the diorama wall but out Virginia’s bedroom window, onto our walls outside, so that instead of being small, the words would be huge. In my mind’s eye, they would flicker: the flickering was, to me, very important.
Then there was to be one of the painter Alice Neel, in the sanatorium to which she was sent after her nervous breakdown at around the age of thirty. I wanted there to be an echo, you see, between Emily Dickinson’s spare white room and Alice Neel’s white room, the monastic and the asylum: both retreats, but of such different types. And both the province of women. I even thought about the title of my nonexistent series: A Room of One’s Own? I thought the question mark was the key.
I loved the story of Alice Neel, in part because her life was so hard and bitter but turned out all right in the end, and in part because her art, like mine, was resolutely unfashionable for almost all of her life, and because of that she had to know why she was doing it and why she kept doing it to the last. She was the AFH: the Anti-Fun-House. I was bound to love her for that.
The last diorama I planned was to be the opposite of the others. It was going to be Edie Sedgwick’s room in Warhol’s Factory. Instead of trying to escape the world, Edie sacrificed herself to it. She existed only in the public gaze. Imagine that: a surface, so beautiful, from which all depth has been erased. But then, the photos, their intensity, her vitality—it certainly looks as though a soul was trapped behind those eyes.
Edie was essential. I’d spent a chunk of my adolescence in thrall to Edie Sedgwick, in love with the insect limbs in their black tights, and the giant eyes, and the stares, even though she was already long dead in my day. She was the cool people’s Marilyn Monroe—smaller, faster, brighter, more immediately alive, and more efficiently dead, an anorexic slip of a life, with no more known interiority than a dachshund. Yet if, when I was sixteen and on my way to college, you’d asked me whether I wanted to be Georgia O’Keeffe or Edie Sedgwick, I would definitely have hesitated. And I might have said Sedgwick. She’d defined something, we said back then.
But the point is that I was consumed—in a digressive, obliterating way—by my hypothetical series, and by my Emily Dickinson diorama in the first instance, by its practical minutiae. I had paintbrushes comprised of a single hair, and a loupe like a watchmaker’s that I could attach to my forehead, and I’d spend three days on a miniature replica of the woodcut landscape that hung between the windows in Emily’s bedroom, only to decide, once it was done, that the likeness was poor, and that I needed to begin again.
Hours and hours and hours of dollhouse labor, and I loved it, was lost in it like one of my children. But when Sirena left me, sooner or later I’d look up from my table and realize that I was alone in a tiny pool of light in a great dark room, as if I were myself the figure in someone else’s diorama, manipulated in my own stage set by a giant I could not see. Once aware of my isolation, I was afraid not of it but of its interruption: I’d walk to the windows and peer into the night, trying to make sure I wasn’t being watched; I’d stand at the studio door, listening for movement in the hallways, or in the neighboring rooms. If there were footsteps or clamor, I was reassured if they were loud, as though the faceless were announcing themselves; happier still when there were voices or, as sometimes, a distant radio; but if the sounds were muffled, muted, intermittent, my heart seized, and I feared that the hooded villain of my nightmares was lurking in the stairwell awaiting my departure.
Sometimes I could get over it, force myself back to my table, my Lilliputian world, and lose myself again; but on other evenings—particularly if the weather was silent, no rattling, no rain, no sounds at all but those around me—I’d succumb to my terrors, packing up in haste and banging at top volume through the building, down the hallway, down the stairs and out, always surprised by the softness of the streetlights, the bland calm of the road outside the warehouse.