Nighthawks
The painter won’t tell you this. He did tell his wife. He always told his wife everything and she told him, firm and straight, he must never tell that story. “Let the many preparatory studies for the work suffice,” she said coolly. “Let people think what they want and make up their own stories.” She had always been better at thinking about reputation, dicey things like that. He nodded and thanked her. She had always had a head for such things. Just as she always just intuitively knew how to help him with the staging of his paintings, the blocking and postural elements when she was acting as a model (much more than a model really, a collaborator).
She proved right in the long run. He had been much rattled at the time and had nearly told several people how the work came to him. What a disaster that might have been. The painting’s reception was spectacular. The Art Institute had anointed the work by purchasing it instantly. And what a fantastic ransom they had scored, three thousand dollars! And he did think of the score as theirs, not merely his. He lost sleep at first over the painting, before it had manifested in that final form, before he had given it over to the tubes and brushes, before he had made of a spiritual problem an exercise in formalism; before he had exorcised it. Or he hoped at the completion of the painting that he had exorcised the thing, anyway. Sometimes he would see them again, but mercifully less and less frequently.
He was on one of his solitary night walks. It was the middle of the night when he saw the bright light up ahead, coming from a corner he had passed many times, what should have been a vacant lot. He had passed the dark emptiness of that lot just a few nights before. It was impossible that anything had been built that quickly. He reached the corner and there they were. People trapped in their fish bowl diner. He could tell right away what they were…and, more importantly, what they weren’t. He stood in the shadows across the street from them for a while. They seemed not to sense him. Well, none of them did at first. It was the little girl who sensed him first, even with her back turned. She slowly swiveled around and stared out at him. The childish hunger of her stare frightened him.
He knew she shouldn’t have been able to see him. She should have been staring only at her own reflection in that bright interior. But he knew she did see him. He felt instantly how crushed she was. She wasn’t even there with an adult, or that he could tell anyway. She wore a strange blue party dress with a sash. He felt it had probably been her birthday when it happened, whatever it had been. Something terrible. He knew that much, as everything about her said that she knew she was an image, some strange lingering formalism sadness could assume. Whether it was because she saw him or some other trigger, now the others turned to look at him too. Even the waiter stared at the painter now while polishing a glass dry with a dishrag. The painter shrank back into the darker shadows of a doorway, but none of them in there stopped staring. Indeed, one by one they were going up to the glass now to get as close as they could to him. Though he was across the street, he felt the chill of their predicament and a chill from their regard. There was no door into that diner. There was no way out.
There wasn’t much street traffic at that hour, but a few cars drove past occasionally and neither drivers nor passengers ever cast a glance over at that brightly lit island of glass. Some of them were surely drunk or stupid with lack of sleep but there should have been glances cast that way. It was a dark street at this hour and the diner blazed. He knew people well enough to know this wasn’t the way of the world. But something inside that glass cage was. It was the way of the world.
Nobody beckoned to him from inside that cage. They were past that. He felt sorriest for the little girl. He never did paint her. He just couldn’t. He could not bring himself to paint her, even seen obliquely or from behind. Nobody would have believed it anyway. He would have had to move her closer to an adult, and make a different sort of emotional predicament in that claustrophobic hour of the morning. But he didn’t want to see her trapped in there forever. Maybe the others had done something to deserve it. But she surely had not. It would have changed everything in the painting.
He felt a certain cowardice in himself when he turned his back on them. He couldn’t look backwards as he headed home, cutting his night walk short. He couldn’t look backwards or he felt he might become a contemporary pillar of salt. He had many blocks to go and the images were pounding in his head. He knew he had to get to paper. It would be a long journey to canvas. He did look over his shoulder before entering his dwelling. He had never felt so relieved to see the street empty behind him, glittering with spilled light from sleeping buildings.
His wife found him shaking. She made him sit down and got the story from him straight. She wanted to laugh at one point, but she sensed it would cut him terribly deep. Something had happened in the realm of making and she knew to respect that weird annunciation which had just occurred in that strange kingdom of images, as she respected that kingdom in her own work. He began drawing immediately, even as he was still giving her details of the encounter but soon he just lapsed into the silence of drawing. She watched over his shoulder briefly and then withdrew. She went to bed and lay in a curl wondering.
They woke to the sunny afternoon which followed that strangely shaped night, after a fitful sleep in which he had clasped her more than usually close, and the two of them took a stroll to the place. He had insisted they do it. He promised her that he expected nothing. He knew it was impossible something had been built that quickly. The lot was indeed vacant as the painter expected to see. The grasses were grown high. She smiled at the weedy mess of it and then smiled at him. She tried to see what he had seen. He was staring that direction and not smiling. Neither of them wanted to cross the street or stand in that place. They knew better, but possibly in different ways.
“Well, good artists imagine,” she said. “Great ones hallucinate.”
“They could see me. What were they thinking?”
“Paint them before they saw you,” she advised. “I don’t even want to imagine how they looked then. Can you remember that, can you see it still?”
“Of course,” he replied.
“Then do that. And, after you paint it, please sell it right away or burn it. That’s all I ask. Promise me, Edward?”
He looked to see if she was joking. The expression she shot back at him told him she was not.
The painting manifested in time and was sold. The painter and his wife took to the open road. After that, he just wanted to be in constant motion. He would still capture the moments of utter stillness in those places. The paintings often felt so divided in spirit towards their subject matter. Both people and places inhabited a radiant stasis in his paintings. The painter would often confess a haunting without saying the words, without opening himself to ridicule. He learned how never to say a thing, to show how easily the things themselves eluded our saying.
How wise a woman the painter’s wife. She was, herself, a painter. Eighty years after that night, people still argue over the location of the diner. They point to this or that plate glass, this or that corner, this or that building which has stood since the early forties. And the painter did his work of keeping his mouth shut. But the painting whispers on. It whispers to many tonight in their claustrophobic hours. But the little girl. She’s not there. He asked his wife if it was okay. Over and over. He came to feel near the end of his life that he had perhaps betrayed her by erasing her. His love held his hand and told him all was well. “None of this is real,” she promised him. She indicated the room around them, and by implication, the world beyond the bedroom’s walls. The painter shook his head in violent disagreement and tried to argue, but she enfolded him. Then he wisely went into the shadows of her breast and felt his rest.
