The Cave Painter & The Woodcutter

by Don Hannah

  Bone isn’t solid, that would make it too heavy, it’s lacy and light. After Dad died, I started making little marks in my sketchbook, and I realized I was drawing it, drawing something that was both real and dead.

  The etchings were very big (indicates two by three feet with her hands), copper plates. I started drawing tiny little lines in the hard ground, immersing the plates in the acid for short bites, chewing my way into the plate in layers, the bites getting deeper, the lines heavier. There was a time when those deep bites would have intimidated me, because they’re so final—if they hadn’t worked the plates would’ve been ruined. Back then, I was foolish enough to think that everything I did was a potential masterpiece. I wanted to be a little art star so that the world could tell Dad that he was wrong. Wrong about me and art school and everything else.

  Wrong about Simon.

  A growing darkness, the wall is becoming a rougher surface.

  Then after he died, I was drawing this bone, then etching it into copper and beginning to understand that what makes us make pictures in the first place is a need to figure out what to do with the dead.

  Schoolboys discovered the Lascaux Cave in 1940. Occupied France, four boys in the woods with a dog named Robot, and they stumble into this cave that no one has seen for around sixteen or seventeen thousand years.

  It’s a perfect story. Children, the woods, a dog. A cave filled with wonders.

  And way back—six hundred generations back—who started painting on the walls of caves? Did their parents say, “It’s a load of crap, in my humble opinion”?

  The sense that she is in a cave.

  Or was it the parents and grandparents who started to paint? After a generation of experience, of living in the world, were they trying to show their kids something?

  Deep in the cave, a huge parade of animals, horses and bulls, painted across the roof and walls. Then, deeper, a herd of swimming deer. In the Chamber of Engravings, hundreds of animals are scraped into the walls, layers upon layers, each obscuring the other.

  Then the Shaft of the Dead Man.

  The only human figure in all Lascaux is in here, a stick man, with a little pointy penis, lying on his back. Was he somebody? Does he represent something? Is he dead, is he sleeping, is everything that surrounds him a dream? Why are the animals so magnificent and the lone human a mysterious stick man with a little pointy penis? How can we not be curious about him?

  The interior of a cave, the interior of the deer bone, Dad’s heart bursting in a car in his adopted country.

  I love the photo Grammy took when he was a little boy, 1920-something, playing on the front steps on Powers Street. His childhood in Brooklyn, his friendship with Uncle Ross, his falling in love with Mom—a series of coincidences and meetings that led to my existence. And then, Grammy’s friend taking me to MoMA and Matisse, and Simon, and getting pregnant and—

  Isn’t this how random and unplanned it’s been for all of us since the dawn of time? It’s all so amazingly haphazard.

  The sense of a cave, a tunnel, remains. She puts the bone beside the pin. Then she sorts through and discards the other objects on the table: books, perhaps, some broken kitchenware—nothing that relates directly to what she is saying.

  Simon had nowhere to go that Christmas because he’d gone home to Clark’s Harbour at Thanksgiving and come out to his family. Good Baptists, they wanted nothing to do with that kind of sin whatsoever, and so he never ever saw them again.

  I didn’t tell Dad that. I just said that I’d be bringing my best friend home from art school. Afterwards, he said, “I knew a fellow like that in the war and I always felt sorry for his poor wife ’cause she only had half a husband.”

  “He’s my friend,” I said. “We’re just friends, Dad.”

  “You don’t know everything, Miss Modern Art. You be careful.”

  So, of course, he was really unpleasant when five years later I told him that Simon and I were going to have a baby. He couldn’t help himself, (mimics) “That goddamn little fruit!”

  Lascaux is closed now, but we went to the cave at Font-de-Gaume, where there’s the painting of the reindeer buck licking the kneeling doe’s forehead.

  No matter where we went in France, Ryan said it was boring, “I don’t care about your stupid cavemen.”

  It’s so hard to be an adolescent.

  Almost as hard as it is to live with one.

  “And I don’t care about your new boyfriend, either.”

  “Pete’s a really good guy,” I said. “Why are you so mean? What do you want, Ryan? What would make you happy?”

  “I just want to be normal.”

  Normal.

  What do you know from normal when you’re young?

  We’re in the hotel together, it’s afternoon. “How come he gets the car?”

  “Because he’s interviewing someone who used to work at Lascaux. He’ll be back soon.”

  “It’s no fair.” He’d been sulky and sullen the whole time, as if he were in the running for Twelve Year Old Prick of the Century.

  “Why’d you drag me along on your dumb honeymoon?”

  “It’s not a honeymoon. Can’t the three of us travel together like adults?”

  But apparently not. ’Cause suddenly we’re having this fight. And he says something that makes me just—

  It makes my blood boil still.

  I told him that he should give Pete a chance, “He’s an interesting guy, the two of you could be friends, he doesn’t expect to be your father,” when Ryan goes, “Prob’ly just another fag anyway.”

  Meaning his father, meaning Simon.

  I slapped him.

  This makes her very uncomfortable; she shivers.

  There are horrible moments sometimes when you’re a parent, when you realize that nothing is rational, that even though you are the adult, you are capable of doing something so wrong that all could be lost.

  He sounded like Dad. My father’s prejudice was surfacing in my son, so I slapped him.

  There is a faint but growing light. She goes to an upturned wooden chair and drags it to a spot of cleared floor. A place, eventually, to sit.

  When I was a miserable teenager, Dad disapproved of everything I did. Steph drove me crazy back then because she was such a tattletale suck and everyone thought she was all perfect. And Mom, poor Mom, was trying to make me feel like I was part of a groovy, with-it family by making those godawful kaftans.

  Embarrassing, matching, double-knit, paisley kaftans. Jesus.

  I begged and begged and begged to be allowed to go to New York with the group from the Y, even though Mrs. Morrissey was the chaperone. I thought I wanted to belong.

  “You’ve always said they were stuck-up,” Dad said. “You’ve always said you couldn’t stand that Marsha Morrissey, or her mother.”

  “Please please please!”

  “Oh, let her go,” Mom said, “or we won’t have a moment’s peace.”

  A whiteness grows; it gradually becomes extremely intense.

  But on the bus down I made the mistake of telling Marsha about the art class at MoMA, about collages and Matisse.

  “We didn’t know you were so artsy-fartsy,” she said. “Such a hippie.” And everybody laughed.

  Our first night there, we went to see something called Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato.

  Why can’t we see Hair?

  “Because,” said Mrs. Morrissey, “it isn’t suitable for young people.”

  (incredulous) Hair?

  The weird thing was they all seemed to love Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato—they thought Noël Coward’s Sweet Potato was the cat’s ass.

  “My favourite part was—”

  “Didn’t you love it when—”

  “It’s the greatest thing I ever saw in my whole life!”

  I took off the n
ext morning before seven, skipping the trip to the Statue of Liberty and the matinee of Plaza Suite. Or, as I was calling it, Plaza Suite Potato.

  The wall is white, glowing behind her; the clutter below fades into shadows.

  I walked up to Central Park, walked all around midtown. At MoMA, everything thrilled me. Guernica and the Water Lilies and Matisse, of course. And then I was standing next to two young women—real art students—and I overheard one say, “Have you see the Eva Hesse show at Fischbach? It’s just a couple of blocks away.”

  I followed them.

  She moves as if she were in a gallery.

  The space was big and white and spare. I was clueless, a sixteen-year-old hick from New Brunswick, I didn’t know anything, had never seen anything like it. The big cube in the centre of the floor with soft rubbery insides, the fibreglass serial pieces on the walls. I felt as if I had stumbled into something that had been waiting for me all my life.

  When I started at art school a year and a half later, Simon and I thought we were so cool because we knew who Eva Hesse was before anyone else did. But suddenly she was dead. She was only thirty-three or four—brain tumour. And then everyone talked about her death as if it had always been at the centre of her work. Which was so wrong, because, for me, Eva Hesse was all about what was possible in the future.

  I was amazed that something could look like work, could make me think of all the grunginess that had gone into making it, and yet be so, so…

  Well, ethereal. At the Fischbach Gallery, I was in Heaven.

  The whiteness is gone.

  And then everything went to hell.

  The last thing I expected was that stupid Mrs. Morrissey would panic, would call the police, call Dad, cancel the Statue of Liberty, cancel Plaza Suite, “You think rules are only for other people, Dianne, don’t you? You ruined this for everyone!”

  I crawl home after the longest bus ride in the history of the world, and Steph’s prancing around in her fucking paisley kaftan, (chants) “Dianne’s gonna get it, she’s gonna get it!”

  And Dad was so angry. “What the hell got into you? What the hell were you thinking?”

  But I didn’t think it would be that big a deal. I was so nothing to those people, I didn’t think they’d even miss me.

  Was that when Dad and I started to dig ourselves in on opposite sides of everything?

  Everything that matters to me, everything that makes me who I am, none of it made sense to my father.

  I’m so sorry, Dad.

  What if I’d put on that damn kaftan so you could’ve taken a picture of us standing beside the Christmas tree? Back then, I’d have died rather than have that picture exist. Now, I wish it were in a little frame in front of me. Mom, Steph and me in our paisley kaftans. I can see the sullen look that would have been on my face.

  She sees a bit of fabric poking out from a pile and goes and pulls the kaftan out of the debris. She holds it up.

  Holy crap. It’s worse than I remembered.

  Poor Mom. And this was when she still had all her faculties.

  Well, most of them. I’m not sure if taste is a faculty.

  When I told Simon about them, he was all, “Can you get them for us? Wouldn’t that be fabulous!”

  Think of that. Gay Pride Day, a loud, tall queen, his best girl friend and their son, marching in matching paisley kaftans.

  That’s a definition of “the road not taken,” that is.

  Ryan loved being silly when he was little. He loved dressing up. The two of them at Halloween, oh my God.

  But now, our son is— How did our son become this stranger?

  What would’ve happened if he hadn’t fallen in love with…

  I mean Elaine, Elaine is so…

  She’s…

  Well, on one level, I suppose, she’s goodness itself, she’s…

  You know, I say that but I can’t think of a single, fucking, good thin—

  (thinks of one) She has a very lovely figure. She has beautiful arms. And she’d be attractive if she…

  She wears these…

  Her hair is…

  Oh, she’s just so… (bundles up and throws the kaftan away) that.

  She reads the Bible every day. She reads it from start to finish every year, starting on New Year’s, and she has been doing this since she was thirteen. When she found out my birthday she said, “Oh, Lamentations, Chapter Three.” And does she even think about the fact that she’s reading something that’s been translated from Hebrew and Greek? No. She’s one of those “if English was good enough for Jesus it’s good enough for me” people.

  She does have one hobby that isn’t totally Christian. She collects cookbooks, but only to look at; she never uses them to cook, because she’s suspicious of anything new. She makes the same dreary meals her mother cooked. They’re all like, “If shepherd’s pie was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.”

  She has all the self-awareness of my left tit!

  She never seems to have any fun. Never even been tipsy in her life—not an ounce of liquor to be found at the wedding anywhere. Except in my sister’s purse. That wedding. Oh, that terrifying wedding.

  At the end of that very long day, with a half-dozen bridesmaids all done up like hooker starlets, and blank beefy boys in rented tuxes, and a cake the size of a temple, when Ryan and Elaine left in a white stretch limo, we were exhausted by the sheer waste and tackiness of it all. The moment we got back at the hotel, Mom goes, “Oh, Pete, please, break out the booze for the love of God!”

  I understood it when Ryan told me that he wanted stability. He wanted a steady income. He wanted to be part of a big family. I do understand that it hasn’t been easy being my son.

  “I want to be normal !”

  (rants) Nobody’s fucking normal ! Some people are just uninteresting! Some people are just dull because they think that shepherd’s pie was good enough for Jesus!

  I knew it would be a traditional wedding but I asked if there could be a time, a place, maybe not during the service, but afterwards, the reception maybe, where I could mention Simon’s name, where I could talk a bit about Ryan’s family.

  I just wanted to say, “Ryan’s father was the most interesting person in the room, and the smartest, and the liveliest. Simon was crazy over our son, and we had such fun, the three of us.”

  I wanted to say…

  The lighting slowly becomes romantic, pink and soft.

  Oh, Simon!

  My God but you were fun.

  How can you not love a man who loved dressing up?

  Never looked so butch before or after that Halloween. Wool skirt and blouse, sleeveless wool vest. Hair cut so short. “You look like George C. Scott in drag,” I said, and he said, “I’m supposed to! I’m Gertrude Stein!”

  I’d gone the whole route with gum arabic and tweezers and hair I’d cut from my bangs and had a dark little Alice B. Toklas moustache.

  We were so silly all night. I carried both our purses, like the photo by Carl Van Vechten.

  And we kept running into people who didn’t know who Gertrude and Alice were, and that seemed so funny.

  “Tell’m who I am, Alice,” he’d roar.

  And I’d go, “Miss Stein is America’s greatest living writer.” I’d go, “Gertrude Stein is a genius!”

  We kept quoting them both all night—God, they cracked us up!

  “What is the use of being a little boy if you grow up to be a man?”

  “Gertrude has said things tonight it will take her ten years to understand.”

  Quoting, and drinking.

  Then, back at my place, “Miss Toklas, have I ever told you that I find your moustache most attractive?”

  “Oh, Miss Stein!”

  And he started kissing it, my moustache, “Mmm. You’re so hairy!”

 
And it just seemed so hysterical that we were necking that we kept on going.

  Then he took off his big Gertrude boobs, “Not to the future, but to the fuchsia!”

  And I opened my dress and said, “Oh look, I have tender buttons!”

  And he started caressing them, my breasts.

  And we were sort of playing, sort of into it.

  And then I’m, “That’s quite the basket you have there, Miss Stein!”

  And he’s, “I am I because my little dog knows me!”

  I’m going, “Woof woof!” and we’re in the bedroom, and we’ve never even seen each other naked before, and we know it’s not for real real, we know it’s because we love each other and we’re drunk and pretending to be Jewish lesbians in France between the wars.

  “Every time I sleep with a genius I hear a bell.”

  “Ding! Ding! Ding!”

  “Oh, Miss Stein!”

  “Oh, Miss Toklas!”

  And then, a few weeks later, when the pregnancy-test shit hits the fan, he said, “Di, it’s all up to you.” He said, “If you decide no, then I’ll be with you. And if you decide yes, then we’ll figure it out.”

  He said, “It’s up to you. But I’ll do whatever I can.”

  And, for a considerable length of time, he did, and would have continued to do so.

  If he hadn’t fallen in love with Cal when Ryan was in grade two—“This is it, Di, the Great Love of my life”—if he hadn’t moved to Vancouver to be with him, if Cal hadn’t gone back to his Mormon ex-wife in Calgary, if Simon hadn’t gotten AIDS and come back to Ryan and me to die.

  It almost worked.

  It worked there for a while.

  It worked as much as anything else that our fucking generation was so hot about.

  We are stardust. We are golden. Jesus. Woodstock. Fuck.

  The romantic light has gone. She is standing.

  Now, I knew I’d never get away with a story like that at Ryan’s wedding. That’s not the kind of story you can share with the folks at the Mount Zion Newly Reformed Church of God in Christ.

  The sense of something looming behind her.

  Oh, his death, oh the misery of his death. The first death where I was there, where I was holding someone, holding his hand, and Ryan was there, too—