a bench, where she was safe to gesticulate. I tried to let myself feel it, the way Claire did. Things that weren't there, that might not be there.
'See,' she said, quietly, keeping her eye on the guard. 'The yellow comes toward you, the blue moves away. The yellow expands, the blue contracts.'
The red, the yellow, this well of dark green — expanding, contracting, still pools with bleeding edges, an angle like a fist. A boy and a girl, arms around each other's shoulders, drifted past the pictures, like they were passing shopwindows.
'And see how he takes the edge away from the frame, making an asymmetrical edge?' She pointed to the lemon ribbon curving the left side.
I had heard people say things like this in museums, and had always thought they were just trying to impress their friends. But this was Claire, and I knew she really wanted me to understand. I stared at the painting, the angle, the ribbon. So much going on in Kandinsky, it was like the frames were having trouble keeping the pictures inside.
In another gallery, Claire stopped in front of a bunch of pencil sketches. Lines on paper, angles and circles, like pickup sticks and tiddlywinks. Like what you'd doodle while you were talking on the telephone.
'See this angle?' She pointed at a sharp angle in pencil, and then gestured over to the massive composition that all the sketches and oil studies led up to. 'See it?' The angle dominated the canvas.
She drew my attention to various elements of the pencil sketches, circles, arcs, and I found them in the finished composition, in vibrant red, and a deep graded blue. He had all the elements right from the start. Each sketch held its own part of the idea, like a series of keys that you had to put all together to make the safe open. If I could stack them and hold them to the light, I would see the form of the completed composition. I stared, dumbfounded at the vision.
We walked arm in arm through the show, pointing out to each other details that recurred, the abstracted horsemen, the towers, the different kinds of angles, the color changing as a form crossed another form. Mainly, it was the sense of order, vision retained over time, that brought me to my knees.
I sat on a bench and took out my sketch pad, tried to draw the basic forms. Acute angles, arcs, like the movement of a clock. It was impossible. I needed color, I needed ink and a brush. I didn't know what I needed.
'Imagine the work to assemble all this in one place,' Claire said. 'The years of convincing people to lend their artworks.'
I imagined Kandinsky's mind, spread out all over the world, and then gathered together. Everyone having only a piece of the puzzle. Only in a show like this could you see the complete picture, stack the pieces up, hold them to the light, see how it all fit together. It made me hopeful, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
We went back twice a week for the rest of the summer. Claire bought me oil pastels so I could work in color without making the guards nervous. We would spend all day in a single room, looking at one picture. I had never done that before. A composition from 1913 presaged the First World War. 'He was very sensitive. He could tell it was coming,' Claire said. The blackness, the cannons, wild, a mood so violent and dark, of course he had to invent abstraction.
The return to Russia. The exuberance of the avant-garde, but the darkening suspicion that it was coming to a close, even as it was flowering. On to the Bauhaus in the twenties. Straight lines, geometric forms. You didn't let yourself go in times like that. You tried to find some underlying structure. I understood him perfectly. Finally, the move to Paris. Pinks and blues and lavenders. Organic forms again, for the first time in years. What a relief Paris must have been, the color, the ability to be soft again.
I wondered how I would paint our times. Shiny cars and wounded flesh, denim blue and zigzagged dog teeth, bits of broken mirror, fire and orange moons and garnet hearts.
IN THE FALL I signed up for honors classes again. Claire made me think it was worth trying. Of course you took the honors classes. Of course you wore your jewelry. Of course you signed up for art classes at the museum. Of course.
In the empty studio in the basement of the art museum, we waited for the teacher, Ms. Tricia Day. My palms sweated onto the portfolio case Claire had bought me. She wanted to sign me up for an adult class in painting. There were teen courses, in photography, fabric art, video. But no painting. 'We'll go talk to the teacher,' she said.
A woman came in. Small, middle-aged, with cropped gray hair. She wore khaki pants and black horn- rimmed glasses. She looked at us wearily, an overeager mother and her spoiled kid, asking for special treatment. I was embarrassed just being there, but Claire was surprisingly businesslike. Ms. Day went through my portfolio briskly, her eyes moving in sharp lines over the surfaces. The realistic things, Claire lying on the couch, poinsettias, and the L.A. Kandinskys. 'Where have you studied?'
I shook my head. 'Nowhere.'
She finished the portfolio and handed it back to Claire. 'Okay. We'll give it a try.'
Every Tuesday night, Claire brought me to the museum, went home, and then returned three hours later to pick me up. I felt guilty for her willingness to do things for me, like I was using her. I heard my mother saying, 'Don't be absurd. She wants to be used.' But I didn't want to be like that. I wanted to be like Claire. Who but Claire would make sure I had art class, would give up a Tuesday night for me?
In art class, I learned to build a support, stretch canvas, gesso it smooth. Ms. Day had us experiment with color, with strokes. The stroke of the brush was the evidence of the gesture of your arm. A record of your existence, the quality of your personality, your touch, pressure, the authority of your movement. We painted still lifes. Flowers, books. Some of the ladies in class painted only tiny flowers. Ms. Day told them to paint bigger but they were too embarrassed. I painted flowers big as pizzas, strawberries magnified to a series of green triangles on a red ground, the patterns of the seeds. Ms. Day was spartan in her praise, blunt in her criticism. Every class there was somebody crying. My mother would have liked her. I liked her too.
I carefully edited what I wrote to my mother. Hello, how are you, how's the writing. I wrote about grades, gardening, art class, the smell of the Santa Anas and the scorched landscape, the blues of November, shortening of days. Strate A's, homecome queen. I sent her small drawings, watercolors the size of postcards, she didn't have much space. She loved the Kandinsky period, and my new work. I sent her a series of pencil drawings on onionskin paper. It was a self-portrait, but layered, a line here, a line there, one at a time, for her to figure out — she had to layer to get the whole thing. I didn't lay it out for her anymore. She had to work for it.
