My knuckles ache. I have been gripping the two poles with my two hands. The pain across my back has sharpened with the tensing of my torso. Under my fingers the brushstrokes in the paint — how many coats has somebody applied? — some young couple proud of their clapboard dream and then the landlord hoping to salt away a little nest egg, wanting to be a man of property. The bird does not regard me with its flat eye. There is no malevolence in things. Not even in a hypodermic needle. M. Partenier gave me a crust because the sugar had run out. The bird had probably got a bit of dirty discard and my longing painted it into something precious. I wish I had Dogzilla. But I could not have raised a baby on my own, faulty or whole.
I use the poles to stretch, hanging in an arc against the pain, which pulls my spine, releases, and relaxes. The moon has risen across Oak Alley and tangles in the cottonwood leaves. The dust has dropped with night and left spiced balmi-ness. I turn and go back in, latching the screen behind me.
PART III: THE STORIES, ANALYZED
10. "Flamenco" by Erich Sysak
Flamenco
It is impossible to escape the heat of the French Quarter. It is searing and ubiquitous, cruel from early June until late September. The few full-time residents of Toulouse and Decatur and St. Peter near City Park stay indoors living lives surrounded by plaster walls and chugging window air conditioners. The insides of things stare back at you. It is hot. This part of the Quarter sits in the soggy apex of an old geographical spoon. It is where artists live. The rent is cheap.
I had come to my father's studio that afternoon to tell him good news, and to ask of him a favor he would not want to fulfill. My girlfriend, Megumi Kido, of one year, had just agreed to marry me. An American would say, Mey-gumi. Two syllables and a half-silent g. But this is not her name. Her name is Me-gu-mi. Three syllables, each one rising softly in your mouth until the last e flutters out like a small bird. It is her secret name. Her real name; her bedroom name.
Since I met her along the bayou at the New Orleans Museum of Art (she sat alone on a plaid blanket to watch mullet jump) she has been the center of my every thought.
For her, I exercise an uncontainable desire to improve, to read prospectuses late at night, to depreciate the adjusted basis of gifts and fair market values ranging as far back as 1946. She understands my craving for things to remain unchanged in our briar, Covington home — the furniture and books, the Kabuki mask and ceramic vase above the fireplace, the silk throw rugs beyond the sofa. She also understands my need to pace, and then to sit quietly and think, sometimes for hours, about the puzzle of numbers a financial accountant must learn the shape of. I am the youngest to make junior partner at Connick, Castelano, Warwick & O'Connor since the Great War. It is a firm with history.
The double shotgun where my parents live needs more than paint. The neighborhood turns pretty around it. It's an old plan to keep thieves away. Vines of bougainvillea breed in the wrought-iron porch rails, and pose against the darkened windows. The old planks, not wide, but delicate and old-fashioned gingerbread, look powdered with white dust and dry. I parallel park behind the Volkswagen van, once my mother's shuttle for doctor's appointments, late-to-school rides, dance recitals, and classes, now with its guts hanging loose below it, reminds the three of us of the chaos of motherhood. Promises have been made to repair it. I step over the stacks of yellow coffee cans, mostly from the Cafe Du Monde, filled with muddy, mineral spirits and colors, and knock on the studio door before I enter.
It is alleged that Van Gogh's insanity was more than biological. The invisible vapors of mineral spirits inhaled, even swallowed from wet brushes, over time caused his intellect to fail. Inside the studio, these same vapors radiate from the wood floors, the high ceilings where the heat rests, the wet canvas, and the dry stacked arm deep against the walls. All of us have inhaled it over the years.
He sits on a three-legged stool in a cave of paintings. I'm used to the colors, but a stranger is assaulted by it. Your sense of proportion and the familiar, muted tones of the earth, the colors of school buses and buildings, trees and bridges, water, televisions and furniture explode, disappear. His paintings are large, intimidating, colorful, violent, busy, involved. You cannot glance. It takes a while to see them.
He does not turn, but half sits, half stands, juggling the legs of the stool slightly off the ground. He wears no shirt or shoes. There are streaks of red paint on his right arm. His skin is pale. His hair is fine and light gray, tossed up from thinking with his fingers. A box fan twirls near the window where an air conditioner hums. My mother said we look exactly alike. Me at twenty-nine. My father once at twenty-nine. The same. I have seen sketches. It is almost true.
I fall into a vinyl chair near the desk just inside the door, and forget my age.
"I have very good news," I say and cross my hands.
"That would be welcome." His voice is distant. Thinking. Contrary to all logic, it is the best time to speak to him.
"I asked her."
"It's about time."
"She said yes, Dad."
"Congratulations," he says, and offers to shake.
I pull him toward me and gently slap my hand against his soft, sticky back. "I have a favor to ask," I say.
He nods knowingly, but cannot know, and picks through the day's mail at his desk.
"A favor," he repeats to the letters and papers. I look at the painting he's working on and see, through the vastness of time spread out, through the valleys and mountains and creatures within it, a woman, in the distance, on some kind of colorful ledge, a rainbow ledge, and she is dancing. Her hands are posed, fingers snap. She will stomp her right foot in a moment and send catastrophic fissures from her heel.
"Will you paint her?" I ask. The box fan whirs. The air conditioner putters and clicks. From the other side of the shotgun, where my mother lives, I hear her steps on the wooden floor.
"She'll have to sit," he replies.
"Of course," I breathe. "She's so patient, Dad."
Then, from somewhere close, but beyond the universe of my father's studio, a voice materializes. The voice is close. In it there is what can only be called yearning, a friction between the sound, the note, and the ear. It creeps through the windows of the studio: oh-yeh, oh ya-ya-ya-yaya-u-ya, and breaks the closure of our deal.
"What is it?" I ask.
"What do you think? He sings. His name is Paco."
"But where?"
"Where? Can't you tell? It's this Jimayna De Alba shit all over again."
The singing stops for a moment, and then continues, just as loudly as before. Jimayna De Alba is my mother's stage name. It is a name that represents her absence from our home. It is time I spent with my father alone. It is how I grew.
My father turns from the painting and points at me with an ox-hair fan brush. "He is singing to her."
"To Mom," I say, knowing already.
He nods and drops the brush into the turpentine. "Yes, for a week now." He looks at the floor, then at me. His blue eyes surprise me. "She quit the studio. I wanted more time with her. It takes her away, not just physically." He cocks his head and considers something quietly.
He has asked my mother to quit. He has asked before. There is nothing I can say to him, though I wish to. It is not the idea, but the words coming out of him. My father does not speak of these things. He does not speak of my mother as the private woman, ever. He does not speak of things inside him, of love, of pain of remembering. Something has changed be-tween us.