The museum guard in the corner took a step forward and coughed. I retracted my hand.
“Yeah, and look at the people below the balcony,” Gauguin added.
“Amazing—he made each one with just a gesture of black paint.” My body was sucking in the painting. I felt how Matisse felt, saw what he saw—and what couldn’t be seen with the eyes, things that were not in the room he was painting but that the canvas demanded be there.
Gauguin grabbed my hand. “C’mon, let’s go find some paintings done by my namesake.”
I moved differently after that Matisse painting. Every step I took was a block of color. Every breath was a shadow. Every movement of my head or hands was a shape, and every painting I saw was a banquet of language. The painters were talking to me. I never knew before how much paintings spoke without words and told me in form and color about the natural unity of the world.
This visit with Gauguin felt like my first real trip to the museum, as well as his. I was meeting these painters now with hunger and friendship. They could teach me something. And it felt good to have the man I loved and had married standing beside me.
When we got to the third floor, Gauguin grabbed me right in the middle of one of the galleries. He was excited by everything he was seeing. All he’d expected was a hug in this public place, but I turned my head and kissed him so full on the lips, my tongue so deep in his mouth, right under an Alexander Calder mobile, that it felt as though we were flying through space, like two people in a painting by Chagall.
As we neared Ohio, on our drive back to Minnesota through Pennsylvania, we thought of stopping at Gauguin’s Aunt June’s, only thirty miles south of the highway. But when we approached the turn, we stopped at Stuckey’s instead and walked up and down the aisles of pecan chews and Ohio T-shirts in the kind of daze that driving across flat country induces. We ordered one hamburger to share and stood at the counter watching the thin blond man throw a ball of ground meat on the grill so hard that the meat flattened out, but just in case, the cook also pressed the spatula over it. In front of us was a glass case with a light that kept warm the precooked french fries in individual white bags. I ordered some. We paid, took our food to the orange booth by the window, and ate quickly. The hamburger was good. We ordered another one. Outside the sky was pale blue and stretched out forever. I asked if they had coffee ice cream.
“You must be from New York. Only New Yorkers driving on to California ask for coffee. Nope. We got chocolate, vanilla, and butter pecan.”
After dawdling for too long, we decided to skip Gauguin’s aunt and head for Rip’s mother, who lived in a small town in Indiana. It was out of our way, but we didn’t care. We got back in the car and continued west. When we got to Logansport in late afternoon, we passed a Dunkin’ Donuts, made a right, drove down half a block, and parked in front of a small stone house with a large white porch. We knocked at the front door. No answer. We went around back.
There she was, in a white apron, squatting barefoot by the peas. She was eighty-two years old and had warm patches of pale red freckles all over her arms and face. She was tying clear plastic bags to a thin white string she had strung across the garden.
“Camille.” Gauguin called his grandmother by her first name.
She looked up. We hadn’t told her ahead of time that we were coming. “This is to fool the birds. I devised it myself,” she explained, half to herself. Then she paused. “George?” She squinted as a big smile blossomed in her face. “My word! Help me up, honey. It’s so good to see you.” She looked past him at me. “This must be your bride.” We hugged. Her body felt generously soft and full. “Come in the house.” She looked back at me. “My, George, she’s pretty. I like her dark skin and her hair’s real nice.”
She wiped her hands on her apron, climbed up the three concrete steps, and held open the back screen door as she ushered us in. The kitchen was cool and pale green against the humidity that clamped down among the dogwood and spruce trees outside.
Immediately Camille began to make her famous chicken and dumplings. As she cooked, she rattled on about how beautiful she’d heard the wedding was, how cute my parents were, how tired we must be from our long trip, and how she had once visited New York City when she was thirteen.
“Camille, you know you don’t have to do this. We can take you out.” Gauguin held up his hand.
“How often do I have you? Don’t you miss my dumplings? Here, you just sit still and sip at your pink lemonade. Nell, do you want some cookies? I’ve got some Oreos in that jar there, the one with the fat belly. I figure the jar’s been eating too much and wants you to have a cookie. Ah, wait.” She brushed some hair out of her face. “I’ll scoop you up some vanilla ice cream. George, hand me that big silver spoon over there on the drain board. I’ll pour some of my peach preserves over it. Right from the tree out back.”
“Camille, are those old trees still making peaches?” Gauguin asked.
“Well, yes, if the frost don’t get them first. This year I think I’ll be lucky if I get two peaches from all four trees together.”
She ran back and forth from the refrigerator to the stove to the gray Formica table. Her small fists were powdered with white flour. When she rolled out the dough, she pressed her full weight into it and stood on her toes for leverage.
I stirred the ice cream as it melted in my dish. Gauguin motioned to me with his eyes to eat it. I didn’t want to.
“Camille, tell me about George when he was a young boy,” I asked. It felt funny to call Gauguin George.
“He was the sweetest thing. Remember, George, how you used to catch salamanders, kiss them, and let them go? You learned to do that in Iowa with your grandmother Mary Ellen. I was afraid you’d get warts. Then remember when you were twenty-one and came to visit here in that black limousine you drove, painted pink and silver? Your red hair was down to your shoulders. I thought, ‘Now what’s he up to?’ But you still ate my dumplings and peach preserves and I said to myself, ‘Don’t worry, Camille, the boy’s just fine.’ Honey, hand me that Mazola oil.” She pointed to the bottle above the sink. “How’s your dad? Tell me, George”—she turned her blue eyes away from the dough and toward him—“does he ever go to church? I worry about him and pray each Sunday for him to find his way. You know, he can’t get into heaven if he doesn’t go to church.”
“Now, Camille, Rip will find his own way,” Gauguin assured her.
“Well, I know he’s independent, but you can’t fight God. You’ll lose. He’s got all the big atomic weapons wrapped into one.”
“Where’d you hear that?” Gauguin asked.
“The preacher said it last month.” She paused in her kneading to look at Gauguin. “He says, ‘The president thinks he’s mighty, but let you tell me, one sweep of God’s hand, and the whole world will be blown up.’” She nodded emphatically and in wonder at God’s power.
“You mean, ‘Let me tell you,’ ” Gauguin corrected her.
“That’s what I said.” She turned to me. “Honey, you don’t have to eat it, if you don’t like.” The vanilla ice cream was soup in my dish.
I smiled weakly. I’d never understood why someone would eat vanilla ice cream.
After Camille fell asleep in front of the TV, Gauguin and I took a walk in the cool evening. We held hands and strolled under the bright lights of the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot.
“Does your grandmother like me?” I asked.
“When you went in the bathroom, she whispered to me, ‘She’s real sweet. I like her shiny dark hair,’ but I think it helped that you liked her dumplings.”
We slept that night under a pink satin coverlet on a bed that was soft and full of lumps. It was the one Camille and her husband had slept in. He was a coal miner, and when the mines closed, he left. They never heard from him again until he died fifteen years later. His brother sent Camille a telegram. “Robert died. We buried him in Greeley, Colorado. Send money for the tombstone.” Camille read the note, sat down in the kitchen,
put her face on the table, and cried, her hands tucked into the pockets of her white apron. She sent money for the gravestone from what she’d made baking bread in her big oven and selling it still hot to her neighbors.
The next morning, we ate cornflakes and more peach preserves. I cried when we left Camille. I cried because I loved her and I loved my own grandmother, and I cried because the wedding and the honeymoon were over and now we were headed straight through the Midwest to Minneapolis, for good.
34
“HEY, GAUGUIN, WHERE’S your wedding ring?” We had just passed the exit for Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
“I took it off,” he said.
My eyes moved from his left hand on the steering wheel to his face, which was looking out at the blue slate highway with its broken yellow line. We had been driving for a long time.
“You took it off? How come?” We had bought them at a hock shop on First Avenue for thirty dollars apiece. I liked wearing mine.
“Because you didn’t change your last name,” he said, still staring ahead.
“What? Before we were married, you said you didn’t care. You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I’m not. I felt weird telling my grandmother you were Nell Schwartz. Even at work right after the wedding, my dad made fun of it, says I married a women’s libber.”
I stared at his ringless finger. I was filled with a sudden rage that flashed like a bright quarter. This couldn’t be possible. Who was this man sitting next to me? It wasn’t Gauguin. I stared straight ahead, trying to compute. I looked at him again. I was right. It wasn’t Gauguin. It was George Howard. I’d married the wrong person. Right then and there, I let out a terrible scream. Then I gave it words. “What does the fucking ring have to do with my name? You’re nuts!”
I grabbed his right arm below the elbow with my two hands and squeezed as tight as I could. “I’m not changing my name,” I yelled. “You said it didn’t matter to you.” I wanted to get out of that car before we reached the Minnesota border.
“Nell, let go of my arm,” Gauguin said in a low, measured tone. “I’m trying to drive. I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve changed my mind. Changing your name is important to me.”
“Why the fuck didn’t you tell me instead of taking off your ring? What does one thing have to do with the other?” Suddenly, I was a mathematician, trying to make the equation compute. It didn’t. I went back to my old profession, a madwoman.
“Fuck you, George Howard!” I screamed.
35
TEARS RAN DOWN my cheeks and across my lips. I licked them. I was trying to paint. A brush was in my right hand and a cloth in my left. That morning, Gauguin and I had had another fight.
As he left for work, I’d yelled, “I’m not doing all the dishes. I don’t care if you work for your father. I’m not doing all the housework.”
I was having a hard time being married. Gauguin told me one night that he wanted to be boss. It was the second Tuesday in August at eight in the evening. It was still light out, and I could see the bathroom from where I sat at the kitchen table. The bathroom was white, but in the light of dusk, white took on the shadows of gray and blue.
We were eating an avocado salad that Gauguin had made. I was on my second bite. I crunched into a lettuce leaf.
“Gauguin, this is good,” I said cheerily.
“Nell—” He hesitated. “I don’t want to be cooking. I want to be boss in this house.”
When I heard that again in my head as I stood in front of the painting, the words shot down to the muscle of my heart and squeezed it. The blood rushed to my throat, and I had the urge to vomit. I heard it over and over, “I want to be boss. I want to be boss...” It was impossible for me to paint. I wanted to bolt out the door and go downtown, get Gauguin, and belt him.
I wiped my face with the sleeve of my painting shirt, put down my brush, and decided to go for a walk. I meandered down Riverside. It was still summer, but I could smell fall in the air and almost see it at the edge of tree leaves. Soon it would be Rash Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Being back in a city reminded me of the Jewish holidays. I’d fled all that when I went away to college. Judaism had seemed oppressive in Brooklyn, old-fashioned, something my parents did, but now I kind of missed it. I wondered where there was a synagogue.
I didn’t mind doing a little bit more than Gauguin, I mused. After all, he did go to work, but then again, I wasn’t just sitting around. I was setting up a studio in the living room. I’d begun a series of paintings: pears in the corners of rooms. I’d already painted yellow pears sitting in the four corners of the bathroom. One was of two in the corner under the toilet, another showed three together in the bathtub corner. I added a green one there.
Suddenly the sun peeked out from behind a cloud and struck the maple tree above my head in an extraordinary way. Gauguin couldn’t possibly be serious about being boss. That was George Howard, a million miles away in downtown Minneapolis at his father’s office. I was in love with another man. I was in love with Gauguin.
A warm feeling suddenly filled my belly. My knees got weak. Yes, I was in love with him. I thought back just a few nights ago. We’d been lying in bed with only a thin sheet over us. The air had been humid, but a cool breeze blew in through the screens. Just as I was drifting off to sleep, Gauguin had touched me between my legs.
“I want to tell you a story,” he whispered in my ear. “When I was at work today, I thought of you. I got up to go to the water cooler. I bent over and took a white paper cup”—I began to moan. “I took the white cup and put it under the nozzle.” He paused and put his tongue in my ear. “I pressed the nozzle. I wanted you.” The heat of his breath in my ear made me wet. “A bubble came up in the water cooler. My cock hardened behind my fly.” He moved on top of me. I spread my legs. “My cock wanted to spring out of my pants.” He entered me.
“Ohhh.” I felt like a thousand fireflies were feeding on the walls of my vagina.
“Gauguin.” I blew out his name with my breath.
“Yes, yes.” He kept his mouth at my ear. “Nell, Nell, I love you.”
I looked up at the sizzling maple. Now that was Gauguin, the man I had married. I shook my head. This George stuff—I was just imagining it.
The phone rang when I entered the house. It was Gauguin. “Nell, my mom wants to come over tonight. She baked us a peach pie. I invited her for dinner.”
“Great. What are you going to make?” I asked nonchalantly.
There was a long pause. “I guess I could pick up a pizza.” Pause again. “Alice doesn’t like pizza.” Another pause. “Nell, could you make something?”
A sparrow was singing on our window ledge near the petunias I had planted in the flower box. “Okay,” I said casually. And then I had a thought. “It’s Friday night. Why don’t I make roast chicken? We can do a Shabbos.”
“Great.” Gauguin was relieved that I’d cook. He hung up.
The phone rang again right away. “Uh, Nell, I don’t know about Shabbos. Alice doesn’t know much about Jews. You know, an Iowa farm and all. Maybe we shouldn’t do it?”
“We’ll just light candles. It’ll be okay.” We hung up. Well, it’s time she learned, I thought.
I rummaged through an old jewelry bag and found the Star of David my father’s mother had left for me in her will. I put it on and looked in the mirror. “Banana Rose, you are still magic.”
The table was all set when Gauguin came home. “Hey,” he said. He was pleased.
I smiled primly. With an apron covering my tight jeans and white T-shirt that read, “Georgia O’Keeffe lives in New Mexico,” I was the perfect little wife.
Alice came soon after. Her pie was covered with a blue-checked cotton cloth. We placed it between the two unlit candles.
She surveyed the kitchen. She could smell food cooking. A suspicious look crossed her face.
“Oh, Nell made this whole meal,” Gauguin said cheerily.
I understood. She thought her poor son had had to cook aft
er being at work all day.
I turned from the sink. “I made a traditional Shabbos meal.” Then I explained to her what Shabbos was.
“My,” she said, “my.” She sounded like my mother.
I lit the candles and said the prayers.
“My, I never heard Hebrew spoken before,” Alice said as we sat down at the kitchen table. “I guess that’s what Jesus spoke.”
“Jesus doesn’t have much to do with this.” I cut a leg off the chicken and put it on her plate. “Dark meat?”
“Yes.” She smiled weakly. “Gauguin told me how your grandfather used to play school with you, and you played the teacher.”
I nodded. “Yes, we had a great time.”
“Is that Jewish?” she asked. “I mean, it sounded so indulgent. No adult played with me when I was growing up.”
What was she getting at? “That’s too bad,” I said. “It was a lot of fun.” I forked some green beans into my mouth.
Alice looked around the kitchen and into the bedroom. “Gauguin, this place looks a little messy. Maybe Nell should buy a vacuum cleaner.”
Reaching into the refrigerator for some ginger ale, I said, “Oh, Gauguin, you can pick one up tomorrow.” The kitchen was a combat zone.
“This is good, Nell,” Gauguin said as he bit into a buttered potato. He saw his comment wasn’t going to amend things. He tried another angle. “Alice, after we finish, Nell should show you some of her paintings.”
Bingo! I lit up. “I’d love to show you my work.”
Gauguin’s face relaxed.
Alice’s didn’t, though. “What work? I thought you were a schoolteacher.”
“Oh, we Jews do a lot of things,” I said gaily, screwing the top back on the ginger ale.
Her peach pie was delicious. I made tea to go with it. The Shabbos candles were half burned down now. We had no electric lights on except the bathroom one in the hall.