I’m not going to go on and on about how fucking brilliant my wife was, nor will I describe all of her many wonderful paintings, and I mean that literally—they were full of wonder, even the frightening ones—because going into detail about her portfolio would take up ten thousand pages of this report. I’ll just tell you about the best one she did very early on, which she titled The Reason You’re Alive. It might have been the first painting she made in that studio of hers.
You might think I’m vain when I tell you about my favorite of Jessica’s, because it’s a portrait of me. Baby Hank’s in there too. I’m in my full Vietnam combat gear, decked out in camouflage with a rifle strapped to my back, and I’m in the jungle with all sorts of bad shit around me—gooks in trees, tigers, unidentifiable snakes, because Jessica didn’t know all that much about the specific snakes they had in Vietnam, napalm fire, and part of the jungle is even melting from Agent Orange.
But in the middle of everything, I’m not fighting; I’m holding little naked Hank, whose umbilical cord is still connected to his stomach. If you follow the cord with your eyes, you will see that it turns into a bubble that surrounds Hank and me and seems to be shielding us from all of that bad shit in Vietnam.
It was heavily influenced by Henri Rousseau, to say the least. And you don’t have to go to art appreciation school to understand the symbolism in that or any of Jessica’s paintings, which is why my wife is so much better than artists like Eggplant X and other bozos who just want to make money and be mysterious asshole celebrities trying to make people guess what the fuck their paintings mean and then making everyone feel stupid when they get it wrong. Jessica never wanted to show her paintings to anyone, let alone sell them. I’m pretty sure they would have commanded millions on the open market. But she just wanted to paint. Period. Needed to paint. It kept her alive for ten years of motherhood. She never really wanted to be a mother.
When she let me see The Reason You’re Alive, I didn’t cry but I got a big old lump in my throat. She had captured me perfectly—not just the way I looked, either, but how I felt damned, and yet I was still trying my hardest to atone. I was allowed to see the painting three or four more times before it went into Jessica’s archives, which meant that it was stacked up with all the other paintings, and no one was allowed to touch any of them. I had always dreamed that Jessica would one day get up the courage to show her art, maybe after Hank grew up and she was older and had matured as an artist or when she had finally beaten her depression, but that never happened.
A few years later, things got really bad, only I didn’t catch it in time.
I knew Jessica was having more difficulty pretending that she wanted to be a mother to Hank, but I was climbing up the corporate ladder at the bank I was working at in the city, which often meant after-work drinks and golf outings and dinners at expensive restaurants that Jessica never wanted to go to. And her reclusiveness was doing zilch for my career. The wife of a banker is supposed to schmooze, and all the other wives at the bank were fucking pros. So I was handicapped.
I thought the art supplies and garage were enough, but one night in December of 1980 I took Hank to a 76ers game, and when we came home there were fire trucks and police cars everywhere. Our house was fine, but Jessica’s studio had burned to the ground, which meant all of her paintings had been destroyed. My heart sank. I knew this would send her over the edge, into an even deeper depression. But then I saw the haunted looks that the cops and firefighters were giving me.
There are no words to describe how I felt, losing Jessica, so I’m not even going to try here.
She seemed so happy when we left her that night. I’ve since heard that’s a classic sign for depressed people who are about to commit suicide: it means their suffering is about to end. Jessica kissed us both in the kitchen before we exited the house through the back door in the kitchen. Her last words to us were “Have a great time at the game!”
Just as soon as he understood what had happened, standing there with all the fire trucks and hoses and sad-looking cops, Hank started to apologize. He kept saying he was sorry, like he had lit the fire, which he obviously hadn’t. At the time I was trying to process everything—the horrific fact that my wife burned herself to death, using her own art as a funeral pyre. But later I’d hear Hank apologizing for his mother’s death in my mind. I still hear it sometimes. It’s a whisper that’s ever-present, like my own heartbeat. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
I probably should have talked more with Hank about his mother’s suicide. Today a kid like that would get therapy. But it was a long time ago, and you people trained me to keep my mouth shut and soldier on, which is exactly what I did, right or wrong. Young Hank followed my lead there, and time kept passing.
Burning yourself alive is a hell of a way to go. I have spent all my time since blaming myself for what had happened, even though the VA shrink I currently see and four or five other headshrinkers have all told me it’s not my fault so many times over the decades that followed.
But I know this is God paying me back for killing so many gook civilians and burning so many villages. No matter how much I might not like it, God likes humans, even Communist gooks, better than dogs, and that is the exact reason why God put the bad thoughts in Jessica’s brain. After all I had done during the war, I would never be allowed happiness, no matter how many good deeds I did for the rest of my life. Everyone who didn’t understand God’s math said I should remarry, but I never could go through all that again. Wouldn’t want to bring another woman down. And Jessica was the only one for me, anyway.
The reason I went into all of this stuff here is that a few weeks after Jessica burned herself to death, I was emptying out her bureau, getting rid of her clothes, when I saw Clayton Fire Bear’s real name carved into the bottom of her underwear drawer. The letters were big white blocks, like he had cut to the bone of the stained wood. Since she had never even heard it, Jessica couldn’t have carved that name into the drawer bottom, although she would have surely seen it every time she put her laundry away. It was a mystery that I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve at first, especially since the firefighters had confirmed without a doubt, using their firefighter science, that my wife had intentionally started the blaze and made no attempt to escape it, but rather chose to go up in smoke with her art. Try living with that on your fucking conscience.
I’ve asked all the VA shrinks—and I’ve seen more than a few over the years—why Jessica didn’t just leave Hank and me and start a new life if she hated ours so much. They all say leaving doesn’t kill what’s inside. And I know that’s true because I left the Vietnam jungle so many years ago.