The Light of Paris(50)

But as I opened the door to the basement and the smell of it rushed up to meet me, filled with more memories than a thousand Parisian rose gardens, something cracked open inside me and I felt young and wild and aching again.

The stairs were the same: wooden and creaking under my weight, with black rubber treads on each step, rough against my bare feet. Nothing had changed in the basement for years; I wondered if my mother ever even came down here. There was a shed in the back for her gardening tools, and most anything valuable was kept in the attic, and all that was here was what had been here for as long as I could remember: two armchairs and a sofa, all in need of reupholstering, old wooden tennis rackets in frames, a croquet set, stacks of cardboard boxes that looked as though they had been packed for a move and then never been opened, now sagging under each other’s weight.

And there, in the corner, between two windows that spread shafts of light across the floor like pathways, was my easel. This was where I had painted during high school and college, and when I had moved out, I had bought all new things and left these here. The walls were cinder block, and I had made an attempt to paint a mural on them at some point, which was barely visible now, faded in the damp. Leaning against those walls were a dozen canvases, a few blank, most of them painted. What had happened to the rest of my paintings, my drawings? I must have produced hundreds of them. I had a vague memory of bringing some things down here for storage before I got married, but this couldn’t be all of them. Had I simply thrown them away, confident there would always be more, I would always make more?

I flipped through the canvases against the wall. A still life, where I had clearly been trying to master the play of light and the prismatic translucence of a jug of water; a landscape, where I had taught myself perspective. Neither of them exactly good, neither total disasters either. An abstract painting in red and yellow, blocky stripes made with a wide, flat brush, trailing out like vapor toward the edges of the canvas as the paint had run out. I peered at that one for a while, trying to remember what I had wanted to capture. I had never been any good at abstract art, not even when I had learned to understand it, to read it.

Finally, two canvases I remembered, that worked—one, a painting of a corner of my parents’ attic. A desk pushed against a window with an ancient typewriter set in the center of it, one of the keys permanently pressed down, a paper slipped over the roll, as though someone had only stepped away for a moment, mid-thought, and would return to finish what they were writing. Whatever I had been searching for in that jug of water I had found here; outside the clear glass of the window there was the colorful blur of my mother’s garden, and the sunbeams fell across the floor, illuminating the dust in the air. A spill of photographs spread across the table like a hand of cards, a small box sat on its corner waiting to be opened. Even as I looked at it, I felt the urge to rush upstairs and explore the attic, to look for more of my grandmother’s books, to find photos of her when she had been young and in Paris, before she had married my grandfather, to look for more notebooks to see if she had kept writing after she had gotten married, to find the person she had wanted to be underneath the person she had become.

Instead, I flipped to the last painting. It was a self-portrait, me in my debutante dress, sitting in a window seat at the country club, looking out into the night. Behind me, there was a full dance floor, a blur of tuxedos and ball gowns. Ahead of me, there was only the silent night, and I was caught in between. It was a frank portrait, so honest I was surprised I had had the stomach to draw it, my hair beginning to fall and escape its tight and elegant updo, a fold of flesh on my side pressing out against the white silk, my face blank and plain in the dim light, away from the brilliance of the room behind me. I had titled it Escape, and as I looked at it, I felt a little hitch in my chest, the quiet threat of tears. I had failed that girl. I hadn’t escaped at all. I’d had the chance for freedom, and instead I had run straight into the arms of the life I had known was not for me.

Letting the paintings fall back against the wall, I walked over to a stool in the corner, where the paint-splattered boom box I had listened to all those hours when I painted was still sitting. I flipped it on and pressed Play on the tape deck, and music exploded out of the speakers in a jangle of guitars. At first I laughed, covered my mouth, as though I had unearthed a treasure, and then I wanted to cry, remembering how much these songs had meant to me, how I had spent hours painting to these tapes, not the music they played at school dances, or that the other girls listened to, but music that meant something to me, music that was dark and haunting and beautiful and made everything around me seem more intense, the moon brighter and the night darker and the hours elastic and full of promises they couldn’t keep.

I picked up one of the blank canvases, peeled the plastic off it, ran my hand over the surface. It was smooth, the frame still straight, and I lifted it and set it on the easel, admiring its freshness, the emptiness of it. To me, this had always been the best part of starting a painting: the moment before I did anything, the moment before the paint went onto the canvas and began to shape it into something, the moment when the magic of it was all possible, the emotion in my heart and the image in my mind perfectly aligned, before I spoiled it all by actually touching my brush to the fabric.

Under the easel was the tackle box I had kept my paints in. Kneeling down, I began to pull out the tubes. Most of them were acrylic, half used and now dried up, fossils from another age. But at the bottom were three tubes of oil paint, unopened, that still yielded when I pressed on them. I unscrewed the tops and squeezed until I had three small pools of paint on my palette, found some brushes in the utility sink and rinsed them until they were pliable again, and then I stood in front of the easel, looking at that blank canvas, letting an image form in my mind, and I began to paint.