The Ghost Brush (60 page)

She practised judo—I was right about the martial thing—and good works. She gardened. She cooked on weekends with her grown-up kids. (I didn’t like that part so much.) She was a mother, she was a daughter, and she travelled—sometimes with Andrew, and always with a project.

In short, this was one lucky woman. She had money of her own and a little leisure. I thought, given this, that she should do something for the rest of us. In fact, taking a larger view, wheeling up and away from Rebecca, looking down along the whole crowded concourse with its dozens of departure lounges, I would say that her freedom was unprecedented in the lives of women on this planet. I hoped that she wasn’t a blip, that her daughter would enjoy the same. The state of the world can change very quickly, and when it does, everything women cadged from the previous regime can be reversed by the new rulers—even while they swear they’re bettering your lot. I’ve seen it happen. But Rebecca seemed to know it intuitively; her privileges were gifts that might be taken back. Just in case, she liked to say, she was going to enjoy her free state to the hilt. For instance, here she was off on a whim to look at pictures. Spring in Washington: it would be wonderful. And she had friends to visit too.

Oh, about the pictures. Rebecca would not like to think that she had become someone who took things up, the way people take up watercolours and golf. Her enthusiasms weren’t sidebars; they were total. While her friends and exes settled into reflexive praise and sinecure, pensions on the way, she kept her curiosity stoked. Her projects were not useful or healthy. They had to do with what mattered to her, what interested her, what spoke to her.

That would be me.

F
ORTUNATE THAT SHE PERSEVERED
with the stale licorice nibs, because on board the passengers weren’t offered even the customary pretzels. There was turbulence: no drinks. They circled Dulles for an hour and landed late. “We got you here safely, and that was our goal,” announced the pilot defensively.

“Sounds as if there was some doubt,” she muttered to the man beside her as she stood to leave, her head inclined on her right ear under the low ceiling in their row. The old trick: open a conversation on landing. They’d be out of here in minutes.

Her seatmate stood with his head poking into the aisle, similarly disgruntled. He looked like a civil servant.

“This home for you?”

“No, Toronto is.”

“What brings you to Washington?”

She smiled. “An art show.”

He cocked an eyebrow. “Which?”

“The Freer Gallery. Hokusai’s late works.”

“Oh, yeah. The Japanese guy. The Great Wave. Where the matchstick fishing boat full of men is about to be smashed to . . .”

“That’s him.”

“I read about it. Supposed to be great.”

They both kept their eyes fixed on the aisle. The line of people showed no sign of moving to the door. Rebecca began to get claustrophobic. She gingerly rotated her head so her neck was bent the other way. She lifted and set down her bag, then shifted her feet.

“I remember wondering why the excitement now, when apparently the Freer has had these pictures in storage since it was founded?”

“Oh,” she said, “but that’s exactly why. Hokusai’s been out of fashion for over a century, but now he’s back in. And these are mostly his late works. He painted them in his seventies, eighties. There’s a lot of curiosity about them. Almost no one has seen them.”

“Why is that?” said the man.

Did he really want to know? Was he was just passing the time? There was no escaping this plane.

“Well,” said Rebecca, warming to her subject, “when Japan was ‘opened’ to the West, the country’s treasures were up for grabs—everything from temple fixings to erotic books. Hokusai had been wildly popular. His works were bought up and went all over the globe—the Netherlands, England, New York. The French were influenced; the Americans got excited. So then Freer—you know, the railway entrepreneur—got into the game in Japan and bought everything that was left. He built a museum for it. The catch was that by the terms of Freer’s will, nothing could ever be loaned. The Hokusais were shown once and then locked in storage. Where they’ve stayed. For over one hundred years. They’ve never been seen in Japan, for instance; they’ve never been seen in the light of the rest of his work.”

“So they’re being rediscovered?”

“Reassessed, I’d say. The exhibition is closing this weekend. There’s going to be a symposium. Experts from around the world will speak.”

“Including you?”

“Oh, no. No, no, no. I’m just an innocent bystander. Just here out of curiosity. The public is invited. I signed up online.” She gave him a smile as the plug of people in the aisle began, finally, to shuffle forward.

2

Summons

OF COURSE SPRING COULD BE UNPREDICTABLE
.

Rebecca rolled through Dulles airport. She was excited.

There would be cherry trees. And memories. Twenty-five years ago she came to Washington with a journalist; he got down on his knee and asked her to marry him in a second-floor bistro off M Street. It was fall, and the leaves were thick and yellow on the sidewalks of Georgetown. They were “aliens” with I-
94
visas, allowed to stay as long as they worked for foreign newspapers. She came to her husband’s office in the National Press Building carrying balloons to announce that she was pregnant. Her son was born in this city. She pushed his perambulator around the reflecting pools of the Jefferson Memorial. No matter what else happened, she had to love Washington.

T
he Super Shuttle driver lounged, dripping, by the sliding doors, peering out through the sheets of rain.

“I’se scared to go back out there,” he said. “It’s a tornado.”

Then it seemed to let up. He braced himself and signalled. Six of them burst out and rushed the van. Beside Rebecca, a patrician-looking woman raised her umbrella. It caught a gust and flipped inside out. She brandished it still, some sort of tulip; it wobbled and then collapsed, dumping water all down her front.

Rebecca tried to help, but the dowager was fast; lowering the broken umbrella, she covered her head with crossed arms and ran the thirty yards to the van. Behind her, a soaking couple pushed blindly to get out of the downpour. Two burly young men set their backs slant across the driving rain and barged ahead.

Rebecca was last. She put her hand on the van door. She took a final look at the sky and she saw it, a transformation: they were Peasants Surprised by a Sudden Rainstorm. They were in that Hokusai image she adored—travellers at a crossroads seized by weather. They were his creatures. Captured. Shutter-stopped, in the great designer’s vision. Their predicament—heads drenched, skirts flying, bony knees and haunches exposed—was his joke. Even the treetops she could see on the airport drive, tossing in a lowering brown wind, were from his world. “Hey, look!” she started to say. “Do you see?” She laughed at the irony of it. She had a sense that someone was laughing with her, but there was no one there.

It was just a moment, but it was uncanny.

And that strange yellow light falling from above? It was Hokusai’s light. It gave a hallucinatory glow to everything; the burnish seemed to fix them to the place.

A
modest trick of mine.

“
Let up” had been optimistic. Rebecca’s jeans were glued to her thighs. The two large, dripping men hauled her up between them. They sat in three rows in the back of the van. It planed along the highway, great scallops of water dishing out from under its wheels. The driver turned on the heat. Steam rose from her legs. The denim was moulding to her knees. The windscreen fogged again and again.

One of the giant young men was black, the other white. They were Los Angeles cops here to attend a memorial for their dead. Their pals had cycled across the country. She could just see them, battalions of soaked, sentimental policemen leaning over their handlebars as they homed in on the capital. The dowager said she had buried her husband in the naval cemetery in Arlington, Virginia. He was probably a hero, then. The drenched couple’s flight had been cancelled.

They became festive. The driver hooted as water sluiced across the freeway. Slaloming on a big wake, they took an exit for Ronald Reagan National Airport and delivered the couple to Howard Johnson’s. They crossed the Potomac. The elegant widow wished to meet her son on a drowned street corner in Dupont Circle; he was not in sight, but she stepped gamely forth, her broken umbrella tilted into the wind. Their driver named the befogged monuments as they spun through the empty streets of the capital. “Cherry blossoms,” he declared, waving at a pale halo over some trees. “Sakura: gift of Japan.”

“Ah,” said everyone who was left.

Cherry blossoms, exhausted metaphor for the brevity of life.

Without warning, they washed up at a deserted square in the midst of office buildings that looked like sepulchres. Thank you, Expedia.

“This used to be a slum,” said the driver. “Trouble is, when they clean ’em up like this they figures out people can’t afford to live here no more.”

“Where do the people live now?” Rebecca said.

“Jail,” said one of the L.A. cops knowledgeably. He was getting his land legs.

She wished them an excellent celebration.

In her hotel room she took a hot bath.

T
HE MORNING WAS SUNNY AND BENIGN
; the storm of the night before might never have happened. Except that on the Mall, the cherry blossoms had been stripped from the branches and lay soaking in the dirt. Behaving according to type, they were—being exquisite for a tragically short time. Trucks were already delivering annuals to go into the beds.

Rebecca sat with her coffee in the Smithsonian garden waiting for the Freer Gallery to open. When a dark form appeared inside the glass and unlocked the door, she dumped her cup in the bin and was first in line for her ticket.

Inside, she was immediately in his world, Hokusai’s Edo of the nineteenth century. It was magnificent. The pictures were alive in the space. They seemed to be saying, “Together at last.” She doubted the artist had ever imagined them like this, connected by the huge rooms they decorated, speaking back and forth across the space to one another. Of course he hadn’t. He had painted just to stay alive.

His prints and paintings were so rich in bizarre detail that they came to her like dreams, encompassing, convincing, and ultimately fleeting. Here was the Edo she had once wished to inhabit. Here were its theatre placards, children’s toys, festival dances, shopfronts, crowded bridges, and ferryboats. He had put it in his prints, as if he was deliberately cataloguing it. Every person was a character, every little figure engaged in some buffoonery or strenuous task. They seemed full of urgent messages.

Imagine this work in storage! she thought. It must have been rattling the walls down. She inched along, over and over brought close to tears.

She went through the section of landscapes. There was the looming Great Wave off Kanagawa, with the tiny boatmen in its frothy claws, the most famous image ever to come out of Japan. An image of fear, they said.

Then came the section on the “floating world.” Here were the courtesans, electric in their massive gear—sultry women in matchstick rooms with makeup boxes and jazzed, red-edged underskirts. She stopped dead at Parading Courtesan, painted on silk in
1816
. Here was fear in more visceral, more beautiful form. The courtesan in question was stepping out to the right, holding up layers of skirts in one claw-like hand, her head bowed under an array of foot-long hairpins. These young women were forced to parade to advertise themselves. She was merchandise on display. Rebecca could feel her shame, and her pride, despite the fact that her features were made each by a single brush stroke. Her clothes shimmered, but her face was down and closed, grief-struck.

Not all the women were that way. Here was a proud one, walking under a willow tree with a folded umbrella. Lingering and piquant, she looked back to the viewer. She was tall and thin, with a long face and nose. She was particular, her neck expressive. That is a real woman, someone he knew well, thought Rebecca, although she wore clogs of a ridiculous height that showed she too must be a courtesan.

Then she came to a woodblock print from the series One Hundred Ghost Tales. The ghost was a woman with a white face and long black hair. Her neck was extraordinary, made of a stack of plates, each with its individual blue markings showing through the skin. The she-ghost rose out of a wooden well, smoking a long, thin pipe. A dragon’s tail of white smoke rose into the blue night sky. Her eye sought Rebecca knowingly.

Rebecca’s throat tightened. She felt a little trapped. She turned to left and right, but there was no escape. She stood, arrested, arms slack, drinking in the picture on the wall as if it were a vision at the end of a hall of mirrors. No one noticed her gaping. It wasn’t unusual. It was what people did in a place like this, an art gallery.

I
AM A CRONE AND A REPROBATE
and a ghost besides. Still, I have my strong points. Bits of wisdom I’ve collected, nursed behind my unpleasing face. Here is one, a strange fact I’ve noted: people are blind.