Matthew Salesses - The Hundred-Year Flood

Maybe Rockefeller saw her on one of these days:

On the first, Katka stood at the kitchen counter, slipping mandarin slices into her mouth two at a time. She ate everything two bites at a time. “I know him again,” she said. “He is painting again. He does not realize I am with you, because he is too busy thinking. He believes I am giving him time to paint.”

“What do you do when he kisses you,” Tee asked quietly.

“I make him believe I still want him. What else can I do?”

They made love that time too furiously, perhaps.

On the second, she said, “I think he has never done a better painting”—she was Pavel’s subject again; he’d started to use the casts as brushes, started to return to art—“so how can he hate us?”

“How can he hate us?” Tee wondered how she could think their impact was less than it was. Less real than life.

Was that the time Rockefeller saw her, as Tee walked her out? Promise me we will not pretend , Tee had thought, shuttling her into the rain with an arm around her twitching shoulders. Three weeks and she had stopped taking her own advice.

These are the things Tee learned about Katka before the flood:

She ate well, a strong appetite always.

When she wasn’t with Tee, she liked to go outside after dinner, briefly, for the changing light. Not to walk, though she liked walking. Not to garden, though she liked gardens. Sometimes, to stretch. She didn’t like organized exercise, but she would exercise spontaneously.

Her father had studied butterflies. Her mother had studied literature.

She knew her neighbors, though they seemed surprised that she did, as if she was the type not to know.

She hated to lose. She was hardly ever jealous, but she was competitive. She avoided games. If she played games, she would exploit the rules ruthlessly.

Her puzzles were a way of recovering meaning. She enjoyed the work of physically rebuilding what her mind had already interpreted.

She could be simultaneously anxious and composed — her nervous tic was to brush her hair back over her ear, cleaning away her face.

She believed Hanuš had saved his clock, not destroyed it.

Pavel was indeed painting again. He even invited Tee to see. “I had nothing to do with this,” Katka said on the phone. On the tram to Malešice, a crowd got off in Náměstí Republiky and a leg glowed between them. Shouts carried from the square, but Tee didn’t try to follow now. He went straight to Pavel and Katka’s house, and Katka met him outside by the brown patch of earth where the paintings had burned. She warned him to be careful. She burrowed her heel into the patch and went to tussle his hair — he could tell — and stopped herself.

In the bedroom, Tee choked on dust. Pavel stepped down from a wooden chair. Behind him stood a giant canvas, eight feet high and four feet across, propped up against the bed. Tee wondered how they’d gotten it into the house. Bands of yellow, as wide as Pavel’s casts, swept across the surface, one after another. The color bothered Tee. He recognized the curve: it was Katka, lying on her side. Katka again and again, slightly altered each time but always her. He could almost feel her hips. Pavel’s casts were coated in yellow. The mess in the studio, if it had ever been there, was gone.

“You guess how I am doing it,” Pavel said, waving his casts at Tee. “You guess.”

Tee stepped backward, his stomach twisting. The casts couldn’t create detail. What Tee saw was more like half a silhouette. Above were the ripples of yellow, tints from gold to dust, as if Pavel had dropped her in a yellow pond.

“It is his best,” Katka said reluctantly.

Pavel wiped his casts on an already yellow towel and said he wanted Tee to talk to his dealer for him, instead of Rockefeller, about a new series. In the corner, a smaller canvas leaned against the wall, freckled by the same texture but a dark shadowy gray, a depiction of anger, or fear. It was as if Pavel had started painting himself and then switched to his wife.

“You wanted me to see a naked painting of Katka?” Tee asked.

Pavel’s eyes narrowed and he sucked in his cheeks. Tee wanted to say more, but he was suddenly afraid, more afraid than he could explain. The yellow painting of Katka, the gray painting pushed to the corner. Tee leaned his shoulder against the wall. “This art,” Pavel said, “is something new. Tell Rockefeller — how you say it? — he is dead to me.”

Tee heard a faint grinding that seemed to come from the small, dark painting. Then he caught Pavel’s jaw shifting back and forth, his earlobes wobbling.

When Tee got home that day, he had a voice-mail message. “Why don’t you answer?” came his mother’s voice. “You and your dad were always running or hiding from me.” He pictured the expression where her face went from gentle to cutting in an instant, as if even her freckles rearranged. That look had cured him of his nail-biting, another of his father’s habits. “Ignore that. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Tee’s lights flickered, and in the dark, he remembered his mother hovering at his elbow when he was eight, as he held a homemade card over a candle for the first time. Halfway through, she snatched the card away, so that the last two edges burned more neatly. When Tee complained that the girl he liked would know he hadn’t done those sides, his mother’s eyes seemed to unfocus — as if she had another set behind the first, through which she really saw — and she said, “Because of these two sides, she will know you did some of it.” As if mistakes were what people knew him by. He hadn’t known how to undo her logic.

Was it that night, he wondered, the card tucked into his backpack, that she had determined he was too old for bedtime stories? She set a folding chair beside his bed instead of climbing in with him, and said it was time he read to her. He stumbled over words; she didn’t correct him. She kneaded her palms as if she wanted to touch him but couldn’t bring herself to. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but his voice was in her hands. When he woke in the middle of the night, the chair was still there, the lamp still glowed. He put a finger to the seat. It was warm.

He realized now: the glow of the candle flame, of the lamp, of Katka rippling through the painting, of the ghost that wouldn’t leave him alone — somewhere in his mind, they were all the same.

Tee imagined Katka sprawled on the studio floor, nude and covered in dust. Pavel balanced on his chair above her and swiped his casts across the canvas. The bed propping up the painting stood in the middle of the room. They hadn’t moved the bed in years. Underneath it, they’d found the layers of filth in which Katka now posed.

The dust itched; it stirred into the air; it made her cough. But Pavel painted a beauty she had never — even during the Revolution — seen in his art before. She modeled for him because she was cheating on him with Tee.

Pavel had been searching for undestroyed art and had reached under the bed with his cast. When his arm came out gray-yellow, he’d called to her, shouting dimensions. For his art, she’d bought the canvas and a dozen buckets of paint and batches of cheap towels. For his art, she’d cleared the room and pulled out the bed and set the open paint buckets around the chair and stacked the towels beside him, in two piles, one wet, one dry. To change colors, Pavel wiped his casts on a wet towel, then dried them, then, the space around his skin sealed with modeling clay, dipped his arm into a new bucket of paint, up to the elbow. She itched on the floor. At the end of each session, thirty towels went into the wash, gallons of yellowed water swirled down the drain into the Vltava.