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My Father's Palette
I thought I understood what it was for, like an unopened box of crayons. It was always in the window room with the splattered linoleum floor, even when he wasn't. It was exciting, like Felix the Cat's bag of tricks, the primary splotches blending one day in swirls of autumn russet- the next in summer camembert or winter's whited blues. Or smeared, first muddy, then clear with the molted rags of my youth he soaked in that Lethean turpentine, a stench that washed all colors back to scratch: to the brown wood, the kidney-shaped monument to every vista he'd sold, or given, or wordlessly stacked in the attic. I liked to put my thumb in its thumb-hole, or to see it humped with rigid blobs left over from the day before, when calmly as a surgeon in Emergency he'd slit the skins-cerulean or sepia-apply freshly oozing hues to the erection of skewed fenceposts enclosing his fields of revision: all those long-abandoned barns, complicated trees, desolate plainscapes . . . . But no people. Growing up I couldn't fathom why he left them out, always straining to glimpse the profile of a human head through the glare of his blank windows, trying to see what he saw in uninhabitably old farmhouses, fallow fields. When I asked, once, he nodded and said something I can't exactly remember: how you didn't have to see people to know they'd been there, or could have been, and when I still didn't get it, he fell silent, vaguely disappointed. I never asked again. He probably thinks I still don't understand his unpeopled landscapes, their visual silences. But I remember that time in Bermuda when, drowsy, pretending to be asleep on the ugly plaid couch of my parents' hotel room, I watched my father quietly take in all that was missing in the mass-produced hotel painting. I remember the boring waves spraying over the boring rocks on the wall, and with what restraint he selected the skinniest brushes and the tubes for fleshtone and for swimsuit crimson, stirring on a tinfoil takeout plate. And the placing of the lamp. And how the smoke from his pipe my mother didn't mind that night drifted across and above his intent frame as he bent away from us in silhouette to add, with minute strokes, two far-off figures-maybe lovers- to the utterly featureless water. How he added always the human