I begin to feel I am carrying around a Santa’s sack of gifts because of all the things I know that Ficre thought and felt. I know these things, just me, only me. He gave them to me every single day, all day. I was his person; he told me everything he thought. I run into one of the town yoga instructors in a coffee shop, reach into my invisible bag, and tell her how much Ficre respected her teaching, the care of her adjustments, how he came home one day from her class thrilled that he had done a headstand for the first time. I run into a neighbor and tell her Ficre thought she was beautiful and foxy, and had planned to make butterscotch pot de crème sprinkled with fleur de sel to delight her when she and her husband next came for dinner. I tell her about how amazed he was by the sous-vide egg she made when we ate at their house: an egg with an unctuous yolk and a crisp panko and smoked paprika exterior, like nothing he had ever seen or imagined.
I tell a colleague from the music department how much he enjoyed talking to her about her expertise on the gamelan as they waited for the kids at the music school. Gamelan, didgeridoo, korari, the world’s musical instruments fascinated him, and he always wanted to learn one or the other. I tell a friend, Ficre loved the conversation you had at the natural food market with him about the basketball player Jeremy Lin’s winning streak with the New York Knicks, “Lin-sanity,” which captivated our house for the few weeks it lasted. Ficre believed utterly in your gifts, I offer, to a niece who is finally pursuing the arts as we always thought she should. Ficre told me you were the mother he would most trust with our kids, the only house where he would let them sleep. Ficre didn’t usually like potato salad but he would happily eat your potato salad every day. Ficre loved you like a sister. To poet friends: Ficre kept your book in the studio and we had a tug-of-war when your most recent collection came out—he swiped it from my bedside table. There is one friend I have not yet told, He was reading your book the day he died. It was the last book he read.
Fourteen
A year later, it is time to make decisions in the studio. It has been photographed exactly as he left it, each table surface a still life of his artist’s practice, each palette a painting unto itself. Key Jo has sorted paintings according to size, dusted and labeled all 882 of them, plus the sketches, and the photographs, and the small metal sculptures.
We will put aside unused supplies to sell to art students and give to artist friends: rolls of pulpy paper, unopened tubes of fine oil and acrylic paint, tables and chairs and two-by-fours and PVC pipe and wire and glue guns. Coconut shells and the woven rush mats called mishrafat for cooling roasted coffee. And then I will figure out what to save in a few labeled boxes that will read “Daddy’s studio,” for the kids to do something with or not one day.
Anticipating throwing away his paintbrushes makes me queasy. They are somehow biological, his DNA in the brush fibers. I find a box of the very best paintbrushes, which are made of sable. I learn they have a natural taper, which forms a point that painters prize. Some brushes are made of squirrel, some hog bristles, some of faux camel hair—for camel is too woolly and curly to make a good brush—ox, pony, and goat. Ficre and I never talked about this, but as I learn about paintbrushes I chuckle, for I know he knew everything I am now learning and know he found it fascinating. It feels like there is so little he did not share that he knew, but of course each of us is infinite. The qualitative hierarchies of paintbrushes is something I learn from him after he has died. He is not here to teach me, but I would not have learned it without him.
The sable is a species of marten. Every contemplation of Ficre is a foray into learning something I did not know before. My friend Elena, who I have not seen since Ficre’s passing, comes through town. She reminds me of the first night Ficre and the boys and I went to dinner at her house and how Ficre got blissfully lost in the maps in their antique atlas. He was man of maps and atlases; he was a cartographer and a cataloguer; he was a squirrel with nuts in his cheeks.
He would have known about the various animals that are used to make paintbrushes, and have had preferences. He was a connoisseur, I am an epicure. Connoit: to know. Epicureans take pleasure like no others, but are materialists. I am sometimes a sybarite. And surely, attachment is suffering.
The paintbrushes, I feel, contain his DNA, and so there feels something wrong about throwing them away. But I cannot keep them; they are stiff with paint, certainly unusable, unlovely though interesting.
I have long been obsessed with the story of the frozen woolly mammoth, how scientists used a blow-dryer to thaw him and extract DNA from his fur. Now I read they have found liquid blood inside a 10,000-year-old woolly mammoth. They will extract the DNA and eventually fertilize and plant an egg inside an elephant.
I want to know every single thing about woolly mammoths. I have to find a paleontologist. Knowing more and more, though, can block the passageways to feeling.
Ficre’s DNA is everywhere in the studio, and in the paintbrushes he held for so many hours.
We can neither save nor harvest it. There is no frozen sperm. And anyway, the being we would clone would never be Ficre.
I tell Elena; I saw the body without him in it; I know there are souls and bodies are just bodies; I saw his body after the soul had left and understood that our bodies are vessels the souls visit.
And then they go where?
Or are they finished? Are our bodies unique hosts?
Every day I hear music he would have loved. Today it is Esperanza Spalding’s “Apple Blossom,” and as I listen closely I realize it is about a man whose lover has died. The refrain: