Sweat slicks her skin. She hunts down spots on the rug with a bottle of Handy Andy spot remover, then rolls the rug to the wall. She yanks on the rubberized gloves and plunges the scrub brush into the soap pail of Spic and Span, scours the floorboards and linoleum on her hands and knees. She dumps the ashtray from the coffee table, washes it along with a coffee cup and saucer, and leaves them to dry in the dish drain. The counters are sponged, the pantry shelves. Sinks are sponged. The bathtub and toilet are pumiced clean with Old Dutch Cleanser, a crook-backed charwoman on the label chasing away dirt with a big stick. The tiles? Let Lysol do the dirty work! Even ovens can be cleaned with Easy-Off Oven Cleaner!
By the time she drops into one of the kitchen chairs and lights a cigarette, the striped shirt has blotted up so much sweat that it hangs on her like she’s just jumped into a pool. She reaches for the glass garden-green ashtray, but of course it isn’t there. She swept up its remains with the dustpan hours ago.
She eats a piece of cheese and a green apple for supper. Then steps into the shower. The hot water scalds the salty residue of the day’s sweat from her skin. Cleanses her. Toweling dry, she does not bother with anything but her pink chenille robe, even though the room is chilly because she left open the window by the fire escape when she let out the cat. The sunset is a yellow bar the color of butter.
Opening up her battered box of paints, she lays out her palette in cold colors: a greasy blue, a hunter green, a squeeze of black for midnight, and earthen colors: yellow and sulfur, and brown clay. A glob of titanium white as an anchor. At the center of the palette, she will mix her elements, the alchemist.
She drops her robe onto the floor and steps out of it.
The mirror from the bedroom door is leaned against a kitchen chair, footed by phone books. The canvas is positioned on the bridge of the easel. She stands naked and white, stripped of disguises. Bare to her past. She has screwed a pair of hundred-watt bulbs into the floor lamp and removed the shade, so it starkly illuminates her, throwing a black shadow across the floor.
She mixes an ashen-white flesh color on the palette and strikes the Dead Layer with paint.
Painting has sapped her. She feels chilled and emptied as she climbs back into the shower. There is nothing left in her. She has mixed all of herself into the paint she used to smear her naked image onto the stretched canvas. The paint will not wash off with water. If she is to clean herself of it, she must use turpentine and a rough rag or a scrub brush, but she does not. Instead she dresses in Aaron’s plaid bathrobe that still retains his scent, her hair still damp, still dripping, her skin marked by her paints. That’s when she hears the key, before the door to the apartment opens and shuts.
When she enters the living room from the bath, she finds her husband, hat still on his head, his coat hung over his arm, and his hands stuffed into his trouser pockets. He is examining the painting, his shoulders sunk. When he turns around to face her, his expression is drained, as if he’s just finished staring at a car wreck.
“So,” he says, his voice in neutral gear. “This is what you’re painting?”
Rachel picks up a pack of Camels from the sofa and lights up using a matchbook from the restaurant. Fine Dining before Curtain Time! Expelling smoke, she drops onto the sofa. Cautious. Each keeping their distance. “Apparently it is,” she answers him. Her brushes are soaking in the coffee can of turp. Chock full o’ Nuts. Her palette is a chaos of paint, crusting over. But the paint on her canvas gleams. It will take days to dry thoroughly. To dry down to the bone of the canvas.
“And so the idea is…” Aaron begins. “The idea is that
Rachel exhales, gazing at her painted image. “It’s not finished.”
“Oh. So maybe you’re still gonna paint some clothes on?”
Rachel slides her eyes over to her husband. For an instant, she mildly hates him. He’s nothing but a Jew from Flatbush, worried about what the neighbors might think. What does he know of anything?
“I dunno, honey,” he tells her in the same neutral voice, without a hint of rancor. “I think I might be in over my head with you.”
PART THREE
28.