The thing about Kanade is that I have too much of him.
Not too much in the sense of saturation — not the way I have too much of Hasumi, where the scarcity of what I have is the problem, where I am working from a single afternoon and a handful of details and the persistent, specific memory of cold fingers and a carving knife and the way the light fell across a printmaking studio in the middle of a Thursday afternoon in April. With Hasumi, the problem is quantity. I do not have enough.
With Kanade, the problem is the opposite. I have fourteen years. I have fourteen years of looking at his hands when he holds a container of food and fourteen years of watching him tap rhythms on surfaces when he is thinking and fourteen years of seeing the way his eyes change colour in different light — brown in the morning, almost amber in the late afternoon, the colour of whiskey held up to a candle — and fourteen years of knowing the particular way he tilts his head when he is listening, which is different from the way most people tilt their heads because he is actually listening and not performing the appearance of listening, which is the thing that most people do and which he has never, in fourteen years, done to me.
I have this much of him. I have all of this. And what I have learned, in nine months of trying to paint him, is that having is not the same as knowing and knowing is not the same as seeing and seeing is not the same as being able to paint what is in front of you, which is a lesson I should have learned earlier and which I am learning now, late, in the spring of my third year, in the studio, in front of the canvas that is already failing.
The canvas is forty by fifty centimetres. This is larger than the one I used for Hasumi's hands — larger, more ambitious, more of a commitment to the act of painting, which is a way of saying that I am more afraid of this painting than I was of the small one, which I tore in half, which is still in the drawer in my room, which I have not opened since I put it there.
I am painting Kanade's face. This is different from what I painted before — I painted his hands, nine times, in nine versions that were all technically correct and all emotionally absent, and the problem with the hands was that I knew them too well and could not stop knowing them, could not put down the knowledge and look at the thing itself, could not stop being the person who knew Kanade and become, for the duration of the painting, the person who was seeing him, which is a different activity and requires a different kind of attention and is, I am beginning to understand, the thing I have been unable to do.
I start with the eyes.
This is a mistake. I know it is a mistake even as I do it — even as I mix the colour (a dark brown, not quite burnt umber, not quite raw umber, something between the two that I have mixed dozens of times and still do not have right) and position the brush over the canvas and make the first mark in the upper left quadrant where I have decided, without deciding, that Kanade's left eye will go. I know it is a mistake because the eyes are where I look when I am looking at Kanade and they are therefore the part of him I am least capable of painting honestly, because the honesty would require me to paint what I feel when I look at his eyes and what I feel when I look at his eyes is the thing I have been not feeling, the thing I have been keeping at a careful distance, the thing that is the subject of all the paintings and also the thing that all the paintings are trying to avoid.
I paint the left eye. I step back. I look at it.
The eye is brown. This is correct — Kanade's eyes are brown, in the morning light, in the studio light, in the grey light of a February afternoon when we were standing under the bare cherry tree and I was not looking at him and he was looking at me and I could feel his looking without turning to meet it, which is a form of cowardice I have been living with for so long that I have stopped noticing it. The eye is brown. The proportions are correct. The position is correct. The eye is where the eye should be.
It is not Kanade's eye.
I know this. I know this the way I knew the ninth version was not Kanade — not because the eye is wrong but because the eye is right and the rightness is the lie, the way accuracy becomes dishonesty when accuracy is used to conceal rather than to reveal. The eye is the eye of someone I have painted. It is not the eye of the person I am trying to paint. It is the eye I have constructed from fourteen years of looking and fourteen years of knowing and fourteen years of not saying the thing I see when I look at him, which is the thing that would make the painting honest and would also make the painting about the thing I am not prepared to make it about.
I add the right eye. I step back. I look at the two eyes, positioned on the canvas, separated by the correct distance, each one individually accurate and together not Kanade, not the person, not the truth of the person who is standing in front of me when I am not painting him and who I have been unable to paint because I cannot separate the person from the history and I cannot be honest about the history and I cannot stop the history because the history is the substance of who we are to each other and the substance of the thing I have been carrying for fourteen years and have been unable to name.
I paint the nose. I paint the mouth. I paint the jaw, the neck, the suggestion of shoulders — all of it in the same careful, controlled, technically accomplished style that I have been using for three years, the style that makes everything look correct and nothing look true, the style that is the signature of my safety and the evidence of my failure.
The face emerges on the canvas. It is recognisable as Kanade. Anyone who knows him would look at this painting and say: yes, that is Kanade, that is the shape of his face and the colour of his eyes and the particular set of his jaw when he is not smiling. The painting is correct. The painting is complete. The painting is empty.
I step back. I look at it.
The afternoon light is coming through the window at an angle that makes the canvas glow — the particular quality of late afternoon light in an old studio, when the sun is low and the dust motes are visible and the paint looks wet even where it is dry, the way the light transforms the thing it touches and makes it seem more alive than it is, which is also what I have been doing with this painting, which is what I have been doing with everything I make.
I think: this is the tenth version.
I think: I have painted Kanade ten times and this is the tenth and it is no more honest than the first nine.
I think: the problem is not the painting. The problem is me.
I set the brush down. I hold my hands still — not resting on the palette, not in my pockets, just still, the way I used to hold my hands still when I was a child and my mother was watching and I was trying not to be noticed, which is the thing I do when I am afraid and do not want to be seen being afraid.
The painting is on the easel. Kanade's face is on the canvas. It is the face of someone I have known for fourteen years and cannot paint. It is the face of someone I have been looking at my whole life and am unable to see. It is the face of the person who is closest to me and furthest from me simultaneously, which is the definition of the distance I have been living in and which I have been mistaking for proximity because proximity is what the distance resembles when you have forgotten what the real thing feels like.
I think about what Hasumi said. You are painting what you think you should feel. Not what you feel.
I think: how does he know?
I think: how can he see it?
I think: he saw it because he did it. He hid behind technique for two years. He knows the hiding because he was the one hiding.
The thought brings something with it — a recognition, a kinship, the specific feeling of being understood by someone who has stood in the same place and looked at the same wall and painted the same technically correct, emotionally absent work and known, in the knowing, that the correctness was the problem and not the solution.
I look at the painting of Kanade. I look at the face I have made. I think: I know what is missing. I know what is missing because I know what I am not putting in. I am not putting in the thing that makes Kanade Kanade to me — not the shape of his eyes or the colour of his hair or the particular way his jaw sets when he is thinking, but the other thing, the thing underneath, the thing I have been circling for nine months, the thing that is in all the paintings and absent from all of them, the thing that is the subject of the painting and also the thing the painting is refusing to say.
The thing is: I am in love with him.
I do not think this. I have known this for a long time — not consciously, not in the form of a thought that I articulated to myself at a specific moment, but in the form of a knowledge that lived in my body, in my hands, in the way my attention moved toward him when he entered a room, in the way I painted his hands nine times and none of the paintings were honest because the honesty would have required me to admit what the painting was for, which was to look at him without being allowed to touch, which is a form of love and a form of torment and which I have been doing since I was thirteen years old and did not have language for what I was feeling and am now twenty-one and still do not have language for what I am feeling, except that the language is this: I am in love with Kanade and I have been in love with Kanade for eight years and I have not said it because the saying would change the thing and the thing is the only constant I have and I cannot afford for the constant to change.
The tears come. They come the way they came the night I tore the painting — suddenly, without the usual prelude, without the tightness and the pressure and the careful buildup that I have learned to manage and redirect and put somewhere other than where it wants to go. They come and they are not sad and they are not happy and they are, I understand, the admission. They are the thing I have been not saying arriving in the form of water, the body's way of releasing what the mouth cannot, which is a terrible mechanism and also the only one I have.
I sit on the floor. The studio is empty — it is late afternoon, most of the other students have gone, the building is quiet in the way old buildings are quiet when they are emptying, which is not really quiet but the specific quality of sound that remains when the people have gone: the clock, the ventilation, the distant sound of a door closing somewhere on another floor.
I sit on the floor and I look at the painting and I understand, finally, the thing I have been avoiding.
I cannot paint Kanade because the painting would be honest and the honest painting would be about what I feel and what I feel would have to be named and the naming would be the end of the not-naming and the not-naming is the only version of this that I know how to live with.
This is not a revelation. This is a confirmation. I have known this in the body for eight years. I am only now, sitting on the floor of a studio in the late afternoon, allowing myself to know it in the mind.
I get up. I walk to the easel. I look at the painting.
Kanade's face. The tenth version. Technically correct. Emotionally absent. The face of someone I love and cannot say I love and cannot paint honestly because the honest painting would be the admission and the admission would be the beginning of a conversation I am not prepared to have.
I pick up the brush. I hold it over the canvas.
I do not add anything.
I put the brush down. I cover the canvas with a cloth — the old cotton cloth I use for this purpose, the one that has paint stains from years of use and which smells, when you lift it, of turpentine and time and the particular combination of materials that accumulates in the space where painting happens. I cover the canvas. I turn away.
I am going to leave the studio. I am going to walk back to the dormitory. I am going to eat something from the convenience store and lie on the bed and not think about the painting under the cloth, the face of Kanade that is not Kanade, the tenth version of a thing I have been trying to make for nine months and have been failing to make because the failure is not in the painting but in the person who is standing in front of it, who is me, who is the person who has been in love for eight years and has been making paintings about something else in a room where no one can see.
Tomorrow I will uncover the canvas. Tomorrow I will look at it again and it will still be wrong and I will still know why. Tomorrow I will decide whether to continue or to stop, whether to try again or to begin something else, whether the tenth version is the end of the trying or the beginning of a different kind of trying.
Tonight I sit on the floor of the studio and I let the tears come and I do not cover my face and I do not pretend I am not crying and the studio is empty and the light is fading and Kanade's face is under the cloth and the question the question the question is not whether I love him but whether I will ever be able to paint what loving him means.
I sit in the dark. I do not turn on the lamp. The cherry blossoms outside the window are invisible in the failing light but I know they are there, thin and pale, holding on for another week or two before the wind takes them and the year moves on and nothing is the same as it was and nothing is as different as I have been pretending.
The painting is under the cloth. Kanade is under the cloth. The truth is under the cloth.
I will lift the cloth tomorrow. Or I will not. Tonight the cloth stays on and the question stays open and the distance between what I feel and what I paint is the size of an eight-year admission and I am not ready to say it and I am not ready to paint it and the studio is dark and I am sitting in it and the silence is the only honest thing in the room.
Somewhere in the building, a door closed.
