The Colorman (7 page)

Now there was an air of tragedy around her studio. This place she'd been most herself. This home.

The smells: turp, mineral spirits and the earthy-nutty scent of paint glopped straight from the tube, along with the high note of linseed oil that lays over all the others—these were home. Even when Rain was low and uncertain and sure that she had nothing whatever to offer to the world, there were seventy-five things she could do in her studio to soothe her and make her feel like she was doing something right.

If she was not already in the middle of a piece, there was the pleasant busy work of stretching a new canvas or gessoing. Gessoing was Rain's favorite. The craft elements of the work were so satisfying. They had built-in and easy-to-achieve goals. She knew with certainty whether she'd succeeded at her task. Bubbling and rippling were failures. Slack fabric, off-square corners, missed spots—all these were clear failures. Success became humbly invisible, but once achieved, gave her a sense of a proper arena within which to freely take risks.

This started with simply gathering up her materials; poking at the hardening lumps of paint on her palette with the palette knife, adding fresh dollops of whatever colors were low or too dry, picking this and that brush, round tapered filberts, flat square brights, tiny rounds and riggers, pouring out solvents and supports into little metal cups, adjusting lights or angling the canvas to catch the daylight from the big windows, changing the music. This last was key, a big part of creating the mood of whatever piece she was working on. She could still hear what she was listening to when she saw her old paintings. She'd typically crank up all the albums that Karl couldn't stand when she was alone in her studio. King Crimson. The White Stripes. The Tom Tom Club.
La Traviata
, extra loud. The Sugarcubes. All her yell-along music. Music she rode during the hours she worked.

When she felt intensely anti-Karl, Rain got out the series of small self-portraits she had continued making over the years she had known him, despite his deep disdain for realism. These, especial y, she knew he'd have hated, paintings of herself looking odd, dark, angry and lopsided. Somewhat Lucien Freud, with a bit of Ralph Steadman. Not quite Francis Bacon, but getting there. It was something she considered a peculiar little habit, for those days when she needed to exert something individual and independent. Paintings of a woman no one would want to own or control. Paintings of a need-free quirky character, each on a six-by-six inch block of wood, each one created wet, in one session, with little planning beyond whatever gush of emotion she might have been coping with that day, they were beginning to add up in the drawer where she tucked them away to dry. Rain didn't consider them any part of her “real art” so she didn't allow them to amount to anything; they were more a kind of diary.

On the wall behind her easel, Rain had tacked up the encrusted paint she occasional y peeled off the glass of her palette. In the three years she had inhabited her studio, she had produced eight such constructions and they told the story of her materials. Alizarin Crimson, True Ultramarine, Cerulean Blue, Hansa Yellow Deep, Raw Sienna, Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, Viridian Green. These were arrayed along two sides of the rectangle and then blended, bent and zagged toward various browns and blacks in the center and toward the larger globs of Ivory Black and Titanium White on opposite ends.

They were abstracts, worked in an honest, time-consuming and organic way. Rain sometimes stared at them in wonder. There was a kind of perfection in a palette. A purity of potential and intention unsullied by intelligence and effort. Free of the ruin of concept or affectation but full of the richness of human touch.

Once on her “real art” canvases, Rain's colors all tended toward mud. She worked the paint like a sculptor, adding, shaping, pushing, contouring, adding some more. So the palette had something she tried to achieve in her intentional work. An honesty and a purity that her hand ruined.

The work was not going smoothly. She was distracted thinking about Karl and the fall. Heading off to England. How she'd do there. Rain never liked England, though Gwen and John went almost every summer and she had visited them there often.

From home Rain loved England and all things English. She had watched the Royal Wedding at two o'clock in the morning with one of her nannies when she was only five. She loved tea and biscuits, Jane Austen, all the BBC shows and British movies, loved Shakespeare and many of her favorite authors were British or at least partly so. But somehow every time she went to England she found herself speaking her American accent with a self-conscious exaggeration, flinching at the derision that seemed to flow toward her from even the most charming of citizens. Brits she met had such a good-natured way of delivering their condescension, like they just wanted to watch how well you could bear it. Not well in Rain's case, it turns out. Rain never particularly thought of herself as an American—it just wasn't high on her list of self-modifiers—but abroad she found she took it on as a fierce mantle. More abhorrent to her than the way Americans were treated in Europe, however, was the smarmy, effete denial many of them affected regarding their own ingredients while they were there. Like they had baked up a lobster with eggs and flour.

Rain liked the French better. They were less interested in Americans and more interested in all things American, which added up to a grudging respect with a cover of utter disregard. This contrasted wholly with the disdain masked by teasing attention usually dealt her by Brits, especially during her teenaged tan-and-blonde years. France was a much more comfortable arrangement as far as Rain was concerned. Having grown up in New York City, she found a similar gruff positivity in their manner and treatment of tourists.

It had been almost eight years since her last trip to England. And really, she wasn't sure she wanted to experience that treatment while being there as the
Mrs
. It seemed wrong to stay in New York while Karl spent months away in London, though, and too depressing to deal with the end of this studio. But the more she thought about it, the more she grudgingly admitted to herself that Gwen might have been right.

Rain was washing out her brushes. It was no use trying to work when she was feeling this out of sorts. It was too sad knowing this would be one of her last days working here.

But four months without her husband? That seemed awful y long. She wasn't sure if their relationship was strong enough to put up with that stretch. They'd been together now almost eight years and yet she still found Karl attractive. He had an itchy pull on her; she was not sure what it was. His needling and then the sudden odd and unexpected throes of passionate attention were some kind of addictive combination to her. He was a skilled and purely attentive lover, but he kept her guessing and often played games with her expectations. Rain wondered whether this was maybe a formula for a long-lasting, healthy intimate life. However passive her friends might have considered her role, had they known anything about it, there was nothing formulaic about her and Karl's connection. Nothing boring or predictable.

Karl, bare-chested, half covered in a sheet, his twinkling eyes large and strikingly blue without his glasses, his lips full and moist, like fat plums.

Rain covered her palette with a sheet of waxed paper, screwed on the tops of a few open tubes of paint, dried off the brushes she'd left in the sink with paper towels. She checked and buckled up her leather backpack.

Karl smiles and rolls on top of her, going in for her neck.

Rain tugged her bag up over one shoulder and strolled through the West Village. Their apartment building was at Lafayette and 4th Street. Just about equidistant from Parsons where Karl taught and the School of Visual Arts from where Karl had plucked her, had directed her work, narrowed it, taught her so much more than art school could have, challenged her, pushed her, gave her passion and focus and clarity without the suspect motivation of running a business—art school being, he always said, useful for graphic artists, il ustrators and technicians at printing companies (oh, his disdain for his employers ran pretty deep) but pointless for someone with something real to contribute to art history.

Karl strokes the curve of her waist, down along her jutting hipbone…

As she pushed open the door to their apartment, Rain could hear a rustling from the bedroom. She dropped her keys on the table by the door and her bag on the floor underneath. Maybe the sound was coming from the back elevator next to the kitchen. It was an old building and the back elevator still worked for half of the apartments. It was used mostly for trash and deliveries, but otherwise not very often.

“Hello? You home?” Rain called out, heading toward the kitchen.

Karl groaned from the bedroom.

Rain turned back toward the bedroom. There Karl was, lying all rumpled in the bed. He rolled over huffily as she entered the room. He wasn't wearing his glasses.

“Oh, you poor thing…” Rain said. She leaned in to touch Karl's face and he turned crankily away.

Rain was used to his behavior by then. He was such a baby when he got sick. She smiled at him, anyway. “Do you need anything?” she asked him.

“Where have you been? I'm dying here,” Karl said, invoking the blame-equals-innocence effect.

“At the studio,” Rain said, giving him a look. “Was that the elevator?”

“I thought you were supposed to have lunch with Gwen today,” Karl said.

“I am,” Rain said. “I'm heading over there in a few minutes. I just couldn't concentrate this morning—I've got this strange feeling. I'm anxious or something. I can't think why.”

As she sat down on the bed next to him, Karl rose abruptly. “I'm going to take a bath,” he said.

He stood naked from the bed and tromped into the bathroom. His rubbery, aging behind stayed in her mind. Images sometimes sparked their meaning in ways she didn't grasp immediately—little things like Karl didn't normally sleep naked—but the image bestowed itself instead simply as an image: an aging man whose work was not physical, his yellow ass cheeks heading south, darkened unpleasantly with black hairs between them, but the graceful beauty of still loving the man who bears them. Wasn't that the contradiction? It was an image of multilayered subtlety and Rain wasn't raised to see the obvious. Karl slammed the bathroom door.

“You know London?” Karl said, shouting from behind the door to her and then he was silent. Rain thought the air in the room was musty and close and started to straighten the bed.

He hadn't said anything else, so Rain shouted back, “Yeah?”

Karl poked his head out of the bathroom. “I was thinking London was going to be a huge bore for you. Maybe Gwen's right: maybe you should just stick around the States and set up a new studio this fall.” He watched her as she smoothed the sheets, looking around for the top sheet. “You know, get that show ready?” he said.

Rain stopped and straightened up, looking at him. He'd said magic words. Her show. But she asked, “You don't want me to go?”

“No!” Karl shouted in exasperation and slammed the door. And then he opened it again. He paused and said, “I thought you wanted to be an artist.”

He must real y be sick, Rain was thinking. He wasn't usual y this frustrated without some precipitating event. Every little thing was irritating him. This was what his intense involvement in her career had come to. No longer pulling but pushing. The challenge of hope he created in her morphing into a threat now.

Rain grabbed up a pillow, turned her back to him and muttered, “I guess that I thought what I…”

Karl interrupted her. “I mean, how much work can you get done in London, anyway? And here's your last chance to be in the studio and instead you come home…” Karl left that one hanging, playing with the door handle. “I just need to know, are you real y going to be an artist or do you just like talking about it.”

He may have purposefully been trying to start an argument, and with this he succeeded gloriously. Even though Rain knew he was stomping on all her triggers, she had been kicked in her most sensitive spot now.

“YOU talk about it,” Rain said, turning back to face him.

“Yeah, well, Rain, criticism is my job and what you talk about is making art and that is just not the same thing, is it?” Karl took hold of the door again, ready to shut it, a tight smile gripping his face. “Honestly, I'm just trying to help you. Most artists would gnaw off their left arm for a summer group show at Gwendolyn Brooker. If you're just going to let this show drop…”

“Look, just SAY if you don't want me in London, alright?” Rain threw down the pillow she was holding. Just as it hit the floor, the phone started to ring.

Rain was momentarily confused by the sound. She didn't usually fight back with Karl and it gave her a terrible feeling of vertigo. It was as if the pillow hitting the floor had burst into rings. The second ring snapped her out of her daze and she grabbed the phone.

The little green screen on the phone read a familiar number and Rain purposefully plastered a smile on her face as she answered it, “I'm on my way! I'll be right there…”

She listened.

“What happened?”

Listened.

“When?”

Listened.

“Well, what did they say?”

Listened.

“How long?”

Listened.

“I'm coming. Which hospital?”

Listened.

“Sit tight, Gwen, I'll be right there. Do you need anything?”

No ocean deep could hold this sorrow
No midnight sky could wear this hue
I bow my head, pray for tomorrow
and I cry the deepest blue.

—A
L
H
EMBERGER

W
hile “the blues” is probably the most easily identified color emotion, blue in art can often have the opposite effect. It can burst from the canvas in a clean field of beauty. Blue is, of course, the heavens, but it is also the well-established color of the Virgin Mother and all of the purity and innocence that she embodies. In language, blue has its connotations of innocence. A reliable friend is true blue. A flash of innocent eyes are baby blues, since babies' blue eyes might only last a couple of months before they go green or gray or brown. So blue is innocent, genuine, holy and clean, but also dark, depressed and violent.