“Rounding out the small brown hill I wanted to call a mountain but knew its size would not allow it that, I realized I had to circle down, down, down to get my belongings and leave this place. I looked forward to the descent.”
In her hurry, her hand slipped on the hard edge of her suitcase and cut into the top of her thumb. It immediately started bleeding. The cut on her hand looked like strawberry jam, she thought. When people were squeamish around blood or gore, she’d always been confused. To her, the world presented itself in shapes and colors, shadow and light. An artist’s eye, a college professor told her. Because of that, blood and wounds were beautiful: brilliant reds, purples and greens and yellows under a translucent scrim, white and fatty yellow and coral pink. She’d stopped telling people she saw it that way, though. It made her seem crazy or unfeeling, when really it was not from a lack of feeling or empathy, but rather from finding far too much of life beautiful. Far more than anyone else found beautiful, it seemed. And it was not as if this beauty made her immune to understanding the pain.
Maybe this, she thought, was what had kept her so long with bruises blooming on her thighs, her face, cuts striating her arms. She nursed the wounds secretly, rolled up her sleeves and looked in the mirror at them, traced their edges, watched them expand and contract as they healed. Flowers, planets, lines of fire.
She had been an artist once, though that felt so far away from now. It is hard to try to make art when someone eats up all of your time and your brain space. But she had been a painter when she met him. The summer they met she’d gone away to New Hampshire for four weeks. A residency. All expenses paid. A cabin the woods to herself with torn screens that let giant mosquitoes in at night. Lunches that came packed in a basket, the kind she imagined Little Red Riding Hood to have. She painted big. Large canvases took up four of the three walls in her living room and she painted on the porch outside most days. Wild, colorful, abstract. At the time, she was what is called “emerging.”
On the night they met, mutual friends introduced them at a party. She was wearing a Pat Benatar t-shirt that she’d cropped herself. High-waisted jeans, black boots, purple eyeliner. He was tall, dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans with a small cuff around the bottom, the cool leather boots of the year. He talked about his desire to be a filmmaker or a writer. Or both, she’d said, flirting. And she talked about her art, how to stretch a canvas, how soon she would be leaving for the east coast black-fly infested summer. It was exciting to her, after the five years she’d spent in L.A., land of smog, tacos, shorts that rode so high up the ass women’s butts looked like two scoops of melting ice cream coming out the bottom.
Maybe the sun had stunned her and kept her with him. She’d grown up in Ohio, in a town with so much cloud coverage that there was a military base built there. Under such a gray dome of sky, enemy spy planes can’t see what’s going on below. When she’d moved to the west coast, she thought of the Spanish name for sunflower, girasol. Turn to the sun. She was constantly craning her neck up and up when she walked outside. Maybe the light had blinded her, kept her cowed and small, afraid that if she admitted how bad things were she’d have to go back to Ohio, back to living next to a military arsenal, never see the sun again.
There were good things about him and about being with him and the list could be long, very long: a bundle of peonies on her desk when she got home from work, stroking the side of her face when she talked about what she hoped for her life, a surprise trip to Hawaii, a hike planned for just the two of them, allowing her sister to crash for three weeks when she got divorced, all the meals he cooked, the hikes he took her on, the way he held her close that first year.
The house they rented together sat up in the Hollywood Hills. When they’d found the place, she’d loved that it was called a bungalow, liked the way the word sat in her mouth, made her lips into a dramatic “o” at the end. She said the word to everyone she knew. They’d been together a whole year when they did that. Four seasons was enough to know what someone was like, she’d thought. She’d made good decisions on far less.
He’d been a benevolent drunk, for a while. More affectionate when he was drinking, sillier. He liked the music to be turned up louder and louder, Bruce Springsteen sometimes, or a Sturgill Simpson cover, played on repeat. That was the worst of the offenses. Sometimes he’d get angry with himself, though never at her. Then. May, a cicada year, all of them screaming fuck me fuck me fuck me in the trees around their house. They’d been grilling and he accidentally turned over the grill in a buzzed stumble. He kicked the metal belly of the grill until it dented and a small pool of blood appeared soaking the top of his running shoes. Anger like she’d never seen before. And when she came over to help, started to bend down to help him with his foot, he slapped her. Accident, accident, accident, love, love, love was all he said the next day and the weeks after that. Easy to believe him; he was always so sweet to her. Called her baby, drove her to the airport even if it was three hours away in the bigger city so her flights would be cheaper.
Then more, bigger, more alcohol. His film didn’t get picked up, then his script didn’t get read by the right people. Then he felt bad about how little work he’d done, then he felt bad about himself for drinking. All these reasons to drink. She watched how the rage seemed to percolate in his stomach and then move out towards his hands and feet. How he’d usually yell about something first—the bottle opener or the fridge or the dishes. Always something inanimate, then her. Though she became inert in their relationship pretty quickly. She preferred to be a stone than to react to him. Alone, she’d think of herself as kind of brave, as if she was living with a villain from a children’s book.
He was away: a weekend in Las Vegas. There predictably would be booze and cocaine, late nights with his friends in a casino. The women didn’t interest him, but the drinking did. He once said to her, I don’t like to go to bed, it feels like giving up on the day. At the time it had seemed desperately romantic, but now she knew it just meant he didn’t want to stop drinking.
That song, that Sturgill Simpson song is a cover of a Nirvana song. The chorus goes like this: he don't know what it means to love someone. It sounded like velvet coming out of his mouth. That was the thing, he had a good voice even as he sang those words again and again, as if someone deep inside of him knew what he needed to say and was coaching the words up from the pit of his belly.
Like in a fairy tale, there was someone waiting for her, a good witch. When she’d finally told a friend, her friend had wept and wept at her feet while she looked stoically onward. Clear drops of light on her friend’s face. The color and shape of it made her want to paint again. I am so sorry for you, her friend said. It is just what life is right now, the woman said. She’d turned cold as steel against herself. She had to extricate the pain from the rest of her life or it would have swallowed her up ages ago. Her friend was a yoga instructor, a crystals healer, a woman who sometimes made altars and did rituals and spells and her house was full of macramé, which the woman hated to live among. It reminded her of her mother’s house, where the rope art signified bad ’90s taste more than it signified renewal and a turn back to the land or whatever the hell it signified for her friend. But there was a bed there and he didn’t know this friend, couldn’t find her there.
She descended the stairs to the street with her one suitcase, her thumb bleeding just a bit. Long linen pants, long linen sleeves. A black car pulled up. Her Lyft. Miss? The driver said when he rolled down the window. Raul? She said, searching his face, checking the name on the app on her phone. Yes, that’s me. She put her suitcase in the trunk and sat in the back seat. It felt so strange to walk out of her life, leave so much of it behind: pea green coffee mugs, cream ceramic plates, toothpaste still in the tube, aubergine colored sheets still on the bed.
The car circled down the hills slowly toward the city. Later on she would paint images of her wounds from those years, though she didn’t know it yet. That is what artists do all the time, anyway, they represent the wound. Though some of the time it is not so literal. Downtown L.A. felt foreign even though it was so close by. Palm trees and men wearing loafers with no socks, streetlights heavy with light, car after car after car. It took a long time to get from the bungalow to her friend’s apartment. Her pulse was quick the whole way there and she hoped her friend would have a magic trick or ritual or spell to make everything turn out ok. As they drove, night slowly fell. Overheard she could see the occasional blink of a returning plane’s wing light. The red flash. Like a siren. Like blood.
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