self-portrait: Untitled
The pages of my drawing books are filled with women. Women eating breakfast surrounded by teapots and hat boxes, women in seasonal clothing, in cars and on bicycles. I drew my friends as teenagers, as busy wives and mothers. I drew a girl I hated, rendering her in scrupulous detail, then scratching her out with a pen until the page was torn and spattered with ink. Most often though, I drew my mother. I showed her tanning on the patio, her oily, coconut-scented fingers trailing the sides of the chaise, or standing at the sink in bare feet, warm water trickling down her arms. She was newly divorced, beautiful and young and alone, a kind of movie that I watched, flickering in front of my eyes in recurring scenes: flagging down a car when ours broke down, stirring a Bloody Mary as she turned the pages of a book, or polishing her toes at the edge of the bed, her arms glossy against the sleeveless black knit. I drew these daily portraits, my mother and the objects that surrounded her, and nothing in them seemed labored or difficult. I embraced each challenge of mood and setting, the gleam of her ring against a cracked teacup, her tousled hair against a wrinkled blouse worn on days when she cared little of what the world thought.
My reporting was offset by invention and a preference for the ardent. I dashed over the unfamiliar and avoided the kind of technical drawing I saw in the notebooks of boys at school. Their blueprint-like diagrams showed mechanical things: rocket engines and drag mobiles. These were of little interest, but if needed, I drew them anyway. What I didn’t know, I was happy to embellish.
I recall though, the challenge of drawing an embrace, wanting to portray my fingers laced at the back of my mother’s neck, the way it felt to brush against her poised arrangement of complexion, eyes and hair. But it proved to be a subject too elusive, the dynamics of anatomy too complex. And so instead I drew an abstract swell of clouds and sky, temporal as an embrace, nebulous as the place where one person ends and another begins.
*
We lived in Los Angeles then, and my mother was seeing a man named William, a man who seemed to steer his life into ours by simply driving up in his car. He would wait for my mother at the curb, languishing in the sunlight. Sometimes, distracted as he waited for her, he would circle his car, front fender to rear, pushing the hair from he face as he checked the finish for scratches.
Cars were important to William. He always owned more than one, and in the ten years he was with my mother he owned thirty-seven overall, including motorcycles. When I needed a ride after school, William would appear in a sport coupe or convertible with my mother beside him. Other parents didn’t have cars like that. The girls thought William was handsome. The boys envied his cars, awed by the chrome and horsepower.
William was where he wanted to be, at the forefront, selling the world on new ideas. He worked inside a cluster of windowless buildings, part of a team that would engineer the moon landing. He worked with athletic fervor, considering himself more akin to the astronauts than the support. His job was to cajole the players, the administrators and naysayers who couldn’t think outside the lines. The contract, William said, was secured by emphasizing maneuverability. He like to toy with the government men’s straight approach to things, using analogies he knew would escape them, adding off-color references just to make them ill at ease. He wasn't one of those die-cut types, he said. Never would be.
The lunar module unfolded before us in the cast-off bits William scattered across the coffee table. I hoarded them as treasure, spun them like tops, and strung them onto yarn to wear at my throat. Machined into atomic shapes, finely wrought as sculpture, their polished edges glittered in the sun, and arrayed on my bedside table at night, glowed like luminous planets in a distant sky.
*
William became the man my mother wanted to make happy. She knew what William like to drink, to eat, the people he’d take interest in. She knew what clothes to wear, what topics to discuss at dinner. She orchestrated evenings that put him at the center of things, and I suspect she was successful, though at the time I didn't quite know how. I only recall the times when awakened by voices, I would peer down the hall to see candlelit limbo games or clouds of smoke hovering above glasses and brimming ashtrays.
I preferred the parties that I drew, the kind I imagined other families had—tree trimmings at Christmas, Easter brunch beside a swimming pool. I drew daughters with glossy hair who said endearing things. I drew mothers, attentive and sexy, casual in bare feet and Bermuda shorts. Fathers, the most difficult, came last. My attempts to render them in suits and ties produced unconvincing figures that wouldn't anchor on the page. When I dressed them in something easier, like a golf shirt or a tennis sweater, fathers resembled boys at best, and at worst, girls.
But William is there throughout my sketchbook, rendered with substance and rhythm. I drew him at the office, persuasive with a client on the phone. I drew his reel-to-reel tapes and stacks of car magazines. After a while I set fathers aside altogether and drew William instead. And if I were to draw him now, it would be as a cautious man, one who didn't give anything without making a mental note first; a man who, when he first saw my mother, felt an uneasy pull toward a woman he felt he didn't deserve and a discomfort in such a woman's attainability.
When William came for dinner and spoke in future tense, my mother fixed her eyes upon him, placed her hands in her lap, and listened. If she fell asleep in front of the television, William would carefully tuck a coverlet around her, his hands becoming careful, tender. I speculated whether my mother would marry William, and in my drawing book I began a series of weddings: brides in Denmark, flower girls in England, a ceremony in Japan set against a snowy landscape. I drew the seamstress fitting the bride, the florist with the arrangements. I wanted to draw my mother and William deeply in love. How tightly they might hold each other, how hard it would be to let go.