He reaches out for that, breathes towards that and feels there is something there, in his hand. He opens his eyes and looks down to see J-P’s hand there, resting in his own.
“Time to go,” J-P says.
Sophie, New York — 2006
Slouched on the gallery’s bench, opposite Hortense, Sophie lacked the guts to do what she really wanted, which was to speak all her thoughts aloud; about last night’s exhibit opening, about Christa’s call that had come this morning while she was towelling herself dry and what it meant for her future, and how she had a date in a few hours with some cute guy. A poet, Hortense!
No, she wasn’t going to be one of those crazies who sit in the Metropolitan Museum talking to the pictures, not yet, anyway, but she and Hortense had always been able to commune silently, mind to mind and it was right to come see her after yesterday. There was no one else she’d rather share her news with, nowhere else she’d rather be than the Met’s Cézanne rooms, where each painting made a story of its own and, gathered in this space, coalesced into some larger thing.
She spun herself slowly round on the smooth wooden bench, which was like travelling through Cézanne’s nervous system, or scanning his consciousness.
There were apples, of course, always the apples, and fruit stands and dishes, netted eggplants hanging from a hook, tables and flowers and fabric.
Then there was one of his obsessive renderings of Mont Sainte-Victoire, alongside the airy, light-filled seaside landscape around L’Estaque.
The darkly menacing, tree-lined paths of the Jas de Bouffin, the country estate Cézanne had inherited after his father’s death.
Men seated around a table, played cards and smoked their pipes, and solitary men in armchairs, staring out into the middle distance.
There was also a strange, vivid portrait of Cézanne’s uncle wearing what looked like a relaxed, yellow bathrobe over his suit, with some kind of collapsed nightcap on his head, its black silk tassel — as deeply black as his suit, as black as his beard and his eyes — dangling beside his ear.
But it was the portraits of Hortense, Cézanne’s wife, that never failed to enthral Sophie. She’d written her MFA thesis on them, trying to figure out the whole time what it was she loved about them — love at first sight, actually.
One of them, Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory, showed Hortense dressed in midnight blue and sitting beside dusky pink flowers, her head tilted to one side, her pretty face quizzical and sad. Like the Mont Sainte-Victoire, it was unfinished. Inside its rough squiggles and areas of exposed canvas Hortense appeared composed, relaxed, perhaps on the verge of asking a question.
It was this Hortense with whom she usually communed but, today, the other Hortense had beckoned her over the minute she got there. Though she had the same chestnut-coloured hair, parted in the middle and fastened at the back, and the same rosy cheeks, she was sitting stiffly upright beside a fireplace, her bold red dress tied loosely at the collar and cinched in at the waist. Her long, oval face was a mask; eyes blank, nose straight, mouth set firmly in anxious resignation.
The blue drawing room she inhabited was one of her husband’s experiments in colour and multiple perspectives; its angles, lines and corners all off kilter, the high-backed, yellow armchair about to fall over, tipping Hortense into a heavily swagged floral curtain. Looking at her, Sophie was transported back to the vivid sensation of this morning’s dream and had to grip the bench to stop herself from tipping off it, likewise.
In it, she was descending the Met’s wide stone staircase, stepping cautiously because her body was made of thin crystal, bending the light, distorting the lines of the stairs, the walls, as she moved. She’d stopped to examine a painting, extravagantly framed in ornate gilt wood, a portrait of herself, her naked body all smooth and pudgy in the neo-Classical style, lifting a glass arm to view the picture through it. Her glossy painted flesh had bulged and spread before her glass eyes. How had she come to be so transformed?
She’d turned away, then, frightened, and lost her balance, was launched into the air, the world rippling as she flew through it. She held her breath until the startling moment she hit the stone floor and was smashed into glass fragments, which was the moment she blinked awake, the tinkling of her shattering body and the tinkling ringtone of her Blackberry one and the same.
What was that all about exactly? She was feeling breakable, obviously. That’d be right. It was already one of the most significant days of her life and she couldn’t just enjoy this moment, oh no, she had to imagine herself smashed to smithereens. Maybe this Hortense, squashed and skewed in a corner, posing reluctantly at the insistence of her genius husband, was what she was all about today.
There’d been maybe a half second or so after waking of feeling okay, before the steel clip behind her eyes clenched shut and her stomach flipped over. She was in for quite the hangover.
She’d thought it was Christa calling, to give her the night’s gossip, so had picked up with a croaky “Hey,” but it wasn’t Christa, it was this guy talking. She looked at the unknown number on the screen, then put it back to her ear in time to hear something about “Caffe Reggio, tiramisu,” and knew then it was poet guy.
“Great,” she heard, “great,” and he’d sounded out of breath, as if he’d run to the phone, but no, he’d called her, at — what time? — almost midday by then she saw, looking at the screen once more. “So that’s good for you?” he asked. He had not yet stopped speaking.
“I’m sorry,” she’d begun, with a dry laugh, “could you say that again? I’m a bit out of it this morning.”
“Oh, God, sorry. Did I wake you?
“No, no. I was awake, just not. You know. Up.”
“I’m sorry. Course. Last night was a big night for you, right?”
“It might have been,” she’d said. “I’m not sure.”
He suggested meeting at eight, but that was too late for her — “I’m gonna need an early night,” — and said six instead, which was no problem for him. “And — sorry — it’s Joel, right?” She’d been quite certain that was his name but ought to be sure.
There’d been a pause before he said, “Yeah, Joel. And you’re Sophie Number One.”
So he’d seen them, her pictures, of course he had. How could he not have? “Yes, that’s me. Sophie Number One.”
He’d wished her a great day then and she was relieved they weren’t going to talk more at that point — it was probably for the best. He must have been relieved it was over, poor guy. She’d optimistically saved his contact after that, then hauled her ass into the shower, to rinse herself from the inside out, scrub her crystal body squeaky clean.
She caught herself, now, biting at the corner of her thumbnail, and stopped with an inward admonishment. She’d made herself bleed a little and licked the red raw skin. Hortense’s hands, resting in her lap, were holding a flower that was unidentifiable being just a mass of squiggles, and culminated in worried, confused fingers. In the other painting, the fingers were sketched out only, in anxious, dark blue lines that matched her dress.
These unfinished workings out seemed to expose the fact that Cézanne knew his wife’s face — could vary and experiment with its planes and facets — but not her hands. It was like he was frightened of them. In each case, Sophie thought, he’d silenced her by drawing a mouth so tightly closed it would require monumental effort to speak. Except she wasn’t silent. Despite her husband’s best attempt, Hortense did speak to Sophie — about herself, about them both, and about the man she sat for, the husband who painted her. His anxiety had become her anxiety, his worried hands, her worried hands. They were portraits of Cézanne as much as of her. It wasn’t Hortense who was so different and the same in these paintings, it was him.
She took from her shoulder bag the slender book she always brought here with her and made a note of this thought in one of its margins. Annie Yeung’s study of Cézanne, Shadow is a Colour as Light is, wasn’t your standard art history but a sort of person
al diary of looking; tentative and delicate, Yeung was trying to get at something in Cézanne, and in Hortense too, while being aware she might not succeed.
Like Hortense, the book spoke to Sophie in ways she didn’t fully understand, its messages coded and cloudy. Sophie used Annie Yeung as a model when writing her thesis, combining academic conventions with her personal observation, but worried that she’d still turned Hortense into a mere subject, squashed her into a corner like her husband.
She carried Cézanne’s full quotation around with her, in her head, and recited it to herself sometimes like a mantra — shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones. It made her think of her life as well as anything about painting, or her own portraits.
She had shadows of her own, inside and out, and her art was a bringing forward of light and colour that only served to deepen the shadows and the relation between the two. She didn’t fully understand what all this meant yet, maybe never would, but the sense of it thrilled her because a lifetime’s work was potentially contained in lucid thoughts like these, questions that were simple but large. She’d gotten used to waiting for fragments of answers, knowing full well she might never get to construct their entirety.
Having initially struggled to settle on an idea for her final MFA show — the works that Christa had seen and then offered to include in her first group exhibit — Sophie had decided she would become her own subject. The self-portrait would form the basis of her practice, for the time being. Her research, her looking at Hortense over and over, had brought her to the firm position that no one would but herself would ever paint her and that she would do it openly, free from anxiety, which was not at all how she felt. Sophie’s decision to be naked in her self-portraits was hers alone and her use of colour transformed her body into something else, though certainly not fragile crystal glass to be smashed on the floor of a museum.
All she knew was that she wanted to consider herself from the point of view of object and subject together, to control the way she was seen but also to try to figure out who she was in the act of painting; like Cézanne trying to figure out what the apple was, or the mountain, or his wife; like Annie Yeung had been trying to figure out who she was, Sophie felt, in the conjoined acts of looking and writing about looking.
Last night, Christa had told her that this Joel, the poet guy, was ‘complex’, which could mean anything. She’d also mentioned they had a ‘thing’ once; ‘brief and messy’, she’d called it. “He has this game he plays — if he asks you to come up with a subject for a poem, just say anything, whatever comes into your head…”
Sophie was about to ask Christa why it hadn’t worked out between them when he’d come on over. Though she suspected Christa wasn’t exactly a walk in the park either. No, that was unfair, Christa was great. She’d been drunk enough to just go with it, but sober enough to have the presence of mind to mask her alarm at her internal reaction to inky-assed poet guy — a kind of involuntary Shazam! — who was not handsome exactly, more intensely ordinary looking, with a wounded quality, evidenced by the permanently questioning brow and nervy jiggling, which, God forgive her, Sophie was drawn to.
Then, when she and Christa spoke earlier today, of course she’d been too bowled over to ask her anything about Joel and his ink-stained ass, and then too embarrassed to disclose that she’d arranged to meet up with him this very evening, which was why they couldn’t go have a celebration drink together. Instead, she’d claimed tiredness and a headache, which wasn’t a lie exactly because she was still fuzzy with both.
She’s really not sure about the whole thing. As much as she didn’t want anyone else to paint her ever, she didn’t want to be written about either. Muses were unreal, trapped in frames, and it didn’t matter whether those were gilded or poetic.
The whole writing-her-number-on-his-hand incident flashed across her vision and she felt herself blushing, pictured her own cheeks as pink as those on Hortense’s face, whose two painted expressions — the quizzical and tender, the stern and anxious — directed themselves at Sophie both at once.
“I know I know I know,” she whispered. “Stupid, right?”
Abrupt, noisy squawks of rubber-soled sneakers against the wooden floor made her turn towards a hefty guy striding into the room, making a racket so intrusive that everyone in the space shifted their gaze to him. He halted directly in front of Cézanne’s apples and flowers, lifted the large, menacing camera hanging from a strap round his neck, took a second — maybe a second and a half — to point, focus, click, before stomping across the room and out the other doorway, his sneaker’s squeals and squeaks echoing through the space.
“Can you believe that?” Sophie demanded to no one in particular. “He barely looked! Just wanted to snap an image on his fucking memory card — or whatever — not his actual memory. That’s how it’ll always look for him now, because he never actually saw it. Ach!”
She raised her arms in exasperation and tossed her book into her bag, slung it over her shoulder and stood up, all in one action, though too fast because the steel clip that had been in abeyance up until then, clamped down hard on her optic nerve.
Sophie managed to wave a sort of goodbye to Hortense, which set her to swaying, but she managed to rush out of the room in one piece, clench receding. She should cancel this date thing and go on home, that’s what she should do, but, just then, she heard Hortense calling out: “Say yes! Today is a day for saying yes!”
*
Caffe Reggio’s green-painted front, normally so pretty, was nauseating today. Through the windows she could see the space was busy, but there was no way to make out if he was inside, or not.
A woman exiting, on seeing Sophie hovering there, held the door open for her. She felt she had no choice then but to enter the darkly cramped interior and saw him immediately, sitting at the table by the payphone, the one inside its own booth with the bust of Nefertiti on a shelf above your head.
She wove her way through the room, shrugging off the favourite soft, red leather jacket that she wore to keep herself together, and when he stood up to usher her past him into the booth, the weird Shazam! thing happened again. He was wearing jeans, but these had no ink-blot at the ass, she noticed. It was, no doubt about it, a great ass.
As she put down her bag, adjusted the shoulder straps on her navy blue summer dress, tucked her hair behind her ear, her hands fluttered like birds conjured from her sleeves before she was quite ready for them.
“Well, this is my favourite spot,” she declared, to the whole place it felt like, as if he had executed a major coup to secure, for their first date, the most sought after table in the whole of New York. She was over-compensating and annoyed at herself for it. She needed to calm the fuck down.
“I got you a present,” was the next thing she said. He appeared startled and she smiled a brittle glass smile.
They fell silent as the waitress placed menus in front of them, while Sophie rifled through her bag and took out a slim cardboard slipcase. She placed it on the table between them. It was a box of pencils, red ones, with Metropolitan Museum of Art stamped along them in gold.
“I just came from there,” she said, “and I saw these in the gift shop and thought they’d be the perfect thing for you. Y’know, to stop your ass from getting all inky. Though I notice that’s not a problem today.”
She’d meant it to sound all light and playful but ended up poking fun at him before he’d hardly said a word. His eyebrows danced nervously and there was that questioning forehead she remembered.
“Well,” he managed, “thank you. I was planning on getting some pencils myself but now I needn’t bother. I’m really, really glad to have these, which are just so,” — he picked up the box and waved it in the air like a magic wand — “elegant.”
The waitress came back, thank God, and, at Joel’s insistence, Sophie ordered for them both. “Two tiramisu and some green tea. Please.” She sat back and sighed. “Perfect.
”
“Last night was really something, wasn’t it?”
“It was. It really was.”
“And your paintings, well, they were incredible.”
“Oh. Thank you. Really?”
“Sure. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to put yourself on the line like that. I mean, to really show yourself in that way. I think it’s very brave. And the colours. Amazing colours. Truly.”
“To be honest, I don’t feel at all brave about it. It’s like it’s me and it’s not me. It’s painting. I look at myself so much when I’m doing it that I’m not me anymore. Like when you say a word over and over so many times it sounds alien.”
“So you don’t feel exposed? Even though you’re naked?”
“Oh, I feel exposed, sure, but no one could scrutinise me as much as I’ve scrutinised myself in the making of those pictures, so I get a certain, kind of, I don’t know, power from that. No, it’s not power, exactly. Strength. I’m not saying I don’t care what people think about the paintings. I do. A lot. But I don’t care what they think about me — my body, my ego, whatever.” She did care, though, about what he might think of what she’d just said about her work, and herself, wrestled with the impulse to retract or apologise somehow. But this was something that, as an artist and a woman, she’d resolved to stop doing.
He was tracing the outline of the box of pencils with his fingers, nodding gently. She should ask him about his work but fought that impulse too. They could talk about her a little longer, couldn’t they?
“And that guy?” he said, without looking at her, “the one they were all taking photos of? Who was that?”
“Well, it’s kind of incredible really. He’s some hot young movie actor who I’ve not heard of — well, I’ve heard of him but not seen anything he’s done. Christa invited him to the show because apparently he’s made truckloads of money and is looking to become a collector. And, well, he bought my work. All of it. Can you believe that? Christa called me this morning, right after I spoke to you.”
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