Night Blue

by Angela, O’Keeffe

  With the silk gone, I saw what it had contained. Pages, a whole stack of them – and not a neat stack, by any means. All of different sizes and shapes; they were certainly not the size and shape of the pages in Alyssa’s notebook. Yet they were from the notebook, I had no doubt; I knew it as I knew a rock pool is part of the sea. They made a twisted, uneven pile which already began to fall apart in the guard’s lap. It was clear why the silk had been necessary.

  A page fluttered to the floor and I saw the words on it.

  Jackson in the car. Yes, the end, his end. I could hardly bear to look, yet look I must. I’d come this far.

  Jackson at the wheel, Ruth in the seat beside him, her friend in the back. He was hardly aware of them, hardly aware of their screams or their begging, Stop, stop, let us out, please stop!

  The trees rushing by, uneven skeins falling this way, that, like the fall of paint; you couldn’t predict it, you could only give yourself to it, hurl yourself at it, it was a thing of beauty, a holy thing, a part of you but also somewhere beyond you.

  And drawing back you take a breath, take a corner, yes a corner, a blind corner, as most corners are; only trees ahead now, sky through branches.

  The wind hard on his face – on his face! How could that be? The car was no more, the women and their screams gone. There was some wrong in all this, some wrong that was his, or theirs, he couldn’t tell, though he guessed it was his, one more on the rickety pile of wrongs that he couldn’t attend to now, couldn’t try to rearrange or stop from toppling.

  There were trees to attend to. One tree, in particular, picking him out, choosing him, its beauty crooked, as beauty should be, the sky through it dark blue. He’d painted that blue once, he couldn’t place when; it was the blue that came on nights when darkness seemed unnaturally delayed and the day reached into some hidden aspect of itself. It was different to twilight, it was different to dusk; he didn’t know what to call it, a name meant nothing, anyway. It was feeling that mattered. He stared into it in the moment before he hit the tree. Just stared.

  Visitors began arriving. It was busy that day, a holiday of some kind. There were people of all ages; time was soporific. The guard sat with the pages in his lap while still holding the silk; every now and then he drew the embroidered flowers close and studied them. The pages did not interest him. He balanced them as best he could, out of some sense of responsibility, but after a while he grew weary of them. He bent to put them under his chair, and just as he did a gust of wind carrying the smell of gum leaves and the muddy scent of the lake burst in from downstairs, the door being held open for some delivery, and it lifted the pages on one tremendous upcurrent to the ceiling, where they fluttered, suspended, and began to fall in slow motion, in dream motion, tiny parachutes.

  The visitors were entranced. Some ran this way and that, catching pages before they reached the ground; others picked them up off the floor, frowned over them, or laughed at them, or simply looked indifferent. Some did not see the pages at all, they walked right through them as if through clear air. Others stood back to watch.

  ‘A performance piece,’ suggested one woman.

  ‘What do you think it’s about?’ asked her friend.

  ‘Anybody’s guess.’

  ‘This page says, Art for art’s sake.’

  ‘That’s been said before.’

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘But, still.’

  ‘Here, this one, the handwriting’s atrocious. I haven’t got my glasses – can you read it?’

  ‘I’ll give it a go.’

  The woman who took the page wore a linen dress gathered up by a thick belt at the waist. She adjusted her stance, though ended up standing exactly as she had, and began to read with tender curiosity, as if some secret hung on the words, her voice crackly from the remnants of a cold. One hand held the paper and the other hovered in the air as she read. Passers-by stopped to listen. The guard took his attention from the silk and turned to listen. All in the room became attuned to this slightly self-conscious, diligent reader with the crackly voice. The last of the falling pages settled and now nothing moved except the beat of the woman’s hand and her mouth shaping words that danced in parabolas inside the white walls.

  Lee was in Paris when she heard the news. It was the early hours of the morning. She and her friend Paul Jenkins sat in the sitting room of Paul’s apartment, the two of them reading. They’d each left their respective beds, unable to sleep because of the heat. There were other things that stopped Lee from sleeping. It had only been weeks since she’d left Jackson. The break was fresh. She wasn’t sure if it would heal.

  Heal. Somehow the word riled her. It suggested reduction, resolution, a kind of disappearance, which was not the nature of her life with Jackson; nor was it the nature of her life with art.

  Outside, beyond the balcony, the Seine glistened; the river was a god.

  She had been reading a book by Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity. It was full of sharp angles that both repelled and drew her in; had de Beauvoir been a painter, she would have been a Cubist, Lee was sure. The phone rang just as she read, ‘But the present is not a potential past; it is the moment of choice and action; we can’t avoid living it through a project; and there is no project which is purely contemplative since one always projects himself toward something, toward the future…’

  Paul went cautiously to the phone. Because of the hour, he expected bad news, or at best uncomfortable news; he put the phone to his ear and listened, the colour drained from his face.

  ‘No!’ he moaned. ‘Oh god.’

  He looked across at Lee.

  ‘What is it?’ Her voice cut through the pool of light on the table where the phone sat, it ventured out onto the balcony, it rang imploringly to the river god. Whatever this is, tell me it’s not happening. Paul continued to look at her, the phone held to his ear, his eyes frightened of her – yes, of her. What could he have just been told that would make him frightened of her?

  She flung the book aside. A hardback, it slid off the sofa, hitting the floor with a thud.

  ‘Jackson! Jackson!’

  She began to scream, for she knew it now. She tried to stand but couldn’t, her legs wouldn’t work, and she fell back on the sofa, the book face down on the floor, its spine defiant.

  His name in her ears, his name over and over. It came from the depths of her, from some silent place, a place they’d once shared. She wondered how it had happened, had he done it himself? Of course he had: by his own hand, she knew it; by his own brilliant hand.

  Paul was coming towards her, arms outstretched, his face distraught. She didn’t want him to touch her. She wanted Jackson, she wanted the scene of his death, the moment of his death, she wanted to look into his face. She would like to say she wanted him alive – of course she wanted him alive – but already there was acceptance, a sense of making do. All her life she’d made do: with little money, with a tiny studio, with a drunken husband, with the frayed edges of success. All in preparation for this – this impossible news received from the eyes of a friend.

  She managed to stand.

  ‘Jackson!’

  She could say only his name, nothing more, nothing less. She turned towards the balcony, its doors open, the river god beckoned. How wonderful it was, that god, like a long, long canvas, a canvas streaked with light; I am the one to touch you, no other, I am the one for you, it said. She moved towards it, her foot landing on the book, which skidded sideways on the parquet floor, and she almost fell. The book had said something about living into the future through a project – well, here was her project, this river, this canvas streaked with light.

  Paul’s arms were around her, his breath clumsy in her ear. He held her tight, she could hardly breathe; she squirmed and nearly broke free. He was not as strong as Jackson.

  ‘Lee, no!’

  He thinks I’m going to jump, she thought, and almost laughed; she stopped screaming and grew quiet, except for little moans escaping against
the weave of his shirt, little moans like far-off sirens, like the guttural growl of dogs. He doesn’t know about the river god, she thought, he doesn’t know about the long, long canvas that I will move towards for the rest of my life. He doesn’t know it and he never will.

  29

  Time has moved quickly since then, and slowly, and the world has turned many times and hardly at all, and sometimes I am back at the beginning with Jackson at the window, the smoke from his cigarette going out to the rain, and sometimes I am at the end, his end, when he stared into the blue of me.

  Other times I’m with Lee as she moved towards that long canvas. I imagine her during the decades in which she painted in the barn, the new floor covering Jackson’s footprint – covering but not erasing, for the footprint waited. Or I remember her as she was the last time I saw her, as she stared up into the cherry tree that day in Washington, just before I left for Australia. I now know what it was about that scene that had struck me, a thing I’d been unaware of at the time but must have sensed.

  She’d left him, years earlier. We’d had this in common that day in Washington. She’d left him. And I’d left him too.

  For in order to truly take up the life we are given, it seems to me that there must be a leaving, of sorts. After the exhibition, he shut me out. I longed for him, or so I thought. But what I longed for more was life.

  But mostly I am here with the people who visit me, alive in their gaze. I give myself to them, over and over. I am yours, I say, the same declaration I once made to a leaf.

  Words are not my forte, I have told you this before, but there is something that draws them from me, through me, in all their difficult splendour. A desire to live in your gaze; I see it now, it is a kind of destiny. I thought this story existed for itself, for its own precious wonder. Jackson gave me life – ‘The painting has a life of its own,’ he said – but perhaps a story is not a thing that can live for itself, any more than I can. I live for living. This story lives for you.

  Yes, you.

  In the end, this story is no more than an invitation.

  Come visit me. In the tall white building that sits beside the lake. Gum trees spread luxuriantly near the entrance, their aroma strongest in mid-afternoon once the sun has done its work, drifting in the clear air. Walk past the silver-trunked trees with their leaves of greyish-green, some wrinkled or twisted, others scarred by anonymous creatures; every leaf has its story. Enter the building and turn right.

  The turn is important. There is somewhere you must walk, a place at the heart of the building. A heart is seldom reached by walking a straight line; it must be turned towards.

  Down a short ramp, a river made of concrete. On its banks are hollow coffins made from branches and tree trunks. A memorial to the Indigenous people who died as a result of white invasion in this country. A memorial conceived by Djon Mundine in collaboration with Ramingining artists of Central Arnhem Land. A living memorial. I can’t speak for the dead, nor for those left behind; I do not claim to know the history of white invasion in this country, nor the complex layers of culture that existed before that time; that resisted the invasion; that continue to exist. But I can, I believe, speak for death. Art is made of death as much as it is made of life. Some of the coffins bear the head of an animal. Others have no head. They are of varying heights. Walk among these coffins, hollowed and smoothed by living hands, painted by living hands, loved and worried over and dreamed upon by living hands.

  In art, death is life. In art what is lost is not lost. In art the world grows ever fuller.

  Then, when you are finished with the heart, find the stairs and come to me.

  30

  The you I speak to is particular, the you who holds this book.

  But there is a more particular you – I’m sorry to tell you this. Or perhaps you don’t mind, perhaps it even thrills you to know it? There is more to you than you.

  The story circles back to a little girl in an apartment in New York, reading, the end of her pigtail in her mouth. It circles back to a young woman sitting on a sofa in that same apartment, saying goodbye to a painting she grew up with and took for granted in the magnificent way children take things for granted; in the way art takes life for granted and life art. That is magnificent, too.

  She is the you within the you, the you who responded to my invitation. I know her by her eyes, their particular gleam that pitched her thoughts beyond the walls of the apartment. She is a middle-aged woman with mottled skin. She stands before me and looks at me calmly, she trembles, she smiles. She stands like this for some time.

  I should mention that she is not alone. There is a camera crew, its members crouch as if in a war, everyone watching her as she watches me. There is a young woman with a microphone, hair and stockings sleek; she asks the woman from New York questions, and the answers are brief. There is an air of anticlimax in the room, as if the answers should point to more, be more.

  On a little table nearby is an array of glasses of water and a vase filled with eucalyptus flowers, like surprised stars the flowers stare at me. They are the same shade of orange that is threaded through me. A stylist might have matched the colour.

  ‘It’s, what, forty years since you saw Blue Poles?’ asks the interviewer.

  ‘That’s about right,’ replies the woman, whose name I don’t remember. I remember the curve of the end of her pigtail, not her name.

  ‘A national icon, an international icon. And part of your childhood. How does it feel to be standing here, today?’

  I think she utters the word wonderful, but I can’t be sure; it comes out broken, incomprehensible – it could be any word or no word at all. She looks at the floor, then back at me, takes a breath, and now she is no longer the little girl with the pigtail, she is no longer the young woman on the sofa, she is no longer, even, the middle-aged woman standing before me. She is pitched into the future, and I sense the call of her life, a beckoning thing; at the door it waits.

  This is the moment. The story goes to her; she is a window, and like smoke it goes. It settles in her hair and in the folds of her cheeks and on her mottled skin. She goes, and it goes, down the escalator and out the door.

  Yet it is still with me – just. Each leaving has its trajectory.

  ‘You’re going?’ The journalist asks, incredulous, as the woman makes her way to the escalator.

  She turns, her face drained of colour. ‘I’m sorry, I can’t,’ she begins, and steps onto the escalator.

  The journalist watches her orderly descent for a few moments, then folds her arms and turns to a woman holding a camera.

  ‘She agreed to the interview. Postponed her trip back to the states to come here.’ She gestures towards the escalator, which is now empty. ‘Then hardly a word.’

  Out past the gum trees she goes, the story tangled in her hair, drifting on the cadence of her thoughts. Though unaware of its presence, she has a sense of some rising possibility. She turns towards the lake, its surface made of glass.

  I’m not usually stuck for words, she thinks. But all I could do was stand there and look.

  She’d come to Australia for the wedding of a friend. The ceremony had taken place on a cliff above the Pacific ocean at Dover Heights, Sydney. The couple’s promises to one another had hovered in the salty air. After the ceremony she was introduced to an arts journalist, a niece of the bride. They fell into conversation over nori dusted lavosh with pickled fennel. The vinegar from the pickle made them both cough. Carefully the arts journalist wiped her mouth with a linen napkin, then said ‘Why don’t you come to Canberra to see Blue Poles? I could interview you.’

  She was used to being asked about Blue Poles. People assumed that a childhood surrounded by exceptional art meant that you had some unique insight into it, an insight you were constantly at the ready to share. She was used to being asked about Pollock, as if her one meeting with him, when she was still a child, years before her father had purchased Blue Poles, could count for much. She was also used to saying n
o.

  But her father had recently died. She wasn’t sure the arts journalist was aware of this, but she supposed she was. Her father was well known in the art world. From the nineteen fifties onwards he’d been an astute buyer of abstract art, Blue Poles becoming arguably the most famous of his purchases. He was in his nineties when he died. People said he had a great run, and she had to agree.

  But there was grief. Grief was a dream you couldn’t make yourself wake from. She knew this from when she was a child and her mother had died in a car accident. You must wait to be woken – by a shift in the light, a sound from the street, the waking itself as much a morphing into the next dream as it was a true awakening.

  Standing on the grey tufts of native grass with the southerly in her hair, holding a glass of Tasmanian chardonnay in one hand and a partially denuded canape in the other, she’d recognised the journalist’s invitation as a part of that awakening. Two days later, instead of boarding a plane for New York she’d found herself driving across the dry plain to Canberra to visit a painting she’d grown up with, a painting she’d stared into and beyond as her future had taken shape in her, twisting and dissembling like the waves of the Pacific crashing onto the sandstone cliffs of Dover Heights.

  Now, outside the gallery after the aborted interview the air is still. Her face is flushed with embarrassment. Should she go back in and try to explain?

  But how to explain in words the words she hadn’t been able to formulate, let alone speak?

  She watches the sky reflected on the lake, clouds moving slower than stars. Her feet answer her question by continuing on towards the carpark.

  I suppose I was longing for comfort, she thinks. To be taken back to the old apartment: my mother in a shift dress, my father’s hair untouched by grey, my brother with his Frisbee, me on the sofa with my books. But it wasn’t like that.

  Fallen gum leaves litter the path, dull and bright at once.

  Instead, the painting seemed new. Like it was coming into being right there and then, as I looked.