Grace

came in a couple of Saturdays ago, and maybe brought a miracle with her. I don't know. Don't know which of my dreams are precognitive either, or just ambiguous dreck, or wishful thinking. I wonder what good they are, then? Sometimes I think all of it is just carrots on sticks, saying maybe, maybe, don't give up just yet.

Things with my now ex-boyfriend have been mainly horrible. First he didn't speak to me at all for weeks, then he said things were OVER, GOT IT?!!! and threw me out of my beautiful beautiful gallery as of the end of August. Then he called to apologize for being cruel. As if. One of my clients told me, "I slept with this guy last night by accident, it wasn't anything, and this morning he wanted to explain that he didn't want me getting ideas. I said, "kiss me good-bye. I don't have to listen to this shit." All together, now. AS IF.

So I spent obsessive hours job-hunting on the web, and grant-hunting, and round about midnight on a Friday I thought, "okay, now that all is lost, what do I REALLY want?" And the answer came--"I want to live in a spiritual community with a lot of serious artists and writers and scientists and healers." Not a monastery where everybody meditates all the time and gets in touch with their "inner artist" in the ceramics studio on weekends. Not a graduate school with politics and competition and precious dysfunctions taken for genius. I want to be around a lot of people who are looking seriously for the light, and coping gracefully with darkness.

About thirteen hours later, Grace walked in. Usually I don't tell clients my troubles; that is definitely not what they pay me for. I don't know why I broke this rule, except that it was a piece of relevant practical information; "I may not be in this space much longer." Grace did not immediately recoil from failure and bad energy, strangely enough. We got to talking; I told her my vision; she said, "That's my vision too!"

We got together on Wednesday. I have had a picture floating in my head for months now, of how my gallery would be when it was all grown up. She said, "Draw it." As I drew, I realized how clear the structure was; high ceilings, high windows, white with silk jewel tones, flooded with light. Galleries to the left, café to the right, healing offices on the right mezzanine, studio spaces on the left. Large multi-use event space to the back. "That's exactly what I see," said Grace. "My door is a bit different."

Grace likes to do publicity and financing; she plans big events and is part-owner of a bar. Grace lives in a live/work loft three blocks away from my soon-to-be-former gallery, full of artists and healers, a Pilates studio, a dance company, a furniture maker. Her roommate is leaving at the end of August. She said maybe I could move in.

Meanwhile all the résumés and cover letters I have been obsessively sending out might as well have been flushed into outer space, for all the response I've gotten. Meanwhile I had sixteen massage clients in one week, all sixteen of whom enthusiastically signed my mailing list, so I can let them know where I end up after August. If I move in with Grace, I can keep my clients and have a studio in the same space. I can roll out of bed, go to yoga up the street, breakfast in the Read café, book a few clients, go home to massage and paint, go out to openings, go home without moving my car. I can keep my community and build on all the energy I have nurtured over the last two years. If I don't move in with Grace, I will probably end up checking out books at the Queens Public Library for nine dollars an hour, or moving to Jersey City.

It's not fun to want something so badly from someone you hardly know.

I have been dragging myself out to openings, parties and events, whenever someone invites me and I'm not totally exhausted from job-hunting and massaging and portfolio building and painting. Which is not too often but happens now and then. I got invited to an opening at an obscure gallery in Red Hook by two different people, one of them an awful poet who I have been steadily snubbing for two years and who does not take the hint, but continues writing awful poems about all my paintings and telling me he loves me. The other was a promising artist who will now never have a show at my gallery.

I figured I'd better show up. When I did I found I was a minor celebrity. People I didn't know had heard of me, and babbled drunkenly about how I inspired them. I was feeling like the old sponge that gets used to clean cat vomit off the kitchen floor, and was baffled. A beautiful blonde girl started talking and talking about how we are all one in spirit, everything happens for a reason, there is no harm, there is nothing to fear, love is all there is, we just try to let it flow, we do not understand why, we must trust, we have faith...and I kept saying "uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah, right, you're absolutely right, I agree," and this did not help at all, in fact it got boring and annoying really quickly. Particularly since she was too drunk to listen, or to impart illustrative details.

I discussed this problem with my sister--the fact that even though I believe in the mystical unity of the universe, I do not generally enjoy hanging out with people who talk constantly about the mystical unity of the universe. She said, "I think that's the purpose of great art--to communicate things that are incredibly banal when expressed in words." Thus my sister got to the nub of Why I Paint, and I was grateful. She also pointed out that talking about the mystical unity of the universe, when someone you don't know very well is suffering, is not necessarily apt or kind. "I'm so sorry" is more polite.

Last weekend I went to another party, given by someone I know slightly, to celebrate the completion of her five-years'-overdue MFA thesis. Unlike the people at some other parties I've been to, her friends were kind and unpretentious and interested in meeting people. They said simple things like "Hi, I'm Beverly, how do you know Harriet?" Banal as this sort of conversation may be, it can lead to infinitely interesting places. I stayed till 1 AM, and could have stayed longer. One of the guests was a classics professor at an obscure college in Indiana; he was passionately interested in, and informed about, the Greek play that Harriet wants to direct. She was thrilled to have met him, and he was thrilled to be a surprise celebrity at a party in New York. I said, "Wait, you teach at Wabash College? Do you know Stephen Forsythe?" "Yeah, Stephen Forsythe interviewed me for my job." Stephen Forsythe was one of my intimate friends in college. Six degrees of separation, my foot.

Late in the evening, on the terrace strung with Christmas lights and ringed with planters, we got to asking the married people how they'd met.

"We were volunteering for Nader. I mentioned I'd written my thesis about Samuel Beckett."

"You wrote a thesis about Samuel Beckett?!!!! *I* wrote my thesis about Samuel Beckett!! Oh my God, I don't talk like that, he must think I'm a dork..."

"Our wedding celebration was a week long. She's worth it."

"I was running the lights for an obscure theatre production at Intersection for the Arts. Every Tuesday through Saturday, for six weeks, I lit her spotlight while she did her monologue. We became friends. It's funny, how humans mate."

My ex-boyfriend thinks that commitment is the worst horror imaginable. He thinks that independence and separation are goals for which to sacrifice everything. I didn't cry among strangers. I didn't have any more wine, and went home soon afterward. I rode my bicycle in my white sundress through the dark city, and it was cooler after midnight.

The big purge

If anybody wants some schlumpy, formless summer clothes in natural-fiber fabrics, please inquire. A large box of them is currently sitting outside my door, waiting for it to stop raining so I can put them on the street. I've stopped dressing that way. One of my college friends once mentioned that nobody back then knew what kind of a figure I had. Well, it was better than I thought it was, better than it is now, but is not yet so far gone that I need to hold onto these clothes. If I get pregnant in the next couple of years I may regret it, but I don't think so.

In addition to purging my closet, I got a haircut just slightly like Heather Locklear's. I have not let a hairdresser layer my hair since I was about ten, because it is so very very straight that layers just lie there, balefully refusing to pouf out in the slightest. But the girl who did it this time had a nice haircut herself, and a French accent, and I was at an emotional disadvantage in more than one way. "Little sheggy layeurs," she said, pawing my head disdainfully. I decided what the heck, if it looks horrible I can always go back to the chin-length blunt cut, staple of uptight classy girls, no-maintenance and boring.

The French chick actually did a good job. I think I look sexy. It doesn't feel "layered" at all, just like there's more hair there, and my face doesn't look so horsy. I can slap it into a French twist and little tendrils hang down artfully at different levels. I considered getting the "light irridescent blond" color kit at Pathmark and a set of rollers, so that I could manufacture a gigantic golden mop like Kate Hudson's, but decided to hold off. I'm bleaching it slowly and cheaply with medicinal peroxide instead.

Of course, the day after I purge my closet, pack up all the winter clothes and winter blankets, the weather gets chilly again. I have the windows open and it's almost uncomfortable. I wanted to bike to Pearl Paint and pick up some tubes of white (NEVER buy white paint in a jar, it dries up on all the exposed surfaces and gets nasty and lumpy) but more rain is in the forecast. I may do it anyway.

Working for BWAC was mildly frustrating. Like with most collective organizations, management is erratic. We sat around for an hour before anyone gave us a task, and then had to pack up about fifty paintings for shipping, with inadequate packing material. This should have been done already, since we were the "site-prep" crew; the girl working with me complained all day about the lack of organization, and how last year was different, there was coffee and donuts and pizza, and paint and spackle all laid out, and she just spackled and rollered without talking to anyone and went home. I would have liked to talk to more people, since networking is one of the major reasons I joined BWAC, but I was missing C. a whole lot that day and did not have sufficient energy surplus for gregariousness. So I wrapped and taped and said "mmmmm" for eight hours and went home.

The BWAC girl reminded me somewhat of a friend of mine who came to visit me in Mexico, and complained for the entire three weeks of her stay. After about ten days of it I let her know that respectfully, she was driving me crazy, and she didn't get it. I realized that ritualized complaining is the only way some people know how to interact. The underlying assumption, as near as I can figure, is that things SHOULD be a certain way, it's somebody else's stupid FAULT if they're not that way, there's nothing that can be done about it, and nothing more to be learned from the situation. This strikes me as utterly pointless. If you start from the assumption that there is a reason for everything, no matter how desperate and stupid it may appear, the world becomes a much more interesting and exciting place. It becomes a dynamic mystery novel and four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle suspended all around you, daring you to assemble it. Once you do, of course, it changes completely and you get to do it again, and again, and again.

It occurs to me that this underlying assumption of mine, that everything happens for a meaningful reason, may have been one of the factors contributing to the explosion of my friendship with L. I made a few innocent, wondering comments like "Isn't it funny that you're meeting all these guys named Mark who aren't calling" and she abruptly disintegrated into hostile paranoia. "I don't think it's FUNNY," she said, and proceeded to accuse me of taking "subtle pot-shots" at her. Which could not have been further from my mind. It WAS funny. Why were they all named Mark? What does "Mark" mean. He's the mark, a marked man, on the mark, marked out? Was she missing the mark? Speculations were open-ended, and had nothing at all to do with her attractiveness or call-worthiness, which I took as given.

But in her mind, I had suddenly become a jealous bitch who was sniggering at her romantic failures, and nothing I could say or do would convince her otherwise. Oh well. Actually I dreamed about her last night. We were both applying for a waitress job, sitting at a table drinking Coke and waiting for the manager, who looked a lot like Jim Carrey. Nobody came over for an hour, and we couldn't even attract anyone's attention to pay for our Cokes. She said something self-righteous, and I said, "you're the one who destroyed a friendship for something trivial in your head." She went over to say goodbye, and I realized she'd already worked a five-hour shift with them. I decided that waiting tables was the last thing I needed to be doing at the moment, and left.

Back in the city

surprisingly feels pretty nice. I even exchanged friendly words with my landlord, Phil the Neanderthal. He did not make a fuss about the fact that my rent was a week late, or that my stairwell is a fire hazard, and inquired about the problem with my air conditioning. He was here because the girls on the ground floor moved out. I will miss them. They threw away a ton of great stuff, which I recycled out of the garbage can--two silver-framed mirrors, three virgin stretched canvases, a brand-new mat cutter, a shower caddy with half a jar of lime-coconut sea-salt exfoliator, and a wool Army trench coat just my size. Oh, to have a day job which allows me to think I can afford such luxuries.

Today I am doing a Master Cleanse fast, which makes me headachy, probably from caffeine withdrawal. I decided that my ankle problem might have to do with toxicity of the liver (this is not insane, the massage therapist pointed out that my entire liver meridian is tender) and so I have quit alcohol for the time being. Went for a bike ride round Prospect Park, which I must do more frequently so I don't go into tree withdrawal again, and did a very lazy, slap-happy, distracted yoga set, pausing every three minutes to snuggle with my Big Splendid Cat. All of us missed one other.

Stopped by Barnes & Noble last night, in desperate search for the new Robin McKinley book, which I need so that I can escape my own brain for a couple more days. Realized that during the last five years (FIVE years? Five YEARS since I've had a steady job? Ack! Ack! Ack!) since I worked in a library, and have been living in other countries and not browsing the new book shelf almost daily, all my favorite authors have been busy writing more books. That's what authors do, right? Whoopee! Backlog!

Argh, I'm hungry. You're not supposed to GET hungry doing Master Cleanse, but I always do. Some people I know have done it for a month or more, but the longest I've managed is two days, in Mexico. Then at the end of the second day I broke the fast with a Baratillo steak quesadilla with tons and tons of really hot salsa. All my vegetarian friends were like, what? You broke your fast with a TACO? You're supposed to start with carrot juice, and work up to brown rice, or some such rot. Sorry, I think I'm a different SPECIES from these people.

I think I've finished the painting for the BWAC show, which has to be delivered Saturday. I don't like it too much, I don't think it's one of my best, but it's not bad enough to pull out of the show. It is supposed to surge and glitter and sparkle, and it sort of does, but not to the extent that I envisioned, and now it's in danger of being completely overworked. I need more space, so I can paint bigger and back up farther, and more time, and more money for huge canvases and brushes and paint. Well, don't we all. I should be all inspired and motivated, seeing as how I've got to go back to the shop pretty soon and start trying to earn my keep again, but all I want to do is lie on the couch and read my new Thomas Perry novel and make a bunch of macaroni and cheese. God, I hate fasting.

I've given myself a one-year ultimatum for stabilizing my finances--if income does not equal or exceed expenditures by the time my lease expires next June, I think I have to move to Maine or Philadelphia, where the licensing laws are gentler and rents are much lower. My friend Sasha vigorously tried to talk me out of this plan, over a way-too-expensive salad at the Brooklyn Diner yesterday evening. It's true that I belong here, and I don't want to go anywhere else. But I've been here two years and still am not breaking remotely even on rent and bills, let alone qualifying for a mortgage on a home of my own, even a stupid little condo which wouldn't be big enough to paint in anyway.

If I think of my current life as a one-year artist residency in New York City, maybe this will motivate me to use my time a little better, market my work a little more (I'm still terrified of gallery owners, even though I AM one) and get out of bed in the mornings. Today I actually got up after eight and a half hours of sleep, hooray. Quitting drinking is probably the secret, dammit.

What I Think About Sex

Started running just a bit, just a wee small bit, yesterday and today. The problem isn't my aerobic condition; the problem is my left ankle, which tends to lock up, scream and collapse whenever I'm going through anguish in a primary sexual relationship. I took the painful ankle to a local massage therapist yesterday, who specializes in trigger point therapy, horses, and old people. She was frustratingly tentative and cerebral. She kept poking me lightly and asking, 'there?' It came to me that there are as many mediocre bodyworkers as there are mediocre painters; both are deceptively simple mediums with a nearly limitless range of potential lameness. There are kitsch massages, all swoosh and no substance; aggressive, brutal carpenter massages, where the guy knows the anatomy but forgets there's a person in there; formless Abstract Expressionist bodywork; wispy drypoint doodling that is all theory and no affect. Knowledge, coupled with humility, coupled with empathy and power is very, very rare.

A person's body is not a machine that rights itself when you press the right button. It is an instrument that sings if you caress it with skill and with passion, warps if it is left out in the rain, sulks and decays if you put it in a box. I want a bodyworker who goes straight to the sore places and sinks into them over and over, stretches out the kinks, unblocks the flow, kneads and swirls like a cat dancing on my spine. I want someone who allows energy to flow through them like a cataract, who doesn't chatter or explain, who senses my body because they are in a body too, and they know what bodies feel like. Someone who massages people just like *I* do, dammit.

Anyway. This Sex thing. I figured I'd just EXPLAIN, finally, instead of getting into all these confusing, cross-purposes tangles, tangles that have been happening to me now for nearly twenty years. These scenarios are the stuff of farce. For years I have been considering writing a comic novel that begins with me reading a Georgette Heyer Regency romance novel on my boyfriend's bed, while he quietly and elaborately ties himself up. Occasionally I prod his penis with my foot; he groans in ecstasy, and we pass the entire afternoon in parallel fetish harmony.

But if I started, the funny stories would not end, and not a jot of enlightenment would be obtained, for each story is a story of separation, confusion, isolation and miscommunication. A friend of a friend of mine, bless her heart, recently attended a "sex workshop" in Manhattan, because she felt she needed some liberation. The instructor used some sort of egg object to masturbate in front of the entire (co-ed) class, then the participants paired off to coach each other in the technique. For other classes, an "intimate partner" was needed, but if you came to the class solo, they'd pair you up with someone. Oh, blarrgh, horror of horrors. It boggles.

Okay, so don't start getting upset and calling me a repressed fascist. I didn't finish yet. Learning the mechanics of sex is not bad, wrong or evil. It's merely necessary. It's also not sex; it's practicing scales. I can't get that excited about scales. For me, sex is intimate. It is integrated. And it is singular.

Arrgh, that doesn't work. Let me try again. Sex is the top of a fiddlehead fern thrusting through the earth. It is rooted in a single place; it pulls the sun and the water and the soil through itself, it pokes, it springs, it releases lace and glory to the air. It is concentrated creative potential, at one with its surroundings.

Intimate, what is that? It means you know, and are known.

It has always baffled me when people talk about having 'great sex' with people they barely know and don't particularly like. How is this possible? Yes, you can have an intense physical release, made all the more intense by the mystery, the adrenalin, the danger of an animal encounter with another animal in the dark. It's fine as far as it goes. But it doesn't last, it goes nowhere, it isn't rooted in anything. Non-intimate sex is lowest-common-denominator plumbing, snot-rag-for-the-lower-extremities, parts is parts. How boring. How depressing.

This is why, when all my college friends were blithely entering into polyamorous angst and telling me I was an uptight prude, I didn't get laid at all. I danced instead. Can we say, "sublimation?" Freshman and sophomore year I went to parties and had five beers, and when Joe Jackson's 'Steppin' Out' came on I started whirling and didn't stop until the song was over, and only then did I notice the circle of gaping mouths around me. Later on I discovered Austin's peerless live music scene, and for three dollars I could spend the whole evening doing interpretive movement, channelled straight from the source. The musicians would ask me, 'how do you know what we're going to do before we do it?' and of course I didn't; I wasn't thinking at all, just entering the flow. I was simply present.

I didn't want to sleep with anyone who wasn't interested in my soul, was all. The boys who approached me seemed all about ego, and arrogance, and indifference. They didn't give a hoot if I got pregnant, or herpes, or heartbroken. So I kept dancing. Allowing the complexities of music to direct me was the closest I could find to an intimacy high.

Later on, I tried, I tried so hard to un-repress myself, to get it the way other people seemed to. My first lover was simply awful in the sack, worse because he thought he was the greatest. He'd slobber all over me, put his hands in the wrong places, and misinterpret me jerking my face away from his octopus tongue for thrashings of ecstasy. The second was worse, a misogynistic narcissist who thought my body was disgusting. On and on, an act which should have been about communication became an exercise in frustration and misunderstanding. I tried to separate sex from relationship, from emotion, from partnership and communication, and failed completely. My first instinct has always been to integrate, and I think it is a sound one.

Great sex, I think, is a poem about a person. What I like is fine because I like it. What you like is beautiful too. How may these specifics work together to make art?

What interests me is tantric sex, which I haven't read much about because it is too damn frustrating to think about without an interested partner. How about moving very, very slowly, just to see what it's like, or gazing into each other's eyes for twenty minutes? What is there to discover? Can our souls touch each other?

It takes an enormous amount of trust, strength, and good boundaries to embark on a project like this; also chemistry, community and committment. Which is why I've so rarely tried it. I don't want to gaze into the eyes of someone who might suck me dry, or rip me to bits, or freak out and abandon me, or smell really bad and start to bore me. So I apologize to all the people who might have felt rejected by me over the years. What they didn't understand was that when they said, "hey baby, yer cute, why don't we get it on?" what I responded to was, "hey baby, how 'bout I suck up your soul and use it for Kleenex?" Just my own freaky baggage.

I wish I had a boat

Sooth, I know not why I am so tired. Slept 10 hours last night, after a bubble bath and a 45 minute meditation; got up, did yoga, poached an egg, wandered down to the beach and fell asleep on a rock for an hour. Some doofus was using a table saw on the ridge behind me. I drive all this way to get away from industrial noise, and there is a table saw at the beach. Blarrrgh.

I really wonder if there's something wrong with me, that I sleep so much. It weirds people out, but I've been like that since I was born. Sleeping nine, or ten, or ten and a half hours a night is not unusual for me, and if I don't get enough sleep, trying to function like a normal human is physically painful. Perhaps I should try some sort of cleanse, or fast, or exercise, or homeopathic something, but I don't know what, and I don't want to mortify the spirit to a greater extent than it has already been mortified, lately. I am on vacation, dammit, I'll sleep if I want to.

Usually it seems to me that when I fancy myself in a desperate situation, and am clamoring to whatever powers that be that I need a little help, here, the powers that follow me are irritatingly smug and tight-lipped about it. I remember in Mexico, when I had returned to find a psycho landlady who had not yet vacated my house and was demanding excessive money from me in payment of imaginary debts, and the former love of my life was living with somebody else, and I was melting down about all of it, K. told me that my guides were in the room. One of them, she said, had his arm around my shoulders, and was patting my back and shaking his head. "He says that this is nothing at all compared to the battles you're GOING to fight," she said. This was not entirely comforting.

This time I've been asking for advice, and they're actually being nice to me. The night before last they didn't say anything, but gave me something blue to breathe in, which felt all nice and soothing and opened up the top of my head. Last night it was orange, like coals--I don't know what effect that is supposed to have. I don't feel fiery. I just feel tired, and like writing and writing even though I don't have much to say.

Last night, brother-in-law and I were discussing the vagaries of my extremely conservative parents. The last time I went to visit them with C., my mother had RENTED a cot and set it up in the office for me to sleep on, so that I didn't sin in her house. She gave C. the best bedroom, with the Nantucket decor and the private bathroom. At least he didn't have to sleep in the garage. When Mom showed me the cot, I started laughing in incredulity, and even Dad joined in. "Your dad has a clue," said brother-in-law. "Once we all went out without the two of you, and said we'd be back in two hours. After about an hour and forty-five minutes we were ready to go, and I saw your dad checking his watch so that we didn't surprise you." How sweet. After all, I am THIRTY-SIX YEARS OLD.

The only thing worse than having your parents put you on a cot in the office, however, is suspecting that this is a relief to your boyfriend. I mentioned this, and brother-in-law said, "Serena, you rock." Do I rock? I feel like I'm just perpetually messing up, because I sleep too much.

Sometimes I want to live the life of a character in a Robertson Davies novel--erudite, eccentric, argumentative, contextualized somewhere between great art, great scholarship, and academic uselessness. This afternoon I picked up "Murther and Walking Spirits" and curled up on the big cuddly couch in the baroque, sage green reading room of the Belfast Public Library. It's little short of a miracle that this library is here. It's suspiciously brand-new, light-drenched, well-furnished, Internet-connected, and freshly painted in Martha Stewart shades of butternut, cream and sage for a public library in a town of 6300. Maybe I actually did die, driving home last Tuesday. Maybe I just went plowing through a red light and into a huge truck, and this is the Bardo.

I don't know what to do with myself.

Crossing the border

into Maine, the car suddenly started smelling like Deep Woods Off. It kept smelling like that--I had the sun roof open, and I wondered if maybe the Maine government dusts the whole state with Deep Woods Off to keep down mosquitoes. When I pulled up to my brother-in-law's apartment, it was still there. I mentioned it to him, and he got a quizzical look on his face and said, "Maybe Deep Woods Off has a 'piney fresh scent.'

Oh.

Belfast has an organic foods co-op, and a big Victorian-ceilinged library with free Internet access, and a few too many galleries. The chicken-processing plant closed last year, along with the fish-processing plant, and the harbor is full of yuppie sailboats. My brother-in-law is here designing high-end townhouses and condos for a new development. My brother-in-law's business acumen is looking sharp to me.

Even the library smells like Deep Woods Off.

My brother-in-law has tactfully provided a piece of floor for me to crash on, and a very comfortable boat mattress, and a hand-me-down quilt from his mom. I suddenly had a flashback to the month or so I crashed on the floor at B. and V.'s loft in Oakland, in 1996 I think, after getting smeared into the pavement in my SF ghetto, dumped by my then-partner and having nowhere else to go. I wonder what happened to make me the sort of person who goes through periodic crises and ends up crashing on people's floors or couches or spare office bedrooms for longer than a week. I suppose it's that persistent willingness to risk absolutely everything on an irrational compulsion. I can understand why people try to dissuade me--too often, they're the ones who have to mop up the wreckage.

Then again, the time I got stranded in Austin and stayed with my friend Carlotta for a month or so, she invited me to go with her on road trips to her parents' vanity farm in Canton, and to her uncle's fiftieth birthday party, and out to poetry slams, and was sorry when I left again, so at least I'm not a terrible house guest. Not the kind of house guest who complains that the couch makes her back hurt and the mayonnaise is all wrong and there isn't any sugar and she hates honey, and the cat is staring at her and she hasn't slept in four days. And she forgot her toothpaste and she doesn't like mine.

(Do not compare yourself with others, lest you become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself...)

Had a Moment yesterday evening, after driving eight hours and walking around the waterfront at high tide, and meeting a couple of daddy long-legs which don't freak me out as much as they used to, and chatting neutrally with brother-in-law, when he said "...and I got some single-malt Scotch, thought you might need it" and I suddenly gasped as though I had been shot, and said no I wasn't okay, thank you. There was a long silence, and brother-in-law said, "You don't have to have any Scotch if you don't want any." I pulled myself together, and made both of us one of those fabulous salads with corn and tuna and artichokes and haricots verts that I learned to make from my French boyfriend. It's one of those things that keeps my welcomes fresh.

My friend K. in Canada says, "You are mourning what you wanted, not what you had" but that's not true; I miss C.'s actual presence, his actual self, the actual intimacy built up over thousands of minutes together. He once put a pill on his tongue, stuck it out and said "Say bye-bye," and I thought this was hysterically funny, even though I didn't think it was funny at all in first grade when boys did stupid things like that. It came to me that having your skin ripped off isn't even the hard part--it's all those hundreds of thousands of minutes afterwards when every bit of your life is impregnated by absence. I feel like a faded, childless widow, being dutifully cared for by a tired brother-in-law who has also got a business to run.

My actual lips taste like Deep Woods Off. It's weird.

That vanity farm in Canton was slightly disturbing. Carlotta's mother bought it with the proceeds of selling her clothing boutique in Dallas, and she decorated the main estate house and each of four smaller houses with antiques from the local flea market, each in a different theme. I slept in the Hummingbird Bedroom in the Derby House. When we arrived at 11 PM, all the lights were on in all the rooms of all the houses, and all the dining-room tables were set in matching service for twelve. The living room of the Derby House was decorated with Kentcky Derby paraphernalia--riding crops and horse portraits and large tomes of racing statistics. The back bedroom where Carlotta slept had an enormous mural of a desert painted on all four walls, with cacti and mountains in the distance, and a four-poster bed made of fence posts. Little vignettes were set up in every corner--a place for young mothers to chitchat over tea and knitting, a place for a solitary writer to while away the afternoon with lemonade and a journal, an Irish Lodge for fourteen boisterous soccer players to sit up all night with Fritos and horror films, before crashing under matching plaid blankets in the bunk beds all round the room. And as you explored the increasing detailed wonders of every room in every house, you realized that NOBODY LIVES HERE--all these rooms are set up for imaginary people who never come to stay. Carlotta said that when she and her siblings were little, her mother would follow around after them, putting all the cushions and lamps and charming arrangements of books and flowers and musical instruments Back In Place, in the elaborately casual way they had been before real live children messed them up.

Carlotta said, furthermore, that her mother periodically gets bored with the theme of each house, tears everything out and redecorates again. Her brother lived in the Derby House for awhile with his first wife, but they had to leave because his wife said it was like living in a museum. They weren't allowed to have their own dishes or furniture or possessions or lives; they had to keep the tables set all the time. Carlotta's mother said exactly one thing to me the whole time I was there; she said my hair ornament was "cuuuuute." And we all went shopping at the antique flea market.

I liked staying in the Hummingbird Bedroom, though. It had an iron bedstead with hummingbirds on it, and a hummingbird bath with books about birds stacked up on it, under the hummingbird lamp, and antique white dresses hanging on the wall. The mattress was all poufy and new, and there were about twelve pillows on the bed. Carlotta said her mom bought all new mattresses after one of her mom's friends mentioned that the aesthetic details were perfect, but the mattresses were old and thin and scungy. It was a lucky place for a tired gypsy to rest.

When we went to her uncle's fiftieth birthday party, Carlotta didn't even introduce me to anybody before she disappeared into the thicket. She said later that she knew I'd be fine. I was fine, but it wasn't easy. For an itinerant artist I'm sort of shy. Her uncle showed me his art collection and his wine collection, and I provided temporary Interesting Person conversational material to various stranded aunts and co-workers. It was just after 9/11, and I was just about to move to New York. I said, "New York could use some healing," and some pilot said, "You would make a profit on that?" I forbore to ask him whether he'd fly a plane for free, camp out in Central Park and eat out of trash cans if flying planes would help the wounded, and said, "It's about survival." My sister later said that the only proper response to that is to look the person in the eye and say, "Yes."

Women on Walls

Biking around the pier in Red Hook last weekend I found another one. It was almost a physical shock. The last one I found I never photographed; I was driving, and literally slammed on the brakes and backed up to have a look at it, but I didn't have my camera on hand and was lazy. There was a third, perhaps, practically a palimpsest of peeling paint in the shape of an intricate face, just around the corner from the gallery, which I passed every day and almost took for granted. Then one day they started renovating the building, and before I knew it the entire wall was gone.

I had just been to have a look at the BWAC show, a pretty show, a nice show, of pretty nice art done by pretty nice people. It was a very lovely day. I was already, I know, bracing myself for the shock of breaking up with C. Putting out roots, grounding in the world outside of us, outside of him.

Now, a gift. My cup runneth over, and the memory card on my digital camera; when I came upon the next one, I was almost angry. Now I had to erase something.



Paper. They're made of paper, and ink, and pencil. They're cut out with exacto knives, probably. I guess they last a few months, depending upon the weather. The weather in New York State will eradicate a stone building in twenty-five years, unmaintained. They are not remotely like any other street art I've ever seen.

I don't think I want to know who does them.

If I weren't an artist, I might be a journalist. There are interesting things literally around every corner, magical things, just waiting to be discovered. It's only the Thing in me that won't be ignored or put aside, like carrying around a boulder in my gut, that makes me an artist first and an observer merely as a supplement to it. It's not enough for me to just discover things; I have to chew them up and transform them. Some days I wish I could put this boulder down.



The artist must be a man, I think; probably not an attractive one either, probably not a young one. Some of the faces look sad, others more than sad; they are distraught, destroyed. The one I didn't photograph was of a bride as a decaying corpse. Immediately I thought of Mexico, of course, but the level of detail, creativity and artistic sophistication goes well beyond any iconic Katrinas.



Later in the day I called C., who had promised to invite me to a movie later, and didn't. It is, of course, the Rule to never, never do that, but something in me needed to push it. Lately he has been treating me like his paper-doll, junior-high-school girlfriend--holding my hand, taking me to movies, telling me he loves me, chatting about neutral things. But he doesn't make love to me, he doesn't plan a life with me, he tries to separate out all the essential things and put them in boxes while waiting for a miracle, which he doesn't believe in, anyway. And I was watching my dreams disintegrate like a paper woman on a fence.



So I went ahead and pushed it, and now I know, and now I can move on. Yes, it was like having my skin ripped off. No, I don't regret it. I don't believe in settling for whatever you think you can get, instead of going full steam for what you want. Settling just means that failure is assured.



I got to sleep the last two nights by creating a blue bubble all around me, an egg really, full of blue light with a golden shell. The blue light was for healing, the shell was to keep out hostile things. It's like the oxygen tent my daddy made for me when I was three and had come back from the hospital, after being treated for severe asthma. I cried because I missed my tent, and instead of explaining that I didn't need it anymore, daddy the engineer solved the problem. He strapped an umbrella to the back of an upright chair next to my bed, draped a sheet over it, and placed a humidifier on the seat of the chair underneath. The sheet was over my whole bed, and the hum of the humidifier blanketed my world and let me sleep.

Next week I will go to Maine, I think, and visit my brother-in-law, and find a body of water, and sit next to it without moving for days and days. Then I will come back to the city, and figure out how to get business loans, or artist grants, and maybe find a place where I can live and work at the same time, so that I don't have to pay two rents. None of this will be easy. I could fail horribly. I could use up every cent of capital and go into terrible debt and be alone my whole life and die in the gutter.



Well, okay, then, here I go.