Entropy (30 page)

She was four years older than I was, but was more immature than me in some respects. I was only fourteen at the time, but I wanted desperately to become a woman, and have her help me become worldly and mature. I felt so much anger towards our mother for dying and not being there to guide me on the path to womanhood. I was afraid that if my sister left, that I would become incommensurate as a woman, and be unable to differentiate between love and contempt, intimacy and distance.

But a person should never hope to grow up suddenly.

***

I started to thumb through some more pages in the catalogue. Throughout the catalogue there were explanations about your work on topics such as your use of lighting and shading, and what brought about the themes that were either hidden behind the colors you chose, or seen more easily in the bold, often pained images that you depicted. Things that I would have never told anyone were casually mentioned, as if they really possessed no deep meaning for you. You told the world our secrets, and instructed them on how to gain admission to the most private and intimate parts of me. Although my name was never attached to any individual painting, I was there, visible in the stunning cobalt blues and tender grays. Tears started to well in my eyes as I read your words describing to strangers our most intimate, private moments. It made the tiny hairs rise on the small of my back. I resented you for this betrayal but I soon hated you after I turned a page and saw the next image that confronted me in the catalogue.

Page 8.

You never showed this painting to me! I immediately recognized the distant trees that grew behind my childhood house and how they looked like thin colored pencils pressed into the ground. There should have been a small wicker basket on the corner of the porch and although you omitted it, it could never change what happened. I could see the bleached areas within the paint of where the porch structure was attached, right above the front door. I wished that I could have asked you why you failed to include the basket. It wasn't until now that I regretted telling you what had happened. I quickly turned over the page, preferring to look at the images where your brushes captured the failures in our relationship, rather than the pain of my more distant past.

Page 10
.

Hearing the rain dripping onto the edges of the concrete and grass around me sounds like a thousand fishing lures suddenly breaking the surface of a lake, which seems apt as I look at one of the images of the fishermen who you painted off the coast of Maine, at that secluded boathouse we purchased before our daughter was born. I remember how you would scrutinize the fishermen every morning while steam rose from the cup of coffee at your feet.

Those mornings when you went out to paint them, sometimes before dawn, were so tranquil and still. I would watch you through the open window, the curtains drawn slightly, trying to entice you to come back into our bedroom, and make love to me. However you never wavered, you always put your work first. If you had broken just once and turned around, you would have seen me standing there barely dressed, the breeze coming in off of the lake, nudging aside your favorite red shirt and exposing my breasts to the warmth from the sunrise.

There is nothing left at the boathouse now, maybe just some dried out art supplies, spoiled groceries, the toys she used to play with, and the clothes that she once wore. You appeared to punish me for what happened by taking most of her things there so that I could not touch them after she died; so that I could not handle them easily and remember her gentle laughter and curiosity. It appeared that you wanted me to forget about her.

My memories of the boathouse are also tainted by our failure. I knew when it first happened, hardly sleeping during those nights, even after you had made love to me, because I could sense that your body was holding back slightly. Sex with you had begun to make me feel alone and insufficient, but I never stopped you from entering me, because I wanted to be loved by you, by someone, to be needed. A lover always knew what the truth actually was, especially a woman. There wasn't a need for me to question it at all, or deconstruct it internally. I simply needed assurance … but your body was unable to give to me.

I wondered when that other woman had first touched you, if she had discovered the complex substance of your canvas, your fingertips still stained with the resins of the paint's base.

Page 14
.

In the third painting in the series you stretched out the tree line from a stranger's perspective, distancing yourself from the obscurely detailed background. And I was lost there, somewhere in the relationship between the bay and the stone at the base of the lighthouse. I didn't remember it in proportion to the boat that you said we needed, but sat abandoned, tied to the edge of the dock like a wanted criminal. In your note you said that I could keep it. There was little that I knew or cared about boating.

I will probably return to the boathouse one final time, clean the property, scrub the molded edges of the walkway to the dock with bleach, and let everything drown.

Page 18
.

I stare at the bones and muscles in my naked back, strands of my dark hair cutting the tender plane of alabaster skin of my right shoulder.

I clearly remembered posing for that portrait. Our daughter was still a baby. Water stuttered from the brass faucet into the cast iron tub. I was physically and emotionally exhausted and barely had the strength to remove my own clothes. However your work always came before my needs. The tight, black slacks that I had been wearing, had been discarded in the corner of the room but still cradled the shape of my hips. I slowly removed my bra and stood in the doorway, moving closer to the tub.

I undressed further and raised a leg and placed it into the water. It numbed me but it shouldn't have. I sat on the rim of the bathtub, and cupped some water in my right palm and dripped it over the right side of my neck and collarbone. The water was clear, but you later added small pieces of black cinders into the painting, especially around my face, as if were my tender fingertips that had destroyed and scorched everything.

It was as if I was a
pestilence
.

Although it was late in the evening by the time we finished, you left our house without bothering to tell me where you were going or when you would return. I was left alone with our daughter. Feeling used and unwanted, I pulled the plug from the drain, and listened to the circular waves of dull water collapsing through the metal screen and rushing into the pipes. The sound was hollow. For some reason, it made me feel impermanent.

There were no words spoken when you first arrived home in the early hours of the morning and woke me. I had fallen asleep, calmed by the light breathing of our daughter. I wished that I could sleep as deeply as she did; close my eyes so effortlessly and dream. The pressure from your body shifted me closer towards you.

Although I tensed initially when the fine fibers of a small, detailed horsehair brush traced across the curves of my back, I couldn't help myself and soon asked you what color you were using. As you answered you kissed my shoulder blade and spine. You told me that it was ashen; a hue you often used to symbolize failure and fear in your portraits. I asked you if that's what I reminded you of: pain and loss; the harborer of your uncertainty and declination. You placed the brush in another spot, harder, and roughly hissed across my burning, lustful flesh that I was beautiful but fragile, and that inside me hid a woman who was weak, terrified and afraid.

So that is what you saw in me, your lover, and the mother of your only child: apprehension; aversion; timidity. Despite what you said, I still opened my body to you, uncovered my breasts and stomach, and turned towards you, my slender legs rubbing against one another.

However I remained untouched by your body.

***

As I walked towards the edge of the road, I saw an approaching bus. I knew that I shouldn't go to New York, but I had to see you, just once more. I could never let go of you, or our daughter. The bus stopped, and I watched as another man stepped cautiously in front of me, not wanting to be rude or intrusive but unsure of my intentions as I hesitated.

Finally, I place a foot onto the first step, and check with the driver if he was going to the intercity terminus. The colors from your paintings seem to be noticeable everywhere. I see it in the dingy shade of the gray tires and rims covered in brake dust and oil. They stream and pour down the sides of the smeared windows, clashing with the clear raindrops, and spilling onto the black street. The morose tones invade the broken branches and bleached curbsides, masking the colored chalk the kids scratched hopscotch numbers with, destroying all evidence that innocence was ever there.

I suddenly realize how dangerous seeing you again could be, and that as much as I want to rebuild my life by never seeing you or hearing your voice again, I also want to be ruined by it all as well.

There are only a few other passengers inside. A few of the overhead lights are broken. My footsteps sound hollow on the metal floor. I notice a disabled man, and see another man gazing through the window, absently running his fingers across the inside of his elbow. The interior feels humid and uncomfortable, with condensation forming on the bus windows. I touch it with my finger, and immediately think of your sweat, and suddenly long to kiss the salt from the back of your neck as you paint the plush, endless green acreage behind our home.

Page 20, upper right
.

That painting seems out of place in the collection. It wasn't as detailed and intense as I once remembered. It was also the only painting that you hadn't titled. I remember it was nearly 5 a.m. when I discovered you alone outside, as you tried to capture the sun imprisoned; your interpretation of morning's early struggle. The grass was high and the blades touched the sides of your ankles, dampening the bottoms of your shoes.

I wished that you would come inside and leave tracks on the kitchen floor again so that I felt I had a purpose,
your
purpose.

Despite knowing about your infidelity for years, it still plagued me. At least at the start you tried to be discrete. But there was no hiding her from me, as much as you tried to. When was the first time that you saw her with that much passionate detail, that you wanted her and to forsake me? Did she model for you and lie there on the floor in front of you as I once did, her flesh and body agitated but aroused by the placement of your hands across her breasts, molding her into what you wanted her to be? Or did she seduce you with gentle promises of passion?

The thought that she finally stole you completely from me after so many years of trying by exploiting your weakness and vulnerability continues to crush my soul. You left so hurriedly after our daughter's death that I never got to share in your grief and heartache. Instead, I sat pathetic, alone and pitiful among the ruins. Did she let you sob on her shoulder, your tears of misunderstanding and disillusionment flowing in a river along her?

It seems unlikely.

No, you ruled her from the start, like you wanted to rule me and everyone else around you. I am sure of that. With your persuasion and your exoticism she broke in the presence of your will and your persistence; satisfying that innate need you have to recreate everyone you come in contact with. How many times did you paint her, tell her how stunning and alluring she would be on that pale white canvas, surrounded by various pigmentations that only spoke one thing, the truth; the truth about the emancipation she would feel, apprehensive and raw on a drop cloth, watching you reconstruct her lines and her lips?

When you used me, there was always criticism behind each depiction, each direction. It lingered on the back of my bare shoulders. It affected me, your judgment in how I moved, or how I pulled my hair across the nape of my neck to expose my shoulders. I jealously wondered whether she moved correctly, slid her body across the areas you wanted her to, and turn her head at the proper angles so that her eyes looked like pure pools of blue liquid?

You never painted me privately or intimately without severe analysis. You never just opened up my blouse to discover the geography of my body, and paint me with love and compassion.

Although the distance between us started to develop more than ten years before our child's death, that distance was pushed out further, once the last thing that connected us was shattered when she passed. You withdrew completely from me. The morning after I admitted that I had seen you with
her
and you finally admitted that you were having an affair, you left in such a hurry. You saw no more point in pretending anymore. You didn't even stay long enough to allow me to descend feverishly into indignation and doubt. I should have been allowed to become angry, been given the respect to grieve.

However what was worse was the guilt that you caused with your judgment about my culpability in our daughter's death. The blame you laid upon me was completely disfiguring. I wondered, if the artists saw it in that classroom, as I lay nude and effortless before them, motionless among their questions and their criticism? Was my once indelible, tender body now wretched and poison to their erect canvases, causing their vision and colors to hemorrhage?

Page 20, bottom right
.

I always admired how this small painting resembled a worn photograph, with the small scratches at the bottom of the viewer's point of view, contrasting with the advection of the morning atmosphere concentrated over the sagging shoulders of the foliage. However, I deeply resented the representation of the isolation in the work, knowing that you had chosen to exploit my pain and instability, as your inspiration for the work.

As the bus stops and idles at alight, I visualize you on the opposite side of the street creating that painting, sitting on an overturned wooden planter box at the edge of that foreclosed property, the mailbox tilted and rusted over your right shoulder, as you dip your paintbrush into a vase full of water. You then stand and move beside the incomplete canvas to change your perspective, and I see
that
woman emerge from the woods, our daughter chasing behind, her fingers fumbling helplessly to gain access to the inside of her palm. Jenni then grips her hand tightly, as if she were terrified of abandonment and insecurity. Our daughter then turns towards me for a brief moment, her eyes sullen, disconcerted,and ashamed.