What will it hurt to look? she asked.
You say your name is Meg?
Meg Caro.
How old are you, Meg Caro?
Twenty-two, she said.
That’s old enough to know better than to visit a strange man all alone.
I know.
Where are you from, Meg Caro?
Miami.
Let me see the pictures.
She opened her backpack and handed me a ring binder.
I opened it but couldn’t see. I’ll have to get my glasses, I said.
They’re on your head.
Thanks. I looked at the pictures of her paintings. These are pretty good.
I studied at the Art Institute of Chicago.
That should help me like the paintings more?
No, I just thought.
I’d stepped on her a bit, so I said, I like the work. Of course, you can tell only so much from photos. The paintings were young, not uninteresting, and nice enough to look at. Photos are so flat.
Oh, I know, she said.
I studied her broad face for a second. Come in here, I said. I led her into my studio. See that big painting on the wall. I had a ten-bytwelve-foot canvas nailed up. Tell me what you think?
She breathed, then sighed. I like parts of it, she said. It reminds me of another of your paintings. That really big yellow one in Philadelphia. Somehow this seems like two paintings.
I stood next to her and stared at the work.
The underpainting seems somehow warmer on the left side. Is there some blue under there? Maybe some Indian yellow. She stepped back, leaned back. Her movements were confident, perhaps a little cocky.
Would you like some tea?
Please.
I went to the sink and put more water in my little battered electric pot. I glanced back to see that the woman was walking around the room, looking at drawings and notes and canvases.
What is this painting about?
I studied her young face and looked at the canvas until she turned to view it again with me. This painting is about blue and yellow. Sometimes yellow and blue. Do you think it’s about more than that?
She didn’t say anything.
Are you always so neat? she asked.
I didn’t know I was. I’d ask you what kind of tea you’d like, but I have only one kind.
That’s fine.
It’s Lipton.
That’s fine.
Are your parents still in Miami? I asked.
My mother is.
Does she know you’re here?
I’m twenty-two years old.
I forgot.
I poured water into a mug and dropped in a bag, handed it to her. She took it and blew on it. She told me she really loved my work. I thanked her and together we looked at what was on my walls and floor.
Like I said, I don’t have a need for an intern.
You wouldn’t have to pay me, she said.
I didn’t even think of that, I told her. There’s really nothing around here for you to help me with.
I just want to be around you while you work.
As flattering as that is, I find it a little weird. I looked at her and became nervous, if not a little frightened. Maybe you should leave now.
Okay. I didn’t mean to come off as a stalker.
All right, I believe you, but you still have to leave.
I understand. Will you think about it, though?
She put her mug on the table and started to the door.
Thanks for stopping by, I said. I walked out behind her and made sure she walked down the drive and past the house. She wasn’t the first person to make the walk from the road. Usually it was men looking for work and I gave it to them when there was something to do, but a young woman coming up seemed different. I could imagine my wife coming home to find that I had taken on an apprentice. I would tell Claire about her when she came up and she would listen and I would tell her that I had been uncomfortable and she would tell me I was employing a double standard, that I would not have had the same reaction if she had been he. I would agree with her and then say the only true thing left to say, Nonetheless.
Is this supposed to be my story? The story I’m supposed to write or would write if I were a writer?
My, but you are dumb.
What is this? Who is Gregory Lang?
You’re Gregory Lang. This is what you would write or should write if you wrote. Like I said.
I don’t write. Who is Meg Caro?
I imagine she is the daughter you don’t know you have.
I see. Why don’t you just admit that you’re working again?
I don’t know. Maybe I am working again? Tell everybody I’m workin’ again. Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Lord, have mercy, I’m workin’ again. If I could, I’d get up and do a little jig to that. I love that line: Doctor said it’ll kill me, but he didn’t say when. Did you know that a camera is just a box with a little hole in it?
As a matter of fact, I did know that.
Dad, why all this writing for me? Why don’t you write it yourself?
I’m an eighty-year-old man, almost eighty, anyway. What do I have to say to those assholes out there? And people my age, well, all they read is prescription labels and the obituaries.
That’s not quite true.
Nor is it quite false. Why do they print the obits so small?
Listen, you’ve got a sharp, a strong, mind.
Try wrapping your fist around that in the morning.
Dad, you realize that I’m dead.
Yes, son, I do. But I wasn’t aware that you knew it.
Definite Descriptions
I’ll be Murphy. You be whoever. Or is it whomever? Murphy was asleep when he had the dream. He thought it was the best place to find it. In it he was not himself, whoever that might be. He was an older man, a smarter man, not the man who took all the small contracting jobs that people never took anymore because you couldn’t make a living doing it. He made a living, albeit a meager one, but he lived, job to job, house to house, argument to argument, as most people liked the idea of someone doing the jobs they could maybe do themselves, the jobs the larger contractors simply wouldn’t do. And more often than not, the clients did not pay. At least, not happily, never promptly. A client would ask for a cedar closet and then balk at the price of the cedar paneling, choose beautiful cabinet fixtures and act surprised to find out that beauty came with a price tag. Murphy kept immaculate records and would show the clients the cost of the materials, show them that he was making no profit on the materials and even show them where they had signed off on the purchase of the materials before the materials were in fact purchased. He’d managed somehow to remain content if not happy, calm if not relaxed. His hands remained reasonably soft and he felt a small twinge of pride about that. His wife had left him a few years earlier and he’d long ago stopped dreaming about her. She walked 15 out saying something about his lack of ambition, but he didn’t feel like pursuing any understanding of her complaint; this made him laugh. He didn’t agree with her but felt no compulsion to argue. Every hour he didn’t work, he read, and at night he read himself to sleep and eagerly searched out dreams where he was someone else. In this dream he was a writer, maybe, and like all of his dreams, it was narrated.
What did he dream? You want to know. You’d like to know. He dreamed that Nat Turner was getting to tell William Styron’s story. The Confessions of Bill Styron by Nat Turner. You could write that, then follow it with The Truth about Natty by Chingachgook.
I am the darkness visible. Would that my despair might be not only my preoccupation but my occupation, that my plight might be my profit, that my station, my suffering, might be my sustenance. I am the darkness visible. Maybe the darkie visible. Certainly, I am the darkest invisible. If I could have lived for another buck-fifty years, oh what compensation might I have realized for my decades in shackles, my years of ribbon-backed bondage. The question remains whether I would be made whole by some comfort. Probably not.