Twenty-Two #3
On the table is a bowl of oranges and a chocolate bar in a gold wrapper.
Clément adds a mug and they ask for my opinion.
“Maybe something for height,” I say. Nathalie takes a taper candle from the living room.
They choose colors. I add dollops of white and black to their glass palette for mixing.
Give them their own small jars of turpentine and linseed oil.
Their own rags. I make sure they have everything they need, and they are darling and serious, considering their still life from different angles.
I put on a record for us. I approach my painting again.
It stares back at me, blankly. What was I going to do next?
It’s as though someone else made it and now I’m supposed to step in.
Supposed to know how to do it. And meanwhile I’ve lost the courage to touch my paintbrush to the canvas.
I close my eyes. Keep them closed. The kids are silent.
Occupied. They should stay that way for a while.
I open my eyes again. The shadows are blotchy.
I need to make their color flatter—that was it.
I get lost in time. In smooth brushstrokes.
In charcoal first, and then yellow. The kids whisper and giggle.
It’s going so well, better than I could have imagined.
They’re behind me, sneaking a look, trying not to interrupt me, their tones admiring.
There’s a chair scrape across the kitchen floor, and the opening of a cabinet.
The rustle of saltine sleeves. Darkness outside.
And then, sometime later: “Mommy,” Clément says. “We don’t feel well. Our heads hurt.”
I set my brush down. I go to step toward them but I’m suddenly woozy, a sharpness shooting through my skull, and I stagger forward, find the wall with my hand to steady myself. “Mommy!” Nathalie cries. I strain to bring her into focus but everything’s blurry. The turpentine, I realize.
I fling open the front door and the kitchen door, open the windows to cold and dark and the sound of rain.
“Let’s stand outside,” I say. “We need fresh air.” I guide them out under the awning, their backs angular and delicate against my palms. “Damn it,” I say, shaking.
“Take deep breaths. I’m so, so sorry.” Through the lit window the house is a mess, dishes undone, empty soup cans scattered on the counter.
Castaway saltine sleeves and hardening orange peels.
I can’t take them back in there. Not yet.
I have them wait outside while I seal up the turpentine and linseed oil.
I leave the windows cracked so air will come in but not rain.
I take them to a drive-in for dinner and then to the Crest in Long Beach for a showing of cartoons.
Sneak looks at their faces in the projector’s beam of light.
Even as they laugh along, they look exhausted, pale.
So foolish of me, to paint for hours without a thought to the air we were breathing.
Careless. Irresponsible. Back home, once they’re sleeping, I wash the dishes and scrub the counters and sweep the floors.
I set the children’s paintings on the kitchen counter to dry.
I stand in the doorway to the living room, looking at my painting on its easel.
A lurch of anger, hot and violent. I douse a cloth in turpentine, and I scour the paint off the canvas.
Scour myself off. I rub until the canvas is smooth again and only a ghost of the image remains.
Maybe the painting was headed somewhere but I’ll never know now.
I clean my brushes and put them away. I pack up my paints and drag a chair to the high kitchen cabinet, push the materials far back, out of my own reach.
The next day, the last of my vacation from work, I take the kids to Adele and Al’s house, sit in the yard with the men, smoke cigarette after cigarette.
“Where have you been?” Adele asks me, carrying a platter of cheese and crackers and cornichons.
“Holed up painting,” I say. “Stupid.”
“Why stupid?” Al asks.
“You have talent,” Bernard says. “You shouldn’t let it go to waste.”
“Okay,” I say, my gaze fixed to the edge of the yard. “Incompatible, then.”
“With what?” Al asks.
“My life.”
A pause. Throats clearing. Al changes the subject. “I saw in the paper that Bayard Rustin’s coming out here from New York.”
“Is that right,” Bernard says. “What for?”
“To give a lecture on nonviolence. Problem is, it’s to the Women’s League. Think we could disguise ourselves?” They laugh.
And then it’s back to the Listening booth, back to my sketchbook.
Felix back home and conversations over dinner.
I stop into a toy store after work and ask for a good family game, come home with Clue.
We examine the figurines and miniature knife and pistol.
We sip hot chocolate and Nathalie sits with her legs lined up with mine and I begin to forgive myself.
One night Felix and I stay up reading in the living room by the fire.
He’s scanning the LA Times, turning the pages. A quick intake of breath.
I set down my book. “What is it?”
He hands me the paper. Bayard Rustin, 40-year-old nationally known Negro lecturer, was jailed on a morals charge in Pasadena early yesterday a few hours after he had spoken on the subject of world peace …
It goes on to say that he was arrested while in an automobile with two other men.
All three were booked on lewd vagrancy charges.
The other men’s full names and ages are stated, along with the neighborhoods they live in.
I lower the paper. Felix doesn’t meet my eye. “How careful are you?” I ask.
The wrong response, suspicious and blaming.
He doesn’t know that I once kissed Ginny under the open sky outside her old apartment.
Anyone could have seen us there. He doesn’t know how I avoid her each time I make a run to Production for new records to test, how I never stop at her machine because I still flush each time she looks at me.
“Careful,” he says, and averts his eyes.
The next day, Rustin pleads guilty, and he’s sentenced to sixty days in the county jail. “There goes his career,” Bernard says over dinner.
“Shh,” Claire says. “Not in front of the children.” But later, swirling an ice cube in her glass, she says, “To think a man like that was masquerading as an upright citizen. A leader of the movement, no less.”
Tears rush in, burning. I blink and blink, turn for the bathroom before anyone notices. On my way I hear Al say, “Not so sure it negates what he brings to the movement, but it’s a shame he showed so little self-control.”