The rainy season had started, so we didn’t go much of anywhere. I was unprepared for the forty-days-and-forty-nights quality of rain in Los Angeles. Insane apocalyptic downpours that went on steadily for hours without interruption, as if some celestial somebody had turned on a tap in the heavens full blast and forgotten about it. Sometimes at night I’d open my curtains just to watch the waterfall outside and listen to its monsoonal roar. You could smell the dampness of the earth inside the house, even with all the windows closed. I thanked god for the stucco wall that would, I hope, save us from sliding down the hillside or at least cushion our fall if we did.
Most mornings Frank and I would suit up in big black oilskin raincoats and wellies and struggle giant mortician’s umbrellas through the deluge out to the Dream House to work on our project. The portrait wasn’t going so well. The air was wet and heavy, the oil paint refused to dry even with three portable fans pointed at it, and there was no accelerant in the Dream House that I could find. Instead of waiting out the wet paint I pressed on, which meant the portrait gradually took on a queasy muddiness of blurred pigments and smudged lines that reminded me of how hog slop looks on hot days when it smells so bad that even the pigs are put off their feed.
Frank, bless his heart, hovered and offered pointers. But it was hopeless. I should have put the canvas aside and played Clue with the kid until the weather or my head cleared, but I was on a deadline. I hated to disappoint Frank, and now his disappointment seemed inevitable.
“I don’t understand why you’re having so much trouble,” Frank said to me a few mornings before Christmas. “Your sketches are utterly charming.”
“Thanks,” I said. We were across from each other at the yellow table. I felt so dejected I closed my eyes and put my forehead on the table and left it there. The air was so full of moisture, even that paint felt damp.
I heard the kid get up to rummage around the Dream House. There were no big sharp knives in the joint. If he wandered too close to the edge, the creaky floorboards would give him away in time for me to stop him from going over. I couldn’t open my eyes. I needed a break from seeing.
I listened to him open one of the flat files, rustle some paper and bang around this and that. It was sort of like listening to a radio play. Despite myself, I was enjoying trying to figure out what he was up to. After he was done with whatever it was, he came and pressed his cheek against my shoulder blade. “Alice,” he said, “wake up.”
When I raised my head and looked I saw that Frank had plucked my soggy canvas from the easel and clipped a big piece of watercolor paper in its place. To the upper-right corner he’d pinned a sketch I’d done of him in his Little Prince outfit with binoculars in his hands and scarf billowing behind him. “I’ve been observing your technique and have come to the conclusion that oils are not your first love,” he said. “I thought you might be more comfortable doing something more impressionistic, maybe along the lines of this sketch writ large and brightened with a watercolor wash. There are some Auguste Rodin portraits done that way that I’m very fond of.”
I was willing to try anything. “Watercolor drips, so the paper needs to be flat,” I said.
“Is that so?” Before I could scrape my chair back Frank had fetched the paper and smoothed it out on the table in front of me. “I don’t know much about watercolor other than it’s sometimes undervalued in comparison to oils as it is easily damaged, hard to preserve, and pooh-poohed by critics as the province of hobbyists and Victorian ladies, despite being one of the most vital yet difficult mediums to work in. I hadn’t considered the dripping, although of course it makes perfect sense. Alice, I learn something from you every day.”
I was done with the thing in the hour. It was dry by dinnertime. The hardest part of the whole business was getting the portrait back inside the house without tearing it or crumpling it or getting it soaked in the downpour.
The most outstanding characteristic of my finished piece, I thought, was that it was big enough to cover the unfaded square over the mantel. There wasn’t time to frame it, so we didn’t. Frank and I stole into the living room as Christmas Eve flipped over into Christmas day and tacked it up there. As we did I saw that his stocking—one of his argyle socks, actually—hung from the lip of the mantel, lank and empty. I hoped Frank hadn’t noticed, too. After I herded him back to bed I gathered up whatever I could find to stuff in it. A pair of scissors. A roll of tape. A pack of chewing gum. My hairbrush. A set of fake mustaches I had planned to wrap for him and put under the tree. Anything to fill the void.
Christmas morning, Frank’s sock bulged with nothing I’d put in it. I found my contributions tossed in a mixing bowl outside my bedroom door, with a note from Mimi that read: “I believe these things are yours.”
Everything except for the mustaches. Those she wrapped very nicely, adding a typed tag that read: “For Frank, With Love, From Alice.” Frank was so delighted with the mustaches that he put on three right away. One on his lip and the other two over his eyebrows. After that he said he would like for me to hug him and he stood there without flinching while I did it.