I chewed on the cloth and kept the liquid it yielded in a cheek pocket, like a country-boy pitcher on the mound. Faintly herbal, a little like turkey stuffing, not unpleasant. After ten minutes I was allowed to expel the wad. Then nothing for a while. I thought about the Vanity Fair project, about money, the usual sad, self-pitying thoughts about how essentially and irreparably screwed up my life was, floating mind-crap. After a while I felt a certain relaxation, like I was looking at Chaz thinking this shit and finding it amusing; I guess I actually laughed a little then. Next a feeling of vague physical discomfort, like my muscles were starting to cramp, that claustro coach-class airliner feeling, and I got up and went for the door.
Harris said I couldn’t leave, so I sat down, got up, sat down, paced back and forth, energy flowing through my body, electric, vibrational and crunching over gravel and dead leaves, the air chill and damp and I’m just drifting, not really sad, but somehow feeling a déjà vu as we’re walking toward the grave site at the head of a column of mourners, quite a few of them, more than I had expected really, my sister in her nun’s head-scarf, they’d dumped the black clothes by then, holding on to my arm. I stopped and stumbled a little from the force of the disorientation and she asked me what was wrong. I told her and said I’d never had a déjà vu that strong, and she said no wonder, it’s not every day you bury your father, and we walked along and the rest of the funeral played out.
Charlie and I got a little drunk later and she told me she was thinking about leaving the religious life. She liked helping the starving millions in the world’s nasty places, but the good they could do seemed so paltry compared to the extent of the evil. Yes, it was good to give twenty girls a year a convent education and keep them from being raped by older guys, but there were hundreds and hundreds they couldn’t help, the mothers would bring them to the school in Kitgum, crowds of women and girls begging for admission, knowing it was hopeless, but what else could they do? And somehow now that our father was gone a lot of the reason for it (as she now admitted) was gone too, and she felt she wanted to move into the world, not to leave religion exactly, but to be of some greater service. We talked about that for a while, what different orders of sisters did, and she asked me how my painting was going and did I think I would start painting for myself now and not just to piss the old man off, and I laughed at that.
We stayed up late talking, just like we’d done in the old days when we were kids, and she kissed me good night and then I went up to my old room. It hadn’t changed at all, the Indian blanket on the bed, my old hockey stick on the wall next to the painting of my mother, and that damp wicker smell from the old furniture. I got out of my clothes and was going to go to bed but remembered I hadn’t closed the French doors leading to the terrace and if the wind shifted in the night the rain would ruin the carpets, so I put my old blue plaid robe on and tried to open the door. The door wouldn’t open, and I rattled the knob and pounded and kicked at it, and there was a hand on my shoulder, which scared the shit out of me because I was alone in the room, and I turned around and this woman was there in a white coat with HARRIS on the tag and I was back in the drug study.
Now, you absolutely have to understand that this was not a reverie or a dream, nothing like that at all. I was there. I was back in time twenty-two years, inhabiting my younger body, talking to my sister in the living room of my father’s house, full color, stereo sound, the works. I said, holy shit! And my knees gave way and I had to lie down on the couch, and Harris was all over me about what had happened. It was hard to reply at first. It wasn’t that I felt drugged, or dull, or extra sharp like on coke or speed, but more detached, a very subtle variation in consciousness, and there was a beating in my head, a pulse like a kitten licking my brain four or five times a second, thnick thnick thnick, in just that delicate way.
At the same time I felt both extremely focused and detached, as if experiencing my life for the first time without the blurring of worry and regret. Not in the least like hash and the furthest thing from acid. She asked me a bunch of questions she read off a printed sheet, and I answered them as best I could, yes, I attended my father’s funeral; no, I can’t guarantee that what I experienced was a memory and not a fantasy. It seemed perfectly real, just like talking right then to the silly woman seemed real, although if you informed me that I was still in my room on the night of the funeral and that this interview was a fantasy I would have said sure, right.
She kept me for another hour. The kitten licking faded after a while and I returned more or less to normal, although at that point I was no longer sure what normal was. On the way out I lifted from the reception room table a tattered old People magazine with a story about Madonna in it. Back at the loft, I set up a small gessoed wood panel and dug through the chests until I found an old theatrical costume that would do, plum colored, with gilt threads and a straight, high bodice-some Juliet must have worn it in the Edwardian age, stank of mothballs, but in good shape. I hung it on my manikin, propped her in an armchair, arranged the lighting, pinned Madonna’s face up on the wall nearby, and got to work.
I drew it out in charcoal, a figure from the waist up with her arms demurely folded, pale hair in ringlets falling to the neck, showing against a cloudy background and a little city with walls and towers back there. Underpainting in warm gray-ochre, mixed a little Japan dryer in because I’m a commercial artist, can’t wait for the paint to dry, and who cares if it cracks and blackens in fifty years? So when the imprimatura was touch-dry, I built up the masses, laid on glazes, and then the fall of the drapery, and it went terrific, I painted for hours, it got dark outside, I got hungry, I ignored the phone ringing. Was it different? I guess. I can often get lost in the act of painting and forget for a while that what I’m doing is essentially commercial crap, but this session was even more so, I was totally into it, with my body, just letting the paint flow out onto the fresh white surface, magic.
My stomach was growling by then and I wanted to give the underpaint a chance to dry, so I took a break and walked over to Chinatown for some noodles and took the People with me to read and study Madonna some more. Her face in the cheap printing showed the mere mask of the celebrity, and the job was to find the interior behind it, and of course you can’t do that from a photo, that’s the point, the handlers want to control the star’s image, revelation not wanted, so I knew I’d have to imagine it. And naturally I thought about Suzanne, a singer at a vastly lower level of celebrity but a face I knew well, and I worked with that. The People photo was a typical lowering Madonna shot, the overbit mouth pouting and a little downturned, the eyelids at half mast in a way meant to be read as sexual according to the conventions of beauty shots.
When I got back to my place I opened her mouth into a little gape of astonishment and put into her eyes the deep loneliness and insecurity of the famous performer. And the not-so-famous, as I knew from experience.
And the bambino. They hadn’t asked for one but I thought it added the right touch. So I pulled out an old baby picture of Milo and painted it in freehand. Milo had a kind of sly expression, you know the kind, the secret and unknowable joy of the pre-articulate child.