within seconds, the final crack of the handle pulled hard against the door frame and ringing through the hall. This is Vishni all over: covert but ultimately clumsy. Bureau drawers not entirely closed and overdue bills stuffed roughly back into envelopes are typical of her handiwork. There is nothing to see there: the bed will be made, the curtains drawn. If I had the voice I could save her the futility. At our ages, we think of economy in all things. She is breathless with exertion, her heavy lungs punishing her for this impulsiveness. As she stands outside my room, more hesitant than before, her wheezy rasp seeps through the gap under the door. She knows it is unlikely that you will be here but wishes to be thorough. The door handle rattles with her uncertainty, to wake me with a knock or ease the door open to spy on someone who despises being watched, who has made a career of being invisible.
– What is it?
– I was looking for John, Anna.
– I sent him to the store. We ran out of one of the oils last night. Had to finish early because of it.
Lightness appears in Vishni’s voice – relief – betraying that she too shared the same thoughts.
– Let me get the fire going. I’ll have breakfast ready for when he returns.
She is only here for you; enjoys your company and pandering to your needs. Coffee is served how you like it, breakfast and other meals to your whims. It’s why we often eat like children: franks and beans, macaroni with everything. On those mornings when your presence at the table is shortened because of the need for firewood or household repair, the tone is quite different. The radio is mostly switched off. She will not sit and watch me eat. No teasing passes between us. The offer of second helpings when the plate is clean is only made the once, both of us understanding that mothering cannot be applied here. We are left as two women thinking about their respective work, aware of the other’s presence, but still in our separate spheres.
When you first moved here, I warned you of my need for silence and space. You warned me of your need to eat something that was not raw or burnt. Vishni has been here almost as long as you, following barely a month after your arrival. See how quickly I acted for you back then! Your every intelligent suggestion was my command. I wonder if you even remember the nights I spent away from my work to call people I knew in the town asking for recommendations; people who were alarmed at hearing my voice at the end of the receiver, having been aware of my long-standing reticence toward the telephone, and believing that I would only be calling in a case of dire emergency. But then they remembered that you had arrived and their panic, if not irritation, softened to indulgence and finally warmth. If I pressed you on this now I am certain you would not even recall it, so taken were you with the meadow and the scattering of macadamia trees that flanked the drive. Out of New York for the first time in your life, you were full of wonder and mischief; running back and forth the length of the meadow with one of the yard dogs from the neighboring farm, each trying to exhaust the other, pulling yourself up the first trees you had ever climbed that were not in Central Park and swimming the river that divided the house from the village, not minding the rain or mud, nor the stones on the river bank and bed that bruised and cut your feet.
– I’m looking for work. Anything you have.
– Can you build a fence? Knock down a wall?
– I’ve little experience, but I can try. I’m strong and can work hard. Been asking at the other farms, but they’re having the same problems as those I left behind in the city. All of us, scrabbling around like mice.
The bulk of my work, what they will remember, sprang from those words. You; sitting on the veranda steps while I fetched you some water, returning to see how the light treated your face; how everything changed during that minute I was in the house.
On those first afternoons I sketched you, you were restless, wanting to be anywhere but indoors. Instructed to keep your eyes forward, you constantly deviated, looking past the window to the garden table where Vishni had promised you that she would serve all meals. Those twin pulls have never changed: someone to put home-cooked food in your belly and the need to feel your feet in the grass. This is why I know you can never leave, not entirely. Something will always bring you back. Inside and out, you have made roots here; from pushing your fingers deep into the earth when you thought no one was looking, as if the feel of soil between your hands and under your nails made it real; and from your face being in the paintings. Whether you are aware of this or not, you have created invisible roots capable of dragging back the unwilling. Once they are unfurled they will recoil. In the meantime I have my work to keep me occupied and the smell of Vishni’s coffee burning on the hot plate to jolt me when my attention slips.
WE ARE HUSBAND and wife. Some run a shop or diner together. This is ours.
You once said that the darkness of the studio was my comforter, having watched my first minutes or so there each morning, when I seem wrapped up in its closeness before rolling back the shutters from the skylight.
– It’s like the dark is some kind of magnet. Pulling away all the shit that’s amassed since you were last here. Everything about you is different. Another person.
In those days you were referring to a myriad of things. Attention, wanted and unwanted; the demands that often pulled us away from work. Now our problems are more localized, to do with ageing bodies and various worries about the condition of the house. We have both had recent spells in hospital, which each will not talk to the other about; the magnet’s main area of concern. You were amazed that I could cut off mid-sentence as soon as I reached the studio door; how my face would change, the hold it had on me. It is true that the moment often feels like a shrug, something similar to walking through disinfectant before diving into a municipal pool, or the long, measured exhalation of a yogi’s asana. I need this ritual in order to feel ready; precious seconds to right wrongs and clear my mind. The day ahead feels unbalanced if I do not begin by walking into black.
Vishni’s sixes and sevens have rubbed off on me. I stand in darkness for longer than I should, imagining the lump of rags on the floor to be your prostrate frame, twisted into the shapes I long made you hold. I have often started the day without you being in the studio. This part is normal; a series of corrections and progressions that can be made without the model present. There may have been many periods of days, months even, when I wished for it to be more that way; when the sound of your voice riled me, or simply the sound of mine. If only then I had the ingenuity, the confidence to believe that working alone from a mere set of photographs rather than using a sitter, could reveal a truth. But I needed you. If you were not here to start, at my request or otherwise, you were always nearby: somewhere in the house or on the land. At your most petulant you still responded to my call when it came. You had various stages of wonder and resentment of the process, sometimes hating it to the point where you were ready to happily destroy the paintings, but still you came when I called. Your claim to this room, where you have stood every day for the past fifty years, is greater than mine. I gave my eyes, but you readily gave up your soul. And again. And again.
You are coming back. I know it. You are probably minutes away. The work can continue. Vishni’s fears shall be allayed. But still I stand at the door, unable to move closer to the painting. Do you remember how I told you about the house I was raised in, how there were crucifixes in every room, but that the largest one was above my parents’ bed; terrifying in its expansive iron cast, the face writhed in pain so lifelike, the gaze itself inexplicably direct, that as children we were unable to go past that room without breaking into a run, so determined were we not to look at it. Without realizing it, we trained ourselves to look downward whenever we were in that part of the house, because to catch even the briefest glimpse of His tortured face frozen in acceptance would be to turn to stone. Many summer days were cast over for one or other of us by making that mistake. It was only later that I understood what my mother must have gone through, having to make love and give birth on that bed with a grotesque
