Friday, April 22, 2011

I still think of you on cold winter mornings, darling, they still remind me of when we were at school.

Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

yellow to the eyes

The night I rode my bike down to alphabet city—the night you would not come with me but I came back for you at three in a cold sweat inside my red coca cola sweatshirt—I found an old dresser I think you would have liked. I saw a lot of things you would have liked: a smoke shop on seventh and first, that little French restaurant we ate at last spring and could never remember the name of, a saxophone abandoned on the corner of 10th and Avenue B, a brownstone with a very blue door. I’ve heard that Salman Rushdie lives there behind that door, just two doors down from Patricia Nix. I’ve heard professors say she’s faded and her art washed out, but I don’t believe it. There are eyes that watch you climb the narrow stairs in her narrow house. They blink and wink, peacock feathers painted over in striking reds and blues. She had me to dinner back in September, but you would not come with me then either. Nicky came instead and we drank champagne in the thin parlour on a blue velvet couch, sided by a marble bust of Benjamin Franklin, and portrait of Queen Elizabeth I in a red and gold dress, her eyes made of glass and portraits of children. The elevator from 1913 opened like a wardrobe, clicking with that distinct click of an old and ancient lock, and inside Ben and I were pressed close but he was not you. We rode up and down between the basement garden and the fifth floor. You would have liked the fifth floor. Patricia’s left over paintings piled and stacked, an old piano with its keys removed that cannot sing, the face of Henry VIII in every painting, grim in the corner spying on me. When I asked, Patricia told me, ‘I paint Henry and Elizabeth because I am Elizabeth reborn.’ In every portrait there is always red paint and in the painting hung over blue velvet couch the skin of snakes twist down her dress and her eyes are the eyes of her mother, cut out from yellowed photos and the stark white face of her baby brother. Always red roses of the reddest hue for the Tudor rose. ‘My eyes are blue like hers, see?’ she said. ‘I remember those corsets—see how they left scars on my ribs?’ Walking back down the Lower East side that night after dinner, I broke into a cold sweat inside my coat and I only saw the blue eyes, blinking and staring at my knees the way you stared at them in fiction class. I went back to Patricia’s for Thanksgiving, too, but you had already gone home, shut your yellowed eyes in San Francisco. You should have stayed in New York.