In the next room, the pictures were dissolving.
“Can’t you feel the movement?” Claire said, pointing out a big angle on the canvas, the tip facing right, the fan left. The edge of her hands following the lines. “It’s like an arrow.”
The guard watched her excited hands, too close to the painting for his liking. “Miss?”
She flushed and apologized, like an A student who’d overslept once in her life. She pulled me back to sit on a bench, where she was safe to gesticulate. I tried to let myself feel it, the way Claire did. Things that weren’t there, that might not be there.
“See,” she said, quietly, keeping her eye on the guard. “The yellow comes toward you, the blue moves away. The yellow expands, the blue contracts.”
The red, the yellow, this well of dark green — expanding, contracting, still pools with bleeding edges, an angle like a fist. A boy and a girl, arms around each other’s shoulders, drifted past the pictures, like they were passing shopwindows.
“And see how he takes the edge away from the frame, making an asymmetrical edge?” She pointed to the lemon ribbon curving the left side.
I had heard people say things like this in museums, and had always thought they were just trying to impress their friends. But this was Claire, and I knew she really wanted me to understand. I stared at the painting, the angle, the ribbon. So much going on in Kandinsky, it was like the frames were having trouble keeping the pictures inside.
In another gallery, Claire stopped in front of a bunch of pencil sketches. Lines on paper, angles and circles, like pickup sticks and tiddlywinks. Like what you’d doodle while you were talking on the telephone.
“See this angle?” She pointed at a sharp angle in pencil, and then gestured over to the massive composition that all the sketches and oil studies led up to. “See it?” The angle dominated the canvas.
She drew my attention to various elements of the pencil sketches, circles, arcs, and I found them in the finished composition, in vibrant red, and a deep graded blue. He had all the elements right from the start. Each sketch held its own part of the idea, like a series of keys that you had to put all together to make the safe open. If I could stack them and hold them to the light, I would see the form of the completed composition. I stared, dumbfounded at the vision.
We walked arm in arm through the show, pointing out to each other details that recurred, the abstracted horsemen, the towers, the different kinds of angles, the color changing as a form crossed another form. Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought me to my knees.
I sat on a bench and took out my sketch pad, tried to draw the basic forms. Acute angles, arcs, like the movement of a clock. It was impossible. I needed color, I needed ink and a brush. I didn’t know what I needed.
“Imagine the work to assemble all this in one place,” Claire said. “The years of convincing people to lend their artworks.”
I imagined Kandinsky’s mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
We went back twice a week for the rest of the summer. Claire bought me oil pastels so I could work in color without making the guards nervous. We would spend all day in a single room, looking at one picture. I had never done that before. A composition from 1913 presaged the First World War. “He was very sensitive. He could tell it was coming,” Claire said. The blackness, the cannons, wild, a mood so violent and dark, of course he had to invent abstraction.
The return to Russia. The exuberance of the avant-garde, but the darkening suspicion that it was coming to a close, even as it was flowering. On to the Bauhaus in the twenties. Straight lines, geometric forms. You didn’t let yourself go in times like that. You tried to find some underlying structure. I understood him perfectly. Finally, the move to Paris. Pinks and blues and lavenders. Organic forms again, for the first time in years. What a relief Paris must have been, the color, the ability to be soft again.
I wondered how I would paint our times. Shiny cars and wounded flesh, denim blue and zigzagged dog teeth, bits of broken mirror, fire and orange moons and garnet hearts.
IN THE FALL I signed up for honors classes again. Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course.
In the empty studio in the basement of the art museum, we waited for the teacher, Ms. Tricia Day. My palms sweated onto the portfolio case Claire had bought me. She wanted to sign me up for an adult class in painting. There were teen courses, in photography, fabric art, video. But no painting. “We ’ll go talk to the teacher,” she said.
A woman came in. Small, middle-aged, with cropped gray hair. She wore khaki pants and black horn-rimmed glasses. She looked at us wearily, an overeager mother and her spoiled kid, asking for special treatment. I was embarrassed just being there, but Claire was surprisingly businesslike. Ms. Day went through my portfolio briskly, her eyes moving in sharp lines over the surfaces. The realistic things, Claire lying on the couch, poinsettias, and the L.A. Kandinskys. “Where have you studied?”
I shook my head. “Nowhere.”
She finished the portfolio and handed it back to Claire. “Okay. We’ll give it a try.”
Every Tuesday night, Claire brought me to the museum, went home, and then returned three hours later to pick me up. I felt guilty for her willingness to do things for me, like I was using her. I heard my mother saying, “Don’t be absurd. She wants to be used.” But I didn’t want to be like that. I wanted to be like Claire. Who but Claire would make sure I had art class, would give up a Tuesday night for me?
In art class, I learned to build a support, stretch canvas, gesso it smooth. Ms. Day had us experiment with color, with strokes. The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement. We painted still lifes. Flowers, books. Some of the ladies in class painted only tiny flowers. Ms. Day told them to paint bigger but they were too embarrassed. I painted flowers big as pizzas, strawberries magnified to a series of green triangles on a red ground, the patterns of the seeds. Ms. Day was spartan in her praise, blunt in her criticism. Every class there was somebody crying. My mother would have liked her. I liked her too.
I carefully edited what I wrote to my mother. Hello, how are you, how’s the writing. I wrote about grades, gardening, art class, the smell of the Santa Anas and the scorched landscape, the blues of November, shortening of days. Strate A’s, homecome queen. I sent her small drawings, watercolors the size of postcards, she didn’t have much space. She loved the Kandinsky period, and my new work. I sent her a series of pencil drawings on onionskin paper. It was a self-portrait, but layered, a line here, a line there, one at a time, for her to figure out — she had to layer to get the whole thing. I didn’t lay it out for her anymore. She had to work for it.
MY MOTHER WROTE that she had poems in Kenyon Review and in the all-poetry issue of Zyzzyva. I asked Claire if we could get them, and she took me up to Book Soup on the Strip, bought them both for me. There was a long poem about running in prison, that was a big part of her day. When she wasn’t writing she was running the track, fifty, a hundred miles a week. She wore out her shoes every four months, and sometimes they’d give her new ones and sometimes they wouldn’t. I had an idea.
I Xeroxed ten copies of the poem, and used them as the background for drawings. I sat at the table in the red-and-white kitchen and drew in oil pastel on top of her words, the feeling of running, of senseless, circular activity. Like her mind.
The rains had begun, they whispered outside the steamed kitchen window. Claire sat next to me with a cup of
mint tea. “Tell me about her.”
There was something that kept me from talking much about my mother to Claire. She was curious, like everyone else, my counselors at school, Ray, Joan Peeler, the editors of small literary journals. Poets in prison, the sheer paradox. I didn’t know what to say. She murdered a man. She was my mother. I didn’t know if I was like her or not. Mostly, I didn’t want to talk about her. I wanted Claire to be something separate from my mother, I wanted them to be on different pages, and only I could hold them up to the light together.
Claire read the running poem again. “I love this line, the back stretch, twenty years. A clock without hands. Life in prison, it’s unimaginable. Three years gone, the beaten dirt around. She must be so brave. How can she stand it?”
“She’s never where she is,” I said. “She’s only inside her head.”
“That must be wonderful.” Claire stroked the side of the mug like the cheek of a child. “I wish I could do that.”
I was glad she couldn’t. Things touched Claire. Maybe too much, but at least they touched her. She couldn’t twist things around in her mind, make the ends come out right. I looked at my mother’s poem in Kenyon. So interesting that she was always the heroine, the outlaw, one against the rest. Never the villain.
“It’s the difference between a true artist and everybody else.” Claire sighed. “They can remake the world.”
“You’re an artist,” I said.
“An actress,” she said. “Not even that.”
I’d seen a couple of Claire’s movies now. She was transparent, heartbreaking. I would be afraid to be so vulnerable. I’d spent the last three years trying to build up some kind of a skin, so I wouldn’t drip with blood every time I brushed up against something. She was naked, she peeled herself daily. In one film, she played a professor’s wife, trembling, in pearls. In another, an eighteenth-century woman, a cast-off lover, in a convent. “You’re a terrific actress,” I said.
Claire shrugged, read the other poem, about a fight in prison. “I like your mother’s violence. Her strength. How I admire that.”
I dipped a small sumi brush into a bottle of ink, and in a few strokes I inked in arcs and lines, a black spot. Her violence. Claire, what did you know about violence? My mother’s strength? Well, she wasn’t strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.
ONE SLUGGISHLY warm and hazy day, as I came home from school, Claire met me at the rose arch. “I got a part!” she called out before I was even through it.
She threw her head back and bared her throat to the weak winter sun, laughter bursting upward like a geyser. Hugging me, kissing me. She tried calling Ron in Russia, in the Urals, where he was covering a research convention for telekinetics. She couldn’t reach him. Even that didn’t take the sparkle from the air. She opened a bottle of Tattinger champagne, kept cold in the refrigerator for a special occasion. It came flooding out all over the glasses and the table, foaming down to the floor. We toasted the new job.
It wasn’t a big part, but it was tricky. She played a character’s elegant but drunken wife at a dinner party, in a long gown and diamonds. A lot of drinking and eating, she had to remember when to do what, so it would all cut together. “Always somebody’s lonely wife,” she sighed. “What is this, typecasting?”
She got the part because the director was a friend of Ron’s, and the actress who was supposed to play the lonely wife, the director’s ex-wife’s sister, broke her collarbone at the last minute and they needed someone about the same height and coloring who could wear the strapless dress.
“At least I’m talking to the protagonist,” she explained. “They can’t cut the scene.”
It was a small role, just five lines, a woman who shows up dead two scenes later. I helped her rehearse it, playing the hero. The hard part, she explained, was that she had to eat and drink during the scene, while she was talking. She had it down after the second try, but insisted on doing it over and over again. She was very particular to remember which word she paused and drank the wine on, exactly when she raised her fork, with which hand and how high. “Eating scenes are the worst,” she explained. “Everything has to match.” We rehearsed the part for a week. She was so serious about five lines. I didn’t realize actors were so perfectionistic. I’d always thought they just went on and did it.
ON THE DAY of the shoot, she had a six a.m. makeup call. She told me not to get up, but I got up anyway. I sat with her as she made herself a smoothie, added protein powder, spirulina, brewer’s yeast, vitamin E and C. She was very pale, and silent. Concentrating. She did a breathing exercise called Breathing Monkeys, singing Chinese syllables on both the exhale and the inhale. The exhaled tones were low and resonant, but the inhaled ones were weird, high and wailing. It was called chi gong, she said it kept her calm.
I gave her a quick hug as she was leaving. She’d taught me never to say “good luck.” “Break a leg” was what you said to actors. “Break a leg!” I called after her, and cringed to see her trip on a sprinkler head.
I raced home after school, eager to hear how the shoot had gone, and especially to hear about Harold McCann — the English star playing Guy — but she wasn’t back yet. I did all my homework, even read ahead in English and history. By six it was dark, and not a call, not a clue. I hoped she hadn’t gotten into an accident, she was so nervous this morning. But she probably went out for a drink with the other actors afterward, or dinner or something. Still, it wasn’t like her not to call. She called if she was so much as running late at the market.
I fixed dinner, meat loaf and corn bread, a salad, and kept thinking, by the time it was ready she ’d be home. At twenty after eight, I heard her car in the driveway. I met her at the door. “I made dinner,” I said.
Her eye makeup in circles around her eyes. She ran past me, made for the bathroom. I heard her throwing up.
“Claire?”
She came out, lay down on the couch, covered her eyes with the back of her arm. I took her shoes off. “Can I get you something? Aspirin? Seven-Up?”
She started crying, deep harsh moans, turned her head away from me.
I got her some Tylenol and a glass of soda, watched as she took it in sips. “Vinegar. On a washcloth.” She fell back onto the cushions. “White vinegar. Wring it out.” Her voice hoarse as sandpaper. “And turn out the lights.”
I turned off the lamps, soaked a washcloth in vinegar, wrung it out, brought it to her. I didn’t dare ask what had happened.
“Seventeen takes,” she said, placing the washcloth over her forehead and eyes. “Do you know how long that is? A hundred people waiting for you? I will never, ever act again.”
I held her hand, sat on the floor by her supine figure in the dark room filled with vinegar fumes. I didn’t know what to say. It was like watching someone you loved step on a land mine, all the parts flying around. You don’t know what to do with the pieces.
“Put on Leonard Cohen,” she whispered. “The first album, with ‘The Sisters of Mercy.’ ”
I found the album, the one with Cohen’s beaky face on the front, a saint rising from flames on the back, put it on. I sat by her, pressed her hand hard against my cheek. His sad singsong voice droning plaintively about the Sisters of Mercy, how he hoped you’d run into them too.
After a while she stopped crying, I think she fell asleep.
I’d never cared about someone so much that I could feel their pain before. It made me sick, that they could do something like that to Claire, and I wasn’t there, to tell her, Quit, you don’t have to do this. “I love you, Claire,” I said softly.
I WENT TO art class one evening, and we waited for Ms. Day, but she didn’t show up. One of the old lady students drove me home. I opened the door, hung with a Christmas wreath with little candied pears and porcelain doves, expecting to find Claire in the living room, reading one of her magazines and listening to music, but she wasn’t there.
I found her sitting on my
bed, cross-legged, reading my mother’s papers. Letters from prison, poet’s journals, personal papers, all fanned out around her. She looked pale, absorbed, biting the nail of her ring finger. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I was outraged, I was scared. She shouldn’t have been reading those things. I needed to keep them separate. I didn’t want her to have anything to do with my mother, anything I couldn’t control. And now she ’d gone and opened the box. Like Pandora. Letting out all the evil. They were always so fascinated by Ingrid Magnussen. I felt myself retreating again, into her shadow. These were my things. Not even mine. I trusted her.
“What are you doing?”
She jumped, throwing the notebook she was reading into the air. Her mouth opened to explain, then closed. Opened again. No sound came. When she was upset, she couldn’t say a thing. She tried gathering the offending materials with trembling hands, but they came in too many shapes, they scattered under her awkward clutchings. Defeated, she let them fall, closed her eyes, covered her face with her hands. She reminded me of Caitlin, who thought we couldn’t see her if she couldn’t see us. “Don’t hate me,” she said.
“Why, Claire? I would have shown you if you had asked.”
I started to collect the notebooks, rice paper bound in string, Italian marbleized notebooks, Amsterdam school copybooks, smooth-bound, leather-bound, tied with shoelaces. My mother’s journals, my absence written in the margins. None of this was about me. Even the letters. Only her.
“I was depressed. You were gone. She seemed so strong.”
She was looking for a role model? I almost had to laugh. Claire admiring my mother made me want to slap her. Wake up! I wanted to scream. Ingrid Magnussen could damage you just passing by on the way to the bathroom.
And now she’d read the letters. She knew that I’d refused to discuss her with my mother. I imagined how it must have hurt her. Now I wished I’d thrown them out, not lugged them around like a curse. Ingrid Magnussen. How could I explain? I didn’t want my mother to know about you, Claire. You’re the one good thing that ever happened to me. I didn’t want to take any chances. How my mother would hate you. She doesn’t want me to be happy, Claire. She liked it that I hated Marvel. It made her feel close to me. An artist doesn’t need to be happy, she said. If I were happy, I wouldn’t need her, she meant. I might forget her. And she was right. I just might.