Sketch - short story - Clarence Major Issue

African American Review, Spring, 1994 by Clarence Major

Morning on the terrace. Can hear Jean Baptiste Quenin crooning "Veilleur de toutes les nuits." Radio in the kitchen, Middle of February". New Grumbacher French Portable easel out here on the terrace. A sketch-pad against my hip. A particular pen A particular brush. Things changed.

Things continue to change. Here, we are somewhere else, knotted, unknotted, and the wallpaper, the sky, everything is different. If this is doppelganger-time, you are not my uncle, not my brother, not my Other but me. I can't capture You in lines. We live in the spasm of each other's sagging lives. While shopping at the old market today I saw you look suspiciously at me (in a mirror) the same way you looked suspiciously at the onions, the red fish, the aged cheese. How are we sleeping these days? Orthodox or paradox? I'm the ox but I'm also the bull.

My wife? She's in there, in the cool house, sitting up in bed reading a magazine, no, reading a novel. We have a particular morning ritual. We donate time to thoughts like clouds, they linger over our heads, mackerel-sky stuff, then I'm up and the coffee is going, and she's up too. But this morning, she's hanging out, coffee at bedside. Marie-Paule Belle singing "Les Petits Paletlins." Is that really our kitchen radio or the neighbor's?

Running out of things to sketch? View from cafe-bar at corner of rue Alphonse Karr and rue de la Liberte. Quick action of people walking. Juxtaposition. Traffic jam. Noise into the clashing of lines. The rue de la Liberte traffic is hectic with honking and fumes, shouting hot, shouting cold. Four fingers of the left hand. Flower spikes.

The view from the mall with its potted tropical shrubbery at Palais de Quency against the gray of the old apartment buildings. Concentrate on this. Where are all my Arab friends this morning? Insults floating over their heads - no grass grows under foot - like Concentrate in a Negro church. Une negregsse morte, or should I say dead soldiers? But my Arab friends don't drink red wine, and empty bottles are as taboo as, uh, a sheygget (disgusting!) to Behane, my friend from North Africa, born to a Jewish mother, which is all that counts, so they count him in. High place. A firebrand. Son of sorrow To Behane I'm as clear as Running Water, so he never calls me shokher no sir.

But the question arises: What else is there to draw here? I've done the faces-spirited, noble, valorous, comely, harmonions, bright, lily-like, hospitable, fair, helmeted, feminine, animated, veiled, pleasant, blooming wise and unwise - and though I know there are still endless uncharted faces, all different, damsel and gaselle, I'm sagging like a palm tree with face-boredom.

So go home. What's home? Whose home?

At the end of February. A bar across from Hall du Voyage. The crowd is younger here. Motorbikes crowding the curb. British music French kids jukebox screams. Yet moderation, moderation. The Russian with his coffee at the back table. Tatiana in apron. Sidonia in the doorway. Tara coming in with a shoe box under arm. My sketch-pad on table. My hand waiting for a jewel a sea, a prosperous moment, the tip-off for the right motif. A thick forest of ideas floating just out of reach. Outside, a double-parked delivery truck. That's good enough for the moment, but move fast. Girl with white mane blocks view. (So stick her in.)

The lycee crowd, this. View of street construction crew and triphammer, drill-noise creating gems of terror, rosemary-throbbings. But any of this could be anywhere, in the City of Light or the Eternal City. Nice is nice. I nickname it Salty, Reborn, Without Fault, The Happy Peaceful Place, Patrician, Nymph of Ageless Lust, Opal. Card across from Hotel Vendome on Pastorelli? Orange plastic chairs, white metal tables. This is the right stuff, the honored model, no, ideal model, the archetypal-simple things. Metal tables. Chairs.

Sit here as in a dream house, dazed but alive as Mars. Sketch the Arab street sweeper washing and sweeping the sidewalk with fire-hydrant water, cleaning the street of its unending string of dog turds and piss.

Keep the hand moving. Care not to knock over the coffee. Coffee. Two francs, not three. An old woman in a third-floor window as she opens her shutters with a bang. Her eyes connect with mine, she draws back as though slapped. Rebellion-face, a face belonging to Bitterness, to the Ill-Tempered Kingdom. Seventy different meanings for such a face, Mary, Mary, quite contrary. Touch it with a laurel cast it in a battle, under a lime tree or keep it with the barren, the diseased. Find the right motif to move with the hand, as now the voice of Catherine Ferry singing "Bonjour, Bonjour," in the spirit of the Roman goddess of spring or the Serpent of Light.

Even this late in February, the cozy, translucent, ceramic-white sunlight, multicolored sunlight pours down in the nickname of Joy, on my sketch-pad. And page after page, I am filling it. Fulfilling it, like a promised oath. A name, a bond, a lilac in a meadow. Before leaving for Old Town, I do this: My Wife Sunbathing, her bra beside her on the towel.