MARBLEHEAD
32-V-2
It will be a gray this time, another gray. She is thinking this, this gray, even while her lover is finishing behind her. Her hands are flat against the wall, pushing the wall to push back against him as he pushes into her. She has already come. The wall in front of her is a gray. She can't be sure. There's a trick of the light in the room as the late afternoon shadows break across the surface before her eyes. She senses an unevenness, what seems to be another kind of shadow, a shadow of the drywall in the space between her spread arms, flexing, springing back against him. No amount of paint can disguise it, a sloppy application of the mud, that lack of sanding. Tomorrow she will look through the paint chips for the right gray. There are hundreds of chips, each tweaked to register the slight variation of brightness, intensity, saturation. After she has been with him, she likes to paint the living room of her house. She has lost count of the number of times she has painted the living room. She has been seeing him a dozen years. There must be a dozen dozens of layers of paint, a gross of layers. How many layers will it take to contract the volume of the room, to build up, to fill in the in of the room? She likes to stay with the neutral colors, the whites and all the off-whites, the grays, and the other grays. Other colors bleed through the new paint, taking too long to cover, needing too many extra coats to cover. The paint's been rolled on here in this room or maybe sprayed. He is moving faster and his hands have left her breasts and moved to her hips. And in the mix, she thinks she sees, some sparkle, a mica fleck. At least it isn't paper with its patterns and seams. Her husband never asks why she paints the living room over and over. He compliments her on the room once it is done as she washes the brushes in the sink, asks her if he can move back the furniture. Her lover likes to make love to her after she has made love to her husband. She doesn't ask him why. The color of come, she thinks, is the color of this wall, the wall she is looking at as her lover finishes behind her, inside her. It lacks the pearlescence of semen though, cloudy nacreous mix of light and its reflection, the wet paint sheen that encapsulates the flat depthless milt beneath the shiny marble glass skin. She likes to watch it dry. The come. The paint too. She sits for hours in the living room, after she's finished painting it once again, to watch it take on its color, steep and deepen. Sand. Stone. Marble. Mountain. She imagines that a woman somewhere thinks of the names for all the grays, a kind of poetry. Now, he tells her when he is about to, stops, holds still, then does, waits, waits, waits then slides out of her. She lunges away, disconnects, no longer up on her toes, collapses forward, falls onto the wall as if the wall emits its own gravitational pull. She's drawn in, adheres. She presses her whole body along the wall, flattens herself against it, wants to pass right through it into the next room. She turns her head to the side to feel its cool color, feel its pallor, the pigment rub off on her breasts, her belly and thighs, her flushed cheek.
MT. MCKINLEY
32-V-3
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At the first session of each new Congress the representative from President McKinley's home district in Ohio rises to take the floor and introduces legislation to retain the mountain's appellation, preventing it from being renamed Denali for another two years. The measure is accompanied by additional remarks concerning the mountain to be read into the record.
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The mountain's gray silhouette indicates two major summits, twin peaks, the southern one the highest, and reveals a massif with a melodramatic ridgeline of lesser ascending and descending slopes out of which flow four major glaciers, variations of the same denouement.
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On a ridge near the summit of Denali, the Japan Alpine Club has established a meteorological observatory that was donated to The University of Alaska. The weather station is one of only two such installations in the world located above 18,000 feet. Japanese newlyweds consummate their marriages at lodges in the shadow of Denali as the northern lights, the aurora borealis, unfold overhead, in the belief that such conditions are fortuitous for the resulting pregnancies as well as therapeutic for those who have been unable, until now, to conceive.
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Meanwhile, it is the spring solstice in Alaska. Each succeeding twenty-four-hour period sees an additional five minutes of sunlight added to the day. As the northern hemisphere begins to tip toward the sun in spring, shadows lengthen in the folds found on the distant mountain. The serrated ridge of Denali holds onto the increasing sunlight the longest, an incision of the lengthening shadow etched next to the crest line, rising up to the cloudless sky. The sharply defined horizon tilts south, soon to deny, by summer, the sun's sunset.
THE EDGE OF NIGHT
32-V-4
She changes out of her painting clothes — a plaid flannel shirt and actual white (well, once they were white) cut-off-at-the-knees painter's pants — and catches herself in the mirror, pasted together in broad fields of skin. The parts of her body that were exposed as she painted, her hands and arms, her face and hair, her lower legs, are splotched with gray paint. Dried, the paint has taken on the texture of the pores beneath it, scaled and creased and puckered where it has splashed on her elastic, sliding, scaling skin. Her skin is like the skin old paint generates when left in an old can, a pudding's skin, the color and the medium separating beneath the rubbery suspended crust at the top, a fossil liquid. She rubs off what she can, the fine hair of her forearms snagging in the crumbs of erased paint. In the failing light, her body in the mirror reflects swathes of gray planes, swatches of gray strokes. A sheet of gray on her belly folds under at a jutting hipbone. The tops of her thighs race down her legs, V to the bright dollops of her knees. Her collarbones are cut-out scallops, sloughed epaulets of contracting light. She's contracting too, flattening, an illusion. Over her shoulder, her shoulder blade fans out, ribbed with the weak pattern the window's blind projects. The weakening available light seeps in in the dusk. Paint on her skin picks up what's left of the light, lights up what gloss there is, the speckled constellation along the arm, a milky way of milky paint along the shin. Her forehead is a fresco, a wall, a white-washed wall. Her left cheek has been redrawn, is disconnected from her face, slides down her chin. It is a kind of careless camouflage, this sloppy paint splatter in the dark. She is becoming hard to see. She can't even see herself. She is breaking up, broken up, in bits. She has left her lover again. In the shower, the paint dissolves, peels. It is water-based. She scrubs, likes the feeling, the exfoliation, flaying the same paint that in the living room downstairs is shrinking microns as it dries, to fit a new thin skim on the walls. For a long time she had thought that the Dutch Boy of the paint was the same Dutch boy of legend who patches a dam with his finger, and she wondered what that had to do with paint. But she looked closely at Dutch Boy's Dutch boy on the can. He sits there topped with the hat and bobbed haircut, in the blousy blouse and blousy coveralls, the wooden shoes, holding up a loaded paintbrush like a torch. She supposes it is in a Flemish style, this Dutch Boy, all light and shadow. A brown study. In the shower, she imagines she is the girl on the salt box in the rain, the salt girl running as the paint begins to run. With her finger, she draws through the beads of water adhering to the tiles of the shower stall. As the finger moves, the beads come together, streak and smear, follow the gesture she paints. She pictures a picture of a brushstroke made up of brushstrokes. The swipes of water shatter back into quivering beads. The shower steams. She is made of salt or she is made of the color of salt and she dissolves and is dissolving in the rain, drains down the drain. The Dutch Boy is painting, painting the long wall of the dike that divides the land from the Zuiderzee, the Zuiderzee that disappears in the Dutch distance. And now the thin layer of soap she has applied to her body the color of the color of — but in this light it is hard to tell its color. It begins to peel in sheets as well. It runs. And as it drains, it assumes the spiral habit it has as it disappears in the shadows at her feet. She thinks: it will be that thin layer of paint that holds back that wall of all that water waiting to find its own true straight level.