Painted Light
At the end of his life, what the under-appreciated painter remembered, more than any particular painting he made, was the light that made him want to paint in the first place, that first lonely winter in New York, living in a rented room that was so cold he had to break the ice in the wash basin in the morning before filling his cupped hands with its freezing water to wash his face, until one day something in the light falling through his dirty window, its view of the river being the place’s only saving grace, reminded him of the light that used to fall slantwise through the dining room windows in late afternoon, in early September, when, saddened by Sunday, he would offer to help his mother set the table, taking the stack of heavy porcelain plates from her and laying them out with great care before each of the five chairs, blowing a dead fly off of one of them, then pairing the silverware on the folded linen napkins, then filling the water glasses that acted like prisms, breaking the light into colorful flecks that trembled faintly on the clean blue-and-white-checkered tablecloth, so that, in remembering this light, he had to immediately run out and, with the very last of the money his father had sent him begrudgingly by Western Union, buy paints and brushes and canvas at a store he had passed a hundred times before without so much as glancing in through its windows, then went on to spend months in that rented room in New York, trying to make appear, on canvas he kept whitewashing in order to save money, that dining room in Indiana, all so that, years later, at the opening, he could be photographed standing next to the painting of the dining room, a painting, the gallery owner had promised, that would make him famous, suffering their congratulations for the way he had rendered light falling on clean chinaware as if light was what was being served when it was always a roast that had been cooking since they’d come home from church and that his father had to stand up to carve, the light cutting across his wrist but meaning him no harm, but there were no people in the painting, just the plates and silverware and glasses with the light falling upon and through them, depending, a good painting but not a true one, so that, in the cab home, he told his wife what he had been thinking all evening, looking at the painting hanging on the clean gallery walls, that he hadn’t gotten the light quite right, and when she insisted that he had, gotten the light right, that is, he asked her how she could possibly know, she hadn’t been there that day, some long ago September, back when his parents were still alive and he was a little boy, to which she said, without missing a beat, that, by that logic, he hadn’t been there either, a quip the driver found so impressive that he slapped the steering wheel as he turned onto Christopher Street, and after that evening the painter gave up trying to describe the difference between painted light and remembered light, even to his wife, his closest friend, the only person he thought might be able to understand, if anyone could, until, just before he died, when he’d lost his ability to speak and thus tell her about it where she sat at his bedside, he saw it again, cupped in his upturned palm, like a currency given him in consolation for having tried.