This Shared Dream (36 page)

The panels: shorthand. Swiftly drawn lines made emotions clear without the need for fancy verbal descriptions. The character’s background, weaknesses, foibles, were constantly expressed, as if each panel came straight from the center of the story, rather than building with the linearity of a novel. It was a new language.

But it was a scary language. Right now, even the thought of speaking it again brought back all that pain, doubt, suffering, depression, the heavy responsibility, everything that had spiraled outward from Gypsy Myra and had led her to Dallas.

Jill, not Painting Woman, pushed open the door and walked into its cool, waiting realm. Maybe she had learned something in St. E’s after all. How to surrender; the importance and power of being oneself, not many.

She roved up and down the aisles in a time-free interlude of gathering in this land of milk and honey. Unlike in her younger days, she could now afford anything—the finest watercolors, the best paper, expensive brushes analogous to a Stradivarius; pastels and oil crayons to point things up. Good tools that would faithfully reflect her thoughts. The cashier’s face registered astonishment as she rang up the bill, and a young man helped her carry everything out to a taxi.

The taxi stopped at her mansion of flowers and wicker chairs and Zen poems, of Bette’s school and cool stone grotto by the creek coupled with Sam’s cool jazz, of Megan and Brian running up and down stairs, letting screen doors slam, of her father loosening his tie as he strode in the door after work and flinging it on the polished cherry table in the foyer and finding Bette, wherever she was, grabbing her around the waist, and kissing her deep and hard, every single afternoon, exclaiming “Doll
baby
!” Yes, the house was alive again.

It took Jill a while to carry everything upstairs to her old room. Then, she passed out in her old bed wearing all her clothes, including her shoes, while delicious, overwhelming, color infused her with paradise, complete.

The honking horn of Whens’ school van woke her an hour later.

She was disoriented for a moment, but that didn’t stop her from running down the stairs, opening the front door, and waving to the driver.

The evening passed pleasantly, with Whens so obedient and charming that Jill would have suspected something had he been older. After a perfunctory fuss at bedtime, he was soon asleep. Jill was at his side, falling in the space between waking and sleeping into the replenishing nourishment of Beauty.

*   *   *

Jill awoke to full, lucid, refreshed consciousness.

The only problem was that it was three o’clock in the morning. Crap.

She wondered if a sound had awakened her, someone trying to break into the house. But Manfred was lying on the floor, peacefully asleep. She eased out of bed, careful not to disturb Whens.

Manfred, instantly awake, followed Jill.

As she prowled the house, Jill wasn’t sure what to do if she found someone there. Maybe Brian was right. Maybe she was just nervous about being here alone.

But finally, she declared to herself that everything was clear. She was just having a case of her regular old insomnia.

Then she realized that it was more than that. It was work time.

This had always been Painting Woman’s favorite time to work. Somehow, in this dark no-time, while stars spiraled overhead, it was easier to access the interstices, to investigate strangeness, to lay down lines of words or pictures, to create these messages from the present to some future.

She made herself a pot of oolong tea and took it up to her old room. The evidence of rough and smooth paper riffling through her fingers convinced her she was awake. Choosing a sheet of medium-slick paper, the paper on which she had pen-and-inked her Madwoman of Time comic, she wondered: Was another installation coming on?

She smiled, recalling Elmore in those days, then frowned. Elmore couldn’t even remember them. Denied them, and therefore, that they had ever fallen in love, caught up in the heady times and their shared commitment to social justice.

As she rummaged in the small top drawer for a clean nib, inserted it into the nib-holder, and opened a jar of India ink, she finally felt the ache of loss that the therapist had told her would come at some point. But it was not just that he’d forgotten their shared past—in this world, he simply hadn’t shared it. Maybe she was silly to think that this made him much poorer in spirit than the Elmore she’d known before. She missed him so! Lavender Lady had no right to him!

She laughed at her thought, then broke into sobs and hugged herself; staggered around and leaned against the doorway until it passed.

Then she hurried down the hall, through ghosts of three kids, and her dad shaving before work as the radio sang “Citizen’s Bank of Maryland conveniently yours,” and yanked the bathroom’s chain light. As large as a suburban bedroom, tiled with tiny black-and-white hexagons, it held the old easy chair where Bette had leaned forward as she watched her kids splash in the slipper tub, next to the tall window admitting the drone of cicadas, and Sam’s moonlight-drenched garden.

When Jill opened the faucet to splash cold water on her face, the pipes shuddered and moaned. She rubbed her face dry and was ready: but for what? Not Gypsy Myra.

But once she was back in her room, it became immediately clear. Painting Woman had awakened. Jill’s walkabout the previous afternoon had been Painting Woman’s yawn, stretch, and coffee interlude, and then she had stocked up with the breakfast and vitamin infusion of materials.

She was, of course, not a separate entity within Jill. But she was a part of Jill’s persona that she had buried. Doing art—penning the Gypsy Myra comics—had led to the complete disintegration of her world, literally. No wonder she had stopped paying attention to Painting Woman’s urges and demands.

Maybe, Jill speculated, she was stronger now, able to bear and allow Painting Woman her rightful place in the physical world, her own means of expression, because of her breakdown. Yes, that sounded like suitable therapy-speak. At any rate, she had tried ignoring her, using the time-honored method of Getting on with Her Life. That had been ever so successful. Allowing felt much, much better.

Jill moved pots of dead plants from her weathered oak painting table, sent the remaining dry leaves flying with an old T-shirt, and eagerly unpacked her bags of loot.

Dr. Ph. Martin’s colorfast dyes, in eyedropper bottles, with seductive names like Gamboge and Rose Madder. Fifteen tubes of Dutch watercolors. Ten fine brushes of Kolinsky sable—rounds, filberts, flats, in many sizes.

Painting Woman had never registered hunger or drop-dead exhaustion. She always ignored them, and always ignored Megan and Brian frolicking around her, or her mother, trying to get her to come down to dinner or go to sleep.

She radiated ideas—mostly images, but sometimes narrative as well. Generally, Painting Woman didn’t much care what Jill did with her radiations—sell them, give them away, or toss them in a corner. She was just adamant about the need to record them. Jill imagined poets felt the same imperative urge regarding their poetry, and writers about their stories.

This night, in the old house, in her old room, as creek frogs sang and warm, damp air suffused the paper, was one of those times. She even imagined the comforting, faint scent of Bette’s cigarette, wafting up from the grotto by the creek that Sam had built for her. Bette had been an insomniac too.

Jill rummaged in the large junk drawer, found some masking tape, and taped down the edges of a sheet of watercolor paper. Theoretically, you were supposed to soak the paper in water and tape it to a board, and when it dried, it would remain flat and smooth. But Painting Woman was in a big rush, damn her. She was often wasteful. Not only that, she thought everything she suggested was perfect. Jill, on the other hand, had a moment’s anxiety about using such expensive paper for something unplanned, something that might turn out badly. But using expensive paper was always anxiety producing, whether or not she had something planned.

Jill took a moment to rummage for a water container and found an old enamel pot. Walking to the bathroom, she held Painting Woman at bay, rather like an air traffic controller telling a plane that it had to circle the airport, while Painting Woman yelled over the radio that the passengers were becoming so restless that they just might go to another airport.

It was all marvelously familiar, despite the gap of many years, and a sidestep to another world.

Jill filled the pot with water. She did need water in order to paint, she reminded Painting Woman. She couldn’t be expected to have everything ready all the time.

She switched on a small art nouveau lamp that Megan had found at a yard sale that featured rows of tiny green fish within parallel copper boundaries, and poured herself a finger of Oban Scotch from an old, dusty bottle she’d hidden from her parents ages ago.

Painting Woman always wore a long dress. Jill wore raggedy shorts and a white T-shirt, perfect for wiping her brushes. She sipped the fine Scotch.

She hated to be bossed around.

Finally, she snapped, “Okay! Okay!”

She considered the blank paper.

It was an odd weight, two-hundred pound, but handmade and cold-pressed. It had a pleasing, wavy deckle edge and was off-white, rather creamy.

A pencil was required; a sketch. All these expensive supplies, and she needed a pencil! The junk drawer had one that was from Hart’s Ice Factory on U Street. Teeth marks broke the white paint. A dog’s? A child’s?

Its line was too hard and faint. Her old pencils were here somewhere, real pencils, from 9H to 9B. Finally, she spotted them, splayed in an old jelly jar on top of her dresser.

The picture took form.

The process was not much different from the comics she had created. She saw something in her mind and drew it. It was not that she couldn’t do the elementary things that most artists did; she had taken life classes, she had set up still-life tableaus, she had painted portraits of both Brian and Megan when they were ten and twelve, and they had laughed at them quite cruelly. Jill wondered, as she drew, if the portraits were in the attic, or if they had, as threatened, used the sturdy canvases as sleds the following winter.

There was a headless statue in the foreground. Greece? A tree in front of a wall; the rear of a garden.

The garden contained chairs and tables. Soon, it contained a bar, in the background, with a roof. She determined a vanishing point, got a ruler from the drawer, and redrew.

Those were the sketchy parts, the background for the main subjects. A woman and a man, embracing.

Red,
wrote Jill on the woman’s dress.

And finally, with a mixture of dread and love, she sketched out their heads.

It was clear that the woman’s hair was blond, and, although Jill could only see the back of her head, she was Jill’s mother.

The man rested his head on top of Bette’s head, lightly, and of course, he was Sam; the weathered, sad Sam of the 1970s. But in this instant, his features were illuminated with joy. His eyes were closed, and a slight smile played across his lips. His arms held Bette tightly, crushing her dress in radiating shadows.

The flowering tree had a scent,
linden,
but Jill could not paint that. It was night; and a full moon illuminated the garden, and a light from somewhere—perhaps a house window—brightened a skewed rectangle of Bette’s dress. The brass rail of the bar had a dull glint; the shadows of the linden branches required Jill’s smallest brush. A wash of gold was too strong; she blotted it out with a paper towel, leaving a pale, almost white, yellow, which she glazed with the suggestion of bricks in moonlight.

It was about four in the morning when she realized that the painting was done.

The
Biergarten
. Was Painting Woman trying to tell her something? If so, she would have to shout much louder. Jill knew all about the
Biergarten
.

She rinsed her brushes and set them bristle-up in a glass to dry. She carried the old enamel pot downstairs to the porch and tossed paint-tinted water into the backyard, washed the white plate she had used as a palette and set it in the dish drainer, returned to her room and made sure each tube of paint was tightly capped and returned to its assigned space in her toolbox, untaped the painting, and thought she was done.

But no.

Painting Woman was only warming up.

Cicadas whirred their slow calypso of sound, ceaseless and yet varying, comforting waves of intensities and lulls. A drawing took form in a large-format sketchbook.

The Madwoman of Time.

She still wasn’t sure what had happened. She had pressed her father about it again and again, but he just wouldn’t talk about what had happened, about the day of the Kent State Massacre when she had hitchhiked into time to try and prevent Kennedy’s assassination, based on the blueprint poured into her mind by the Madwoman of Time.

Jill sketched her quickly.

She had a strong face, a large, straight nose, large, dark eyes, a wide mouth, and long, dark, curly hair.

When she’d picked Jill up outside Slapdown, Arkansas, she’d been wearing jeans—faded Levi’s 501s, actually—a light cotton, red plaid shortsleeved shirt, and scarred black pointed-toe boots. Her hair was tied back with a red bandana, and she drove a white F100 pickup truck that rattled something terrible. She’d pulled up next to Jill on the hot, narrow road that seemed to stretch to infinity, leaned over, flung open the door, and said, “Get in.”

*   *   *

“Want a beer?”

Jill looked over and saw that the woman had a bottle of beer clamped between her thighs. She shifted into high gear with eye-blurring speed. Eighty-mile-an-hour wind roared past the open wing windows, and they had to shout to be heard. The woman took a long gulp of beer and thrust it toward Jill.

“No, thanks.”

“Got some on ice in the back.”

“Uh … Want me to drive?”

The woman threw back her head and laughed. “Not quite yet, sister. Now, just look around and tell me what the hell there is to run into out here.”