The Small Backs of Children (13 page)

How a story can change in the violence of an instant. How content is a glimpse of something.

And in the end a train carries them. And a plane lifts them into the sky. On the plane the poet tells the girl the story of how she came to find her, and why. The girl listens, not catching all of what this woman is saying to her, since her English is still forming. But individual words and lines and images go into her. And the quivering in the poet’s hands when she lifts the little airplane drink up to her face again and again. And the tiny lines near her eyes that have written themselves this day. And the marks on the poet’s body that the girl knows hide violence like a skin song beneath her clothes. And the girl carries something with her as small as a seed.

The first year I lived with the American artists is a collage.

This is a house.

These are the rooms.

This one, your room.

A room of your own.

We are giving it to you.

Because we can.

This is the table of the artists, where we eat and speak and act out relations.

This is the school, the American Interdisciplinary Art School.

Isn’t it something?

This is the in-home entertainment system with Sensurround sound and these are the Mac computers and this is a cell phone with a computer and this is software to make films in the sanctity of one’s own home.

Can you believe it?

This is what’s bad: The Nixon administration. The Reagan
administration. The Bush administrations. War. Poverty. Injustice. Christians. Oil. Racists. Global warming. Homophobia. Corporations. The plight of third world nations.

This is money.

This is how we shop online.

This is Organic.

This is a haircut, makeup, jewelry, scented soaps. This is how to be a girl in this country. Pink.

I am upstairs in the painting room they created for me, in a house surrounded by firs, ferns, alders. I am the only one home. I lick the skin of my arm. Salt. Then I hear the UPS truck grumbling its way toward the house. I know it will stop here; I can see when it arrives from this wide upstairs room where I paint. It comes once a month. For years. Once a month a delivery of canvas, paper, paint, brushes, linseed oil, turpentine, art books. For me.

The deliveries come from a man who has become the exiled American painter in my mind’s eye. I have learned about him through their stories of him, how he rose to fame as an abstract painter, how he used women as if they were paint, how he shot his wife the writer. And I have read about him through my own research on the Internet, through all the media this country so lavishly spills all over everything.

It seems important to them that he is a kind of villain in their stories. This seems American.

There is something I have never told them. For seven years now, deep inside the delivery packaging, this man—the American painter—hides little notes, and I find them as I use the materials.
Sable brushes are preferable to any other—don’t waste your time with the small ones. Detail work is for Dutch dead men. Use the light from the window in the room they’ve created for you—never artificial light. Never. Take ten steps back from your work every hour or you will lose sight of it. Don’t think. Don’t know. Just paint. If you must paint with your hands, use these—latex gloves. Oil paint can kill you, for fuck’s sake.
The notes are rolled around tubes of paint or brushes, slid between pages in books, buried inside rolls of paper or written in pencil on canvas. These secret hieroglyphics from the man who shot his wife.

All I ever wanted was canvas. Even when the environment was dire.

The UPS truck is pulling up the gravel drive, through the alder trees. I close my eyes and breathe.

The second year I lived here is a mural with the images of three women on it in different states. The first woman is the writer. I saw her one morning emerging from the shower, dripping with water. A woman who suffered great loss and did not die. Baptismal.

The second image of a woman is the poet’s body before I untied her in the room of her torture, her arms outspread, her naked body carrying the trace of violence as if her wounds had been painted. Velázquez.

The third image of a woman is a girl—for there is no girl we are not always already making into a woman from the moment she is born—making a city in the dirt next to the boot of a man.
It could be rage or love in his feet. The girl could be me or any other girl.

The third year I lived here is a double portrait, like a deformed reflection.

The left side is a girl with a wolf’s paw in place of a hand. She stands naked in a pool of her own blood, her head lifted upward as she laughs a whole sky filled with snow geese and song. The right side is the writer, her journal resting in her hands, the words filling the space so that her face, her hair, her mouth, her eyes are made of language. A mother and a girl who are separate but joined.

The fourth year is a painting at the bottom of the stairs, in the living room opposite the wall that wears the famous photo of me as a child. How strange to look at one of my paintings next to this photograph of . . . is it of me? How?

My painting is different from the photo. In the photo, they say over and over again that the girl is a “victim of violence.” But in my painting, a young woman comes out of fire with a vengeance in her stare. Her stone blue eyes finding you.

The fifth and sixth years are animal: wolves turning into girls, girls turning into fire.

The seventh year is now. The painting I am making now.

To make a small pool of blood to use with paint, place a bowl between your legs, not an artificially scented wad of cotton. You must move outside what you have been told.

I am painting the spread legs of a grown woman, the mouth of her opening up to the viewer, her breasts a terrain just before her face in the distant background.

With my hands.

On a six-feet-by-six-feet canvas.

In this room in a house they have given to me.

Inside her cleft will be hands.

Her hair will be woven with wolves.

The UPS truck is nearly at the house, and I am the only one here just now, so I will need to go to the door and sign for the delivery. I clean my hands with wipes, leaving the act of painting and moving into the act of looking.

I think of the canvas like a body. It is alive. It is a body and I am a body and my inner rhythms tell me how to move with this other body.

I have read about the history of painting.

There are things in my head that no one has taught me, that I have not read or seen or heard anywhere else. They come out from my hands.

For the fleshy inside of her thighs, then, I will use blood and indigo.

I turn and leave the room, making my way down the stairs of this house. The UPS truck’s little horn blows three times. My feet on each stair step look cartoonlike to me—little Nike symbols making their marks.

Are there more brands of shoes in America than there are children in the world?

Seven years I have lived with this small group of American artists. I know all their stories. The playwright’s story is the drama of a brother and sister; a family plot. The poet’s story is a relentless body. The filmmaker’s story is flex and light and
speed: action and male. The writer’s journal crosses the terrain of loss and love like a great white tundra.

The painter shot his wife and the photographer shot me, to make art.

I think art is a place where all our stories collect.

They mean to keep me safe, to give me a story that will hold me. There are many kinds of love, but there is never a love, or a life, without pain.

I mean to paint my way home. I am ready.

You must consider filmmaking. It is the dominant mode of artistic production in our time. You know more about filmmaking than most of what you were taught in school. You are the camera’s eye. You are in control of everything we see. Hear. How things are framed. What the shot-reverse-shot relationships are, what every cut is, you are shooting. You are, after all,
American
. Eternal superpower, the camera’s eye.

For the opening, you decide to move in slow motion and black-and-white. An excruciatingly beautiful girl gone to woman, walking. A girl who has toppled over into woman, her lips already in a pout between yes and no, her torso and ass breaking faith. Moving down a tree-lined city sidewalk. Fall. Her coat pulled up to the flush of her cheeks. Her hands stuffed down into pockets. Her hair making art in the wind.

Her eyes . . .

Her eyes.

Think of actresses who could fill the screen with them.

It is a remarkable passage, a symphony of aesthetics, when a girl stops walking like a girl and begins to walk like a woman.

I’m not sure anyone has ever captured that before. Perhaps we are afraid to name it, that coming of age, that passage. We’ve one great story, I suppose:
Lolita
. Several painters come to mind. Perhaps a few photographers. And of course film stars. In any case, none of it, nothing in the history of art, is quite right for this particular moment, is it? For this simple reason: she is not the object of desire now in the ways we are used to, is she? I mean, from the point of view of the American male artist she is, and from the point of view of the photographer, and maybe all the artists, but from the point of view we’re inhabiting she’s new. A man desires her more than he can stand, to be sure, and everyone who peoples her life just now desires her in one way or another, but that is not what is propelling the action or creating this plot, is what I’m saying.

It is her and you.

This has not been narrated in a previous scene, and yet, you know that blood is what’s driving her.

Blood driving her down the tree-lined sidewalk.

Blood driving her to the door of the warehouse building where the artist’s studio sits wombed among other artists’ spaces.

Blood driving her sexualized body.

You wish I would stop speaking of all this blood, but I’m afraid it’s the point.

Stop wishing it wasn’t.

Just once, the story will keep its allegiance to the body of a single woman.

Not the object of her body, but her experience of her body.

With all of history deeply up and in her.

So then. You have kept the entire scene of her walking to the door of the building in black and white. As she approaches the door to the warehouse, you give color. You give the door and her lips Alizarin crimson. And as she enters the throat of the building, more things go to color, but you filter it with a kind of midnight blue bruise tone.

You can do that kind of thing.

You can manipulate everything.

You can make meaning no matter what the reality.

American.

As she enters the cargo elevator, floor by floor, you return from slow motion to regular time.

By the time she reaches his floor, lurchingly, the speed of things is how we think we experience it in reality (forgetting everything we know).

You know, you’ve so many choices here. A letch of a middle-aged man, about to meet the image of his dreams. A familiar story.

But that’s not this story, is it?

His desire has not driven, well, anything. It’s downright impotent.

It is her desire that has begun to set the entire building on fire.

It is her action.

It is her subjectivity that is taking its fullest form—and she is not doing what we’d hoped or wanted.

She has come there in a premeditated way from the belly of history itself.

She has come to make an image take form, to complete an image of a self.

She placed herself between violence and desire.

She has come from an atomized family.

From the slobbering violence of men.

From the lost youth of a girl.

From the foreign hopes born between women.

His door is ajar. He is of course there, drinking, not painting. He is thinking of painting, but the only thing he wants to paint is the girl from the photo. And so he goes to the studio every day and drinks himself into oblivion and either sleeps in his own excess or stumble-fucks his way back home. I don’t know how these people stay alive, but they do. They do. And then they don’t.

How you frame it is all in her hands.

She takes her right hand out of her coat pocket and you move to slow motion again. Her hand then takes up the entire shot, larger than life. Her hand (with blood-red traces) pushes the door open as if she is moving gender itself.

He turns and looks at her, but the camera’s point of view is hers, not his, and so he looks small and puzzled, like a circus midget, at first. Then he looks like a tiny symbol of a man whose prayers have been answered, and he lowers his head, and no I am not kidding, he cries. Huge heaves like a kid. He cries and cries.

You will think there are pages missing, whole scenes.

But there are no pages or scenes missing.

This is the room of art.

Your life rules do not apply here.

Hold still.

I have related this earlier, but I will remind you: the first thing he says, the first words out of his mouth are, I have been painting you.

There is no conversation about this.

There is nothing that . . . confuses her or hoodwinks her or overpowers her.

She simply removes her clothes—and how you film this is mostly through color and odd angled blur, a little abstract and almost underwater looking—until she is nude there before him, except that again it is not his point of view, so it is not really
before him,
and to the audience it looks like some mythic woman god taking up nearly the entire frame except for the almost-cowering man in the lower-right-hand corner.

A miniature man of a man. Twitchy and nervous and simian.

Her body is enormous and milk-blue-aqua.

It almost glows.

You fill the screen with her out-of-focus back and ass and oceans of blond hair. And you take a further risk: you let the camera linger there, with the little monkey of a man frantically painting in the small right-lower corner, for an enormously long time.

It isn’t very dramatic how they come to each other. It’s actually rather simple: His erratic monkey-man gestures finally overtake him and he lunges at her and she absorbs him, like energy disappearing into its opposite.

She laughs, but the sound is loving, not mocking.

For four days, they wrestle-fuck—what is making love—what has it ever been—what is it in this moment—violent “making”—on the floor in the paint and the sweat and the secretions of a male body and a female body. They eat and drink minimally, mostly alcohol and water and pretzels and oranges.

A word about mouths and hands.

You will have to work hard to figure out a way to do credit to this on film. Because the fact is, their devouring mouths and their uncontrollable hands are much more important than their genitals. This has never been filmed before, nor captured in writing, but it is the truth beneath the lie of what usually passes for the “sex scene,” and all I am doing is naming it.

This may not be true for everyone, but it is true for them: that their mouths and their hands are the center. The absolute fulcrum from which all energy emerges. And every other organ or opening is simply an extension or metaphor.

It goes without saying that they both bleed, numerous times.

Biting, scratching, tearing, cutting.

It goes without saying that they paint together with blood.

Four days.

A bloody, messy lovemaking.

That’s it. That’s the scene.