The old bottles and metal tubes looked handmade. Each top was inset with a jewel or a lump of precious metal. The brushes were certainly handmade: bright brass ferules held luscious swellings of smooth bristle. Sable hair, or something finer, even more perfect, strand by strand.
A thick envelope was bound by ribbons to the lid of the box, sealed with wax and very formally addressed to her.
Rain removed a letter from it, and began to read:
For Rain Loss Morton, daughter of Alice Gudrid Loss Morrow,
Please forgive my cowardice, and please accept this
unworthy trifle from me. I've put everything I have and
everything I kept from her into these materials, which I hope you will set free into the world. It has taken me nearly thirty years, but I think I may have begun to understand a little bit about life and about our sad little efforts to pass through it with dignity and grace. You do what you can with what you have, and I hope I can give you more to work with after I'm gone.At first I was confused by your coming to see me, but, as time went on, and you never spoke of her, I began to loosen my iron grip on her memory. I don't know what you can possibly know of her, having been so tiny at the time of her death, but I can only assume that you can't know who your mother was to me. And writing this now, I realize there is nothing I can say that could convey even a little of that to you. And so, not being able to turn that most important and most powerful thing in my life into words, I had to do what I know what to do with it. Put it into paints.
What you surely cannot realize is that she lives on in you. You are distinctly your own, clearly, but there is some of her going along for the ride inside you and it pains me very deeply that you didn't know her. Still, she is there. I have seen her.
Though you deserve to have everything that was hers, I hope you will understand the form in which I need to give it to you. Once she was gone, it was clear to me that every mate- rial thing in the physical world is simply meaningless. It is what we do with those things that matters so profoundly. What we give each other, what we reflect, what we transmit. The things we build are only worth the building
of them. Fail there, and nothing you hold in your hand will improve things.Perhaps it is selfish of me to intervene between her and you, but I tell you honestly that I am only trying to offer what I can of her to you. Please accept her and use her.
I give my labor, I give all I had of her, I give my body and my life. Please carry it forward into the world and find love, acceptance, understanding and reciprocity there.
You are a rare treasure. You are beloved. She is with us now.
In love and gratitude,
James Morrow
La Traviata
blared through Rain's tiny, but decent, speakers on the floor of the studio, as she brazenly opened and grabbed tubes from the box. Handwritten in fountain pen on the paper labels wrapped around the tubes were odd descriptions:
jewelry/
gold, clothing/blue
,
china/bone white
and other even more cryptic notations were scrawled there. Each had a stripe of its contents painted onto the label. The colors were rich, though not too brilliant. A few brights in tiny tubes, many whites and a broad selection of strangely earthy tones. It was ridiculous, the luxury in the box, the arch formality of his letter. He thought she had known all along. That she was playing some game with him. She strolled into his life assuming a mild acquaintance between her father and him, looking for, what? Solace?
And now this? Take this woman forward into history? Take him? Him? His body? What did he mean by that? As if she could guarantee anything. As if her works would even survive her, let alone be cared for by museum storage maintenance staff, lent around, displayed. She may have grown up around a cultural icon, but if she learned anything so far in life, it was the slimness of the chances of having your individual voice impact the world. Worse than lottery odds. Didn't she know that? Didn't she?
Rain thought how she had tried to return it, and how he'd messed up the first box, squeezing paints onto her palette, removing the temptation to treat it like what appeared to be. A precious artifact.
She was just going to glob it all onto canvas. The enigma of this gift was only partially explained by the letter, but she began to understand. It was what she ought to do now. What felt right and correct now.
She squeezed the unfamiliar colors out on the palette, tentatively mixing them around to find unusual pairings, tones that set the others off in unexpected ways, textures that worked wel with other textures. It was a devil-may-care bravery she employed while dispensing and mixing. So what if these were my mother's paints, or my mother's life somehow reduced to paints?
Here's the thing Rain loved about painting figures and the face in particular. The human mind is fiercely attuned to the most minute vicissitude, the tiniest tweak of muscle in the human face. Even in people we've never seen before, we can sense when they're lying, or in pain, or a little bit guilty. Sometimes we just know that something is wrong. Babies spend serious chunks of time studying faces, learning them, getting the language down. So Rain knew when she had gotten a face right. In painting a face, there are artists who can capture feeling, and there are technicians. Sometimes the two skills meet, but usually an artist leans one way or the other. The feeling artists tend to paint more loosely, catching a flare of emotion like capturing a firefly, delicately and with well-practiced, single passes, rather than a careful molding. The technicians can usually mimic an emotion by getting the image mechanically perfect, though the risk is a tiny sense of vacuousness.
Rain was amazed by the lesser-known colleagues of her favorites, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Whistler and Winslow Homer. The also-rans hanging next to them in museums were sometimes great technicians who did everything right, but somehow still produced dull, flat images. On first glance and by provenance these paintings were quite important. The colors were nearly the same, the brushstrokes every bit as careful and skilled, but the emotion just wasn't there. The tiny fluctuations that tell us a smile isn't genuine are minute muscle flarings, failings to twitch just the right way, and if a painter isn't in control of every miniscule slope and fall in his subject's face, it could all fall apart.
This was one of the advantages Rain found in working with oil paints. Painting was neither a straight and easy loping journey lulled by classical flutes and strings, nor a rock-and-roll, jackedup expression session. It was not glamorous or straightforward. It was something that engulfed Rain, an experience into which she climbed and lived. Before she had begun a piece, she sometimes wondered how she was supposed to do this. She knew how to be in the middle of a painting, even a little bit about how to finish one, not with a bang but many many many feathery whimpers. But starting a painting. That was scary. Oil paints eased this fear since she could always trowel down an area that was bugging her, that she had overworked or that suddenly turned out to be in the wrong place entirely.
That is the secret of oil paint and one reason this ancient medium has resisted the onslaught of most modern chemistry. It is forgiving. Some paintings, of course, cannot be saved at all, but often Rain found herself adjusting proportion, moving the turn of a lip, raising a nostril by a millimeter. And with just that tiny move, the paint almost moving along the canvas of a piece, she could bring life and vibrance and authenticity to a face. Not that she was going for likenesses. But rather an undeniably real but conflicted emotion she witnessed on that face in that moment.
On those rare occasions when she ran across another shot of the same person, she was often involuntarily critical of the other photograph. Yes, it was the same person, but never the same feeling. She was not painting people. She was painting raw feeling.
A paintbrush is nothing like a pencil, a charcoal or a pen. And paint is not like ink. It has body and dimension and you convey it to canvas not by dragging the brush along the surface, but by gentle sculpting, pushing, laying, pulling and manipulating. The brush is an intermediary between the painter and the paints. The painter stands facing a canvas as its equal, brings the paint as an offering and then works it in as a negotiation: brush to paint, mind to image.
In painting, this process goes from the murky expressionism of childhood, through the control of making symbols (“this is an eye, this is a nose, this is a mouth”) back to a fresh way of seeing that is all light and form. It resists parroting symbols, is brave enough to use yellow here and green there and illogical shapes we've trained ourselves no longer to see. There is a kind of bravery when your goal is to represent something recognizable and offer it to the judgment of others; a kind of bravery that pushes you to see the dark triangle under the chin, the utter lack of line at the jaw despite the strong sense of sharpness of the jawline. A bravery in creating a nose from darkened shadows extending down the lip, the shine competing against the lightest pales in the face. Rain thought that perhaps she was starting to understand what her father meant, what “discovery and pleasure” he was talking about, what he said he'd miss.
Over the following few days, plugging away at her paintings, more than a dozen sketches, larger, looser and more expressive with each face she painted, Rain worked her way through the leftover turkey and through the hours of the day and night until she approached an almost normal schedule of sleep and waking. One day, having worked all the way through a night and day until six the next evening, Rain crashed to sleep and then awakened refreshed and wide awake at four-thirty the following morning.
She was pleasantly surprised to find herself approaching a mortal's time clock and scraping the bottom of her pantry: pickled garlic stems, a tiny jar of honey mustard and rolled oats. The rice was gone, she had eaten the quinoa and wheat barley with broths and spices. It was facing the specter of mustard oatmeal with this truly intense and impossibly nauseating condiment, that finally gave her the impetus to leave the house and reconnect to the outside world.
Rain didn't feel like actually seeing people, especially not James Morrow nor certainly Chassie, embarrassed as she was about her last encounter with her. So she decided that what she
could
do was go to the city. Funny that the more populated place felt more anonymous, but it was just that one step closer to the world that she could yet take.
A shower and some surprisingly loose-fitting clothing later, Rain was aboard Metro North and hurtling toward the city, watching the Hudson glitter in the bright, hard winter sunlight. She was crushed among the morning commuters, who were crowded and uniformly silent by the time they'd passed Croton and Spuyten Duyvil. Rain watched a crew team sculling at the head of the East River above the tip of Manhattan, inside the bay-like widening under the Henry Hudson Bridge. She let in the landscape, the rocking of the train, the soothing rhythm of the greenery slipping past and the steadier company of the dramatic wet blue of the sky, the heavy, flat sloth of the river and the bright, rolling clouds that had accompanied her to the city.
When she was about ten, John Morton went through what Rain characterized as her father's Buddhist phase. Although he had retained some of the teachings and the practice of meditation for the rest of his life, Rain remembered this time as a phase since he became overwhelmed with his discoveries. He had even decorated the apartment like a yurt and obsessed about his mind's expansion for a while. He'd also sought the regular company of monks, feeding this or that monk at their family dinners.
So it was at times like these in her life, Rain could hear the voices of these peaceful men come to her with their impressive being-ness and calm. She knew what they would say to her. She knew she would be encouraged to be whatever came so persistently to her, whether that be making images with paint or just doing nothing in particular. Today she was planning to try nothing. They always said it wasn't easy, even while assuring her it was the simplest thing in the world to find your path. Only now did that seeming contradiction make sense to her.
So she walked. Starting from Grand Central over to Lex, then down 34th, crossing over to Third, walking steadily, block by block, the city festooned gloriously for the holidays. She walked with genuinely no intention of arriving where she was headed until she passed 14th, crossed back over Third past Astor Place and found herself at her old coffee shop right below the apartment she'd shared with Karl for almost seven years. She had always thought of it as his apartment, having consciously or unconsciously kept her things discreet and organized and separate in the place, never having claimed more than carefully separated spaces for her toiletries, her books, even the few dishes that mattered to her. They hadn't amassed much as a couple since for their wedding they'd skipped the big ceremony and Karl's apartment had been fairly well set up before she met him.
Rain sat, nursing a latte, even ordering a second before Karl finally came into the place, doing an unintentionally comical double-take when he saw her sitting there. Rain smiled a wan smile at him, wondering whether she'd come all this way just to see him and hoping that it wasn't a big mistake.
“Rain,” Karl said. He came to her table and looked around like he was expecting cameras or police or something.
“Hi Karl,” Rain said with a big sigh. “Hi,” she repeated, smiling genuinely this time.
“What are you doing here?” Karl asked, taking hold of the chair across from her but not sitting down.
“I'm not sure,” Rain said. “I guess I just wanted to see you.”
He looked at her warily, waved to the barista and then slipped out the front door of the cafe to make a call on his cell.
“They can manage,” Karl said, coming back in, grabbing a chair and sitting across from her in one swift move. When he looked up, they both registered a little shock to be seeing each other, at how suddenly and almost unconsciously comfortable they could feel again, but then they both reared back into the reality of their situation. “I like the⦔ he hesitated, “â¦interesting hair.”