Resurrection

I’ll tell you what it’s like to be dead. Death is zinc white with streaks of cerulean blue. It is like being reborn.
Today is Saturday. I’ve been dead for two days and only sobered up long enough to stretch a single canvas. I’ve been celebrating my departure.
…

Departure

“I am not disappearing, Daniel, but transmigrating.”

As I explained it to Daniel over a year ago he began to understand that a corpse could be more nourishing for a parasite then a live body. Especially when the live body was a celebrated painter whose paintings would triple in value the moment he became a corpse. This was the logic I’d developed for Daniel; a syllogism grounded in commerce. “You will be changed only slightly,” I said. “From a tick to a maggot.”

His white-capped smile began to creep back.

“How will you do it?”

So at last, after four Stoli martinis apiece and three hours of conversational tug-of-war, I’d won him over.

“We, Daniel. How will we do it.”
…

The Exquisite Corpse

I’m a little disappointed in the turnout. I count less than a hundred people in all, but maybe it’s the weather. They say rain at a funeral means the dead were of good heart but what if it’s only drizzling? Maybe people feel they are being cheated of a real funeral.

The burial of the empty coffin was my idea, executed through Daniel. I want these people to feel my life like a parenthesis never closed, the prickly non-finality of a soldier missing in action—the survivors spending their life anticipating a ghostly knocking at their door.

Imagine this is a canvas:

I paint this scene with nothing but black and white. A gray wash would form the sky. Black hash marks with pale-circle faces would capture the luminaries of the New York art scene: critics, gallery owners and artists stand indistinguishable from each other as they hunch forward, vultures on a branch, their heads sagging above the black uniforms of the bereaved. I scan the crowd for a tear. It’s hard to tell with the sprinkling. Anyway, people seem suitably sober. Except for The Bear, of course. He is the lone smear of brown in this painting.

Bear Dance

Besides Daniel, Boris, The Bear, is the closest thing I have to a friend. He totters slightly in the rumpled, brown corduroy suit he wears every day and passes out in most every night. He’s a sculptor. From marble he chisels elephantine women with breasts like cannon balls.

He looked the same the last time I saw him. Exactly the same.

Russian Baptism

“Did I ever tell you the story of my father, Frank?”

“Many times, Boris, many times.”

“I tell you again. I think you need to hear it again.”

Boris was buying the drinks so I listened. Again.

“My father was one of the greatest icon painters in Russia. He do restorations on Rublyov in the great churches of Moscow and Vladimir. He paint murals for the party, but always with style of icons. He say fuck the party’s idea of social realism. He say the real come from God. He say the only art that matters is art for God, fuck art for man or art for art.”

“I know. You’ve told me.”

“But did I tell you I was icon painter too? When I was a boy I study with him. He have to make icons to sell to tourists, icons to be smuggled to the West. So I paint Icons: Mary and St. Nicolai and St. George—so many Saints—and Jesus, of course, always Jesus. I must have paint five hundred pictures of Jesus as a boy. All that heroic suffering. All that serious shit. Their faces look constipated with that serious shit. My father said icon’s eyes must hold ‘wisdom of eons’ but, to me, always that wisdom look like a terrible, terrible weight.

“So one time, when I paint the resurrection, I give Jesus a smile. Not big smile, but small grin for satisfaction. Little twinkle in the eye too that says ‘hey, I’m like Houdini of the ages. I pull out greatest trick of all time.’ How else you think a man feels after rising from the dead?

“I tell my father this and also, ‘Can not Jesus take little pleasure in his own miracles?’ And you know what he says?”

“Nothing.” I said.

“Right. He says nothing. But goddammit to hell, he beats the shit out of me.”

Boris’ laugh sounds like rising notes on a tuba.

“Those bruises they go away but never the questions, Frank, never the questions.”

Two drinks later the storm systems, as they always did, began to move in behind that great Russian brow. Boris held up his leathery hands as though he was surrendering.

“Frank. Now, the deeper in stone I go, the more ideas fade. Fallen pieces at my foot make more sense then what I sculpt.”

My eyes had wandered to a young blonde at the bar. Boris yanked my wrist to draw me back. There was dust in his beard. He looked ancient, a character from Greek tragedy.

“It is like the hammer’s strikes are hitting me not stone.” He thumped his chest, atop his heart. “It is like I am carving myself,” he said.

Mourning Picture

Now, Boris rubs his dusty hands together as though my open grave is a fire pit.

Daniel stands at the foot of my grave, his arm locked in Clio’s. A broad-brimmed hat with netting blurs her features. I remember she hates black. When we moved into the city she threw out every piece of black clothing she had in protest against what she’d called the “young art fascists.”

She stands as rigid as the surrounding tombstones. Is her face wet? Again, it might be the rain. Daniel leans in to whisper something at her ear. She nods her head and, I think, smiles faintly.

Tristan and Isolde

No. She falls to her knees. She tears her hair out in clumps and wailing, leaps into the grave to fill my vacant coffin. Tristan and Isolde: our bodies will grow above ground, forever entwine in the limbs of a tree.

Time Unveiling Truth

No. She just stands there. Shivering from the damp and squeezing Daniel’s arm, she tilts her head toward the priest as he clears his throat.

Epiphany

After the eulogy the mourners file past my grave, dropping roses in the hole. Boris pulls out a pewter flask and pours a few swallows onto my coffin before tipping it into his mouth. Clio extracts something tiny from her purse and releases it, fluttering, into the hole.

I wait for the people to leave and move in closer. No one comes to fill the grave; it seems even the cemetery workers do not hurry for an empty coffin.

My headstone is a tasteful, “Paradise Black,” granite. I chose the epitaph myself, a quote from Renoir when asked why he still painted though his hands were half gnarled from arthritis: “The pain passes but the beauty remains.”

I am suddenly struck with what Clio used to call a “stupid epiphany,” a banal thing so obvious it should have been apparent years ago. Looking at the sandblasted words on my tombstone I realize the word “paint” contains the word “pain.”

Entombment

I search for what Clio left me. Atop the coffin, amid the scattered roses, I see a tiny patch of color—no bigger than a thumbnail—indigo blue flecked with canary yellow. It was her favorite paint chip, gathered from a cracking Van Gogh and smuggled from the restoration labs of the Metropolitan. She had the glint of the criminal in her eye, holding it up for me like a purloined sapphire when she came home that night. “A sliver of genius,” she had said.

After a quick glance around I lower myself into my grave. The earth surrounds me, moist and smelling of clay. I pocket the paint chip. Beneath my feet the coffin is slippery with rain and roses. I imagine myself falling, breaking my neck on my coffin or knocking myself unconscious and being arrested for looting my own grave. A giggle builds inside my gut. Let the exiting bereaved beware! I picture goose bumps on their necks as they slide into their limousines and return to the antiseptic vacuums of their penthouses and lofts. I imagine revenges. I am a modern Monte Cristo. I will descend like a divine lightening bolt on the philistines; I will haunt the shadows and dreams of these Park Avenue dilettantes. I will paint a masterpiece for no man to see or sell.
…

On White II
Back in my studio the canvas waits. I had not stretched my own in ages, leaving the busywork to one of the many assistants that had come and gone over the years. This canvas I stretched and gessoed the day after my death.

I have not put a brush to it yet.

Arid white. A mythic city lost in a snowstorm. A page awaiting color. Indifferent and blank, it leans slightly on its easel in the center of my studio. Still perfect. Unmarred by paint.

It is like this: