The Sunrise
Yvonne follows men. She does this discreetly and at a distance, at first; usually she spots them on the subway, where she has the leisure to sit down and look about her, but sometimes she will pass one on the street and turn and walk along behind him, hurrying a little to keep up. Occasionally she rides the subway or goes walking just for this purpose, but more often the sighting is accidental. Once she’s made it, though, she postpones whatever she’s doing and makes a detour. This has caused her to miss appointments, which bothers her because she’s punctual as a rule.
On the subway, Yvonne takes care not to stare too hard: she doesn’t want to frighten anyone. When the man gets off the train, Yvonne gets off too and walks to the exit with him, several yards behind. At this point she will either follow him home to see where he lives and lie in wait for him some other day, when she’s made up her mind about him, or she’ll speak to him once they’re out on the street. Two or three times a man has realized he’s being shadowed. One actually began to run. Another turned to confront her, back against a nearby drugstore window, as if cornered. One headed for a crowd and lost her in it. These, she thinks, are the ones with guilty consciences.
When the time is right, Yvonne quickens her pace, comes up beside the man, and touches him on the arm. She always says the same thing:
“Excuse me. You’re going to find this strange, but I’d like to draw you. Please don’t mistake this for a sexual advance.”
Then there’s an interval, during which they say What? and Yvonne explains. There’s no charge, she says, and no strings. She just wants to draw them. They don’t have to take their clothes off if they don’t want to; the head and shoulders will do nicely. She really is a professional artist. She is not mad.
If they’ve listened to her initial appeal at all, and most do, it’s very hard for them to say no. What does she want from them, after all? Only a small amount of their time, so that they can let her have access to something only they can give. They’ve been singled out as unique, told they are not interchangeable. No one knows better than Yvonne how seductive this is. Most of them say yes.
Yvonne isn’t interested in men who are handsome in the ordinary way: she’s not drawing toothpaste ads. Besides, men with capped-looking teeth and regular features, men even remotely like Greek gods, are conscious of the surface they present and of its effect. They display themselves as if their faces are pictures already, finished, varnished, impermeable. Yvonne wants instead whatever it is that’s behind the face and sees out through it. She chooses men who look as if things have happened to them, things they didn’t like very much, men who show signs of the forces acting upon them, who have been chipped a little, rained on, frayed, like shells on the beach. A jaw slightly undershot, a nose too large or long, eyes of different sizes, asymmetry and counterpoise, these are the qualities that attract her. Men of this kind are not likely to be vain in any standard way. Instead they know that they must depend on something other than appearance to make an impact; but the mere act of being drawn throws them back upon their own unreliable bodies, their imperfect flesh. They watch her as she draws, puzzled, distrustful, yet at the same time vulnerable and oddly confiding. Something of theirs is in her hands.
Once Yvonne gets the men into her studio she is very delicate with them, very tactful. With them in mind she has purchased a second-hand armchair with a footstool to match: solid, comforting, wine velvet, not her usual taste. She sits them in it beside the large window, and turns them so that the light catches on their bones. She brings them a cup of tea or coffee, to put them at ease, and tells them how much she appreciates what they are doing for her. Her gratitude is real: she’s about to eat their souls, not the whole soul of course, but even a small amount is not to be taken lightly. Sometimes she puts on a tape, something classical and not too noisy.
If she thinks they’re relaxed enough she asks them to take off their shirts. She finds collar-bones very expressive, or rather the slight hollow at the V, the base of the throat; the wish-bone, which gives luck only when broken. The pulse there says something different from the pulse at wrist or temple. This is the place where, in historical movies set in mediaeval times, the arrow goes in.
When Yvonne has arranged her materials and started to draw, she goes quickly: for the sake of the men, she doesn’t like to stretch things out. Having been subjected to it herself in her student days, when people posed for each other, she knows how excruciating it is to sit still and let yourself be looked at. The sound of the pencil travelling over the paper raises the small hairs on the skin, as if the pencil is not a pencil at all but a hand being passed over the body, half an inch from the surface. Not surprisingly, some of the men connect this sensation – which can be erotic – with Yvonne, and ask to take her out or see her again or even sleep with her.
Here Yvonne becomes fastidious. She asks if the man is married, and if he is, she asks if he’s happy. She has no wish to get involved with an unhappily married man; she doesn’t want to breathe anyone else’s black smoke. But if he’s happy, why would he want to sleep with her? If he isn’t married, she thinks there must be some good reason why not. Mostly, when these invitations are issued, Yvonne refuses, gently and continuing to smile. She discounts protestations of love, passion, and undying friendship, praise of her beauty and talent, claims on her charity, whining, and bluster; she’s heard these before. For Yvonne, only the simplest-minded rationale will do. “Because I want to” is about all she’ll accept.
Yvonne’s studio is right downtown, near the waterfront, in an area of nineteenth-century factories and warehouses, some of which are still used in the original way, some of which have been taken over by people like her. In these streets there are drunks, derelicts, people who live in cardboard boxes; which doesn’t bother Yvonne, since she hardly ever goes there at night. On the way to her studio in the mornings she has often passed a man who looks like Beethoven. He has the same domed forehead, overgrown brow bones, gloomy meditative scowl. His hair is grey and long and matted, and he wears a crumbling jeans suit and sneakers tied on with pieces of parcel string, even in winter, and carries a plastic-wrapped bundle that Yvonne thinks must contain everything he owns. He talks to himself and never looks at her. Yvonne would very much like to draw him, but he’s far too crazy. She has a well-developed sense of self-protection, which must be why she hasn’t landed in serious trouble with any of the men she picks up. This man alarms her, not because she thinks he’s dangerous, but because he’s a little too much like what she could become.
Nobody knows how old Yvonne is. She looks thirty and dresses as if she were twenty, though sometimes she looks forty and dresses as if she were fifty. Her age depends on the light, and what she wears depends on how she feels, which depends on how old she looks that day, which depends on the light. It’s a delicate interaction. She wears her bronze-coloured hair cut short at the back and falling slantwise across her forehead, like Peter Pan’s. Sometimes she rigs herself out in black leather pants and rides a very small motorcycle; on the other hand, sometimes she pins on a hat with a little veil, sticks a beauty mark on her cheek with an eyebrow pencil, and slings a second-hand silver fox with three tails around her neck.
She sometimes explains her age by saying she’s old enough to remember garter belts when they were just ordinary articles of women’s clothing. You wore them when you were young, before you were forced to put on girdles and become rubberized, like mothers. Yvonne remembers the advent of panty-hose, the death of the seamed stocking, whereas for younger women these events are only mythology.
She has another way of dating herself, which she uses less often. Once, when she was young but adult, she had a show of her paintings closed down by the police. It was charged with being obscene. She was one of the first artists in Toronto that this happened to. Just before that, no gallery would even have dared to mount the show, and shortly afterwards, when chains and blood and body parts in supermarket trays had become chic, it would have been considered tame. All Yvonne did at the time was to stick the penises onto men’s bodies more or less the way they really were, and erect into the bargain. “I don’t see what the big deal was,” she can say, still ingenuously. “I was only painting hard-ons. Isn’t that what every man wants? The police were just jealous.” She goes on to add that she can’t make out why, if a penis is a good thing, calling someone a penis-brain is an insult. She has this conversation only with people she knows very well or else has just met. The shocking thing about Yvonne, when she intends to be shocking, is the contrast between certain elements of her vocabulary and the rest of it, which, like her manner, is reserved and even secretive.
For a while she became a sort of celebrity, but that was because she was too inexperienced to know better. People made her into a cause, and even collected money for her, which was nice of them but got in the way, she now feels, of her reputation as a serious artist. It became boring to be referred to as “the penis lady.” There was one advantage though: people bought her paintings, though not for ultra-top prices, especially after magic realism came back in. By this time she has money put away: she knows too much about the lives of artists to spend it all and have nothing to fall back on when the wind shifts and the crunch comes, though she sometimes worries that she’ll be one of those old women found dead in a pile of empty cat-food cans with a million dollars stashed in her sock. She hasn’t had a show now for several years; she calls it “lying low.” The truth is she hasn’t been producing much except her drawings of men. She has quite a few of them by now, but she isn’t sure what she’s going to do with them. Whatever she’s looking for she hasn’t yet found.
At the time of her revolutionary penises, she was more interested in bodies than she is now. Renoir was her hero, and she still admires him as a colourist, but she now finds his great lolloping nudes vapid and meaningless. Recently she’s become obsessed with Holbein. A print of his portrait of Georg Gisze hangs in her bathroom, where she can see it while lying in the tub. Georg looks out at her, wearing a black fur coat and a wonderful pink silk shirt, each vein in his hands, each fingernail perfectly rendered, with a suggestion of darkness in his eyes, a wet shine on his lip, the symbols of his spiritual life around him. On his desk stands a vase, signifying the emptiness and vanity of mortal existence, with one carnation in it, signifying the Holy Ghost, or possibly betrothal. Earlier in her life Yvonne used to dismiss this kind of thing as the Rosemary for Remembrance school of flower arranging: everything had to mean something else. The thing about painting penises was that no one ever mistook them for phallic symbols, or indeed for symbols at all. But now she thinks it would be so handy if there were still some language of images like this, commonly known and understood. She would like to be able to put carnations between the fingers of the men she draws, but it’s far too late for that. Surely Impressionism was a mistake, with its flesh that was merely flesh, however beautiful, its flowers that were merely flowers. (But what does she mean by “merely”? Isn’t that enough, for a flower to be itself? If Yvonne knew the answer.…)
Yvonne likes to work in the late mornings, when the light is at its best in her studio. After that she sometimes has lunch, with various people she knows. She arranges these lunches from pay phones. She doesn’t have a phone herself; when she did have one, she felt she was always at its mercy, whether it was ringing or not; mostly when it was not.
She doles out these lunches to herself like pills, at intervals, when she thinks she needs them. People living alone, she believes, get squirrelly if they go too long without human contact. Yvonne has had to learn how to take care of herself; she didn’t always know. She’s like a plant – not a sickly one, everybody comments on how healthy she always is – but a rare one, which can flourish and even live only under certain conditions. A transplant. She would like to write down instructions for herself and hand them over to someone else to be carried out, but despite several attempts on her part this hasn’t proved to be possible.
She prefers small restaurants with tablecloths; the tablecloth gives her something to hold on to. She sits opposite whoever it is that day, her large green eyes looking out from behind the hair that keeps falling down over her forehead, her chin tilted so that the left side of her head is forward. She’s convinced that she can hear better with her left ear than with her right, a belief that has nothing to do with deafness.
Her friends enjoy having lunch with Yvonne, though probably they wouldn’t enjoy it as much if they did it more often. They would find themselves running out of things to say. As it is, Yvonne is a good listener: she’s always so interested in everything. (There’s no deception here: she is interested in everything, in a way.) She likes to catch up on what people are doing. Nobody gets around to catching up on what she is doing, because she gives the impression of being so serene, so perfectly balanced, that their minds are at rest about her. Whatever she’s doing is so obviously the right thing. When they do ask, she has a repertoire of anecdotes about herself which are amusing but not very informative. When she runs out of these, she tells jokes. She writes down the punch lines and keeps them on filing cards in her purse so she won’t forget them.
She eats out alone, but not often. When she does, it’s usually at sushi bars, where she can sit with her back to the rest of the room and watch the hands of the chefs as they deftly caress and stroke her food. As she eats, she can almost feel their fingers in her mouth.
Yvonne lives on the top floor of a large house in an older but newly stylish part of the city. She has two big rooms, a bathroom, a kitchenette concealed by louvred folding doors which she keeps closed most of the time, and a walk-out deck on which there are several planters made from barrels sawed in two. These once contained rosebushes, not Yvonne’s. This floor used to be the attic, and although Yvonne has to go through the rest of the house to get to it, there’s a door at the bottom of her stairs that she can lock if she wants to.
The house is owned by a youngish couple named Al and Judy, who both work for the town planning department of City Hall and are full of talk and projects. They intend to expand their own living area into Yvonne’s floor when their mortgage is paid off; it will be a study for Al. Meanwhile, they are delighted to have a tenant like Yvonne. These arrangements are so fragile, so open to incompatibility and other forms of disaster, so easily destroyed by stereo sets and mud on the rugs. But Yvonne is a gem, says Judy: they never hear a peep out of her. She’s almost too quiet for Al, who would rather hear the footsteps when someone comes up behind him. He refers to Yvonne as “The Shadow,” but only when he’s had a hard day at work and a couple of drinks.
Anyway, the advantages far outweigh the disadvantages. Al and Judy have a year-old baby named Kimberly, who is at day-care in the mornings and Judy’s office in the afternoons, but if they want to go out in the evenings and Yvonne is in, they have no hesitation about leaving Kimberly in her charge. They don’t ask her to put Kimberly to bed herself, however. They have never said she’s just like one of the family; they don’t make that mistake. Sometimes Yvonne comes down and sits in the kitchen while Kimberly is being fed, and Judy thinks she can spot a wistful expression in Yvonne’s eyes.
At night when they’re lying in bed or in the morning when they’re getting dressed, Al and Judy sometimes talk about Yvonne. Each has a different version of her, based on the fact that she never has men over, or even women. Judy thinks she has no sex life at all; she’s given it up, for a reason which is probably tragic. Al thinks she does have a sex life, but carries it on elsewhere. A woman who looks like Yvonne – he’s not specific – has to be getting it somehow. Judy says he’s a dirty old man, and pokes him in the midriff.
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Al says. “Yvonne knows.”
As for Yvonne, the situation suits her, for now. She finds it comforting to hear the sounds of family life going on beneath her, especially in the evenings, and when she goes away Judy waters her plants. She doesn’t have many of these. In fact, she doesn’t have much of anything, in Judy’s opinion: an architectural drawing board, a rug and some cushions and a low table, a couple of framed prints, and, in the bedroom, two futons, one on top of the other. Judy speculated at first that the second was for when some man slept over, but none ever does. Yvonne’s place is always very tidy, but to Judy it looks precarious. It’s too portable, she feels, as if the whole establishment could be folded up in a minute and transported and unfolded almost anywhere else. Judy tells Al that she wouldn’t be surprised one morning to find that Yvonne has simply vanished. Al tells her not to be silly: Yvonne is responsible, she’d never go without giving notice. Judy says she’s talking about a feeling, not about what she thinks objectively is really going to happen. Al is always so literal.
Al and Judy have two cats, which are very curious about Yvonne. They climb up to her deck and meow at the french doors to be let in. If she leaves her door ajar, they are up her stairs like a shot. Yvonne has no objection to them, except when they jump on her head while she’s resting. Sometimes she will pick up one of them and hold it so that its paws are on either side of her neck and she can feel its heart beating against her. The cats find this position uncomfortable.
Once in a while Yvonne disappears for days, maybe even a week at a time. Al and Judy don’t worry about her, since she says when she’ll be back and she’s always there at the time stated. She never tells them where she’s going, but she leaves a sealed envelope with them which she claims contains instructions for how she could be reached in case of an emergency. She doesn’t say what would constitute an emergency. Judy sticks the envelope carefully behind the wall telephone in the kitchen; she doesn’t know it’s empty.
Al and Judy have incorporated these absences of Yvonne’s into the romances they have built up about her. In Al’s, she’s off to meet a lover, whose identity must remain secret, either because he’s married or for reasons of state, or both. He imagines this lover as much richer and more important than he is. For Judy, Yvonne is visiting the child or children Judy is convinced she has. The father is a brute, and more strong-willed than Yvonne, who anyone can see is the kind of woman who couldn’t stand up to either physical violence or a long court battle. This is the only thing that can excuse, for Judy, Yvonne’s abandonment of her children. Yvonne is allowed to see them only at infrequent intervals. Judy pictures her meeting them in restaurants, in parks, the constraint, the anguish of separation. She spoons applesauce into the wet pink oyster-like mouth of Kimberly and bursts into tears.
“Don’t be silly,” says Al. “She’s just off having a roll in the hay. It’ll do her a world of good.” Al thinks Yvonne has been looking too pale.
“You think sex with a man is the big solution to everything, don’t you?” says Judy, wiping her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater.
Al pats her. “Not the only one,” he says, “but it’s better than a slap with a wet noodle, eh?”
Sometimes it is a slap with a wet noodle, thinks Judy, who has been over-tired recently and feels too many demands are being made upon her. But she smiles up at Al with fondness and appreciation. She knows she’s lucky. The standard against which she measures her luck is Yvonne.
Thus the existence of Yvonne and her slightly weird behaviour lead to marital communication and eventual concord. If she knew this, Yvonne would be both pleased and a little scornful; but deep down underneath she would not give a piss.
When everything has been smooth and without painful incident for some time, when the tide has gone out too far, when Yvonne has been wandering along the street, looking with curiosity but no great interest at the lighting fixtures, the coral-encrusted bottles and the bridesmaids’ dresses, the waterlogged shoes and the antique candle-holders held up by winged nymphs and the gasping fish that the receding waters have left glistening and exposed in all their detail, when she’s gone into the Donut Centre and sat down at the counter and seen the doughnuts under glass beneath her elbows, their tentacles drawn in, breathing lightly, every grain of sugar distinct, she knows that up on the hills, in the large suburban yards, the snakes and moles are coming out of their burrows and the earth is trembling imperceptibly beneath the feet of the old men in cardigans and tweed caps raking their lawns. She gets up and goes out, no faster than usual and not forgetting to leave a tip. She’s considerate of waitresses because she never wants to be one again.
She heads for home, trying not to hurry. Behind her, visible over her shoulder if she would only turn her head, and approaching with horrifying but silent speed, is a towering wall of black water. It catches the light of the sun, there are glints of movement, of life caught up in it and doomed, near its translucent crest.
Yvonne climbs the stairs to her apartment, almost running, the two cats bounding up behind her, and hits the bed just as the blackness breaks over her head with a force that tears the pillow out of her hands and blinds and deafens her. Confusion sweeps over and around her, but underneath the surface terror she is not too frightened. She’s done this before, she has some trust in the water, she knows that all she has to do is draw her knees up and close everything, ears, eyes, mouth, hands. All she has to do is hold on. Some would advocate that she let go instead, ride with the current, but she’s tried it. Collision with other floating objects does her no good. The cats jump on her head, walk on her, purr in her ear; she can hear them in the distance, like flute music on a hillside, up on the shore.
Yvonne can think of no reason for these episodes. There’s no trigger for them, no early warning. They’re just something that happens to her, like a sneeze. She thinks of them as chemical.
Today Yvonne is having lunch with a man whose collar-bone she admires, or did admire when it was available to her. Right now it isn’t, because Yvonne is no longer sleeping with this man. She stopped because of the impossibility of the situation. For Yvonne, situations become impossible quickly. She doesn’t like situations.
This is a man with whom Yvonne was once in love. There are several such men in Yvonne’s life; she makes a distinction between them and the men she draws. She never draws men she’s in love with; she thinks it’s because she lacks the necessary distance from them. She sees them, not as form or line or colour or even expression, but as concentrations of the light. (That’s her version of it when she’s in love; when she isn’t, she remembers them as rarefied blurs, like something you’ve spilled on a tablecloth and are trying to wash out. She has occasionally made the mistake of trying to explain all this to the men concerned.) She’s no stranger to addiction, having once passed far too many chemical travelogues through her body, and she knows its dangers. As far as she’s concerned love is just another form of it.
She can’t stand too much of this sort of thing, so her affairs with such men don’t last long. She doesn’t begin them with any illusions about permanence, or even about temporary domestic arrangements; the days are gone when she could believe that if only she could climb into bed with a man and pull the covers over both their heads, they would be safe.
However, she often likes these men and thinks that something is due them, and so she continues to see them afterwards, which is easy because, her separations from them are never unpleasant, not any more. Life is too short.
Yvonne sits across from the man, at a table in a small restaurant, holding onto the tablecloth with one hand, below the table where he can’t see it. She’s listening to him with her customary interest, head tilted. She misses him intensely; or rather, she misses, not him, but the sensations he used to be able to arouse in her. The light has gone out of him and now she can see him clearly. She finds this objectivity of hers, this clarity, almost more depressing than she can bear, not because there is anything hideous or repellant about this man but because he has now returned to the ordinary level, the level of things she can see, in all their amazing and complex particularity, but cannot touch.
He’s come to the end of what he’s been saying, which had to do with politics. Now it’s time for Yvonne to tell him a joke.
“Why is pubic hair curly?” she says.
“Why?” he says; as usual, he attempts to conceal the shock he feels at hearing her say words like pubic. Nice men are more difficult for Yvonne than pigs. If a man is piggish enough, she’s glad to see him go.
“So you won’t poke your eyes out,” says Yvonne, clutching the tablecloth.
Instead of laughing he smiles at her, a little sadly. “I don’t know how you do it,” he says. “Nothing ever bothers you.”
Yvonne pauses. Maybe he’s referring to the fact that, in their withdrawal from each other, there were no frantic phone calls from her, no broken dishes, no accusations, no tears. She’s tried all these in the past and found them lacking. But maybe he wanted those things, as proof of something, of love perhaps; maybe he’s disappointed by her failure to provide them.
“Things bother me,” says Yvonne,
“You have so much energy,” he goes on, as if he hasn’t heard her. “Where do you get it from? What’s your secret?”
Yvonne looks down at her plate, on which there is half an apple and walnut and watercress salad and a crust of bread. To touch his hand, which is there in plain view, on the tablecloth a mere six inches away from her wine glass, would be to put herself at risk again, and she is already at risk. Once she delighted in being at risk; but once she did everything too much.
She looks up at him and smiles. “My secret is that I get up every morning to watch the sunrise,” she says. This is her secret, though it’s not the only one; it’s only the one that’s on offer today. She watches him to see if he’s bought it, and he has. This is enough in character for him, it’s what he thinks she’s really like. He’s satisfied that she’s all right, that there will be no trouble, which is what he wanted to know. He orders another cup of coffee and asks for the bill. When it comes, Yvonne pays half.
They walk out into the March air, warmer than usual this year, a fact on which they both comment. Yvonne avoids shaking hands with him. It occurs to her that he is the last man she will ever have the energy to love. It’s so much work. He waves good-bye to her and gets onto a streetcar and is borne away, towards a set of distant stoplights, along tracks that converge as they recede.
Near the streetcar stop there’s a small flower shop where you can buy one flower at a time, if one flower is all you want. It’s all Yvonne ever wants. Today they have tulips, for the first time this year, and Yvonne chooses a red one, the inside of the cup an acrylic orange. She will take this tulip back to her room and set it in a white bud vase in the sunlight and drink its blood until it dies.
Yvonne carries the tulip in one hand, wrapped in its cone of paper, held stiffly out in front of her as if it’s dripping. Walking along past the store windows, into which she peers with her usual eagerness, her usual sense that maybe, today, she will discover behind them something that will truly be worth seeing, she feels as if her feet are not on cement at all but on ice. The blade of the skate floats, she knows, on a thin film of water, which it melts by pressure and which freezes behind it. This is the freedom of the present tense, this sliding edge.
Yvonne is drawing another man. As a rule, she draws only men who fall well within the norm: they dress more or less conventionally, they turn out, when asked, to have jobs recognized and respected by society, they’re within ten years of her own age, shooting either way. This one is different.
She began to follow him about three blocks past the flower shop, trotting along behind him – he has long legs – with her tulip held up in front of her like a child’s flag. He’s young, maybe twenty-three, and on the street he was carrying a black leather portfolio, which is now leaning against the wall by her door. His pants were black leather too, and his jacket, under which he was wearing a hot-pink shirt. His head is shaved up the back and sides, leaving a plume on top, dyed fake-fur orang-outang orange, and he has two gold earrings in his left ear. The leather portfolio means that he’s an artist or a designer of some sort; she suspects he’s a spray-painter, the kind that goes around at night and writes things on brick walls, things like crunchy granola sucks and Save Soviet Jews! Win Big Prizes! If he ever draws at all, it’s with pink and green fluorescent felt pens. She’d bet ten dollars he can’t draw fingers. Yvonne’s own renderings of fingers are very good.
In the past she’s avoided anything that looked like another artist, but there’s something about him, the sullenness, the stylistic belligerence, the aggressive pastiness and deliberate potato-sprouting-in-the-cellar lack of health. When she caught sight of him, Yvonne felt a shock of recognition, as if this was what she’d been looking for, though she doesn’t yet know why. She ran him to earth outside a submarine shop and said her piece. She expected a rejection, rude at that, but here he is, in her studio, wearing nothing at the moment but his pink shirt, one bloodless leg thrown over the arm of the wine velvet chair. In his hand is the tulip, which clashes violently with the shirt and the chair and his hair, which all clash with each other. He’s like a welding-shop accident, a motorcycle driven full tilt into a cement wall. The look he’s focussing on her is pure defiance, but defiance of what? She doesn’t know why he agreed to come with her. All he said was, “Sure, why not?” with a look she read as meaning that she totally failed to impress him.
Yvonne draws, her pencil moving lightly over his body. She knows she has to go quickly or he will get restless, he will escape her. She can put the tulip in later, when she paints him. Already she’s decided to paint him; he will be her first real painting for years. The tulip will become a poppy; it’s almost the right colour anyway.
She’s only down to the collar-bone, half visible under the open shirt, when he says, “That’s enough,” and pulls himself out of the chair and comes over and stands behind her. He puts his hands on her waist and presses himself against her: no preliminaries here, which would suit Yvonne fine – she likes these things to be fast – except that she’s uneasy about him. None of her usual mollifications, coffee, music, gratefulness, have worked on him: he’s maintained a consistent level of surliness. He’s beyond her. She thinks of Al and Judy’s cat, the black one, and the time it got its foot caught in the cord of her Venetian blind. It was so enraged she had to throw a towel over it to get it untangled.
“That’s art,” he says, looking over her shoulder.
Yvonne mistakes this for a compliment, until he says, “Art sucks.” There’s a hiss in the last word.
Yvonne gasps: there is such hatred in his voice. Maybe if she just stands there nothing will happen. He turns away from her and goes to the corner near the door: he wants to show her what he’s got in his portfolio. What he does are collages. The settings are all outdoors: woods, meadows, rocks, seashores. Onto them he has pasted women, meticulously cut from magazines, splayed open-legged torsoes with the hands and feet removed, sometimes the heads, over-painted with nail polish in various shades of purple and red, shiny and wet-looking against the paper.
Yet as a lover he is slow and meditative, abstracted, somnambulant almost, as if the motions he’s going through are only a kind of afterthought, like a dog groaning in a dream. The violence is all on the cardboard; it’s only art, after all. Maybe everything is only art, Yvonne thinks, picking her sky-blue shirt up off the floor, buttoning it. She wonders how many times in the future she will find herself doing up these particular buttons.
When he’s gone out, she locks the door behind him and sits in the red velvet chair. It’s herself she’s in danger from. She decides to go away for a week. When she comes back she will buy a canvas the size of a doorway and begin again. Though if art sucks and everything is only art, what has she done with her life?
In her medicine cabinet Yvonne keeps several bottles of pills, which she has collected from doctors on one pretext or another over the years. There was no need to do this, to go through the rigmarole of prescriptions, since anything you want is available on the street and Yvonne knows who from; yet the prescriptions gave her a kind of sanction. Even the actual pieces of paper, with their illegible Arabic-textured scrawls, reassured her, much as a charm would if she believed in them.
At one time she knew exactly how many pills to take, of which kinds, at which precisely timed intervals, to keep from either throwing up or passing out before the right dose had been reached. She knew what she would say ahead of time to fend off those who might otherwise come looking for her, where she would go, which doors she would lock, where and in what position she would lie down; even, and not least importantly, what she would wear. She wanted her body to look well and not be too troublesome to those who would eventually have to deal with it. Clothed corpses are so much less disturbing than naked ones.
But lately she’s been forgetting much of this arcane knowledge. She should throw the pills out: they’ve become obsolete. She’s replaced them with something much simpler, more direct, faster, more failure-proof, and, she’s been told, less painful. A bathtub full of warm water, her own bathtub in the bathroom she uses every day, and an ordinary razor blade, for which no prescriptions are necessary. The recommendation is that the lights be turned out, to avoid panic: if you can’t see the spreading red, you hardly know it’s there. A stinging at the wrists, like a minor insect. She pictures herself wearing a flannel nightgown, printed with small pink flowers, that buttons up to the neck. She has not yet bought this.
She keeps a razor blade in her paintbox; it could be for slicing paper. In fact she does slice paper with it, and when it gets dull she replaces it. One side of the blade is taped, since she has no desire to cut her fingers by accident.
Yvonne hardly ever thinks about this razor blade and what it’s really doing in her paintbox. She is not obsessed with death, her own or anybody else’s. She doesn’t approve of suicide; she finds it morally distasteful. She takes care crossing the street, watches what she puts into her mouth, saves her money.
But the razor blade is there all the time, underneath everything. Yvonne needs it there. What it means is that she can control her death; and if she can’t do that, what control can she ever possibly achieve over her life?
Perhaps the razor blade is only a kind of memento mori, after all. Perhaps it’s only a pictorial flirtation. Perhaps it’s only a dutiful symbol, like the carnation on the desk of Holbein’s young man. He isn’t looking at the carnation anyway, he’s looking out of the picture, so earnestly, so intently, so sweetly. He’s looking at Yvonne, and he can see in the dark.
The days are getting longer, and Yvonne’s alarm clock goes off earlier and earlier. In the summers she takes to having afternoon naps, to make up for the sleep she loses to these dawn rituals. She hasn’t missed the sunrise for years; she depends on it. It’s almost as if she believes that if she isn’t there to see it there will be no sunrise at all.
And yet she knows that her dependence is not on something that can be grasped, held in the hand, kept, but only on an accident of the language, because sunrise should not be a noun. The sunrise is not a thing, but only an effect of the light caused by the positions of two astronomical bodies in relation to each other. The sun does not really rise at all, it’s the earth that turns. The sunrise is a fraud.
Today there’s no overcast. Yvonne, standing out on her deck in her too-thin Japanese robe, holds onto the wooden railing to keep from lifting her arms as the sun floats up above the horizon, like a shimmering white blimp, an enormous kite whose string she almost holds in her hand. Light, chilly and thin but light, reaches her from it. She breathes it in.