Robert Butler - From Where You Dream - The Process of Writing Fiction

He sits on a three-legged stool in a cave of paintings. I'm used to the colors, but a stranger is assaulted by it. Your sense of proportion and the familiar, muted tones of the earth, the colors of school buses and buildings, trees and bridges, water, televisions and furniture explode, disappear. His paintings are large, intimidating, colorful, violent, busy, involved. You cannot glance. It takes a while to see them.

He does not turn, but half sits, half stands, juggling the legs of the stool slightly off the ground. He wears no shirt or shoes. There are streaks of red paint on his right arm. His skin is pale. His hair is fine and light gray, tossed up from thinking with his fingers. A box fan twirls near the window where an air conditioner hums. My mother said we look exactly alike. Me at twenty-nine. My father once at twenty-nine. The same. I have seen sketches. It is almost true.

I fall into a vinyl chair near the desk just inside the door, and forget my age.

"I have very good news," I say and cross my hands.

"That would be welcome." His voice is distant. Thinking. Contrary to all logic, it is the best time to speak to him.

"I asked her."

"It's about time."

"She said yes, Dad."

"Congratulations," he says, and offers to shake.

I pull him toward me and gently slap my hand against his soft, sticky back. "I have a favor to ask," I say.

He nods knowingly, but cannot know, and picks through the day's mail at his desk.

"A favor," he repeats to the letters and papers. I look at the painting he's working on and see, through the vastness of time spread out, through the valleys and mountains and creatures within it, a woman, in the distance, on some kind of colorful ledge, a rainbow ledge, and she is dancing. Her hands are posed, fingers snap. She will stomp her right foot in a moment and send catastrophic fissures from her heel.

"Will you paint her?" I ask. The box fan whirs. The air conditioner putters and clicks. From the other side of the shotgun, where my mother lives, I hear her steps on the wooden floor.

"She'll have to sit," he replies.

"Of course," I breathe. "She's so patient, Dad."

Then, from somewhere close, but beyond the universe of my father's studio, a voice materializes. The voice is close. In it there is what can only be called yearning, a friction between the sound, the note, and the ear. It creeps through the windows of the studio: oh-yeh, oh ya-ya-ya-yaya-u-ya, and breaks the closure of our deal.

"What is it?" I ask.

"What do you think? He sings. His name is Paco."

"But where?"

"Where? Can't you tell? It's this Jimayna De Alba shit all over again."

The singing stops for a moment, and then continues, just as loudly as before. Jimayna De Alba is my mother's stage name. It is a name that represents her absence from our home. It is time I spent with my father alone. It is how I grew.

My father turns from the painting and points at me with an ox-hair fan brush. "He is singing to her."

"To Mom," I say, knowing already.

He nods and drops the brush into the turpentine. "Yes, for a week now." He looks at the floor, then at me. His blue eyes surprise me. "She quit the studio. I wanted more time with her. It takes her away, not just physically." He cocks his head and considers something quietly.

He has asked my mother to quit. He has asked before. There is nothing I can say to him, though I wish to. It is not the idea, but the words coming out of him. My father does not speak of these things. He does not speak of my mother as the private woman, ever. He does not speak of things inside him, of love, of pain of remembering. Something has changed be-tween us.

"What will you do?" I ask.

"I will paint," he says and points to the canvas.

Then she begins. I feel the vibrations in the floor before I hear it. My mother dances in the next house, where I learned to crawl and speak and run and think. I listen to the clacking, as fast as a card in a bicycle wheel, at times, then hard and

final. A thunder in the floor.

From my mother, I learned this: flamenco borrows from Arabic and Eastern Indian musical rhythms, Spanish and African spirituals, and the Gypsy. It is a guitarist, a singer, and a dancer. They weave a song between them. The guitar is the bridge and the background. The dancer is sung to the floor. Sympathetic, she is held in grief by the voice. The singer kneels to sounds, trills the pieces of the song that call for it. I saw them through the windows of the car, from the back rooms of the dance studio where my mother worked. I heard them do this.

I imagine Paco with his hands, Christlike, palms up, an offering from his chest to my mother where something brews to come out as voice. His eyes are closed. He sits in a wooden chair in an empty room near the windows. His boots tap the floor. The wood shutters are dark, unpainted. And sunlight there, full of dust, touches his white teeth. He sits on the edge of the chair and calls out to who will hear. His singing is devout.

When my parents were younger than I am now, and I was not yet born, people followed my mother to a little club below studio apartments at the corners of Poydras and Decatur, at the fringe of the old Quarter. Ciro's, a small club with doors wide-open at night, spilled music and light into the half-darkened streets. You would walk past and see the crowds— penultimate, staggering groups, cold drinks, laughter. Later, you would also hear the masculine strumming of a flamenco guitar, and then the hard clapping of my mother's shoes on a parquet floor. When the dancer is called, she rises and taps the floor like a drum. She gesticulates. The movements are an expression of temperament. This I know.

My mother learned flamenco at Tulane where she also studied the art of making paper, restoring archival documents, preservation. This is where she met my father, a visiting artist, a devoted painter. She danced weekends and Tuesday nights at Ciro's. But now, Ciro's is boarded over, the studio apartment where she lived above, where my father leaned and watched the crowd adore her, and where it was revealed that she was the most desired woman in all the Quarter at that moment, is empty.

Three days later, we arrive. A boy darts into the street ahead of me, and chases a soccer ball beneath my mother's van. I see his legs V'd beneath the frame, and slow my car to a crawl. I hear my wheels crunching gravel. Megumi smiles and purses her lips in the way she does. Her dark hair is pinned off her neck, and swirls at the crown. We are having children. Her long fingers trace the line of bangs curling above her eyebrows.

"He'll be fine," I say. "I'll be there."

She nods. Her chin gently rises. "I know," she says.

On the porch, at the stoop of my father's door, I see red carnations and white roses draped in paper. When Megumi sees them she captures my hand, thinking that I've put them there for her. I have not. I know they are for my mother, but someone, Paco I assume, has calculated wrong and courted the wrong door.

"They're so fresh," Megumi says, and spreads the flowers beneath her nose.

"There he is," I say and watch my father's silhouette move toward us. I smile. I can't take away her happiness.

The studio floor is swept. The clutter has been stacked into meaningful piles. My father wears a white oxford button-down, khaki shorts, and tennis shoes.

"Welcome," he says warmly, and holds the door for us.

Megumi's yellow dress overwhelms the colors of the paintings. She walks through the rooms toward the kitchen. Suddenly, I look at my father and know he is thinking the same thing.

"My God, I've forgotten how beautiful she is," he says.

"I've never been happier, Dad," I say, watching her appear briefly in the kitchen doorway. "I'm sorry about the flowers."