed. They even bought my fake pitch. But it was that little extra bit, that life-affirming confidence I had with me when I walked into the room that I was sure had put me over the top.
I definitely nailed it, I figured, so I decided to treat myself. Organic crab and avocado wrap with extra chipotle aioli down at the farmer’s market at the Ferry Building. It would have meant an extra set at the gym, but it turned out I’d be pressing something else that night.
I had just taken my first bite, when I saw her, The One.
2.
[Stacey] I was so exhausted that rest only made it worse. I felt as though a small seed was budding deep inside my body. It physically pained me. Actually, to make you understand, I think I have to jump back about five years. Sorry.
My mother had just died of AIDS. Five years before that, it got really bad. Actually, you probably already knew that; her obituary appeared in just about every major newspaper, so I'm sorry. In the event that you hadn't heard, my mother was Gail Hendrix. Activist, author, lecturer, thinker by day and my mother in her spare time.
And so, I have a confession: I once mistakenly thought she died and I was relieved. I took a well-deserved deep breath. I'm not a bad person, and neither was she, per se. To understand it, you'll need to listen to a bit more of the story. I'm prefacing again. I do that too much. I'm sorry but before I get to the story, let me say that I know I apologize too much also. I'm working on it. I'm sorry in advance.
The story goes like this:
I moved home from New York to the Houston suburbs, Clear Lake to be exact, to care for my mother. Her nurse, a real nurse, called me on the phone to explain that only a lover or daughter could stay long enough to give her the emotional care she deserved. I explained to the nurse that lovers aren’t known for sticking around. And she said, “Fine, a daughter it is.” I said, “Fantastic.” And so I stayed, accepting payment in something other than money, more or less valuable, I still don't know. But I stayed, more or less unable to quit.
My mother was a very smart woman. Too smart. She could follow even the thinnest and most tenuous thread of a thought well beyond where most minds could cope. She would hang her whole self on that fragile thought. I hated her for it as a child. I admired her for it as an adult. And I resented her for it as her personal carer. She would get lost in herself and let the rest of her life, the real part where I lived, get blurry.
Lost somewhere in that land of hers, she forgot to take her medication. The virus mutated beyond where medicine could cope and she soon deteriorated beyond the ability for self-care. The same trait that gave her life renown also brought it destruction. Irony. She wanted to write a book about it, but she never got past the first few pages. Her hands and stamina failed her. She never asked me for help.
What AIDS does to a person is absolutely horrible. It tore my mother apart from her DNA outwards. For five years I watched as it happened. I cleaned her body and her wounds, while maintaining her unrelenting cocktail of medication even though it did her no good. I visited a different free clinic every three months in fear that I had contracted the disease myself.
She didn't suffer gracefully. I can't fault her for it. Grace in suffering is a bit of an oxymoron, certainly one I would never judge someone by. Personally, I've never really suffered beyond trapping myself in the normal self-righteousness that imprisons all upper-middle class teenagers. I’ve suffered from my own self pity induced by an over abundance of choice in my life. I’ve suffered from my incessantly chattering mind. My mother actually suffered. I don't actually know, but I think that grace blossoms from a blessing rather than in spite of a tragedy. If grace is to be found in a tragedy, it's unexpected. If not, it's forgiven.
The expectation of catharsis remained a powerful force, however. I stayed running on the fume of a hope that we would have one of those made-for-TV mother/daughter moments of understanding. We had no special moment because, and this is just a theory, over time her pain and embarrassment lowered me to a level below gratitude in her eyes. She had always been fond of telling me that we only see what we want to see in situations because the brain is wired to support its own comfortable, selfish world view. At the end she couldn't even look at me. Some nights I would sit outside her bedroom and cry. And I was certain I could hear the same sounds coming from within. But again, it might have been an illusion kept alight by that same fume of hope.
My confession, that the first time I thought she had died I felt relief, came from an episode during the summer. One hot afternoon, standard Texas fare, I hadn't breathed the fresh air in three days and she had her first seizure. It marked the beginning of the second worst period of care. I had never seen anything like it. I tried to shove a wooden spoon in her mouth, Hollywood first aid, but she nearly bit my finger off so I gave up. All I managed to do was freak out. Sweaty. Heart pounding. Stiff as a board. Flailing. I could do nothing. Helpless. As helpless as I'd ever felt. I understand why they call it seizing.
When it stopped, the world resumed with odd stillness. I sat on the edge of her bed and looked down at her. I believed so clearly her death was real. We only see what we want to see; we only know what we want to know.
Sitting on her bed, I rested my hand on her forehead and brushed her hair back. I kissed her on her decrepit forehead. “She has died,” I thought. “At last. Thank god. I'm free.” I felt tears well up in my throat and spill out from my eyes. I threw my head back and started laughing, snot rolling into my mouth. I must have looked like such an evil wreck.
When I reached for the phone to call the hospital, I swear her eyes were closed. I swear it. I pressed the speed dial for the hospital and stood as it began to ring.
At about the time they answered, I looked back at my mom. She wasn’t moving, hands stiff and neck stern but eyes opened. Eyes opened and staring straight back at me. My heart turned to ice. I just remember screaming over and over, pressing my back against the door. She just kept staring at me.
That evening, after seven hours of ignoring the TV in the hospital waiting room, the doctor finally came in and talked to me. He said she would be fine, but I was to add an anti-seizure drug to her cocktail. I tried to argue with him about the half dozen more pills he recommended to deal with added side effects, but in the end, I consented.
She didn't die for another thirteen months after that, and while I'm in the business of sharing uncomfortable revelations, let me admit that I was relieved then too. I wanted to believe that she hung on all that time to torture me, but the truth is that she hung on to torture herself. She was not a happy woman.
I'm sorry. That story took way too long. I'm not as bad as all that. I do like to laugh. Thanks for listening, though. It felt good to get it off my chest.
I lived in that empty house for seven months. The phrase "my home" that I'd used blithely all my life took on a new, stark and specific meaning. I told myself that I had spent those seven months resting but I never felt any better. I couldn’t tell if the smell had been cleared from the empty rooms or just from my head. I had money, my mom was rich and I could have retired. But I needed to busy myself. I needed a job.
I had two requirements for this mysterious job. One, it should take me far away from Houston. Two, it should start very, very soon. I had to muster an immense effort to even start looking, and hardly anyone responded to my resume, but I got a few bites. In a truly classic-me move, I assumed that all the responses were in error.
That's how I ended up in San Francisco that day: interview to be a Regional Marketing Director at some tech company. My qualifications in no way matched the job, but whatever. They flew me out, put me up in a hotel room. I needed a vacation and I liked the idea of someone else paying for it. I planned to raid the mini-bar and get room service up the wazoo. I tried to imagine myself having wild victory sex, but I thought I'd never allow myself to go there. Besides, what with my mother just dying of AIDS, I didn’t want to tempt fate.
My name's Stacy, by the way. Hi. I'm HIV negative. Yay!
3.
[Sebastian] The sun shining brightly, I saw her as I walked across the big square in front of the Embarcadero Center. I had to climb to the top of The Column, a performance art stage that wasn’t used anymore, to get a proper look. Her hair. Her stance. Her amazing body. She threw her hair back to reveal her face. Her face. I wondered if anyone else saw that face but me.
It was definitely Her. The One. I knew it. I just knew.
I stared at her in awe, she was on the phone. Good news or bad, I couldn't tell, but I hoped it was good news. An angel like this only deserved the best of what the world can concoct for a person. I lost my senses so thoroughly that I dropped my organic crab and avocado wrap and it fell all the way to the ground. I heard the chipotle aioli splatter but I didn't look. I'm amazed I didn't fall to the ground myself.
She hung up. She did a little dance. In that moment, I felt the weight carried by this woman fly off her shoulders, right past me, and away to the heavens forever. It took all my will power to stop myself from walking down. She had to come up. I had to kiss her for the first time where I stood. The last first kiss of my life, I thought. High above the square for everyone to see.
I called to her.
[Stacey] "Hey!" interrupted a voice from above. Literally from above. From the top of an ugly pillar in the middle of the square. "Hey you!" he repeated.
I looked at him for a moment. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place it. The sun shone on his back and, though I squinted, I couldn’t make out his face. Who was he? A friend? A celebrity? "Hi?" I called back, "I'm Stacy."
"Sebastian.” I didn't know a Sebastian, did I? No, I absolutely did not. Standing on the threshold between anger and curiosity, I felt the corners of my mouth fold into a smirk as I chose curiosity. “Are you coming up?" he repeated.
Any other day I would have run away, and that day the impulse still lived. But that day, wordlessly, I started to climb. I was in a new city, hardly ten minutes out of my interview when I got a call offering me the job, and suddenly, there’s a man. On a pillar. Calling me. Life was good in that moment. Or at least it was interesting.
The path to the top of the pillar wrapped around it like a spiral staircase. The last step was the biggest and most dangerous. I doubted I needed a hand, but I accepted his anyway.
“Good news?” he asked.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“On the phone,” he said. “I saw you celebrate something with a dance. You looked happy.”
Okay, that was a little bit creepy, but I was already on the pillar. I swallowed and I went with it. “Yeah,” I said. “I was just offered a job.”
“Take it,” he said grabbing me around the waist.
“I don’t know, I…”
“Life is about choice. Make this one. Our connection is undeniable. Choose passion. Choose us.”
I wish I were as naïve as him, but I’m not. Passion dies but family is constant. We can't always take care of ourselves, so we need people to help us at our lowest points. Love isn't an observation of desire; it's a promise to stay to the end. Marriage, among the biggest of commitments we can make, is the one chance we have to choose our family, to commit to live love as a promise.
But in that moment, I realized that people need each other for other things as well. Sometimes those things are very base. They're sweaty, dirty, forbidden needs couched entirely in pleasure. The timeline of those needs is often very short, but necessary nonetheless. I'd always done my best to deny those needs and categorize them as worse or lesser. But in that moment, wanting to practice saying 'yes', I realized that the scenario I played in my mind, the sweaty dirty forbidden one, could be real. If only temporary, it could be real. I might say yes, I thought. I mean, the idea of it wasn’t totally unappealing.
[Sebastian] We both felt the electricity.
She looked at me for a little while. There was so little room on the top of that column that we were already inches from each other. But still, I put my arms around her and pulled her in closer. I could feel her breathing in her stomach, her heart in her chest. I could feel mine. I looked back and forth between her eyes, down at her mouth.
"You have some mayonnaise on your face." she said.
[Stacy] “It’s organic chipotle aioli,” was his reply with no irony in his voice. I think he thought it was sexy. I didn't want to, but I couldn't help laughing. He was such a cliché San Francisco fake hippy loser.
"Did I get it?" he said.
He didn't get it at all.
[Sebastian] She didn't answer. I’m sure she would have, but we were beyond words. I kissed her mouth. I felt urgency in her lips and tongue. Relief. I embraced her tightly, matching her urgency and raising it higher. I don't know how long that kiss lasted, but the moment is like a black hole in my memory. No other sensations can compare. It was everything.
When we pulled away, I noticed a glob of mayonnaise on her cheek. "You have a little something on your..." I wiped it off with my thumb.
"Thanks."
"So…" I said licking my thumb clean.
She laughed. I did too.
[Stacey] I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was all so ridiculous. Fuck it, I thought. This was all a bit forward for me, but fuck it. Ha! Fuck it! I mean, shit, my life in that moment consisted of standing on a pillar about to get naked with a complete stranger! Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it!
[Sebastian] And there, on top of that piece of public art, we kissed again.
4.
[Ellie] “How are you, Lucy? It’s Ellie. I just called to say hi and send my love.
“There was something I meant to tell you. Darn it, what was it? I’m on the machine and I can’t remember. It was from when we had coffee last week. You didn't look so good, I remember that. You said you were happy, but I don’t believe you.
“You’re just like you were as a little girl. You'll always be that little girl to me, I don't care what happens. The boys had moved out by then and I hardly had a month to relax before your mother, rest her soul, knocked on my door and asked if I could watch you for the day. One day, that was supposed to be it, if you believe that.
“You had a basketball, with you, I remember that. Why you had a basketball, I'll never know because the first thing you did when you came into my house was drop the ball and let it roll away, right across my living room floor.
“You went straight for my easel set and, before I could stop you, you already painted all over my canvas. It didn’t matter, I was just copying the man on TV. From that first painting you were already better than me. Truly.
“And that afternoon, and every afternoon for years, five times a week, sometimes six, we'd paint together. I doubt you even remember, but those were some of the best memories I have in this old head of mine. I do hope you're painting again by now. You are so talented.
“You can grow up all you want but you'll always be that little girl to me; the little girl with the long blonde hair and a paintbrush in her hand.
“Maybe that's the reason you didn't look very good. Because I can only see that little girl inside you. We're never as good as when we were children. We're never as much ourselves as when we were young. You must have been lying to yourself about something or something else. Lie all you want, but never lie to yourself. It's those lies we tell to ourselves that make us old. They block ourselves from who we really are. Remember that. Humility is nothing more than being honest to yourself. Growing old is the hardening of the ego. One's age is where the two meet.
“Was that the beep? Is this thing still recording?
“Oh! That’s right! I was calling about your hair. You look strange as a brunette. Go back to being blond. You're a natural blond, live it up! I know plenty of girls who would kill for your hair. Anyhow, I just wanted to say hello. I love you my Lucy bear. Speak to you soon. Bye-bye.”
[Lucy] That day, finally, I let myself be free of Sebastian. I washed myself of him in my art studio, the haunted spare room in the apartment. I looked at the canvas on my easel. It was thick with all the failures painted on each other in oil paints (Sebastian always encouraged me to use oil paints because, “that’s what real artists do”). I had covered each one over by my own, dissatisfied hand. My sculpture of false starts.
I sat down and picked up my brush. I promised it would be the last time I painted over that canvas. That night, start to finish, without a break, I painted what I later called, "self-portrait of my infatuation with him."
It was a nice painting to look at, but the more you looked the more disturbing it became. On a rock, floating in the sky above a windswept vista, were Sebastian and myself. Sebastian was hardly on the canvas at all, his body mostly cut off by the edge of the frame. It wasn't about him. It was about me. In the center was me, looking at his face, my smile was bigger than Sebastian's. His hands were on my ass; my hands were on his chest. I painted his face to be far more handsome than he is in real life. But as you scan down his body, it slowly and subtly melted. My body did the same when scanned from the bottom to the top, which created a sort of counter-clockwise spiral effect. The sky around us was brilliantly lit from the glow of a setting sun. The view below the rock, the windswept vista itself, was filled with friendly faces and opened doors, obscured and blurrier, but closer than they first appear. Like one of those films he loved so much, the thin veneer of romance hardly covered an ugly reality. It recreated the moment that felt perfect for the mind I had at the time, but completely disconnected from the life I wanted. I wanted my life to be made from blood and dirt and fire.
And thus, it had finished. I mourned the end of an era by brushing my teeth and going to bed.
The next day I woke early with my alarm. I leaned the previous night's painting against the wall by the window and clipped a small sheet of paper to the easel. I didn't know what I wanted to paint, but I knew it had to be still and quiet and patient.
I dipped my brush into some light blue watercolor and began painting a portrait of the ghost that haunted my studio.
1.
[Lucy] People expect me to have a favorite painter, as if influence is that simple.
I oblige them when they ask though. Sometimes I say Picasso. Sometimes Rembrandt. Van Gogh. I like Van Gogh because of the leaps he takes in translating the world we share to the world he sees. He filters out everything that isn't unique to his imagination's eye, everything that isn’t beautiful. If I'm in the mood to make people roll their eyes, and I often am, I'll say, 'Zora Neale Hurston because she paints with words' or 'Wagner because he paints with sounds.'
None of it's true.
Painting is like being a prism. Into the painter shines the same bland, white light that touches everywhere else in the world. My job is to transform it to something multifaceted and beautiful. From there, the refracted light bounces back into the world. Mostly, it's misplaced. It's absorbed into fabrics and buildings until it's lost and gone forever. But sometimes it finds its way into an appreciative mind, which is both lucky and rare.
You're probably rolling your eyes at this. Don't worry, that's a perfectly normal reaction. I'd be doing the same if the observation weren’t coming from me. I don't limit it to painters. We all do this; we're all creative. We all reshape the world with our imaginations' eyes in the same way Van Gogh did. For some people it's sports. For some people it's fashion. Politics. Religion. For some it's family. I wish mine were family. The only family I have left is Ellie, the lady I grew up next-door to, she used to baby-sit me as a kid. So mine happens to be called art, the most pretentious description for creativity ever uttered. But everyone does it. We all touch the same world with our fingers, the shared world. And that touch changes it. Our own perspective makes it all beautiful to someone or someone else. At least everyone who is awake does this.
I'm less idealistic than I used to be. Some people, I now realize, it’s not that they’re uncreative. They’re simply not expressive. I don’t mean they're boring either. I mean they're in the audience. But, even being in the audience member you transform the light that shines on you. It's inevitable. Unavoidable.
That’s why I liked Sebastian. I wasn’t a professional painter yet, and not even that much of an amateur if you count the previous year or so, but still: I was a painter who just needed to paint. Sebastian was nothing of the sort. He’s an audience member.
Painter and audience, myself and Sebastian, we were the perfect symbiotic relationship. That was my theory anyway. In practice, we were something else entirely.
I had a good job that, in theory, should have supported my ambitions. I had money for supplies. I didn’t construct my own canvasses any more. My color palate was bigger even than it was in college. I could afford my own two-bedroom flat, one room for sleeping, one for painting. The room for painting, at least according to the landlady, was haunted. I even had time. I sat in there in front of a canvas five, six, seven times a week. I had a stack of bulk bought, plastic-wrapped canvasses leaning against the back wall of my studio. The only one that wasn’t blank was the one on my easel. Far from it. It had been painted over so many times that I was on the verge of considering it a sculpture.
The night before I washed myself of Sebastian, I was sitting at my canvas when he called and asked me over to watch a movie. I wasn't actually painting and really didn't have the desire to start. So I said yes and got on the 71 bus to his place.
[Sebastian] We watched one of my favorite romantic comedies. It was the one where the girl and the boy end up falling madly in love with each other.
Of course, the story didn't work out quite so simply, it never does. The two hated each other at first. Complete opposites. Nobody thought they could work as a couple. All they had in common were their staggeringly-charming-girl-and-boy-next-door good looks. She took a job in Texas to get away from him, for Christ's sake! But he undertook a heart wrenching recalculation of his life, raced to the airport (where he bought a ticket for that day, very expensive) and made her love him.
I loved romantic comedies. Absolutely true. I used to coddle that information close to my chest. It was my secret pet. I'd let it out to play with my closest friends and people who I wanted to impress, but no one else. One’s quirk is only endearing if you try to keep it a secret. I figured that standing up for uncool taste in films made me into some sort of anti-rebel against hipster malaise in favor of genuine pleasure. I knew romantic comedies (never call them “rom-coms”) were shallow, but the idea of love inspired me, what's wrong with that? It showed character, I told myself.
They’re not chick flicks, and I resent anyone who claims they are. Romantic comedies are for anyone who has ever dared to dream that love might be his. Last time I checked, that’s all of us. Just because women are allowed to be open with their feelings doesn't mean men don't have them. I most certainly have feelings. Big feelings. Overwhelming feelings. I probably have more romantic hopes than most people. Sometimes it’s crushing.
Do you know what? I’ll go further. Romantic comedies are secretly made for men. I think they are. Men as a whole are more romantic than women. Think about how the different genders choose a partner.
Women choose one man and believe in him against all odds. They work at the relationship. They try to change their man. Mould him, craft him, shape him into some model of perfection to show off to their friends. And they think it’s achievable! It’s not romantic in the least. That's pragmatism and an inconceivable way of thinking. Women read about relationships in books, for Christ’s sake. Books!!
When was the last time you saw an 18th century Romantic crack open a book about meteorology? Never. Romantics stand on a cliff and anxiously await the coming storm. Romantics have despair. They’re overwhelmed. Helpless. And that is exactly what men are!
We fall in love with dozens of women in a second. Nearly every woman could be The One. I can't walk down the street without falling in love at least twice. That's why we never say 'no' to sex. It's not because we're secretly perverse animals in heat. We're complex creatures. If a woman wants to have sex with us, even if it's just fucking, we can't say no and potentially disrupt destiny. It's an opportunity to make love, and love is all any man wants. We must be ready at a moment's notice. We stay emotionally detached from our girlfriends so we can break it off fast if we ever have to follow our hearts.
Men are Don Quixote. Women are Sancho Panza.
As you can see, my years of obsessing over romantic comedies eventually crystallized into a solid theory. My obsession grew to the point that I stopped renting romantic comedies. I would just walk into a video store and buy whichever ones were on sale. I’d even watch them alone sometimes.
Watching them alone can be depressing. I'm not totally naive. The feelings are relatively plastic and when the movie ends, it leaves you in an empty apartment with nothing but dishes to clean. You’re feeling all bloated and jowly from the tub of cookie dough ice cream you ate. If you’re alone when you watch them, you really feel it.
Luckily, Lucy and I were able to have a quick fuck before she headed home. So the movie left me feeling affirmed in my life.
[Lucy] I'm not a fool; I knew what I was getting myself into. Sebastian gets stoned on Thursdays. On most days really. So I knew he'd have pot. That's fine; we smoked it and then watched his movie. After that we ate junk food and had sex. The evening was pretty par for the course.
Once in a while I would sleep over, but not very often. Certainly not as often as I did the dishes while he stood in the kitchen and blathered on about how, “defining our relationship might stifle our feelings, you know?”
That night, I didn't expect how good the movie would be. Years of Art had turned me hard. I loved Sebastian as the audience member. He was the one who got excited about movies and things. That night, it reminded me of who I wanted to be and why I liked him. I could never quite explain it to my friends. I struggled to enjoy other people's work. I was jealous or judgmental or rude, but I realized I had forgotten to be an audience member. Sebastian was the anti-painter. He's simple and beautiful. Instead of being a prism, he basked in the rainbow. He genuinely loved to look at art, something I'd come to disdain after all those years of constantly comparing myself to anything remotely good. Sebastian was the quintessential audience member. I realized I had no idea who I was.
The movie's plot was so predictable that I'm not even going to spend my time explaining it to you. I didn't care about the plot. The plot had been produced by 15 year olds on an assembly line in China, stuffed with cotton and sold to tourists at Pier 39. The plot was a humming, white light from a florescent bulb. The plot didn't impress me.
The characters, alternatively, they were magnificent.
I was 24. I never claimed that was old; I was smarter than that. But I knew my purest years were behind me. The time of single-minded obsession had passed. The years when love was everything and then gone in an instant. Where life brimmed so high with potential that sometimes it wasn't worth living. The mind of a teenage girl is like that of a monk in meditation: a mind of utter focus and determination. The characters in the movie simply wanted what they wanted and they wanted each other in a way I've never wanted anything. Desire brings with it self-sacrifice and drama. Finding and having each other was their personal revolution, to be won at all costs. The characters in that movie believed in a way I had forgotten and never really knew. I never wanted Sebastian like that. I never wanted myself like that. I never wanted painting or art like that.
Ironically (and to my great excitement) I wanted to express this, I wanted to paint. I saw the shapes and the movements of my brush. I saw the textures and I saw the colors reflecting in my imagination before me, but my canvas was across town. It was too far away. I went through the motions with Sebastian, hardly speaking, hardly listening as he waxed on about love and I waxed off the dry ketchup from his dirty plates. I felt like I'd never be allowed to leave. The night wouldn't end. It was a slow escalator climbing to where the oxygen was thin.
By the time I got home, the impulse had passed. I didn't even go to the spare bedroom, my haunted art studio. I put on my pajamas and went to bed. I didn't even have the energy to brush my teeth.
[Sebastian] The next morning, I woke up and felt completely affirmed in every choice I had ever made. I was affirmed in the shower. I was affirmed when I skipped breakfast. My life was affirmed when I got a seat on BART during rush hour and affirmed as I walked into work to prep for my big interview. The feelings were prompted by Hollywood stars and pop music, and so were underpinned with desperation and regret. Still though, life was good. Love exists. It was only a matter of time before I found it.
The interview, by the way, was for a position that had opened up in my company and they were considering me. I was to be a Regional Marketing Director at the tech company I worked for. I had been waging a campaign to get them to consider me for months. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I was sleeping with Lucy, who was the boss’ assistant, but ultimately I earned the opportunity on my own. Finally, that day of all days, the day of affirmation, I gave my mock presentation for my company's directors.
I nailed it. My PowerPoint kicked ass. All my jokes landed. They even bought my fake pitch. But it was that little extra bit, that life-affirming confidence I had with me when I walked into the room that I was sure had put me over the top.
I definitely nailed it, I figured, so I decided to treat myself. Organic crab and avocado wrap with extra chipotle aioli down at the farmer’s market at the Ferry Building. It would have meant an extra set at the gym, but it turned out I’d be pressing something else that night.
I had just taken my first bite, when I saw her, The One.
2.
[Stacey] I was so exhausted that rest only made it worse. I felt as though a small seed was budding deep inside my body. It physically pained me. Actually, to make you understand, I think I have to jump back about five years. Sorry.
My mother had just died of AIDS. Five years before that, it got really bad. Actually, you probably already knew that; her obituary appeared in just about every major newspaper, so I'm sorry. In the event that you hadn't heard, my mother was Gail Hendrix. Activist, author, lecturer, thinker by day and my mother in her spare time.
And so, I have a confession: I once mistakenly thought she died and I was relieved. I took a well-deserved deep breath. I'm not a bad person, and neither was she, per se. To understand it, you'll need to listen to a bit more of the story. I'm prefacing again. I do that too much. I'm sorry but before I get to the story, let me say that I know I apologize too much also. I'm working on it. I'm sorry in advance.
The story goes like this:
I moved home from New York to the Houston suburbs, Clear Lake to be exact, to care for my mother. Her nurse, a real nurse, called me on the phone to explain that only a lover or daughter could stay long enough to give her the emotional care she deserved. I explained to the nurse that lovers aren’t known for sticking around. And she said, “Fine, a daughter it is.” I said, “Fantastic.” And so I stayed, accepting payment in something other than money, more or less valuable, I still don't know. But I stayed, more or less unable to quit.
My mother was a very smart woman. Too smart. She could follow even the thinnest and most tenuous thread of a thought well beyond where most minds could cope. She would hang her whole self on that fragile thought. I hated her for it as a child. I admired her for it as an adult. And I resented her for it as her personal carer. She would get lost in herself and let the rest of her life, the real part where I lived, get blurry.
Lost somewhere in that land of hers, she forgot to take her medication. The virus mutated beyond where medicine could cope and she soon deteriorated beyond the ability for self-care. The same trait that gave her life renown also brought it destruction. Irony. She wanted to write a book about it, but she never got past the first few pages. Her hands and stamina failed her. She never asked me for help.
What AIDS does to a person is absolutely horrible. It tore my mother apart from her DNA outwards. For five years I watched as it happened. I cleaned her body and her wounds, while maintaining her unrelenting cocktail of medication even though it did her no good. I visited a different free clinic every three months in fear that I had contracted the disease myself.
She didn't suffer gracefully. I can't fault her for it. Grace in suffering is a bit of an oxymoron, certainly one I would never judge someone by. Personally, I've never really suffered beyond trapping myself in the normal self-righteousness that imprisons all upper-middle class teenagers. I’ve suffered from my own self pity induced by an over abundance of choice in my life. I’ve suffered from my incessantly chattering mind. My mother actually suffered. I don't actually know, but I think that grace blossoms from a blessing rather than in spite of a tragedy. If grace is to be found in a tragedy, it's unexpected. If not, it's forgiven.
The expectation of catharsis remained a powerful force, however. I stayed running on the fume of a hope that we would have one of those made-for-TV mother/daughter moments of understanding. We had no special moment because, and this is just a theory, over time her pain and embarrassment lowered me to a level below gratitude in her eyes. She had always been fond of telling me that we only see what we want to see in situations because the brain is wired to support its own comfortable, selfish world view. At the end she couldn't even look at me. Some nights I would sit outside her bedroom and cry. And I was certain I could hear the same sounds coming from within. But again, it might have been an illusion kept alight by that same fume of hope.
My confession, that the first time I thought she had died I felt relief, came from an episode during the summer. One hot afternoon, standard Texas fare, I hadn't breathed the fresh air in three days and she had her first seizure. It marked the beginning of the second worst period of care. I had never seen anything like it. I tried to shove a wooden spoon in her mouth, Hollywood first aid, but she nearly bit my finger off so I gave up. All I managed to do was freak out. Sweaty. Heart pounding. Stiff as a board. Flailing. I could do nothing. Helpless. As helpless as I'd ever felt. I understand why they call it seizing.
When it stopped, the world resumed with odd stillness. I sat on the edge of her bed and looked down at her. I believed so clearly her death was real. We only see what we want to see; we only know what we want to know.
Sitting on her bed, I rested my hand on her forehead and brushed her hair back. I kissed her on her decrepit forehead. “She has died,” I thought. “At last. Thank god. I'm free.” I felt tears well up in my throat and spill out from my eyes. I threw my head back and started laughing, snot rolling into my mouth. I must have looked like such an evil wreck.
When I reached for the phone to call the hospital, I swear her eyes were closed. I swear it. I pressed the speed dial for the hospital and stood as it began to ring.
At about the time they answered, I looked back at my mom. She wasn’t moving, hands stiff and neck stern but eyes opened. Eyes opened and staring straight back at me. My heart turned to ice. I just remember screaming over and over, pressing my back against the door. She just kept staring at me.
That evening, after seven hours of ignoring the TV in the hospital waiting room, the doctor finally came in and talked to me. He said she would be fine, but I was to add an anti-seizure drug to her cocktail. I tried to argue with him about the half dozen more pills he recommended to deal with added side effects, but in the end, I consented.
She didn't die for another thirteen months after that, and while I'm in the business of sharing uncomfortable revelations, let me admit that I was relieved then too. I wanted to believe that she hung on all that time to torture me, but the truth is that she hung on to torture herself. She was not a happy woman.
I'm sorry. That story took way too long. I'm not as bad as all that. I do like to laugh. Thanks for listening, though. It felt good to get it off my chest.
I lived in that empty house for seven months. The phrase "my home" that I'd used blithely all my life took on a new, stark and specific meaning. I told myself that I had spent those seven months resting but I never felt any better. I couldn’t tell if the smell had been cleared from the empty rooms or just from my head. I had money, my mom was rich and I could have retired. But I needed to busy myself. I needed a job.
I had two requirements for this mysterious job. One, it should take me far away from Houston. Two, it should start very, very soon. I had to muster an immense effort to even start looking, and hardly anyone responded to my resume, but I got a few bites. In a truly classic-me move, I assumed that all the responses were in error.
That's how I ended up in San Francisco that day: interview to be a Regional Marketing Director at some tech company. My qualifications in no way matched the job, but whatever. They flew me out, put me up in a hotel room. I needed a vacation and I liked the idea of someone else paying for it. I planned to raid the mini-bar and get room service up the wazoo. I tried to imagine myself having wild victory sex, but I thought I'd never allow myself to go there. Besides, what with my mother just dying of AIDS, I didn’t want to tempt fate.
My name's Stacy, by the way. Hi. I'm HIV negative. Yay!
3.
[Sebastian] The sun shining brightly, I saw her as I walked across the big square in front of the Embarcadero Center. I had to climb to the top of The Column, a performance art stage that wasn’t used anymore, to get a proper look. Her hair. Her stance. Her amazing body. She threw her hair back to reveal her face. Her face. I wondered if anyone else saw that face but me.
It was definitely Her. The One. I knew it. I just knew.
I stared at her in awe, she was on the phone. Good news or bad, I couldn't tell, but I hoped it was good news. An angel like this only deserved the best of what the world can concoct for a person. I lost my senses so thoroughly that I dropped my organic crab and avocado wrap and it fell all the way to the ground. I heard the chipotle aioli splatter but I didn't look. I'm amazed I didn't fall to the ground myself.
She hung up. She did a little dance. In that moment, I felt the weight carried by this woman fly off her shoulders, right past me, and away to the heavens forever. It took all my will power to stop myself from walking down. She had to come up. I had to kiss her for the first time where I stood. The last first kiss of my life, I thought. High above the square for everyone to see.
I called to her.
[Stacey] "Hey!" interrupted a voice from above. Literally from above. From the top of an ugly pillar in the middle of the square. "Hey you!" he repeated.
I looked at him for a moment. He looked familiar, but I couldn't place it. The sun shone on his back and, though I squinted, I couldn’t make out his face. Who was he? A friend? A celebrity? "Hi?" I called back, "I'm Stacy."
"Sebastian.” I didn't know a Sebastian, did I? No, I absolutely did not. Standing on the threshold between anger and curiosity, I felt the corners of my mouth fold into a smirk as I chose curiosity. “Are you coming up?" he repeated.
Any other day I would have run away, and that day the impulse still lived. But that day, wordlessly, I started to climb. I was in a new city, hardly ten minutes out of my interview when I got a call offering me the job, and suddenly, there’s a man. On a pillar. Calling me. Life was good in that moment. Or at least it was interesting.
The path to the top of the pillar wrapped around it like a spiral staircase. The last step was the biggest and most dangerous. I doubted I needed a hand, but I accepted his anyway.
“Good news?” he asked.
I had no idea what he was talking about.
“On the phone,” he said. “I saw you celebrate something with a dance. You looked happy.”
Okay, that was a little bit creepy, but I was already on the pillar. I swallowed and I went with it. “Yeah,” I said. “I was just offered a job.”
“Take it,” he said grabbing me around the waist.
“I don’t know, I…”
“Life is about choice. Make this one. Our connection is undeniable. Choose passion. Choose us.”
I wish I were as naïve as him, but I’m not. Passion dies but family is constant. We can't always take care of ourselves, so we need people to help us at our lowest points. Love isn't an observation of desire; it's a promise to stay to the end. Marriage, among the biggest of commitments we can make, is the one chance we have to choose our family, to commit to live love as a promise.
But in that moment, I realized that people need each other for other things as well. Sometimes those things are very base. They're sweaty, dirty, forbidden needs couched entirely in pleasure. The timeline of those needs is often very short, but necessary nonetheless. I'd always done my best to deny those needs and categorize them as worse or lesser. But in that moment, wanting to practice saying 'yes', I realized that the scenario I played in my mind, the sweaty dirty forbidden one, could be real. If only temporary, it could be real. I might say yes, I thought. I mean, the idea of it wasn’t totally unappealing.
[Sebastian] We both felt the electricity.
She looked at me for a little while. There was so little room on the top of that column that we were already inches from each other. But still, I put my arms around her and pulled her in closer. I could feel her breathing in her stomach, her heart in her chest. I could feel mine. I looked back and forth between her eyes, down at her mouth.
"You have some mayonnaise on your face." she said.
[Stacy] “It’s organic chipotle aioli,” was his reply with no irony in his voice. I think he thought it was sexy. I didn't want to, but I couldn't help laughing. He was such a cliché San Francisco fake hippy loser.
"Did I get it?" he said.
He didn't get it at all.
[Sebastian] She didn't answer. I’m sure she would have, but we were beyond words. I kissed her mouth. I felt urgency in her lips and tongue. Relief. I embraced her tightly, matching her urgency and raising it higher. I don't know how long that kiss lasted, but the moment is like a black hole in my memory. No other sensations can compare. It was everything.
When we pulled away, I noticed a glob of mayonnaise on her cheek. "You have a little something on your..." I wiped it off with my thumb.
"Thanks."
"So…" I said licking my thumb clean.
She laughed. I did too.
[Stacey] I laughed. I couldn't help it. It was all so ridiculous. Fuck it, I thought. This was all a bit forward for me, but fuck it. Ha! Fuck it! I mean, shit, my life in that moment consisted of standing on a pillar about to get naked with a complete stranger! Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it!
[Sebastian] And there, on top of that piece of public art, we kissed again.
4.
[Ellie] “How are you, Lucy? It’s Ellie. I just called to say hi and send my love.
“There was something I meant to tell you. Darn it, what was it? I’m on the machine and I can’t remember. It was from when we had coffee last week. You didn't look so good, I remember that. You said you were happy, but I don’t believe you.
“You’re just like you were as a little girl. You'll always be that little girl to me, I don't care what happens. The boys had moved out by then and I hardly had a month to relax before your mother, rest her soul, knocked on my door and asked if I could watch you for the day. One day, that was supposed to be it, if you believe that.
“You had a basketball, with you, I remember that. Why you had a basketball, I'll never know because the first thing you did when you came into my house was drop the ball and let it roll away, right across my living room floor.
“You went straight for my easel set and, before I could stop you, you already painted all over my canvas. It didn’t matter, I was just copying the man on TV. From that first painting you were already better than me. Truly.
“And that afternoon, and every afternoon for years, five times a week, sometimes six, we'd paint together. I doubt you even remember, but those were some of the best memories I have in this old head of mine. I do hope you're painting again by now. You are so talented.
“You can grow up all you want but you'll always be that little girl to me; the little girl with the long blonde hair and a paintbrush in her hand.
“Maybe that's the reason you didn't look very good. Because I can only see that little girl inside you. We're never as good as when we were children. We're never as much ourselves as when we were young. You must have been lying to yourself about something or something else. Lie all you want, but never lie to yourself. It's those lies we tell to ourselves that make us old. They block ourselves from who we really are. Remember that. Humility is nothing more than being honest to yourself. Growing old is the hardening of the ego. One's age is where the two meet.
“Was that the beep? Is this thing still recording?
“Oh! That’s right! I was calling about your hair. You look strange as a brunette. Go back to being blond. You're a natural blond, live it up! I know plenty of girls who would kill for your hair. Anyhow, I just wanted to say hello. I love you my Lucy bear. Speak to you soon. Bye-bye.”
[Lucy] That day, finally, I let myself be free of Sebastian. I washed myself of him in my art studio, the haunted spare room in the apartment. I looked at the canvas on my easel. It was thick with all the failures painted on each other in oil paints (Sebastian always encouraged me to use oil paints because, “that’s what real artists do”). I had covered each one over by my own, dissatisfied hand. My sculpture of false starts.
I sat down and picked up my brush. I promised it would be the last time I painted over that canvas. That night, start to finish, without a break, I painted what I later called, "self-portrait of my infatuation with him."
It was a nice painting to look at, but the more you looked the more disturbing it became. On a rock, floating in the sky above a windswept vista, were Sebastian and myself. Sebastian was hardly on the canvas at all, his body mostly cut off by the edge of the frame. It wasn't about him. It was about me. In the center was me, looking at his face, my smile was bigger than Sebastian's. His hands were on my ass; my hands were on his chest. I painted his face to be far more handsome than he is in real life. But as you scan down his body, it slowly and subtly melted. My body did the same when scanned from the bottom to the top, which created a sort of counter-clockwise spiral effect. The sky around us was brilliantly lit from the glow of a setting sun. The view below the rock, the windswept vista itself, was filled with friendly faces and opened doors, obscured and blurrier, but closer than they first appear. Like one of those films he loved so much, the thin veneer of romance hardly covered an ugly reality. It recreated the moment that felt perfect for the mind I had at the time, but completely disconnected from the life I wanted. I wanted my life to be made from blood and dirt and fire.
And thus, it had finished. I mourned the end of an era by brushing my teeth and going to bed.
The next day I woke early with my alarm. I leaned the previous night's painting against the wall by the window and clipped a small sheet of paper to the easel. I didn't know what I wanted to paint, but I knew it had to be still and quiet and patient.
I dipped my brush into some light blue watercolor and began painting a portrait of the ghost that haunted my studio.