...And the Damage Done Read Free

of
them
. It is as if I am expected, though why, I cannot guess. Yet a few among the few who look at me do so the way that
they
do—as if I am their property that has rudely not acknowledged their ownership of me. I look away from them, and suddenly feel as if the earth rises to meet me. As if I have been taken by a swoon and fall to the floor of a red-sanded desert.
    “I’m glad you came,” says a soft voice as a hand is placed on my shoulder, as I remember such a touch from all the times Marie had so greeted me. I turn and see a mask of Marie, fleeting, as if I have stared at a black and white photo of her and suddenly looked to an expanse of pure white. The mask fades and a face like Marie’s lingers in flesh where the mask had been.
    Nell looks much like her sister, and what is more wounding to me, she smells like Marie, if such a family likeness is possible. She is the ground— the earth that supports—beneath the radiant sky that had been Marie. Nell’s eyes are blue, the near opposite of the warm brown of Marie’s eyes, yet just as deep and arresting. I place the hand I abraded on cinder block over the hand she has placed on my shoulder, and see under the sleeve of her blouse the raised, worm-coloured scars along her forearm that are there, or that will be there one day. Where Marie has used a needle, Nell has used, or will use, the teeth of a broken bottle.
    “Marie said she wanted you here. For this.” She swallows after speaking the last two words, as if to take them back.
    “I had to come, and I wanted to.”
    “Could you . . . could I ask you to come with me?” She takes my chafed hand and leads me past the deep forests Marie had painted half from the banks of brush and trees in Golden Gate Park and half from her imagination, past the seascapes Marie had done of an ocean she had never seen but had read about, past the small cottage in Berkeley she had painted that she had transplanted to a hillock like one in a work by Cezanne. Nell walks ahead of me with near-unreal gracefulness that shames me in a way that I cannot name. There is a memory that stirs warmly inside me, and I realize that Nell leads me the way Marie led me to the corner of that freezing bar in January.
    Nell stops us before the far wall of the space, near windows that look out on the Bay.
    “Can you tell me who they are?” she asks, gesturing to Marie’s portraits.
    Empathy
is what scholars say is the investment of oneself into a painting. It is an incomplete notion, for a painting can intrude upon
you
and your perceptions. Looking at the canvas that Marie painted, looking at how Marie had forced her own compassionate and loving sight to
stay
within the textures and strokes she crafted, I
felt
all that is, that was, that had been, Janet intrude upon me. Marie had painted Janet reading a book in the Park. The curling flames of Janet’s rich, thick hair were draped over one hand. So perfect were the textures, one could see the motion of Janet’s fingers twisting a lock as she read.
    “Do you know her?” asks Nell.
    “It’s . . . she’s . . . Janet. Marie and I knew her years ago. She disappeared.” I stumble for the words. “Could you ask the curator, or whoever is handling the sales, to not put this one in the catalogue? Or online? And maybe leave the work untitled?”
    “Marie arranged for all that weeks ago,” says Nell. Her words are clipped, not out of anger at my request, but out of discomfort for speaking of Marie in the so recent past.
    “
Of course she did, of course she would
,” I say. Or think I say.
    So frightened, so sleep-deprived had Janet been before she fled town and her stalking ex-husband, Marie and I had heard her scream when a lock of her hair, flowing around her like red-brown smoke, had been caught in a low-hanging branch one windy day.
    “Marie said that she . . .
Janet
, you said? That she probably wanted to stay disappeared.”
    Nell next walks me to a portrait of Tom, whom Marie had