There was no way I’d be able to sleep myself, so I stayed up and finally made a few notes about Souls on Board, which I should have already started by now. I don’t know what’s been holding me back—am I afraid of failing at the project I’ve planned for so long, the vision that kept me going after my father died, and ever since?—but this day and night have given me new inspiration.
Artist’s Statement DRAFT
Souls on Board is inspired by the loss of an airplane that crashed in a thunderstorm off the coast of North Carolina on April 30, 1997. The crash killed 149 people, including my father. Passengers are portrayed in individual panels, assembled in grids laid out to simulate an aircraft cabin: six horizontal rows and six vertical, with a dividing space down the middle to designate the aisle. The panels are separate, self-contained portraits of people who recognize that they are entering the last seconds of their lives.
The concept for this piece comes from Jacob Lawrence’s series The Migration of the Negro (although those panels tell a progressive story, whereas mine represent multiple experiences of a simultaneous moment). For style, I am influenced by the work of hyperrealist painters, particularly Chuck Close and Alyssa Monks. Medium: oil on linen.
What I hope to evoke in the viewer is
I’ve been sitting here trying to complete that last sentence for half an hour. But I’ll have to put the book aside without finishing, at least for—everything that’s happened today has finally caught up to me.
Monday, September 7
Susanne invited me over for a Labor Day barbecue along with members of Gil’s crew—some he’s had to lay off, and the few still working for him. We haven’t seen each other since the night we slept together, which seems like longer ago than four months. I called her after Grandee died, and she called back to say she was sorry, but after that she told me we’d better “let things go” for the summer, she’d see me back here when school started again.
I did not want to “let things go,” but I recognized that I had no choice in it. When she asked me to the barbecue, I felt both thrilled and anxious. I considered declining, or at least pretended to consider it, knowing that in the end I wouldn’t resist the chance to see her as soon as I could, especially in her own home.
She gave me the same hug as when I’d won the Lewison Award back in May, only a few hours before she came to my house (and my bed). This time her husband was right there next to her, and he shook my hand as I felt my heart batter against my chest. They introduced me to Joy, who was not what I expected; from everything Susanne had told me about her last spring, I’d pictured a lighthearted girl. This one appeared somber, uneasy, although I thought I saw a light in her eyes when she heard my name. Feeling a tension among the three of them, not wanting to wonder about its source, I excused myself to join a group of men from Gil’s crew.
But I felt just as awkward with them, not knowing what to talk about and sensing that they felt the awkwardness, too. I believed it was because of me, and not because I’m an artist instead of a contractor or handyman. One tried to talk to me about basketball, and I had to confess that I don’t follow the Knicks or anyone else. Another asked me where I’m from, and when I said Rochester, he started to say something else but stopped himself. (I mean originally, I guessed were the words; it’s happened before.) A third, who smelled like pot, appeared to feel as uncomfortable as I did, and he let me know in an undertone that this was the case—“I’m one of the shitcans, not enough work to go around. Last thing I wanted to do today was come eat hot dogs and suck up, but whatever, he said he’s gonna try to bring me back on. Like I buy that. But I figure I don’t have a choice, right?”
At first, I wasn’t even sure if it was me he was muttering to or not, because he was looking across the room at his former coworkers, who’d edged themselves away. I excused myself to the bathroom, and after feigning the use of it I lingered in the hallway to look at the pictures hanging on the wall. I thought maybe I’d see something of Susanne’s, but instead I found a series of framed crayon drawings with the signature JOY, in block print letters, occupying the bottom right corners. The later pieces were done in a mixture of crayon and paint—crayon outlines filled in with watercolor, creating an effect that was at once primitive and sophisticated. The work had a distinctive, deliberate style, and I could tell that Joy had a gift, maybe even more so (although I would never have told her this) than Susanne herself.
Joy came up behind me and said, “Don’t look at those.” But her tone was more embarrassed than commanding. “Those are all old. I don’t do that stuff anymore.”
I told her they were beautiful.
“Well, you’re nice to say so. To hear that from you—I’m flattered.” She averted her eyes, and I remembered Susanne telling me she was shy. Yet she showed more energy and animation now than when we’d met a few minutes earlier. “My mother took me to see American Commonplace last spring. I loved it.”
“She did?” I was surprised Susanne hadn’t told me this.
“It was amazing.” The fervency in her voice told me the praise was real. “Can I show you my more recent stuff? It’s in here.” She led me into her bedroom, where a series of impressionist pencil drawings hung on the far wall. I peered closely at each one, exhilarated by the skill I saw.
“You use such minimal detail,” I said. “It’s the exact opposite of what I do. But the effect is just as powerful—we just go about it in different ways.” She asked me how I would define hyperrealism, and I said I thought of it as not only the effort to reproduce life on the canvas but to render it as more real than it actually is.
“How can something be more real?” she asked. I said I thought it was a matter of how you looked at things, which was the whole point of art, and not wanting to get us mired down in that particular quicksand, I gestured again at her sketches and said, “I see a lot of Monet in these.” The one I liked best was a group of children jointly examining an object in front of them that could not be identified—a ball? An apple? “And van Gogh, too.” At the end of the row was a variation on van Gogh’s Hands in Repose, and I recognized immediately that Joy had used her mother as a model, though of course I could not say so because I could not give away my intimate knowledge of her mother’s hands. Instead I told her that though I’d never tried charcoal myself, I’d been struck in reading about it to learn that so much of that medium is erasing: the artist covers the page with black and then creates an image by deciding how much to take away, instead of adding.
Joy nodded. “‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.’” She blushed, seeming embarrassed to have the Michelangelo quote so readily at hand.
“You’ve been talking to your mother.” Anyone who knew Susanne would have recognized one of her favorite lines. “Are you going on for a degree?” Then I wanted to kick myself, remembering too late what Susanne had told me: they’d saved enough money for Joy to attend the Decker Institute in New York, but her husband lost everything on that bad investment.
So when Joy nodded and said, “Decker,” I tried to hide my surprise.
“Really?”
“You must have thought about applying there,” she added. Every art student thinks about applying to Decker.
“I couldn’t afford it,” I told her. I didn’t feel like saying the other part of the truth, which is that I’d been afraid to be rejected. “They don’t give any aid.” Surely she knows this, I thought. But it wasn’t my place to deflate her fantasies of attending the premier art school in the country. Instead I wished her luck and made as if to leave the room, but she caught my arm and said, “Wait. What are you working on now?”
I sensed something in her that I often feel in myself: the impulse to be distracted from the subject at hand. Yet she also appeared genuinely interested in my answer. I found myself eager to describe Souls on Board to her, though at school I tend not to talk about it. Why? I get along fine with the other graduate students, but I haven’t found anyone I particularly want to conf
ide in, besides Susanne. Joy is different.
I began by describing the plane crash that killed my father and the phone conversation we’d had the night before it, when he called from Atlanta and I waited for him to describe the meeting he’d had with Linda Martin. How anxious I was to hear what she’d said when he raised to my mother the prospect of meeting me, or at least getting to know me through letters and on the phone.
But instead he told me he wanted to wait until he could speak to me in person about how the visit had gone. That was when I knew he’d never even contacted Linda—that he’d no doubt done the same thing he always did when faced with anything that made him anxious: chickened out. Instead of arranging beforehand to meet with her, he must have booked the plane trip believing that once he got that far, the investment he’d made and the trouble he’d gone to would spur him on to completing the mission. I imagined the scene: he arrives at the airport, checks into some crappy hotel room intending to take a cab to the address he’s somehow found for her, but then looks in the mirror and loses his nerve.
What was he afraid of? That she’d close the door in his face? That he’d see the white husband and white children and be reminded of how wrong he’d been to love her, or how wrong for her to love him? It’s not a big deal, I pictured him trying to convince himself. But of course he would have known that it was a very big deal, him stepping back into her life after she’d explicitly asked him not to. So he got cold feet and boarded the flight headed for home.
Even through the chaos of what followed the news of the crash—having to endure and manage Grandee’s grief, as well as my own—I realized I was waiting for Linda Martin to show up. I expected to see her at the funeral. Wouldn’t the list of people on the downed plane be printed in the newspaper? Wouldn’t she have seen James Willett’s name, realized it was my father, made an effort to learn about the arrangements, and decided that she owed him the courtesy of paying her final respects? Not to mention meet the son she’d given up at birth twelve years earlier?
But this was a fantasy, of course—as was every other thing I’d ever hoped for with regard to my mother. Even if she’d seen the name, which was not a given, she might have decided it was another James Willett; she’d have no reason to think he’d have left upstate New York. More to the point, there’d be no reward for her in believing it was her old lover. It was in her best interest to leave the two of us, him and me, tucked together in some corner of her mind as a piece of unpleasantness from her past she’d taken care of, no need to think about it anymore.
I told all of this to Joy even as I realized how irrelevant it was to the question she’d asked me about my work. But instead of directing the subject back to art, she said, “I’m close to my grandmother, too,” and asked what happened after my father died. I found myself wanting to continue my story. Now that Grandee is gone, there’s no one else who knows it all; even with Violet and Susanne I’ve held things back, afraid to say everything in case it overwhelms me, afraid to seem too vulnerable.
But somehow, this afternoon, I didn’t worry about that with Joy. I told her that after the plane crash I went to live with my grandmother, staying with her as a commuter student during college and for a year after I graduated, when I worked as a guard at the Memorial Art Gallery. I told Joy that in the same way I’d been obsessed before the crash by the idea that my white mother living in the South would come back and ask me to be in her life, I replaced that obsession afterward by imagining what it had been like for everyone on the plane during those last few seconds as the storm pitched them toward the water. That was the plan for my project, I said—to depict those passengers at the moment they realized their lives were about to end.
Almost imperceptibly (but I saw it), Joy frowned. “What?” I asked, feeling warier than if she’d been one of my professors. When she mumbled Nothing and shook her head, I pressed her on it.
“Well,” she said, “who am I to tell you what you should do?” She seemed chagrined by her own audacity, but it didn’t keep her from continuing. “I was thinking that if you capture them when they know what’s happening, it’s really a portrait of the fear they’re feeling, instead of the people themselves. Right?” But she didn’t wait for me to answer. “I was just thinking it might be more—haunting, or whatever—if you painted them right before they knew. Wouldn’t that make it all the more poignant, somehow? All the more sad? Then, if I’m standing in front of the painting and I know what happens in the next instant, I’m thinking, That could be me. Or any of us.”
I recognized immediately that she was right, yet for some reason I felt embarrassed to let her know this, and played down my reaction as I made a point of appearing to consider her words. She asked if I’d started any of the portraits yet, and I told her Not really. When she asked why, I admitted I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.
“Well, for sure you won’t if you never get started.” Joy’s answer came so readily, and made so much sense, that I laughed. In the next moment, I knew she’d just told me something more valuable than anything I’d heard from an art professor during the past year, including Susanne.
Joy asked how many panels I planned. When I told her three dozen, she whistled and said, “So it’s not a diptych, and it’s not a triptych—”
I smiled back. “Right. It’s a thirty-six-tych.”
“And where did you get the title? ‘Souls on Board’?”
It was an old nautical term, I told her, from when ships carried corpses and needed a way to distinguish between live passengers and dead ones in caskets, in case the ship went down and all that could be recovered were bodies in the water. (I decided not to mention another origin of the phrase, which had to do with slave ships and the fact that souls were attributed only to the white people on them.)
“It gives me the creeps,” Joy murmured, shivering as she wrapped her arms around herself. “But I bet it’ll be amazing when you’re done.”
Her saying this made us both blush, and I hoped Joy didn’t also have her mother’s talent for being able to see this in me. Then, from the kitchen, we heard Susanne calling Joy’s name before she appeared in the doorway. It took her a moment to register that I was also in the room, and what passed over her face then was a smile expressing not only pleasure but possessiveness as well, which she tried but failed to redirect toward Joy alone. Joy, I could tell, saw that I was included in it, too. Registering this, I hurried toward the door as Joy held her hand open to indicate that I should precede her out of the bedroom and back to the party. Something had changed between us, and in the way she looked at me. I didn’t speak to her alone again during the cookout, except when I was leaving, when I added a Good luck to my good-bye.
“You, too,” she said. I waited for the smile she’d shown me so frequently during our earlier conversation. But she had already turned her face away, and the connection was lost.
First Friend
The day before their test on The Odyssey, Joy came over to help Harper study, but instead she was helping her set up a Facebook page. She hadn’t done it before now because Harper’s mother was afraid some lunatic might track her down and kill her.
“Your mother doesn’t have to know everything,” Joy said, her fingers hovering above the mouse as she paused before the section reserved for a profile description. “Mine doesn’t. Here, I’m putting that you have a cat who plays the piano and you’re an awesome baker.”
“‘Pastry chef.’ And could that be any more boring?”
“Not the part about the piano-playing cat.” Joy smiled, and Harper couldn’t help smiling back. As if he knew they were talking about him, Chip lifted his head from the bedspread and blinked. “If you want to sound interesting, you could always tell the truth, that you have a mother who’s written fourteen unpublished novels and refuses to drive.”
“It’s not fourteen,” Harper said. But she had lost count by now; it might have been fourteen. “And it’s not really refusing. She would just prefer not to.” She hoped
Joy would smile at the reference to Bartleby, which they’d read the first week of the semester, but Joy seemed to have missed it in her intense focus on creating Harper’s page.
“Where are your pictures?” she asked, picking up one of the protein pumpkin bars Harper had made especially for her; too much sugar could make Joy sick. She scrolled around on Harper’s computer until she found the file, then clicked through images. “Here’s a good one,” she said. “It’s of both of us, but I can crop it so it’s just you.”
“Really, let’s just forget it. Who am I kidding? I’ll end up with, like, three Friends. Can’t we just forget Facebook and study for the test?”
“But it’s all done! Look, there you are.” Joy made a flourishing motion with her hands to display Harper’s profile. For a moment Harper flinched, but it was more in expectation of what she might see than what was actually on the screen. In fact, Joy had uploaded one of the few photographs Harper liked of herself, which Joy’s mother had taken at Elbow Pond the summer before their junior year. The girls had just come out of the water and wrapped an old Little Mermaid towel around themselves, Joy’s sun-blond hair tangled with Harper’s shorter brown at the spot where their shoulders joined. The shot made Harper appear almost pretty; someone who didn’t know better might mistake her for a popular girl.
There hadn’t been any trips to the pond together this summer, which meant that Harper didn’t go at all. Part of the reason was that Joy spent so many hours at her nursing home job, but there was another part of it that Harper was afraid to ask about. All she knew was that she’d missed their old routine, and Joy, more than she was willing to admit, even to herself. When Joy suggested this study session, Harper felt bad for wondering why, and tried to convince herself that Joy missed these times, too. It almost worked.
How Will I Know You? Page 8
