CHAPTER 3
Aquatic Trillium, pretty but didn't push any personal art boundaries, was sold to an older rich couple. I did an online search, their house was worth eleven and a half million dollars. It was an architect’s dream, all soaring walls and expansive, sky-lighted ceilings. A real and true architectural artist must have been given carte blanche to create such a cohesive, elegant design, achingly exquisite in every detail. This glorious pinnacle of someone’s creativity had been featured front and center on 21st Century Design, a fancy architecture-to-die-for website. On the shores of Lake Washington, it had two docks and a dedicated boat house for jet skis. The boat house was actually incorporated into the living space of the main house; with the push of a button a wall slid back and you could literally walk from the dining table, down a few steps, get on your jet ski and speed off into the watery sunset. That James Bond idea must have delighted the architect when the owners signed off on it. The owners probably came from California, probably hadn't been here long enough to get soggy and depressed from the rain. It was reassuring to have my paintings go to imaginative people with big walls and lots of light.
I put the RX7 in neutral and glided down the long, sloping drive, past old growth trees and manicured lawn, careful to avoid the miscreant geese. The wife answered the door, clutching a small dog under one arm. She looked me up and down in a friendly way, standing there holding her large painting on my shoulder and decided I was harmless. She said let me show you where Aquatic Trillium will hang, and swung open the twelve foot, carved wood, laced copper-clad door. The door opened into a cathedral of light and towering walls. We crossed the marble floor along an intricately scrolled, gun-metal-silver metal wall and went up a sweeping staircase. I tried not to breathe hard as the large painting got heavier, tried not to sweat. Luckily, she went first. At the top of the stairs we turned right.
I don’t know what happened after that. I seemed to go into a dream, ceased to exist in this reality. Amazement had short-circuited my brain. We had entered what looked like a Roman bath house. This bathroom—their seventh—had not been in the magazine's photo spread. Maybe it was the owners' special secret. It was bigger than my apartment, sprawled across the entire upper floor. Vertical windows looked out onto Lake Washington. Tiled ceiling archways curved high overhead while white tile marched the floor away in a Renaissance perspective. Built-in shelving created a sleek architectural line against two dozen, tightly rolled Caribbean-blue towels, each nestled in its own diamond-shaped space. Massive silver arching faucet fixtures echoed the overhead patterns. Four glass showers and three freestanding bathtubs with lion’s paw silver feet—how many people lived here?
Far away, barely visible, past the sparkling Renaissance tile was a huge bedroom. Its east-facing windows looked out onto Lake Washington, watery reflections rippled patterns across the ceiling and walls, warbled the sun's gold onto bedspread and furniture. I forgot I was holding a forty pound painting. Bowing her head, she kissed the still-clutched, furry, small dog, its tiny eyes black as a shark's. It squirmed, all happy, and showed its pink gums over tiny, sharp teeth. We both ignored the tinkling sound as its pee hit the tile. She turned back to where we had been, gestured to the entrance wall at the top of the stairs—the foyer of the bathroom—and said won’t Aquatic Trillium look wonderful here. All those huge white walls below us, those spectacular heights of marbled conspicuous consumption, and this was where my painting would hang. I couldn't believe it. It was a fine wall, although constrained, and it had directional lighting. But it led to toilets. You wouldn't see my painting unless you were heading for bed or had excrement on your mind. An entryway to a bathroom, and exactly the same color as her towels. When her interior designer decided sapphire azure was better, what would become of my painting? I drove home, feeling beat up.
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Strewn with papers, the classroom smelled of pencils and vague unease. Heads were bowed in concentration, earnestness commingled with anxiety. It was the sixties and there was a lot of testing going on during that era of experimentation, trying new ways to teach more effectively and new ways to judge its success. The teacher handed out our scores from taking tests the week before, saying each individual’s results were his or hers alone and weren’t to be revealed. Then she handed out lookalike graph paper to chart the numbers. Across the top were the words math, English, spatial recognition, and a dozen other esoteric quantifiers, while down the side were percentage numbers. We were to transcribe what was on our individual results page onto the graph, blacken the bubbles with a graphite pencil, then draw a line left to right, connecting the dots. The line should zigzag like a sawblade or like a slumbering giant who snored with a crayon in his mouth.
Take your time, as long as necessary, it was important. Finally, all my numbers were charted, neat dots across the page. I connected them as instructed and felt a rising sense of fear. My graph didn’t zigzag, it was a straight line across the top. Something was wrong. What did I do wrong? I surreptitiously looked left and right. Everybody’s graphs were erratic, a sleeping crayon-drooling giant’s, everybody’s except mine. My straight line was the ninety-ninth percentile, of everything. I asked the teacher why there wasn't a one hundredth percentile, surely I’d zigzag then; but she was speechless, so I left, late for band practice and embarrassed by my uninteresting, monolithic line.
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An art patron named Everly brought her husband and three well-groomed, expressive children to my studio. I wore good clothes and played the part, described paintings, process, and showed them all four floors of the Iliad. They gasped with pleasure and bought Night Hills because it matched their Persian rugs. I took the painting off the wall and placed it under a skylight so they could better see its color nuances and lively textures. They leaned her cell phone with photos of the Persian rugs against the painting to make sure the colors were the same, didn’t see me wince at such terrible behavior. Did they lean their cell phones against paintings in art museums, too? For some reason they made me uncomfortable in spite of the easy husband-and-wife banter. I swore intermittently, a nervous tic; then, unnerved by my own wild mouth, I swore some more, until eventually we all stared at the ground in silence. They were both psychiatrists and too well-trained to reel me in, children or no children. I was horrified but could not stop; the urge to flip the apple cart kept getting stronger. I watched myself continue to swear. The words piled on top of one another, more and more, gleefully intensified as they stared at the floor. Of all my paintings, they had chosen the single one that I had displayed upside down, thinking anything was better than the way it was actually painted. They had walked past my best works, had ignored some truly fine pieces. Their silence deepened as their alarm increased. I cursed a blue streak, tried to smile. They thanked me and rushed to the elevator, eyes averted, painting in tow. I calmed down. The stream of expletives stopped. This strange behavior hasn't happened since.
Michelle Knowles’ teeth got on my nerves. They were small and perfectly even, but when she smiled her pink gums and everything above that took over until there was so much shiny pink I couldn't think. It was lucky she didn’t smile a lot, didn’t talk that much, either. Her minimalist interior design aesthetic extended to her personality and we got along fine, for a long time. She mostly emailed; photos, examples, inspirations, "inspo" she called them, color wheel names like Sherwood Green HC-118. None of that polite rubbish, she got right to the point with size, deadline and price. It was an alternate universe, one I used to know, and loved.
Fazli Girah was the strangest person. He was tall, not as tall as a basketball player, or someone who always had to duck through doors, but just-right tall so when my face angled upward to meet his eyes my neck didn’t crick with the strain. What was strange was how kind, self-possessed, gentle-yet-strong he was; you could feel his moral fiber guiding him through the world. He was probably good with animals, although coming from New York City may have limited his options. I imagined him as a horse trainer, near a race track. He would whisper in some equine's ear and that stunning animal would win just to please him. It felt as though he had never had a bad encounter nor spoken a harsh word to anyone, yet he oozed strength of a ferocious kind. It was not a surprise when he chose Heat, a fiery, passionate, red-orange abstract painting, 58” x 48”, oil on panel, framed in gold leaf. His SUV was huge and the painting easily fit. Normally I would fear for the gold leaf, wouldn’t let an art patron handle it, would insist I deliver it, but in his case he was so sensitive, so tender with all things, that it was fine and I let it go. I was a wild horse, being tamed.
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”The Cat in the Hat" and "Green Eggs and Ham" by Dr. Seuss were my mother’s favorites. She’d read them aloud to us when we were little; with great merriment alter her voice to match the characters, turning the pages as we followed along. I was glad she was happy and snuggled close, but I never liked those stories, was repulsed by pointless nursery rhymes and glaring primary colors. It was Odysseus I craved. She read aloud the grown-ups’ version of The Iliad and Odyssey, with no silly pictures, and it was glorious. Trying to return home and encountering all kinds of strange, mythical creatures along the way, Odysseus was heroic, wild, tied to the mast of his ship so he could hear the Sirens; stabbing Cyclops’s eye and escaping by holding onto the underbelly of his giant sheep, as Cyclops called out Nobody! had attacked him. Odysseus was brilliant, brave and resourceful; and I wanted to be like him.
Unexpectedly, The Silver Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum made me burst into tears. My mother read all the Wizard of Oz books to us, and they were wonderful, full of adventure and pluck, full of interesting places and creatures. The illustrations were excellent as she had first editions of everything, and the art of that time was superb. The colors sang across the pages, the linework intricate and imaginative. But the poor princess, having accidentally arrived in Oz from a place far, far away, from a world with no color at all, at first saw nothing but her home world color of silver. She couldn’t see color! I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe anyone could be that sad.
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