The Ghost Brush (59 page)
Introduction to the Ghost
“
HEY, YOU!
You with the big chin! Oei!”
He’s calling me.
I don’t answer him. Not yet.
I dip the tip of the brush in the ink bowl.
I let it sink. I lift it, turn it, and press it down into the ink again. Then I lift and tap.
I press it against the edge of the bowl, twisting so ink beads at the tip of the bristles and then drops back into the small, still, dark pool. Again I press the hairs of the brush into the ink, flattening the bulb against the bottom of the bowl, rolling it.
“Don’t press so hard!” the Old Man barks.
I bare my teeth. “Shut up, Old Man.” He laughs. Thinks he’s distracted me.
But my hand is zealous. To spite him I press for one full minute. I lift the brush from the bowl. It is not dripping, not full, but fully moist. I hold it over the paper, balanced in my fingers. I raise and lower it, ever so slightly, giving it breath, and then touch the point to paper. I begin the fine, fine lines of the courtesan’s nape hair. That which he has no patience to do, and no steady hand.
“Oei!”
I don’t answer. I stay inside my head.
I am Oei. Katsushika Oei. Katsushika I take from the place where my father was born. Oei is a pun on how he calls me. It means “Hey, you!” I have other names: Ago-Ago—he gave me that too—meaning “chin-chin,” calling attention to my big, stubborn jaw. Then there are the brush names: Iitsu, meaning “one again”; Tipsy, meaning just what you think; Flourishing Woman, self-evident, you’d think. I’ve answered to many names. Though in this matter, as in others, I am no match for him.
He named himself for the North Star, and for the Thunder God; he named himself the Old Man Mad about Painting; he has named and new-named himself twenty times. To me he’s just the Old Man.
Some people call the Old Man difficult. I don’t agree. He is not difficult.
He is impossible.
True, I’m not easy myself. I do not comply. I mock, I dissemble, I glower. They say I was never properly trained to be a woman. The more sympathetic blame my father himself for this failure. It is a scandal. “She paints but does not sew,” they say. Hah! That could be my epitaph. Perhaps it is. But you would have to find my grave to know.
And that you cannot do.
A
FRIDAY IN MAY, 2006
. At the Toronto airport there was chaos. Strong winds in the Midwest meant cancelled flights to Chicago and St. Louis. New York was a maybe. Calgary, hopeless. Men in suits were waving their boarding passes and sliding their forefingers over their phone screens. The lineup ran back and forth, back and forth in squashed loops across the giant hallway leading to Departures. Travellers eyed one another’s too-big bags, unruly kids, and scattered forms, pouncing at the guard’s barked “Next! Number five!”
There was my woman, snapping to at Desk
5
. She had checked in for her flight to Dulles, fighting her way through the irate and past the panic-stricken, shouldering her laptop and pulling her rolling suitcase behind her like a reluctant dog. She faced the Customs and Immigration agent. She flashed her passport—Canadian. She said yes, she said no, she said three days. She moved ahead and hoisted Fido onto the conveyor belt, opened her laptop, untied her navy trenchcoat, revealing a tight, green, zipped jacket, pulled off her belt and shoes, submitted to a search, put it all back on again, moved to the next station and repeated the exercise, and then—pressing her laptop against her thigh so it didn’t bounce—gripped her suitcase handle with her left hand and ran. Knees bent, staying level, like one of those dan-cers in the Beijing Opera who appear to be on wheels.
Gate D
13
came into sight; there was the crowd in the lounge. Not boarding. She read the overhead panel: forty-five-minute delay. She braked. She pushed out her bottom lip, blowing a strand of chin-length, highlighted, once-blonde hair out of her eyes. She said “Shit!” and then “Fuck!” and then “I don’t believe it.”
Breathe, she thought. Zen is the only way in airports. She inhaled and turned ninety degrees towards a small newsstand. There she hovered over the snacks disconsolately—all sugar except for chips, which were all fat—and, in a snap decision, chose red licorice nibs.
She instantly regretted the purchase. Nevertheless she took the package over to a plastic chair, sat, tore it open, and put one small, pinkish red, bolt-shaped morsel in her mouth. She chewed. It was hard work. She looked for a best-before date but couldn’t read the small print, and reached for another nib.
I
’VE HAD MY EYE ON HER
. She has no idea, of course. By the way, she does have a name. It’s obvious what her name is. But I’m not going to use it. People today don’t like that sort of thing. They want their illusions. They crack the spine; they sit down to stare at the pool of light on the page. They are alone. They want to stay that way, to believe that the place they journey to is as real and uninvented as the day. They want to see no footprints on the carpet in the halls of invention.
I respect all illusions. I give an antique shrug and find this woman, my victim, my saviour—which is she?—another moniker. Rebecca. It’s a name I came across in the Foreigners’ Cemetery in Yokohama. Up there on the bluff overlooking Tokyo Bay are the graves of traders of all the nations who came to Japan when the port was opened and their wives. I sometimes visit the old red brick warehouses on the shore. When it rains, I rise up the hillside to get above the clouds and wander around the wet, grey headstones. More than once I’ve taken shelter in the little Western-style caretaker’s house.
That’s where I saw the name. It was on the map of who-lies-where. Rebecca somebody: northwest quadrant, third row. I liked the look of it and picked it up, as you would an interesting pebble. I liked the feel of it. It had some weight but wasn’t heavy. It wasn’t flamboyant or plain. Elegant in a quiet way; authoritative but hardly ponderous. Rebecca.
Erase any associations you have with the name, biblical or literary. They mean nothing to me. I don’t know anything about the dead Englishwoman who was called that, either. She has gone to her next life. Her name was up for grabs. As far as I knew no one had taken it yet. So I did. In my world, that’s how it was done.
Very well, then.
Rebecca, here in the airport, was in her fifties. Looked younger on a good day, which this wasn’t. Not tall, nice legs, waist expanded a little beyond the measurements of her girlish figure. Wise eyes that settled on others and seemed to be taking notes. A typical benign, seasoned woman, you might say. But there was nothing typical in her economical, forceful movements. The way she hoisted that suitcase, shouldered the laptop and the purse, and skimmed down those airport corridors. A traveller. Experienced in airports. Determined. Quick on her feet and no shrinker when it came to holding a place in line. Elbowed right in and kept pressing forward, impatient but more amused than irritated.
Still, all of this assertion had got her only as far as a plastic row chair in the crowded lounge. Now she sat, feet slightly apart under the chair, laptop and bag stacked beside her, passport and ticket tucked neatly in the outside pocket of her purse. She was chewing in a concentrated way, remaining erect and aware. And somehow, apart.
She didn’t blend in. She was on the alert. She was almost, if not for her age and gender, martial. It was subtle, but it was there: In this crowd I will be first to reach the emergency exit. I will be handing out the lifejackets. She had green or brown eyes—difficult to tell which in the colourless airport light. She had an oval face and a small mouth with bowed lips, a pointed chin, and a certain amount of cheekbone. She had a pretty smile, when she bothered to use it. I was treated to its brief summer as I hovered over the chair beside her. But it faded as she turned to face forward once more, furrowed, enduring the delay.
In profile, the bony bridge of her nose was proud.
I stared and she turned to me again, seeing nothing.
Straight on, the nose faltered. She had broken it twice: once when playing tennis in a high wind, and once by walking into a glass door in a Turkish hotel with her eye on a coffee bar in the garden. It had been rebuilt twice, but so stubborn was this nose that both times it had created, out of its new, elegant progression down the exact centre of her face, the same jag to the left and the same gentle hook that had led the boys in school to call her “the Baby Eagle.”
She was frequently underestimated as a child. She was small and eager to please, and people didn’t see the strength of purpose. Then, her nickname was something ridiculous, like Bibi. Now, she allowed the diminutive only to those people who had known her forever. There weren’t that many of them, because she’d moved around a lot, from Alberta to Toronto, to Washington, to London and back. A few of her acquaintances had complementary trajectories. The married couples were mostly gone, but with the people she cared about, she took pains to connect. She looked them up, visited when she was in town; she attended their second weddings. There must have been something she valued beyond their company. Perhaps continuity with her old self.
Because her lifeline—I could see her palm—was broken, like her nose.
Rebecca was restless; she moved on. She hated to be bored. She smiled at dogs and held doors for women pushing strollers, but she wasn’t all that nice, even though she was Canadian and the niceness of her countrymen was legendary. She said she disliked niceness. But that wasn’t true; she disliked smugness—that is, the consciousness of being nice. She preferred people who had suffered a few kicks to people who had not. She excused herself from dull conversations. She did this in the politest possible way, but she did it. She was civil but opinionated; she was impatient without being irritated. Usually. She just wanted to get going. Because how much time was there left?
When she was forty, people had thought her arrogant. They didn’t anymore. Her manner had changed, the way a person’s manner does change as life delivers its little blows. What woman in her fifties can manage arrogance? You no longer glow with concupiscence. You are no longer alluring on the grounds of your availability to bear some man’s child—at least not without freakish medical intervention. You are no longer soothing to those with pressing needs; you are concerned with your own. You are ready at last to be yourself. And so the world does not dance attendance on you.
I know about that although I never attracted such devotions. I never was one of those ripe sexual beings men slaver over. But Rebecca was. She had had her era of being a shimmering bauble. Sadly, like most of them, she hadn’t noticed, and so had failed to enjoy it. At the time she was quite vocal about sexism. If anyone said she looked great she was deeply offended.
These days, however, she would be charmed by one of those over-the-shoulder second glances, those leers that had so irked her years ago. Was she that desperate? No, but she was aghast when she looked in the mirror. She now understood that she had been living with a powerful ally. Perhaps not always an advantage. Sometimes a bother, and even a handicap—no man seemed able to take you seriously when he was seriously attracted—but a balm to the ego.
Now the good looks were gone. There was compensation. No more high heels. She could drink a bottle of wine alone. She could wander the streets of Rome, or Nome, unmolested. She no longer had to explain to her kids or her parents where she had been on a Sunday. She made plane reservations and took money out of the bank at will. But still. A whistle of appreciation wouldn’t hurt.
She was aware that the aforementioned were not huge accomplishments. She regretted that a little. So she was a bit of an underachiever. No captain of industry; not a cardiologist or a judge or a politician, although her peers and even her friends were amongst the first women who did these things. She might have gone to law school; she might have been a diplomat (she imagined). Instead she did two things—not wise, not provident, but for love: she married, and she became a writer. They were both very hard work, and oddly similar in that the rewards were unpredictable.
She was still a writer. And she’d had a good divorce. The splitting of lives was painful, but it opened the door to an era of personal liberty. Added to the end of beauty and the delayed but eventual flight of the kids from the fractured nest was a dawning realization: no one actually cared how she spent her time. She could do whatever she wanted. Typically, she didn’t get it right away. Someone had to tell her. And someone did—a man called Andrew, who since has become her very good friend.