The white light of Arizona was crushing. I was sitting on a train barreling through the Southwest to see the Grand Canyon. All I wanted was to find a javelina. I had wanted to revisit the Grand Canyon ever since seeing it as a child. Joseph was coming with me, a chaperone in my cruel cerulean mood. They sat beside me fidgeting and looking at something in the distance. I sipped my coffee and looked at the cacti. I’d been reading about a famous landscape painter and her companion Lily; I imagined they’d been lovers. Of course, they probably hadn’t been, but it was nice to think so. To me she became the painter, the singular painter. I saw ghosts in her decrepit flowers.
The painter had been a large part of my life after my breakup and subsequent seclusion. I convinced Joseph to come with me on the trip. They had grown up in New Mexico and I figured we could just get a wide swath of everything. Long ago we went from lovers to friends, a gentle companionship. I watched them find new lovers and they watched me turn into a solitary hermit. It’d been a long time since I’d ventured out of my apartment when I suggested the trip. My situation was detonating. I didn’t know quite what to do, so I thought of all the painters I admired and we decided to see the Grand Canyon on a train with a brief stop in New Mexico to visit the painter’s house. Her house was now a small, quaint museum. Joseph figured this way they could also see some family members they hadn’t seen since things had been hard.
I can’t say that I was just going to go. I wanted an epiphany, a moment of clarity in my self-destructive life. Each of the past three years had ended with too much reflection, too much sorrow. I didn’t feel very Buddhist and instead felt quite graspy. My first year in New York ended in an affair. The second year had ended with the end of a dalliance with a director. The third with my most recent breakup.
I guess this is it, I realized. This is life.
The train rolled by in the desert, cacti blooming, sand, sky. I tried to imagine a life of lack and then thought better of it. Why psychologize land?
Coffee was served. Joseph took theirs with cream and sugar and asked for some peanuts. I happily ate half of theirs as they yelled at me sweetly.
I wondered what would have happened if I had been able to make it work with any of my past lovers. I felt like an oceanographer. Let’s discover, let’s discover now.
Eventually, we reached the town and disembarked softly. We were going to stay for a day before going to the Grand Canyon on the morning train. Joseph had grown up nearby and we were meeting a relative of theirs for lunch. I had greedily accepted, hoping for the possibility of a free meal. I felt a bug on my leg as we walked out into the heat with our backpacks. I flicked it off.
I saw what a white landscape artist would like, a world that wasn’t her own. I pushed my hair back into a ponytail and hoped my nail polish wasn’t too visible. Joseph wore a crop top and booty shorts, an Aries if ever there was one.
We walked through the streets as the heat pressed down on us. I projected an Americana, an afternoon quiet hum of small-town life. Not long before leaving, I had watched a Western late into the night on my laptop trying to evoke some mythos. Feeling could not touch me then. I was living among boxes and boxes and spending time crying or in a coffee-laced stupor.
The diner was sweet, a mild pink place, one with waitresses serving goopy coffee, burnt pancakes, and overly buttered toast. Maybe I could get high on coffee there. Joseph scanned the diner for their relative, some cousin or something. I had hardly paid attention to anything for months, I barely knew when our flights or trains were.
It was unlike me, the mom-ness having flown out of me and destroyed itself like a withering crone. I didn’t have answers. It was the Year of the Metal Rat. I was born the year of the Wood Pig. My lucky colors were gray, white, and green. This year was supposed to be bad for jobs yet I also was supposed to receive a bucket of gold. I wasn’t sure how that would work. I’d read this on a Chinese Zodiac website. I was hunting deep online for amulets, charms, and spells. A cosmic wandering. I had changed my phone screen to a picture of the painter before we left New York, another talisman to watch over me from below. Or, a reminder. Someone who knew what they were doing their whole life while I kept wandering and wanting to do something like paint or write or make movies, but never committing to one thing. Perhaps it was good to forgo mastery, to not believe in domain, or maybe it was just laziness or a lack of real talent. I was not someone who could stick to science fiction or confessional diaries or poems. I would look at word docs for hours not committing to a singular syntax. I used to be the person who would show everything to everyone. Now I had no internet footprint. Invisibility. Joy was just so fickle.
We sat down and I got coffee, my third or fourth of the day already at 12:30pm. I knew Joseph was thinking about the time I’d told them to limit my coffee intake. We were simply here now, wherever here was. Joseph tried calling the cousin, who was apparently just running a little late. “Be there in five…” I heard. “Start without me.”
Joseph ordered a pancake and bacon combination and I got rye toast with scrambled eggs. The server looked like she was ready to ask me if I wanted anything else, but nodded kindly and walked off.
“How are you feeling?” Joseph asked.
“It’s weird to be where you’re from.”
I ate with relish. After battling with my weight, I had entered a period where I tried to just eat what I wanted when I wanted to and not feel guilt. Mostly, I ate toast, eggs, some fish, salads, coffee, and occasionally chocolate. Every once in a while I would have a martini or an edible, but for the most part I was sober. Joseph called me some weird amalgam of a housewife and a freak. I took it with coleslaw. Hunger had always been a bitter edge, from the frenetic pace of my childhood brownie and Coke days, my diet of only roast chicken and dollar meals in college to save money to move to New York, to my days of veganism thinly veiling a desire to be thin in the eyes of the Hell’s Kitchen gays I dated every once in a while. Not that it was ever enough. As much as the wispy people I dated wanted to believe in body positivity, more often than not they held deep-seated anger over their own bodies that they projected onto others; their thinness a weapon, their shame a blade. And I was guilty of it too. I was never a saint, not even as I tried to be when I was younger. Trying abstinence or being a good student like costumes of holiness.
So I ate my rye bread and I ate my eggs. I tried to be fun. I harbored mixed feelings about being there, having read in college about eco-tourism, the whiteness of the tourist industrial complex. I guess Joseph being from here was a slight shield. I didn’t know how to interpret the growing sense that everything was immoral. The Buddhists had a word for that. I know Roshi Joan Halifax would call it compassion fatigue. I listened on the plane to one podcast where she was asked, You must know that what you do—helping orphans, spreading blankets—is different from what the rest of us are doing?'
Once my ex Astrid’s roommate made us a crinkle, a welcome pastry for my visit before Astrid and I sped off to a museum only to cry in each other’s arms. I hadn’t asked if it was vegan, even though I’d been vegan at the time. So much black-and-white thinking. I knew my therapist would try to get me to see the falseness of these dichotomies. And sometimes I could, I could see the world as just a spinning orb where there was no need to do anything other than live. I realized how many puzzles I self-invented, which only made the actual puzzles that much harder. I needed things to be solvable. I needed to plan.
What was I doing here? Not in this diner, this cosmic little gas station, what was I doing at all? Just spinning around in deep wide circles as if in a vat of red wine?
Patsy Cline came on the radio. Joseph was singing along in a joking voice, lulling me back into the room.
“I don’t think my cousin’s coming,” they said. I nodded. I wandered to the counter.
“Do you have black and white shakes?” I asked. “Or can you make one?”
The waitress looked at me with a sympathetic look. “I don’t think we do. I’ll see if any of the girls know how to make one.” I shook my head, got the check, and refilled our canteens.
Once I had felt more motherly, matronly, and protective of them, but for a while now I felt like the peeling flower. We walked back out into the arid world of lizards and a sky too hot for sensation.
“Where does this painter live?” Joseph asked patiently.
“Somewhere up near the mountain, down the road,” I said.
“Shall we?” they asked, hiking their backpack up.
We started down the dust road. I wondered if I could live there, in all that silence. So many people lived their lives with quiet conviction. Day in, day out, punch in, punch out, talk to a few neighbors, empty nest or raise a kid, go to the bar or just go home and watch the news and Jeopardy. Instead, I felt insatiable. All the time. The world’s green orb could not provide the provenance I so desperately wanted.
Eventually, we found the painter’s house. Luckily there was a snack shop. I bought iced coffee. It was the kind they made simply by pouring hot coffee over ice after letting it sit. I nabbed a bunch of granola bars. From the porch of the snack shop, the house looked tiny. The house was a little blip in surrender of the magnitude that surrounded its little thatch roof. A few cacti huddled near the highway. I saw why a landscape artist would move here. Once I had felt the call of portraiture. The call of showing a thing so obliquely it became obscured. Now I felt like vanishing without a trace. What if, against my better judgment, I moved somewhere and blended in so completely.
“She did not have style,” Joseph said.
“I feel like she did, it’s just… kind of barren. She had a spartan thing going on.”
I could sense the people around us staring. I imagined we weren’t the typical crowd for this museum. Still I wanted to take my time, this wasn’t the kind of place I would ever be again.
I sat on a bench with Joseph and chomped down on one of the granola bars eying a large cacti nearby. “What’s that one called?” I asked.
After a few moments, we went inside to poke around. I thought of all the writers who had now done residencies or some sort of project in dead authors’ houses, to conjure something past. Here, there was little evidence of a great painter besides the few paintings hung on her walls posthumously. Her hues and escapes and portals were bright for the most part, flashes of red and yellow, streaks and cuts and seams coming undone of what seemed like sky but could perhaps be sea. Late in life, she had rarely painted things the color we think they are. She had instead found the sunset a cascade of negation and inter-participation. The interstitial joys of colors swimming through one another. A purple was really a bunch of blues near a red, she had infamously said in one of the less than a dozen interviews she ever gave. She wasn’t exactly a pointillist but she was on the edge. A Seurat of the desert, she had been called in a recent MOMA exhibit.
I was holding a notebook, perched on some railing before her bed when Joseph came over and whispered. “I think they don’t like the notebook.” I looked at a woman in a black wrap and a menacing scowl.
“Okay,” I said. I put the notebook away as a gesture of good faith. Besides, I did not feel whatever spiritual disaster I felt I was supposed to feel.
Disaster meant something to me, after a life of endings. For so long I had wanted to die, had thought of veins and hills and pills and the color red. I had thought of a life of completion at 27. Now I was skulking in the middle of nowhere, no lover, and little to show for my life. At least in the way fifteen-year-old me would have conceptualized it. Everyone meant well, when I had left for the trip they tried to be encouraging.
Once I had imagined that by this point in time Terry Gross would be interviewing me. I would have done something worth being interviewed on NPR about. Some mythology, some cornerstone, some romance building up to a tower of capital letters.
I felt suddenly small and lowercase, more frail than anything else, not daring to go on a trip alone and not feeling all that social either. Me and my fucked up digestion.
The museum had a copy of her last painting hung up over her bed. Her bed was a pale flower thing, fraying sheets even though she hadn’t died that long ago. She’d been cremated in secret. I stood there craning over her bed at the painting. It was lit slightly by one window in her room, the deep crimson curtains were pulled back. I had seen reproductions of the painting and found it odd that it was so far removed from the viewer. Untouchable and hardly visible.
I was paranoid about taking out my notebook now, but felt that I had to. I scribbled something down hoping later it would prove meaningful. Joseph came over to see what I was looking at.
“I always hated this one,” they said.
I cocked my head. “I don’t think I hate it or like it really, not in some way, but on some level I’m really drawn to it.”
“Romantic,” they giggled.
“I don’t know. Something about it feels interesting.”
“I sense an essay,” they said. If creation was some vibrant contest, I wasn’t in the running. I was just a little dopey pilgrim who had started eating eggs again. Joseph had made fun of the fact that I had read Thich Nhat Hahn while on the plane. “Afraid of flying?” they asked. “Yes,” I said. “But I’m giving into it.” The clouds had been nice to zone off to. I suppose if I wanted to I could eat marshmallows.
The painting was hardly a painting, in fact it was a work on paper, mostly lines and some green paint. Scholars had argued endlessly about what it was trying to represent or if overall it was abstract. She’d been in her eighties, living with a companion and had a weird diet of her own—nettle tea, jello, and diner food. She had tried to forego coffee and alcohol for the most part in her eighties. Lily, someone who was still alive and lived in a nearby town according to a New York Times article from 2007, would read mystery novels to her or they’d listen to the radio. The article quoted her: “She was mostly a nice woman, but I don’t like her paintings too much anymore.”
Her last one, this green one, looked slightly like nettle to me. The impression was faint, some had wondered at first if it was watercolor even though she had never used watercolors before.
I looked at the time, 3:15pm. I couldn’t place my body in time. How long had we been in the museum?
Joseph came over and put their hand on my shoulder. “You tired?” they said. “Cause I am.” I nodded and we began to stroll out. The security guard nodded, not that I felt he could have stopped me if I had wanted to grab one of the paintings.
The fire of the sky beamed down on us, two devil-angels walking in the red of the cerulean. I laughed thinking of such an absurd painterly image. I had entered a dream-state, a little sunken world of make-believe. Sometimes I wished I could show these reveries as they were, wholesale. Here is what my brain is. Is it enough? Is it enough? Is the whole world enough for you yet?
We got back to the town around 4:50pm and checked into our motel. Joseph joked about buying porn as I took a surprisingly cold shower and leaned against the wall sighing. I had no ideas. Fresh out, brain empty. God forbid.
“Oh shit, John texted me.”
“What’d he say?” I yelled, lightly banging my head against the shower wall.
“He said he’s thinking of meeee.”
“You should sext him.”
“Wouldn’t that be weird?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re right there in the shower?”
I was staring at a blond hair stuck on the grimy, yellow shower wall.
“Don’t let me stop you. I have to shampoo anyway and with my hair…” I trailed off. I had a flash of the nettle painting. Why something so small? Why such a small moment? Had she finally settled on something smaller? Only a few weeks before she had been painting cliffs. I took a deep breath. I shampooed my hair and took an out breath. The next day we were going to see the Grand Canyon, I thought. I should be there. I should take it in.
We sat down to dinner at a bar, ordering bean soup, nopales, and margaritas. I was droning on about laser hair removal surgery. “Great!” Joseph said.
After an hour of rambling, we walked back in the early twilight surrounded by little cacti shadows. It made me think of all those Peanuts comics with Spike in the desert, only wolves for friends.
Joseph got us some mezcal and we sipped it on the front porch of the motel. Admitting the end was not the end, I took a big gulp. An optimist and a pessimist drinking some silver honey.
We slept in the same bed with the fan spinning wildly above us.
Late in the night, with only a few hours before we needed to get up to catch our train, I bolted awake. I rubbed my forehead and stirred. I got up to get some water. Outside I heard a car turning on, one or two hikers probably getting an extremely early start. I looked at Joseph’s bags, all packed neatly except something poking out. A postcard. Odd. I hadn’t seen them get anything anywhere yet.
I pulled it out to sneak a better look. It was a postcard with a print of the painter’s last work on paper. The nettle. I smiled widely and slipped it back in. I’d been too anxious to go back into the gift shop after the notebook incident.
“Okay,” I said quietly. “Okay.”