A certain slowness
If the main questions are true and viable, my life pre-Ned had few affirmatives. Resolution was slow in coming until I learned to ferret out the clues they left. I could organize a small museum of them, but what medium exactly? In Ned’s world, he might tag walls with them when not modeling at art schools. I almost wrote “Ned world,” to which I have a season pass, renewable the way Virginia Woolf asked Leonard to renew their marriage. Ned World is a similar arrangement. We even sent out a ha-ha postcard.
Ned shares with LW forbearance and solidity. I almost wrote “patience,” but it ranges further, a buoyant confidence that I realize again and again is as viable as it gets. Truth is guile’s absence, benign, the calm unwrapped body I first saw while sketching it, drawn by his neutrality or is it non-alignment? An analogy to sovereignty is apt, a mountain outpost with an ancient charter or an island kingdom that’s on no one’s map.
Except mine, of course, sailing as I was on that spring afternoon, the weather finally warmer. Nora, I announced. “I’m Ned,” he answered, and offered his hand. All but unclothed, he could have been wearing a suit in that encounter, a layer of hair, fine and light against his skin. He wasn’t pale despite the recent winter, “owing to walking,” he told me later. He likes to walk. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him run.
My father had a 30-foot sloop, Canadian, a fast boat on which we went to Edgartown via the Cape May channel, the East River, and Woods Hole, pausing at Block Island and other places. He grew older and sold the boat. I dated sailors, but their answers failed to measure up. “I admire swimmers, but I can only dog paddle. I like to look at the water,” Ned mentioned. Life can be lived in reverse, experiencing what proves ephemeral, becomes a memory that’s enough when you factor in the inconvenience. Dad also liked to camp. Those journeys involved tents and things I had to pump.
Ned World involves neither of these things. I like to swim, but I do that alone. Ned likes to walk and is fine with company or on his own. He never asks, “Want to take a walk?” He just heads out and in time he returns, and then I learn what Ned’s world had to show him, a recurring feature.
Life swans, sidles, or slithers in, preferring a window or a side entrance. I want it to enter properly, declare itself, conduct its business openly. If my world was any other, the sheer falseness of life would get to me, but Ned finds it silly, that part, and finds the human responses to it poignant, the source of a comedy always tinged with sadness, like a Mozart piece.
Pen in hand: this is how it is with me. Ned draws me writing, saying that my body’s there and my mind is God knows where. “When I model, it’s the same. I’d respond unless I absented myself, but where I go is entirely blank. Like a wall painter, I think of it as flat, matte, unreflective. As well as keeping my body docile, it’s like staring at red then seeing green, only blank’s opposite is riotous. I carry that home and paint it. Nothingness is the uterus, I learned from modeling. Creativity depends on it.”
Ned has a few large canvases in process. He’ll photograph one and post it with a price and expiration date. He bases the price on something seen he feels is comparable. The basis for it is tentative, but if asked, he articulates his reasoning. It comes down to his sense of his evolution as a painter and where the painting fits “if I think like an art historian.” His education took him down that path before he abandoned it, “but it can’t be, once you get it. Dealers are the blunt end of this, and my pricing is in homage.”
True and viable: the answers can conform and yet be malleable, or are theories put out as such. One 11 May, proof arrived. We went to France the next month because of it; the rest went in the bank. We live carefully, as fits a household of our type, barely registering on Mammon’s scales. It all goes unremarked, unless you count the followers, but I do write up his walking anecdotes. I write from memory, but I have a feeling for his voice. He’s also a character in my fiction, Charles, borrowed from a more famous walker.
