She got out the ice and ingredients and I made them. She leaned against the countertop, ankles crossed, sipped and said, “If I suddenly fall on my face, don’t be alarmed. I did a damfool thing last night after we got her settled down. I had to get my mind off… everything and I went out to the boathouse and painted a fool thing I’ll probably paint out. It was five before I went to bed and Tom woke me up at eight when he left.”
“Can I have a look at it?”
“Well… why not? But it isn’t anything like what I usually do.”
We carried our drinks. There was an outside staircase to the big room over the boathouse, which she had fixed up as a studio. A window air-conditioner was humming. She turned on a second one, then went over and turned on an intercom and turned the volume up until I could hear a slow rhythmic sound I suddenly identified as the deep and somewhat guttural breathing of someone in deep sleep.
She said, “Maurie can’t wake up, actually, but I just feel better if I can hear her.” The studio had a composite smell of pigments and oils and thinner. The work stacked against the walls and the few that were hung were semi-abstract. Obviously she had taken her themes from nature, from stones, earth, bark, leaves. The colors were powerful. Some of the areas were almost representational.
She waved toward them. “These are the usual me. Kind of old hat. No op and pop. No structures and lumps and walk-throughs.”
“But,” I said, “one hell of a lot of overpainting and glazes, so you can see down into those colors.”
She looked surprised and pleased. “Member of the club?”
“Hell, woman, I even know the trick words that mean absolutely nothing. Like dynamic symmetry.”
“Tonal integrity?”
“Sure. Structural perceptions. Compositionally iconoclastic.”
She laughed aloud and it was a good laugh. “It’s such terrible crap, isn’t it? The language of gallery people and critics, and insecure painters. What are your words, Professor McGee?”
“Does a painting always look the same or will it change according to the light and how I happen to feel? And after it has been hung for a month, will it disappear so completely the only time I might notice it would be if it fell off the wall?”
She nodded thoughtfully. “So I’ll buy that. Anyway… I seldom do the figure. But here is my night work.”
It was on an easel, a horizontal rectangle, maybe thirty inches by four feet. At dead center was a small clearing, a naked female figure sitting, jackknifed, huddled, arms around her legs, face buried against her knees, blond hair spilling down. Around her was angry jungle, slashes of sharp spears of leaf, vine tangle, visceral roots, hints of black water, fleshy tropic blooms against black-green. It had a flavor of great silence, stillness, waiting.
We studied it and could hear the deep sonorous breathing of the sleeping sister. Biddy coughed, sipped her drink, said, “I think it’s too dramatic and sentimental and… narrative.”
“I say let it sit. You’ll know more about it later.”
She put her drink down, lifted it off the easel, and placed it against the wall, the back of the canvas toward the room. She backed off. “Where I can’t see it, I guess.”
She showed me more of her work and then she turned the intercom off and one of the air-conditioners. We walked back to the house. “Another drink and maybe a sandwich?”
“On one condition.”
“Such as?”
“Quick drink and simple sandwich and then you go fall into the sack. I am reliable, dependable, conscientious, and so on. If you’re needed for anything, I’ll wake you up.”
“I couldn’t let you do–”
“Hot shower, clean sheets, blinds closed, and McGee taking care.”
She covered her yawn with the back of her fist. “Bless you, bless you. I’m sold.”
After we ate, she led me upstairs and down the carpeted hallway to Maureen’s room. Maureen slept on her back in the middle of a double bed. The room was air-conditioned to coolness. She wore a quilted bed jacket. The sheets and pillowcases were blue with a white flower pattern. The blanket was a darker blue. Her face and throat were puffed, red-blotched. There was a mixture of small odors in the silence, calamine and rubbing alcohol and perfume. Flavors of illness and of girl. She wore opaque sleep-glasses in spite of the room being darkened.