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I said, “When I was a little kid, starting from about age six through about age eleven, my father would take me out to our dock or down the beach, nearly every day when it wasn’t raining or freezing, with watercolor sets and portable easels and canvas chairs, and we would paint together. I had a set just like Dad’s, with Winsor and Newton colors and sable brushes, and we used expensive cold-pressed D’Arches watercolor blocks, twenty-four by eighteen. My father doesn’t believe in cheap materials, even for little kids. And we painted together, for an hour, two hours, depending on the light. We went down at different times of the day, so we could catch all the varieties of light and what the light did to the water and the sand and the rocks and the sky. In the warm weather we painted figures, people on the beach, and boats out on the Sound, and in the winter, we just painted the beach, the sea, and the sky, the same view, over and over again. It was our Mount St. Victoire, our Rouen Cathedral. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Not really,” she said.
“No. But anyway, what do you think of the paintings? These are his, by the way. I used to tear mine up afterward because it made me so mad that I couldn’t do what he did with a brush.”
“They’re beautiful.”
“Yes, they are. This one, for example, a fleshy woman and a child sitting on the beach, early in the morning. Look at the heft and presence of the figures, all done freehand with a loaded brush, ten strokes and there they are. And look at the sweep of the wet sand! That perfect color, and the white of the paper showing through just enough to make it shine. And this one: winter on the Sound, and three seagulls made out of the white of the paper, just chopped in against the gray sky, and they’re perfect and alive. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get those effects in aquarelle? This is not the kind of kitsch you buy in resort souvenir shops, it’s nearly as good as anything Winslow Homer or Edward Hopper ever did in the medium. You get that word, ‘nearly’? I use it because that’s the story of his life as an artist-‘nearly.’ He didn’t ever take it that extra foot into greatness. He checked at the fence. And it wasn’t just that he was an illustrator. Homer did illustration, Durer, for Christ’s sake, did illustration. No, there was something missing, or maybe, yeah, something stifled in him. That’s why he put these away, he doesn’t want to be reminded of how close he came. You need more than talent to be a painter. You have to take risks. You have to not give a shit. You have to be open to…I don’t know what it is-to life, God, truth, some kind of other stuff. It’s a business, art, but not just a business.
“And you know what the really horrible thing is? He knows it. He knows it. He knows what kind of gift he threw away, and that knowledge made a poison in this house, a curse, and that sad, ruined woman they just dragged away knew it too and she took it all in, she tried to absorb the poison, she fucking carried it, so that he could still be jaunty C. P. Wilmot, with his little straw hat and his romantic cape, traipsing about her house and chasing cunt. He’s a vampire: perfect ma
And so on and on. She looked at me like I was a traffic accident, one of those mashed-beer-can ones with blood on the glass, where you can imagine what happened to the people inside, but you can’t take your eyes away. She jumped to her feet while I was still yapping away and walked out of the room without another word.
The strange thing about this little encounter was that while I was talking it came into my mind why I was so reluctant to leave Oyster Bay. Looking at those pictures-it was like a concentrated elixir of my childhood, the beach, the flats, the water, the boats, my mother wrapping me in a sweater on the beach on a cool evening, and Charlie’s hand over mine on the warm tiller of her little sailboat the summer she taught me how to sail. And the smell of low tide, and always the sparkle and play of light on the water; I used to lie facedown on the dock and stare at it like a mystic stares at a mandala, the door to a higher existence. I was born there, I never really lived anywhere else but there and in the city during school, and even then I’d come home every summer.
After Melanie walked out I went up the back stairs to the widow’s walk, and stood out in the breeze, and looked at the lights on Lloyd Point and Centre Island, and the cha
I seem to recall you had a car and helped me move out, or maybe it was someone else, and I started living in the ruined factory on Walker Street. I worked like a bastard for five weeks, throwing out a ton of trash, tangles of wires, rusted machinery, then putting down tile on the splintered floors, wiring the place, hauling cabinets up five flights of stairs, plus a stove, a kitchen sink, and the hot-water heater. If I’d known what it would be like, I probably wouldn’t have started. A hot-water heater up five flights of stairs by myself!
The only thing I had help on was the drywall. The guy on the second floor took pity on me, De
A week later I rented a paint sprayer and masked the windows and my face and sprayed the whole interior white. The paint was barely dry when, as we’d arranged, Suza