@@@@@I thought it was going to
be a long and
@@@@@I thought it was going to
be a long and exhausting evening, but I felt I was
on the verge of great discoveries, and what I felt
wasn't fright - not then - but a kind of coppermouthed
excitementI bent down and picked up Elizabeth's third
drawingMoving
with greater and greater speedSometimes I
stopped to draw, but mostly I didn't have toThe
pictures were forming in my head, now, and the
reason I didn't have to put them down on paper
seemed clear to me: Elizabeth had already done
that work, long ago, when she had been recovering
from the accident that nearly killed herIn the happy days before Noveen began to talkiv
At one point during my interview with Mary Ire,
she said discovering in my middle age that I could
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paint with the best of them must have been like
having someone give me the keys to a souped-up
muscle car - a Roadrunner or a GTOI said yes, it
was like thatAt another point she said it must
have been like having someone give me the keys to
a fully furnished houseI said
yes, like that, tooAnd if she had gone on? Said
it must have been like inheriting a million shares
of Microsoft stock, or being elected ruler for
life of some oil-rich (and peaceful) emirate in
the mideast? I would have said yeah, sure, you betBecause those questions were about
herI could see the longing look in her eyes when
she asked themThey were the eyes of a kid who
knows the closest she's ever going to get to
realizing her dream of the high trapeze is sitting
on the bleachers at the Saturday matinee
performanceShe was a critic, and lots of critics
who aren't called to do what they write about grow
jealous and mean and small in their disappointmentMary wasn't like thatMary still loved it allShe drank whiskey from a water-glass and wanted to
know what it was like when Tinker Bell flew out of
nowhere and tapped you on the shoulder and you
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discovered that, even though you were on the
wrinkle-neck side of fifty, you had suddenly
gained the ability to fly past the face of the
moonSo even though it wasn't like having a fast
car or being handed the keys to a fully furnished
house, I told her it wasBecause you can't tell
anyone what it's likeYou can only talk around it
until everyone's exhausted and it's time to go to
sleepBut Elizabeth had known what it was likeIt was in her drawings, then in her paintingsIt was like being given a tongue when you had been
muteIt was like being given
back your memory, and a person's memory is
everything, really
