I decided, again, that I didn't like the painting. I can't remember what number I'm up to, how many repetitions of this same seascape I've made, or even why this particular composition never seems to live up to what I envision. We had been outdoors last night, the painting and I, in weak porchlight beneath the black bag of humidity still loud with the vocalizations of birds and island insects. I've gone all grey and lost my optimism, and it's been five years since I came here with Ellen: I'm getting sicker and sicker of it. I may have yelled at the painting. I was drunk. I can only afford to be away from my smoggy home in the Philadelphia suburbs for so long before I have to abandon painting iterations of nothing on this Virgin Island. I was already into the whisky and it burned like a revolting sun, but by the third year of my "vacation" on St. John Island I had wanted to get as far away from rum as possible. Owning private property helps. Something else that helped me last night was turpenoid: not as acrid as real turpentine but just as refreshing when you pour it down a fucked up canvas. The most satisfying part is when the strong solvent burns up my stupid signature, the mocking "Ed Kelley" swirling away into oblivion. The seascape melted into first abstraction and then nothing, like my memories as I downed whisky from the other pungent bottle. Just one more try, I promised myself. I remember destroying yesterday’s painting, setting out fumblingly a blank canvas for the morning from the stack, regurgitating some of the alcohol past porcelain gates, and then collapsing into my pointlessly ample bed.
I was drunk in my dream too, and lost in the port town where I buy groceries. I stumbled with my paintbrushes past disgruntled marketplace faces, correcting the hues on their melons and coconuts. Then I dipped my brushes into all the fruit and used up my remaining canvases painting neon seascapes using pineapple juice and strawberries. Each portrayal was perfect, exactly how I had wanted all this time. There wasn't even any trick to it; it was so simple! A wonder that I'd never grasped it before. I raced from the fruit stand, brushes dripping, and I searched up up the winding sunlit streets and down down through alien trees to the beach where the real canvas ominously anticipated me. I think I found Ellen again there, in a portrait made with brushes full of sea and seaweed.
The shrill alarm assaults my ears. Almost dawn. When I open my eyes I can see the large canvas still shining pale and I'm both relieved and depressed when I see it fresh, unpainted. One more try. Yawning, I slide up in bed and wring weariness from my bones. These pillows never do the trick, I have to palpate each side of my neck before I feel good enough to stand. Coffee wakes up my mind but I don't want that this morning, don't want to overthink things. I grab my bag -- brushes tubes and turpenoid -- and sling the canvas under my arm. A little awkward to get out the door but after that I'm in the pre-dawn darkness of the island, mist hanging through the branches of coastal trees. Only the hidden songbirds are awake now, and maybe a few of the wild donkeys that roam these mostly deserted roads. I traverse the charcoal-line of pavement that the undergrowth fights to take back and I let my mind bob on the rhythm of the nearby waves. It's just a short walk from my cabin down the forested cliffs towards the beach where I'm all set up, where the easel always awaits me with gloomy certainty. Quietly, to myself for reassurance, I say "I've got it this time," but it’s difficult to tell if my sorts of prayers are heard.
This is the fifty something-th time I've been down the overgrown trail this year, not counting dreams. I don't know why this one subject should give me so much trouble, but it's never the right blend of what I see and what I feel, and what I remember. Monet could show everything about morning by depicting a river, and everyone feels Van Gogh's illness from the use of those insidious greens. Will anyone ever analyze a Kelley? I've been shown in galleries up and down the east coast, and my chaotic abstractions are usually well-received, but I don't think anyone takes a genuine interest. No one sees them like I do. When I head home after finishing this island, things will be different.
Once I'm on the damp dark sand I slip off my flip-flops and barefoot over to my brown picnic-chair, supporting the large blank rectangle on the easel's lip. There's very little wind, unlike the day before last, and a few birds speak from the tangled mangroves. From here I can peek through the cliffs to see where the ocean meets the horizon just beginning to smoulder. About ten minutes left to set up. I don't want to look at the horizon too long just yet, seen it an awful lot these past few days, so I focus on arranging my palate and laying out colors and solvents and media, making sure everything is close at hand. All my friends gathered here for the main event. I take a few deep breaths and stare at the sand where pallid crabs switch from burrow to burrow. Ellen would have hated this, what this vacation has become for me, but I need it. I need this painting to be perfect, nothing more.
I sit before the colorless canvas, the door into nothingness, and begin to mix umbers into reds on my palate. With a healthy splash of solvent and paint I create the sea cliffs that enclose my composition and me, but not the wild horizon. I shape out the sea across that stretched flesh in darkness, working quickly to get in the rough forms, shaping nature with my gesture. Eyes back and forth darting between the real and my copy. Ellen and I were fifty when we first holidayed here on St. John's, back then we hadn't known about this beach that’s tucked away in the wilderness. It had been a whim at first but we started coming to the island every few years, and then every year after we retired. I think she imagined that the sea air would be good for her, but I doubt it made any difference. I sweep my arm across void and form a mourning sky out of sullen violet and crimson. Now that she's gone I return every winter mostly as an escape from frozen Philly, though I'm too sentimental to sell our house. The sun has risen enough that I begin to spread some lighter browns on the faces of the cliffs and smear scraggly blue-green foliage across their brows. I have more time alone now, it's true, but that's just more time to focus on my hobby. Ellen liked to sleep in until sunlight played in her blonde hair -- I could never have painted all morning like this. Some yellows onto the beach bring out its tone, and speckled brown from another brush brings out its texture. It's a struggle between the two. But that's alright because the shade of blue I make the ocean forgives all difficulties: it's the same color as when she and I found this place.
It hadn't been on any map of the island, and certainly not on the flashy cheap ones we had picked up when we got off the plane. We had wanted a house to rent to get away from the harbor town of Cruz Bay, or anything that reminded us of city life. We could afford a small property in the hills, the last thing we wanted to buy before we went onto our pension, but we needed to have the best one. We were walking through one of the few neighborhoods with houses for sale when Ellen, ever with an eye for such things, spotted one of the wild donkeys roaming alongside the road. It had been our first day on the island since the previous year and the weather was perfect: we decided to walk with the dusty animal a ways. While Ellen and I were talking, forgetting about work and laughing, the donkey wandered off the road and onto a hiking trail through the woods. Pipe-organ cactuses and volcanic boulders lined the path that had been invisible from the houses. We had lost the donkey but continued through the trees and dappled sunlight, down and further down, until we found this cove more secluded than any other we'd seen on the island.
"Don't you just love it?" she had asked, and I did, I do, though I hadn't said so then.
By the time I get the first layer of color draped across my fictional beach, only an hour of morning remains. Faint clouds have rolled in, might rain later, but everything on my canvas looks perfect so far. There's an elegant composition that balances salty cliffs with secretive oceans, blending past and present. It's beautiful, but it's not done. This outermost layer is the most important, the one everyone sees. I switch to my smallest brushes to render details so that eyes accept the scene as realism. Muted sepias, olives and aquas tangle across the cliffs; seabirds will make their homes among these ragged trees and spend their days scouting pale crustaceans or the lithe forms of fish. But the only birds I'll make today will barely be splotches against my cerulean expanse, all animal forms little more than suggestions in submissive hues. For five pointless years I've been making and remaking this simulacrum, peering intently as any pelican at the way each dawn's light falls across the strand, and it has seemed as if the minutiae of animal existence is only barely visible from my vantage. The sea and stones stay steadfast against the weathering of time and year after year the view preserves my recollections. I have to mix ultramarine into a bright phthalo turquoise to create the same ocean I saw with Ellen that first time, when she confessed to me about her illness, about how she might end up. I have to choke down a grim chuckle: I told her I wouldn't let her die, and here I am five years later mixing blue with turquoise in her memory. We stayed out here all afternoon that day, and we lingered even when night had extinguished the sun. As we cradled one another on a plastic chaise-lounge she dreamily pointed out various constellations and told me their stories, half asleep in my arms. It seems like forever ago when I felt that moment would last forever. Now that she's gone it only seems like this painting will last forever. I work on it while I wake, and at night it stretches its roots through my sleep until my dreams are filled with the odor of turpenoid. I put my big brushes to soak in that jar of solvent and use my size four filbert to swiftly sketch the last details I can capture of dawn before the sun soars out of reach, when I notice a pallid speedboat tearing across the horizon. I give an ugly grimace at the prospect of it altering the natural flow of my waves even though I've already finished most of the water. Probably some playboy kid on a joyride: champagne, girls. Can't take the time to sit in one place and concentrate, busy desecrating an old man's solemnity. He vanishes before I'm finished frowning at him.
My size four filbert does the trick though, and I finish my painting at eleven something by slathering my signature into a corner where branches tangle sand. I stand back from the easel as far as I can without tripping over the roots of mangroves, and examine my creation. No glaring flaws, that's good. I've painted the dawn’s light a lugubrious pink, nice and eerie against the shadows. I decide it's not terrible. In fact, the more I examine my tones and gestures I get the feeling that this is one of the best I've ever done. I always give a final decisive inspection at my cabin before bed, once I’ve had some time to reflect, but this version has such an intangible mysterious energy in its pigmentation that I feel strangely satisfied. With the easel's expensive tarp I shield the painting from the wind and everything while I start up the hidden path and head into town for lunch.
It's something of a hike, but after sitting for so long and laying on paint it's good to work the rawness from my joints. Families of talkative birds nest in the trees overhanging the road, and a pair of slate-colored donkeys chew at a wooden fence. As I walk along the cliffside overlooking black rocks and churning eddies I hold the contours of my creation in my mind. Could I finally have done it, truly, after all these years of trying? Could I have made a painting worthy of my memories? Worthy of Ellen? Occasionally a car hums by, but the clouds are billowing thicker now and I don't see many people until I get to the well-paved streets of Cruz Bay. Even here they seem to be rushing to get indoors before the imminent shower. I know my canvas will stay dry beneath the heavy tarp: that, of all the difficulties I've had here, fortunately isn't among my worries. My destination isn't too far from the concrete outskirts, and just as drops begin to fall I shuffle into the smoke-saturated interior of the Driftwood Grill.
"My good man Mr. Kelley!" grins Tony, the lanky native behind the counter with teeth that shine like mother-of-pearl. He's from St. Croix, the next island over, and about thirty years my junior.
As I pull myself up onto a squawking bar stool I ask, "Slow day?"
"Not so bad. Was a small party of tourists left when the clouds blew in. Nothing to speak of. What can I get you man, burger? Fries?"
"You know what I like,” I agree, slapping my frayed wallet on the counter. A vision of the finished painting surfaces in the tidepool of my mind, and I feel refreshingly the afterglow of success. "Hell," I say. "I'll have a beer too."
"Oh, today something special? Pretty early still I think, though not so early for some." He passes me a bottle that's like an infant glacier, and I press it against my forehead to soothe the perpetual summer. Tony's been working here the past six months or so, and I always come back 'cause of the burgers. Seems like something you could get anywhere, but I had to try six other burger shacks till I found this hole in the wall a while back. I never needed the fancy seafood from sit-down restaurants where Ellen liked to go. They were nice, we had gone to make her happy, but they were too much for me. There's a ding from the kitchen and Tony serves my steaming patty with crinkled winsor-green lettuce, crisp slices of cadmium tomato and melted ochre cheese. There's a pickle, and a paper bag of salty fries too. I fix my sandwich with packets of ketchup and mayonnaise, squash the whole thing down using the top bun, and rip a celebratory bite from it. When he's done running my card through his register he hands it back to me and asks "So how did it go out there today?"
"You know what," I mumble around my chewing, "I think I got it this time."
"Hey man, that's great news! You deserve that beer." I nod in appreciation but focus on my burger. That's one of the best parts about conversing during a meal, there's no obligation to reply. He lets me eat for a while, he can see I'm wolfing it down, but curiosity and a lack of customers gets him asking, "So you got kids back home?" I don't want to answer, but I have to swallow eventually.
"Yeah. Two boys, moved out long ago." My next bite is emphatic but Tony doesn't take the hint.
"That's cool man, that's cool. We just found out yesterday my wife is pregnant. I'm so excited." He sure is, washing out grease fat from the oven with a big childish grin on his caribbean face.
"Great."
"You shoulda come to the wedding back in July. Flowers everywhere, and her all in white, Isabella never looked so beautiful you know?" I bet she was covered in sweat, like everyone must be here in the summer months. Fifteen degrees hotter and I'd probably faint even though it's Febuary. "What about your wife, man, what's she like? I never seen you come in with someone."
The flesh of the burger turns to slugs in my mouth. It tastes the way her flesh looked in the end: withered, stretched, a Van Gogh green. "Dead," I say after gagging down the mouthful.
Tony's face falls, and he distances himself from his cleaning. "I didn't mean nothing by it Mr. Kelley, I'm so sorry to hear that." He shakes his head, repeating himself, but I gesture his grievances away with a forgiving wave. I just want to keep eating. This was supposed to be a celebration, not another pity party. I thought being done with the painting would mean being done with this kind of stuff. He's friendly and exuberant, but Tony just doesn't know when to shut the hell up. "You're quite a man Mr. Kelley, she must have been quite a woman. How did she die?" Huh. Wouldn't have been able to get away with a question like that in the States.
"Cancer."
"Least it wasn't no sudden thing then, you got to be by her side for all that extra time. My Da was hit right by a fucking bus, dead on the spot. Bam. No goodbye no nothing. A real goodbye has gotta make up for the pain of watching them suffer. I didn't have no closure, couldn't even believe it for weeks. Just didn't make no damn sense. You must have gotten some precious last words. You hold on to them, Mr. Kelley."
I had been at the gallery showing my new series when I got a phone call from the doctor's number, wrenching the phone from my pocket I was about to answer I heard my name called from behind. My agent had been flirting with some rich couple he thought had open minds and open wallets, and I had just been introduced: I had to shake hands. I slipped the phone away for only a moment, intending to call immediately back. But mere civility turned into a drink among friends, which later turned into a frantic race across labyrinthine highways to the hospital several hours later. It was my own fault. It was pride. They let me see her body, and had me sign a bunch of stuff.
But to Tony I say "Yeah" anyway. "Real last words to live by." He offers me a shot of rum on the house and I take it. Here's to memories.
The rest of the afternoon I wander around town, buzzed but still feeling surly from lunch. What turned out to have been only a drizzle was swept away on coastal winds while I ate, and people are beginning to show their faces. I walk along the small harbor where arriving tourists photograph waders hunting for fish, but then find myself passing over cobbled streets and shops and stalls. I can't take my mind off my finished painting for some reason. Like deja-vu everything seems somehow familiar, and I meander through the small marketplace where fruit is sold. I pick up a mango. What is the point of beauty if beautiful things wither and extinguish themselves? The fruit is good here, fresher than what you'd find anywhere back home. The reds and greens of the mango, colors naturally opposed, blend into a symbiosis of flavorful hues as they devour one another. They look ripe, but I'm full with heavy hamburger and don't buy anything.
I stroll up and down the roads, sometimes deviating into quaint shops, but I'm really thinking about what's waiting for me under the tarp when I return home. I feel weightless finally having finished this particular herculean labor, and I wonder what I'll do with my life now. Return to painting for the galleries probably. Still Life With Snakes VIII had been next, experimental and satisfyingly sloppy, finally something I'll be able to work on in a studio. I just have to make sure that my memorial seascape is really finished. After that I'll be able to face the horizon. I need another drink, so I slip into a tourist trap that sells little bottles of rum. I wish they had something different, but I'll make do for now. When I get outside the sky has already started to dim with evening's blush, and I have no choice but to start making my way back up the winding path. The sun droops towards the ocean on my trek and when I get back to my beach, having drained the all the spirits from the bottle, I catch myself thinking that the colors and lighting are all wrong; that the sun is on the wrong side of the sky. I meticulously make certain I'm not marring even the slightest bit of wet paint as I grab the canvas and carry it the rest of the way to my cabin. From this distance it's impossible to discern its picture, and all I see is a dull blue swirl like the whirlpool I’m trapped in.
After I get past my gate, locking it, I take the painting to my ample backyard and lean it against the wall. The nesting birds squawk as a humid ocean breeze distorts the canopy, and the insects start to sing in the darkness. I run inside briefly to pull the whisky from my fridge, a necessary ingredient to this ritual, then stand far enough from my canvas that the seascape comes into view under the clinical porchlight. Yes: there is the sand soft as flour, and the peaks of proud volcanic rock painted with thick impasto. The forlorn morning faintly touches everything it plays upon with a quiet intensity. It's perfect.
Only...
Perhaps the dawn is not as intense as it should be, because the sky had clouded over? The beach had been sunny and clear when Ellen and I found it. Does that mar the essence of the art? And then I see them, small uneven creases in the ocean's surface -- no doubt the damned speedboat threw me off. It's still a well-depicted representation of this morning but I haven't put enough feeling into it. I sigh and take a deep pull of burning fluid. In spite of my aches and efforts, the brushstrokes hadn't captured anything of my half-forgotten sacred morning.
I decide, again, that I don't like the painting. One of a seemingly never-ending series, I find that I am unable to acknowledge this flawed version of my paradisiacal vision. Maybe the island has run out of magic for me. But I can’t just quit now. I'm so close, and this iteration was just shy of perfect: I've definitely almost grasped it. I only need one more try, one day more to complete this painting and I’ll pack my bags and return to the smog of grey Philly. I feel certain I can do it with just one more try and dry heave at the thought of remaining here until next year, still ceaselessly stuck on the same subject. I put down the alcohol and pick up something with a stronger odor to pour down the fucked up canvas. The most satisfying part is when the strong solvent burns up my stupid signature, the mocking "Ed Kelley" swirling away into oblivion. The seascape melts into first abstraction and then nothing, like my memories as I dissolve my insides with the rest of the whisky. I vaguely notice setting out a new canvas before stumbling into the bathroom to regurgitate my feelings for the day, the year, the general cycle my life has become -- and then everything vanishes as I fall unconscious, into dreams of the perfect hues found on marketplace fruit.