“Yeah,” and he heard a smile shape her voice, “which is a lot of the most beautiful part. But we do other things. Remember those too. That’s cruel of me to ask when you’re going through this, isn’t it? But there’s so much you don’t see. You walk around in a world with holes in it; you stumble into them; and get hurt. That’s cruel to say, but it’s hard to watch.”
“No.” He frowned at the long dawn. “When we went up to see New-boy, did you like—” and remembered her ruined dress while he said: “At Calkins’—did you have fun?”
She laughed. “You didn’t?” Her laugh died.
Still, he felt her smile pressed on his shoulder. “It was strange. For me. It’s easy sometimes to forget I’ve got anything to do other than…well, this.”
“You talked about an art teacher once. I remember that. And the tape editing and the teaching. You paint too?”
“Years ago,” she countered. “When I was seventeen I had a scholarship to the Art Students’ League in New York, five, six years back. I don’t paint now. I don’t want to.”
“Why’d you stop?”
“Would you like to hear the story? Basically, because I’m very lazy.” She shrugged in his arms. “I just drifted away from it. When I was drifting, I was very worried for a while. My parents hated the idea of my living in New York. I had just left Sarah Lawrence—again—and they wanted me to stay with a family. But I was sharing an awful apartment on Twenty-Second Street with two other girls and going part time to the League. My parents thought I was quite mad and were very happy when I wanted to go to a psychiatrist about my ‘painting block.’ They thought he would keep me from doing anything really foolish.” She barked a one-syllable laugh. “After a while, he said what I should do is set myself a project. I was to make myself paint three hours each day—paint anything, it didn’t matter. I was to keep track of the time in a little twenty-five cent pad. And for every minute under three hours I didn’t paint, I had to spend six times that amount of time doing something I didn’t like—it was washing dishes, yes. We had decided that I had a phobia against painting, and my shrink was behaviorist. He was going to set up a counter unpleasantness—”
“You had a phobia about dishwashing too?”
“Anyway.” She frowned at him in the near dark. “I left his office in the morning and got started that afternoon. I was very excited. I felt I might get into all sorts of areas of my unconscious in my painting that way…whatever that meant. I didn’t fall behind until the third day. And then only twenty minutes. But I couldn’t bring myself to do two hours of dishwashing.”
“How many dishes did you have?”
“I was supposed to wash clean ones if I ran out of dirty ones. The next day I was okay. Only I didn’t like the painting that was coming out. The day after that I don’t think I painted at all. That’s right, somebody came over and we went up to Poe’s Cottage.”
“Ever been to Robert Louis Stevenson’s house in Monterey?”
“No.”
“He only rented a room in it for a couple of months and finally got thrown out because he couldn’t pay the rent. Now they call it Stevenson’s House and it’s a museum all about him.”
She laughed. “Anyway, I was supposed to see the doctor the next day. And report on how it was going. That night I started looking at the paintings—I took them out because I thought I might make up some work time. Then I began to see how awful they were. Suddenly I got absolutely furious. And tore them up—two big ones, a little one, and about a dozen drawings I’d done. Into lots of pieces. And threw them away. Then I washed every dish in the house.”
“Shit…” He frowned at the top of her head.
“I think I did some drawing after that, but that’s more or less when I really stopped painting. I realized something though—”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he interrupted. “That was awful.”
“It was years ago,” she said. “It was sort of childish. But I—”
“It frightens me.”
She looked at him. “It was years ago.” Her face was greyed in the grey dawn. “It was.” She turned away, and continued. “But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They’re both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it. As soon as you get a problem in any one of them, the solution it gives is always to go deeper into the same system. They’re all in a rather uneasy truce with one another in what’s actually a mortal battle. Like all self-reinforcing systems. At best, each is trying to encompass the other two and define them as sub-groups. You know: religion and art are both forms of madness and madness is the realm of psychiatry. Or, art is the study and praise of man and man’s ideals, so therefore a religious experience becomes just a brutalized aesthetic response and psychiatry is just another tool for the artist to observe man and render his portraits more accurately. And the religious attitude I guess is that the other two are only useful as long as they promote the good life. At worst, they all try to destroy one another. Which is what my psychiatrist, whether he knew it or not, was trying, quite effectively, to do to my painting. I gave up psychiatry too, pretty soon. I just didn’t want to get all wound up in any systems at all.”
“You like washing dishes?”
“I haven’t had to in a long, long time.” She shrugged again. “And when I have to now, actually I find it rather relaxing.”
He laughed. “I guess I do too.” Then: “But you shouldn’t have torn up those paintings. I mean, suppose you changed your mind. Or maybe there was something good in them that you could have used later—”
“It was bad if I wanted to be an artist. But I wasn’t an artist. I didn’t want to be.”
“You got a scholarship.”
“So did a lot of other people. Their paintings were terrible, mostly. By the laws of chance, mine were probably terrible too. No, it wasn’t bad if I didn’t want to paint at all.”
But he was still shaking his head.
“That really upsets you, doesn’t it? Why?”
He took a breath and moved his arm from under her. “It’s like everything you—anybody says to me…it’s like they’re trying to tell me a hundred and fifty other things as well. Besides what they’re saying direct.”
“Oh, perhaps I am, just a bit.”
“I mean, here I am, half nuts and trying to write poems, and you’re trying to tell me I shouldn’t put my faith in art or psychiatry.”
“Oh no!” She folded her hands on his chest, and put her chin there. “I’m saying I decided not to. But I wasn’t nuts. I was just lazy. There is a difference, I hope. And I wasn’t an artist. A tape editor, a teacher, a harmonica player, but not an artist.” He folded his arms across her neck and pushed her head flat to its cheek. “I suppose the problem,” she went on, muffled in his armpit, “is that we have an inside and an outside. We’ve got problems both places, but it’s so hard to tell where the one stops and the other takes up.” She paused a moment, moving her head. “My blue dress…”
“That reminds you of the problem with the outside?”
“That, and going up to Calkins’. I don’t mind living like that—every once in a while. When I’ve had the chance, I’ve always done it rather well.”
“We could have a place like Calkins’. You can have anything you want in this city. Maybe it wouldn’t be as big, but we could find a nice house; and I could get stuff like everybody else does. Tak’s got an electric stove that cooks a roast beef in ten minutes. With microwaves. We could have anything—”
“That—” she was shaking her head—“however, is when the inside problems start. Or start to become problems, anyway. Sometimes, I don’t think I have any inside problems at all. I think I’m just giving myself something to worry about. I’m not scared of half the things half the people I know are. I’ve gone lots of places, met lots of people, had lots of fun. Maybe it is all a matter of getting the outside problems solved. Another not nice thing: When I look at you, sometimes I don’t think I have a right to think I have any problems, inside or out.”