After You Left(3)

Justin’s going to be working from home.

I walk over to the wardrobe, but instead of pulling out a skirt, I can only see the many shirts, trousers, jackets and suits that are lined up in perfect almost-colour-coordinated order, plus an equally orderly row of his shoes. All his stuff that he will be needing at some point. He’s going to need his stuff.

So he’ll definitely have to be back.



I emerge from the Metro station into the grey morning. I always get off one stop early so I can walk the rest of the way to the gallery. This is what I used to love before I had a husband who left me after only five days – these twenty minutes alone, walking to and from work; they were like peaceful bookends that held each day together. But today they’re just brackets around a blank. I cross the road and barely note the car horn, the person who hangs out of the window and shouts, ‘Watch where you’re going! For fuck’s sake!’ My shoes clack on the cobblestones of Grey Street. I hear them as though they’re louder than they really are, and bury myself in their rhythm. The rest of rush hour is conducting itself around me with the ‘Mute’ button on. A workman in a parked white van says, ‘Nice legs.’ Normally, I would smile. Who is immune to a compliment? But the note is suddenly there again, stopping my legs and my heart. I’ve made a terrible mistake. I can’t go on, for everyone’s sake. I’m sorry.

Cars slide by me, and people mill around me, and I am stuck here, in the middle of the street, in a different band of time. I have read it and read it until the words have blurred, like writing over writing. But I haven’t seen this before. It doesn’t say for my sake or your sake, or both of our sakes.

Clearly, there is someone else’s sake to be considered.





TWO


‘Realism is a tricky word. The artist sets up a narrative, but we have to bring our own story to it.’

The young journalist scribbles away. Whenever I give interviews, I always worry I’m going to encounter someone who knows more than I do, though that’s rarely the case. Usually, they’re like this one: young, impressible and slightly out of their depth, sent to cover a major exhibition, the first of its kind in the region’s history, when, really, they just need words on a page by 2 p.m.

‘This exhibition features two iconic, mid-twentieth-century American artists. Andrew Wyeth, who is famous for capturing the land and the people around him, and revealing the unspoken emotion of simple people and things. And Edward Hopper, who possessed an outstanding ability to identify the monumental drama of people engaged in doing nothing apparently extraordinary, or even noteworthy.’

He pauses, nods, scribbles. In the absence of a question, I press on.

‘Looking at Wyeth’s work, we find a bittersweet familiarity with things that have gone before. You are often left with the feeling that over time we have lost something; that sense of the past being slightly more perfect than the present.’ For a moment, my words give me pause. He looks at me, attentive, waiting. ‘That’s what makes Mood and Memory such a fascinating exhibition. Because we can integrate so well with the enigmatic isolation and contemplation expressed in the paintings.’

Has he got it? We’ve been at this twenty minutes and I’m not sure what’s penetrated. If only I could write his article for him. Justin says I’m a bit of a control freak.

I’ve always thought that there’s something about the pace at which art inspires the world around it to move, a devotional calm, that puts you so wholly in the moment. When you look at an awe-inspiring painting, you literally forget about everything else; you subconsciously free up space in your mind so there exists a pleasurable nothingness. I studied art more by accident than design. I needed to get a degree. I’d had no passion for any particular subject. This course had sounded fractionally less dull than most of the others. I applied, and was surprised to find I was accepted. A few other random events took me from there to here. And I’m lucky because I think I was made for this job. The slow procession of visitors through the gallery and the quiet thrum of their observations reach me like a cross between yoga and hypnotherapy. I love fancying myself living in the world the artist has created on his or her canvas. There’s something so compelling about Hopper’s uneventful subject matter, Wyeth’s hauntingly beautiful portrayal of life and the people of Maine. Something unattainable that simmers beneath the mantle of their simple lives. It pulls me in, toys with me, and refuses to let me go.

‘Which of his paintings speaks to you the most?’ the journalist asks now, out of the blue. My phone choo-choos – a text.

The pulse in my neck flicks like the wings of a trapped bird. The phone is too far away on the desk for me to see it. I try to strain, but no.

‘Wyeth’s Christina’s World,’ I say. ‘His starkly atmospheric painting of a disabled girl wearing a pink dress. Christina is on her hands and knees in a field, almost crawling toward a house far away in the distance.’ I slide the brochure across the desk, with the image on the front cover. The phone choo-choos again, pulling my eyes. ‘There are really only three elements to it – the land, the girl, the farmhouse. Yet there’s some profound hankering or tragedy that lives in her, that we need to know about her. That I need to know about her. It’s that sense of wanting to learn about someone else in order to illuminate something in oneself.’