Two Names — Chapter 2

The walk from my apartment to Geidai takes eleven minutes if I leave at seven-fifteen and do not stop at the combini, fourteen if I do. I have made this walk four hundred and twelve times — I counted once, in October, when I was avoiding a painting — and I know every step of it the way I know the route to a place I do not want to go: automatically, with a portion of my attention permanently assigned to the task of navigation, leaving the rest free to think about something else.

The something else is usually the same something else. This morning it is the canvas in my studio, the one I worked on for twenty minutes before I stopped, the one with the warm grey background and the figure that is not yet a figure. I did not sleep well. I dreamed about color — specifically about the cadmium red I mixed on Sunday, the way it thinned at the edges, the way it was not quite the color I wanted and not quite the color I expected but somewhere in between, a color that did not have a name because I had not yet decided what it was for.

This is what it is like to be a painter who is also, apparently, a person who dreams in paint. I am not sure which one is the problem.

The cherry trees along the approach to the university are at the stage where they are more promise than product — the blossoms are open but the leaves have not yet come, so the branches are a pale, uncertain green beneath the pink, and the petals are already beginning to let go. Someone has put a tarp beneath the largest tree near the main gate, catching the fallen petals so they can be collected later. I do not know who does this or why. I have been at Geidai for two and a half years and I have never once thought about what happens to the cherry blossoms after they fall. Today I think about it. Today I think about almost nothing else.

The studio building — Building 3, the one they reserve for third-years because it has the best north light and the smallest windows and the kind of institutional heating that works when it wants to and not a moment before — is quiet at seven-thirty in the morning. The second-years are in Building 1, the graduate students have their own wing that I have never entered, and the fourth-years, the ones who are not graduating this year for one reason or another, are scattered in the various auxiliary studios around campus, making work in spaces I do not know the names of. I pass two people on the stairs: a woman I do not recognize carrying a portfolio tube, and Professor Endo, who nods at me in the specific way that professors nod at students they know by sight but not by name, a nod that acknowledges presence without making any claim on it. I nod back. We continue in opposite directions.

My studio is on the second floor, third from the stairwell, the door marked with my name in the handwriting of whoever it was that made the nameplates three years ago and which I have never bothered to replace. The handwriting is slightly too large, slightly too round, a handwriting that suggests optimism about the future. I am not optimistic about the future. I am cautiously skeptical about the present, which is a different thing.

Inside: the canvas from Sunday, still on the easel, the red now dry to a matte surface that is darker than I intended but not wrong. Not wrong. I stand in front of it for three minutes, which is longer than I should stand in front of a painting I am working on because standing too long creates a kind of intimacy that can curdle into attachment, and I have been too attached to the wrong things for too long. I make coffee with the machine I keep on the windowsill. The windowsill is wide and painted white and covered in the residue of every paint I have used in this room, a geological record of two and a half years of color. I do not clean the windowsill. I have never thought about cleaning the windowsill. Today I notice it. Today I notice everything.

The coffee is from the combini. It is always from the combini. I have tried, in the past, to make better coffee — I own a French press that I bought in my first year with the vague idea that it represented some version of adulthood I was working toward — but the French press is in a cabinet I have not opened since my second semester, buried beneath a stack of stretched canvases that I bought in bulk and have not yet stretched. The combini coffee is fine. It is the temperature I expect and the flavor I do not think about.

I drink it standing at the window, looking out at the courtyard, which is empty except for the maintenance workers laying fresh gravel in the planters, which will not hold flowers for another month, which are, right now, just dark soil waiting for something to happen to it.

At eight-fifteen, the others arrive.

Shiraishi Rin is the first. She comes through the door without knocking — which is something she does, which is something I have not yet decided how to feel about — carrying a paper cup from the specialty coffee place on the street behind the campus, the one that charges twice what the combini charges and which Shiraishi insists is worth it. She is wearing a canvas jacket with paint on the sleeves and her hair is in the particular configuration that suggests she got dressed quickly, or by someone else, or in a car. She is twenty. She is in her second year. She is, in the particular hierarchy of the studio, the person who is lowest in it, which means she has the smallest desk space and the worst drying rack placement and the automatic inclusion in any studio maintenance rotation that the third-years would prefer not to do themselves.

She is also the only person in the studio who has never, to my knowledge, said anything unkind about another student's work.

"Morning, senpai," she says, and sets her coffee down on the desk that is technically mine but which she uses when she is here, which is often, which is something I have not asked her about and which she has not explained. "You're early."

"So are you."

"I never left." She says this the way she says most things — lightly, as if the information is not significant, as if she has not just admitted to sleeping in the studio, which she has, which she does sometimes, which the second-year girls in the studio seem to accept as a fact of her personality rather than a thing that requires explanation. "I was working on the figure study. The one from last week's gesture drawing session. I think I finally got the knee."

She is already walking toward her desk, which is near the window I am standing at, which means she has to pass within arm's reach of me, which she does with the particular ease of someone who has decided that physical proximity is not a thing that requires anxiety. She has this quality — this absence of the thing I carry, the thing that makes me step sideways in hallways and sit at the edges of rooms and stand at the far end of the drying rack when anyone else is near. She moves through the studio like water through a space that was made for water. I have always admired this about her. I have never told her.

I go back to my easel. The canvas is dry now, fully dry, which means I can work on it without the underlayers lifting, which means I can begin to build the figure on top of the warm red ground I laid on Sunday. I pick up a brush. I put it down. I pick it up again.

"You went somewhere on Sunday," Shiraishi says. She is not looking at me. She is stretching canvases — her own, the ones she preps in bulk and sells to first-years who do not yet know how, or who know and do not want to. "You weren't here. You weren't answering your phone, either."

"I was here," I say. "Later."

"Later isn't the same thing." She says this without turning around, without inflection, as if she is noting a fact about the weather. "You were somewhere else first."

I do not answer. I have learned, over two and a half years of sharing studio space with Shiraishi Rin, that she does not require answers. She collects them, sometimes, when they are offered freely, but she does not pursue them. This is one of the things I find difficult about her — the way she waits, the way the waiting is not demanding but is, in its own way, more effective than demanding would be. She waits and you find yourself filling the silence because the silence has become a room you are both standing in and the room is too quiet and you would say anything to hear a sound that is not the sound of your own breathing.

"I was in the studio," I say. "All day."

"I know. I'm not asking where you were when you were here." She turns around. She is holding a staple gun, which she uses with a competence that suggests she has been using staple guns since before she was allowed to. "I'm asking where you were before you were here."

The question is specific in a way that catches me off guard. She is looking at me now, not with the particular brightness she usually affects — the cheerfulness that makes people underestimate her — but with something quieter, something that is closer to what I think she actually is, which is a person who is paying a very particular kind of attention to everything.

"I went for a walk," I say. "In Ueno."

"Ueno is nice this time of year," she says, and turns back to her canvases, and the conversation is apparently over, or was never a conversation, or was a conversation about something else entirely, and I am standing in front of my canvas with a brush in my hand and the sound of her staple gun in my ears and the cherry blossoms outside the window and the gravel being laid and the morning not yet ten and the day already full of things I do not have language for.

I paint. Or I try to.

What I do, specifically, is this: I mix a flesh tone — a neutral, the base I use for figures I have not yet decided about — and I apply it in broad strokes to the area where the head will be, where the face will eventually be, where the eyes are that I spent four hours on in the ninth version and which were technically accurate and emotionally absent. The brushwork is deliberate. The paint is thin. I am not committing to anything yet. I am, in the way I have perfected over three years of making work that cannot be criticized, laying groundwork.

By noon I have a head shape. It is not yet a face. It is a suggestion of a face, a skull beneath skin, the architecture of a person without the person. It could be anyone. It could be no one. It is, in the way that all my paintings are at this stage, safe.

The Central Cafeteria — which is not called the Central Cafeteria by anyone who works there or by any official document I have ever seen but which is called the Central Cafeteria by every student at Geidai because the official name is in characters so obscure that no one bothers and because it is, in fact, the central cafeteria, the largest one, the one that sits between the art buildings and the music building and is where everyone who is not in a studio goes to pretend they are not thinking about what they are making — is crowded at twelve-fifteen. I go because Shiraishi asked me to, which is not something she usually does and which therefore carries a weight I cannot quantify.

She is already at a table when I arrive — one of the long tables near the window, the ones that seat eight and which are usually occupied by groups too large to fit anywhere else, but which she has somehow secured for two. She is eating a bowl of soba, cold, which is her usual order, which she eats with a speed that suggests she is hungry in a way that is structural rather than occasional. I get curry rice because it is the only thing on the menu I do not have to think about.

"The professor talked to me," she says, before I have sat down. "Last week. About my work."

I sit down. "What did she say?"

"She said it's technically proficient and emotionally distant." Shiraishi twirls a strand of soba around her chopsticks. The motion is precise, almost musical. "She said it the same way she said it to you. I think she has a script."

I do not know what to say to this. I do not know whether Shiraishi is telling me this because she wants my sympathy, or my advice, or simply because she has noticed a pattern and wanted to name it. She is like this — she offers information and lets you decide what to do with it, which is a kind of intelligence I do not possess and which I find both useful and slightly unnerving.

"That's the same thing she said to me," I say. Which she already knows. Which is presumably why she said it.

"I know," Shiraishi says. "I wasn't sure if you knew she says it to everyone, or if you thought it was specifically about you."

I think about this. I think about it for longer than the question requires, which is characteristic of the way I think — slowly, circuitously, arriving at obvious conclusions several steps after the people around me have already moved on. The curry rice is too hot. I wait for it to cool. The cafeteria is full of the sound of other people's conversations, which I am not listening to but which I am aware of, the way I am always aware of ambient sound, the way I have trained myself to be because the ambient sound is often more honest than the foreground one.

"I think I knew," I say. "On some level."

"On some level," she repeats. She is watching me with an expression I cannot read. "That's a very specific place to know something."

"It means I knew but I didn't believe it."

"That's better," Shiraishi says. "That's an actual answer."

She finishes her soba in four more bites. She is always eating quickly, always moving to the next thing, which is another quality I have noticed and admired and not understood — the way she seems to be in perpetual forward motion, the way she treats each moment as if it is already ending, as if the ending is part of the point. I eat my curry rice at the pace I eat everything: slowly, attentively, with the awareness that eating is a thing I am doing and therefore a thing I should do correctly.

"Can I see it?" she asks. "Your painting. The one you're working on."

"It's not ready."

"It's never ready. That's not the question."

The question is a door she is holding open. I could walk through it or not. I could tell her what the painting is about or I could tell her it is not about anything, which is a lie and she knows it is a lie, and then we would both know that I have lied and she has caught me and we would have to decide what to do with that knowledge, which is a thing I do not want to decide, which is a thing I have been not deciding about for nine months in a studio by myself.

"You can see it," I say. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," she agrees. "But senpai?"

"Yes."

"Your painting today — the one on the easel, I saw it through the window when I came in this morning — it looks a little lonely."

She says this without weight, without the particular gravity that statements of this kind usually carry, as if she is telling me the light is grey or the curry rice is hot. A fact. An observation. Something she has noticed and is reporting, without judgment, without recommendation, without any of the things that would make it feel like an accusation or a kindness.

I do not know what to say. I do not know how to respond to this. I think about the painting — the red ground, the skull beneath the skin, the architecture of a person who is not yet a person — and I think about the word she used. Lonely. Which is not the word I would have chosen. Which is, precisely, the word I would not have chosen because it is too honest, too close to the thing beneath the thing, too willing to name what I have been refusing to name.

"I'll see you tomorrow," I say.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she says, and takes her tray to the return station, and walks out into the spring light, and leaves me at the table with the curry rice and the sound of the cafeteria and the knowledge that she has seen something I did not know was visible.

The painting is on my easel when I return. The head shape is still there. The face is still absent. The red ground is still warm beneath the neutral flesh tone, and the figure is still not a figure, and the morning is almost over and the afternoon is beginning and the graduation show is six months away.

Lonely. The word sits in me like a stone I have swallowed without knowing it was there.

I put the brush down.

I leave the studio.

I do not go home. I walk instead — through the campus, past the cherry trees, through the gate and into Ueno Park, where the petals are falling and the groundskeepers are gathering them and the afternoon light is doing the thing that afternoon light does in spring in Tokyo, which is to say it is golden and brief and asking me to pay attention to it, and I am not paying attention, I am thinking about the word, I am thinking about the painting, I am thinking about the space between what I make and what I mean, and the distance is six months and nine failed paintings and one second-year girl who sees what I am too afraid to show.

The park is full of people who are not thinking about any of this. Students on blankets. A man with a camera. Children running. A couple on a bench who are looking at each other and not at me, which is the kind of thing that happens to other people, which is the kind of thing I observe and do not inhabit.

I walk until the light changes. Then I walk back.

The canvas is waiting. The brushes are in the jar. The studio is dark.

I do not turn the lights on. I stand in the grey spring evening and I look at the figure that is not yet a figure and I think about what Shiraishi said and I do not know if she is right and I do not know if she is wrong and I do not know if the painting is lonely and I do not know what it would mean for a painting to be lonely and I do not know what it would cost to make it otherwise.

The campus outside is dark. The cherry blossoms are still falling. Somewhere in the city, Kanade is doing whatever Kanade does when I am not there, which I am never certain of, which is a thing I have trained myself not to think about.

Tomorrow, I will paint the face. I will not know whose face it is. I will not let myself know. The not-knowing is the safest thing I have.

I go home. I sleep. I do not dream.

My phone screen glowed once in the dark. A message from Kanade. I did not open it.