by Kim Aubrey
DAY FIVE. “BLUE ROOM”
The blue room is white, but Yoko’s small, neat handwriting asks her to imagine that it is blue. A television set shows a live video of the sky. Today the sky is a bright cobalt, seeming to lend its blueness to the room. In front of the television, a sign reads, “This is not here.” Ann is willing to believe in the absence of the TV set, just as she is willing to believe that “This room gets as wide as an ocean at the other end,” and that “This room glows in the dark while we are asleep.” Turning around to the ocean-wide end, she reads, “This room gets very narrow like a point at the other end.” She feels dizzy and amorphous as if she has plunged briefly into Wonderland, growing within minutes both very large and very small.
She’d like to bring her daughter’s fiancé here, to see him in this room. Last night he and Vanessa came for dinner, revealing a diamond and platinum engagement ring. Ann threw her arms around them, wondering—Is this what she wants? He seemed so slight and limited, with his talk of the usefulness of his MBA, with his flyaway brown hair, and the worried frown his face assumed when he wasn’t smiling at Vanessa’s jokes or holding forth on investment strategies. Ann had wanted the world for her daughter, something big, colourful, and full of surprises, not a shadowy, boxed-in life, an apartment where everything is sawn in half. But perhaps he is as wide as the ocean at one end, while she has only seen the end that is as small as a point.
DAY SIX. “POINTEDNESS”
The point is a glass sphere. On the stand sit Yoko’s words: “This sphere will be a sharp point when it gets to the far corners of the room in your mind.” If Ann looks at it long enough, perhaps its roundness will fall away to expose the point at its very centre, the core from which it has evolved. Is the essence of the ball its point, its pointy-ness, its antithesis? She imagines the sphere stretching out into the corners of her mind, into its passages and dead ends, transfixing them.
DAY SEVEN. “AMAZE”
Ann drives to the art gallery, cheered by sunshine, daffodils, and forsythia. Maybe Yoko will call today. She spies an empty parking spot, but is distracted by a swirl of orange on the sidewalk, a woman’s dress celebrating the warm April day. She expects the traffic to keep flowing in front of her, but it stops abruptly, causing her van to strike a white BMW. She feels like she has collided with something that is not there, or shouldn’t have been there. “This is not happening,” she says out loud. Now she will have to postpone her visit to the gallery, take her car to the accident reporting station, and maybe tomorrow the body shop. She’ll have to calm her husband, who hates for anything to go wrong, and defend her own carelessness, as well as all the time she has been spending at the art gallery. Her thoughts retreat into a familiar cul-de-sac where she often gets stuck, worrying that she has let someone down. Contrite, she doesn’t notice how kind the man in the BMW is being.
“Don’t worry about it,” he says. “It’s just the bumper. That’s what they’re for.”
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m in great shape.” He flexes his biceps under his shiny suit.
He has silver hair and eyes like glossy pebbles in a stream. Ann’s husband is growing not silver, but grey and rough like a tree trunk. The silvery man is smooth and sweet as milk. He looks at her bumper.
“Do you want my information?” he asks. “Are you worried?”
“No,” she says. The van is seven years old. They have talked about buying her a new car.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “We’ll pretend this never happened.”
“This never happened,” Ann repeats, feeling it become true. She can hardly see the scratches on her bumper. What looked like a dent reveals itself to be a shadow cast by the sun and the parking sign. “Thank you,” she says.
Later, Ann enters the big central room of the exhibit. Just past the phone and the half room stands the maze. Usually a dozen teenagers are lined up, waiting to enter, but today all three rooms are surprisingly quiet. When she slips off her loafers, the white-haired custodian, whose job it is to make sure that only one person enters at a time, waves her in. The walls of the maze are clear plastic, but even though she can see out and people can see in, she has a sense of privacy, of a private, somewhat silly quest, a child’s serious game. She walks along, taking the turns, feeling ahead with her hands so that she doesn’t bump into any transparent walls. Finding herself in a dead end, she backs up and tries another way. Soon she is in the centre where a white toilet sits, its wooden seat cover down. She could settle here like Rodin’s thinker and ponder life. Instead, like everyone else she’s watched through the invisible walls, she lifts the cover to look inside at the familiar empty bowl. When Vanessa was four, she used to sit on the toilet making up jokes while she pooped, laughing at her own brilliance, her ability to create two things at once. Ann hadn’t thought the jokes were funny, but they’d delighted her clear-eyed daughter who now wants to marry the financial advisor with the flyaway hair.
After she exits the maze and starts to slip her shoes back on, the phone rings. She looks at the custodian, who shrugs, saying, “She hasn’t called in a few days.”
“I talked to her last week.” Ann hurries to answer the phone. Her fingers tremble as she lifts the receiver and hugs it to her ear.
“Who is this?” a woman’s voice asks.
It isn’t Yoko. Ann doesn’t know what to say. “I’m just a visitor to the exhibit.”
“Someone there called this number.”
“Well, it wasn’t me.” She hangs up.
“Was it her?” the custodian asks.
“No.” Ann drops her hands.
“Sometimes she gets her friends to call, and create situations.”
DAY EIGHT. “MOUND OF SORROW. MOUND OF JOY.”
Ann returns to the same room the following day. Across from the telephone hang the framed scraps of paper she looked at after Yoko’s call. Yoko gave nine of them to a gallery, but there are only six in this show. One is marked with crayon. Was that a child’s mischief or intentional—Yoko saying that art is not sacred, but open to other people’s additions? Ann found crayon marks on the wall in Duncan’s closet when she cleaned his room after he left for university. Angry red and yellow slashes, faded records of some childish tantrum. They must have gestured silently there for at least ten or twelve years, hidden behind games and boxes. Yoko’s framed pages are torn, words missing. They are more instructional “paintings,” but Ann is tired of reading Yoko’s instructions.
She wanders to the other side of the big room where three piles of small grey stones lie on the floor in front of a television showing Yoko and John in bed for peace. The large pile is unnamed, but the other two are marked, “mound of sorrow,” and “mound of joy.” A woman in a red sweater crouches beside one of the piles, building a stack of stones, each smaller than the last, like the tower of coloured plastic rings Vanessa and Duncan used to play with. Ann had always loved to gather the rings back, in order of size, onto their yellow pole, the colours arranged like a rainbow, while her children slept and she bustled from room to room, tidying traces of the day’s activities, attempting to compose the disarray in her own mind and heart.
The joy and sorrow piles seem of equal size, although the stones are arranged differently in each, forming random patterns. Some stones have strayed over the lines that circumscribe joy and sorrow, into the neutral territory between. The woman’s tower wobbles a little, but she rests a finger on top, kneeling there as if saying a prayer over her measure of joy.
The voices from the TV sound hollow and ghostly. Ann picks up a stone, rubs it between her fingers, lets it fall with a click onto the mound of sorrow. She has spent half her life erasing the evidence of her children’s tantrums and messes, mistakes and disappointments, willing their lives to be perfect and happy, but her power to make them so, always limited, is now lost. Her daughter will marry the small-as-a-point financial adviso
r. They will lavish their days on jobs in office buildings fifty stories high, and their evenings on each other in an uptown apartment, from which their wastefully lit offices will be visible all night. Her son will become the dentist his father wants him to be, not the singer he could be. He will hum melodies to himself while drilling his patients’ teeth. And he will be sad and angry a thousand times over without ever again resolving his feelings into red and yellow strokes made for her to discover.
In the third and final room, across from the wall of doodles, Ann finds the “point” in its 1980s incarnation, not a glass sphere as Yoko conceived it in the sixties, but cast in bronze like the baby shoes Ann keeps locked in a drawer, evidence that her children were once so small they needed her to hold their hands whenever they walked out into the world.
DAY NINE. “FLY”
Ann watches the video in a dark, narrow room, sitting on one of two black leather benches. Is that Yoko’s young body the fly leaps and buzzes along, her curves forming a desert landscape for the insect to explore? The soundtrack—Yoko wailing and crooning, playing with sound like a child unaware she is being listened to—reflects either the fly’s triumphs and disappointments or the woman’s agony at being nothing but the fly’s motionless terrain. Ann laughs in delight and horror, delighted at the correlation of Yoko’s frantic noises and the fly’s apparently aimless quest, horrified as she imagines how it would feel to let a fly probe her lips, tickle her nose, and creep along her naked skin.
She becomes aware that people have entered the room behind her, making the air feel warm and thick. The fly wanders through Yoko’s pubic hair. A man sits down on the bench beside Ann. The camera pans back from Yoko, showing her whole body speckled with flies. Ann jumps up and pushes her way out of the room.
The fly had twenty-five minutes on Yoko’s body. Ann has had nine days inside her mind. She has completed her mission, but what has she accomplished? Coming here every day was like picking up her children from school—a daily ritual, nothing more or less than that, something to lean on for a time, to build her life around.
She hurries past the maze and the silent telephone, back to the first room where the white walls still pretend to be blue. She stops to look at the broken mornings in their case. If only she’d paid attention to the details of those mornings, she could remember whether the sky had been yellow, silver, or pink, how the light slanted through the window, where it fell on her daughter’s cheek or her son’s rough hair. If one of these bits of glass could hold all that, she would smash the case for it. She has a few colour photos which capture a mood from back then, some jerky home videos, but that’s not what she’s missing. If she’d allowed herself to make art all those years—portraits, landscapes, real photographs—she might have noticed more, slowed time with her attention, ceased to wish away the years yearning for her old freedom in the black-and-white apartment. Then maybe now she wouldn’t feel so incomplete.
She turns to stare at the box with its shiny glass keys. They blur and warp behind her tears. Yoko told her to take one, but the Plexiglas looks impenetrable. She would have to lift the whole thing from the wall, and carry it out in full view of the guards and visitors. She swipes a tissue across her eyelids, crumples it. Lets it fall. Will someone wonder if it’s part of the exhibit, construct meaning from its placement on the floor, conjure up a whole, solid, and convincing portrait of her, the absent agent of its disposal?
Before leaving, she notices a new apple perched on the column. The light forms a splash of white along the green curve of the fruit. Its stem rises to a point. Ann has read that the museum bought a case of organic Granny Smiths from which they replace the bitten and shrivelled ones. She imagines the museum’s shadowy basement full of crates overflowing with bright round fruit. Without worrying what anyone might say, she reaches for the apple, and slips it into her purse.
A Large Dark
THREE AND A HALF MONTHS AFTER HIS WIFE LEFT HIM, André had signed up for an evening watercolour class held in a Sunday school classroom at a suburban church. He’d been looking for a way to get out of the house one night a week, to talk to someone other than his son, the nanny, the people at work, to meet a woman who’d praise his paintings and let him take her out to dinner.
One mild Thursday evening in November, a fluorescent ceiling fixture was flickering in the art room. Barry, the white-haired art teacher, lumbered onto a stepstool to try to deactivate it, while André, thirty years younger and at least thirty pounds lighter, pulled a muscle craning his neck and offering unhelpful advice. When Barry finally gave up to let him try, André balanced on the stool, searching for the place where the narrow bulb was attached, but bulb and fixture seemed to be all one, conjoined and wired to the ceiling. Tapping the bulb, he leaned over too far, almost falling onto Barry.
“Don’t hurt yourself,” Barry said, stone-faced.
André took one last look before jumping down. Massaging his neck, he asked, “Why do they make them like that?”
“To torment us.” Barry grinned.
From the portraits on one wall, past ministers, their faces grey and bespectacled, peered out over rows of collapsible tables and plastic chairs, while the windows of the opposite wall reflected the lit figures of the students within.
André returned to his seat, feeling foolish and clumsy. He was sitting directly across from the flickering light, which promised to give him a headache. He removed his glasses, rubbing the grooves between nose and eyes, then placed the heavy, black-framed lenses onto the table in front of him. He considered moving to a free spot across the room, but Katya, who hadn’t arrived yet, always sat beside him, and he liked watching her chestnut hair fall across her face as she leaned in closer to her painting. Katya’s missing his attempt at fixing the light had been a lucky break.
Even without his glasses, André could see the reflection of the teacher’s paper in the mirror overhanging the table at the front of the room. Barry always tilted the mirror so his students, tired after working all day, could opt to watch him paint from their seats. Consulting his reference, a photo of a seascape, Barry began his demonstration by floating cobalt blue into an orange wash. André relaxed his eyes, tried to breathe deeply. Tonight he hoped to let go of his perfectionism, and allow the paint to flow onto the paper, resisting his tendency to overwork the watercolours until they made thick pasty mud in the shapes of trees. That had been last week’s production.
“Do a sketch first to get the composition,” Barry was telling the class. “Play with placement. Leave things out. Put them in. Multiply, subtract. It’s like math.”
“I used to be good at math,” André joked. But no one laughed or even turned to look at him.
When Katya appeared in a red jacket, bringing with her the mingled scents of her spicy perfume and the warm night, André thought how he needed a woman to make his life add up again.
“How much have I missed?” she whispered, unpacking her paints.
“Not much.” He fiddled with his glasses. He could never think of the right words.
“I used to live by the sea,” she said, peering at the reflection of Barry’s painting. There was a hint of the Ukraine in her accent.
“My father’s family came from Kiev,” he said.
“Shh!” said Miriam, the grey-haired woman who sat in front of André.
Katya’s eyes were black with flecks of white where the light struck them. “Do you speak Ukrainian?” she whispered.
“No,” he said too loudly, causing Miriam and her neighbour to glare at him, but he only noticed Katya’s gaze, which flickered like the unfixable light before returning to Barry’s painting in the mirror.
André put on his glasses to watch Barry write in the details with a long narrow brush, a form of calligraphy, shaping fine, finger-like branches and a flourish of leaves.
“A few more touches,” Barry said. “And it’s done.”
“You s
aid I didn’t miss anything.” Katya frowned.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” he said. But she’d already grabbed her sketchbook and was dashing to the front of the room to join the students crowded around Barry’s table.
André followed. He wanted to say something that would make her smile in gratitude, or even admiration. He watched her study Barry’s painting and scribble in her book.
Up close, the painting looked sketchy and insubstantial. When André took a few steps back, it started to gain strength. Its power lay not in its strokes and colours, but in the way they played off each other, the contrast of light and dark, the illusion they created of moodiness and movement. The rocks and branches in the foreground seemed to beckon to the glistening sailboat on the horizon where the deep indigo of the ocean faded into mauve.
“I don’t know how you do it,” he said to Barry.
“Practice,” Barry said. “That’s all it takes.”
André didn’t believe him. He suspected there was some trick Barry was keeping to himself, that to make the magic work he’d need to find the right brand and shades of paint, the right weight and grain of paper, the exact alchemical formula.
“Is that a new red?” he asked, leaning over the table to point to a deep crimson next to the yellows on Barry’s palette. Some of the other students moved in to examine the colour.
“No,” Barry said. “That’s just alizarin.”
