Moonglow by Michael Chabon

Author:Michael Chabon
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

20

There were a lot of painters living at Fontana Village. They painted detailed oil portraits of World War II aircraft, still lifes with seashells, nostalgia-brown scenes of shtetl weddings. They exhibited their work in the lobby of the Activity Center, at the annual holiday art fair.

Sally Sichel was not that kind of painter. She had studied at Pratt and taught painting at UC Davis with Arneson and Thiebaud. Joan Mitchell was the bridesmaid at her first wedding. Her work was not well known—my grandfather, whose idea of great painting began with Winslow Homer and ended with Analog magazine cover artist Kelly Freas, had never heard of her—but she was hardly unknown. Her canvases hung in museums and on the walls of collectors as far away as Japan. Back when SFMOMA was still in the War Memorial Veterans Building, they used to keep a small Sichel in a dim corner, where I paid it a visit once not long after my grandfather’s death. Like most of Sally’s work from the sixties, it seemed to be rooted in some dense and private mathematics. Its lacework of parabolas and angles—red-orange against titanium white—confused the eye. Retinal afterimages turned the white regions to jumping blue-green neon.

When she met my grandfather, she had been a widow for less than two months, but she had been alone and grieving for much longer than that. Leslie Port, her third husband, had succumbed, slowly at first and then in a dizzying rush, to an unspecified disease that, my grandfather only later came to realize, must have been AIDS. The disease was poorly understood at the time, and Leslie’s care was a prolonged bout of expensive flailing. Though Les had worked for years at Hewlett-Packard—he helped to invent the screen-and-button interface used by ATM machines and gas pumps all over the world—and made a good living, in time his treatment devoured his savings, along with all of Sally’s mental and emotional resources. Along the road to his death were wild switchbacks in diagnosis, prognosis, and prescription. Leslie’s first wife and three adult children, with their spouses and ex-spouses, formed a repertory company of guilt, cluelessness, and resentment that seized upon each reversal to stage marathon productions. Sally told my grandfather she had not touched a paintbrush in three years. “I haven’t had the time,” she said. “Or if I had time, then I didn’t have the energy. I was too tired. I’m still tired.”

They were lying on their backs in my grandfather’s bed, a queen. My grandfather lay on the side (the left) that had been the haunt of his insomnia, dreams, and cares for all the years of his marriage and then widowerhood. In that long-desert region of the mattress there was now, astonishingly, the warm body of a woman and a smell of amber and cloves. It was their second night together. She had begun with her head nestled against his shoulder, but his shoulder was too bony and her cheek was too hot. The name of

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