Chapter 31
31
The next day, or whenever, it is midday on a weekday. I don’t know which. One of the nurses has told me to say affirmations into the mirror and so I do, when I remember, in the bathroom.
I am strong.
I am full of ease.
I am hopeful.
I am hungry.
I do not look at my face exactly—that stopped years ago—but past it, past us, to a different time. It is not that I’m imagining youth. It is just that I am not imagining this.
In our room, you are in bright yellow pajamas in bed. They light up your face as though there is a spotlight under your chin. I’d like to ask you about color theory, about warmth and coolness. Instead, I reach for your hand and when I’ve got your stem fingers in mine, you nod, imperceptibly. Is this our secret language? I wonder. Or am I talking to myself?
Jane, I say. Do you remember that picnic in the Park—we were eating bagels and gravlax—when Max strolled through? He’d been somewhere on the Upper East Side, hadn’t he?
Where? I ask.
Maxine Bentley’s apartment, you say.
How do you remember? What were we celebrating? What about the sky?
That you don’t remember, you say. Me either. I wonder about that.
I ask you if you remember the blue-and-white blanket we used for years for our picnics. The one with the mustard stain in the corner. Whatever happened to it? Why do I long for it now?
Then you say that sometimes in the Park, but only in the Park for some reason, you were sure you saw Alice. But you never did.
Did you?
You go on.
You remember when you got into the Whitney, we celebrated at the Carlyle. You remember your show in Madrid when you sold all but one. You remember painting on linen, the smell of glue, your staple gun and how it was splattered dark green. You remember when a famous gallerist asked you to lunch and called you Joan and you corrected him and that was the last you heard from him.
Do you think we should have included Max? you say. In everything?
He wouldn’t have wanted to be included. He was a teenager. He was always with his friends.
But we’re both thinking about the trade-offs between ease and commitment, hardship and giving up. No one knows, I tell you, how to do it exactly.
Still, you remember things feeling easier for a while.
You remember painting a round of carousel horses for a private residence in the South of France, clay again, and then watercolor. I remember that you could do anything, make anything, make anything into art. You were covered in gold leaf for a year or so. It looked so ethereal on your skin. That, you were. Are.
You remember lentil soup with purple carrots, down coats as light as feathers, working with magnets and tiles, a little cactus in your studio that bloomed every season, differently though consistently, for years. You remember how we would walk to dinner on Columbus when the street was slick black and it smelled like pine and also soy sauce, and how the lights reflected in the puddles and on the glass doors, and you thought, holding my hand, No one can take this from us.
You remember how Max always carried a notebook, as we did, and also a pen. You remember how he went out a lot and some nights he slept out. And even though he never told you anything about anything, you didn’t worry that he wouldn’t be okay. You trusted him and that felt like a feat.
You remember painting plates and how they basically made us rich. And how that surprised you. That you could never guess. You remember meeting other artists and always thinking they were either farther along or farther behind. Especially the men.
You remember how we used to sit on the sofa and read the same books so we could talk about them as soon as we both were done. You remember when we started cooking for my mother—carrot ginger soup, bean burgers, salmon cakes—and how you used to beg her to move in. I’m too young for that, she’d say. She was not.
You remember my teal computer, our corn muffin phase, standing outside Shakespeare we were lucky to know only one—and how I wouldn’t let you volunteer below Fourteenth Street because we couldn’t take any chances. It is not my lungs, you said.
And yet.
You remember the perfect cherry red, an easel that always tilted right, when Leo Sinsky got stabbed (he was all right, though he died of an accidental overdose not long after), listening to opera, locking the door, and me showing up with grilled cheese.
You remember seeing your work in Paris (we both went, Max stayed home, took Bubbe to dinner), escargot and the Eiffel Tower and a store that sold only lavender oil. You remember when I did a reading in the Louvre. You remember your brief fascination with using butterflies, a needle tool that you had for fifteen, maybe twenty years, and when you dropped a roll of canvas on your toe and how, in the emergency room, the doctor had to drill a hole in your nail to release the pressure. Let me do it, you’d said to him. Let me, he’d said back.
You remember, when you weren’t sick, we worried about you getting sick again but we never talked about it directly. I know because if we saw an ad in the paper for the hospital, or a person in a wheelchair, or we had to write down our medical history for the dermatologist (age spots!), our faces and voices would lift. Like hiking up pants. And suddenly, we’d talk more quickly, more superficially. Play it cool.
You remember your collection of pearls on tiny canvases. Lulu. It took you years and years and years.
You remember an article in which they called your success hard-won.
Why do you remember that? I ask.
It made me think of my mother, you say. How she struggled. What she had to show for it, at the end.
You? I say.
You.
I do remember Alice, you say then. Do you? I say. I don’t know, you say. I can’t know.
You look out the window. There is a copper beech we named Ginger Rogers, and a whole collection of birches, and birdhouses, wind chimes. You rub your ears. You rub your eyes. I want to ask you what you’re thinking but I apologize instead.
Let’s keep going, you say. Instead.
You remember your mother’s hands. She smelled like jasmine and cigarettes and called you Habibibaby. You remember her slow walk, hands around a wineglass, hands in your hands—like birch branches? Tulip petals? Those twiggy dried things on the beach. You remember she told you that she used to sneak kebabs from the Muslim butcher. You loved to imagine her young. She used to rest her chin on her shoulder to think. You do the same. It always comes back to the mother, I think. Doesn’t it?
This time, you don’t tell me the answer. Maybe it is too much. Now you are looking at the ceiling, your eyes flitting back and forth as if there were a poem up there in ink. Read to me.
Out of nowhere you say: I think the saddest part of a novel is that you can’t take it in all at once.
Is it?
Maybe that’s why you painted, I say. To stand back. For the flush of feeling like that.
But you aren’t listening.
It is not that I haven’t had a full life, you say. You trail off. I can’t tell if you’re crying or if it’s just your eyes. You close them.
Jane, don’t go.
Your words are sparks in the night.
It hurts, you say then. It hurts.
What can I do but hold on to you? I do.