Midpoint the canvas and a tint the name of which she couldn’t, tip of the tongue, remember. Bleu de Veronique, bleu de Delft, bleu de something. Nearly invisible, but raised off the spread as she looked at it now and obviously, a thread backstroked by the brush, so thickly clotted with the then-new blue that it was black, and pointing east, rightwards to the margin where her eyes traveled.
Her eyes had been the source of much trouble. Black, sick, pure, empty, plain, clear. Filly-faced chimera, starved or puffy with dope, oval as androgyny. The perfume fades, a camphor collar encircles a secret nest, her silhouette moves across the old city. Its yellow, heavy fog would only appear to grow with dread if filmed dead on and set to a 4/4 beat, heavy as a Sisters Of Mercy kick, the painful drag and snap of the bonecrack snare. The sun, weak as a bleached lemon, beat softly against her unmoving eyes.
Violins creaked in the corner of the gallery room. Candles opened and closed; underage widows were trotted out for sympathy, or sizing up. Throughout, the vision of an emaciated man, his ferocious smile, the rapid struggle of his dance. In the heart of existence sorrow is the pearl. Sorrow without questions, with manners and looks almost human, wallflower sorrow waiting for an end to the music. Bleu de Veronique, bleu de Delft, then you, she thought, feeling the ghost’s breath on her face, waiting open-mouthed just beyond the edge of the frame and the same height as her, where she’d been easily dogged from stopping point to stopping point since entering the gallery. She closed her eyes for the necessary moment, the span of which might be measurable against a haystack, an archway, the furl of a yellow Flemish sail. Out of doors, the snow mocked architects. Their weakness, the transparency of their vanities: so handsome, so rotten with beauty. Sorrow was the pearl in the heart of existence. What she was looking for and what she never found was a plum-colored idea. Her favorite dream was one that was poorly lit, incorporating whatever dense perfume had last fogged her lover’s fruitless fantasies, snippets of which he’d written down for her to find. She vowed to be better. She vowed to try and be better. It had been a late start and thus a day of small events with the winding down seen three hours off in coming. Her maid’s apron is barely off and he appears, this latest case officer, unhousing his hose and winking her over and down. A chat that like a drink, proved bottomless. With a clear conscience she would sleep, searchlit by the moon. The void surrounding him would contradict her. ‘Your eyes … so deep, so Atlantic.’ She wasn’t the only one who couldn’t quite believe her ears, cupping a palm behind her gypsy earring to cry what’s that? Eventually always resolves to now. So that in an hour and a prickwet moment fatigue would come upon her in her bed. Bloodshot, gin-soaked, erect and evil and small. For who could know better than she the moment in which the bed had been set afloat. The moment in which the pillow had leapt through the far room, crying like a humpbacked pilot, staggering between the columns of snow. Behind the curtain a roll of brief thunder intense as a night of sudden sun and only an irritating old blind woman skilled enough to translate. ‘We are approaching the end of the world.’ A mother’s nightmare peering up from the coral reef of discarded underthings, a monster’s childlike face, white-scaled and glistening, perched on a crouch of body and waiting. The apathy of dead fish, poisoned in their millions, their slow drift of silver signaling the end. Jostled softly upon malevolent whispers and hums, the little ship, becalmed at the entrance to the final sea. She vowed to be better. She vowed to make a list of nice things to do, nice thoughts to think. She’ll consign her body to him, to receive with violence if that is where his desire lies. Or construct of it a shadowy mirror, a glass in which to make love with himself. Congratulations would be in order. At last he might do what he will.
She broke her vow with a flute of slippery champagne, a rich pornographer’s insulting gift. Stunned by white flames, her nostrils were tickled pink, her nose wriggling as though invaded by intelligent ants. The thing she wanted was always being hidden from her in someone’s tightly closed fist. The Himalayas reduced to a child’s knuckle, snuffed candle and the room filling with the dust of softly settling moths. A porcelain needle, a glass bird, a tiny blood-red heart.
In the corner of the gallery violins were busy constructing a coral reef. Under the papery skin, drawn taut as eggshell, his skull shone like the sun. But the eyes, moving from an oceanic hollow to a near twinkle, as if to say ‘I’m not a symbol, my dear young lady, I’m a man.’ He stares at her from the violin-dizzy corner of the room. She turns away knowing she will always wonder what his first words would have been.
One end was then this mysterious blot of deliberate blue and the other end crept into imagination as a walkable, garden-enclosed terrain of shadows, its prospects made fraudulent by starlight. Silence, discretion, manners: shouldn’t these be enough to achieve what privately was a glass of red wine away from being unthinkable? She heard a memory springing from its patient pause and the painting’s code cracked into relief, blurred only by the sound of the crystal figurine (Moor, with owlet) shattering on and over the patio tile. The sacrifice, however unspeakable, had taken place. She surrendered to, and was abandoned by, the memory’s dark instant.
At night she left the curtains open. She made sure the bedroom light was off before she left the bathroom, crossing the moonlit room in the simplicity of her modest nightgown or the smoother simplicity of nakedness. She slid her socked feet beneath the black and white checks of the cover and open-eyed, subsided in moonlight. The moon, when it could be seen, was benevolent and big, it didn’t seem to know how thoroughly it cleaned the world below, the many impurities it bathed, dissolved and dusted to blowaway. There were some topics that only the moon was fit to hear her speaking of, for although it might not remember, it had been there. His voice to her, or hers to another, an even smaller child, a little, very little boy. Bringing her into the garden he wanted her hands left free. Cry, if you wish, but do so silently. Of the clutter of infra-vowel sounds ou is the one that most conveys a whimper, although neither letter appears in the cowering word itself. Could she even have said what was hidden between those trembling lips? A trap of murdered voices she might say now, revising the memory, or prompting the next victim, speeding the ordeal along, sparing them some few fine moments of torture. A black swan, dying at the edge of the polluted estuary, her throat bruising with the intake of tears and mucus, filling to the brim with a drowning music, rhythms lost in the lush surround, grateful even for the narcotic’s heavyhanded soothe, rising round her with the color of sleep. She surrendered to, was surrounded by, sleep.
Caged in a cone of sun a juvenile goddess was smiling sideways past her. Part Kali, part Persephone, and sharing some small portion of the facial attitude of the earringed and cigarette-holding young man in Gauguin’s ‘Relacher’. Verging (the goddess) into a pose of ridicule, lips pursing to spit, but frozen, pausing again on the ecstasy of that priceless burning diamond, that single soul-destroying word.
She breathed out in an audible gasp, knew her cheeks would be blushed if anyone happened through the aftermath. ‘Priceless burning diamond’ was not quite the proper name for a ghost but was sufficient to contain it and the insurance of her strength against darkness, against temptation, against memory. Six simple words: I am afraid to know you. At the end of the gallery a uniformed guard was posting the cafeteria menu on the white cork of a bulletin board. Art gave her appetite. She wanted to leap upon the moon. And make no impression.