I. The Subject
The artist smoked cigars—one on his porch with a glass of mescal, another during an evening stroll through the neighborhood. One cigar a day, maybe two. “Nice cigars,” he said.
Each step of the preparation called for craft and attention: curating the cigar for a given moment, towing it in a leather-bound humidor, unwrapping and cutting the cap, torching the tip with a butane lighter to let the tobacco heat up, and rotating the flame to toast it evenly.
Before the artist ghosted, he found a plane ticket to meet me in New York. He reached out to one of his collectors upstate, who had—many times, he said—invited him to stay on their Hudson Valley property. Like my artist—though he was never mine and I was never his—Philip Guston reveled in colors and strangeness, refusing to be confined to one style, medium, or definition of what constitutes art.
If he had flown to New York, he would have, undoubtedly, worn sunglasses inside their home. He would introduce me as his special lady friend. I wouldn’t mind it; I agreed to be the shadow, to absolve my edges into his.
He would comment on the smoothness of the travertine beneath his feet and tell them how we met—weeks, months prior. Immediate and familiar, there was a pull to connect. He looked like the focus of Guston’s Painting, Smoking, Eating (1973): a canvas of spongy pinks and crimson, seemingly alive under the Texas sky.
Before I could get lost in the loneliness of the hope in their eyes, they’d open a third bottle of chilled natural wine. “Stay! Please! Relax!” they would insist we stay the night. A multi-course meal would begin with butter churned with chive blossoms from their garden. We’d all listened as the artist quoted Seinfeld and regaled stories about a road trip with his daughters, slipping further into his diluted Southern accent with each additional glass of skin-contact orange. “Daddy, slow down,” he’d recount, amused by his own delivery.
The collectors would marvel at the artist’s palate as he detected notes of Saratoga in the spring water in their kitchen. They would see themselves as investors, showcasing his original work: proof of a concrete possession. They would ask about his musings and motivations, and the contemporary painter and muralist would say how he had always wanted to stand inside Guston’s studio—to feel the presence or the absence.
In a world of the ephemeral, the artist was real; he took his girls to the movies and bought them scrunchies and flavored ChapSticks. He made black bean quesadillas. He baked oatmeal cookies from The Joy of Cooking, save for the raisins. He hung a disco ball in his studio and lit citronella candles to ward off mosquitos. He went to therapy; he was working to confront his avoidance. He ordered coffee as a long black and he liked the way I traced my fingertips on his skin, a suggestion of a touch without it.
II. The Object
I clutched onto my first cigar poolside too tightly. It didn’t fit and neither did the combat boots that swelled around my ankles. Let the smoke linger in your mouth, he demonstrated, exhaling an opaque white. Rest it on your teeth without biting it, but only if you know what you’re doing, he said, crossing his legs in European pants, tailored to fit his frame: a six-foot-five living version of Lowly Worm from The Busy World of Richard Scarry. A milky cartoon-like cloud evaporated into nothing as the smoke slipped through his fingers.
Let the ash fall off naturally, he said, appreciating the flavors. If it starts to flake, gently rest it in a tray and roll it off. Don’t press it down. Do not rush it. Let it burn out when it’s ready.
There was no smoke when I exhaled; no veil for hiding. So instead, I hid behind the camera.
There is no such thing as a picture, Guston wrote on September 27, 1978, “I just did a painting which I shall call The Tomb or The Artist’s Tomb. So it is truly a bitter comedy that is being played out.” The bitter comedy of the living while dying, two years before the end of his life. “Painting, which duplicates and is a kind of substitute for your life, is lived from hour to hour, day to day. Nothing is stable, all is shifting, changing.”
After he ghosted, I deleted the photos. Evidence of his puffs with a flip-book quality. If I had saved them; I feared being haunted by evidence of not having learned my lessons. Like the one who professed his love in letters from Byron Bay while sharing a bed with an older woman and the spoken “I love you” and the wannabe Basquiat in his Lower East Side loft when I couldn’t compete with his tray of cocaine. While this was my first time being left with no communication, I was no stranger to the final stage of a fleeting romance; I burned the wistful memories with ashes of other men whose words didn’t match their actions. I rotated the flame evenly to toast it.
III. The Ghost
I wonder if we had wandered the halls of Guston’s studio if we have felt his presence; proof of his existence? Would the studio smell holy, stale with dried paint and dusted tethered canvases?
I didn’t make it to the studio. Instead, at the cabin near a waterfall, I stripped in front of a full-length mirror. I was the asymmetrical, full-bodied woman in Guston’s Female Nude with Easel (1935). My late-thirties breasts no longer spilled over the palm of my hand, but they still bounced.
My belly was ripe, ready to bear a child—a creative project or an expression of self. I turned to the side, imagining Philip Guston’s mother pregnant with him: her seventh child. She and my great-grandmother fled the same Ukrainian town during the Pogroms. I was them and they were me, separated by time and fantasy of believing. We were women united in a biological design to create, carry, nurture, and birth another being, only to let it go. To live and to die. To live on after it dies with a legacy—of any kind—to document a reality.
“The only thing I have is my radicalism against art,” Guston wrote. “All that abstract shit – museum and art history aesthetics. What a lie – lie! The only true impulse is realism.”
“All that abstract shit:” The way the artist kept his lips locked around mine at the end of a kiss to breathe in and breathe out, in unison. Nostalgic for the moment as we lived it.
In Female Nude with Easel, the woman studies herself: the delicate pouch below her belly button, the soft curve of her hips. She was her own muse. I stepped closer to the mirror, searching for others’ scars on my body but only finding my own. The times I hoped my loving someone else’s brokenness might make me feel whole. I pressed my lips onto the soft skin of my shoulder. I kissed it—breathing in, breathing out—nostalgic for the moment as I experienced it.
If I was alone, I did not feel it. I was the flickering memories and hauntings of what lingered—stories that didn’t belong to me from past generations and sweet details, like the cast iron skillet I shared with my first partner to make buckwheat pancakes on Saturday mornings. In the scheme of my lifetime, I will likely forget the time I was ghosted by the artist. I stood among the greenery in the Hudson Valley; trees, rooted for centuries before me, most of which will long outlive me.
Because that is what the living artist, Marie Howe, wrote in What the Living Do (1998). “But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, / say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep/ for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.”
*****
Rachel Elam’s work has appeared in New York Magazine, American Writers Review, Las Lagunas Gallery, and more. She has received support from Write Toscana and Bennington Writing Seminars, where she earned an MFA.
