in abstract expressionism class we’ve been talking about jackson pollock. my professor is something of a pollock fanatic, and the other day he told a story about the summer he spent doing research at the pollock-krasner house. on his first night at the house, after the staff had left for the day, he took his bags upstairs to one of the bedrooms and begin to unpack. opening a dresser drawer to put some of his things in, he looked inside and found a few of lee krasner’s personal effects. there were prescription bottles, an eyeglass case, some other things. he quickly closed the drawer and sat down on the bed, realizing that this was their bedroom, their dresser, their mattress. this was where they’d slept.
we’ve talked about both jackson pollock and lee krasner in our class, and what i’ve been most interested in is not pollock himself or his art. not the gallons of paint he used or the things he applied it with or the dried-up redyellowblackgreen on the floor of his studio. not his drinking, not his temperament his affair his death in a car accident. no, i’m interested in her. i’m interested in who she was underneath mrs. jackson pollock, underneath the woman who was in some ways willing to put aside parts of herself for someone else. i’m interested in what it was like to be married to a man more successful than you at your own life’s work. most specifically, i’m interested in how she might have felt after he died, as she was managing his estate. i picture her going back to the house where they lived, walking up the stairs and sitting down on that bed to sift through his personal things, deciding what to keep and what to give away. i picture her in the studio, looking at his paintings, making piles of work to sell work not to sell. i imagine she must have thought about the car accident, about his mistress in the seat next to him. was she sad? wistful? angry? relieved? but no matter how hard i try, i can’t come up with a way to write that. i think a lot about her lately, about what she must have been like and how she dealt with things, but i can’t seem to get inside her head. tis a project i fear may be bigger than my ability. my dad told me once about some show he saw when he was a kid, about a guy who put one coat of paint on a two-by-four every day for fifteen years. after all that, my dad said, the paint was only two inches thick. did he use different colors? i asked. i don’t know, he said. i guess he would just finish one can of paint and open up another one.Category Archives: writing
fucking tourists
my first assignment in short story writing class was to write one scene in three completely different ways. the sequence of events had to be the same in each one: a character pulls the stop cord on the bus, gets up, steps off onto the sidewalk, and sees an old woman walking her dog.
How beautiful this place is! she thought, as the bus neared her stop. How much the way I imagined it! Look at this little red bus full of Londoners on their way to work or school or tea! She pulled the yellow cord near the window to tell the bus driver to stop. Sheíd been dreaming of coming to London since she was a little girl, and now here she was! Collecting her purse, backpack, camera, and shopping bags from the seat next to her, she made her way to the front of the bus with the other passengers, stopping just outside the bus to take in the sights: Big Ben piercing the crisp blue sky, the Thames rippling in the sunlight. Even the little old woman walking her dog along the river seemed to fit perfectly in merry old England. He was already slowing down for the next bus stop, but the blonde girl a few rows back pulled the cord anyway. Pushing the lever to open the passenger door, he watched in the rearview mirror as she collected her things from the seat next to her. These girls are all the same, he thought to himself as he watched her thin short skirt ride up on her thigh as she stood to exit. Always tarted up as though everyoneís watching them. Still, as she stepped off the bus and stopped to watch an old woman walking her dog, he got a nice look at her ass. Fucking tourists, he thought as he watched her pull the yellow stop cord. Theyíre never going to realize that theyíre not the only people here. He was tired and hungry and ready to go home, and he didnít appreciate the fact that she had used the last available seat for her mountain of useless purchases, forcing him to stand in the aisle next to some smelly old geezer. As he walked behind her toward the exit, he decided that London could go to hell for all he cared, with its disgusting river and dirty old pseudo-landmarks and hordes of ignorant visitors. It figures, he thought, as she stopped directly in front of him to watch some old woman walking her dog, sheíd block the way and keep us all from getting off the bus.
12/24/2002
before i thought about the other thing, i was going to write about fiction and nonfiction. i was going to write about how are they opposites? if i write something here and label it fiction, is everyone going to think that i took some piece of nonfiction, some truth from my life and wrote it backwards to be false? are they going to believe that, because of something i wrote and said was made-up, that i do NOT, that i am NOT?
also i was wondering do you think that someone who cleans airport restrooms for a living feels strange when she has to use the toilet she just cleaned herself? i thought about this sunday night in the ladies’ at lambert – st. louis international, when under the stall divider i saw the sensible shoes and polyester cuffs of the woman who’d just been pushing the janitorial cart outside by the sink. and then i was thinking about how i’d love to write a story about an airport custodian. it’d be set inside a stall in the ladies’ room, and would involve an airport custodian having to use the toilet she just cleaned herself. that’s as far as i got, of course, as i have no real grasp of how to write fiction, or even how to think about it as anything other than the opposite of not fiction. or the not oppsite of not not not not fiction. but all that’s gone away now that i’m in rural ohio with some extended and unfamiliar family. now i’m just thinking about how maybe there are two kinds of caring. maybe there’s active caring and passive caring, and if there is, i’d rather be alone than a victim of the latter.