Chapter 6.2 - Vernissage

The role of emotions is to push the mind in the direction it needs to go. Emotions are catalysts for the thinking process, they don’t do anything in and of themselves, they don’t get consumed in the process, but they make an idea possible when, under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been. Dismissing the reactions catalyzed by negative emotions is like throwing away half of the reactants in the chemistry lab because they have potential to be toxic. You don’t do that if you’re an accomplished chemist, you only do it if you have the chemistry knowledge of a ten year old.

“Did you start looking for galleries?” Grandmother asked with an imperative tone that indicated she wasn’t going to let this subject go until it was resolved to her satisfaction.

“Yes,” Claire’s answer surprised her. She stopped for a second, taken aback, to reorganize her inquiry.

“But…” she stuttered, “how? When?”

“I made a few calls,” Claire answered. She was calm, as if none of this regarded her in the least, as if she was planning the affairs of a complete stranger. For a minute Grandmother didn’t believe her.

“Don’t lie to me, bebelle,” she chided, and then turned the corner to another tactic. “Which galleries? I want names.”

Claire obliged, adding names and details and photographic records of her work. Grandmother reviewed all the materials, still incredulous, then shook her head, slightly disappointed, as if she expected more of her granddaughter, as if all of these raw and conflicted emotions that called out to her from her granddaughter’s paintings were not good enough. 

Claire was in the middle of the drawing room, aptly called so in retrospect. The room had been transformed beyond recognition, all the furniture had been moved out of it and the walls were lined up with large canvasses in various states of completion. In the middle of the room, still on the easel, her last painting was waiting for the oil to dry. For days Claire had been adding layers and scraping them off with her knife, adding and scraping and mixing together, a real life depiction of the layers of her soul. Just like with the latter, the layers underneath were concealed by the reflections of the glaze that covered them, and those half-concealed layers were the most important ones; she could neither reveal nor let go of them and they made her go around in circles, scraping and covering and scraping and covering, building uneven thicknesses in the painting, so pronounced one could experience them with their eyes closed, just through the tips of the fingers. At one point the canvas had been scraped so many times the weave had been rendered threadbare and one could see through it, like through a rare sieve. The painting looked labored and rough, not entirely pleasant to contemplate, a quality which the threadbare patch accentuated, but one couldn’t take one’s eyes off of it, it demanded all of one’s attention, like an open wound.

“What is this about?” Grandmother asked, disquieted by the painting’s mesmerizing call.

“I don’t know,” Claire responded simply.

“Well, you painted it, if you don’t know, then who?” Grandmother joked.

Claire shrugged and continued scraping. A medium sized area to the left, which had been the beneficiary of an impressive paint thickness up until that point was now cleared off and ready to be refashioned. The young woman frowned at it for being bare, as if it were its fault.

“Claire,” Grandmother tried to get her attention. “Claire!”

“Yes?” the latter responded with a time delay, still staring at the empty patch on the canvas.

“Honey, are you ok?”

“No worse than usual,” Claire responded. “Why are you asking?”

“That…” Grandmother pointed to the tormented struggle,  “that looks like a lot of pain.”

“Pain is an emotion,” Claire answered with the same detachment. It was pain that she had painted, but not her pain, not anymore, she was painting the pain, a pain, as it exists when freed from its Pandora’s box, the individual human soul. It wasn’t ugly or beautiful, it was like the face of a person you can pass countless times on the street without noticing, but the echoes it reverberated in another person’s heart were haunting and real and painful themselves.

“Why would you paint something like this?”

“Because it was there,” Claire continued adding layers and then covering them up, unsure whether to reveal or conceal their contents. “I paint what is there. This was there.”

“You know, you never told me what happened to you. Why are you here, bebelle?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why are you here, with us, instead of out, living your life. Why did you come here?” Grandmother insisted.

“This is my life, maman. However I live every day is my life. Why is this life worse than any other life I could have lived, I’m happy here,” Claire continued in the same serene tone.

“This doesn’t look happy to me,” Grandmother took her hand gently.

“Whatever it is that you see on this canvas would be a thousand times worse anywhere else,” Claire smiled. “We all have our burdens to bear, I guess I just cheated on mine a little bit. Not everybody gets to walk out the door and be greeted with love. And then walk back in and be greeted with love as well.”

“If you say so, child,” Grandmother responded softly, then changed the subject to a more practical matter. “So, when do we get to see these publicly displayed?”

“The curators need time to decide, I just sent the drafts,” Claire came back to earth, drawing on the practicalities she was so familiar with from her previous life. A shadow passed over her face, brought on by an unpleasant memory which had hitched a ride on the decisiveness of her professional persona. She put the brush down slowly, as if she was afraid she was going to hurt it and just stood there, staring at the haunting painting and its gaping holes. “Maybe it is finished,” she thought as she looked at it. “Maybe the whole point of it is not what is there, but what is missing.”

“What does a man have to do to get a cup of coffee around here,” Grandfather clamored from the doorway, faking outrage. It was five o’clock already and the women had forgotten the daily ritual.

“Oh, dear!” Grandmother smiled. “Why don’t you two go outside and set the table, I’ll be there with the coffee as soon as it’s ready.”

It is not often that one goes out the front door and ends up changing the world. The second Claire stepped over the threshold she knew this wasn’t her world anymore. Everything looked the same, but she knew somewhere deep inside her soul, in that place that felt the dark softness of the shadow wrap around her shoulders, she knew this wasn’t her world. This was the world of the tall man and his companions, the ones she couldn’t see, a world not made for humans, she feared, because humans were weak and scared and they got lost in the places they didn’t understand.

A gust of wind rustled the leaves of the oak tree and then brushed past Claire, as if to greet her in a language unknown. She smiled back, not knowing what to do, and stretched out her hands, trying to grab onto something she could not see. The gust of wind intensified, sweeping over her open palms and pushing the sleeves of her shirt all the way up to her shoulders. 

“Claire,” a voice whispered in the wind, so softly she couldn’t tell whether it was real or just a rustling of leaves.

Clouds passed overhead, too fast almost, changing colors and shapes before she could tell them apart.

“What a strange thing this is,” she thought, “shapes made of air.” They made the whole world feel just as immaterial, her hands, the house, the large oak tree, the pond, just vast spaces dotted by rarefied particles, the illusion of matter, the illusion of senses. Not the illusion of being, she was pleased to notice. Being just was, like the wind, like the love, like the pain. 

What difference did it make whether this world she thought she saw was the way she perceived it or it had a completely different nature, concealed by the limitations of her understanding? It was the perception of it that constituted her life, not the reality itself.

“But the things we cannot see are just as real,” a thought fell into her consciousness, disturbing its smooth surface like a rock in a pond and sending circular waves through her other thoughts, blending them together and converging them until they stopped making sense and she couldn’t tell them apart anymore. She closed her eyes instead, to allow the strange embrace of the wind to touch her shoulders and swirl a few barren leaves around her body in a slow circle dance. “This is just as real.”

“Are you coming?” Grandfather brought her back from her reverie. She realized she was still standing in the doorway, barely past the mirrors, on her way out to the garden. The sky was filled with birds flying together in large flocks that changed direction suddenly, in unison.

“Weather’s coming,” Grandfather looked up at them, knowingly. “We better pick those tomatoes tomorrow, before the rain splits them. Ugh!” he sat himself down at the table with a groan. “It’s not easy being old.”

“Quit your complaining, Joseph. It’s better than the alternative,” Grandmother joked as she approached with the coffee. “When are you going to New Orleans?” she asked Claire, determined to keep her granddaughter’s goals on track.

“She’s going to New Orleans?” Grandfather asked.

“She better if she knows what’s good for her,” Grandmother frowned in Claire’s direction, anticipating dissent.

“I don’t know, maman. Whenever I’ll get an answer, I’ll decide then.”

“Maybe you’ll finish your painting by then,” Grandmother hesitated. 

Just like the swarming of the birds against the open sky, the gaps in the painting had a purpose, so she made up her mind that they had to stay. 

She couldn’t explain why, but she knew that the tall man, this unlikely kin she’d never known, was leaning against the oak tree, watching her from a distance while she drank her coffee on the porch.