Hall
I was beginning to put together the collection by then, though for many reasons it had taken me eight years to make the decision to do it. Each time I added a new piece to the shelves I had built forthis purpose, I would draw it and then paint it on a one-foot square canvas. I would walk around the studio for hours at a time with a Sèvres teacup mere inches from my eyes, then try to capture on canvas what I had seen. I was experimenting with visual intimacy, moving the object closer and closer until proximity obliterated meaning as I always suspected it would; the patterns — flowers, birds, garlands, swags, or whatever — exploding and blurring on the surface of the paintings. The series was meant to be a memorial to George, to the delicate, breakable cosmos that had surrounded him. But, in the end, the paintings — a wasteland of colour — didn’t work. I could never determine the right format for them. Squares were not appropriate, and when I experimented with the shaped canvases that were in fashion then, they fought with rather than mirrored the curves of saucers and bowls.
But I’ve put all that away. There is ample storage in my modernist basement. “Go forward with what you have to say,” Robert Henri once told me, told all of us who listened — mesmerized — to every word he uttered. “You are new evidence, fresh and young.”
Well, I am old evidence now. There is no testament that has not been tarnished by age.
E ntire kingdoms of objects have disappeared from the planet, it seems, but not from my visual memory, my eidetic malediction.
Think of all the gear associated with the horse-drawn carriage, the winter sleigh; all the straps and bits and bells, the reins and shoes and blinkers. Think of the wrappers for razor blades decorated with bearded men, a tin container for coal oil, the paper rolls for player pianos, spats, moustache cups, a square box sporting a huge red blossom from which music spills. This century has been one particularly concerned with disappearance, elimination. What ever happened, for instance, to the pale-yellow tickets from the pavilion, summer 1913? Five cents a dance.
I would stroll up from our beachside house in the early evening and meet George in front of his locked store. Even from a block away I would be able to see his frown, know that he was preoccupied. Vivian Lacey would have been the focus of his imagination for the better part of the afternoon, the possibility of her appearance that night ringing like an adamant bellin his mind, until he would have been unable to hear, to see anything else.
As we crossed the park he would become more and more silent, finally not talking at all except to reply monosyllabically to random requests I was making for information — facts I hoped would fill the void I could now feel developing between us. He never looked at me when he answered, and I know now that to speak would have meant his breaking through the dark, painful music that he took with him to the dance, to Vivian. But at the time I simply noted with surprise and mild anxiety that there was an odd kind of absence that the mere idea of a woman can create in a man like George, as if, lifted by the evening breeze, he was left floating somewhere, far out over the lake.
Once we were inside the pavilion his mood would mutate; he would become garrulous, almost coarse, punching the shoulders of the young men he knew, referring to me as his “Yank pal,” all of this a shoreline of angry energy around the deep lake of the inexplicable suffering that, even then, related to Vivian. Claiming that women liked Americans best, he insisted that I dance with every girl he spoke to, though many of them were several years older than I was and all of them blushed with embarrassment. Sometimes when I miserably blundered through dance steps I was only just beginning to learn, I would see George looking towards the door, his face strained, as if he wished to break from this artificial
I was beginning to put together the collection by then, though for many reasons it had taken me eight years to make the decision to do it. Each time I added a new piece to the shelves I had built forthis purpose, I would draw it and then paint it on a one-foot square canvas. I would walk around the studio for hours at a time with a Sèvres teacup mere inches from my eyes, then try to capture on canvas what I had seen. I was experimenting with visual intimacy, moving the object closer and closer until proximity obliterated meaning as I always suspected it would; the patterns — flowers, birds, garlands, swags, or whatever — exploding and blurring on the surface of the paintings. The series was meant to be a memorial to George, to the delicate, breakable cosmos that had surrounded him. But, in the end, the paintings — a wasteland of colour — didn’t work. I could never determine the right format for them. Squares were not appropriate, and when I experimented with the shaped canvases that were in fashion then, they fought with rather than mirrored the curves of saucers and bowls.
But I’ve put all that away. There is ample storage in my modernist basement. “Go forward with what you have to say,” Robert Henri once told me, told all of us who listened — mesmerized — to every word he uttered. “You are new evidence, fresh and young.”
Well, I am old evidence now. There is no testament that has not been tarnished by age.
E ntire kingdoms of objects have disappeared from the planet, it seems, but not from my visual memory, my eidetic malediction.
Think of all the gear associated with the horse-drawn carriage, the winter sleigh; all the straps and bits and bells, the reins and shoes and blinkers. Think of the wrappers for razor blades decorated with bearded men, a tin container for coal oil, the paper rolls for player pianos, spats, moustache cups, a square box sporting a huge red blossom from which music spills. This century has been one particularly concerned with disappearance, elimination. What ever happened, for instance, to the pale-yellow tickets from the pavilion, summer 1913? Five cents a dance.
I would stroll up from our beachside house in the early evening and meet George in front of his locked store. Even from a block away I would be able to see his frown, know that he was preoccupied. Vivian Lacey would have been the focus of his imagination for the better part of the afternoon, the possibility of her appearance that night ringing like an adamant bellin his mind, until he would have been unable to hear, to see anything else.
As we crossed the park he would become more and more silent, finally not talking at all except to reply monosyllabically to random requests I was making for information — facts I hoped would fill the void I could now feel developing between us. He never looked at me when he answered, and I know now that to speak would have meant his breaking through the dark, painful music that he took with him to the dance, to Vivian. But at the time I simply noted with surprise and mild anxiety that there was an odd kind of absence that the mere idea of a woman can create in a man like George, as if, lifted by the evening breeze, he was left floating somewhere, far out over the lake.
Once we were inside the pavilion his mood would mutate; he would become garrulous, almost coarse, punching the shoulders of the young men he knew, referring to me as his “Yank pal,” all of this a shoreline of angry energy around the deep lake of the inexplicable suffering that, even then, related to Vivian. Claiming that women liked Americans best, he insisted that I dance with every girl he spoke to, though many of them were several years older than I was and all of them blushed with embarrassment. Sometimes when I miserably blundered through dance steps I was only just beginning to learn, I would see George looking towards the door, his face strained, as if he wished to break from this artificial
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