The Rags of Time (36 page)

The studio is an outbuilding, a quarter mile up a path from the white clap-board house where she lives with her family. Her husband is home today, caring for Maisy, down with her third cold of the season. Cyril has gone off on the school bus, no sweater, a ripped T-shirt proving he’s cool. Everything now arranged. North light filters through bare branches of maples. Her studio with a sliding glass door may have been a small barn. Canvases are properly stacked in a loft above, temperature control softly humming, kettle on the boil, tidy kitchenette in a cubby once a stall. Louise, raised on a farm, knows it’s too narrow for horses, perhaps goats for their milk, for cheese. Exactly eleven o’clock when the curator arrives. He has been told to follow the path back, a bit bumpy in this first November freeze. Louise has not expected the driver. Will he come in with Blodgette, who is to look over her new work for a show? She’s expected a tête-à tête. Blodge, still in the black BMW with New York T plates, looks to the driver, taps his watch briefly as if to say he’ll not be long. Through the shingle side of the studio, she hears the blast of music—salsa, Afro-Cuban? No way Blodgette’s choice.

Now, bussing her, one cheek then the other.

The world he brings with him is of this moment, apparent in lightly streaked hair, two-day beard. Torn jeans sport their patch like a price tag. The black leather jacket, silky soft, seems live as she takes his arm, faces him toward the postcards on display. It’s been some years since she’s seen Blodge in the city, at openings, or at the museum properly suited for the trustees. To be fair, they are both costumed. They now stand side by side, Louise in that artist’s smock over black turtleneck and L.L. Bean cords, wool socks, leather sandals. Her glasses, thick lenses, hang round her neck from a chain mended with twisties, at the ready in case, just in case she does not see the aerial view (6” × 4½“) to be Wells Cathedral, or that the bombed church (Moselle, France) with the big clock face standing in rubble (Paul Strand, 1950) reads 9:35. Time of the blast?

Blodge will have tea. No milk, no sugar.

But when steeped, poured into their mugs, the smoky fragrance mingling with the oils and turp is faintly nauseating. The music blasts its way in from the car. Like street music, do what you will, no way to silence the din, as in the city on Lower Broadway where Louise Moffett worked in her loft, mid- to late nineties. Blodge takes in the current scene. In this barn she has set up a diorama—his term, calling it that, arms spread in an expansive gesture—her postcards on canvas, tools of the painter’s trade abandoned? Half-executed copies, her Poussin missing its tiny human figures; St. Catherine delivering her dialogues to an inkpot. No scribe. Louise has set her postcard next to the frozen moment of the original. Moffett’s men: Duchamp without chessboard; John James Audubon birdless, eyes scummed with cataracts in his demented old age.

Christopher Blodgette leans in, examines the background, the canvas itself (4’ × 6’), size of a throw rug.

Louise on the defensive, laughing.
It’s not black-black, not a shroud, don’t you see? More organic, like soil composted with manure.
Now why talk country to this creature of the city?

She bridles at his untranslatable instruction, or (more likely) at his deep misreading of her work past and present. He goes on about her continuing vitality as though she must be propped up to carry on beyond time allotted. Music now pulsing, Pearl Jam or maybe Nirvana. Once she could have called:
Teen Spirit.
Louise claps her hands over her ears.

Blodge raps on the glass door.
Keep it down.
They watch in the blessed silence as his driver jogs round the car pursuing his puffs of cold air, then stretches against the hood.

Back to Blodgette’s curatorial business.
Truly amazing, the random collection. Great work so diminished. Then rescued with the investment of your documentation.

He takes up a small drawing, size of a postcard,
Washington Crossing the Delaware.
In Moffett’s rendering, only the prow and founding father are sketched in. The rest of the crew still awash in the cold river?

She takes that as a cut. Since when did dusty old draftsmanship figure in his vocabulary? Since he learned to please old ladies with money, partner them at benefits, Park Avenue dinners. Louise remembers Blodgette just down from Cambridge with the proper degrees, a lanky boy scarfing the hors d’oeuvres at every opening, gobbling art world in one viewing. Fond of him, she had so looked forward to this day. They’d been friends on the rise, not close but of an age. Once they stayed up all night in her shoe-box apartment, pre-loft, drinking jug wine, last of the easy tokers, that’s how she remembers it, Coltrane on a Summer night, pressing PLAY again and again, the window thrown open to the noise of revelry below. They had no interest in each other, not really. Discreet fondling, sex consumed by their dreaminess, or was it ambition? She was ahead of the game, her first postcards so carefully observed and painted, photographic in detail. Small sightings of where she came from—dairy farm in Wisconsin, the landscape of memory mocked, distorted as memory will have it.

Now the sky performs one of its tricks, quick clouds moving in. Louise gets a glimpse of herself in the glass door: the weight she’s put on, the uncontrollable blink of her tired eyes while Blodge drinks the dregs of his tea as though sipping an elixir from the fountain of youth, a rather crusty cosmeticized youth, still. . . . And the show he proposes is a group show, planning stages. Louise has missed a beat in his e-mail request for the studio visit. Retro: had he not made that clear? Artists of the Nineties, Eighties if we can look back that far. He runs through a list of possible survivors, Moffett’s pulled through. She must suck that hard candy as a compliment.

He speaks of the return to her strong suit, narrative, then pops
Spiral Staircase, Statue of Liberty
off the canvas for a closer look. Two boys and a man who might be their father are trapped in the belly of this cast-iron symbol, climbing toward the deleted torch as Blodge reads it. The visit dwindles to gossip, past the demise of po-mo to talk of the art market, holding despite . . .

Christopher?
Her voice barely audible.
We’ll have lunch up at the house.

Lou-Lou, I must take a pass.
On the road to New Haven,
chat up the folks at the Mellon
. . . . They are distracted by the driver huffing and puffing at the glass door. He sweeps his hands toward the heavens, protests snow gently falling. He is a large, untidy boy. His sad moon face begs his release.

When they are gone—Bing and Blodge, really!—she reposts
Spiral Staircase:
unlovely industrial green, the great weight propping Miss Liberty—that’s all she meant, if she meant anything at all. She wraps a shawl round her smock, begins the walk back up to the house.

Artie will ask.
How’d it go?

Her husband never got the hang of these visits. In his world of mathematics, things mostly work. If they don’t, go figure. He understands her anxiety. Lou no longer courts, perhaps fears exposure. It’s not unlike . . . but there his comparison ends. Math is most often content with its equal signs, unlike art’s uncertain proof of the pudding. Today she tells Artie that the visit was something like a courtesy call.

Best keep it to herself, the group show with golden oldies. Blodgette’s response to her installation—she will call it
Last Mailing
—was inattentive, rambling at best. He had not opened the book right there on the table, a ledger with a worn marbleized cover. On its pages lined for debit or credit, she had written messages for each postcard mounted, and for those stacked, which he did not shuffle through. On the path home, Louise experiences not anger, just the melancholy of solo flight often felt when she’s working. Her ledger has no narrative at all; jottings, no story. She kicks a stone aside with the artsy sandals; now she will have a sore toe. Bing, huffing and puffing, or his friend the curator who had not been curious about her new work, just dropped by, pumping her studio full of hot air. Her bitter thought:
He must call his exhibit “Old Masters,”
not her way of thinking at all, but it lightens her way to the house, where a child is sick and needs her attention. A dusting of snow in the tire ruts is already melting away.

Then, too, a flock of red-winged blackbirds flitter across her path, birds now seen too often in the marsh encroaching on the Freemans’ land. Birds that should be out of season. For a moment she longs for Central Park with its spectacular migration, that rectangular plot with less acreage than her father’s megadairy. Or, on this last lap of her journey, did she long for a girl with a neat ponytail who flagged down a bus early, before milking? It stopped by the side of the road, picked her up with one suitcase and a portfolio of drawings to show the world. The bright image of that girl long abandoned, only the looming shadow in which she might see herself, sharp as a silhouette with all the forgiving details gone.

Should have said? The old chestnut of regret.

Open the book. You see, it’s people I’ll never meet, greetings from where I’ve never been, but where I might like to go. To Marienbad (
1923)
,
pink clouds over the Grand Hotel.
Allegory of the Planets and Continents,
Tiepolo (1770-96).
Open the book, Blodge:
0 through 9, Jasper Johns (1960),
the artist’s numbers consuming each other in a magician’s scribble. That’s for Artie, my math husband, who will love my Cobb salad,
Bibb lettuce scooping still-life goodies presented on an Italian platter (Deruta, 2003). You might say an inspired show curated for Christopher Blodgette with a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau in season.

 

 

 

Cyril comes in the kitchen door. It’s past noon, Friday, half day of school. He hears his parents at a distance, finds them in the dining room.

What’s this?
Tablecloth, weird gourds in a basket. He slings down his backpack.

No thank you.
Pepperoni pizza at school, it being Zig’s birthday. Cyril is ten, a scrawny kid, red hair courtesy of a grandmother long gone, owl glasses, wry smile as though he knows what’s up. Maybe he does. Shivering in a T-shirt though he will never admit it. Good boy, he asks after his sister. Maisy is watching, is allowed to watch a cartoon. Odd about his parents drinking wine middle of the day, like they were practicing for Christmas when the whole dairy-land crew comes from Wisconsin. General talk of the weekend, last soccer match at the high school where afreeman.edu teaches. His father is pals with advanced nerds, writes their language. His mother offers cumulus clouds on a soupy pudding.

It is awfully quiet. Only Maisy’s cough, now persistent, finds its way to where they sit at the round table with candles unlit and bread crumbs. Louise runs for the stairs, turns back to her boy.

Run down to the barn.
Not calling it my studio.
Latch the door.
Pleading as though urgent,
Please put on your sweatshirt. Do it.
She never does lock up. There have been no incidents. Moffett’s barn is safe as houses. But today there has been an intrusion. And who knows? In the bluster of this cold wind, could be her postcards will scatter.

 

 

 

Maisy watches a rabbit fool a fox, a fairly brutal episode—pops to the fox snout with one hell of a carrot. Her mother’s hand on her forehead is cool, cooler than the sweat that breaks her fever. They lie together on her parents’ big bed watching a cartoon they have seen many times. Lou not following the blow-by-blow script: on the path back to the house, she admitted she had looked forward to his critical eye with just enough of the old desire to show work in progress. Everything arranged, then she had not welcomed the visit. Going through the paces with Christopher Blodgette, she’d been at best inhospitable. Should she have defended her reverence for the tools of her trade?
See, I’ve not abandoned my craft, only given it halfhearted attention, might as well collect postcards, not a random stack. These are my people great and small. Tour my chosen places—most never seen.
As for diorama—taxidermy art, Blodge knows it. Well, she is not yet stuffed, propped behind glass. She can post her many views, change scenes. So why tears, just a few, as she trotted the path home? Tears of brisk wind, not sorrow. The fox has a net—aha!—stretched over the farmer’s garden. He watches his unwitting prey chew a whole row of leafy lettuce, then makes his move. We knew the net would entangle him; still Maisy laughs and so does her mother as the rabbit digs his way out of this fix.

 

 

The studio door is latched, a flimsy arrangement. It will be easy for Cyril to break into his mother’s sacred place. He thinks about it, then tests the bolt, which springs back against the shingles. Before he enters, he looks through the glass door at the setup framed just like a picture, her big dark canvas, a painting half done on an easel and all her brushes and turp on a table. He slides the door open. Warm inside, cozy. Who’s to hear the tread of his sneakers, see him rub the sleeve of his sweatshirt across the snot dribbling from his nose? Catching his sister’s cold? Just the chill of the day. He sits Indian style facing the night sky of his mother’s painting.
Funny
and
fun,
two words fit together. He flips the stacked postcards. There’s the little green one, he gets it—Adam and Eve, and the fuzzy picture of a bearded old man looking dead-eye at the camera. He’s Audubon, responsible for his parents’ birdwatching, for the most boring hours he’s ever lived, trailing them in silence for the flap of a feather, a flick, a tweet. Fair is fair. Cyril has his lepidoptera pinned in glass cases. Slews not yet collected. Even now the pupae dig in, wintering over. That guy at the chess table should sacrifice his rook, save the queen. Old Market, Innsbruck: fat fellow with a humongous cheese. Clock stopped in the rubble, some church in France. St. Catherine doesn’t look like she’s talking, but the monk, doofus if ever, is writing. What’s awesome is the wall above them dissolving, and who’s there? Christ, that’s who, coaching, cheering them on. San Francisco, leveled to ash, lies in the distance.