17 GREEN CLING OF THE TRAMPLED
17
G REEN C LING OF THE T RAMPLED
On Thursday, we took the train into Chicago. It was the kind of cold outside that made it hurt to breathe, cold the color of frostbite, cold like the dizzying scent of woodsmoke. The landscape beyond the train’s windows was a sheen of gray and white, snow over everything, trees bending with the weight. It was the first time I’d been off campus in weeks. I didn’t realize I was bouncing my knee nervously until Finch turned around in the seat in front of me to tell me to stop.
I sat with Saz, who slept on my shoulder the whole three-hour ride, bundled up in a puffy pink coat that nearly swallowed her whole. Her head poked out of the collar, a dark lump of hair brushing my chin whenever I shifted. The peachy warmth of her shampoo and her floral perfume rose around me in a cloud. She’d been quiet after the Survey decision, some of her light snuffed out, listless in her desires and her willingness to show up nearly on time for class. It was hard to get her out of bed before. Now she rarely set an alarm.
The city was adorned for the holidays with the same grace of a department store window, wreaths around the lampposts and the necks of statues, slush in the streets, gold lights glittering from awnings. We got off the Amtrak and took the L straight to the Art Institute of Chicago, where we’d spend the day considering influences for our thesis papers and examining the latest exhibitions. It was supposed to be a treat, Moody told us. A chance to think about something other than Solo and its inevitability—or, for the other six painters, its impossibility. She was our steadfast leader in fitted brown trousers, a thick beige turtleneck, and a pair of frameless glasses. Out of all the cliques that had formed within our class—Veda and Phoebe and Yejun clustered at the front vying for Moody’s attention, Cameron with his arm around Mars, Thea behind them throwing looks over her shoulder at Finch—our five remained surprisingly quiet. Saz kept her arm looped in mine but her eyes on her phone. Finch checked her watch with a frown. Amrita sipped from a cup of train coffee that smelled amazing, but after she offered me a taste it settled on my tongue like tar. Caroline was dressed like she had come for a funeral: black dress to her knees, tall boots that rose to meet its hem, hair whipping in the wind. The only color was in the faint dusting of blue over her eyelids and the bloody bitten line of her mouth.
Painting students at Rotham made this trip annually. Past visits to the Art Institute had been some of my favorite extracurricular experiences—campus was so isolated from the rest of the world that it was hard to spend time with work that wasn’t a part of Rotham’s collection. Knowing that our thesis papers would play a part in who would Solo amped up the stress as the deadline loomed closer. I had a sketchbook in my bag with a pen hooked over its cover ready for the occasion. In its current state, my paper consisted of nothing more than fragments and the beginning of a thought from my notes app where I had started to type out a thought and fell asleep halfway through, the text devolving into a long line of hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh where my thumb had pressed down in my sleep.
We split up inside the museum, and I took my time meandering. Yearly visits had given me time to curate out my favored niches. I liked to start in the Arts of the Americas exhibition; there was always a crowd around Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks , but I circumvented them in favor of trompe l’oeil still lifes of fruit and skinned birds, an avant-garde Florine Stettheimer portrait that reminded me of Saz, lush Georgia O’Keeffe watercolors, a sweet Mary Cassatt depicting a woman bathing a child’s feet. I took the long way around past the blue glow of Marc Chagall’s stained-glass windows, through the Photography and Media gallery with Sally Mann’s Immediate Family gelatin silver prints. Upstairs, I didn’t slow until I reached the gallery I loved the most—Painting and Sculpture of Europe.
My affection had nothing to do with Europe itself. It was in the expansive nature of the collection—the massive Impressionistic pieces and sweeping old master paintings, that haunting intersection of religious iconography, fleeting glances of eighteenth-century life, Romantic disasters at sea. Again, I bypassed the spectators admiring Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and sought out a few of my favorites: Resting by Antonio Mancini, in which a nude woman reclined among downy pillows, her expression distraught, the paint built up with such a thick impasto effect that it seemed like she had been carved out of clay. Jules Adolphe Breton’s portrait The Song of the Lark , depicting a lone barefoot woman in a field as she stood under a setting sun with a sickle in hand and her mouth hanging open as if in mid-plea. Then Juan Sánchez Cotán’s still lifes of hanging fowl and peeled melon waiting to be devoured, hunger coiling in my stomach.
Finally, Francisco Goya’s Boy on a Ram . It was a painting I returned to without fail. A young boy sat on a ram’s back in decadent clothing. His hammy fist raised a switch high in the air. The ram beneath him had its head twisted away from the switch and the leaning boy, one serpentine eye gleaming red and wide. Behind them was a pastoral landscape, barely sketched out in pastel greens and blues. The boy’s face was doll-like and blank. I’d sketched the composition a hundred times. I’d used the ram itself as inspiration for my Grotesque mask. There was something fascinating about the eerie distance of the boy’s expression, the ram’s wild eye, the startling juxtaposition of the boy’s prepared violence and the idyllic landscape.
I leaned as close to the painting as I could manage without tripping any alarms. The overheads illuminated the boy’s bulbous eyes and cherubic cheeks. Beneath one of the eyes I found a slit—the finest cut in canvas, a weeping wound.
Blinking wouldn’t banish the sight. It only revealed new slices to me unfurling all over the boy’s body, his fine clothes, the ram’s toiling head. It looked like someone had taken an X-Acto knife to the whole portrait. Beneath each fine laceration was a black gap, an oily promise, like tearing open the fabric of a night sky and letting stardust pour out. A high-pitched whine kicked off in my ears, a close and bleating scream, the kind that nearly sent me to my knees.
“Miss! Step back!”
It took me far too long to register that the voice was aimed at me. My vision stuttered, and I yanked my hand back. One finger had been pressed to the surface of the painting, a nail digging against the ram’s eye, threatening to puncture right through the canvas. I rocked away from the painting and held my hands up in defense. The shrill noise finally stopped ringing in my ears—it had been the sound of the alarm going off when a body got too close to the art.
The glaring security guard who had reprimanded me had one hand on his radio. “No touching the paintings. I have to ask you to move on before we need to escort you from the building.”
“Right, sorry, I’m so sorry.” My heart was pounding. “I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry.”
Every head in the room pointed in my direction. A quick and grateful glance told me that none of my women had witnessed my fuckup. The only familiar face I landed on was Thea, standing in the doorway to the gallery with her eyes narrowed directly on me. Cameron followed close behind her, laughing at something Mars said as they trailed in. I sped past them with the boy on his ram at my back, canvas unblemished despite the threat my thumb had posed. Like wiggling a finger into a wound and working it open, exposing the meat underneath.
The image was difficult to shake. I was scaring myself.
Unsettled, I wandered Contemporary Art in search of an escape, plucked a piece from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s carefully weighed mountain of plastic-wrapped candies and sucked it around my tongue for a sugar distraction, lingered by Kerry James Marshall’s massive Many Mansions , let myself get lost in one of Agnes Martin’s untitled grids. The abstract pieces in this gallery reminded me of Saz: Eva Hesse, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, explosions of color and expressive brushstrokes. Finally, I found the back of a familiar head in the center of the room, seated before a Cy Twombly painting.
I slid onto the bench next to Finch and sat on my hands to hide the way they were shaking. “Knew I’d find you here,” I said.
She was quiet, focused on Twombly’s Untitled (to Sappho) . I watched her for a moment—her sharp profile, straight nose, fluttering lashes. Most of her hair was pulled away from her face with a clip, but choppy strands hung across her brow. Beneath them, her eyes flickered back and forth, back and forth.
I followed her gaze to the painting. It was a framed sheet of paper about the width and height of my arms if I held them out at my sides, mostly blank space, the creamy color of milk gone slightly beige with age and time. There were smudges and flecks of paint marked in spots. Accident, or the smallest hint of detail. On the left side was an oily purple mass, like a scribble marked out in crayon, the kind of shape you might imagine hanging over a cartoon character’s head after an argument. A cloud of lavender and graphite, layer upon layer of wax and pencil. And to the bottom right were Sappho’s words in Twombly’s frenetic handwriting:
Voice like a hyacinth in
the mountains, trampled
by shepherds until
only a purple stain
remains on the ground
“He loved ancient Greece,” Finch said. She was crying a little. She did that sometimes when she really loved a painting. The corners of her eyes glimmered with the feeling, and I pretended not to notice out of fear that my concern might make her stop speaking. “He’s from Virginia, though I’m sure you know that. But he had a studio in Rome. People always look at his work and say shit like ‘I could do that’ or ‘It looks like a child painted it,’ but they don’t see how devotional it is, how he linked this modern practice to such an enduring mythology, how he gave us these stories of divinity and queerness and devotion.”
Finch shook her head and sucked her bottom lip between her teeth, then the top. “It’s a sad fucking poem about the way marriage changes a woman. The girl’s the hyacinth. We don’t know how the marriage unfolds. We just know she’s lost her freedom along the way. The original poem doesn’t include the word voice , but I like to think that by adding it, he’s telling us someone is speaking the words aloud and giving the painting a voice of its own. I don’t know, I probably sound ridiculous. It’s tough to even decipher his handwriting. But that’s how the words make me feel. Like by reading the poem aloud with him, I’m following instructions and becoming that voice.”
I didn’t try to interrupt. Just let her ramble on about the emotion in the downward slope of his handwriting, as if Twombly’s thoughts trailed off into nothing at the end. My gaze lingered on her thigh where I knew her own hyacinth was inked forever.
“I always think of you when I see this painting,” I admitted after we’d been staring in silence for a while. Her face crumpled. I slid a hand free and circled my fingers around her wrist. Held tight.
“Sometimes I worry that it’s a bad thing we know each other so well,” she said finally. “I think it’s hurting us.”
You don’t know everything about me, I wanted to say, but I was afraid it would be a lie. Instead, I shrugged and tried to keep my voice steady when I said, “I want to know you better than anyone. I don’t care if it hurts.”
Finch looked at me. Her smile was wry, her damp eyes halfway to rolling. “Fuck off,” she murmured, that smile growing. Her pulse pounded in the thin skin beneath my thumb.
I was afraid that by loving her, I’d leashed her. There was nowhere she could go where I hadn’t already touched. We were already so scuffed by each other and the downward spiral of this year. But the way she watched me was so open, so trusting, so calm—I wanted to tell her everything. The ripped-up ram. The Boar King in his front-row Survey seat. The figure at the edge of the pond, at the end of the bed, in the dark corners of my brain. The uneasiness Caroline’s presence produced and Saz’s desperate hope for magic.
But she had enough on her plate—we both did—with Solo’s impending threat and Caroline’s insistence on arguing. Despite her hardened exterior, Finch could be sensitive and overwarm, too willing to trust, too easy to wound. I wouldn’t be another perpetrator of that hurt. Couldn’t give her something else to worry about.
“There you are,” a hard voice said to my right. I looked up and met Caroline’s irritated expression. “You’re late. We were all supposed to meet Moody on the Grand Staircase for lunch.”
Her eyes flickered down to where I still held Finch’s wrist. Disdain warred with something heavier in her face. I pulled my hand away and let it fall in my lap.
“Sorry. Thanks for finding us.”
Finch tucked her hands back in her jacket pockets. She wouldn’t look at me. I felt as if I’d done something wrong—crossed a line I shouldn’t have, deepened an unseen rift. “Lead the way, Caroline,” she said.
Caroline paused, gaze floating over our heads and landing on Twombly’s Sapphic devotion.
“I hate that painting,” she muttered, and then she turned from the room with us trailing after her like scolded children.