I look down at my work table, knowing I’ve left the most important part of packing to the end. Every journey begins the same way. With reluctance, holding part of the self in abeyance, a distancing until I’m ready. I’m caught by this feeling, no matter what the destination. It’s a suspension of the want, the real work, the getting serious, the facing up. But facing up also means admitting the dark places that are only too ready to seep from the shadows. It occurs to me that I’m not unlike Basil, turning circles inside the front door as soon as he imagines a hand reaching for a jacket.
I stand, hands extended over the surface, ready to choose. Floor lamp to one side, small easel before me, supplies laid out as if I’d been painting only yesterday. Two plastic containers, water in one. Striped socks, a contrast of cobalt and dusky blue, slit lengthwise and made into rags that hang from hooks at the side of the table. A bar of Sunlight soap, worn flat in an old sardine tin. Brushes of every size laid out side by side; a dozen stubby bottles of acrylics in colours I’ve blended myself.
The truth is, I haven’t been in this room for weeks. The truth is, I haven’t cared about this room or the paintings in it. My heart lurches as if my thoughts have just created a zone called danger.
Across the room, an abandoned abstract leans into the larger of my two easels. From here, the edges are dark and menacing. Tentacles grope along the lower half, trying to slither into position. At the top left, oranges and yellows spill from what could be a split gourd, a generous, big-hearted offering. I feel a jolt of something stirring, some earlier sense-image. I’m struck by the balance of the whole. But just as quickly, the glimmer of satisfaction is gone. A broad, pumpkin-coloured sweep wants a push to the centre; it wants … or maybe it’s all right as it is and should be left alone.
When did I have the desire of those oranges and yellows inside me? I try to recover the feeling I had when I began to work on the canvas. Because here’s the proof that I was making an effort, even if it turned out to be an aborted thrust. Stab and pull back, stab and pull back.
Anger is not so easy to disguise to the self.
My sister, Kay, would have something to say about that—if given the opening. She fills the silent spaces, has a name, a theory, for everything. As a child, she was always a leader. But she’s more authoritative now, her ambition to the fore. It’s partly her job, what she deals with every day in her work as a counsellor. She has to define problems, probe for solutions, solve problems. Sometimes I picture a sleep-deprived student facing her across a wide desk, fumbling, looking down at his lap, inventing answers he thinks she would like to hear.
And what about Greg? Has he been seeing a counsellor at his own university? He wouldn’t tell me one way or another. Not that I would ask. I don’t push my way into his territory unless invited.
At the beginning, after Lena’s death, after the funeral in November, he phoned home every few days. His grief was raw and undisguised, the calls painfully brief. They are less frequent now—more like every few weeks.
“Dad? Are you working yet? Are you okay?”
I wasn’t able to help him and didn’t know how anyway. Greg has been a worrier, a Gramps, from the day he was born. Remembering the waver in his voice during one of those calls makes me think of another episode from his childhood. He hadn’t yet started school and I was away on assignment, doing illustrations for a natural history magazine that paid extremely well. I was staying at a motel in Alberta’s Badlands and had been gone almost two weeks when I received a letter from Lena. In those days, we wrote when either of us was away. Or sent cards.
You’ve been missed from the moment you boarded the plane. All the way back from the airport Greg stared glumly out the side window of the car. He said, “It isn’t funny, you know. It isn’t one bit funny when the family is split up like this.” When we returned to the house, he spread his palms—truly indignant—and said, accusing ME, as if I were the one responsible, “Now there are only two.”
And how, Lena continued, am I supposed to handle that?
A picture from Greg was enclosed, three large crayoned stick figures holding hands. It was labelled FAMBLY. A multicoloured rainbow arced across the upper right corner. At the bottom left were a stick-figure dinosaur and a hoodoo, both tiny, as if to let me know that the work I was doing was small, in comparison to FAMBLY.
Well, we are two again, but a different two, and Greg and I are stumbling along, but in separate parts of the country.
I look around my workroom and wish for what I cannot have. A time warp, a few moments when the three of us are living under one roof again. A light left on in the hall for the last person to come in from the dark. A meal of heated leftovers, nothing fancy. A note from Lena on the fridge door telling me she has taken Greg to his swimming lesson. The music of Benny Goodman floating out from the living room, announcing that Lena is home from work. Our bodies touching, by intent, as we brush past each other in the doorway.
A sharp bark from Basil at the foot of the stairs gets me moving again, and I begin to slide items into a shoulder pack from shelves above the table. A bound sketch pad, India ink, bamboo stylus that I probably won’t use but will bring anyway. A wooden box with a hinged lid that Greg unearthed at a flea market in Halifax two years ago and gave me for Christmas. A faded list, pasted inside the lid, shows that the box was once used to store medical slides. In thin lines of penmanship, the list reads: Blood, Cardiac muscle, Trachea, Tonsil, Tooth. I’ve left the list in place because I like the idea of objects in their original state. And I use the box now to hold charcoal, graphite pencils, jackknife for sharpening, soft eraser, quills. I take these on the road with me every time I travel. When Greg came home during Christmas break that year, he packed the box inside a carry-on suitcase he’d built from cardboard. There had been snowstorms on the East Coast and these had caused airport confusions, cancellations, rebookings, a bleary-eyed son arriving hours late. A son who was proud of his homemade suitcase and had Lena and me laughing the moment we picked him up and took a look at his luggage.
I stuff more bits and pieces into the side pockets of my pack. I’m not exactly sure what I’ll need, but I’ll figure this out along the way. More slit socks for rags, a capped container for water. Some of my river drawings are abstracts in graphite; some have been done in pen and ink. The larger acrylics were done at home in my studio. My upcoming show will be a mixture of the three.
I add a second sketch pad, though it’s a joke to think I’ll fill two. This isn’t a trip to the other side of the planet. The overseas work was done—sporadically—during the decade before the idea became a proposal. River themes was the way Lena referred to my project, long before the work revealed its true shape to me.
I cast my memory back over countries visited, histories read, tales of rivers listened to and told. Not to mention the stack of drawings and paintings that has accumulated. My friend Nathan, who owns the gallery where I exhibit, suggested the show while I was still seeing the work in its separate parts.
“Join them up,” he said. “Why not?” And then he began to talk quickly, as if he had a plan, as if the words might stop if he slowed down. “Put the ink drawings and some of the acrylics together,” he said. “Just the river series. You select, you decide. The theme is fabulous, Bin, it’s a great sequence. Every painting, every drawing is different, but with a mood or form that sets it apart. Totally recognizable as an Okuma abstract. I especially love the sensation of movement. The work is poetic, lyrical. And we can link the exhibit with publication. Otto will do the catalogue, I’m sure of it—he has the money. You can add short personal accounts if you want text. Leave that part to me; I’ll discuss it with Otto. He’ll probably want to write the introduction himself, he knows your work so well. We’ll have the show and launch the book at the same time. We can celebrate, have a grand opening.”
Nathan’s gallery is close to the market, a modern building with three rooms and great lighting, great space. He and Otto have collaborated this way before
. The exhibition I’ve agreed to is scheduled for the last week of November, seven months from now, and it’s true that most of the work is complete, drawings and paintings delivered. But Otto has begun to ask for extra information, details, discussions on individual pieces. I haven’t settled on a title yet, for the catalogue or the show—though it will be the same for both. We’ve tossed ideas back and forth since fall, and both Nathan and Otto are waiting for me to make up my mind.
All of this has become a disturbing weight in my head. But I’m thinking clearly enough to know that the trip, sudden though it might be, has to be a good idea. I need to get away from here, if only for a few weeks. I’m not in the mood for the company of friends—Basil excepted—and I don’t want to fly. It will be better to get behind the wheel and point the car west. I’d drive non-stop if I thought I could stay awake.
I recognize the buildup of energy that has to be released, energy I should be putting into my work. So, I argue with myself. Run away. You aren’t going to hurt anyone. Again, I have a flash of the old surge through the limbs, a feeling that I should be working on three canvases at once, an urge so strong, I could run in any direction and create while on the move. Until I’d be forced to stop and think, and then I’d start to feel like an imposter. There’s a fragile line between the desire to create and the act of creation. An idea can so quickly lose its lustre—and so easily disappear.
I look down at Otto’s most recent note, lying on my work table.
Would you add half a dozen lines to this, Bin—so we can write up a brief description for the jacket? Send it back as soon as you can. Your own words. We’ll tidy it up and do the rest.
He has already begun:
RIVERS (working title only, I know, I know)
EXCITING NEW OFFERING FROM CELEBRATED ARTIST
BIN OKUMA
After that, blank space.
Trying to reassure, no doubt. I’m betting that Nathan was in the background when the note was sent out. If I were to imagine conversations between the two men, I’d be weary. Uncertain. About the entire project—dual project, as it’s now become. But they are both loyal; I know this. And now that the momentum is underway, they’ll see the project through to the end. Even with Otto distracted by his new girlfriend.
Twice divorced, Otto readily admits his weakness for phases. The present phase began with dreams of geisha, he told me. And involves all things Japanese, including Miki, who emigrated from Japan a year ago and has now moved in with him. She is teaching him to make sushi on weekends, he says, and he’s become an expert. They eat out in Japanese restaurants twice a week, and I’ve joined them a couple of times. A month ago, Miki brought along a friend, a woman who works at the Japanese embassy. I didn’t comment when Otto called me, next day. He has also begun to track down woodblock prints, and attends auctions seeking more. He’ll be travelling to a Buddhist retreat for two weeks this summer while Miki visits her family in Japan. I swear he would turn Japanese if he could. I think of the years I looked into the mirror, never liking the person I saw, wishing to be anything—anyone—but. And marvel at the leap through time. So many Japanese Canadian men of my generation turned away from Japanese women. They made friends with and married hakujin—”white” girls. And I found Lena. In Montreal. We found each other.
I should be happy to have the support of Otto and Nathan, happy that the show will take place at all. And it is time for a show. My work has been changing over the last four or five years. A natural evolution, Lena told me a couple of years ago. Look at you. An idea, a shape, a brushstroke, a mood: one begets another, begets another. It’s so organic, so much about form. It’s all about challenge and risk with you, isn’t it?
Challenge and risk. That sums it up. Or did. Because, lately, my biggest worry about the project, the one that has gnawed up the side of me with depressing persistence, is that the spirit of the whole has not been realized. Not on paper, not on canvas, not at all.
There was a time—it now seems long ago—when I cared about all of this.
I did not complete the catalogue description for Otto, nor did I send it back.
I think of Otto at the funeral, a quick pat on the arm, his hand resting on my sleeve. “It will be good for you to finish the river project, Bin. Get it done once and for all. You’ve dragged it behind you long enough. You need to sink into it again. It will give you something to do.”
His use of the word sink unnoticed by him, even as it was uttered. He didn’t mean to discourage or offend, I know. But while he was speaking, I could see over his shoulder the rectangular box that held Lena’s ashes, three feet behind him on a polished wooden stand. That was immediately after the service, before everyone assembled to walk through the cemetery’s convoluted paths that led to the “garden” where the ashes were to be interred. There was initial confusion before people fell into some sort of procession. Feet moving in different directions until a leader emerged and order prevailed. Who was that leader? Someone to the left of me, someone from the funeral parlour, perhaps. Voices were subdued, people half-nodded to one another. My brother and sister had arrived, and Lena’s family, of course. They had to be there. They were there. It must have been Greg on my left. We were trying to look out for each other. Keep moving. Silently. No obligation to say anything to anyone. Made insensible, insensate, made useless by grief.
I go to the rolltop desk in the corner of my studio and open the long drawer beneath its extendable surface. There’s a small Japanese scroll in there and, beside it, a manila folder with printing along the top edge: FRASER RIVER CAMP / REMOVAL FROM PACIFIC COAST. Lena gathered and compiled the contents. Her signature—familiar, flowing, at a forward slant—is written across the bottom. All the differences between us are blatant in that signature. My own, in comparison, resembles hidden tracks. I take the folder out of the drawer and shove it into my pack. A folder I have not, until this moment, intended to bring. Now it will be with me, whether I decide to look at it or not.
Keep river as your focus, Lena said, often enough. She repeated it like a mantra. Through the weeks and months and many summers that she, and sometimes she and Greg, accompanied me on my travels. This is an important project for you, Bin. Keep river as your focus and the work will get done.
I do a final check of the room from the doorway, glance back and see what I have not been looking for. Along the windowsill, my array of smalls, collected over the years. From Long River in Prince Edward Island, a sandstone quill holder, brownish red, plucked in its natural state. A tiny glass whale with jagged flukes from the Saguenay. A palm-sized burl picked up on a trail near the Saco River in Maine. A delicate Bourgault carving of a man in a green toque, from Saint-Jean-Port-Joli on the St. Lawrence. I had settled on a large rock behind the auberge in that place and was watching the tide push back the great river. It was a summer night, and a yellow band of light floated above the waterline. The evening was so layered, so exquisite, I sank into it and couldn’t leave. By the time complete darkness rolled up the river valley, all that remained visible was a band of woolly cloud joining west to east. A grove of trees to my right had blackened in silhouette, and Lena stepped out of that blur of darkness and made her way down the slope. She was shaking her head. Did you forget you were to meet me in the dining room? I might have known. But she came to sit with me, in the dark.
Here, too, is my tiny clay seaman, his left leg snapped below the knee. Created to sit on the edge of a shelf or sill, he is ruddy and elegant, even with a peg leg. Lena and Greg chose him in a pottery shop in Cornwall while I was sketching outcrops on the lower banks of the Helford Estuary. It was a working holiday for me. We had sailed, embarking in New York and docking in Southampton, where we rented a car. We were almost five days at sea before reaching England, and Greg—who was eight at the time—spent much of the voyage asking about ocean tremors, canyons, earthquakes. He was fascinated, but full of worry, too. Are we crossing an ocean ridge right now, an ocean trench? Will our ship be lost at sea? I gave him a compa
ct sketchbook of his own, a blue Hilroy, and he drew pictures of wrecks all the way across the Atlantic. In pencil and ink he created ships with flags, primitive lifeboats, our cabin porthole, spray and blue froth, sailors and pirates, undersea creatures, shark and octopus, giant fish eating smaller fish, a narrow trill of waves inked and glued separately beneath a ship as if in afterthought—or maybe a carefully planned collage. All part of his vision. He also drew a spewing ocean volcano in menacing black and red crayon. Two ships bobbed on rocky waves to the right of the picture. An explanation accompanied: The big ship is helping the little ship to get by safely. Someone was often lending a helping hand in Greg’s drawings.
Later, the same afternoon I’d been sketching in Cornwall, we drove the car to Helston and sat on a stone wall at the top of the hill and ate Cornish pasties purchased from a street vendor. That was when Lena and Greg presented me with the clay seaman. But shortly after we returned to Canada, my sleeve brushed the cap of the tiny man as I reached towards the window, and I knocked him to the floor.
Bin, protector of fractured and broken goods. Lena laughed at my collection of smalls, even when she herself was fractured and broken. Though neither of us knew how broken she was. Nor did we know that the stroke that took her life had already announced its arrival, in the weeks preceding her death.
CHAPTER 3
I haul things out to the station wagon: Thermos, cooler with the green lid, road map on the passenger seat, camera, a bottle of Scotch in its sturdy cylinder, Beethoven tapes and some of Lena’s Benny Goodmans. Books to read in motels along the way, placed on the floor, passenger side: Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, which Greg has been urging me to read for a few years; essays by Heinrich Böll; Beethoven’s letters. I’ll be lucky to finish any one book completely, but at least I’ll have choice. I give silent thanks to Okuma-san and wonder, as I often have, if without him in my life I’d have come to music, literature, even my own painting, in the same way.