The Ghost Brush (61 page)

It’s true. People do not see with the eyes they have been given.

Blindness I knew in my lifetime. The blind were singled out pitilessly, restricted, herded together. A blind man was one who must have sinned in a previous life. A blind man, or woman, was living a punishment. I hated the blind. Unfairly. Irrationally. Why? Because I believed they were indifferent to beauty. Beauty was everything, all my pleasures. Ugly though I was. Hah! You’ve got to laugh.

What did I learn in the end? That not only the sightless are blind. Many people are. Most people are. Even people who look at art. Especially people who look at art. They pride themselves on their connoisseurship, but they are blind. Maybe it is punishment for the pride they take in their connoisseurship. Much of what their eyes take in, they ignore. They see with their ears, with their rusty brains, with their suspicions, with their beliefs. Sometimes false beliefs.

But look here. See what I found: this Rebecca person; no one special, just a woman who liked pictures. No real opinions on art, and if she had them, she wouldn’t trust them. But here’s the joy: she doesn’t trust anyone else’s either. She trusts her eyes. She sees.

I opened my cracked lips. The half-forgotten words rattled up my dry throat, this serpentine neck that my father drew for the ghost of the servant woman who was thrown in the well for breaking the plates. A neck-stack of pottery discs, clattering.

“Pssst. Hey, you!”

Seeing her freeze I almost choked on my plates. And then, because I had no other words, I used the call that had been reserved for the Old Man, for our mutual hollering, our street-vendor talk, our private (by virtue of being public) language. Ridiculous words. Coarse words, outdated, not understood. What words would have been better? What words did we have in common?

“Hey, hey. How about it?”

She had no idea where the voice came from. She went absolutely still. She pressed her lips together. She blushed.

It made me laugh. A croaking, ribald, too-loud laugh.

In my day women spoke in high and childish tones. I didn’t. My voice was not meek, or saucy like a courtesan’s. It was husky and strong; a little bit grainy, but not without charm, I hoped. It was a voice that had been smoking and a voice that had its own mind.

She cocked her head. She didn’t understand.

“Excuse me? What did you say?”

Rebecca lowered her chin discreetly and cast her eyes to one side and then the other without turning her head. Nobody there. The other visitors appeared not to have heard.

She looked back at the print, at the ghost coming out of her well. She wanted to lift it off the wall and look behind it to see if there was a speaker box. But of course if she did, security would get her. She edged closer. She was afraid of looking stupid, but she was sure she was being summoned. She took a few steps back, as if trying to get a perspective. Was it a public announcement? Emboldened, she scanned the room. No one had heard.

She was flustered.

I tried to call again. This was it. Come on, Oei. Speak! I couldn’t. Oh, come on, I cursed. Don’t stop now: this is urgent. But my voice went down the drain. What was happening? I was sinking. Other sounds rose—a silky, crooning voice; the twangs of a plucked koto; shouts to a beast or a child; pounding wooden clogs; a hollow temple bell. I had invoked my whole world. And it was swallowing me. Just the way it had.

R
ebecca was astounded.

“That painting spoke to me,” she said indignantly. “That painting is making noises.” She could hear water lapping and a boat banging against a wooden dock.

A man with a briefcase was standing beside her. She hadn’t looked at him. He could have been the man from the airplane, or another one; he had much the same worn, seen-it-all, half-interested eyes. She waited for him to comment, to reassure her or laugh with her. But he just widened his eyes slightly, as if she were trying to pick him up. He should be so lucky. He continued to look very deliberately at the painting, and then he slid away.

Rebecca blushed more. Her forehead and the back of her neck grew moist. Why did she say that? Then she rolled her eyes. Really, who cared? The guy obviously had no imagination. She looked around again. She realized that she was overexcited. Zen, she counselled herself.

She lowered her chin and put a hand to her brow, the thumb on one temple and the middle finger on the other. She pressed into the outside of her eye sockets. She was hearing things. Perhaps that rough landing at Dulles last night? Perhaps her devotion to the art of the ukiyo-e had gone too far?

The clatter began to recede.

The presence—because there was a presence, somehow raw and forceful and insistent and . . . Was that the smell of tobacco? No smoking—this is an art gallery. Yes, the presence was fading.

Relieved but unsettled, Rebecca raised her chin and moved on along the wall.

T
HINK WHITMAN
: “I am large, I contain multitudes.” So did Hokusai. He contained the burgeoning, birthing city of Edo. Then he went beyond it, to the mountains, the seaside. In his seventies and eighties, the old painter never stopped experimenting. He inventoried bridges and waterfalls and Buddhist saints in the clouds. Demonic, he spun through all his previous styles. He soared and crowed, a human sinking in beauty and blood and rivers, beasts and pilgrims. Tigers prowled and gods came down from heaven with writing brush in hand.

There were demons suspended in air, swirling in fabric. But their faces were real and fleshy—the noses squat and full-nostrilled, the eyebrows knotted, the fingers long and agile. As Hokusai aged, a certain intense, single-focused image with a burnished look of perfect technique showed up more and more often. In those works, the colour was heavy and deep, and the figures clustered on an empty background. In others, the figures were loosely cast as part of the dominating landscape. Sometimes a wild, shaky hand was at work. Other times the brush hand was so sharp that the pictures were cartoonish, like animation. He was spinning out of control here. And then there, the control was almost unbearably tight. The man was more than versatile, Rebecca began to think: he had a split personality.

She was at the very end of the exhibit. The last paintings of Hokusai’s life hung here. She stood in front of Tiger in Snow—a tiger seemingly weightless, his giant, curling claws extended in sympathy with the pine needles protruding from snow clumps weighing down the branches. Snow was in the air too, a luminous shower of smaller and larger dots on the silk—uncannily like the effect you get now when you take flash photographs into a fall of snow. The tiger had that characteristic fat face—squat nose; smug, closed lips; blissful, contained, bulky but without heaviness; padded, almost.

“Thought to be a self-portrait,” she read. “Painted in his final year, at age eighty-nine.”

Her eyebrows went up. “Eighty-nine? Are you kidding?” she muttered. She had looked at picture after picture. They were lovely, and they were familiar; many she had seen in books. But the tiger bounding though snow was new to her. It was a painting, which set it apart from the prints. It was bounding, gleeful with emotion. It was not airy and not documentary, not intending to record the ways of the tiger—an imaginary creature, in any case, to the Japanese. This creature had a god-like weightlessness and a languid power, and it almost smiled.

“Isn’t it incredible that an old man could paint this?” she said. “Those delicate, fine hairlines on the tiger’s fur and whiskers? Imagine his hand, without a tremor, with such exactitude, making each hair. It is so uncannily perfect—it’s almost like animation. It’s bizarre . . .”

The man with the briefcase was, coincidentally, close by.

“I agree,” he said this time.

“
Incredible is the word for it,” I said dryly. I had found my voice, and some vocabulary.

Rebecca was ready for it. She stuck out her bottom lip. Stubborn, I guess.

“All right, who are you?” she said.

I shut up.

She narrowed her eyes. “I know you’re there.”

I wavered around on my neck-stalk, wondering what to do next. What I would be able to do.

“Well, anyway I do love this one,” Rebecca said, quite calmly, considering. Then she put her head down and headed for the exit.

“What the hell?” Rebecca said out in the sunlight. “What the hell was that?” The whole event—the exhibition, the heard voice of the ghost, the tiger in the snow, and the way she herself had blurted—was scary. She couldn’t grasp it and she couldn’t shake it, and she just wanted to get out of there.

S
HE HAD A DATE WITH HER FRIENDS
John and Karen later that evening. They owned a secondhand bookstore on M Street called Bartleby’s. They had all met in prenatal class when Karen and Rebecca were both pregnant with their first-borns. Rebecca took a taxi across town. It jolted to a halt at every light, giving her time to see the Watergate building, Rock Creek Park—places she’d all but forgotten. It passed within a block of the house she’d lived in when she was first married. Then it stopped, barely long enough for her to tug her coat out of the door, where it seemed to be caught.

“Ugh!” she said, nearly tripping.

“Sorry,” I said, slipping out after her.

Bartleby’s, on the second floor, was small and tidy for a bookshop: the ceiling was high and the shelves of books reached right to it. Timid customers skulked between rows. Old posters crammed every bit of wall space. There was the smell of old leather and faint damp, and a warm silence, the air still and rich with the feel of written words, worlds stowed in those closed volumes. Rebecca walked slowly amongst the shelves. She loved the store—its bright order, its dignity, the comfort in its old things, its big windows looking down on the broad sidewalk of wandering shoppers.

So did I.

The taxi ride was wicked too. I was so pleased that I’d chosen this woman, this Rebecca. It felt right. And the bookstore—it took me back. Friends of mine had owned just such stores. Of course, in Edo it would have been even smaller, the space above our heads filled with prints pinned like laundry to lines of string. It would have smelled not of dust and slightly musty paper, as this one did, but of ink and coal and sawdust that had been laid on the floor with a wet mop.

Oh, happy day.

I
n the middle of Bartleby’s, at a paper-strewn desk with cash register and computer, sat a large man tapping keys. Rebecca watched in silence. John was a child of the sixties, a high school dropout, a former street kid, self-educated and vastly well read. He had built up the business when there was a thirst for books. Only a few feet away was Karen—thin with a long red mane. She had been a flower child in the eighties, a generation late.

John looked up over the computer screen, his thick brown hair and beard leaving only a little white space around his eyes and nose. He’d been happy to hear from her. He had once been shy and shambling but now looked distinguished, in the centre of his empire.

“Hi! It’s me.” Rebecca smiled, hands hanging at her sides. There was an awkward moment. It was brave, really, to revisit people from a stage in life that was over. Others might have let it die. She had been married and was no longer. They had all been intent on family then. Karen and John had made theirs work, and Rebecca hadn’t. Her birth coach—he of the tennis balls for back labour, the Snugli to carry the baby on Saturday mornings, the bottle to replace the breast milk—was out of the picture now. Decades had passed.

But the discomfort vanished. Everyone jumped forward at once.

“How long has it been? Don’t even start!” John was heavier and Karen was grey, and God knows Rebecca had changed. The women hugged and squealed and John looked on, tapping his chin, smiling somewhere inside that facial hair. “What brings you?”

“I’m looking at pictures. The Hokusais.”

John had seen the exhibit. “Fabulous.”

She nodded slowly.

“So you’ve got yourself a new project?” They remembered about Rebecca’s projects, then.

“Not necessarily. Just looking.” And then, because she knew they would never ask, she said, “But I do have a new man.”

“You do?” Hands on hips, John looked sceptical. A customer came up. “You’ll have to tell us when we get out of here.”

“How are your kids?” said Karen.

They gravitated to the computer and tapped into their childrens’ websites. Rebecca’s son, Mike, swam up on the screen holding a beer mug in a row of grinning faces, over and over. Here was New Zealand, there Australia; more grins, more beer. Hey! He went to Japan too. He loved Japan. He got into taking pictures of cherry blossoms.

Daughter Jenna materialized, her artwork and photographs. In turn, Karen and John showed off Adam boarding a bus for a tour of the continent: like his dad, he couldn’t handle school. “Oh my God, is that what he ended up looking like?” He still had the enormous head that had given Karen so much trouble. Sarah was born later, after Rebecca had moved back to Toronto.

They crossed the street for dinner and ordered red wine.

“Okay, so who is the man?” said Karen as soon as she’d taken the first gulp.

“His name is Andrew. Also divorced, no kids. Also in the book trade . . .”