On the drive in to the market, clover fields and red barns and the clear sky lent their lines and colour to Alex’s vision of Anthony painting some woman’s breasts. Streaks of alizarin crimson and cerulean blue half-circles erased the politeness and distance of pure white canvas, while Anthony’s layered paint strokes teased swollen nipples until they stood erect to catch the light from the northern window. Alex could picture them winking in delight at the man who caressed them tirelessly in cadmium yellow and Acra red.
This happened every time Anthony painted a nude. Alex imagined her husband having sex with his subject the minute she wasn’t around. It didn’t matter that he repeatedly told her they weren’t women to him, but lines and curves, and light, and energy. Not to mention these paintings were the only source of his meagre income — supported by women who wanted to surprise their husbands or treat themselves to a nude portrait by the renowned artist, Anthony Roy. It kept him well stocked in oils and canvas, and with very little left to contribute to their modest living.
None of that mattered to Alex anymore.
She could no longer believe that when these masses of curves and light crossed their legs, and positioned themselves this way and that way, Anthony didn’t see their vaginas, neatly shaven and moist from the summer heat, and stinging with excitement over being seen by a man they hardly knew. How could he say he only saw a black triangular shape and cobalt violet curls? And what about the sexual energy, with a heartbeat of its own, pounding and begging him to embrace it and devour it for the eternity of the moment?
Those were the thoughts that ran through her mind on a Saturday afternoon at the farmers’ market, when the light changed and cast shadows all around her from its harsh, unforgiving place above. It was defeating when Alex realized, once again, she was seeing herself through her own eyes. Anthony’s continued to elude her.
At some point, Alex started talking to herself — out loud. She did this in her truck when she drove the back roads home from the market and as she sat in the spare room, cutting clothes that used to fit her into square rags for Anthony. He was always saying a painter could never have too many rags.
It had become an annoying habit — this talking to herself. But she no longer trusted the mute voice in her own head to sort things out. To pay heed to what went through her mind.
A few weeks earlier — when she was at the market — dazed from a lack of sleep the night before, and weakened by another day of unrelenting heat, Alex mumbled something about thick arms and unreachable happiness. She was thinking of Picasso’s Seated Nude, and how the woman’s arms were rounded, like parentheses, “bracketing what she could not reach but longed to hold.”
She caught herself quickly, but Alex knew Vincent had heard her, the man who sold sunflowers out of the truck parked beside hers. He never said anything, but she was sure he looked at her differently from that moment on — as if he was waiting for the unbalanced woman selling zucchini beside him to mumble more spontaneous, incomplete thoughts.
In the spare room, Alex cut a pair of beige pants that were destined to be smeared with a burnt sienna and Viridian green hillside, and she thought about the swish-swish-swish sound she heard the other day. It was the sound of friction between her legs. The top of her thighs had rubbed together when she walked down the gravel driveway to check the mail. She had never heard it before and tried walking with her legs farther apart. But it didn’t do any good. She decided she would have to walk bowlegged to separate her newly joined thighs and that seemed extreme and ridiculously vain.
What other betrayals of the body did she have to look forward to, she wondered? Would her sagging breasts eventually reach the crease that formed when she sat, like some kind of stupid grin across her belly? Would she end up with large pockets of cellulite behind her rubbing thighs? Would they look like lumpy beanbags?
No wonder Anthony never cared to throw such horrors of the flesh at his virgin canvas. Even the greatest impressionist must paint with at least some hint of the living creature before him, no matter how unpleasant the reality.
The first time Vincent invited Alex for a drink after the market, she declined. She was afraid he was only curious about the state of her unstable mind. If she was capable of talking out loud to no one in particular, what other strange behaviour might he be entertained with? She’d heard he was a psychotherapist in Toronto before he divorced and moved to the old Ryan farm on the fifth concession. Apparently, he was on some kind of sabbatical from life and didn’t want to do anything but grow sunflowers and fix up the dilapidated farmhouse he had bought a couple of years ago.
The next time Vincent invited her for a drink, Alex accepted. She told herself he was probably just lonely, in need of a little conversation after spending all of his time tending his towering sunflowers, and filling cracks in plaster walls with spackling compound. A person could go mad living the quiet life, especially after being used to the traffic and buzz of the city. Even a woman who talked to herself was better company than no company at all.
After they packed up their unsold goods at the end of a long day, Alex followed Vincent along the back roads to his farmhouse. The sun was already burrowing into the horizon, skipping stones of deep yellow light across the tops of passing trees and turning the metal rooftops on barns into slanted sheets of rippled gold.
She knew Anthony would be admiring the same sunset from the studio window, standing in its path so he could feel the light on his weathered face. She knew he’d eventually close his eyes to watch the private light show of the sun’s after-image. She assumed he wouldn’t be thinking about her. She hadn’t been gone long enough for that yet.
The last time Alex drove down the same road, Vincent had just moved into the greying, white stucco house. The fields that lined the narrow laneway were full of thistles and in need of cutting. She was surprised to see how they had changed, to see them full of sunflowers as tall as any man, with faces glowing as the sun settled down to sleep and gave them one last kiss of light.
She couldn’t help but think of van Gogh, and the number of times his much-loved sunflowers came up in conversations with Anthony. Van Gogh, Chagall, Matisse, Monet, and Gauguin. They weren’t dead at all, she thought. They lived on. On a dirt road in Ontario — the eighth concession of Rawdon Township — in the rags, canvases, and hundreds of tubes of paint in a converted chicken coop.
Anthony always spoke of them as family, as distant relatives whose genius had somehow been passed down to him, deserving of his constant verbal recognition of their technique, passion, and madness.
He never mentioned the wife of Henri Matisse, who supported their family with a millinery before he was able to make a living selling his paintings. Every fall when she found herself back at school teaching the young and the uninterested about the colour wheel — and when she dropped into the tub exhausted from weeding and picking and selling vegetables for extra money in the summer — Alex thought about Madame Matisse.
Anthony never mentioned Chagall’s wife, Bella, either — never talked about the way Chagall celebrated every wedding anniversary with a painting of himself and his wife. Anthony didn’t see what that had to do with anything.
He did give Alex a painting once — early on in their marriage. She never understood it, but dutifully placed it in a prominent place in the house, in the living room, where she could spend the rest of her life trying to figure it out. Most of the space on the canvas was untouched. In the middle, there were a series of shapes and outlines of half-drawn figures, painted in primary colours, in lines that never joined and sometimes trailed off faintly until barely visible. It was untitled.
Alex wondered what Anthony would make of that picture now. Would he