Blue has had one of the most dramatic of histories in art materials. Egyptian blue, which kept the murals in Pompeii grand and bright over millennia, was made from a simple enough recipe of copper, calcium, sand and salt, heated to 830 degrees Fahrenheit. The all-important specific methods of its preparation were lost some time between 200 and 700 C.E. However, once discovered, other blues took its place. The blue of the Madonna's robes in all the most spectacular frescoes in Italy is the precious crushed lapis, Ultramarine.
Extreme blue.
Lapis lazuli is a beautiful stone, streaked and mottled with gold. While this works to advantage in jewels, bringing a complementary depth and glint to the stone, in paint, that silica will dull the blue. In 1437, Cennino Cennini, the Plato of art materials, described the method for purifying Ultramarine: the powdered lapis should be kneaded under a weak lye solution in a dough of wax, pine rosin, linseed oil and gum mastic. The dough hangs on to the silica, the calcite and the pyrite of the beautiful gold streaks, while the purest blue particles settle out in the solution.
Yves Klein eventually demonstrated that there was a blue bluer than blue, but his was more a method than a new hue; pure Ultramarine in a resin medium of his invention which avoids the previously inevitable contamination of the pigment by its supporting oil, egg or glue. There are, of course, dozens of distinct blues we can identify, though many artists create them from nothing more than one good Ultramarine combined with whites and breaths of other tones to pul from it. A standard palette will include at least two blues, the cooler Ultramarine and perhaps a Cerulean, the warm, greenish blue made from cobaltous chloride and potassium stannate. Combined with silica and calcium sulphate, washed and heated, it becomes the only blue without any violet, and thus an important player on any palette.
Lucy Wilkinson enjoyed her body more and more as she aged. Turning fifty that year had been strangely liberating. Strange only since she'd been so unhappy at the turning of her last two decade markers, both occasions having been the crux of one crisis or another. The birth of her son on the first and the devastating split of her third marriage on the second. But now, stretching out on her lover's empty bed in his quaint Hudson River house, she thought she must finally have gotten this thing right. She even suspected there was a little bit of the masculine sense of freedom and,
bien sûr
, an ultimately Buddhist spirit of non-ownership in her relationship with James Morrow. The things that were meaningful to herâher yoga practice, her ongoing healing with her grown son, her various women's groupsâthese were her true heart's connections. They took a place apart from her sexuality, though of course, the yoga did sneak into it a little.
She might say she was just here for the sex, but it seemed to her that she and James had a beautifully “skillful” relationship, to use another of her yogic terms. Evolved. Lucy's maturity was thrilling to her, especially since her carefully minimal food intake and her vigorous teaching schedule kept her body toned like an eighteen-year-old's. This physical confidence and pleasure was something she hadn't been blessed with as a teenager or a young woman. Finding it now, even though her face had loosened and her hair was wiry with grays, was like a consolation prize worth far more than the dangled carrot you were supposed to have wanted in the first place.
Better, since the pleasures of attractiveness were such a double-edged sword for a young woman. By spending her teens, twenties and even up through much of her forties increasingly plump, Lucy suspected that she'd taken down one of the pillars of her beauty on purpose since all it ever brought her was insult and pain. Uncaring lovers looking only for conquests, jealousy and insults from other women and that leering false interest and utter dismissal from elders. These last two were attitudes in which she always promised herself she would never indulge. The respect and directness she employed when dealing with others in the studio where she taught may have been partly responsible for her elevated status there, where most of the other teachers and students were much younger women.
Now that she had little jowls and crows feet and those unruly gray curls, Lucy could embrace her sexuality and attractiveness. Age brought her another pillar down, societally speaking, but this demotion somehow made her feel braver and stronger, rather than simply shut out, the way her fat had.
Though James was not her only partner, he was her most regular. She kept her other relations to one-night stands, usually with other yoga teachers on retreat, those opportunities for combined enlightenment, tantric practice and the “letting go of attachment” being too good to pass up. Those isolated incidents were a bit of a game, she knew, both for her and for these men, who were invariably quite a bit younger than sheâusually married, vaguely homosexual or in committed relationships. There was plenty of experimentation and the occasional group session, but she didn't go on retreats too often, as maintaining that perfectly balanced detachment was sometimes difficult in the face of the dangerously contagious exhibitionism so rampant there.
With James there was nothing to have to pretend. They had an ease together, James expecting so little of her, and allowing her to conquer him at each of their twice-monthly meetings. Once she came on to him, he would come back at her voraciously enough, but he was passive until she'd moved on him.In fact, he had been quite unperturbed by the one companionably unsexual evening they'd spent together. Lucy had done it to test him, to get a feel for what he might do, and though by their next date he did seem particularly energetic, James was so easy with skipping the sex, that Lucy wondered whether she needed to complain. But then she brought her awareness to yet another level of appreciation for this relationship. No attachment. No expectations or whining or games or demands. Just what it was.
They had the routine whittled down to dinner at his place once a month when she came up to perform onsite physical therapy for his employees and in the city at her place between those visits. Their assignations were easy, slipped into like favorite slippers but no less energetic or pleasurable for that ease.
James would always rise early, make coffee, and get the Sunday paper from his porch or down at her corner deli, while Lucy committed her series of morning poses in the bedroom. When she joined him, James would poach them each an egg, his taken with buttered toast, hers with a teaspoon of wheat germ instead of the yolk, and they would indulge in another hour or so of the
Sunday Times
, “that great public bath,” as Wolfe called it.
In the city, they might go to a movie or a play, walk around the Village or Soho, take in a few galleries. In the country, they might take a drive, go to an apple orchard or a regional food or antiques festival. Sometimes they planned these Sundays ahead, but mostly they would just flow into a day of companionship, suggested lightly by one of them from something they'd come across in the paper.
Always they'd take their leave of each other with a kiss and a date for their next meeting, rarely the following week, rarely more than two weeks on.
Lucy's sense of their detachment from one another was exaggerated, however, and this became clear when she came downstairs on this particular morning to find James looking stricken at the breakfast table, no coffee, no eggs or toast. He seemed suddenly old, his jaw slack and his eyes watery and red.
“Oh, my God, are you all right?” Lucy asked, genuinely worried. He looked like he'd had an attack of some kind, and Lucy struggled to put down the very attached and unenlightened selfish worry that she'd be stuck caring for him if he'd had a stroke or something.
Be here now, be here now
, she chanted in her mind.
“Lucy,” James said vaguely.
“Yes, James?” she asked.
“No, it's nothing, it's⦔ He trailed off here, rose and started to make the coffee and eggs. “I just lost track of time.”
Lucy sat at the table and slid the paper he'd been reading over to her. The paper was folded to the obituaries page, with the headline
John Ray Morton, 72, Pulitzer PrizeâWinning Author, Is Dead
(
From Page A1
) at the top. “Oh,” she said, uncertainly. “Did you know him?”
“What?⦠Yes,” James answered, unconvincingly on to the next task.
“He wrote
Danville's Mission
, right? And
Shoes
â¦? Something about shoes?”
“
Shoes of the Trumpeter
. Yesâ”
Lucy sat in silence for a while, calculating what she knew of James' age. She was pretty sure he was still in his sixties. That number, that “72,” coupled with the very
Times-
ian, rather bludgeonly “Is Dead” were indeed chilling, and Lucy was feeling a distinct distance growing between embracing getting older and her revulsion for that which age ultimately brings. She spent so much time around her younger colleagues, so careful to ignore their generational differences, that she had embraced, she realized, her age merely as a fashion statement, like dressing down pearls, rather than any kind of reality about time. After all, Lucy had achieved something of a rare feat by leaving behind the bodily unease of her youth, the aches and injuries her large body had foisted upon her, and had therefore fooled herself into appreciating this onset of age.
So James looking suddenly old, his colleagues beginning to appear in obituaries, this brought such an unwelcome feeling of fear and disgust upon Lucy, that she could feel the kitchen turning into a morgue. What she'd always seen as a peaceful Zen-like antiquity started to look gray and elderly, washed out and airless. She stood. She paced a moment. James seemed not to notice her agitation, perhaps being involved in his own thoughts of his lost friend.
“Was this⦔ Lucy began. “Was this a good friend of yours?” she asked.
“I wouldn't say⦔ James paused. He didn't turn around, but he ceased moving. “No. No, he was someone I knew once. He⦠he used to live up the road here.”
Lucy's irrational fears began to abate just enough for the room to return to its normal hues. Though she'd successfully averted the panic attack, she surprised herself by being so thrown off by James' display of emotion. She'd flattered herself, in a way, that all of the routine and careful integrity of roles played were something she maintained for James' sake, rather than her own. But he seemed perfectly open to her in his silence and stillness, so unlike her catlike pacing and jittery nerves.
Deep breath. Sit again. Be with the feelings. Make note of the panic and let it pass on by. Another deep breath.
Rain and Karl waited in an elevator. Rain rested her head against the cool marble of the elevator wall. Karl was preoccupied. His eyes darted around.
“I don't want to talk about it,” Rain said, tired.
“Asshole lawyers,” Karl spat.
“His estate is complicated. They'll sort it out eventually,” she said and then added a prickly, “Why do you care?”
“Rain,” Karl began and, as the doors opened, he fell silent again. They walked out into a modern, all-glass lobby. The flat brilliance of the late summer day was magnified in this vast clear box.
As they left the building, Rain said flatly, “I want to walk.”
Karl rolled his eyes. “Seventy-five blocks? Jesus, Rain.”
“Seventy-five blocks,” Rain said.
“I want to talk to you about the fall,” Karl said taking her arm possessively. “I was thinking you might want to spend those months up at the cabin.”
“You⦔ Rain stopped walking, but didn't look at him. She stared down at the concrete beneath her feet and said, “You what?”
“It's supposed to be valuable, and it'll be too cold to work on it by the time I get back⦔
“Why?” Rain said. “Why would Iâ¦?”
“I just thought now that there's the cabin⦔
“The
cabin
?” Rain sputtered. Now she looked at him. Karl reflexively let go of her arm. “It's not a
cabin
; it's a rotting shed out in the woods. I don't think anybody's lived there since I was a baby.”
“So you'll spend some time chasing the raccoons out of the place, and by the time I'm back you'll have the perfect studio, and a nice little weekend place for us.”
“I was going to paint in that place in London⦔
“And why can't you paint there? Look, Rain, most artists⦔
“Karl, please please please don't start with the lecturing right now. PLEASE please. I really can't take it.” She started walking again.
“I was just going to say⦔
“Please.” Rain stopped and put her head into her hands, bracing herself for her husband's all-the-more-intense lecture. She knew asking him to spare her was futileâbackfiring, most likely, but she couldn't stop herself. She knew what was coming: generous, superior instruction.
“Rain,” Karl began with a cozy sigh, “most artists don't have cushy studios to work in. If you're really an artist, you're just thrilled just to have some timeâto carve out every spare moment⦔
“Most?” Rain demanded, uncharacteristically letting her irritation show. “Most you've ever heard of actually are supported, are helped and financed if they're going to make it at all.”
“Oh, yeah, so they can produce a bunch of shit colorful la-dida LANDscapes, right?” Karl said, heating himself up now. “I respect work that just HAS to be made, that the artist doesn't make just to show. Ambition, Rain, ambition is like a poison to art. All those things you want, that image you have of yourself preening around a pretty studio, it's poison, Rain. It gets you nothing. Maybe that's all you want, though, huh?” She knew he was pushing her in two directions at once, but the heat that it generated in her head didn't allow her to name it, to point out his double standards, the push-you-pull-me he foisted on her.