She unscrewed the top, looked inside and shook the jar lightly. Two small blue pills surfaced. She shook the jar again. One pill disappeared; two more came to the top. She picked one out and turned her hand at the wrist to see the pill from several sides. It was a dusty blue, the size of a lentil. A few shreds of oregano stuck to the surface. She rolled the pill between her fingers until all the oregano had dropped away. For one more moment she looked at it, then she carefully placed it back inside, letting it lie gently on the oregano like the egg of a miniature robin in a nest of dried and broken leaves. She shook the jar. The pill was still poking up through the oregano. She shook the jar again. The pill was no longer visible. She screwed the cap back on, put the jar on the shelf, and rubbed the oregano dust from her fingers into the air above the sink.
16.
Dempsey took a good long look at the painting she had finished. Lazarus indeed was magnificently risen from the dead. But Dempsey being Dempsey, she was able to find several places where more work was needed. There was that curl of hair above the left ear that wasn’t right. There was no spring to it. It seemed to have been hardened by hair spray into splinters of cedar. Slowly she reworked it, giving it light and dark. A soft shadowing that finally let it touch gently into the ear. She checked to see if this should affect the lighting in the dark bowl of the ear itself or the line of hair, disheveled and spiky, that poked at the ear from the side. She had momentary doubts, then decided no change was needed. Now at last it was time to clean the brushes.
As if picking up twigs for a bonfire, she collected her brushes, gathering them into her fist until she couldn’t hold any more. She slid them into the wide-mouthed can of turpentine and pressed down lightly, giving the bristles a good quick drink. She rounded up the rest: one on the floor under the table, another hidden under a putty knife she sometimes used to scrape down the smeared paint to make just the right surface for the next coat, and the last to be found was on the stool near the canvas—the quarter-inch brush, completely worn away, that she’d used as a stick to scratch lines into the colors already layered onto the canvas. It occurred to her that a new three-quarter-inch brush would soon be needed, then was almost amused by such a needless concern.
Again she pressed the bristles farther into the turpentine, encouraging a deeper drink. Paint tubes were capped, but against her usual practice, she didn’t bother to roll the bottoms or to smooth the wrinkled and dented metal. Considering the fiery burial to which she had consigned her Lazarus, it seemed only right that the flesh tones used in his resurrection were mostly Burnt Sienna and Burnt Umber.
There was nothing left in the Yellow Ochre and at first she considered throwing the empty tube away, but habit told her that there might be one last dollop inside, waiting to be forced out and given to the light. No longer susceptible to amusement, she threw it out.
One by one the brushes were cleaned, squeezed into the rags she’d set out, mostly scraps she hadn’t needed for the shroud. The cloth wasn’t as absorbent as she might have liked, but it would do. She rubbed the bristles into the cloth, dipped them again into the turpentine, squeezed them with her fingers, then rubbed them once more into the cloth. Next they were washed with soap and water at the bathroom sink, a final cleansing. They were dried with a clean white towel, pressed into the nap, until as much water as possible had been drawn out. If the towel showed the least streak or smudge of color, the brush was returned to the turpentine and the entire process begun again.
On a cleared space of the worktable, the brushes were lined up, not according to size or length but as they happened to be lifted from Dempsey’s fist. She thought of arranging them into some kind of order, perhaps even the order in which she’d bought them—memories that, for whatever reason, caused her no effort. She could even remember something of the day itself on which each purchase of each brush had been made: a sense of the weather, some part of her clothing, an incident on the way to Pearl Paint or Utrecht or Central, or on the way home—a dog, the tubs and bins of fish in the Chinese market on Canal Street. On the day of the red sable brush—from Central on Third Avenue—there had been a sudden storm and she had kept right on walking. After she was completely soaked, she’d deliberately peed because she knew it wouldn’t make any difference, wetting herself, letting it run down her legs, indistinguishable from the rain that had already soaked her to the bones. The round-tip brush still seemed to smell of fish because she’d stuck the bristle end into the bag, piercing the skin of the fish and drawing into itself forever the last oils and fluids the fish would ever produce. A man with purple eyes had sold her the two-inch brush, and it seemed only fitting that the handle, too, was purple. She never saw him again and the two-inch remained her only brush with a purple handle.
When she had finished lining them up, she counted. Forty-seven brushes had been used—one of them an ox-hair, now a stub, dated back to the days of her poverty. She’d stolen it from Pearl Paint on Canal Street, slipping it up the sleeve of her winter coat. To make sure it wouldn’t fall out, she’d kept scratching the back of her head so she could keep her arm raised. She’d worried that the pointed end would poke out through the elbow of the coat, but it hadn’t.
The painting of the risen Lazarus she leaned against the worktable. She then placed the ladder-back chair about ten feet away. She had been told to give herself some point of concentration during the time she’d be taking the pills, some mental occupation for the intervals so she would be doing something more than just waiting for the next dose. She would look at the painting, study it, see perhaps where she’d gone wrong, or even better, appreciate what she’d done right. It would be a risky business. She might see minute or glaring failures; there would be invitations to improvement; corrections would suggest themselves. But she had determined the work was finished. The tubes were capped, the brushes cleaned, and this would have to be the end. She had forbidden herself the least intrusion now. One could, she told herself, do worse at the last than take inventory of one’s flaws and failures.
One by one, Dempsey picked the blue pills out of the oregano jar. There were supposed to be twenty. After she’d picked one up, she dusted it lightly, blew on it, then carefully placed it on a saucer. There were only eighteen. She dumped the entire contents of the jar onto the table, shifted the crushed leaves and unearthed one more. She liked the idea that the final taste she would have in her mouth would be oregano. Since Johnny had scorned it as tasting too much like mud, she had denied herself the pleasure for too long. How Johnny knew what mud tasted like she never asked. But compensation was soon to be made. She would hold each pill on her tongue just long enough to catch the taste before taking the prescribed swallow of water. She asked only that the memories the taste might evoke would not be muted—the pasta, the salads, the tomatoes, the omelets, whatever.
Poking among the leaves, she found the twentieth pill. Two shreds of oregano had stuck themselves onto it and had to be peeled away. A few specks refused to go, even when she pecked at them with her fingernail. Some conjugal chemistry had been at work in the dark jar among the soft siftings, and Dempsey must honor the commitment. The specks were allowed to stay.