Luster(46)

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In the morning, I feel sick. I lie in bed all day and get up only to dry heave. At night Rebecca lets herself into my room and tells me to get dressed. She doesn’t say where we are going, so I put on a sequin dress and the highest heels I own. When I climb into her truck, she asks me if I’m cold. It is not a question. It is a commentary, but so is this dress. It is meant to say, your ambiguity is tiring. It is meant to say, this is what happens when you leave it up to my interpretation. She puts on the heat and turns the radio to Top 40, and the rotation is always the same, digressive low-frequency capitalism, commercials for tax assistance and sofas and farewell concert promos for the old heads of R&B and quiet storm, but as for the actual music, I don’t recognize a single thing. It occurs to me that I have been in Jersey too long. We are in midtown before I realize we are back in the city, and when I look down Sixth, the city actually feels like an island, besieged by hard, yellow water, receding slowly into the loam. And then we are at the hospital. As we take the elevator down to the morgue, I do feel a little stupid about my clothes. When Rebecca offers me a hazmat suit, I am grateful, but determined to remain impassive. Then she opens her locker and brings out an easel, a blank canvas, a steel palette, three paintbrushes, a palette knife, and some yellow, magenta, and cyan. I turn the brush around in my hand and look at the gold lettering on the stem. She opens the door to the morgue.

“The brushes are badger hair. Is that okay?”

“Yes,” I breathe, looking at the paints, which are as beautiful as the brushes. Pure, saturated linseed oils. As I’m looking through the supplies, she circles the cadaver and wrings her hands. She already looks like she is tired, but then she puts the radio on and gets her saw. She glances at me a little impatiently, and I realize I, too, am meant to start. I open the easel and set up my canvas. I mix some tertiary colors and make all of them hot, the magenta such a buttery high pigment that I can’t bring myself to cool it down. But after the initial rush of establishing my palette, I look at the cadaver and my stomach turns. It isn’t the body. It’s the audience. Rebecca proceeds as if I am not there, but when I turn to my canvas, I feel her eyes. She tells me to come closer and says to no one in particular: White, male, eighty-seven, coronary occlusion. Then she opens the chest and brings out the heart, which is shiny and large and weeping yellow plaque. I do my initial sketch of the body in watered-down cyan, and as I go to fill in the flesh, I find she works faster than I can accommodate. One moment the body is whole, and the next it is turned out like a rind.



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The painting is muddy and full of nerves, but inside there is something exact, and after she showers and we drive home, there is a trail of sequins leading to my room. Next time, I put on a T-shirt and jeans. I bring some graphite and a jar of turpentine. I program the radio with a few of my own presets, and Rebecca doesn’t protest. As we enter the Holland Tunnel the lights on her dashboard flare. She tells me to ignore it, that her truck has been crying wolf for two years, but as we pull into the hospital, the engine makes a human sound. We put on our suits and I unpack my supplies. She opens the door, and as I’m mixing, she is collecting the large intestine into a silver pan. I get close and she says: White, male, eighty-nine, prostate cancer. I do my best not to think too much about it, but it is hard not to take the point of the surgery scars between the rectum and bladder, which is that he tried, and he failed. Of course, this is what Rebecca loves about the work, the stories the bodies tell. She believes the best way to see how a thing is made is to take it apart. She says she was a kid who dismantled all her toys, that it disturbed her mother but her father understood and started buying her things she could assemble from scratch—clocks and cars and model airplanes.



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Rebecca smiles at my depiction of a brain that she cuts in half, which, from an aerial view, looks like a spaceship, or a root vegetable. We listen to the radio, and during commercial breaks she tells me more stories in her terse, non sequitur way. Like this: There was an explosion at the crematorium. Someone forgot to take the pacemaker out. Or this: Da Vinci injected molten wax into the cavities of the brain and put the negative image down in ink. However, I am not inventing the MRI. I am grappling with the tendons of the hand. The masters were masters because their anatomical vocabularies were large, because they understood the lateral, posterior, and anterior aspects of the shoulder, which ultimately helped them depict how Jesus might actually hang on the cross, but there is more language within even the respiratory system than I could ever understand. A week later, Rebecca has an obese Vietnam vet with hyper-inflated lungs (white, male, sixty-three, asthma attack), and while she is as strong as a woman who regularly heaves postmortem weight would need to be, she can’t move him by herself. I leave my canvas and at her instruction I take the legs, and we move him as one might move a couch up the stairs.



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Beyond this, all my joy is underneath my palette knife, the folds of the body more pronounced and so more fun to paint, the palette overwhelmingly Caucasian, and so a little tedious, though inside the body there is room to experiment with blues and dark, cool reds. The cadavers in Rembrandt’s paintings were all criminals. The subjects are really the learned men around the corpse. Within my paintings, there is always a half-articulated form of a woman, too mobile to be opaque, craned over the body with forceps in her hand. If she sees herself there, she doesn’t mention it. But there are moments when she looks over my shoulder and hums her approval, which of course I resent, but also, a little bit, love.