She sits up and I set the book back in her lap. She wipes her eyes with flat palms, turns through the pages and points at bright lines of ocean-tumble swirling color. “Van Gogh,” I say. “Okay, what else.” Taking little hiccupping gasps, she flips a few pages deeper into the book and points to more neon noxious color and little light dabbles. “Derain. Got it.”
She reaches for her notepad and carefully prints, And all the other wild beasts.
“Like who?” She turns the page and jabs her finger at magenta old lady wallpaper and a turquoise window escape. “Matisse.” She nods. She keeps flipping and points to Picasso, Braque, Dali, Chagall, then shuts the book and looks at me. “All right, Izzy.” I run my hands down her arms. “I’ll get everything I can.”
I’m thinking she’ll smile at me now, but Izzy fixes me with a hard stare like she’s trying to bore some sentence into my skull. I wait, and listen, but nothing comes, and Izzy’s mouth twists into a grimace. Holding the notepad out to me like a police badge, she’s written, You get everything.
“Okay, Izzy, I’ll do what I can.” She shakes her head and shrugs my hands away and suddenly she’s still. She’s looking at me so dead center I think she might bite. You get me everything—you owe me all of it.
I stare at the words you owe me, you owe me all of it as Izzy’s eyes bore into me. All my days of wandering downtown, breathing sunlight in through the pores of my skin and running, swimming, wandering as far as my legs will carry me, days when I walk and walk against the worry of Izzy’s fever climbing higher and higher, stretching the tether between us so thin my chest feels tight with the constriction, all these days rise like an oily bubble beneath my ribs, bob up and lodge in my throat, and I turn, run, pound downstairs and out the door, outside.
All I can think is keep going farther, past the hotel, farther, until there’s a hidden beach I hardly ever go to, my legs rubbery as I pick down the cliff between sharp rocks to the wide sand. I take off my shirt and shorts and run in, swimming then beating against the water until I’m so far out everything is silent and I can just float, the ocean holding me up so steadily I hardly even feel I have a body.
Sky and black water surround me and my ears fill with rocking waves, with night the color of a hole I can drop down into, and none of it, nothing is with me. I let the dark erase me, push my mind over maps and pictures of far-off places. I’m hovering above the narrow walled streets of some Moorish city but somewhere distantly Izzy’s shrieking so I push further into the dark, the old stone permeated with smoke rising off of lit embers, the clank clank of a metal smith echoing between women swaying past in long caftans. Like the eye of the filmstrip I watched in World Cultures class, I swoop down in between the women and brush past bolted doors where the sounds of children bounce around like voices down a well and I round a corner and swoop up again. Up above the stacks of square, whitewashed houses, then down to the cobblestones: smoke, clank clank, language I can’t speak.
It’s cold and I can’t tell where the sky begins and the water ends. My eyelids, my whole body is heavy so I kick back towards shore, working against my loose limbs. I slog a little ways up the sand then drop and roll over, the moon icing my goose-bumped skin, erasing my brain like a blind eye.
Only fitting she should bring this book on the day she’s first riotous inside. Flipping through the different artists’ movements, classicism and realism—why always this obsession with what can be touched and measured, all this silliness of breasts and beauty and brawn. How they delight in surfaces—the whisk of fabric, the gloss of bodies—but never the misty swirlings of the inner eye. Something here that implies feeling in Cassatt’s little whale-white belly of a daughter, mother spreading her chubbed toes to water in the white-bellied bowl. The silent workings between them, a something that can’t be seen. And here, what they called fauvism, vision the eyes alone can’t see, sight of deepest speaking, color for a true mood. She wasn’t even hang-head or blowing over how she’s been keeping all these paintings from me, never telling, never teaching me, she never told me—what her whole body can’t know, only I. Cubism, how the seams and turnings in a person, the many seen and hidden versions, overlap—yes, they know, they can see beyond the bodies, these painters. How long ago—fifty, a hundred—I am a hundred years behind.
Seven
Monday, July 8, 1974
30 days
“Don’t move.” The early sun tilts into my eyes so all I can see is someone standing close over me. There’s a click, click and the person drops a camera from the dark outline of his face and crouches down to root around in a canvas bag. I’m freezing, curled up on my side in the cold sand. Sun-spots swim across my vision and when I turn my head I see the person is a girl, skinny as a colt, crouched in khaki pants and a black tank-top. “Damn. Didn’t you hear me?”
“I haven’t moved,” I say, shivering, and although my eyes burn with salt and sand, I don’t lift a hand to rub them.
“Your hair. I wanted the swirl of it on the sand.”
“Oh.” I sit up and wrap my arms around my knees. “Sorry.”
She shrugs, and even though she’s almost as small as me, she’s older than I first thought—a grown woman, the corners of her eyes radiating faint lines.
She twists a dark filter off the end of her lens then slots it into a plastic box, all of her movements quick and efficient. “I was pretty much finished for the morning anyway. The kids seem to have picked this beach clean.”
“You mean shells? There are never any out here. You have to go up that way.” I point back down the beach towards the house. My teeth are chattering, and she turns her dark eyes to look at me, then pulls a windbreaker out of her bag and tosses it over. “Hey,” I say, her accent registering. “You’re an out-of-towner.”
“Hardly the only one.” She points with her chin towards the windbreaker and I slide my arms in, pull it over my knees, and the shivers stop. She digs in her bag, pulls out a little brush with a bulb on the end, and starts swiping at the lens.
“Yeah, but you’re a yankee.”
She lets out a loud, quick “ha!” and grins, sitting down next to me and peering at me from behind a shoulder-length curtain of shaggy brown hair. “What’s your name?”
“Ansel.”
“After the photographer?”
“After my grandfather.”
“I’m Lee. But just call me The Yankee.”
I get up, dust the sand from my legs, and my whole face blazes when I realize I’m only wearing a bra and underwear underneath the windbreaker. “I bet I’m not the first person to call you that,” I mumble as I scoop my clothes against my body, then scramble behind some big rocks back against the cliff. I strip off my still-damp undies and hastily pull my shirt and shorts on over my raw skin, then shove my damp bra in one back pocket and my panties in the other.
“Maybe not, but you’re the first to call me that to my face.” She’s standing beside the rock now and I see the dark eyelid of her camera blink back at me before I can say anything. I shove the windbreaker at her as I push past and the camera winks at me again.
“Well, I…” but nothing I can think of would sound mature, cool, so I turn and walk slowly away from her. She snorts and starts to laugh as I take off running, up the beach away from her, my feet light on the cold sand.
The clock at the diner says 7:15 and Pauline makes me a hot chocolate, on the house. We’re the only two there so she settles on a stool, pulls the ashtray over and smokes, watching me.
“Everything okay at home, Ansel?”
I don’t think of Izzy when I shrug and wrap my hands around the cup, the heat not seeping deep enough to warm my bones.
“You look like hell, is all.” I stare into my mug and blow and sip as Pauline shakes