video—the Appleton plan, as we called it—and in addition to my regular teaching load and the higgledy-piggledy bustle of my spring term classroom—times tables! Tadpoles! A trip on the school bus to the MFA!—and to my dream nights as Reza’s beloved Auntie—in addition (what had I done with my time up till now, I had to wonder, and have to wonder now again: Does Being Happy simply Create More Time, in the way that Being Sad, as we all know, slows time and thickens it, like cornstarch in a sauce?), anyway, in addition to all these things, I made my own art.
It seems hard to credit it, but I did.
I worked on not one but two rooms from my cycle, at one time. Even though I ought, technically, chronologically, to have set about building Virginia Woolf’s workroom at Rodmell, with her notebook open and her shawl draped over her chair and her last note propped upon the mantelpiece, I somehow couldn’t bear to—it was not a season for suicide, not in my life at any rate—and so I set about doing the rooms for Alice Neel and Edie Sedgwick, which weren’t exactly cheerful in themselves; but I found, somehow, a joy in them.
The Alice Neel room was to be the sanatorium suicide ward in small-town Pennsylvania where she was locked up after her breakdown. She’d lost her two little girls, one to diphtheria and the other to her fickle Cuban husband, who’d promised to send for her but never did, and, leaving their daughter with his parents, went on to Paris alone. I wanted to get into the barren room the memory of her little girls, but also I wanted to slip into the corners the ghosts of her future sons, the two devoted and adored boys who stuck by her through thick and thin—through so much thin; and at so great a cost to themselves—as she grew old and fat and plain and was all the time poor, so long unrecognized, obsessed with her work, piling up her unsold canvases in the narrow hallway of her grimy walk-up apartment—but through it all, she’d have those boys, both of whom would flee bohemia for the professions, solid and bourgeois and aggressively uneventful in their days, carrying in them all the pains of her life, of her lost youth and their unknown, lost siblings, but never abandoning her, not ever; and somehow it would have seemed wrong, in the new, golden light of love with which I saw the world illuminated, to make my Alice’s room reflect only the nadir, her darkest isolation, when she felt forsaken by life and by art and by love.
I still wanted my rows of white-draped iron beds, the high white windows unadorned, the swabbed white linoleum floor; I wanted her white nightgown, torn at the shoulder, her hands to her ears in a Munch-like scream. But I wanted the colors of Cuba, of motherhood, of the future, in the interstices, outside the windows, high up the walls, like shoots coming up through the earth, the promise of spring.
For Edie, beautiful Edie, the strangeness was that the joy was already in the room, even as it was killing her. When, as a woman, you make yourself the work of art, and when you are then what everyone looks at, then whatever else, you aren’t alone. Edie was never, on the outside, alone. Emily, Virginia, Alice—the woman artist so fundamentally isolated. And then Edie: never alone. Never invisible. Arguably, also, never seen; and in that sense, more than alone: annihilated.
But to imagine her room was in itself strangely pleasurable. How free I felt to do it, because hers was the only wholly imaginary room, the only one not based on a photograph or a painting or a description of an actual place. I could make it up: a room lined with blown-up pictures of herself, and in between the pictures, windows, and outside the windows, people crowded around, watching her, the spectacle of her. As if she were in the Christmas display at Bloomingdale’s.
I reserved the making of my rooms for myself. Which isn’t to say they were hidden from Sirena. I mean simply that I worked on them only when Sirena wasn’t there. I waited. I held back. I knew everything about her project, you see, whereas she knew only a bit about mine, and I chose to see this as my triumph, some small upper hand. My dignity, if you will, in subservience.