THE TRICKSTER
a memoir
by Eva Margueriette
Table of Contents
Prologue July 26, 1996
Leaving San Marino, I head east on the 210 Freeway.
Bruch’s violin concerto crescendos on the CD player.
I pass through Monrovia where Terry was born thirty-one-years ago.
Crying joyful tears, I see him lying on my stomach, moist skin to skin.
Duarte, our first home, trikes to bikes, little league, tennis lessons,
Where he pursued the art of magic and attempted suicide at sixteen.
Glendora, beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, golden ochre in
Summer’s heat, where he’d attended the school, I founded in the park.
Claremont, where at twenty-six, like a priest celebrating the Eucharist,
he’d served his birthday cake to fellow mental patients.
Upland, my destination. My home those three months before his birth.
The thirty-one-mile journey ending where my story begins.
Parked on the hot asphalt, I pound on the steering wheel, sobbing.
The violins are crying, weeping with me, ripping my heart open.
Terry went missing nineteen days before we found his unidentified
body in the Los Angeles County morgue and buried three days ago.
Like Jacob, wrestling with the angel, I demand an answer. God
knows, I tried and failed, but why couldn’t someone have saved him?
Over the roar of the motor, the violins wailing, I hear the angel say:
“Nothing is lost. Every moment led to this holy instant.
Life is a divine drama. Everyone played their part perfectly.
Every word spoken and unspoken, every action taken and not taken.
“Love is all there is,” the angel said. “Life is never-ending, beautiful,
complete with music. This music will play until this story is told.”
I leave San Marino and head east on the 210 Freeway.
Bruch’s violin concerto crescendos on the CD player.
I enter Monrovia, Terry’s birthplace thirty-one-years past.
Tears of joy, I see him lying on my stomach, moist skin to skin.
Duarte, our first home, trikes to bikes, little league, and tennis lessons,
Pursued the art of magic before suicide attempt at sixteen.
Glendora, beneath the San Gabriel Mountains, golden ochre in
Summer heat, where he attended the school I founded in the park.
Claremont, hospitalized at twenty-six. Like a priest giving Eucharist,
He served a Trader Joe’s cheesecake to his fellow mental patients.
Upland, my art workshop destination and home before his birth.
The thirty-one-mile journey ends where my story begins.
Parked on the hot asphalt, I pummel the steering wheel, sobbing.
The violin’s cry. Their soulful vibrations rip my heart open.
Missing nineteen days, we found Terry in the Los Angeles morgue.
Buried him three days ago in the cemetery by Church of Our Savior.
Like Jacob, wrestling with the angel, I demand an answer.
God knows, I tried and failed, but why couldn’t someone save him?
Over the sound of the motor, the violins wailing, I hear the angel say:
“Nothing is lost. Every moment led to this holy instant.
Life is a divine drama. Everyone played their part in perfect order.
Every word spoken and unspoken, every action taken or not.
Life is all there is, never-ending, beautiful, and complete with music.
And the music will play until this story is told.”
The San Gabriel Mountains, Eva Margueriette, WC, 22 x 30, The Kommerstad collection.
1. Rites of Passage
The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children, William Shakespeare
THINKING BACK ON THOSE hectic times, nothing unusual set that September morning in 1974 apart from any other second day of a new school year. Terry and Melissa ate ketchup-smeared eggs on English muffins, grabbed their lunch boxes, and sprinted over broken branches ripped off tour trees in last night’s windstorm. I stood by the gate as they turned the corner headed toward Royal Oaks Elementary nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains.
In the 1950’s asphalt roads and rock-roofed tract houses just like the one we bought in 1970, twenty miles east of Los Angeles supplanted the uprooted citrus trees. Thirteen blue gum eucalyptus imported from Australia to protect the orange groves from Santa Ana winds remained standing sentinel in our backyard, too close to the house. Every fall the prescient devil winds blew in from the upper Mohave Desert fanning wildfires and suicides. When they roared out of the canyons at fifty miles an hour into the wash behind our house, I feared the century-old, camphor-scented windbreakers crashing through the roof.
In the hushed light of summer’s end, free from sibling fights and swimming lessons, I spent the day in my kitchen studio working on an oil painting for an upcoming exhibit. When the phone rang, I set my brush on the palette, removed my powerful hearing aid from my right ear—my better ear—and pressed it against the receiver of my amplifier phone. I heard my son’s new fourth-grade teacher’s name. She said Terry had been absent the first two days of school. Hot, dry wind rattled the windowpanes above the kitchen sink. “That’s impossible, I saw him turn the corner. He took his lunch box.”
“There’s more. We caught him smoking in the bushes with a sixth grader named Alex.”
Alex? More than eucalyptus falling on our house, I feared his influence on my son after both boys jumped off the roof last summer.
Before my husband left for the newspaper where he worked the swing shift as a printer, I told him what the teacher said about our son and the mandatory parent conference with her the following morning. I retrieved Terry from the principal’s office. Tears flowing down his cheeks, he promised he’d never lie to us again. We ate in silence and went to bed early. All night the malevolent winds howled like a hurricane on dry land. Even without my hearing aids, I heard eucalyptus branches slapping against the roof of our house.
The next morning after the kids left for school, I entered our bedroom. The curtains drawn against the light; Stuart’s thin five-foot-nine frame wearing only blue checkered boxers sprawled across our queen-sized bed, his complexion grayed, eyes clouded, his body reeked of stale beer. I touched his shoulder reminding him of our appointment. He jerked away.
“I promised the teacher.”
He pulled the sheet over his face. “Nope. I’m too tired.”
“Dammit, Stuart! I’m tired too!” I screamed, slamming the bedroom door. In the bathroom, I wriggled into flesh-toned pantyhose and a too-tight, white pleated skirt bunched at the waist and applied mascara to hide my fatigue. Walking to the school three blocks away, inhaling air washed clean by wind, not rain, gusts whipping at my feet, I felt my life blowing away like the fuzzy tufts on the dandelions poking out of the sidewalk cracks.
The San Gabriel Mountains, rising ten thousand feet above the valley as they had for eons, glowed pink, translucent in morning light. Eight years old that clear January day, I stood neck crooked looking straight up at Mount Wilson for the first time. “You can’t get lost in this valley.” my Uncle Green said. “Look toward the mountains, they’re always true north.” From that moment, I believed I had a powerful guide helping me navigate life without a compass.
At the entrance, orange remnants clung to the liquid amber sapling ravaged by last night’s Santa Ana winds. Beyond the tender tree, children dashed across the sunburnt grass, laughing. In Terry’s classroom, fourth-grade cursive written on lined newsprint was push-pinned on the corkboard. Well-coiffed and a bit older than me, Mrs. Strong sat at her desk against a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows framing the fading pink mountains close enough to touch. I squeezed into a child’s desk across from her waiting to be reprimanded for my failure as a parent.
I made excuses for Stuart’s absence. When I denied any problems at home, Mrs. Strong wanted me to consider the possibility that ditching school and smoking constituted a cry for help, a sign of a deeper problem. Terry might need a drug called Ritalin to help him control his impulsive behavior, to help him focus. Focus? She didn’t know the focus he exhibited playing the accordion, pitching in Little League, reading The Secrets of Magic, and perfecting simple sleight-of-hand tricks or why drugs, doctor-prescribed or otherwise scared me.
My mother, a registered nurse had our family physician prescribe amphetamine-laced diet pills for me in seventh grade. She washed her own prescription down with Coke and Jack Daniels. I’d taken the pills on and off since the age of eleven and like my mother, sister, and husband, I’d been smoking since eighteen and addicted to nicotine. I also worried Terry’s biological father might not be Stuart, but a one-night-stand drug addict.
“My son’s only nine,” I said. “I don’t want him taking drugs.”
“I’m only asking you to consider it,” The kindness in Mrs. Strong’s eyes brought tears to mine, smearing my mascara. I walked home in the shadow of the mountains bleached gray in midday sun.
Back at the house, I cleared my palette and paint rags off the kitchen table, peeled potatoes, and shoved a chicken in the oven to roast. When Stuart and I married the day after I turned twenty-one, two weeks before Terry was born, he expected me to cook like his Pennsylvania Dutch mother, a talented cook also named Eva.
“Beans are a side dish!” he scowled the first time I served pinto beans and cornbread for dinner, my southern family’s favorite. Perhaps, we both craved our childhood comfort foods, but in those days oblivious to my needs, I stopped cooking pinto beans, black-eyed peas, ham hocks, and lima beans and warmed up his favorite canned peas and creamed corn and learned to cook potatoes: mashed, baked, hash-browned, or French fried. The daily menu included roast beef, chicken, or meatloaf—but always potatoes.
Stuart dragged himself out of bed, shaved, and sat at the head of the table scooping chicken and potatoes onto his fork. I relayed the teacher’s concern without mentioning she suggested Terry see a doctor who prescribed drugs for impulsive, overexuberant boys like ours.
Don’t worry,” he said reaching for a cigarette in his shirt pocket. “A little father-son chat ought to straighten him out.” When our son came home from school, Stuart sat opposite him at the kitchen table. Trying to read their lips, I settled on a nearby chair pretending to read a book. Sunlight illuminating Terry’s freckled face in Rembrandt lighting, he resembled the Dutch master’s brooding portrait of Titus, the artist’s only child who survived birth.
Dismissing Terry, he said everything was under control. He’d grounded him from that troublemaker, Alex. He grinned, looking pleased with himself. “You know, boys will be boys!”
No, I didn’t know. Boys and men mystified me. My sister and I had no brothers and our father abandoned us when I was five. Seven years later my mother married Lee, her first cousin who adopted us, deleting our inherited New Orleans name, Commagere from our birth certificates. She remained forever grateful to him for giving us his name but I didn’t like him or the way he encouraged me to sit on his lap. He never satisfied my need for a father.
My sweet boy was too young to relinquish childhood but maybe puberty blew in like a windstorm when least expected. With adolescence looming on the horizon, we needed to be better role models for our children.
Before Stuart left for work, I cornered him. Choking on tears, I pled my case for why we both had to quit smoking. “Stop bugging me about it!” He stomped out, leaned against the car in the driveway, cupped his hands to protect the flame from the wind, and lit a Camel. In profile, he looked like the Trickster, the sinister clown I’d painted in The Harlequins, my first cubistic piece exploring my inner battle between good and evil.
What did he mean boys will be boys? Stuart, like his father, started smoking at thirteen and neither had done well in school. Did my husband consider our nine-year-old boy smoking and ditching school a mere incident, some sick sort of masculine bonding? I feared it meant the sins of the fathers were being passed from generation to generation. Mrs. Strong suggested playing hooky signaled a deeper problem, but I wanted to believe my husband had everything under control. What if pre-adolescence had caused Terry’s impetuous behavior? The crisis might be a normal rite of passage. “Boys will be boys,” like Stuart said.
I stood at the door inhaling the minty scent of eucalyptus in our backyard. The tall tree’s silvery leaves hung limp pointing toward the earth, denying the mayhem of last night’s windstorm like a dysfunctional family—acting as if nothing happened.
The Harlequins, Eva Margueriette, 30 x 36, oil on canvas, 1973
2. The Harlequins
“MY CHILDREN NEED a full-time mother,” I said, but it wasn’t the real reason I stopped painting after graduating from CAL ARTS in 1967. I put my brushes away because I believed I wasn’t good enough to be a real artist.
My creative self survived mixing paint at Terry’s nursery school and sewing curtains from sheets, potholders, and muumuus, the Hawaiian dresses I learned to sew because nothing else fit. One night a neighbor invited me to her macrame class at Covina Adult Education, where I discovered a figure drawing class taught by Mr. Claude Ellington. Even though I hadn’t drawn anything for five years, he encouraged me to sign up. The following week I arrived with my drawing board, paper, and a box of vine charcoal. When the male model assumed his first pose completely naked, I found it difficult to focus on other parts of his anatomy. I complained to the instructor. “When I was in art school the male models always wore jock straps.”
“Things have changed in five years,” he said in a fatherly voice.
Mr. Ellington’s knowledge of craft and teaching style mirrored art school and under his guidance, I reclaimed my art spirit. I had studied with him for three years, painting live models in portrait and figure, and setting up still life compositions in his studio, when he suggested I launch a one-man show of my accumulated work. The summer before Terry ditched school, I’d secured gallery space in the Duarte Public Library and planned a December opening reception.
Mrs. Strong had not called again, and assuming Terry had settled down, I focused on my show. I looked forward to displaying The Harlequins inspired by Cézanne’s Mardi Gras, Pierrot, and Harlequin, completed two years earlier. In my first cubist piece, I explored Carl Jung’s mythological archetypes in our collective unconscious.
Terry was eight when he and Melissa posed for The Harlequins. He sat pretending to strum his guitar and she stood beside him as the evil dancing clown.
“How much longer do we have to sit still?” he said.
Recording their innocence in charcoal marks, I’d forgotten to give them the customary every twenty-minute model-break.
“Take five!” Unable to evaluate my work during breaks, answer the phone, finish a meal, or drink coffee without a cigarette in hand, I lit a Kool and flicked the ashes in the metal ashtray inherited from my mother. As a child, I hated her smoking and swore I’d never be like her.
Melissa squinted at the canvas. “It doesn’t look like me.”
“I know, I’m imagining you as a clown with bells on his hat that jingle when he twirls.” “What’re you making, Mom?” Terry said, his brown eyes wide.
“Music, magic, and mayhem!” An apt alliteration. A medieval passion play, good versus evil, pandemonium, the trickster archetype taunting the lute-playing clown, my son.
Like Cézanne, I clothed the harlequins in cadmium red and black rhombus shapes and painted the trickster’s profile in dark wicked lines.
In the past three months, I had designed and mailed invitations, framed my work, made title cards, and planned a post-exhibit champagne party at our house. The day before the show, I printed a price sheet as if I might sell something.
Opening night, December 3, 1974, my long dark hair curled, I stood in the library gallery surrounded by my ink-wash drawings of live models and cubist oils painted in the kitchen. Jim Jarboe, a professional photographer, friend, and neighbor volunteered to shoot black-and-white photos of me mingling with potential collectors.
Cathy and her husband, Ken Peters, a journalist at Stuart’s newspaper, bought Cleo, an ink-wash drawing of my favorite model for $45. Congratulating me on my first sale, the librarian handed me a box of gold stars. “Stick these on your sold paintings.”
Soon a former nursery school mom chose The Bagpiper, a 30-by-40-inch oil for $300. A neighbor bought Meditation, A Self-Portrait, with a Holy Spirit dove hidden in the oil washes and charcoal lines. Stuart promised to buy me a dishwasher in exchange for Pablo Casals.
Two hours later, more than half the paintings sold, everyone came to our house to celebrate my success— everyone except my mother who said she was angry because I hadn’t introduced her as the guest of honor.
“I’m proud of you, Eva,” Mr. Ellington said, sipping champagne with his wife, Sue. After everyone left, I fell asleep envisioning angels floating above my bed, happier than at any time in my thirty years of living.
“Look!” I said, handing Stuart my gold-starred price sheet the next morning. “I’m so excited about the success of my show.”
“Success?” He scanned the numbers. “How much did you make?” “$1600!” I pointed to the shiny stars. “See, I sold seventeen pieces.”
“I mean profit,” he said. “What’s left after you bought frames, art supplies, invitations, stamps, champagne. Everything.”
“But the champagne was on sale.”
“You didn’t charge enough to cover expenses.” He waved the price sheet too close to my face. “The paintings should cost more than the frames.”
I’d loved painting and putting on the exhibit and believing I could be a real artist after all.
My husband was probably right. Afraid to ask too much, I didn’t know how much to charge. I didn’t know much about business and nothing of my worth.
“So, my show wasn’t a success?”
“Success is a matter of profit and loss,” he said.
Did he mean the three joyful years I spent drawing live models and painting in the kitchen, day and night, amounted to nothing? What about the art lovers who came to my one- man-show and those who bought my paintings? Neither of us fully appreciated the gift of people in our lives nor did we know artists seldom made a profit on their first exhibition.
The following evening Jim spread a stack of 8-by-10-inch, black-and-white photos on our coffee table. A talented photographer, he’d captured: Terry holding a pen in his dimpled hand
signing the guest book in fourth-grade cursive, Melissa in her nightgown sprawled in the recliner at our home reception, and my you’ve-got-to-be-kidding expression when the Peters bought the drawing of Cleo.
Eva Margueriette, Exhibit photo by Jim Jarboe, 1974
He’d caught me in front of The Harlequins greeting a fellow member of Women Painters West and Mr. Ellington in his dressy leather jacket, his back to the camera. The woman in the bottom corner of the photo had the same-shaped face, hair, partly closed eyes, nose, and peaceful smile as the seated harlequin modeled by Terry in the painting.
I stood clutching my tiny box of gold stars, a teacher’s reward for stellar performance. My hair and black-clad torso merged into the shapes of the painting. Looking in opposite directions, but both in profile, my eyes, nose, and mouth matched the clown’s features. I had painted the trickster’s face, a mirror image of my own.
It’s true, every portrait an artist paints is to some degree a self-portrait, but nothing compared to the double-exposed apparition captured on film in that holy instant. I’d accused my husband of looking like the sinister clown in my Harlequin painting. Studying the exhibit photo,
I realized Stuart wasn’t the trickster after all. Neither Terry, though he’d exhibited mischievous behavior, nor Melissa who posed as the devilish dancing clown. Comparing my image with the harlequin’s masked persona, I had a sudden epiphany. The trickster was me!
Saint George Slaying the Dragon, Eva Margueriette, 1975, 50 x 60, oil on linen
3. Knights and Dragons
In mythology, folklore, and religion, the Trickster is a creative magician who exhibits high intelligence, plays tricks, disobeys rules, and defies conventional behavior.
THE UNSETTLING REVELATION I was the Trickster piqued my curiosity. The painted evil harlequin was only a flat, two-dimensional stock character. In years to come, as my son and I negotiated the thin line between genius and insanity, a sacred, more complex trickster played a role in our lives.
In January, five months after the teacher conference, we celebrated Terry’s tenth birthday. When he blew out his candles and made a wish, my fear for his future roared back. I remembered telling Stuart I wanted us to be better role models for our children, I decided to try to quit smoking even if he didn’t.
Before the show, I’d stretched a 50-by-60-inch linen canvas, my largest ever, and begun working on Saint George Slaying the Dragon. The theme symbolized my struggle with guilt, shame, and addiction. Though no longer a virgin princess, I identified with the maiden imprisoned in the tower praying for the holy knight to slay the dragon and set her free.
Days after the birthday party, I dragged the huge canvas into the backyard and leaned it against the bullseye Terry had chalked on the cinderblock wall to practice pitching. The San Gabriel Mountains rising behind me, my feet anchored on the grass, I stood holding a paintbrush in my right hand. Contrary to my twelve-year habit, I did not have a cigarette in the other.
I drew myself in the tower and brushed oil paint washes on the smudged canvas. Unlike
The Harlequins in festive red, Saint George exuded somber metallic grays and steel blues.
Not smoking proved to be a quest worthy of the Holy Grail. “You’ll fail, you know,” said the voice inside my head. My mother, sister, and husband joined in chanting like the chorus in a Shakespearean tragedy. “So, you think you’re better than us, huh?”
I didn’t know such dark thoughts originated in my own mind and I had the power to shut them up. Attributing the critical voices to an outside evil force, I attacked the canvas with my long-handled bristle brush, defining the dragon’s claws and saurian horns. I added fire spewing out between his sharp teeth and echoed the shadows of its wings in the knight’s shining armor.
“Have a cigarette,” the voice said. “You deserve it.”
I’d sought solutions in books since the age of eleven when I read Emerson’s Essay on Friendship because I had no friends and wanted them. Opening The Twelve Steps and Traditions of Alcoholics Anonymous, a book I’d bought for fifty cents at a garage sale to help my husband, I found the steps alcoholics used for forty years to stop drinking:
Step 1. We admitted we were powerless over alcohol and our lives had become unmanageable. Step 2. We came to believe a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. Step 3. We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood him, praying only for knowledge of his will for us and the power to carry it out.
I believed if I changed the word alcohol to cigarettes, the steps would help me overcome my nicotine addiction. I chanted them like a mantra aloud and in silence while working on Saint George in the backyard. One nerve-wracking minute at a time, those crucial hours turned into one full day. I’d never gone that long without a cigarette. Grateful to have defied such odds, I went to bed early.
Drug-free for twenty-four hours, I awoke, electric currents whirling within me. Not joy. Not yet, but the beginning of joy, like little green shoots popping up in a fertile field.
I wanted to sing praises. “I turn my life and will over to the care of God.” But as soon as I got out of bed, my euphoria evaporated like morning mist. All that second day, paranoid and anxious, I repeated step two, “I believe a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity.”
I felt like dying, dying for a smoke. “I’m powerless over nicotine,” I said, recalling the purpose of my sacrifice—to save my son from being dragged into the darkness of addiction.
On that second blessed day in January, I knew I could never be a social smoker. If tricked into indulging in one nicotine fix, I’d want another one and soon be sucked back into my one every-hour habit, and never get another chance to quit. I held to my belief. If I didn’t smoke for three days–the cursed spell would be broken.
At the end of the third day, the true-north mountains glowed beneath a pale sky. Like an alchemist, the last ray of sunlight transformed our stand of eucalyptus into gold for a brief spell. I scraped gray puddles off my palette, cleaned my brushes, and maneuvered the not-yet-completed canvas back into the garage. While painting Saint George, three days passed. Gratitude for the miracle of that first twenty-four hours kept me from lighting a cigarette the second and third day. I was free. It was done unto me as I believed.
4. A Death in the Family
WHEN ATTENDING ART school our family doctor suggested tranquilizers as an alternative to diet pills. I said no. I wanted amphetamines to keep me awake all night completing design homework and studying for tests.
As a young mother, I’d bypassed doctors, haunting diet clinics, popular in the seventies. For a pittance, someone weighed me, took my blood pressure, and gave me a stash of addictive appetite suppressants. I attempted to control my dependency by taking pills only a few days a month. Thriving on jitter and drug-induced energy, I cleaned the whole house, washed windows, planted flowers, organized cupboards, stayed up all night painting, and lost seven pounds in five days.
On that February morning, days after I’d quit smoking; I flushed the diet pills down the toilet. As if on cue, the voice said, “You’ll gain weight, you know.”
“I don’t care. I’ll be a better mother.”
Without the monthly dose of amphetamine and the hourly hit of nicotine, I lay on the couch lethargic, hungry, and unable to read or concentrate. Dishes piled in the sink, newspapers in the corner, clothes unwashed. Stuart fixed himself Campbell soup and Wonderbread and left for work. I helped the children make Kraft Mac and Cheese and crashed again.
Two weeks later, I returned to portrait class and propped my board on an art bench just as the model assumed her first pose. At the break, Mr. Ellington joined the smokers outside. I’d always enjoyed the ritual and comradery. Being excluded felt like that first day of fourth grade when I arrived on the playground with ear molds sticking out of both ears, wires dangling down my neck connected to my new hearing aid, the size of a transistor radio stuffed in my training bra. I knew I’d never be one of the popular kids.
When the model resumed her pose, I finished the drawing, put my art supplies back in my toolbox, and dumped the ink-stained water in the sink.
It had been six months since the conference with Terry’s teacher when I hauled Saint George into the backyard for the last time. The princess remained locked in the tower. The battle for my soul was not yet won. The holy knight had freed me from my addictions, but still imprisoned by my guilty past and fear of the future, I concluded I had to save myself.
First, I had to save the children from the sins of the fathers. Feeling like a single parent, it was all up to me to give them the time and attention they needed. It seemed logical, I had to choose between being an artist or a good mother.
I strengthened the structure lines, slid the canvas into the frame, attached the wire, and hung the enormous painting over the fireplace, unaware of slaying a part of myself.
“Are you crazy?” a friend said. “You can’t quit painting,”
My creative life, once filled with joyous expectation, slipped into despair. Believing I’d worked so hard, so long, for nothing, Stuart’s remark, “Success is a matter of profit and loss,” still rang in my ears. Like someone contemplating suicide, I felt better once I’d hatched my plan.
I informed everyone who loved me: church friends, fellow artists, my new students and collectors, family, neighbors, Stuart, his sister Mona, everyone–except Mr. Ellington.
I found my teacher sweeping up charcoal in his studio after class. Turpentine fumes and cigarette smoke swirled like incense out the door. Shadows gathered in the skylights as we settled on folding chairs surrounded by easels. “We’ve missed you, Eva.”
“I haven’t been painting since I finished Saint George.”
“So, I heard. I don’t get it.” The irritation in his voice surprised me. He’d always been kind, never angry.
“My son got caught smoking. I’m worried about him.”
“I worry about my children, too.” He shifted his tall frame in the metal chair. The room darkened. “Are you serious, about not painting?”
“Yes. My children need a full-time mother.”
“Well Eva, I’m disappointed.” He stroked his graying beard. In the fading light, his elongated face resembled a self-portrait by George Rouault, his favorite artist. “I thought you loved art as much as I do, but I guess I was wrong.”
I’d failed at business but excelled as a painter because I loved my work, even scraping my palette and cleaning brushes. Obsessive, I know, but I knew how to focus. With enough time and energy, I could fix anything, and solve any painting problem. Passion and determination had served me in the creative process, and if applied to the art of parenting, guaranteed success.
I bequeathed my oil paints to a fellow artist. “I don’t want you to stop painting,” she said, fingering a tube of Alizarin Crimson. I gave her my sales pitch about my children needing me, and why, at the age of thirty-one, had chosen early retirement so soon after launching my career.
I kept two illustrated art books, my greatest inspirations, Bridgman’s Complete Guide to Drawing from Life, called the artist’s Bible, and Juan Gris with mounted prints of his Cubist work. I carried the rest of the books to the garage, including, Cézanne, Monet, Modigliani, Degas, Cassatt, and Klee with their original $100 price stickers, I’d bought on sale at LACMA or Vroman’s, our beloved Pasadena bookstore.
Terry and Melissa hammered GARAGE SALE signs on neighborhood telephone poles. At sunrise, a crowd of strangers showed up. The children sold their old toys and clothes. The customers bought all my brushes, drawing paper, charcoal, unused canvases, and art books and all the beauty bound within their hard covers, adorned with masterpieces—for $5 each.
I DREAMED I boarded a cruise ship departing on a long journey to an exotic destination. I told someone why I had to quit painting, though in my awakened life, I’d finally stopped talking about it. Everyone I’d confided in about my scheme to save my children—who might not need saving—stood on the dock waving white handkerchiefs like bon voyage well-wishers, not cheering. Leaving the harbor, my loved ones grew smaller, white dots in the distance.
Gray water. Gray sky. No land in sight. “Where are my children?” I discovered I was the only passenger on board and had no idea where the ship was headed.
