Still Life

The secret to creating a resonant still life isn’t composition but contrast. An apple, orgasmically crimson, placed on a white-velvet tablecloth, begins to sing. Its moment of heightenedness is transitory, though; in a month, the apple will be hole-pocked, softening. Brown.

Yesterday I struggled to paint a still life, wanted it portentous with shadow and light: three oranges and a blue-and-white vase laid out on a pale pink tablecloth. The oranges’ shimmer, in the grouping I’d selected, appeared nearly fluorescent; I felt as if I glimpsed intense circles of fruit, gleaming with an afterretinal effect, everywhere; the whole of my body shimmered orange; my mind seemed suffused in lengthening cast shadows tinged delicately purple, the oranges’ complement; and I walked self-consciously far back from my easel to survey the underpainting, craving appetite. Immersion. Rapture.

But my daughter wanted “Faces” again, so I acquiesced. My daughter is six and excited about possibilities; I’m forty-eight and find “Faces”—usually—depressing. I love my daughter, though, and she can undermine my focus. Like the orange that dwells eternally, but only in the context of oil, composition, canvas, focus withers quickly for me, bursts its fluorescent skin.

We sat down across from each other—the first part of our game. The table shone narrow, rubbled, white, like a dream of a table, and my daughter, after I closed my eyes, started tracing my face. Her fingers, warm, quick-moving, brown (I could see the details when I couldn’t see them), eased down my cheekbones with microscopic grace, sensing my heat with seemingly only fingertips, lingering over my chapped, calloused mouth, its deepening corner carve-lines, the chin where a running accident years ago furnished me with a new appearance crafted of cleft and scar, then gently—more gently—the lidded balls of my eyes.

My turn. My daughter tilted her head back. I leaned forward slightly; I was always nervous touching anything perfect, and my daughter was the most perfect piece I’d crafted: lovely and fragile, with dark brown eyes suffused with an inexplicable sadness. She was a melancholy child, I a melancholy adult. It was what it was. But still, as I touched her face, sensed the cheek curve where skin and flesh yielded to a concavity, to an emptiness of space, to a plenitude of bone; as I stroked her jaw, the living bone it was, beneath the sweetly pointed nadir of her chin, I felt something rise in me, but tentatively, like a sheet glimpsed through a smeared window, fluttering white, a distant pale shadow, on its clothesline.

Then we moved to the bathroom. We set up two tall chairs before the mirror. We sat down, each on her respective chair, and held hands. The mirror hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. Rust spots, dust remnants, toothpaste leavings streaked, smeared, created an archaeological dig for us to sift through, a realm of dirt and dust to slough off before the glass might reveal who we were.

But, around the flecks of detritus, we could see ourselves clearly enough, I believed.

We tilted our cheeks together, taking care not to tip our chairs.

My daughter’s countenance glowed with a phosphoresence that exhilarated me, her face a planet tilting on its axis to an ever lighter and brightening side, her skin luminescently alive, her wet mouth glimmering, her deep and duskcolored eyes aglow with wider and whitening smears of pure light.

Beside her, my face seemed to flicker and dim, the flesh receding on tidal waves of bone.

It was what it was.

Then, suddenly breathless, I thought I glimpsed, just for a second, the dark planes behind my eyes, the skeletal structure of my face in its final disintegratory fracturing, which—not knowing anything else—I was compelled to count as bliss, though, truly, I only half-believed it.

I angled my chair around, kissed my daughter’s mouth; she always giggled when I kissed her, when I stroked her bare and lovely, backtilted throat.

It was beautiful, all of it, I assured myself—it had to be. And resonant because it was real.