Transit(30)

I asked whether, had a different artist been showing at the gallery that morning in Paris, she might have recognised a different narrative, or at least a narrative that combined the same elements in a different way.

She looked at me in silence with her small, unreadable eyes.

Is that what you think? she said.

I had in fact seen a painting by Marsden Hartley. It was several years ago, in a gallery in New York: I had been there with my husband and children, I told her, on holiday, and we had gone into the gallery to get out of the rain. The painting was a seascape: it showed a heaving wall of white water, a rising cumulus strewn with lozenges of blue and green whose volcanic unfolding lay somewhere in the painting’s future. I had stood and looked at the painting while my children, who were still small, grew increasingly impatient; I had seemed to see in it a portent whose meaning penetrated me like a skewer in my chest. I could see it, in fact, still, the turbulent whiteness massing and gathering, the wave whose inability to stop itself rising and breaking formed its inescapable destiny. It was perfectly possible to become the prisoner of an artist’s vision, I said. Like love, I said, being understood creates the fear that you will never be understood again. But there had been other paintings, I said, before and since, that had moved me just as deeply.

I’ve got three hundred thousand words of notes, she said coldly. I can’t just throw them away.

The smell from the basement had become so overpowering that I got up and opened the window. I looked down at the deserted street, the rows of parked cars, the trees that were losing their leaves so that their branches had begun to show, like bare limbs through rags. The air came in, surprisingly cool and rapid.

Why not? I said.

I’m not listening to this, she said. I don’t want to hear this.

When I turned around I was met by the sight of her in the undulating landscape of dust sheets, the whiteness broken by the blue and green shapes of her clothing. Her face was stricken.

Obviously, I said, she could do what she liked, and I would help her as much as I could.

But I’d be wasting my time, she said.

Not wasting it, I said. But spending it.

I asked her to tell me about the evening in Paris that she had spent with the photojournalist, the night before her discovery of Marsden Hartley.

She looked at me quizzically.

Why do you want to know about that? she said.

I said I didn’t quite know why.

She heaved a sigh, her turquoise bust rising and falling.

It was the last night of the course, she said, and there was a drinks reception to mark the occasion. It was summer and the party was held in the gardens of the building, which was near the river beside the Place Saint-Michel. The gardens were very beautiful in the dusk and there was champagne to drink, because the course sponsors were a company of champagne manufacturers. She wore a beautiful white dress she had bought the day before in the Rue des Fougères, having taken the trouble to go back to the hotel and change, despite the fact that her ex-partner had taunted her over the phone earlier that day when she’d spoken to him, saying that she cared only about her appearance and her ability to attract men. The photojournalist was there, drinking champagne in the elegant fragrant gardens where the noise of traffic along the Boulevard Saint-Michel could be faintly heard, but so too – unexpectedly – was someone she disliked, a man from home, from England, a fellow photographer who had insulted her and undermined her on a job where they’d worked together. She didn’t know what he was doing here, but he was stuck to the famous photojournalist like glue. All the same the threads of attraction, carefully woven between herself and the photojournalist over the previous days, remained intact: they glanced at one another frequently and caught one another’s eyes; and then at other times they didn’t look at one another at all and allowed their bodies to radiate awareness. She felt elated, filled with certainty, like a bride in her white dress: several students approached her to praise her for her work, telling her how much she had helped them. An hour or more passed; the party started to thin out. She had been waiting for the photojournalist to come and speak to her, but he didn’t, and as more time passed the knowledge began to creep coldly over her that he would not. In order to evade this knowledge, she decided to seek him out herself: the feeling of elation, and her determination to remain in that state, was more powerful than finicky, disappointing reality. He was still locked in conversation with her adversary – the Englishman – a middle-aged dissolute-looking character she’d always found physically repellent with his slack, pot-bellied body and his big yellow uneven teeth. He bared them like a horse, his lips rolled back, laughing at everything the photojournalist said.

The three of them – the Englishman had no intention of being dislodged – decided to go to a restaurant, and they left the party and walked up the Boulevard Saint-Michel to a bistro the photojournalist knew. It was a noisy, harshly lit place, full of mirrors and metallic surfaces. She sat at a table with the two men and engaged in an outright battle with the Englishman for the photojournalist’s attention, a battle she knew she had won when after two long hours he had leaned towards her and laid his hand lightly on her wrist, remarking concernedly that she hadn’t eaten anything. It was true – her food remained more or less untouched on its plate. The bistro was the unromantic, old-fashioned kind of place where the dishes looked like photographs out of 1970s cookbooks, the kind of cookbooks women of her mother’s generation used to own and of which in fact there had been a memorable example in her own childhood home, her father at a certain point having taken out a subscription for her mother to a series of bound volumes entitled Cordon Bleu Cookery.