Two Names — Chapter 3

The guidance sessions are scheduled for Thursdays at two in the afternoon, which is the time of day when the light in Building 3 is at its most unreliable — too warm from the west, too slanted from the south, a light that makes everything look like it is about to end. I have had four of these sessions this semester. I know the room. I know the chair. I know the particular way the afternoon sounds through the window of Professor Endo's office, which faces the courtyard and the cherry tree that no one has painted and which I have been thinking about painting for three years.

I arrive twelve minutes early because I always arrive twelve minutes early and Professor Endo is already there, which she always is, sitting at her desk with a portfolio open in front of her and a pen in her hand and her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose in the way that reading glasses on the end of a nose always make the wearer look both older and younger than they are. She does not look up when I come in. She says: sit down, Kiryu. The portfolio is yours.

The portfolio is, in fact, mine. It is the work I submitted for the preliminary review — fourteen pieces, all oil on canvas, all technically competent, none of them honest. I know this because I know what I submitted and I know why I submitted it and I know the difference between the work I make because it is good and the work I make because it cannot be criticized. The fourteen pieces are the second kind. They are the work of someone who has learned, over three years, exactly how much risk the system will tolerate and has stopped, deliberately and consistently, just short of that limit.

"Thirteen is better than twelve," Professor Endo says. She is turning the pages. She has turned them before — this is not the first time she has seen these pieces, this is the second time, and the conversation we are about to have is the same conversation we have been having, in various forms, since my second year. "But I want to talk about this one."

She stops on the ninth piece. This is not the painting I worked on Sunday. This is the ninth piece in the portfolio, the one I submitted in January, the one I painted in November, the one that is a landscape — or appears to be — of the courtyard outside the studio building, with the cherry tree visible in the background and a figure standing beneath it, small, indistinct, turned away from the viewer.

"What is this painting about?" she asks.

"About?" I say. "It's the courtyard. The cherry tree. I was interested in the light."

"The light is very well rendered," Professor Endo says. She says this the way she says most things — neutrally, without praise, which is not the same as without approval. She is the kind of teacher who has learned that praise is a drug and that some students need it more than they need honesty and that the ones who need it more than they need honesty are usually the ones who should not have it. I do not know which category I fall into. I do not know if I have ever let her know. "But I am asking you what the painting is about. Not what it depicts."

I look at the painting. I have been looking at it for three months and I do not have an answer to this question that I am willing to give, which is the same as not having an answer, which is the same as the painting being about nothing, which is the same as what she is going to say next.

"The figure," she says. "Who is it?"

"I don't know," I say. Which is a lie. "A student, I suppose. Someone from the studio."

"You painted a figure you don't know standing under a tree you've walked past every day for two and a half years. You painted them in the specific light of a specific afternoon in November. And you submitted this as your preliminary portfolio piece." She pauses. She takes off her glasses, which is something she does when she is about to say something she considers important. "Kiryu. Who is the figure."

The question is a door with a weight behind it. I can feel it — the pressure of her attention, the precision of her language, the way she has asked the question not as a question but as a recognition, as if she already knows the answer and is waiting to see if I will give it to her or make her take it. I think about lying. I think about saying the thing I always say, which is that the painting is about form and light and the relationship between the organic and the architectural, which is a sentence I constructed in my second year and have been deploying ever since like a shield I am not sure is stopping anything.

"It's someone I know," I say. "From school."

"From school," she repeats. "Not from the studio?"

"Not from the studio."

She looks at me. Her eyes are the color of the charcoal she uses for preliminary sketches — dark, granular, the kind of color that is not quite black and not quite grey and not quite any color at all but which is, somehow, the most present color in the room. I have tried to paint eyes like that. I have not succeeded.

"Kiryu," she says. "What are you afraid of."

It is the same question. It is the same question she asked me two weeks ago and it is the same question I deflected two weeks ago and it is the same question I have been deflecting, in various forms, for three years. The difference is that this time she is holding the painting in front of us — literally holding it, her hand on the page of the portfolio, her finger resting on the small figure beneath the cherry tree — and she is asking me to look at it, not as my work but as my confession, and I am finding it very difficult to look away from the thing I have painted and not see the thing I have not said.

The figure is Kanade. I painted it in November, on a Tuesday, from memory, from the window of the studio after he left. He had come to bring me dinner because I had not answered my phone for six hours and he had walked from the music building across campus in the cold carrying a container of katsudon from the place near the station and he had stood under the cherry tree — which had no blossoms, which was just branches, which was the most beautiful thing I had seen that month — and he had looked up at my window and waved, a small wave, the kind you give someone you are not sure is watching, and I had painted him from memory three hours later without knowing I was painting him, without deciding to, without doing anything except putting the brush to the canvas and letting the thing that was underneath the thing come through.

The painting is accurate. The proportions are right. The light — the cold November light, the particular grey-white of a Tokyo late autumn afternoon — is exactly as I remember it. The figure beneath the tree is the right height, the right build, the right shape of the head. Everything is correct. Everything is a lie.

The lie is not in the painting. The lie is in the fact that I painted him from memory, alone, at night, without telling him, without asking him, without doing any of the things that would make the painting an act of communication rather than an act of secrecy. I painted him because I wanted to paint him. I submitted it because I could not not submit it. I framed it as a study in light because the truth — that I paint him often, that I have been painting him for years, that I cannot stop painting him, that the painting is the closest I can get to saying something I have not said — is not something I know how to put into words in a guidance session on a Thursday afternoon in a room that smells of linseed oil and old paper.

"I don't know what you mean," I say. Which is the lie. Which is the same lie I have been telling.

Professor Endo closes the portfolio. She sets it down on the desk in front of us. She folds her hands. She waits.

The silence is very long. I can hear the building — the faint sound of someone's radio in a studio on the floor above us, the sound of footsteps in the corridor, the sound of the tree outside the window moving in the wind. The cherry blossoms are almost gone. In another week there will be nothing left of them but leaves and the memory of pink.

"I am going to tell you something," she says, "and I want you to really hear it, not as advice, not as criticism, but as a description of what I see. You have exceptional technical ability. You have a real gift for form, for color, for the relationship between the seen and the unseen. You make work that any department in this country would be proud to claim. And you are, at this point in your development, making work that is afraid of itself."

She pauses. The word is in the air between us. Afraid. She has said it plainly, without softening, without apology. Afraid.

"Your graduation show is in February. You have four months after the final guidance to complete whatever you are going to show. I am your primary advisor. I am telling you, as clearly as I know how to tell you, that if you submit the work you are currently making — this work, this technically excellent, emotionally absent, formally perfect work — you will pass the show, you will graduate with good marks, and you will spend the rest of your life wondering why the paintings that people remember are never the ones you made."

She opens the portfolio again. She turns to the ninth painting, the one with the figure under the cherry tree. She looks at it for a long time.

"This painting," she says. "Could you tell me the name of the person."

"Yes," I say. Before I can stop myself. Before I can construct the deflection. Before I can do any of the things I have been doing for three years. "Yes. I could."

She nods. She does not ask me to say the name. She does not ask me to explain. She simply nods, as if I have confirmed something she already knew, as if the admission — the yes — was the thing she was waiting for.

"Then you have a choice to make," she says. "About what you are going to do with that yes. About whether you are going to paint him — whoever he is, whatever he means — honestly, or whether you are going to keep painting the technically excellent version of him, the one that is safe, the one that cannot be hurt because it cannot be felt. Both are valid. Neither is wrong. But they are not the same thing."

She closes the portfolio again. She picks up her pen. She makes a note on a piece of paper that I cannot see. She sets the pen down.

"Would you dare to paint something that frightens you?" she asks.

The question is not rhetorical. She is asking it as a question, as a genuine inquiry into my willingness to do the thing she is describing. She is asking me to consider, right now, in this room, with the afternoon light coming through the window and the cherry tree outside and the portfolio closed between us, whether I am the kind of person who is capable of making work that costs something.

I think about the ninth version. I think about the hands that were accurate but not his. I think about the red ground on the canvas in my studio. I think about Shiraishi's word — lonely — and the way it sat in me like a swallowed stone. I think about Kanade, standing under the bare cherry tree in November, waving up at my window with a container of katsudon, not knowing that I was painting him, not knowing that I have been painting him, not knowing that the painting is the closest I can come to saying the thing I do not have the language for.

I think about what it would mean to paint him honestly. I think about what it would cost. I think about whether I am willing to pay.

"I don't know," I say.

Professor Endo nods. She does not look disappointed. She does not look anything. She looks, I think, the way she has always looked — which is like someone who has seen this moment many times before, in many different students, and who knows that the answer will come or will not come regardless of what she says next.

"That's an honest answer," she says. "More honest than most. Go make your work, Kiryu. Whatever it is, make it. Make it as honestly as you can. That is all I am asking."

I stand up. I take the portfolio. I bow, which is what you do at the end of a guidance session, the formal acknowledgment that the conversation is over and that something may or may not have been exchanged. I walk to the door. I open it. I step into the corridor.

The corridor is empty. The afternoon light is doing the thing it does at this hour, which is to say it is turning gold at the edges, leaning toward evening, the specific light of a Thursday in March when the cherry blossoms are almost gone and the semester is still long and the thing you are afraid of is still, at this point, undecided.

My hands are shaking.

"He is giving you the room," Endo had said, three years ago, in that same chair, with those same glasses. "Use it."

I notice this because the shaking is loud, in the quiet of the corridor, in the stillness of the late afternoon. My hands are shaking in a way that is not subtle, not controllable, not a thing I can put down to cold or caffeine or the particular nervousness of being in a guidance session. My hands are shaking because I am frightened, which is what Professor Endo was asking about, which is what the portfolio is about, which is what the painting is about.

I am frightened. That is the truth beneath the truth. I am frightened of the painting, which means I am frightened of the thing the painting is about, which means I am frightened of the person I have been painting without being able to paint, which means I am frightened of what it would mean to look at him — really look, really see, really put into paint the thing I have been carrying — and to have that thing be witnessed, be seen, be known.

I walk down the stairs. I walk through the building. I walk across the courtyard. The cherry tree is there, the one I painted, the one with no blossoms, the one he stood under in November. There is nothing under it now. The ground is covered in petals — pale pink, already browning at the edges, the briefest possible form of beauty — and I stand there and I look at the tree and I think about what it would mean to go back to my studio and paint it honestly, to paint the petals honestly, to paint the thing beneath the petals honestly.

I do not know if I can. I do not know if I am willing. I do not know if willing and capable are even the same thing.

My hands are still shaking. I put them in my pockets. I walk to the station. I take the train home. I do not answer my phone.

Tomorrow I will go back to the studio. Tomorrow I will stand in front of the canvas with the warm red ground. Tomorrow I will decide whether to paint the face or to keep painting the space where the face should be.

Tonight I am shaking and I do not know what I am shaking for and the cherry blossoms are falling and I am twenty-one years old and I am running out of time and I am, for the first time in three years, afraid of the thing I am making.

The admission does not feel like courage. It feels like standing at the edge of something and looking down and realizing that the fall is not to the ground but to the thing beneath the ground, the thing you have been not digging for, the thing you have been painting over in technically excellent, emotionally absent, formally perfect layers of cadmium white and titanium yellow and neutral flesh tone and all the colors you know how to mix and none of the colors you are afraid of.

I go home. I sit on my bed. I do not paint.

I do not paint. This is the thing I am afraid of. Not the painting. The not painting. The staying in the place where the painting is safe, where it cannot be criticized because it cannot be felt, where the figure is technically accurate and emotionally absent and the hands are correct and the face is right and none of it is true.

The not painting is the thing I am afraid of. The not painting is the thing I have been doing. The not painting is the painting.

I close my eyes. I see the cherry tree. I see the petals falling. I see him standing there.

I open my eyes. It is dark. I have been sitting here for an hour or for ten minutes or for no time at all. The phone is in my hand. The screen is lit. The notification is from Kanade.

You ok? You didn't answer all day.

I look at the message. I look at the words. I do not know what they mean — whether they are a question or an observation or a concern or simply the thing Kanade says when he has been waiting and the waiting has become, as it always does, a kind of weight.

I do not know how to answer. This is not new. I have not known how to answer for years.

Tonight, for the first time, I wonder if the not answering is the painting. If the silence is the painting. If the thing I have been not painting is the truest thing I make, the thing that says the most about the person I am and the person I am not and the distance between the two.

I put the phone down. I lie down. I close my eyes.

The painting is waiting. It will wait as long as I need it to.

I am not sure, anymore, whether that is a comfort or a warning.