Maybe art can’t give us what we long for. Maybe it can only look our longing in the eye and lead it elsewhere.
She picks out the solid form of the white Toyota Corolla she hired online the week before she left the States. Getting in she notices the cup from the takeaway coffee she drank on the way to the gallery, lipstick smeared around the opening in the lid.
Her mother kissed her on the morning of the accident, kissed her and said, my darling, have a good day.
A good day. A bad day. Days could turn on a moment.
Starting the car and maneuvering it towards the exit, the sky wide above, she suddenly remembers another day, years before that day.
She and her brother sat in the back seat of the car, her father driving, her mother beside him wearing a dress covered in small yellow flowers. The car slowed, made a turn, crawled past a house and stopped before a squat white building around which trees swayed in some dance of their own. A man she’d never seen before came out, his boots covered in specks of colour.
‘Hello Jackson,’ her father said.
‘Hello Jackson,’ echoed her brother, who was still learning to talk.
Jackson looked in through the back window and smiled, ‘Hello,’ he said.
They all got out. The grown-ups stood talking in the sun. The flowers on her mother’s dress were happy in the brightness. Her brother pulled at strands of grass and tried to eat them. In the shade of a tree she picked up a stone: cool, elongated, smooth. She went to Jackson and held it out to him. He took it in his long fingers and turned it over, and over, studying it. He looked at her, then back at the stone. He seemed to be choosing words, but he said none, just went on looking. And she wondered if there was something in a stone that words could not reach, no matter which words you chose.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to Mary Cunnane for her tenacious belief in this book; to Peter Bishop for his insight and encouragement; to Mette Jacobsen, Jenny Fisher, Dominic D’Adam, Sophia Somerville, Cathey Somerville, Cathy Hoare and Pauline Brennan for reading and providing their thoughts; to Geoff Warleigh for reading, and being by my side.
Thanks to Barry Scott at Transit Lounge Publishing and to Rebecca Starford, my editor, for their guidance and care with the manuscript. And to Varuna, the National Writers’ House, where significant sections of the work came to life.
Thank you to Lucina Ward of the National Gallery of Australia for providing assistance with my research. And to Helen Harrison from the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Centre on Long Island, New York, who took me through Jackson and Lee’s studio one cold, still morning and pointed out Jackson’s footprint on the floor. I didn’t know, then, that it would become the central motif of this book.
I am grateful to the following publications for information and inspiration:
Ninth Street Women, by Mary Gabriel
Jackson Pollock, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith
Night Blue Page 10
