I go back to my apartment, lie down on the floor. My body is numb, inert, without sensation. I can hardly move, I can hardly breathe. I feel as if I’m at the center of noth ingness, of a black square that is totally empty; that I’m exploding slowly outward, into the cold burning void of space. When I wake up it’s the middle of the night. I don’t know where I am. I think I’m back in my old room with the cloudy light fixture, in my parents’ house, lying on the floor because I’ve fallen out of bed, as I used to do when we had the army cots. But I know that the house has been sold, that my parents are no longer there. I have somehow been overlooked, left behind.
This is only the end of a dream. I get up, turn on the lights, make myself some hot milk, sit at the kitchen table, shivering with cold.
Until now I’ve always painted things that were actually there, in front of me. Now I begin to paint things that aren’t there.
I paint a silver toaster, the old kind, with knobs and doors. One of the doors is partly open, revealing the red-hot grill within. I paint a glass coffee percolator, with bubbles gathering in the clear water; one drop of dark coffee has fallen, and is beginning to spread.
I paint a wringer washing machine. The washing machine is a squat cylinder of white enamel. The wringer itself is a disturbing flesh-tone pink.
I know that these things must be memories, but they do not have the quality of memories. They are not hazy around the edges, but sharp and clear. They arrive detached from any context; they are simply there, in isolation, as an object glimpsed on the street is there.
I have no image of myself in relation to them. They are suffused with anxiety, but it’s not my own anxiety. The anxiety is in the things themselves.
I paint three sofas. One of them is chintz, in dirty rose; one is maroon velvet, with doilies. The one in the middle is apple-green. On the middle cushion of the middle sofa is an egg cup, five times life-size, with a broken eggshell in it.
I paint a glass jar, with a bouquet of nightshade rising out or it like smoke, like the darkness from a genie’s bottle. The stems twist and intertwine, the branches cluster with red berries, purple flowers. Scarcely visible, far back in the dense tangle of the glossy leaves, are the eyes of cats. In the daytime I go to work, come back, talk, and eat. Jon comes over, eats, sleeps, and goes away. I watch him with detachment; he notices nothing. Every move I make is sodden with unreality. When no one is around, I bite my fingers. I need to feel physical pain, to attach myself to daily life. My body is a separate thing. It ticks like a clock; time is inside it. It has betrayed me, and I am disgusted with it. I paint Mrs. Smeath. She floats up without warning, like a dead fish, materializing on a sofa I am drawing: first her white, sparsely haired legs without ankles, then her thick waist and potato face, her eyes in their steel rims. The afghan is draped across her thighs, the rubber plant rises behind her like a fan. On her head is the felt hat like a badly done-up package that she used to wear on Sundays. She looks out at me from the flat surface of paint, three-dimensional now, smiling her closed half-smile, smug and accusing. Whatever has happened to me is my own fault, the fault of what is wrong with me. Mrs. Smeath knows what it is. She isn’t telling.
One picture of Mrs. Smeath leads to another. She multiplies on the walls like bacteria, standing, sitting, flying, with clothes, without clothes, following me around with her many eyes like those 3-D postcards of Jesus you can get in the cheesier corner stores. Sometimes I turn her faces to the wall.
Chapter 61
We’re living in a larger place now, the three of us: the upper two stories of a red brick semidetached house with a sagging wooden square-pillared porch, on a side street west along Bloor. There are a lot of Italians around here. The older women, the married ones and the widows, wear black clothes and no makeup, as I used to do. When I was in the later months of pregnancy, they would smile at me, as if I was almost one of them. Now they smile at Sarah first.