The pieces of the canvas are on the floor where I left them. I know this before I open my eyes because I remembered, the moment I woke, the thing I did at one in the morning, and the remembering brought with it a physical sensation — a tightening in the chest, a slight difficulty in breathing — that told me the tearing was real and not a dream.
I open my eyes. The room is grey with morning. The railway line is silent. It is not yet six. I lie on the bed and look at the ceiling and do not move.
There are things I could do. I could pick up the pieces. I could tape them back together — not to restore the painting but to see what it looked like, to examine the torn seam, the line of the separation, the place where Hasumi's hand ended and Kanade's began. I could lay them on the desk and look at them in the light and try to understand what I was thinking when I added the second hand and what I was thinking when I tore it apart.
I do none of these things. I lie on the bed and look at the ceiling and the ceiling is a ceiling and does not help.
Eventually I get up. The room smells the way rooms smell after a night of painting — turpentine and linseed oil and the particular stale closeness of a space that has been sealed against the outside air. I open the window. The railway line is below, the tracks glinting in the thin April light, and beyond the tracks the neighbourhood is waking up: a convenience store sign going off, a bicycle passing on the street below, a cat on a windowsill watching something I cannot see.
I pick up the pieces.
They are smaller than I thought. The tearing was precise — along the seam, at the join of the two hands — and what I have is two fragments, each roughly fifteen by twenty centimeters, each containing one hand and part of the press handle, the separation making visible what the painting had put together: the width of the gap between two people who do not know each other, the distance I have been filling with paint.
I set them on the desk. I look at them. Hasumi's hand on the left, Kanade's on the right. In the grey morning light the paint looks different than it did under the desk lamp — flatter, less alive, the cadmium red closer to brown. The hands do not look like they are reaching for each other. They look like two separate hands on two separate pieces of canvas, which is what they are now, which is what I made them.
I put the pieces in a drawer. I close the drawer. I go to the studio.
The studio is on the third floor of Building 3, which is the oldest building on the Geidai campus and the one with the worst heating and the best light, which is why the oil painting students tolerate the cold. The corridors in Building 3 smell of turpentine and old wood and the particular damp that comes from the building's inability to regulate humidity, which means that in April the studios are warm in the afternoons and cold in the mornings and everything is slightly damp all the time, including the canvases and the brushes and, in the months when I am deep in a work, my own hands.
Shiraishi is already there when I arrive. This is not unusual — she is always early, which is one of the things that makes her different from me, who is always exactly on time or slightly late, never early, because early means I have nothing else to be before I arrive and that is a kind of admission I have not yet learned to make.
She is standing at her easel, which is positioned near the window, which she has claimed because she arrived in April of last year before anyone else thought to claim it. She has her hair in pigtails today, which she does sometimes, which makes her look even younger than she usually looks, which is already younger than she is. She is wearing a sweatshirt with the sleeves pushed up past her elbows and there is paint on her right cheek and her posture is the posture of someone who is working and does not want to be interrupted.
I clear my throat. She looks up. She has been looking at me the way she always looks at me — with the particular quality of attention that is not quite curiosity and not quite concern and not quite anything I have a word for, except that I know, from the previous conversation, that it is the look of a person who has seen something and is deciding whether to say what they saw.
"You came back," she says.
"I said I would."
"You did." She sets down her brush. "I wasn't sure you remembered."
I don't say anything to this. I walk to my easel, which is near the back wall, away from the window, which is where I always put it because the light near the window is too good and I do not trust myself with good light — good light makes everything look better than it is and I have learned not to trust the way things look under good light.
Shiraishi follows me with her eyes. I can feel her watching as I set down my bag, as I arrange my brushes, as I stand in front of the empty canvas I have brought and do not begin to paint.
"The viewing," she says. "You said I could come back."
My hands stop moving. I had forgotten. Or I had not forgotten — I had put the forgetting to the side, the way I put difficult things to the side, meaning to deal with them later and meaning, in the meaning, to deal with them never.
"The painting," I say.
"The one with the hands." She says this without looking at me. She is looking at her own canvas, which is half-finished, which appears to be a landscape — Ueno Park, maybe, or the view from the studio window — but which has, in the lower left corner, a smear of colour that does not fit the landscape, a dark red that could be anything or nothing.
"It's not finished," I say.
"That's not what I asked."
I look at her. She is still not looking at me. She has a way of doing this — of asking questions that land as statements, of making observations that are also requests, of being present without being demanding, which is a quality I have not encountered in anyone else and which I find, depending on the day, either restful or terrifying.
"It's not here," I say.
She looks at me now. "Where is it?"
"In my room."
"Should I come back when it's here?"
I stand in front of the empty canvas. The morning light is coming through the window at an angle, falling across the floor in a long shape that reaches almost to where I am standing. In the light, the dust motes are visible — the particular phenomenon of old studios in spring, when the air is damp and the light is angled low and everything that is usually invisible becomes momentarily visible, including dust and paint particles and the small hairs on the back of my own hand.
"I tore it," I say.
The words come out before I have decided to say them. This is not unusual — I have been finding, in the past few weeks, that things come out of me before I decide to say them, which is different from my usual pattern, which is to decide what to say and then say the decided thing, carefully, with attention to the precise wording, which is a way of controlling what is communicated and, by extension, what is understood.
Shiraishi is quiet for a moment. I can hear the clock on the wall — an old thing with a second hand that moves in small jumps, the kind of clock that is found in buildings where people are working and do not have time to notice the clock.
"Can I see the pieces?" she asks.
I look at her. She is standing in front of her easel, her arms crossed, her head slightly tilted, the way she tilts it when she is genuinely curious and not performing curiosity. The paint is still on her cheek, a small streak of cadmium yellow near her left ear. She is twenty years old and she looks twenty and she does not look like someone who would know what to do with a torn painting that is also a confession, but I have already learned not to assume things about Shiraishi, who is the kind of person who sees more than she says and who says, in the end, exactly what is needed and not one word more.
"Later," I say. "After studio hours."
She nods. She picks up her brush. She returns to her landscape. The conversation is over, or suspended, which is different from over, and which I understand as her giving me time, or space, or whatever it is that people give each other when they have seen something and have decided not to name it yet.
I stand at my easel. I do not paint.
The second visit to Hasumi's studio is not planned. It happens the way most things have been happening lately — without planning, without intention, as a result of a series of small decisions that accumulate into a direction I did not set and did not anticipate.
I am walking back from the printmaking building — which is across the courtyard from Building 3 and which I have been avoiding since Thursday, since the first visit, since the studio and the press and the smell and Hasumi's hands — when I find myself in front of the door. I did not decide to come here. I was walking and then I was here, which is the same as deciding, in the way that many of my actions have been the same as decisions lately, which is to say: not the same at all, but I do not have another word for it.
The door is open. This is not unusual — the studios in the printmaking building are kept open during the day, when students are working, because the ventilation required for lithography and woodblock and etching means that closed doors are a health hazard as well as an aesthetic choice. I can see into the room from the corridor. I can see the press, and the inks, and the paper stacked on the shelves, and the long table with the burnishing tools laid out in a row, and the window that faces the courtyard, where the light is coming through at an angle that makes everything visible and nothing hidden.
Hasumi is at the press. He is not printing. He is standing with his back to the door, looking at something on the wall — a print, I think, although I cannot see it from this angle — and his posture is the posture of someone who is evaluating, who is deciding, who is trying to determine whether the thing in front of them is what they intended or something else.
I should keep walking. I know this. I should go back to Building 3 and stand in front of my empty canvas and make the decision that is required, which is the decision to begin or not to begin, to risk or not to risk, to paint the thing I am afraid of or to continue painting the thing I am not afraid of because the thing I am not afraid of cannot hurt me and the thing I am afraid of is the only thing worth making.
I knock.
Hasumi turns. He looks at me. His expression does not change — he is not surprised, not pleased, not anything I have a word for, except that I notice, as I have noticed before, that the looking is precise, is specific, is the look of a person who is taking in the whole of what is in front of them and is not pretending it is less than it is.
"You came back," he says.
This is the second time today someone has said this to me. Shiraishi this morning. Hasumi now. The words are the same but the contexts are different, and the difference is the thing I am trying to understand — the difference between a person who noticed you were gone and a person who knew you would return.
"I was in the area," I say.
He nods. He steps back from the press. He gestures toward the studio — not an invitation exactly, but an acknowledgment, a recognition that I am here and that what happens next will depend on what I do with the fact of my own presence.
I go in.
The studio is the same as I remember. The smell of turpentine and ink and old paper. The light through the window. The press, large and industrial, occupying the centre of the space like an altar or a machine that has not yet been assigned a purpose. The prints on the walls — some finished, some in progress, all of them in the same style of precise, controlled linework that I noticed on Thursday, the style that makes his prints look like they were made by someone who knows exactly what they are doing and is not interested in discovering what they might do if they did not know.
"You're not painting today," he says.
It takes me a moment to understand what he means. Then I look down at myself — my hands, which are clean, no paint, no turpentine, no evidence of the thing I have been doing or the thing I have been not doing. I am wearing the clothes I wore to the studio this morning, which are different from the clothes I wear when I am painting, because when I am painting I wear the two hoodies in rotation, the ones with the paint stains that do not come out, and today I am not wearing either of them.
"I'm taking a day," I say.
He looks at me. He is standing near the long table, his arms loose at his sides, his hands visible — the ink-stained fingers, the small scar on the right thumb, the particular shape of hands that have spent years learning to be precise. He is wearing a white T-shirt and work pants and his forearms are bare and I can see the veins under the skin, the blue lines that map the circulatory system, the evidence of a body that is alive and working and has been working long enough that the working is visible in the structure of the flesh.
"Every painter takes days," he says. "The question is what the days are for."
I do not answer. I am not sure what the question is.
He picks up a tool from the table — a burnisher, I think, something used in the later stages of printmaking, to smooth the paper, to bring out the ink, to make the surface reflect or not reflect depending on the pressure applied. He holds it in his hand. He turns it over, slowly, examining it the way he examined the print on Thursday, with the same quality of attention, the same sense of evaluation.
"Your paintings," he says. "The ones in the studio. I've seen them."
I did not know this. The studio is supposed to be a shared space but it is also, in practice, a space where students work in relative privacy, and I did not think that Hasumi — who is in a different building, a different department, a fourth-year who has no reason to visit the second- and third-year oil painting studios — had seen my work.
"When?"
"Last week. I was looking for Endo." He says this without apology. He has a way of admitting things that makes them sound like facts rather than intrusions, which they may also be, but the admitting changes the nature of the admission, makes it something other than a transgression. "I walked through Building 3 on my way back. The door to your studio was open."
I do not say anything. I am aware of my hands — the clean ones, the ones that belong to the person I am being today, which is not the person who paints, which is not the person who risks, which is not the person who tears paintings in half at one in the morning because the honesty is too much to live with.
"They're good," Hasumi says.
He says this the way he says everything — without emphasis, without affect, as a statement of fact, which makes it different from praise and different from criticism and which I do not know how to receive. I wait for him to continue. He continues.
"They're technically accomplished. The proportions are correct. The colour relationships are sophisticated. You have a good understanding of value and composition and your brushwork is controlled." He pauses. He is looking at the tool in his hand, turning it over, the way he turns things over when he is deciding what to say. "You're painting what you think you should feel," he says. "Not what you feel."
The words land in my chest. I feel them — a small, sharp impact, like the moment when you realise you have been holding your breath and did not know it. My hands do something. I look down. My hands are shaking. Not dramatically, not visibly to anyone who is not looking, but visibly to me, in the specific way that my hands shake when something has been named that I have been avoiding naming, when the thing I have been circling has been identified from the outside by someone who is not me.
I do not know what to say. I have no language for this. I have spent three years learning the language of painting — the technical vocabulary, the formal vocabulary, the vocabulary of composition and colour and value and brushwork — and I have no vocabulary for the thing Hasumi has just said, which is not a technical observation but a personal one, which is not about the painting but about the person who made it, which is about me and the thing I have been doing and the thing I have been not admitting.
"You see that," I say. It is not a question.
"I see it because I used to do it." He sets the tool down on the table. He is not looking at me. He is looking at the press, at the large, silent machine, at the thing he makes when he is being honest. "I spent two years making prints that were technically perfect and emotionally held at a distance. My teacher told me I was talented. I was also, he said, hiding. I didn't understand what he meant for a long time. I thought he was wrong. I thought the distance was the work."
He looks at me now. His eyes are dark, or appear dark in the light from the window, and I cannot tell what colour they are and I realize, in the not-telling, that I want to know, that I have wanted to know since Thursday, that the wanting is part of the thing I have been not admitting.
"Now I think I understand," he says. "The distance is what you use when you can't afford to be wrong. When the work being wrong would mean the person being wrong. When you don't have a way to separate the thing you make from the thing you are."
I am standing in the studio. The smell is the same — turpentine and ink and paper. The light is the same — angled through the window, making everything visible. The press is the same — large, industrial, silent. Hasumi is the same — precise, careful, present. But something has shifted. Something has moved. I do not know what it is or where it has gone but I can feel its absence, the way you feel the absence of a tooth after the dentist has pulled it, the space where the thing was and the knowledge that the space will not be filled again.
"Why are you telling me this?" I ask.
He picks up the tool again. He turns it over. The burnisher is small enough to fit in his palm, which is where it is now, resting on his skin, the metal warm from his grip.
"Because you came back," he says.
I leave the studio. I walk across the courtyard. The cherry trees are still blooming — barely, the petals thinning, the colour fading from white to something closer to the grey of old paper — and the wind is coming from the east, carrying the sound of the traffic on the main road and the particular smell of the city in April, which is exhaust and flowers and the damp of the river and the thing I cannot name that makes April in Tokyo the loneliest month and also, for reasons I do not have language for, the month when I am most afraid of what I might say if I said what I was thinking.
I walk back to Building 3. I walk to my studio. I stand in front of the empty canvas.
My hands are still shaking.
I do not know if it is from what Hasumi said or from the fact that he said it or from the specific quality of his attention when he looked at me and named the thing I have been doing, the thing I have been calling technique and safety and control and which he has just called by a different name, a name I do not want to hear, a name that means the distance between the painting and the person who made it is not a professional choice but a personal failure.
I put my hands in my pockets. I stand in front of the canvas. I do not paint.
Shiraishi passes the open door on her way to the bathroom. She glances in. She does not stop. She does not say anything. She has learned, in the past twenty minutes or the past two days or the past two years of watching me, when not to say things, which is a form of kindness I do not know how to receive and which I am beginning to suspect I do not deserve.
The canvas is empty. The morning is becoming afternoon. The light in the studio is changing — the early light giving way to the midday light, which is flatter, less interesting, the kind of light that makes everything look the same, including my empty canvas, which is beginning to look, in this light, less like a failure and more like a possibility, which is a dangerous thing for an empty canvas to look like and which I do not trust.
I take my hands out of my pockets.
I pick up a brush.
I do not know what I am going to paint.
I do it anyway.
