Chapter 89 The Studio

Chapter 89 The Studio

New York in September was the best version of itself.

The particular quality of early autumn that arrived after summer had finished making its point and stepped back, leaving the air clear and the light changed into something lower and more specific and the city somehow more itself than it had been in the heat. The park below the apartment was still green but beginning to consider other options, the first specific yellows appearing at the edges of things like a question being asked quietly before it was asked loudly.

We came home on a Tuesday.

Noah went back to school on Wednesday with the decisive efficiency of someone who had filed Paris appropriately and was ready for the next thing. He took Gerald. His teacher had developed, over the past weeks, a pragmatic acceptance of Gerald’s presence that suggested she had made her peace with the rabbit the way one made peace with weather.

Luce was four months old and had begun to have specific opinions about mornings that she communicated without ambiguity.

The apartment received us the way it always received us.

With warmth and the cat, who had apparently conducted its own August program of activities in our absence and reported nothing.

I went to Rosa’s apartment on the first Saturday.

Alone. Early. The September morning doing its clear specific thing with the light.

I stood outside the building for a moment before going in.

This building that Rosa Santos had arrived at in her late twenties with a portfolio and six months of savings. That had held her paintings for thirty two years in the particular patient way of buildings that outlasted everything inside them. That had survived a fire one floor below it on New Year’s Eve. That was now, formally and legally and permanently, part of Rosa Santos’s estate which was part of my estate which was part of Luce’s inheritance.

I went up.

The apartment smelled like itself. The particular combination of old wood and the faint lingering presence of paint and something that was simply the smell of a room that had been waiting and had not minded the waiting.

I stood in the center of it.

The table with the two chairs. The bookshelf. The west facing window. The walls where thirty five paintings had once stood facing inward and were now in Barcelona having been seen completely by people who had stood in front of them and felt less alone.

I had been thinking about the studio conversion for two months.

Not the architectural conversion. That was simple. North facing windows meant the light was already right. The space needed shelving and a proper worktable and storage and better lighting for the evenings and almost nothing else because the essential thing, the quality that made a studio a studio rather than a room with paint in it, was already there.

The essential thing was the attention that had happened here.

Thirty years of an evening practice conducted by a woman who had kept going regardless and had left the quality of that going in the walls of the space the way spaces absorbed what happened inside them.

I sat at the table.

I had brought a notebook. Not a sketchbook. A plain notebook, the kind used for writing rather than drawing, and I opened it and wrote down everything the studio needed in the practical sense. Shelving along the east wall. A larger worktable. Better evening light. Storage for materials. A place to hang work in progress where it could be seen from the working position.

Everything else I left exactly as it was.

The table with the two chairs staying.

The bookshelf with its dog eared pages staying.

The color theory book with the four word margin note staying on its shelf exactly where it had always been.

Rosa Santos had worked at this table in the evenings after the bookshop shift. I was going to work at this table in the mornings after the school run. Different decades. Same table. Same west facing window. Same quality of light doing its afternoon thing.

The conversation continued.

I called the contractor from the apartment.

He came on Monday and walked through the space with the focused professional attention of someone identifying what was needed without being told to change what was working. He made notes. He asked two questions. He gave me a timeline of three weeks.

I said yes.

Eleanor came on Wednesday to see the apartment before the work began.

She walked through it the way she walked through everything, with the particular thorough attention of a woman who was assessing something important and intended to understand it properly before forming conclusions.

She stood at the west facing window for a long time.

Then she turned and looked at me.

“She would be pleased,” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Not because it is a studio,” Eleanor said carefully. “Because it is still hers. Because you are not replacing what was here with something new. You are working alongside what was here.” She paused. “That is the right way to do it.”

I looked at the apartment.

At the table and the bookshelf and the west window.

“She said keep going,” I said.

“Yes,” Eleanor said. “And you are.”

Daniel came on Thursday.

He stood in the apartment with the particular quality of someone returning to a place they have a long relationship with and finding it changed in a way that is not loss but continuation.

He looked at the table.

“She would sit there,” he said. “In the evenings. With whatever she was working on. She always had two cups even when she was alone.” He paused. “I asked her about it once. She said the second cup was for whoever she was painting for. Even if she did not know yet who that was.”

I looked at the table with the two chairs.

The painting in the studio at the apartment. Two cups. Thirty years later.

She had known.

Of course she had.

“The second cup was for me,” I said quietly.

Daniel looked at me.

“Yes,” he said. “I think it was.”

We stood in the apartment together in the September morning and let that be what it was.

Which was everything.

The work would begin on Monday.

The studio would be ready in three weeks.

And on the first morning it was ready I would come here with my brushes and my paints and I would sit at Rosa Santos’s table and I would put the second cup beside mine and I would begin.

The way she had always begun.

With the seeing that was hers first.

And the light coming through the west window exactly as it always had.

The light comes through.

Always.