No Blue Without Yellow and Orange

“You’re not always going to look 35, you know,” my mother had pointed out one Christmas years ago when she had arranged for one of her artist friends to paint my portrait.

I was not keen on the prospect. Not only did I dread wasting an afternoon crammed into my blue polka-dotted polyester-and-silk dress when I could be sunbathing on the beach at Siesta Key, I also wasn’t crazy about my sister’s portrait, painted by the same artist who would do me, which hung above the two green sateen chairs, placed conversation style, in front of the television in Mom’s living room. The artist signed herself simply Nanci, presumably in the vein of Vincent of Vincent van Gogh, though the comparison between the two painters ended with the signature.

“I don’t know why you don’t like it,” my mother sniffed, as we watched the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour and I was on my second glass of Chardonnay and she was nursing her pink lemonade, “I think it’s actually a very good likeness.”

“You can’t be serious!” I said, as the screen flashed to an angry mob of Romanians looting Nicholae Ceausescu’s palace, carting out gold-gilt mirrors and mother-of-pearl end tables, their faces oversized and jeering. “The shape of her face is wrong, her nose is too button-like, and her fingers are so elongated they look like she’s got evening gloves on. Furthermore, she hasn’t been that skinny since she was 25.”

“Honestly, aren’t you a pill! I told Nanci that I liked the portrait so much I wanted her to do one of you, too. She’s coming tomorrow after lunch, and you’ll only have to sit long enough for her to take a few rolls of photos. She works strictly from the photos. She’s very professional, and will have the job done in a month.”

My mother, also Nancy, but with a y, worshipped her namesake, whom she regarded as a kind of spiritual twin: they were both originally from the Midwest, both divorced, both about forty pounds overweight, and both considered themselves artists, though Nanci made her living as a painter, while my mother struggled to summon the self-discipline and focus to complete a few sketches a year, and sometimes not even that.

“It’s a waste of time and money,” I fumed, as the screen flashed to a massive woman in a black babushka explaining, through an interpreter, that Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu had looted the country, massacred thousands, and that finally the Romanian people were sending a message to the world: enough was enough. “How much is she going to charge you, anyway?”

“Her regular fee is five grand, but since she’s my dear friend, she’s giving me a special rate and only charging four.”

“ You can’t be serious! That’s highway robbery!”

I had started to repeat myself, an irritating family trait, which had been pointed
out to me repeatedly by my latest boyfriend, with whom I had recently broken up and for whom I was still pining, despite the fact that our relationship was as turbulent as the fall of the Ceausescu regime. At this very moment he was in Paris, no doubt praising the virtues of the Winged Victory in the Louvre with a woman he’d met in the personal ads while I was getting plastered with Mom on Gull Road in South Venice, Florida.

“ Dearie, you know perfectly well that most of the time I live like an absolute pauper,” Mom said. “I haven’t bought myself any new clothes, nothing for the house. The thing is, I want to do this while Nanci’s got time. And you’re not always going to look the way you do now.”

“You said that,” I snapped.

“Something’s burning,” I said, sniffing into the air and getting a strong whiff of burning meat, the roasted chicken from PIggly Wiggly that was meant to have been our dinner.

“When did you put that chicken in?” I asked.

“I don’t know, maybe an hour ago.”

“Well, it’s done.”

“I want to give it a few more minutes. Sometimes they don’t cook them properly
and you can get very sick from uncooked chicken.”

Neither Mom nor I got salmonella, and Nanci arrived the next day, dressed in a flowing lavender schmata and delivering New Age romantic advice as she circled around me with her flashing Leica. (You need to start visualizing the man you want, she advised, as if it were as simple as ordering a pair of relaxed-fit corduroys from Lands End. She then advised me to relax, to breathe in and out, and to imagine that I had just had fabulous sex with this guy. My mother, overseeing the photo session from the couch, made a face, as if she were shocked by her friend’s remarks, then started to giggle.)

One month later, Nanci hand-delivered the completed portrait, and the following Christmas, the massive, nearly life-sized work was hanging on the wall above the green sateen chairs beside its twin-sister. Both portraits were framed in narrow, burnished gold frames---Mom disliked heavy, ornate frames and contended that they competed with, and, in fact, undermined the art.

Nanci idealized me in the same way she had rendered my sister, turning my dishwater-blond hair lighter, my coffee-stained teeth whiter, as well as shaving off ten pounds from my midriff, erasing the dark circles beneath my eyes, and removing all self-pity from my gaze. She had also removed the black polka dots from my dress, and given me two strands of pearls instead of one. When I pointed this out, Mom said most people were rarely satisfied with their own portraits: the burghers of Amsterdam had been so upset with their portrayal in “Night Watch” that they had threatened not to pay Rembrandt.

But the most reprehensible artistic license Nanci had taken, as far as I was concerned, was to insert a Poinsettia plant in the lower right hand corner just behind the antique chair in which I sat. Mom adored Poinsettias, and every Christmas bought them up in bulk, placing them throughout the house as well as on the front and back porches. There was indeed one beside me when Nanci had taken the photos, but why the plant had to remain in the composition for posterity was beyond me.

Mom explained that the redness in the leaves acted as a counterpoint to the solid blue in the dress, and that contrast was a feature of all great art, from Vermeer to van Gogh. “There can be no blue without yellow and without orange,” my mother said, quoting van Gogh, whom she and Nanci both revered. Surely, as a writer, Mom continued, this notion of point-counterpoint was not news.

It was an argument I couldn’t win, and so I sighed and said, Well, if you like it, that’s all that matters, and she said not only did she like it, she was overjoyed with it, and that seeing the two of us every morning when she passed into the kitchen to boil her egg, our presences so lifelike it was as if we were right in the room with her, never failed to make her heart sing.

Many Christmases passed. I married a man who looked as if he might have stepped out of a Lands End catalogue, and we had a baby boy and for some years lived free of the Strum und Drang that had plagued my relationship with his predecessor. Mom moved--from Florida to Virginia to New Hampshire, each time hovering over the movers to make sure the two portraits were wrapped in layers of brown paper and bound up tight with duct tape. They’re original works of art, she explained, as if her mummified treasures were bound for the auction rooms of Sotheby’s, instead of to her next modest home in their usual spot above the green chairs.

In the New Hampshire retirement community she moved to, she instructed my sister and me to hang the paintings at eye level above the green chairs, and when we were finished, she clapped her hands like a child, as thrilled as if she were seeing them for the first time.

After she died, my sister and I went through her things, stunned by the quantum physics of death, which took Mom away, further from us than Romania, and yet left her possessions intact, as if she had would be returning at summer’s end. We spent hours going through papers and clothes (Mom never threw away anything, even twenty-year-old grocery lists). We kept the green chairs, gave away the thirty-year-old Sony TV, but about the portraits’ fate, there was never any question: My sister would hang hers in the bedroom she shared with her husband, cutting the canvas down to fit on the wall, while I would store mine, face down, in an upstairs closet. I didn’t want to hang it anywhere in my house, since my husband and son found it as kitschy as I did. But neither could I give it away to the local hospice shop nor sell it in a garage sale. Who would buy it? Who would want it?

Four years after my mother’s death, I finally surrendered to the reality that I was never going to part with the portrait. I took it out of the closet and, in a kind of aesthetic homeopathy, hung it on the bedroom wall. Different sleep schedules as well as problematic midlife snoring and flatulence had forced my husband and me to take separate bedrooms. As far as he was concerned, I could put up 10 portraits of my younger self. Fortunately, I only had the one by Nanci, which I hung six inches above eye level to the left of the queen-sized bed, so it would not be the first thing I saw in the morning.

I won’t lie. I still cringe when I’m doing upper-arm lift exercises to banish what one friend calls Bingo arms, and I spy that gleaming-toothed, seamlessly complexioned young woman in blue, the leafy red plant ghosting behind her. But sometimes when I hear Mom quoting van Gogh, “There can be no blue without yellow and without orange,” I think of that line, “There is no me without you,” and I feel richer than the owner of Vase with 15 Sunflowers, because Nanci’s portrait never stops telling me that once upon a time I was loved.