I SPENT THE NEXT TWO HOURS UP AT THE U, DIGGING THROUGH the library for reference texts on paint pigments, so that when I telephoned Noreen Babcock I wouldn’t sound like a total rube.
My search was not in vain. I found a three-volume set of books published jointly by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Oxford University Press:
Artists’ Pigments: A Handbook of Their History and Characteristics
. These books were filled with highly detailed information. Each chapter presented a different pigment, documenting its characteristics with laboratory analyses such as mass spectrography, chromatography, spectral absorption curves, X-ray diffraction patterns, photomicrographs, scanning electron micrographs, and a host of other analytical methods. I felt simultaneously cowed by the depth of information and heartened that there might be some meat on the bone of the idea of making a thesis project out of examining Gray Eyes’s painting. Foolish me, I thought all I would need to do was fill in the gap between what the authors of the articles knew about the general topic and what I needed to know in particular about Gray Eyes’s painting, write it up, and run it by Molly Chang for approval.
At lunchtime, I checked the volumes out of the library and took them home to Faye’s house, where I set myself up with a comfy overstuffed chair and ottoman, a PB&J, a cup of tea, and a plate of chocolate-chip cookies. In fact I wolfed down the sandwich on the way between the kitchen and the chair, but I do mean to suggest that I was trying to feed myself a balanced diet. Stuffing the first cookie into my mouth, I picked up Volume 2 and opened it at random. I had gone through volume 1 at the
library. I found myself in chapter two of
Ultramarine Blue, Natural and Artificial
, by Joyce Plesters.
I am not a strong reader. Reading is a linear sequential activity, and I have a time-space random kind of mind, built for visualizing problems in 3- and 4-D. So naturally I turned first to the illustrations. Figure I was captioned, “Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan. Cut and polished specimen. White veins of crystalline impurities and gold-colored flecks of pyrites are visible.”
Cool,
I thought.
Ultramarine-blue pigment was once ground from lapis lazuli. It’s a semiprecious stone, so that must have been expensive!
I went to my room and pulled my copy of
Dana’s Manual of Mineralogy
off of the bookshelf in search of details on lapis lazuli.
Dana’s
advised me that the part of the stone that was used as pigment was in fact a mineral called lazurite, which is the blue part of lapis lazuli, and that the white streaks were calcite, which, together with the pyrite and pyroxene and other silicate minerals, made up the marbled appearance.
The painter would try to remove the calcite and pyrite from the lazurite,
I supposed.
But trace impurities would persist in the pigment, and the stone would vary with its source, perhaps making it possible to identify its source. This is going to be great!
Figure two, on the next page, was a detail from Titian’s
Madonna and Child with Saints John the Baptist and Catherine of Alexandria
. “The Madonna’s robe is painted in natural ultramarine,” the caption informed me.
That’s why the Madonna always wore blue,
I decided, in an art history “aha.”
The paint was so expensive that it became an indicator of value and status
.
I was on a roll. But then I got to looking at the figures in the painting. The seated Madonna was serene, soft, and loving, and appeared tall and strong, like Faye. She even looked somewhat like Faye, her dark hair parted down the middle, accentuating a patrician brow and straight nose. The infant Christ lay supine on her lap. A woman in yellow knelt at the Madonna’s knee, her face bent close to the child’s, her arms around him, as if in desperate need to be near the child’s tiny body.
Needless to say, this image got me thinking about Baby Sloane. Throughout the day I had been pushing away a deep sense of heaviness. Now I realized where that heaviness was coming from: I missed that baby very, very badly. Since her birth, I had not before been separated
from her for longer than a few hours, and now the gap was accumulating into days.
I thought of phoning the Irma Hotel, thinking that Faye would probably have moved there, but knew that if she was there at this hour, she and the baby would be trying to take a nap, and I should not interrupt. To fill the void in my heart, I thought about writing to Jack, but that idea fell flat as well.
The book closed itself in my lap, my excitement dead.
At least it’s a female saint that’s bending over the child,
I thought bitterly.
If Tanya was right, it would have been some guy saint, not this woman in yellow
.
I ate another cookie—or two, or three—took some sips of tea and stared out the window at the street.
A bright yellow rental van was just pulling up. I surmised that Fritz’s furniture must be arriving.
I needed to be around another human being, and the sooner the better, so I got up and wandered outside to see if my new neighbor needed any help. I found him lowering a liftgate from the van, getting ready to offload some furniture. “Good afternoon, Fritz,” I said, as I sauntered up the sidewalk. “Can I give you a hand?”
He turned around and smiled. “Sure,” he said. He had swapped the floppy sweats for a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and I was pleased to note that all that running and stretching had worked to good effect on his musculature. I decided again with satisfaction that he was sufficiently good-looking—not to mention classy—to turn Faye’s head.
As I joined Fritz on the liftgate, I set out to make small talk. “I’ve just been reading a set of books about artists’ pigments. In one book, half the chapters are about yellow. Now you drive up in a yellow truck.”
Fritz smiled at me. “You have a lively mind, Em Hansen. You just stroll up and say, ‘I’ve just been reading some books about pigments.’”
Pleased at the compliment, I helped Fritz untether a piece of furniture so we could move it out of the truck. “Yeah, well. Funny, the associations colors can have. I see a big rental truck this color and all I can think about is Oklahoma City and the first World Trade Center bombing. Nowadays I see as many of these trucks painted white. I guess they’re trying to edge away from the negative publicity.”
I looked up. Fritz was looking straight at me, and he was no longer
smiling. As I connected with his gaze, he averted his eyes to the floor of the truck for a moment, then looked at me again, this time trying to smile but not quite making it. I could not tell whether he was annoyed, disgusted, or about to get sick.
I said, “Sorry. It’s just the work I do. You see it’s the colors, really, not the bombing. Bombs—”
“Let’s not talk about bombs, okay?”
“Sure,” I said, my curiosity now running rampant.
“Tell me about another color,” he said firmly.
I paused, mentally jogging around ultramarine-blue and the associations with it that had propelled me away from my studies. “Well, there’s verdigris; that’s a nice turquoise color that hails from antiquity.”
“Ah, antiquity,” he echoed, working a nice blue corduroy couch loose from the stack of belongings in the truck.
“Yeah, these books are great. They list how these guys called colormen used to make some of the pigments. I can practically quote you the line for verdigris: ‘According to the medieval recipes, copper strips are attached to a wooden block containing acetic acid, and then buried in dung,’” I said, daintily crooking a pinkie.
“Mm. Sounds … delectable,” Fritz said.
Together Fritz and I hefted the couch out of the truck and into the living room.
It’s not a couch, it’s a love seat,
I thought cagily, as I helped him settle it in front of the fireplace. The house was an early Craftsman style, with lots of oak flooring and trim, and the big comfy couch looked nice there, inviting. I imagined a warm fire and some cozy snuggling going on, just the tonic Faye needed.
Next, we brought in some nice side chairs and an end table. “Where do you think I ought to put the table?” he asked.
I cast an eye around the room. “Over here,” I said. “That way it’s handy to the best lounging spot in the room, but not in the main traffic pattern. You can put your beer here and tuck your copies of
Pilot
magazine into the rack underneath it.”
Fritz nodded. “I like that,” he said. “Now, how about the lamps?” “Here and here,” I suggested, pointing at the obvious positions to illuminate reading. “You get good natural light for daytime reading by this chair and ottoman, but at night you’ll want to be over there, facing the fireplace.”
“Just so.”
In half an hour, we had set up the entire living room, even putting pictures on the walls. He had some decent serigraph prints of high, floaty mountains, nothing too extraordinary but darned easy to look at, and he held them in various positions while I backed up and checked the proportions of the pictures relative to the other large objects in the room, all the time thinking how impressed Faye would be with his taste. As a finishing touch, he opened a cardboard box filled with carefully wrapped framed photographs of his son at various ages, which I helped him array across the mantelpiece. “Nice-looking kid,” I said, looking at a lovely snap of the boy at about age two, showing a nice round face with big blue eyes and wild blond curls, lit by a gorgeous smile.
“My son’s very special to me,” he replied.
“You miss him.”
“Yeah. Like I said, he’s in Germany with his mom right now. When he’s in the States I get him most weekends.” He shook himself slightly, as if snapping himself back into focus. He looked around the room. “This looks great,” he said. “So, is this what you do for a living?”
“What?”
“The colors and all. Are you an interior decorator?”
I began to laugh. “No way. I’m a geologist. The pigment books are for a forensics project I’m working on.”
Fritz looked lost.
I shook my head in amazement. “Pigments are geology, get it? They’re little bits of rock, finely ground up. Some pigments are animal-based, and some are vegetable, but most are mineral. Or, these days, most everything is synthetic, but when you think about it, synthetics are like minerals that are man-made, and they’re derived from mined materials.”
“Oh. I never knew that. But of course I never thought about it, either. Color is just … color. But I guess there’s more to it than that.”
“A whole lot. But I’d have to be a chemist or a physicist to really get into all the business about excitement of the electron levels. That part is a total mystery to me. But I can handle the literal part of pigments: A blue rock generally becomes a blue pigment. Plain and simple. Then you hand it over to an artist, who mixes it in oil or water or some other medium, and … then we’re into art, and that’s not mystery, that’s magic.”
He smiled and shook his head. “I took chemistry and physics in college,
but I just design aircraft. Composites. Stabilities. Color is something some other guy paints on the outside of the bird to get it to look sweet.” He gave me an uncertain smile. “Got a little more time? I could use your help with the … well, the beds.”
Oh, a bit of shyness here? How charming
. “Sure,” I said. I helped him muscle the kid’s bunk bed into the first bedroom, and then we went after a nice, big queen-sized sleigh bed that tucked nicely into the larger bedroom toward the back of the house. “Nice carving in this thing,” I commented. I ran a hand along the footboard as I held it so that he could set up the rails.
“Thanks. I got it at an estate sale a couple years back. Sure beats having the box spring and mattress down on the floor.”
“How long you been divorced?” I asked.
Fritz grinned at me. “I like you, Em,” he said. “You want to know something, you open your mouth and ask, don’tcha.”
I blushed. “Yeah, well …”
“The answer is three years. Three years next month, to be precise. We were separated for a year before that. Marsha is an efficient woman, and we didn’t have that much to divide—except custody—so it went pretty quickly. She got the bed. I didn’t want it.”
“Sorry if I’m being nosy.”
“You are, but I don’t mind it. Besides, we might just as well get to know each other, eh?”
“Eh.”
“Now you: How old is Sloane Renee?”
“Seven months.”
“A nice age. Which one of you had her?”
“Huh?”
“Which one of you’s the birth mother?”
My mouth dropped open. I stood there catching flies while the dime dropped and I sorted out what he was saying. “Oh! Oh, you think …”
Suddenly Fritz turned scarlet. “Oh, shit,” he said under his breath. “I mean—oh, I am sorry. I thought you were …”
“A lesbian couple? A two-mommy household?”
He gave me a wilted grin, the kind that looks like a person’s just swallowed about a quart of glue. “I am such an idiot. You know, that was number eight on Marsha’s list of the top ten reasons why she had to divorce me: I am totally clueless about people.”