I wasn’t afraid in the studio anymore. I had a myth of my own invincibility. You can’t imagine, if you’ve never been fearful that way, what a liberation it is to be free of it. You can say it had been silly, that I’d tortured myself for years with an artificial anxiety, and I can’t dispute that this is so; but somehow Sirena—or Reza, or maybe even Skandar—set me free from this. I stopped cowering. She gave me that gift, too.
I was free and unafraid enough to play my music loudly—Fats Waller or Chubby Jackson or Joe Marsala and His Delta Four for Alice Neel; the Velvet Underground when working on Edie—or to smoke a cigarette or even half a cigarette that Sirena had left behind. There came the week in which I was inspired—ridiculous, I know—to try to Be Edie, and I brought lots of makeup and I painted my face in front of a sliver of mirror salvaged from Sirena’s stores—its very sliverness apt, like some relic from the Factory—powdering my skin white and blackening my eyes into great, dark, glimmering hollows. I didn’t cut my hair off, but I slicked it back, and in a white T-shirt and black leggings, cursing myself for having boobs, for being close to forty, for not being tiny, I danced dervishly nevertheless and took Polaroids of myself doing so, with my mother’s old camera. The images were blurry and partial—an eye and nose, an oiled glint of hairline, a moving arm half blocking the frame—but this somehow seemed in keeping with the spirit of it all. I took my shirt off and took pictures of that, too, impressed by the retro quality of my own out-of-focus torso, my breasts in their plain white bra high and distinct in the camera’s record.
In those solitary studio nights, I wandered up and down the small pathways of Sirena’s semi-assembled Wonderland. I gazed up at where the Alice-dress sky would later hang. I sniffed the aspirin flowers, I held conversations with myself, or with Sirena, in a loud, almost abrasive tone. I spoke in silly accents and pidgin Cuban Spanish, as if I were Alice Neel’s mother-in-law telling her she couldn’t have her daughter back. I built Alice’s sanatorium beds out of fat, white-coated electrician’s wire and sewed their tiny tufted mattresses from striped Irish flannel stuffed with foam, busy as the fairy-tale elves, bemoaning out loud, in curses, the first diminishings of my middle-aged eyesight, and repeatedly pricking my forefinger. I laid a carefully joined parquet of sawn Popsicle sticks for the floor of Edie’s Factory room, and painted coat upon coat of stain and varnish to perfect its toasty hue. I framed the plate-glass windows of her hexagonal space—all windows, no doors—and sealed them carefully with putty, old-style. I laid the parquet boardwalk in the space around her room, the Edie-viewing-room, which I planned later to crowd with spectators. But I never got to the spectators themselves, which seems to me to make sense, now.
It was a riot. Like a third grader, I was in my life, in life. I was alive. I thought I’d been wakened, Sleeping Beauty–like, from a Long Sleep. In fact, I didn’t seem to need much sleep, as if all the years of struggling in a slumber had at least set me up to dispense, now, with rest. I sometimes left the studio at one, or even two, and I was in the shower by six thirty on a school day, bright and neat as a pin in my classroom by five to eight, with a surreptitious wink for Reza, who was often a mite tardy and easily anxious about it. For so long I had eaten my greens and here—at last!—was my ice-cream sundae.
7
There was another strand in this tapestry. What does it signify that I’m loath to tell you, slow to tell you? I want to say it was separate, that it was on another account. But that would be a knowing lie, and not-telling becomes, in the parlance of pious Aunt Baby, a Sin of Omission.
Almost every time I stayed with Reza, Skandar walked me home. When it snowed, he put on a hat, an old-fashioned trilby sort of hat, of battered elephant-gray felt, and he looked like a gangster in spite of his glasses. The gangsters’ accountant, maybe. When it was raining, he carried a vast umbrella, of the sort they have at hotels and golf clubs, and he gallantly held it over me