Two Names — Chapter 5

The dormitory room is fourteen tatami mats. I know this because my mother asked, when I moved in, and I counted, not because I wanted to know but because I could not think of what else to say. Fourteen tatami mats. A desk, a bed, a closet, a window that faces the railway line. The trains pass at six in the morning and again at eleven at night and sometimes, on nights when I cannot sleep, at two in the morning, and the sound of them — the particular rhythm of a train at speed, the way the sound builds and then passes and then is gone, leaving only the vibration in the floor for a few seconds after — is the closest thing I have to a clock.

Tonight the train has passed twice. I know this because I have been awake since my first attempt to sleep, which was at ten-thirty and which lasted until I turned over and looked at the canvas I had propped against the wall beside my desk, the one I started yesterday and did not finish, and which was, in the grey light of my desk lamp, already wrong.

I should not be painting in my room. This is not what dormitory rooms are for. Dormitory rooms are for sleeping and studying and, occasionally, eating the convenience store food that constitutes the majority of my nutritional intake during the weeks when I am deep in a work and have forgotten that bodies require maintenance. Painting is done in the studio. Painting is done in the place where the light is correct and the space is large enough and the neighbors do not file complaints about the smell of oil paint.

I am painting in my room because I could not wait until tomorrow. I am painting in my room because I have been thinking about Hasumi's hands for thirty-six hours and the thinking has become a kind of pressure, a thing that is building somewhere behind my sternum, and the only way I know to release the pressure is to put it somewhere else — onto a surface, onto a canvas, into the thing I make rather than the thing I feel.

This is not a healthy relationship with painting. I am aware of this. I am aware of it the way I am aware of most of my unhealthy relationships — with the slightly detached recognition of a person who knows what they should do and does something else. The studio is two buildings away. The studio has the correct light. The studio is where the painting belongs. I am here, in my room, with the window cracked and the lamp on and the smell of turpentine mingling with the smell of the curry I ate at eight and the particular stale smell of a room that is occupied by one person who does not open the windows often enough.

I have been painting for two hours. The canvas is thirty by forty centimeters — small, intimate, the size of a book page, the size that printmakers work in, the size that suggests something private. I chose this size deliberately. I did not choose it consciously. The choosing was done by whatever part of me decides things without consulting the rest of me, the part that knew, before I stretched the canvas and primed it and set it on the easel, what I was going to paint and why.

I am painting Hasumi's hands.

I am painting them from memory. I have not asked him to sit for me. I have not been back to his studio since Thursday, when I stood in the doorway and watched him work and did not paint him. I have thought about asking. I have thought about it in the shower, on the train, in the space between the end of one class and the beginning of another, in all the small voids where I used to think about Kanade and am now, increasingly, thinking about someone else. I have not asked because asking would mean explaining, and explaining would mean admitting, and admitting would mean saying the thing I do not have language for, which is the thing that lives in the space between the seeing and the painting, the thing that makes a painting honest or makes it a lie.

So I am painting from memory. Which is a different thing from painting from life. Which is, in fact, the thing I have been doing wrong for nine months — painting from memory of Kanade instead of from Kanade himself, painting the idea of him rather than the person, the impression rather than the fact. I know this now. I did not know it before. The knowing does not make the painting easier. The knowing makes the painting harder because the knowing tells me that what I am about to do — paint Hasumi from memory, paint the person I have seen only once, paint the thing I do not have enough of to paint honestly — is the same thing I have been doing wrong, is the repetition of the mistake, is the safe version of the risk I have been not taking.

I paint anyway.

The hands. I start with the hands because the hands are what I remember. The hands on the press handle, the way the fingers wrapped around the bar, the particular angle of the wrist when he leaned forward to check the pressure. I have drawn these hands — not painted, drawn, in pencil, in the margins of my notebooks, in the white space at the edges of lecture notes — without thinking about what I was doing, without deciding to, in the way that the body decides things that the mind has not yet authorized. The hand remembers what the mind has not processed. This is a thing I learned in my first year, in a drawing class taught by a professor who was more interested in what the students' hands did when the students were not watching than in what the students' minds did when they were. He said: drawing is the body's memory. The hand knows things you don't know you've seen.

The hand I am painting knows Hasumi's hands. It knows the length of the fingers, the shape of the knuckles, the particular way the thumb curves inward toward the palm. It does not know the coldness of the skin, the temperature that I noticed when his fingers brushed mine in the printmaking studio and which I have been thinking about, absurdly, for two days — the coldness that should have been unpleasant but was not, that was instead a kind of intimacy, a thing you notice when you touch someone, a sign of proximity.

I paint the thumb first. The carving thumb. The one on the right hand — the one he uses to push the blade, the one with the small scar near the base of the nail, the one he showed me without showing me, the one I noticed because I was watching his hands and his hands are what I came to his studio to watch.

The paint is cadmium red. I do not know why I reach for cadmium red. I do not have a plan. I have the brush and the paint and the canvas and the memory of his hands and the pressure of the thing I am trying to say and none of the formal language I need to say it. I thin the red with linseed oil — just enough to make it move, just enough to make it possible to apply in the fine strokes that woodblock carving requires, even in oil, even on canvas, even when the thing you are painting is not a print but a painting of the person who makes prints.

The thumb is wrong. I can see it immediately. The proportions are slightly off — too thick at the base, too thin at the tip, the curve of the nail not quite the curve I remember. I adjust. I thin the paint, add more red, blend the edges. I step back. The thumb is better. The thumb is not right. I step forward. I paint.

This is the process. This is always the process. You paint, you step back, you see what is wrong, you step forward, you fix what you can, you step back, you see what is still wrong, and eventually — if you are lucky, if you are skilled, if the thing you are painting is the thing you are actually capable of painting — you arrive at the moment when the wrongness becomes a different kind of rightness, the moment when the painting is no longer a record of your trying but a thing in itself, complete, requiring nothing.

That moment does not come.

It is past midnight when I realize I have painted only the hands. The composition — if it can be called a composition — is just hands on a press handle, framed tightly, no context, no background, no face, no body, just the hands and the bar and the sense of pressure, of force, of the thing being held and the person holding it. It is technically accomplished. The proportions are correct. The color is right — the particular tone of skin I mixed from cadmium and white and a touch of yellow earth, the color of hands that have been in ink and cold water and have not been warm in a very long time.

It is not Hasumi.

I know this. I know this in the way I knew the ninth version was not Kanade — not because the proportions are wrong but because the thing beneath the proportions is missing. The painting has the information but not the meaning. It has the data but not the feeling. It is the hands of someone who carves woodblocks, but it is not the hands of this person, this specific person, in this specific moment, with this specific quality of attention and care and the particular way he looked at his own work when he said the thumb was wrong.

I should keep going. I should build on this. I should add the background — the press, the studio, the light — and then the figure, the body, the face. I should make the painting larger, more considered, more of the thing I am capable of when I am at my best and my most honest. I should do what Professor Endo asked me to do, which is to dare to paint the thing I am afraid of.

I pick up the brush. I hold it over the canvas. I look at the hands I have painted.

I think about Thursday. I think about the printmaking studio, the smell of turpentine, the sound of the press. I think about Hasumi turning around, the first time, and the quality of his attention when he looked at me — not warm, not cold, just present, just exact, the look of a person who is seeing what is in front of them and is not pretending it is something else.

I think about Kanade.

I do not know where this thought comes from. It is not invited. It arrives the way thoughts arrive when you are trying not to think them — suddenly, completely, without the courtesy of warning. I think about Kanade standing under the bare cherry tree in November. I think about his hands, the way they looked when he held the container of katsudon, the particular way his fingers wrapped around the curve of it. I think about the ninth version and the way I painted his hands — accurately, correctly, with all the technical skill I possess — and the way the accuracy was the lie, the way the correctness was the thing that made the painting hollow, the way I knew and kept painting anyway because the alternative was to paint the truth and the truth was too much.

I think about the brush in my hand. I think about the red paint on the palette, thinned, ready. I think about the canvas in front of me, the hands I have painted, the press handle, the sense of pressure and intention.

I think: what if I add another hand?

The thought is not a thought. It is a motion. It is the brush moving before I have decided to move it, the way the hand knows things the mind does not authorize, the way drawing is the body's memory. I am adding a hand — not Hasumi's hand, not the hand on the press, but another hand, smaller, narrower, the fingers differently shaped, the thumb at a different angle. I am painting Kanade's hand next to Hasumi's hand. I am painting them on the same press handle. I am painting them together.

I stop.

I am standing at the canvas with the brush in my hand and the paint on the canvas and the image forming — not deliberately, not consciously, not with the formal intention that would make it a composition — and I can see what I am doing. I can see what I am doing because the second hand is appearing under my brush with a clarity that the first hand did not have, a presence, a specificity, the kind of truth that I have been unable to access in nine months of deliberate painting. The second hand is honest. The second hand is the thing I have been trying to say and have not been able to say because the saying requires the honesty and the honesty requires the risk and the risk requires the admission that I do not know how to make.

The second hand is Kanade's hand. It is his hand on the same bar, next to Hasumi's hand, in a composition that is not a composition but a confession, a thing that says the thing I have not said in any language I possess, which is the language of paint and canvas and the body and the hand and the thing beneath the thing.

I stare at the canvas.

Two hands. One press handle. Two people who do not know each other, who have probably never stood in the same room, who are connected only through me and the thing I have been not saying, the thing I have been painting around in technically excellent circles for nine months. Two hands. Two names. Two people and the space between them which is the space I occupy, which is the space I have been filling with paint that is accurate and empty, and which is now, in this accidental, uncontrolled, unplanned addition of a second hand, becoming the truest thing I have made.

The tears come before I understand why. They come without warning, without the usual prelude — the tightness in the chest, the pressure behind the eyes — that announces the arrival of feeling I do not want to have. They come and they are not sadness and they are not joy and they are not relief, or they are all three, or they are something that does not have a name in the vocabulary I have been using for my own emotions, which is a vocabulary I am beginning to understand is very small and very old and not at all adequate to the thing it is trying to describe.

I put the brush down. I step back. I look at the painting.

Hasumi's hand is correct. Hasumi's hand is the hand I remember from the studio, the hand on the press, the hand with the cold fingers and the precise movements and the small scar on the thumb. Kanade's hand is — I do not have enough of Kanade. I have seen his hands ten thousand times. I have painted his hands nine times. I know the shape of his knuckles, the length of his fingers, the way his thumb rests against the side of his index finger when he is thinking, the particular position his hand assumes when he is waiting. I know these things the way I know my own breathing, automatically, without effort, without having to remember. I have this much of Kanade. I have fourteen years of Kanade. I have fourteen years of looking at his hands.

But the hand on the canvas is not the hand I planned. The hand on the canvas is not the hand I painted with intention. The hand on the canvas is the hand that appeared under my brush when I was not looking, the hand that came from the place where the truth lives, the place beneath the technique, the place I have been protecting with layers of formal correctness and technical excellence and the deliberate refusal to see what I am looking at. The hand is Kanade's hand but it is not the Kanade I have painted nine times. It is the Kanade I have been not painting, the Kanade I have been circling in technically accurate circles, the Kanade whose hands I know and whose hands I have never, in nine attempts, managed to make honest.

I take the canvas off the easel. I hold it in my hands — my own hands, stained with cadmium red and linseed oil and the particular grey of the underpainting I laid down before I began — and I look at the two hands on the press handle and I understand, for the first time, what I have been doing.

I have been painting both of them. Not separately, not in sequence, not in the careful, controlled way I thought I was painting them. I have been painting both of them together, in the same painting, on the same canvas, in the same compositional space, and I did not know it until this moment, until the second hand appeared, until the thing I was not planning became the thing I could not deny.

The canvas is in my hands. The two hands are visible. The painting is wrong — the composition is unbalanced, the proportions are off, the two hands do not belong together, they are from different people who do not know each other and who should not, in any formally coherent painting, be sharing the same bar — and the painting is also, in this specific and accidental way, the most honest thing I have made.

I should keep it. I should develop it. I should take this accidental honesty and build on it, should add the figures, should make the painting a painting, should do the thing that a serious artist would do with a moment of unexpected truth.

Instead, I tear it.

The tearing is not dramatic. It is not the dramatic gesture of an artist destroying their work in a fit of frustration or despair — that kind of tearing is a performance, and performances are the opposite of honesty. The tearing is quiet. I hold the canvas in my hands and I pull, slowly, at the seam where the two hands meet, and the canvas tears along the line I have drawn — Hasumi's hand on one side, Kanade's hand on the other — and the tearing is precise, surgical, a separation, a division, the thing I have been doing in my life and have now, finally, done in the painting.

The two halves fall to the floor. They land face-up. The hands are still visible — Hasumi's hand on the left piece, Kanade's hand on the right — and from this angle, from this distance, with the room lit only by the desk lamp and the rest of the space in shadow, the hands look like they are still together. They look like they are reaching for each other. They look like the two halves of a thing that was once whole and is now separated and is still, despite the separation, trying to touch.

I stand in the middle of the room. The pieces of the canvas are on the floor. The paint is still wet in places. The room smells of turpentine and linseed oil and the particular burnt smell of the lamp bulb, which is old, which I have been meaning to replace for two months. Outside, the railway line is silent. No train. No passing. The night is holding its breath.

Tomorrow I will go to the studio. Tomorrow I will start again. Tomorrow I will do the thing Professor Endo asked me to do, which is to dare to paint the thing that frightens me. But I do not know what that thing is anymore. I thought it was Hasumi. I thought it was the person I saw once in a printmaking studio and could not stop thinking about. I thought it was the admission of a new feeling, a new attention, a new wanting.

But the second hand on the canvas tells a different story. The second hand tells me that what I have been afraid of — what I have been circling, what I have been painting around in technically excellent, emotionally absent paintings for nine months — is not one person but two. Is not one wanting but two wantings. Is not one admission but the admission of the thing that connects them, the thing that makes them part of the same painting, the same composition, the same truth I have been refusing to name.

The pieces are on the floor. I do not pick them up. I will pick them up tomorrow, or I will not. I will decide tomorrow whether to keep them or to throw them away, whether the two hands on the torn canvas constitute the beginning of something or the end of something or simply a thing that happened once, in a room, at one in the morning, when I was not looking and the brush moved on its own and the truth arrived uninvited and I tore it in half rather than live with what it meant.

I turn off the lamp. I lie down on the bed. I close my eyes.

I see two hands on a press handle. I see them trying to touch. I see the space between them — small, impossibly small, the width of a finger, the distance between two people who do not know they are in the same painting — and I understand that this is what I have been painting all along. Not Hasumi. Not Kanade. The space. The space is the painting. The space is the thing I have been afraid of. The space is the thing I have been making.

Tomorrow I will go back to the studio. Tomorrow I will start again. Tomorrow I will try to paint what is in the space and not just the things on either side of it.

Tonight, I sleep. And the pieces of the canvas are on the floor, and the hands are still trying to touch, and the distance between them is the distance I have been living in for fourteen years, and the distance is smaller than I thought, and the distance is the size of a breath, and the distance is the size of a question I am not yet ready to ask.

The train passes. It is two in the morning. The sound builds and then fades and then is gone.

The painting is torn. The hands are separated.

The question remains.