But here, there was plenty of room.
I padded down the hallway barefoot. My mother was out in her garden, the contractors working up in the attic, and the house was quiet around me as I moved down the stairs, the memory of which ones squeaked coming back to me, as though I were a teenager again, insomnia-struck, sneaking down to the basement to paint. In my adolescent dreams, when I grew up I would have a light-filled studio, dazzling white, like my grandmother’s room in Paris, full of air and light to illuminate my paintings, bring a brilliance to them that I never could in the basement of my parents’ house. Somewhere along the way, that dream had disappeared.
How is it possible things that are so important to us when we are young somehow fade away? If you had asked me when I was in high school to give up painting, I would have laughed. It would have been like surrendering my heart. And yet I had given it up. There had been no grand ceremony, no renunciation, but it had happened nonetheless, in a small, sad way, a gradual distancing, until one day you might have asked me to stop painting and I would have been struck by its absence. All these things we hold close when we are young, when our emotions roar so loudly the only way to make it through is to live in the voices of other people’s hearts, in music loud enough to drown out the wail of our own confusion, in art painted on canvases large enough to capture the whirl of chaos inside us or small enough to fill with the infinite details that explain us, in dance, in poetry, in theater, in art, how do we lose them? Why?
But as I opened the door to the basement and the smell of it rushed up to meet me, filled with more memories than a thousand Parisian rose gardens, something cracked open inside me and I felt young and wild and aching again.
The stairs were the same: wooden and creaking under my weight, with black rubber treads on each step, rough against my bare feet. Nothing had changed in the basement for years; I wondered if my mother ever even came down here. There was a shed in the back for her gardening tools, and most anything valuable was kept in the attic, and all that was here was what had been here for as long as I could remember: two armchairs and a sofa, all in need of reupholstering, old wooden tennis rackets in frames, a croquet set, stacks of cardboard boxes that looked as though they had been packed for a move and then never been opened, now sagging under each other’s weight.
And there, in the corner, between two windows that spread shafts of light across the floor like pathways, was my easel. This was where I had painted during high school and college, and when I had moved out, I had bought all new things and left these here. The walls were cinder block, and I had made an attempt to paint a mural on them at some point, which was barely visible now, faded in the damp. Leaning against those walls were a dozen canvases, a few blank, most of them painted. What had happened to the rest of my paintings, my drawings? I must have produced hundreds of them. I had a vague memory of bringing some things down here for storage before I got married, but this couldn’t be all of them. Had I simply thrown them away, confident there would always be more, I would always make more?
I flipped through the canvases against the wall. A still life, where I had clearly been trying to master the play of light and the prismatic translucence of a jug of water; a landscape, where I had taught myself perspective. Neither of them exactly good, neither total disasters either. An abstract painting in red and yellow, blocky stripes made with a wide, flat brush, trailing out like vapor toward the edges of the canvas as the paint had run out. I peered at that one for a while, trying to remember what I had wanted to capture. I had never been any good at abstract art, not even when I had learned to understand it, to read it.