Don’t talk to the TV, Mommy, I said into the bed.
I wasn’t talking to the TV, she said.
Don’t turn it off, I said.
I think I should take you downstairs, she said.
Can I stay?
In here? With the statue? She nodded at the Maasai herder and poked his beaded loincloth.
Please? I said. They have cable.
How’s your head? Does it hurt? Headache?
No, I believe it’s quite fine, I said. I was the age at which children weave adult constructions into their speech, something overheard, something from TV, and I was also old enough to know that my mother found it endearing, and that it could thus be used to my advantage.
You’ll stay in here, then, madam? No wandering? my mother said.
I’ll stay here, I said without undue solemnity, without any affect at all. She knew I’d comply. She often said to other adults that she admired my forthrightness, that I never resorted to baby talk or whining to get what I wanted. She said I was a straight shooter. I doubt she cared whether or not I had merely figured out how to play the game to my best advantage. What was important to her was that I was no baby.
Okay, my mother said. You’ll be watching the news, I presume?
Nooo, I said.
She flipped around until she found The Odd Couple. The picture was crisp and clean.
Good? she said.
Good, I said.
You want to get under the covers?
I’m okay, I said, propped up on my elbows, already lost in the show. My mother hugged me, then looked at herself in the mirror on the back of the door. With a pinkie nail she scooped the lipstick at the corners of her mouth, floated her hair, tugged at the black turtleneck, adjusted the gold pendant against her breastbone.
You sure? she said.
What? I muttered.
You sure you don’t want me to take you home?
No, Mommy. Close the door. It’s noisy.
Please?
Please.
Get under the covers if you get cold. She glanced at the TV, the granular perfection of the images, as if the station were right next door. How many more representational permutations would they have to go through before the images became so clear they lost all recognizable form? Would there someday be an abstract channel, formless swaths of pulsing color, sounds from an auto repair shop piped in? Someday we’ll get over our childish insistence on mimesis but we’ll never get over the advertisements for disposable razors and luggage and cars with insides like Marie Antoinette’s boudoir. We’ll move forward to something better, won’t we? We’ll move forward and we’ll be in exactly the same place. That’s progress, isn’t it, a walk around the block? Progress isn’t anything but a retrospective device, anyway, a name on the wax and wane, representational overtaking abstract, abstract overtaking representational, the rules thrown out the window and the old molds broken so we can bake up something brand-new that in the end tastes suspiciously like a childhood memory. You’ll crack a tooth, Sarah. Don’t think you know how other people think. Back straight, eyes up.
The party ricocheted through the foyer, a hollow, Victrola wash, and she felt that she was acting in a TV drama, her flats clapping against the marble, as though she alone knew the true nature of existence, the depths of everyone else’s ludicrous vanity and endless pursuit of distraction. The foyer was filling with people, yet she stopped in front of the Mitchell and backed away from it, nearly to the door, so that the paint no longer moved like electrons but formed larger, sweeping planes of color. She hated the word beautiful and she hated the limitations of her intelligence, which always tried to turn everything into words that she could convey to students or to Erwin, when what was on the wall was indescribable. To reduce it to a linguistic description was to destroy it. Wasn’t that the hallmark of good work, anyway? A thing that could be only itself, a thing that defied adaptation or explanation?
What is it about us, she wondered, that compels us to speak the most on subjects about which we know the least? Is it because language is how we exercise our misunderstanding? Once we understand something, we don’t talk about it anymore—we set it in action. Even Jefferson, declaring those truths he claimed to be self-evident, was speaking to a point of personal contention, giving voice to an argument within himself, an argument with his god. All men created equal? Surely not in the tobacco fields. Surely not at Monticello.
Someone had taken off Iggy Pop and put on the White Album, “Dear Prudence” droning along peacefully while my mother alternated between meditation on the painting and arguing with the rowdy, disagreeable visitor parked at the kitchen table in her mind. Shouldn’t she be able to look at a painting without ruining it? What the hell kind of painter was she, who couldn’t simply experience a work of art? Too many years of practice. Her muscles had warped and knotted to perform the specific task of disassembly and now there was no other way to see. There was no other way to paint, either, and that was why Mitchell, and not Saltwater, was hanging on the wall, no matter what Jane said about not mixing money and friendship. The Mitchell was better.
6.
The more weed he smoked, the more people Bo called. By the time I’d fallen asleep, the party had become a sweeping, pulsing organism that had oozed into every room of the penthouse, consuming whatever lay in its path, vacuuming up all the drugs, all the food, all the liquor, the people. And as it
