There's a strip of blue painter's tape on the back of the stretcher with a date on it in pencil. March 9. I never write the year on anything. I used to think of that as a charming habit, a sort of lightness. A year would make it a fact, and a fact would have to be dealt with.
The painting is five feet wide. It's my mother's kitchen, or a kitchen with enough of hers in it to count — the yellow wall clock with a chip out of its rim, and the dented aluminum pot she used for exactly one thing, and the window over the sink she never hung a curtain on, because curtains, she said, were for people with something going on.
It has faced the wall for fourteen months.
Turning it around took four seconds. I took the top corner, pivoted it on one bottom edge, let it knock softly against the plaster, and went and made coffee. Keeping it that way has cost me more than finishing it ever would have, but effort doesn't keep honest books.
Ines at the gallery writes every eleven or twelve weeks. She has a gift for the low-pressure subject line. "checking in :)" — "zero rush, truly" — and once, just: "kitchen?" I looked at that for a long time. One word, somebody else's patience thinning out in real time. Then I archived it and drove to the hardware store for a hinge I didn't need and stood in the aisle for twenty minutes, genuinely absorbed, the way you can only be absorbed by something that isn't yours to make.
For three years in my twenties I rented half of a long room above a dry cleaner on Chapel Street. The other half belonged to Rosalind Vaz, who everybody called Roz, and who finished things.
In August the floorboards were warm underfoot from the presses downstairs, and the whole place smelled like hot cotton with something chemical underneath, a smell I still like more than I should. Roz worked standing up in a man's oxford shirt with the cuffs cut off, fast, humming under her breath in a way that wasn't quite music and wasn't quite not.
I remember a Tuesday in October because she'd asked me to hang around and help her move a table and then never moved it. Around eleven at night she stepped back from a small green painting of a stairwell, dropped her brush in the jar, and said, "Okay."
That was the entire ceremony. She turned it to face out into the studio, wrote the date on the back in ballpoint — month, day, and the year, all three, like a person filling out a form at the DMV — and started digging through a coffee can for her keys.
I asked how she knew.
"Know what," she said, not looking up.
"That it's done."
"It's not done." She found the keys and shook them once, like proof of something. "I'm done. I want to eat."
I thought she was being flip. For years I told that as a story about how she was being flip, how she didn't take it as seriously as I did, which was a very comfortable story for me to have. It took most of two decades to understand she had told me the truth in the plainest words available and I simply had no use for them yet.
These days I get up at five to work on it, which sounds like devotion and is the most elaborate lie I tell.
The studio is a sunporch my brother helped me insulate badly in 2011; until about seven in the morning you can see your breath. I go out there in a coat. I turn on the little ceramic heater, which ticks as it warms, an actual tick, like a nail tapped on glass. I lay out a rag. I squeeze out a worm of Naples yellow I have no plan for.
And then one morning in February I cleaned the same brush three times.
I want to be exact about it, because the vagueness is where I live. I worked a half-inch flat in the jar until the turpentine went cloudy, wiped it on the rag, shaped the tip between my fingers, set it down. Then I picked it up and did all of that again. Then a third time. Somewhere in the third pass I heard a small calm voice in me saying that this was fine, this was preparation, that a clean tool matters — and I understood the voice wasn't lying to me, exactly. It was buying me a morning. It's very good at its job. It has been doing that job for about as long as I've owned the brush.
There was maybe forty minutes of real work left in that painting. I could have itemized it: the reflection on the pot, the left edge of the window frame, and whatever I was finally going to decide about the clock. Forty minutes. Nothing. The whole thing.
In the spring of 2007 I sold a painting for forty dollars off a folding table on Roz's mother's stoop in Fair Haven. It was small, a laundry line against a brick wall, and a woman in a green corduroy coat picked it up with both hands the way you pick up a casserole dish.
"Is it dry?" she asked.
I said yes. It was not quite. She paid in two twenties that had been folded together in her pocket so long they'd gone soft as cloth, and she tucked the painting under her arm against her hip and walked toward the corner. Halfway there she shifted her grip. Then she turned and was gone, and I stood behind the table with the money in my hand feeling something enormous and unaccountable, which I could not call grief, because forty dollars.
What had happened, though, and what I could not have said out loud then, was that the painting had stopped being available. Not for sale — for improvement. There was a clothespin in it I'd gotten wrong, second from the left, too heavy, wrong angle, and it was going to be wrong in that woman's apartment for the rest of its natural life, and there was nothing I could do about it from a folding table on a stoop.
I got extremely productive after that. By which I mean I started a great many things.
Ines called in April instead of emailing, which meant something. I was in the driveway with grocery bags going warm in the trunk.
"I'm not calling about the kitchen," she said, and then we talked for six minutes about a ceramicist in Hamden who had gone quiet on her, and then she said, "So."
I said it was very close. I heard my own voice do the thing it does when it's about to be helpful, going warm and slightly too fast, the voice of somebody handing you a coat.
"Close like weeks," she said.
"Close like — yeah."
A pause with a car door in it on her end. Then: "You know I've seen it, right?"
I had forgotten. Genuinely forgotten. She'd been out to the sunporch that first fall, before I turned it around, and she'd stood in front of it in her coat with her hands in her pockets for what I remember as a long time and probably wasn't.
"It's good," she said, in the flat, slightly bored way people say the sentence you would trade a year of your life to hear, when they already said it once and you declined delivery.
I stood in the driveway until the ice cream in the trunk went soft. Because here is the arithmetic I'd been running without admitting it: as long as that canvas faces the plaster, there is a version of me out here who might. That one is enormously gifted. That one has never once been checked against anything. Finish it and he's gone, and what's left is a person who made a painting of a kitchen, and it is the painting it is.
Roz had a show in November of 2008, in a former bank on Whitney Avenue with the vault door still on the wall like a joke nobody was making. Eleven people came. Four of them were related to her. The gallerist's boyfriend had brought his own bag of pretzels and ate them by the door.
We went out the back onto the fire escape because she wanted a cigarette she didn't actually have. It was cold enough that the wine in her paper cup had gone cold too. Below us was a parking lot with three cars in it.
"Well," she said.
I said something optimistic about the write-up that was supposedly coming.
"No, it's — " she said, and stopped, and looked at the parking lot for a while. Then: "I keep thinking I left the heat on."
She had not left the heat on. She didn't have heat; the boiler in her building had been out for nine days and she'd been sleeping in a wool hat. What she meant, I think — and I'm aware I'm doing the thing where I translate a person into something more useful to me — is that some part of her was still up on Chapel Street with the presses going underneath, and that whatever was happening downstairs with the pretzels had nothing to do with that and never would.
And underneath my sympathy, which was real, there was a bright ugly flicker of relief. She finished, and this is what finishing bought her. Eleven people and a vault door. I've never entirely squared with how good that felt.
In May a man named Marcos came to sand and reseal the sunporch floor, because the boards by the door had gone spongy and I'd been stepping around them for two years. He moved everything out to the yard under a tarp, except the big one, which was too awkward to tarp, so he leaned it against the side of the house facing out.
I came back from the store and there it was, in full afternoon sun, on the grass, being looked at.
Marcos was drinking a blue Gatorade and wiping his forehead with the back of his wrist. "That's — what is that, your kitchen?"
"My mother's."
He nodded and kept looking at it a beat past what politeness requires. Then he pointed. "My mother had one of those." Not the clock, not the window I have repainted eleven times. The pot.
"Yeah?"
"She wouldn't let anybody else touch it, man." He drank. "She made the — " and he made a shape with his free hand, some dish I didn't know the name of and still don't, and I said, "Right," and he said, "Right," and then he asked whether I wanted the threshold sealed too, and that was the end of the conversation about the painting.
I didn't sleep well that night, and not because of anything he said. Because for four hours the thing had been out in the daylight with a stranger in kneepads walking past it, and nothing happened to it. It wasn't ruined. It wasn't confirmed. A man looked at it and thought about his mother's pot and then thought about polyurethane.
Roz stopped painting in 2013. Not dramatically. She went back to school, and she's a physician assistant in Providence now, and she has a kid named Ozzy who is eight, and she sends me photographs of Ozzy's drawings with an enthusiasm I decided at first to find sad and eventually had to admit was just enthusiasm.
I called her in June. I told her about the blue tape and the March 9 with no year on it, and she laughed for slightly the wrong length of time.
"You still doing the — " she said, and didn't finish it, and I knew anyway.
"Yeah."
"Huh." A car sound, a turn signal. "I used to think you were doing that on purpose."
"Doing what on purpose?"
"Being — " A long pause; she was merging. "I don't know. Like it was a strategy. Like you knew something."
I said I didn't know anything.
"Anyway. Write the year on it, that's — I always did that, right? It's not really for you. It's for like, whoever. Later." Her voice went away from the phone. "I gotta go, he's got a thing."
I stood in my kitchen afterward with the phone still warm against the side of my face, holding the strange fact that the person I had quietly filed away as a cautionary tale had spent fifteen years not thinking about me at all, and had answered on the second ring.
I finished it on a Thursday. Not because I'd made peace with anything. Because at eleven at night in May I had agreed by email to a courier on the 22nd, the way you agree to things at eleven at night, and then the 22nd was in four days.
The forty minutes took three hours. I did the reflection on the pot. I did the left edge of the window frame, which turned out to be twenty minutes of nothing and then two minutes of something. And then I put a smear of warm white across the face of the clock to catch the light off the window, and I knew as I was pulling the brush that it was wrong — too bright, too pleased with itself, a little bit of showing off in the middle of my mother's kitchen.
I stood there with the brush lifted, ready to take it back.
I didn't take it back. It's in there now, permanently, a small vanity that will hang in a building on Orange Street where people will hold plastic cups of wine near it and talk about parking. I turned the canvas around to face the porch. Then I got the pencil and wrote on the back, under the March 9, the day's date and the year, and then I went back up and put the year on the March 9 too, and looked at the two of them sitting there in graphite, and the distance between them looked like almost nothing. Like a receipt.
The crate went out to the curb where the van was idling with its back doors open. I set it down and saw, in the yellow of the clock right at the edge where the paint had run past the canvas onto bare wood, one of my own hairs, gray at one end, dried in. I didn't pick it out. I put my palm flat on the crate and felt the engine going through it.
