“The old lady my mother bought the house from. She built it when she was young. This garage went with the original house and the old lady couldn’t get a permit to build a new one, so she never tore this one down. She turned it into her painting atelier.”
Once I got up there I could tell the old lady was an amateur, because she had everything a real artist could ever dream of in a studio but can seldom afford. Here there was not just light and space but wide cabinets with shallow drawers for storing drawings and slotted racks against the wall for canvases and an easel. A sink for cleaning brushes and counter space alongside it and even more drawers under that. A couple of sunflower-yellow straight-backed chairs arranged around a yellow table I couldn’t imagine anyone getting up there in the first place, and a yellow wooden day bed and bedside table.
“Van Gogh at Arles meet Barbie’s Dream House,” I said.
“Yes,” Frank said. “Or somebody got a very good deal on yellow paint. Look, here’s the bathroom.” He opened a door and showed me a tiny bathroom fitted with a teacup-sized copper tub and a demitasse sink and one of those old-fashioned high-tanked toilets with a chain I couldn’t resist pulling. It flushed with a sound like a jet taking off from an aircraft carrier. Frank covered his ears and grimaced.
“Sorry,” I said when he uncovered his ears again. “It’s just that I’ve never seen a toilet like that.”
“Van Gogh would have done the same thing,” he said. “He never saw one, either. Or these.” By the sink, he twisted the knob on the top of what looked like a vertical row of drawers. The lot swung open as one and presto—a tiny concealed refrigerator that released a puff of stale, chilly air. Another drawer by the fridge pulled out to reveal a little two-burner electric stovetop.
“Wow,” I said. “You could live up here. Does your mother come here a lot?”
“Not so much. The ladder scares her. When the son moved the old lady out, he just left all her stuff, see?” He opened another drawer to show me brushes with dried-paint evidence of use on the handles but whose bristles had been so well cared for they were as soft and immaculate as they must have been in the shop. There were tubes of paints and pastels and balls of string and wire and clamps and a hammer and nails and many blue tin cups of tacks segregated by color, all laid out in their drawers as if they were in a shop window in Paris. I say that like I’ve been to Paris. I haven’t, except in movies, or my dreams.
“I don’t know if it was too much trouble to move out, or if it made the old lady too sad to bring it with her. She didn’t want to sell the place but her son didn’t want her anywhere near that ladder again. My mom said she couldn’t bear to pitch everything because the old lady had it all arranged so beautifully and she was about to be dead but her materials were still so alive with potential. Then of course I came along and by the time I was three my mother was pretty sure I was going to be famous for something someday. Since that something might be painting, she kept everything like it was. My mother bought a lot of art back then, too. We don’t have that anymore. But thanks to us keeping all the old lady’s stuff here, the potential for us having it again is alive even if the old lady is dead.”
I reached for one of the brushes. “Oh, don’t touch,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I forgot to ask. Is it yours?”
“I told you all this stuff belongs to the old lady.”
“I thought she was dead.”
“She is, probably. A lot of the pieces in museums used to belong to people who are dead but you aren’t allowed to touch them, either. Here, let me show you my favorite thing up here.” He darted across the loft to a big wire basket on the top rail of the waist-high fence that separated us from the concrete floor a dozen feet below. He flung the basket over the edge, and I gasped. “Don’t worry. It’s attached to this pulley, see? It’s how you get groceries and stuff up and down, since the ladder is so dangerous.”
I came to the fence and peered over. “That’s quite a drop. You be careful,” I said. “If you fell over you’d break your neck, and probably every other bone in your body.”
“I couldn’t fall over that. It’s too high. I’d have to jump it.” Frank leaned his elbows on the top of the fence and looked over.
“Don’t even think that,” I said. “And please, don’t lean on it. What if it gives way?”
“My mother says the same thing. She doesn’t like it when I come up here because she’s sure I’ll manage to find a way to fall like my uncle Julian did. So I have to curate my collection when she isn’t looking.”
Uh-oh. “Wait. Are you not allowed up here?”