A halo of fire rained down from her hair as the little gods around her opened to the day at hand. Most of the world was a wedding to her, the little and the big, the open and the shut.
The colors had chosen her. Deep hues of blue, white, brown, gray, black, clouds and rocks, taunts and lies, birds and flowers, skeletons of internal flora.
She remembered when her hair was well-kept back in a tight bun for him. He was the one who had encouraged her to be full of loss, as if to be a wound was to be light. It didn't matter now, she supposed, dipping her paintbrush in the crimson. It wasn't a color she usually used, but she rose to capture it. Nothing managed. Gain and exasperation manipulated to eject a sense of belonging in the landscapes. When her husband had studied geology, she had learned calligraphy. Well, maybe the sky's blurt would provide some ink. Happy to be alive. Happy to hunt.
God was not kind, she thought. The grids were devouring her now. She looked back at the house. Her husband had flown to New York to flirt with some younger, more abstract painter. His lover painted monochromatic canvases. ‘Oneness,’ her husband had said. The word did not awe her like he wanted it to. Absolutely tasteless.
The gasps and dips in canvas. She'd grown up in a small town, a place with stores and car shops on the highway, not far from an actual city but not close either. She sipped some of the iced tea she'd made. Every once in a while, a friend from New York would come by and help her out, a thing here, a thing there. The friend stopped coming eventually, leaving her more or less alone.
She stepped forward suddenly, seized by mountain, and drew a line. And another. Lines were mesmerizing in their logic, like a forest, a hypnotist, a city. She was there to be moved.
A few days before, when she was standing alone and a raven flew over, she thought of her husband. She painted the land as if her husband and his lovers haunted it. Instead, all that haunted her was the nightly phone call from her husband.
‘How is it in New Mexico, dear?’ he said. He had, of course, stayed in the City after she bought the desert house in January.
‘It's fine.’It wasn't that she was a snake or hissing with toxic defeat, just the kind that is resigned to the moment. Nothing to be changed, only the days to battle with.
She stepped back to look at the lines again. Studying had been one thing, lines, calligraphy, math, color. He had been another. No oasis, like her mother had declared her own marriage. And so what? If she could drown herself in the ambient light of the desert, then?
In December, she and her husband had spent a long stretch of time in Cape Cod. She had gotten a little drunk one night when they had driven into Provincetown. Her martinis seemed unusually strong. Her husband sent her home while he sat gazing at the bartender. She clutched her black purse and walked to the cab. The cabbie had tried to make polite small talk, assuming he understood her situation. He did not.
‘Big night miss? Whaddaya celebrating?’
‘My husband sold a painting I did.’
‘Oh no kidding? Wonderful.’
‘Yes, it sold for fifty-thousand dollars. I could buy a house here if I wanted.’
He didn’t say anything else for the rest of the ride.
She got home and proceeded to vomit crab on clean tile floor, as if a million crustaceans were re-evolving in front of her, threatening to climb up and destroy all land, leaving only a blue world. She managed to clean up their evolution and put herself to bed in a deep purple sleep. She dreamt of destruction.
Waking up, she cut a wobbly path out onto the beach. Her hair was a mess and vomit was still strewn on her clothes. Her husband was still not back from his night out. He had probably gone home with the bartender. As if suffering was unique, something to be overcome. She sat on the white-gray sand with its flecks of rock and shell. She knew out there somewhere were whales in the soup of the sea. Clam chowder. Dinner with her husband had been so brief, so terse.
A gull flew over. She looked at the gray morning and she thought of paint, calamity, and the barrenness. Even the sea with all its evolutionary pull was essentially empty. To capture the empty castle, she thought was bliss. She could not be an open wound for her husband any longer.
She bought the desert house only a few weeks after her sojourn in Provincetown. Her husband had said nothing when she told him. ‘I’m moving to New Mexico. Alone.’ He just looked at her as if it was inevitable.
Soon enough she saw him less and less. He would call but rarely came to visit her. She would wake up alone, go to sleep alone, think alone, read alone. She had taken to reading increasingly esoteric texts, a witch of zen. What else to do? Sometimes she ate strawberries, sometimes she went into town, sometimes she ate Jell-O or roast or she would see if she could remember the way her mother made martinis.
She did not, on principle, pray. It wasn't something she found helpful to her daily life, so why do it? Stubbornly, her spirituality was a study of, not a practice of. She knew that in some places men were finding something freeing. But as a woman, she was not free, or the best she could hope for was to be beside freedom. She did not much hope to be in love again, a strange appetite with even queerer dangers. Pleasure, she thought, was bourgeois. Even as she read about psychoanalysis, she felt it was beyond women. Not in the sense that she was below, but that the conditions for freedom from hope were not favorable to someone like her. She had met, in Provincetown, women who were—at least by her husband's standards— not women, to put it delicately. She feared not a world of orgiastic freshness and chaos, but a world where safety was gone and power totally enforced. So she sat, she read, she thought it was all beyond her and that she might sell some paintings from her remove.
She tried to meditate every few weeks. Just to see if she could feel anything. The danger. She would hike for a few hours and stand on a mountain, her belly full of fruit and diner coffee. Nothing. Besides, beyond, didn't matter, didn't recur. Blood sopped down her leg. A cut. Trying too hard, she'd mutter. She felt as if Victorian morals would eat her alive, but she also felt, what else could she do? She did not live in San Francisco, she did not write. She painted.
A few months into her desert life, she went into town in her red-rusted pickup truck that looked more dirt than steel and sat down at the one diner in town. She had done this a few other times and ordered only coffee. She could not make her percolator work with any reliability. She looked down at the coffee cup, a soft puddle of sludge. What oozing indifference, she thought. She once knew a painter in New York who had painted everyone as if they were his wife, everyone lonely with no doors, only big windows looking at the night.
‘The night, the only vista, the wickedness we deserve,’ he had said. What a dull man. Then again, what difference was there between him and me? she thought softly. She didn't realize everyone in the muted candy-colored diner of seafoam and faded candy-cane red around her had stopped what they were doing. She was pouring her cup of coffee into the sugar. A waitress came over after a few stunned moments.
‘Ma’am?’
She looked at what she had done.
‘I’m- I'm so sorry.’
‘Do you need anything?’ The waitress offered with a grimace.
‘More coffee. Food.’
The waitress looked slightly relieved she hadn't asked for anything else besides the order. Minutes later, the painter was eating some fruit and pancakes and some sausage. A rare moment. The waitress looked like her not so long ago, stunned, tired, not up for it. She motioned the waitress back.
‘Can I get some maple syrup? For my pancakes?’ She smiled devilishly. Not much longer now. She would be the martyr.
When the town discovered she was married, all hell broke loose upon the cacti. Men would come by to slash them. Cacti blooms would lay like corpses. But still, she did not fear. Instead, she would paint the cacti blooms as if they were bodies thrown out as sacrifices to an angry god. And maybe god was angry.
The second time her husband visited her from his own residence out East, he came to her house in the desert and remarked she had nothing to eat.
‘Fine, let's go into town,’ she said.
‘No, no we have to save money—let's go to the grocer’s.’
‘Save money?’
‘Honey, didn't I tell you about the lawsuit?’
She scowled.
‘If you make another painting like ------, then we'll be fine.’
The grocery store was packed. People were buzzing in and out grabbing potatoes, breads, soups, sodas, flowers, cereals, oranges, wilting lettuce, and so on. Her husband had gone to grab vodka. His only food group. She walked down an aisle to see if she could find what she needed: love. No such luck. Instead, she grabbed white bread. It wasn't that she hated him, she understood him, she felt for him, what else could he she it they do? But she had no context for joy, and so would not let him go, for permanence was her only value assessment. She knew it was futile, stupid to do it, or not do it, but she grabbed grapes. They had not even slept in the same bed in years. And so she painted.
She reached for a pack of Marlboros when her husband walked back up clutching a giant brown paper bag. Instead of saying something, she opened the pack while still waiting in line, and lit one. The housewife in pink behind her scowled. It's a desert, she thought, get hardy.
She looked at their cart: a bag of vodka bottles—one near half empty already, white bread, grapes, two packs of Marlboros, bottled water, aspirin, oranges, Jell-O mix, chicken breasts, wilted lettuce, tomatoes, asparagus, potato mix, macaroni mix, pork chops, premade gravy, a bunch of soup cans, some candy her husband had added, coffee, alka seltzer, and a few other vegetables. She sighed. Beep beep, the counter chimed. She looked grimly through the veil of smoke. Next.
If what she really wanted was freedom, she thought, she should go to a convent. But she didn't. She wanted recognition without being seen. If she sold, she was seen somewhere and she didn't have to think about it. Her husband had sold five more paintings this month, nothing as big as -----, but enough that if she wanted to buy a house in Florida she could or if she wanted she could visit Paris. But she wanted none of that. Deeply, she wanted her husband to love her. Shamefully, she wanted the one thing she could not have and would never have. Desperately, she faced each day knowing the thing she wanted would never occur. There was no horizon, no out, no change. Time was the witch of decay clinging on, no future. She did not want children, she did not want to move, she did not particularly want another lover. If she was ironic she would have taken one among the women who lived together in town. But she was not ironic, only bitter. Her husband could be angry all he wanted but deep down he knew she was a saint. She financed his whole life, his silly writings, his affairs, his travels. When he'd been arrested for kissing a man so many years ago, she had paid bail. She had not, however, gone to see him. Some other man went to bail him out. The man who had done something for her husband or for her, like writing poems about them or curating her work, she never paid attention to the men in her husband’s life. That was the way her husband found all his lovers—through the doors she opened. Art shows, openings, meetings, parties, or if he just mentioned he was her husband in an illicit bar. She knew they all led a sad, pathetic life in their own way. But she tried not to think about it. What would her ire do? What would her pain do?
By now, the painter had stopped reading. Stopped meditating. Stopped dwelling. She merely painted. Her husband sold her work in New York, Provincetown, even took trips to London and Los Angeles. After her husband's third visit, she only left the desert twice. Once for her cousin's funeral where she wore all black and sensible pearls, went unaccompanied, said almost nothing, and smoked a pack during the priest’s speech. On the airplane she read her first book in years. She read half a novel by a famous recluse about a recluse. She laughed her way through it, scaring the other fliers. The other time she left the desert was to go to Hawaii. She painted the whole trip and drank one vodka stinger a night. She would wake up, puke on the beach, and paint flowers. She even climbed a volcano. She thought that was pleasure, at first, until she realized it was part of her work. Her husband told her in a letter, work is your pleasure dear. She'd begun to realize he knew some things. And others, he didn't.
Not long after her trip to Hawaii, her husband died.
She did not attend the ceremony, but she did fly to New York with a lawyer, claim his estate, seize control of her paintings, and kick his lover out of their New York apartment. She spent a week among his things, all sorts of prints by homoerotic painters and a large reproduction of Caravaggio. She had the lawyer light a match and set fire to the Caravaggio. When the fire department came, the lawyer was gone and the painter was smoking, ash collecting on the floor.
‘Is this your apartment?’ They asked her.
‘It was.’ She got up, grabbed her purse, and walked out. The next day, she mailed her husband's third or fourth lover the keys and told him the rent was paid off and the damage would be repaired.
After her husband died, her work became a much hotter commodity. After the poet who had been her husband's lover died on Fire Island while carrying a dowsing rod, her work continued to sell. After her own death, her work became even more successful still. Some tabloid said she was a fag hag. She laughed like a crone.
‘I'm practically nothing.’ She threw the tabloid on the table at the diner.
‘I'll have a grapefruit.’ She barked. Her bitterness had dried up. She would say nothing. The dentist could not even get a rise out of her. She just stared at his painting of Hawaii and his ficus. No one could reach her.
She knew that she did not belong in the desert. None of them did, she'd finally read again. She read about the Apache. She thought she had done what she could simply by learning the name of the tribe whose land she had a house on. Whose land she painted.
Her pick up truck was no longer drivable, so she began walking everywhere. Up, down, hiking, backwards, forwards. She asked for someone to live with her and help her. The town had offered up Lily, who sometimes painted watercolors and was thought to be able to benefit from living with the painter more than the others. Lily went. The two women mostly sat in silence. Lily would read from the painter's bookshelf, on psychology, Zen, paperback mysteries. The painter did not have a TV, but Lily started playing the radio most mornings while she made breakfast—coffee and oatmeal, every morning. Lily was sweet to her, the painter thought. But the painter would often yell, unused to the breakage of solitude. It was not an angry yelling. Just the kind that scraped the foam off. The painter did not actually want tranquility. How sad, Lily would think. But Lily knew too this was possibly what awaited her. No guarantees even in the good lord.
One night, despite having gone out of style, a radio drama came on. Moses. Moses lifted his staff and was punished for it. Moses just wanted water for his people. And still, Moses was the one who saw the face of god. Did Moses punish himself too?
The painter chewed her pork chop. Lily drank a glass of Chardonnay and after the radio drama was over she picked up her banjo. She played once a week for the painter, something slight, like Patsy Cline.
‘Crazy, I'm crazy for feeling so lonely…’
Not long before she passed away, which was a silent enough night, the painter stood on a mountain looking out before her. Her paintings were everywhere and she did not know. Her style was emulated and she did not see. She would occasionally read about such things. It wasn't troubling. It never was. For her the most immediate was the problem of love, death, food, land, and movement. It was her own life that troubled her. The soft puddling of worry and ache around her. It had cracked in her old age, the yolk spilled out on the table, the flour had gone bad.
She stood on the mountain and looked at the clouds. Just like they had appeared on the airplane to go attend to her husband's end. His lover was still in the apartment, she'd heard recently. Good, she thought. He was the only of her husband's lovers still alive and had set up some fund or another with the money she had siphoned to him. It was nothing. He was an activist now but had spared her the possible humiliation of a tell-all memoir. Her husband’s lover had plenty of other famous lovers to write about.
She was the ocean. All around her the negative space, negative light. But she would not let herself see, admit, deplete. She had chosen simplicity over reaching. At least, his kind of reaching. God and me, she thought, will always be here reaching, waiting.
She reached forward over the canyon knowing soon she would not feel this. Soon she would be back in the house and Lily would be cooking dinner and she would feel empty again. But now, she looked at the sky with streaks of crimson and violence, lonely expanses of last blues and blank lavenders, and the last adventuring nimbus. Sometimes it was enough to reach for putting that down. Just to know that was there. Just to know something else was there.
Text for a gallery show by Zoe Koke and Ben Borden.
Bill Gates’ new memoir for Defector.
Trans Bathrooms for The Nation.
Image: Agnes Martin.
In the lead up to my book, now available for pre-order—-more soon, I have been sharing some early stories. They don’t have any overt cross-references to the book but I’m finding it fun regardless. Perhaps certain themes echo. Enjoy. Next time’s will be a follow-up to this short piece.