Joel started again, his words floating through the high space right up to the glass atrium at the top. “Those rare times when he seemed to like me, he’d call me into his study and allow me to sit and do my schoolwork beside him. There were days when he’d proclaim himself Emperor and get me to make chains of coloured paper to place around his neck.” He acted out the ghostly assembling of the paper chains, and then solemnly mimed his father’s coronation.
“It was when my father didn’t like me that I was confined to my bedroom. It could last weeks — weeks — my food delivered on trays left outside the door, the adjoining bathroom the furthest I was allowed to venture. I’d be desperate. When you’re that age, weeks is an eternity.”
Sophie had learned never to bring his father up in conversation herself but, when Joel wanted to, it was best to just let him speak without any comment. What would she have said anyway, about the terrible things he’d done? His circular ruminations, these variations on a theme, made her sure there was unexplored, inarticulated poetry in these episodes. He even used his poetry reading voice when telling the stories — detached and strangely dreamy, in language that was careful, thoughtful. Joel had never written anything about his father that she knew of, was avoiding the thing he needed to write about, and that’s why he was unable to write anything. But she couldn’t say anything about that, either.
Like all the questions she’d had at the start of their relationship, about his mom’s disappearance when Joel was just five years old, these words she might say evaporated in the white heat of his pain and she couldn’t persevere with him as a project.
During one of their worst arguments, she’d repeated those questions — “What did your dad do to make her leave? How can someone just vanish these days? Why didn’t she take you with her?” — but with venom that time, not concern. She told him that, no matter how much she loved him she would never have married him if she’d known what he was. Though she thinks it was the worst thing she’s ever said to anyone, Joel had simply nodded in agreement with all of it.
They arrived, finally, at the main Cézanne room. Sophie had thought to go to Hortense immediately but seeing her there she was confronted by a loss of nerve. She liked the Belgian actress who’d been cast to play her, but was perturbed at the prospect of seeing her old friend made flesh, embodied beyond the voice that existed in her head, still, years after her study of these portraits had ended. Their communion had intensified during Sophie’s worst times. She was more Hortense than she wanted to be and didn’t want to see herself in those portraits just now.
As Joel came in behind her, she went instead to Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, immersed herself in the radiant background, drew nearer to bathe in its complex, shimmering surface of delicate greens and blues. Sophie wouldn’t play the long-suffering wife, but was feeling and fearing the impulse to try again with him. Though she didn’t believe it was her job to heal or save him (where did these words come from?) her inability to do so was something she couldn’t help see as a great failure on her part, while hating herself for thinking that way.
She perceived a streak of pink flashing across the blue, and then more streaks, vibrating. She’d never experienced this before; the blue and pink and green passing through and into her like waves of light, tuning her in to its energy, allowing her to hear clearly what she had strained to hear before now: this heart’s singing, calling to the gallery, to Sophie and Joel, the whole world, challenging them all to accept its song. Would she ever make anything as marvellous as this? It seemed to ask so many questions. Any risk she might take, any words she eventually said, could not go as badly as anything that had already passed between them.
As Joel sat on the bench in front of Hortense she focused on the table covered with its white crumpled cloth and flowering pot plant with dark green leaves, the apples and their astonishing layers of dark reds and greens and browns, over purple, or navy blue, or a brighter green, each one its own entire still life.
She counted them; twenty-two, some bunched together, others lined in a row, a few nestling singly in the white tablecloth that rose above them in mountainous ridges, the white fabric hardly ever plain white at all but reflecting the blue-green-pink background, or purple and green in the folds and creases that formed the landscape — the folds undulating hills, the apples tucked amongst the creases like village houses and, towering above everything, the dark spread leaves of the plant were open arms, like flying, or falling, both, then her own arms waiting to receive their child, and him.
You don’t get many chances to put things right. Couldn’t they just say sorry to each other and start over? Would that be enough. Yes, they could say that. She could say that.
Nick, Liverpool — 2008
The woman being killed is lying face up on the ground. Her mouth is open, still, the other woman still bent over, pressing down on her shoulders. The murderer has not brought down his arm, which is raised, as before, gripping the knife.
The two girls are still there too, the one in the apple green Puffa jacket, and her friend sitting on the floor, as focused on their drawing as Nick was on his.
He’ll not hurt them, or himself. He’ll not hurt Maria who he can see coming in. He grips the knife tightly and approaches the painting. He’s not in a car park watching a man he loved and hated burn to death. He can’t save Jimmy, so he’ll save the woman in the picture.
Maria’s voice comes floating through, gently, insistently — “Nick? Nick, love? Nick?” — but he won’t look because if he sees her he might lose his nerve.
He lifts his arm and takes a step forward, aiming for the man whose arm is up like his, the murderer. His focus shifts and he sees himself reflected in the protective glass. The oily-bluey-black of the background’s void paints the glass surface the same colour as the scorched windows of Jimmy’s car that Nick saw himself reflected in as he burned.
The knife won’t break through the glass, Nick realises. It’s just a stupid little fruit knife. He could curl up on the floor below the painting and sleep, but is trapped in the glass, furiously mute, caught in the violence that he can’t not remember, that he can’t break out of. His aching arm drops. It burns too.
Seeing his shoulders slump, his head bowed, Maria treads softly towards him. He’ll be alright. He’s still got the knife but she doesn’t think the painting, the one she’d told him to come and see, is in danger any more. What was she thinking? She should’ve known better. “Nick? Nick, love?”
He looks up and a scene projects itself onto the charcoal-coloured glass, of Jimmy taking a swing at him, in the kitchen, when he was just a boy, and his fist catching Nick on the shoulder, so that he fell back against the electric hob, burning his arm, badly. They couldn’t take him to hospital because the nurses might have asked him questions, and he’d always told everyone, even Maria, that the scars were from landing on his mum’s curling tongs one time, when he’d been bouncing up and down on the bed. If Nick told Maria this story now she might stay. The woman’s voice comes again from the painting: No, she won’t stay.
She won’t say his name again because he’s not responding, but will take some more steps towards him and lead him away from the painting and down the stairs, because the security guy will probably be here any second and she doesn’t want Nick to get into trouble, so she has to move quickly.
Maria comes beside him and puts her hand on his shoulder and, burned by the touch, Nick jerks away and doesn’t even see her when he swings round and his hand comes up from his side and stabs the knife in her belly.
It wasn’t Jimmy’s hand on him, it was Maria’s hand, and now her mouth is open in the same small black hollow as the woman lying on the ground, being killed.
Maria frowns, bites her bottom lip as she doubles over and falls, curled up beneath the painting.
There’s screams from in the room, from the girls, that let the air out, and it’s not right, but what has he done?
There’s blood on the floor and the
fruit knife and his hand are covered in blood, and the pool of blood on the floor is getting bigger, and it’s Maria’s blood.
The security guard who ran in when he heard the screams has his hands out towards Nick, and he looks scared, Nick thinks, and the girl in the apple green Puffa jacket is holding her friend and not letting her look and he hopes to God she didn’t see what he’s done, because if she did he’s ruined her whole bloody life for her, and he hates himself for doing that.
Nick looks to the painting. Nothing’s changed. He couldn’t do it.
He strides towards the security guard who he knows won’t stop him because he’s too scared and has never had to deal with anything like this before. He holds out the knife and the guard takes it quietly from him. He hopes they get to Maria soon, who’s lying on the floor, holding her stomach, legs wheeling slowly in the spreading pool of blood. She’ll be alright, won’t she?
Nick thinks he can make it over the railing but he’ll have to run hard if he’s to do it in one go and he has all the energy he needs now, having decided.
He runs and gets the stride just right so that his foot lands firm on the railing when he jumps and launches himself into the air and he sees, in the café below, the woman serving the tea and cakes put a hand over her mouth as she looks up at him, reaching towards him with her other hand, red raw from the hot washing-up water, and, as he plunges down, he’s sorry that she’ll have to clean up after him.
Sophie & Joel, New York — 2010
Joel was reading that Cézanne’s friends used to call his wife ‘La Boule’, the ball-and-chain, and even he used this cruel nickname for her sometimes. He’d leave her alone a lot of the time, and his mother and sister then treated her with open hostility, certain she was trying to get her hands on the family money. Joel’s dad had said the same thing to him about Sophie once, the last time they ever spoke.
He was sitting with Sophie’s copy of Annie Yeung’s book resting open on his lap, in front of the two portraits of Madame Cézanne. In one, Joel thought, Cézanne had hardly painted a woman at all. The fireplace, the chair, the curtains, all dominated and the shapes and configuration of the red dress she wore seemed more vital to him than the person inside it, as if it was only her formal solidity that fascinated him and not her body at all. He may as well have been painting his mountain.
But the other painting, the one of her sitting on a terrace in front of flowers, had some human warmth in it, some affection. This was definitely a portrait of a real woman, her tenderly expressive face that of a loved one, the body she inhabited a living body, shapely and slender-waisted, not an effigy wrapped and trapped in red fabric.
Joel’s eyes flitted between the two, assessing the degrees of melancholy with which she regarded him, and he felt scrutinised by her in turn. He felt he was witnessing a wife and husband, subject and artist, surveying each other across an unbridgeable gulf, and she, looking out at Joel, was seeing the same. Had they felt much love for each other?
He flicked through the book, both in search of an answer and to avoid the question being bounced back at him, but one of Sophie’s marginal scribbles stopped him. In light blue pencil, she’d written ‘Cézanne’s fear of touch’, beside a sentence of Annie Yeung’s text, itself underlined in darker blue:
Her hands contained memories, emotions, thoughts, all of which her husband felt unable to portray, to represent, or which, perhaps, he actively sought to erase.
Joel looked up to examine those hands and realised that they were, in both cases, only sketched out or obscured, barely there. He thought of Sophie’s hands at the time they were first dating. Her bitten-down fingernails, and the bruised looking knuckles caused, she’d told him, by paint embedded in the lines there that she couldn’t get out without scrubbing hard and she couldn’t be bothered most of the time. She’d never grown her nails into those talons in her early self-portraits, the ones owned now by Marius Woolf. Except for Sophie #1, which he’d not seen for quite some time, given it hung above Sophie’s bed.
He’d even begun a poem about her hands once, initially thought she craved those dripping red talons for herself, but gave it up when she said how uneasy she was at the notion of him interpreting her. He turned to look for her and found her haloed by the bright blue background of the still life, her shoulders encircled by apples and engulfed in pink flowers. One hand was covering her mouth, the other placed on her hip, her arm wrapped around her waist.
Those formerly agitated hands were cleaner and calmer these days, just as his own were becoming more sullied and useless, and she’d stopped biting her nails when Immy was just a few weeks old, just like he’d quit his occasional smoking the moment Sophie got pregnant. Oh, and that ring she used to wear, the one with the glass eye that matched her own, she’d stopped wearing that around the same time.
Sophie sensed Joel staring at her, but stayed in the company of the still life a while longer. She’d found Immy in this canvas already, as an apple nestled between the folds of tablecloth, then there too, suddenly, the pot of primroses was Joel, his arms stretched out wide over them. After everything he’d put her through she couldn’t help but see him. He’d started to appear in her recent work, too; a shadowy figure in the background, sometimes protective, sometimes looming, just like here. Threatening, even. It was a compulsion, outside her control, as if she wanted his presence while also needing to erase it.
This was the moment to go to him, she felt, but she feared facing Hortense’s questioning gaze. She’d only ask Sophie where she’s been and why they haven’t spoken these last few months. But she was going to need to put all her fears aside today.
As she approached Joel, she noticed he was thumbing through a book. With a churning bewilderment she realised what it was and reached out. “Where did you find it! We looked all over, Joel, didn’t we?”
He could pretend he’d only recently found it, but didn’t want to lie, not today. “It — it wasn’t really lost, Soph,” he told her. “I only said it was. I wanted to keep it.”
“To keep it…?” He was holding the precious book out to her to take, but she remained a few paces distant from him. “Joel! You knew how much this book means to me. I was frantic about it.”
“I’m really sorry, Soph. Don’t be angry. Yes, I know, of course I do — it wasn’t that I wanted to steal it. I just couldn’t stand not having it. When you suggested we go see this movie, I was so psyched about doing that together, and coming here with you again… I guess I had an attack of conscience. I knew I had to give it back. I was wrong to keep it.”
“You couldn’t stand not having it?” She scrutinised him with the same tilted head, the same inquisitive sadness, as Cézanne’s wife sitting on her terrace. Both expressions, the painted and the real, pressed for an explanation.
“It’s your annotations, you see? Reading them made me feel you were still around. I was reading one just now, when you were over there with the apples and flowers, and it’s like you’re speaking directly into my head. You’ve written something here,” he said, pointing to the marked page. “What does it mean?”
She knew he wanted to bring her round, make her like him again and was beyond wary, thought she might hate him, but when she stepped forward and took the book from him her whole body loosened. “My fingers remember the book,” she said, breaking into surprised laughter. “I can feel it. They remember…” She slumped down onto the bench next to him.
Joel’s hands were tingling after releasing hold of it. He hadn’t realised how hard he was gripping. To compensate, he slotted one hand into the pocket where he kept the red and gold pencil stub, all that remained from the box she’d presented to him that first time in Caffe Reggio. He held it stable this time, no jabbing himself with it, like in the park.
The answer to his question contained a story, and Sophie would tell it to him without fear, without worrying how it might make him feel, because it wasn’t his. Not every story was his. She’d do it the best way she could; honestly and directly.
“Cézanne was bullied, really bad, at school. One time, he was about fourteen, another boy snuck up behind him and kicked him so hard in the ass he fell down a whole flight of stairs. After that, he developed a — a horror — of physical contact of any kind, which only got worse throughout his life.”
The peculiar déjà vu returned to disorient her and she saw, then felt, herself lying at the bottom of the Met’s grand staircase, her body smashed into a thousand crystalline pieces. She saw too, astonishingly, Joel’s inky ass jeans from their first meeting, but the dark blue stain was a bruise, this time, a mark of all the violence ever done to him. She pressed a finger and thumb against the bridge of her nose. No, she didn’t hate him.
“Is something wrong, Soph? You okay?” Joel asked. His impulse was to put his arm around her, but he resisted.
Sophie straightened up, nodded, “I’m okay,” and re-settled herself. “Imagine being married to someone who can’t bear to be touched.” She thrust the book towards the portraits. “Poor Hortense.”
“Why did she stay with him?” he asked.
“Well, what were her choices? I mean, she had no profession, besides bookbinding, or occasional modelling, and she wouldn’t go back to any of that. Though, I guess… I guess she loved him. At the start at least. They were both lonely, and they found each other. He could have abandoned her when she got pregnant — it wouldn’t have been so unusual among their set — but he didn’t. He stayed with her. At least he has that in the plus column. And he adored their son — little Paul. She wasn’t cut out to be an artist’s wife, I think. Despite his moods, his total lack of social skills and refusal to compromise, they stuck together.”
Shadow Is a Colour as Light Is Page 17
