The journalist, Jonathan Schwarz, wrote about the visible evolution and deepening of the artist’s relationship with his subject, the delicate picking-apart and examination of a tangle of love and bitterness, gratitude and anger, resentment and painful tenderness. Cory did not flinch, he said, from showing his horror and disgust at his mother’s failing body even while he acknowledged his debt to it. He referenced a painting in which he had depicted his mother covered by a white sheet that had barely covered her greying pubic hair, the twin focal points of the work a livid scar on her stomach from the removal of a large portion of her bowel and the faded white line of the C-section by which Cory himself had been born. In another painting, this one shown, he’d represented her cancer as an incubus crouching on her skeletal chest like the hideous figure in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare.
No one, of course, could ask Rebecca Cory how she felt about her son’s work but then it was nearly impossible, Schwarz said, to find anyone he’d painted who was prepared to talk. Whether this was another of his conditions or their own choice was unclear. Despite weeks of research, Schwarz wrote, he’d been on the point of conceding defeat when, almost by chance, he’d managed to make contact with Margaret Robinson, the pianist who had been Cory’s upstairs neighbour in the East Village when he first moved to New York at twenty-four. She’d been in her late-forties at the time, almost fifty, but they’d become lovers the night they met and Cory had painted her over and over again during the three years they’d been together.
Despite his relative youth, she said, it had been one of the most intense experiences of her life. ‘He wanted to know me,’ she said, ‘really know me, as if there was something inside me – an essence, a truth – that he could pull out, wind out of my chest like a silk thread. Or maybe it was the other way about and what he wanted was to go deeper and deeper, follow the thread into my psyche like Theseus in the labyrinth. I’m a New Yorker, I saw a shrink for years, but being analysed was nothing compared to sitting for Michael. I’ve never felt like that before – laid bare, exposed, but seen. Witnessed.’
Schwarz had also tried to contact Greta Mulraine, an old girlfriend and the subject of the six nudes Cory had painted at CalArts that attracted his first gallerist. In trying to track her down, however, he’d hit one brick wall after another: barring references to the portraits, she was invisible online and when he tried to contact her parents, he found they’d left Oregon for their native Australia. His efforts to locate them there had come to nothing. It was only when he left a Facebook message for one of Cory’s old CalArts classmates that he’d discovered what happened. Six months after he’d painted her for the final time, Greta Mulraine had committed suicide.
Eleven
Outside the window, a winter landscape raced past. The fields resembled muddy corduroy, and horses stood disconsolate in paddocks drab with thistles. On the river at Reading, the little pleasure boats huddled under tarpaulin.
Despite the frost glittering at the track edge, the train was hot. It was mid-morning, she’d waited until after the rush, and the seat next to her had been empty all the way from Oxford. Rowan closed her eyes and let her head drop back against the bristly plush upholstery, the heat hitting her like a sleeping pill.
On Saturday night, she’d shut her laptop shortly after one but had lain awake again, brain humming. When St Giles struck three, she’d thrown off the covers, taken Marianne’s dressing gown from the bathroom and gone upstairs. Marianne was everywhere in the house – every room, every picture and piece of furniture triggered a memory – but the studio was where she felt closest.
Rowan had looked at the anorexics, the last tiny woman so close to death, and thought about Cory’s portraits of his mother. Had Marianne talked to him about her work? Might he even have inspired her to track the progress of a disease like this? Maybe he had nothing to do with it: Mirror, Mirror, Jacqueline’s most successful book, discussed eating disorders, and Marianne was a feminist before she could spell the word. On the other hand, both she and Cory seemed to have been drawn to women in extremis.
Had they been drawn to each other, too? She shouldn’t rule out that possibility.
Turning to go, she’d switched off the lights but then, changing her mind, she’d walked over to the window. The moon was almost full and, when her eyes adapted, its milky glow showed her the garden quite clearly. Stillness, complete silence, as if she were the only person awake in the city. The flats in Benson Place were dark.
She’d leaned forward until she could see the ruined grass. What happened, Mazz?
Seconds later, she reared back. In the top flat opposite, the light had snapped on and she saw the same man silhouetted in the window. After a moment, she’d realised he couldn’t see her, the studio was dark, but how long had he been there? She hadn’t long turned the light off; had he seen it and come to the window? It was three o’clock in the morning.
Downstairs, she’d sat on the edge of the bed. Who was he? What was he doing? And how had he done that, turned on the light and yet been standing there motionless?