Rebecca Pyle
The Emptiness
An expressionist painter’s widow she had known decades ago—now long gone—had said something to her, quickly and suddenly: she liked buildings best when nothing was in them. As if warning her never to fall too much in love with a place, as it would soon be ruined by your occupation. She was taking her advice, moving yet again: soon her own place would be returned to pureness of emptiness, except for the simple wood tables which would be unkind not to leave: a shame, she thought, a waste, to throw them out. Also—she would leave some sculptures she had made—few enough they would contain a sort of warning they were house-guardians, and should remain. That was her goal: that they announced they were sculptures that were part of the house. And should remain.
In the place she was going to she dreaded houses with a terrible, dead, arctic whiteness of walls and ceilings of interiors: the glossy spray-painting of every wall in white, making all places feel like the enlarged interior of the modern icebox. She would be hiring painters to paint them over, ceilings included, with duller, darker paint, paint less reflective, colors which contained and accepted shadow, instead of only maniacally reflecting, as white did. The color white, composed of all the colors of all the rays of light, was like a cornered animal when it became a paint, which was the absence of color or pigment: starved for color, it reflected anything and everything.
The real estate agent of the past, and the real estate agent of the future—had both called twice this week; she had made herself call them back. She had found something to say to each. What a strange term, real estate: it sounded like the mocking title of a novel.
Last night she had placed a sculpture of the moon and sun near her favorite old men’s cafe on a busy yet lonely street; a sculpture of the idea of quiet on a long but plain lawn in front of what seemed like an expensive wonderful house which needed, she thought, to be urged toward introspection. Many of these sculptures were small, hollow, easy to place.
Was this abandonment, she wondered? No, she told herself, it was placement; it was artist-volunteering.
There were also the sculpture of just-unclasped hands which seemed to weigh nothing at all as it was a combination of metals with bamboo; and the craziness of a sculpted fat dizzy airplane landing beneath plump and large and nefariously rich clouds, sculpted as a three-dimensional painting. Most of these sculptures were as heavy as three and a half armfuls of wet laundry—so she was able to place them, quietly and easily, against trees, tall flowering shrubs, or evergreens along many of the low or high streets of the city. She placed one chalky abraded limestone half-relief sculpture of a woman holding her hands up as she looked up toward the sky but who seemed blinded by sun—by a stream, to the side of a house. Another, darker stone and smaller, by a lonely shrub, far from houses. To be carried away, by someone. Someone walking, or driving. You didn’t know why they would come across them, why they would need the sculptures. There was the sculpture of a man, liftable because it was a half-relief metal plate, and she knew where to put it: where a woman lived alone, and had given up on men, probably wisely.
She needed to start new with sculptures, or change to paintings, or even garden for a full year before she did either Moving to another city, or country (she had done both, frequently) you were like an orphan placed, by yourself, in a boat. You would need to understand the place you were, before you became an artist again, before the town or city or place tipped its hat and told you that you were needed, to describe and proscribe, to fight back against this or to go along with that. Artists came from nowhere, and they came from somewhere. They also came from neither. Eventually, if they were successful, the place came from them, and stayed in them. The sculptures she was leaving in this city were her decision she had failed. She dared not bring a one with her, even if she had the way to do so. They were the hope that had been in her, left in a town that would become a ghost to her, a ghost much greater in size and in its millions of accepting and denying reflections—than any wall, any house interior, any sky or sculpture.
