Page 36 - WTP Vol. X #2

That night, after the mimosa trees shut up their leaves in the dark, she walked across the lawn to Christian’s barn. She could not sleep. For hours, she had read, wandered sock-footed through the clap- board house. She drank red wine which drove her
to the toilet. She stayed warm under a quilt, willing dreams. Yet thoughts kicked at her. Think you can sleep, Vic? Get up with the night creatures, feel the wind blow over the bay. Go to work. Inside his space, she yanked on her stained pants and shirt. Through the high-up window, the stars blinked at her. His space. He’d been dead two years after he crashed in a car accident. His hold on her would not quit.
Her brushes tilted in his abandoned Chock Full o’ Nuts tins. She mixed her paints and banished all
color from her palette but shades of umber. And then there was white. Over a huge unprimed canvas on her worktable, her strong arms made swirling darks and lights. Sometimes shapes arced into the surface. In the abstract lines, she saw twirling eyes, birds, limbs. Oil paint flew from her thickly loaded brushes. From the small places where she hid her grief—her elbows, the metatarsals in her feet, the tiny indent at the base of her skull—she felt tears rise up.
By six a.m., she had two paintings, almost done. She propped them still wet against the barn wall. She stood back and eyed the repeating swirls, the vortex. Almost. With a sure step forward, she slashed strokes of burnt browns onto one canvas. A fury at Christian’s lingering hold on her life, at his drunken last year and love affair, guided her hand. She had to admit, it felt great and freeing to paint wild as Christian had. Her husband used to crouch on the floor, pouring black paint over canvas, splattering intense reds and yel- lows on top, never afraid to make quick changes.
Long Island, 1960
Outside, the light began to lift. Perhaps she could cre- ate one more painting. Vic moved her flat hands side- ways from her stomach as if smoothing the water’s surface. “Dive into the fucking dark,” Christian had whispered whenever she doubted herself. “You’re good.” Her Midwestern man, with a hard stance and powerful hands, wasn’t one for big words, wasn’t
one for words period. “You talk for us both,” he had said, forever grateful that she could engage in smart “gallery speak” to potential buyers. She had eased his way into the art world. After that first time, when she introduced him to a famous collector, he had cupped her cheek. “Vic, my hero.”
The phone rang in the house, muffled by the door. Why was someone calling now? She raced over and answered, out of breath.
She heard the deep voice of Alfred, their brainy friend, the art critic. A fellow insomniac. “Vic, I want to set up a solo show for you in New York.”
She laughed. “You’re telling me now?” She thrust her lower lip forward. “I’m honored.”
“May I come by today?” Alfred asked.
Vic felt suspicious. In all the years that Alfred had championed Christian’s art in prestigious magazines, he had never once promoted Vic’s work or helped her get a show.
He sounded too eager.
“Let’s make it midafternoon,” she said.
Vic returned to the studio. She had lost her focus. She tightened the caps on the paint tubes and dipped
the brushes in turpentine. She pushed open the barn door. A bird—she fancied that it had flown out of
her painting—stirred in the marsh. From Christian’s plastic chair, she listened to the cackles in the woods, in the neighboring yards.
How’d it go? Vic used to ask him after a day apart. They each retreated into their studios for hours. At dinner, over cheap wine and clams that he dug up, they stared at the marsh that led to the bay,
at the boulders midway on their property that he had strong-armed into the ground. They had loved silence and watched moonlight fall on the nearby
This story is inspired by the artist Lee Krasner.
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Dark Passage
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