The auction room was vast, filled with the tinkling sound of hypothesis and worry and excitement. Who would buy what? The black curtains scalloped like a tide. How much would it sell for? Someone’s dress caught the light. Who would surprise them tonight, and how would they do it? The room handled the murmur expertly, parsing it and folding it into the very architecture of the space, into the cuffs of the men’s shirtsleeves, the soft curls of women’s hair; into the chandeliers, which tentacled around the ceiling like crystal-studded octopi, working flecks of anxious light around the room.
James waited impatiently for the larger quiet to settle in, the quiet he imagined expressed the essence of an event like this, a quiet that spoke of refinery and nervous patience. In the meantime he scanned the room, wondering who might purchase the Estes. A woman with a beak for a nose. A man with a choke-making bow tie. He doubted anyone would find in his painting what he once did: the smell of doughnuts; the taste of rain; the color of his wife’s nylons.
What he had once found. What he had seen and felt, and smelled, and lived by his whole adult life. It had gone missing in what felt like the flash of a camera: one white bulb breaks, and a life is captured and frozen in however it existed in that moment.
That moment: midnight on Winona George’s balcony, a cold sea of hair and diamonds. A collective chanting of the countdown—five, four, three—and snow begins to fall, and then the old year breaks into the new one and the sky breaks open with confetti, and there is sloppy kissing and loud hurrahs! And James and Marge are kissing and the world is spinning with all its spangled bravado. A drunken man with a mustache and his drunken redheaded companion make their merry rounds, tangoing across the balcony. Glitter falls. The redheaded companion in her off-base bohemian dress falls, clutched in the mustache’s besuited arms. And they fall right into and on top of Marge. Holy fuck! says the bohemian girlfriend with a laugh, too old to be a girlfriend, James now sees, and Oopsy daisy! yells her suited suitor. And this is the moment — Marge on the ground saying, I’m okay, I’m okay, trying to laugh, James saying frantically, It’s just that she’s… pregnant—when everything breaks.
Marge, though she said she was fine when they got home, woke in the early morning to a circle of blood leaking from her and out onto the bed, spreading quickly, like a red frost.
James had panicked then. He had felt as if he couldn’t breathe. He had carried Marge down the stairs and the blood had gotten everywhere. His lungs hurt and tears came. Through his wet eyes he somehow found them a cab and somehow told the driver to take them to a hospital, and he somehow listened as the doctor told them patronizingly what they mostly already knew — this doesn’t happen very often in the second trimester, it is a very small percentage, but it can happen, and it happened to you. Neither of them thought to tell the doctor about the fall on the balcony, either because they were caught up in their panic or because they did not want to admit it had happened — as if it would have been admitting that in some way the miscarriage had been their fault… if they had only stayed home from that party… if they had only acted like responsible, with-child adults!
James saw behind the doctor’s words a black circle, slowly moving toward him. He felt an aching in his joints, especially in his feet. The hospital, to him, smelled of fire and smoke. He felt a surreal haze forming around him as they made their way back to the apartment, thinking: How could they be on their way back to their apartment? How would they enter the living room? How would they go to sleep? Not when so much had been lost.
But they did sleep, they slept in scary depth, the kind of sleep people sleep when they do not want to face waking life. They slept through the mean light of morning that pierced through the crack in the curtains. They slept through the middle of the day. When one of them stirred, the other held them still. Not now, they said with their arms. Not yet.
When James finally did let his lids open, though, for long enough to let in the light fully, he felt immediately that something was different. Where he usually woke to a mixture of Marge’s red and the season’s signature — light green (spring), static blue (winter), navy-blue-almost-black (fall), or warm buttery yellow (summer) — this morning he saw nothing. Nothing, that is, aside from the light that was actually gliding through the windows and onto his sleeping wife, a light that held none of the colors usually so active in the prism of his mind. Stupidly he walked over to Marge’s side of the bed and ran his hand through the slice of light that fell on her, as if by touching it it would change color. It didn’t. Just white, bright, normal January light, falling onto his wife’s pale face. He saw nothing. Felt nothing. Nothing at all.
He rushed into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror, slapped his face, threw water onto it. He opened and closed his eyes frantically, thinking if he blinked them hard enough he might spark the colors back into action. But whereas the mirror usually tinted a greenish color (James himself was the color of split-pea soup), he saw only his pale, unshaven face, puffy with tiredness, long but somehow still pudgy, sliding back into his balding forehead. No split pea: just blotchy skin. He smacked at his forehead with the heel of his hand. Nothing. He pricked his skin between a pair of tweezers: pain was usually marked by the sound of crashing waves and that black spot between his eyes. Nothing.
The final test: James brought himself to look at the Ruth Kligman painting near the mirror, the one he had bought for Marge when they were first married and that made him see bright, flashy orange snakes behind his eyes — it looked muddy and empty. How could the Ruth Kligman look empty?! He felt his breath suck into him, the pain of tears about to come. He crumpled onto the toilet and put his face in his hands. Clear, invisible, empty tears fell — they were as meaningless as his reflection in the mirror. But they poured from him in a steady, loud stream. The blood on the stairs. The sheets. The balcony. The emptiness in his mind. He cried so hard that Marge, even in her debilitated state, hobbled from her bed into the bathroom. She saw him hunched and rocking like a madman on the toilet, crying his eyes out, and came to hug and pet him.
“It’s okay,” she whispered down into his large ear. “We can try again, James. Even the doctor said, we can try again.”
But Marge began crying with him, and their two chests heaved together like the heartbeat of a broken heart.
From there things only got worse. James tried with spastic urgency to retrieve his sensibilities — he went to countless art shows, read poems that usually made his colors go wild (O’Hara’s line “how terrible orange is, and life” had once made him roller-coaster dizzy), exposed himself to extreme temperatures and odd foods — but nothing worked. O’Hara didn’t work. Rutabaga didn’t work. The Metropolitan Museum of fucking Art didn’t work.
He soon found that writing didn’t work, either, not without his sensations. He stared at blank pages and cursed his blank brain. For the immediate future, this was okay; he had enough almost-finished articles — which only needed editing and not added ideas — to keep the Times column going for a couple months. After that, he offered to curate a selection of guest columnists, to bide his time. But by April this was tired, and there was nothing left, and he began to miss his deadlines completely.