Pursuits
At that time, I really didn't care about anything in the world - I had recently stopped taking psych drugs after getting really weird hallucinations, being treated for depression, and shutting off from the world completely. My father, with whom I was extremely close, left suddenly when I was 10 for a girl my mother was having an affair with. He was very hurt I didn't care about that, and I understood his pain but also saw from a young age the shallowness of these men's pursuits.
And I myself picked up and ran in the opposite direction. I decided that art was the way out. Art has the potential to be a way out of anything - it's limitless. Now I'm not saying that art is the answer to everything, in a lot of ways it just makes problems. I guess what I'm saying is that the kinds of problems I'm interested in are those that can’t be solved - they must be experienced. I'm interested in mysteries.
I asked why he had such a cut on his face, he said it was a story for another time, we weren't friends and I didn't wait to hear the answer. I saw him later that same day at the party, and he grabbed me by my shoulders. Before I could say anything, he whispered in my ear "it is a story about a dog and a car" then laughed to himself. Throughout the party I tried to have a real conversation with him but he barely looked me in the eyes, and would always be distracted either by one of my friends who he would suddenly begin whispering secrets to, or by some stranger holding an interesting object. Most of the time, he was alone in a corner lost in silent contemplation.
I was painting, suddenly. I painted for hours, and Grant would watch me from across the room, his head tilted as if he were in a dog cage, or contained in some way. Later, I asked him what he thought of my work. He said something vague, about how it is complicated to talk about it when you're looking at it. I took that to mean he didn't like it, and assumed he must have told his father about me.
He was the kind of guy who thought that painting is easy. He'd tell any old stranger "my friend paints like a motherfucker, her paintings are really complicated but also very easy to make". He thought the only kind of art that was worthwhile is the kind that is difficult, complex. And his father was an art critic. He actually often told people that he began to be interested in art after both of his parents had been crushed by the accidental fall of a monumental sculpture by the Brazilian artist Hutton Johnson; this large slab of metal was supposed to have detached from its supports. This was a lie, naturally, not only because there was no such artist as Hutton Johnson but also because the man had never really known his father, who left when he was only ten years old.
It is also worth mentioning that he was almost twice my age, that he considered himself my mentor, something I found deeply offensive. I did see him as an authority though, in a way. He managed to be an artist and live on charity while somehow also maintaining the image of a man who owns land, has money in the bank, travelled all around Europe. He was a kind of a Robber one could say, a man whose life was a long catastrophe punctuated by romantic antics and disastrous gambles. When I met him, he was finishing up his latest exhibition 'the collected works of Hutton Johnson' a monolithic show exploring the psyche of one of history's most enigmatic sculptors (a certain Hutton Johnson is still out there creating colossal and mysterious metal figures across America, no one has ever seen his face). That's all I needed to start fantasizing about, I wanted something challenging, scary and great waiting for me around the corner.
It reminded me that I was always the one who kept talking about what my work could become. Grant rarely spoke of his own work, and I started to wonder if he had no reservations about it at all. What kind of an artist would spend his whole life reproducing the work of others? I was so naive.
He showed me a photo of his face painted in the style of Agnolo Firenze, he asked what I thought about it. I said it was a bit corny. He went on about how he was into that period of Florence, likes the way Taddeo Gaddi paints, all very subtle and almost invisible - I guess you wouldn't like it if it's too complex or something but.... I said yes, that would be terrible.
I kept painting, I didn't know what else to do. I was just going through the motions. I painted without looking at the canvas, and that was how I would come to know for sure that my husband had cheated on me. I painted a landscape and at the bottom right corner there was this tiny dot, red maybe. I took a brush and touched it, more red came out. Had I done that on purpose? Later I looked through my husband's stuff, yes indeed, there was a photo of him posing in front of the painting I had been working on at that moment. He had a little grin that said either "yeah I cheated on you with this painting" or more probably "...yeah I cheated on you with someone of the same colour, probably one of those guys you can see over here" I guess we'll never know now. I kept that small bit of story in my work and in my mind, something to give my therapist a good laugh. I went back to Paris with an unborn child, my husband's coat, and nothing else.
I stayed at the home of a man named Jacques. He had a child of his own, about ten years old I believe, and she was always there when I woke up in the morning. She would leave quiet little drawings on my face and I would carefully remove them with careful fingertips. I felt a strange kind of respect for this child, I would leave small drawings of my own around the house and I was sure she saw them but we never really spoke. Sometimes, her mother would come to the house, when Jacques was out. She would ask me quietly to go for a walk. We would walk through the woods and I told her all kinds of things, about my pregnancy and also about my husband. I tried hard not to utter any specific details, nameless anecdotes about men behaving badly. And all she said was: "People are born on the earth and when their time comes they go into the dirt again. The same for paintings."
Finally I was ready to go. I packed my bag slowly, leaving most of my things behind. I would return, sooner or later. Jacques gave me money for the train, and his contact information. And when I left in the morning, he was there. He walked out into the hallway with me. The girl cried a little. I was about twenty five years old, perhaps older. She was drawing in the kitchen, when I left, and when he followed me to the front door he had to bend his back so that she would not see him, hiding behind the curtain. We walked in silence, in the morning sun, towards the train station. There were drunks; I was leaving Paris for the first time in my life, and it was early in the morning. Jacques was walking a few steps ahead of me, to avoid the worst. He said something snotty about my ex-husband. He said "Whatever happens, this is something that was written, up there" and he pointed towards the sky. I agreed, but I didn't understand. From then on, he said nothing more, he didn't look back once, not when I said goodbye, and I never saw him again. I did see the child again, but she was now a painter, studying at the highest art academies in Europe. She had one side of her face covered with bandages and she almost never spoke. One time, I went to her exhibition in Prague, I was amazed. Her paintings were all so complex. They took me a while to decipher but finally, I understood they were all somehow linked together. Most of them showed some men with rather abnormal face structures, wearing hats. The men were engaging in certain familiar activities. Obviously, I could not decipher the code she had used to arrange these paintings chronologically. But I was impressed. It seemed that in these paintings, the whole world had disappeared, save for the smallest parts of it where the men in hats were operating. That was all that remained of the world.