The Loyalist
By Silas Jones
It is within reach, what I need most; creative time alone. That is, no co-educational tits occupying the airspace above my shoulder as I labor to paint them, pink as the Wasatch outside my window.
Well, fuck you too, Carina says, launching herself off the model stand. The silk draped across it slides beneath her to pool piss-like on the cement floor. She steps into her culottes and snatches my jacket, jamming her camisole into one pocket and her Hanes into the other. It’s freezing in here, she snaps, it sucks.
See you in class, I say, closing the door behind her. She’s a fine pupil; an eye for contrast but no confidence. I am always telling her; you shouldn’t spend more than 20 minutes on a watercolor. She won’t listen. Instead, she agonizes. Her landscapes are diluted suggestions. She can’t stomach portraiture, detests oils.
A capitalist looks at a forest and sees only timber, looks at a mountain and sees only mining claims. A painter sees the true value of the thing, its edges and gradient shadows. I drill this revolutionary notion into my students; the power of representational art is to raise consciousness! I mix Napthol Red with Titanium White, add Yellow Ochre, and begin with the clavicle.
Inside my studio, perfect tranquility. Outside, the slow burble of American chaos. Don’t get me wrong; I have great respect for the working populace; it’s their opiate I abhor. When a Christian looks at a mountain, he sees only his own distorted ego. Not me! Just last week I gave the Chevy to an Underground Weatherman en route to righteous California. I’ve been driving Jill’s Volvo. Jill’s been taking the city bus.
Jill, I tell her, In China, you’d bike.
I’ve seen it with my own eyes; an elegant flood of cyclists sluicing down clean cobbled streets. In the courtyard outside our hotel, a flock of elders practiced tai chi. Young couples played ping pong. I was invited to an important regional hospital where I saw a woman’s white chest folded open like a book. Amongst the surgeons, an acupuncturist flitted, making adjustments. Seeing me with my camera, the patient– awake! –raised a needle-studded hand in socialist salute.
Ah, comrade! My whole adult life, I’ve weighed 120 pounds. In China, I was finally able to gain weight. In the factories, they are smelting. In the country, they are hauling fish from teeming ponds. Everywhere, from the peninsula of Zhanjiang to the high, bright interior, they are pausing to consider the mountains, rendering them with horse hair brushes and soot. I returned to Salt Lake City a changed man with 400 slides, 14 canisters of film, and no paintings whatsoever. Americans need photographic evidence; Nixon knows it. I put my foot through the television screen when I saw him deplaning in Beijing last month, crimson-coated Pat a few steps behind. Leon was irate, Aldous cried. Clara just sat there.
Wait ‘till you see my stuff, I said, uniformed school children in a dirt floor classroom, voices united in patriotic song! Up and down the sidewalk outside, old men sweeping up stray twigs. Seeing is believing; there could be nothing better, nothing more American, than Chinese Communism. Even Jill won’t take my word for it.
Sure, dear, she sneers, handing over her keys as if I was some kind of domestic brute, demanding a martini. I don’t drink. Except in China, I drank Maotai. It was clear and always served room temp. I brought a bottle back but they emptied it at customs. Uh huh, Jill says, have a good day at work, honey. As if she is some kind of disenfranchised housewife! She works part-time in a University lab, something to do with turtles. The turtles all have salmonella.
Last winter, Aldous became infected. Probably because she was the turtle-handling vector, Jill was the first to notice. To prove her point, she stuffed Aldous into the Mao Suit he’d already half outgrown. What a lesson in contrast! Against the high, blue-black color, my youngest son’s skin shone Naples Yellow. The hospital charged us an arm and a leg. Only in America.
I offered to pay in portraiture! In landscape! But the doctor, or rather, his simpering administrator, refused. I told her about Dr. Ashe, who every year accepts a painting of his darling Rebecca in exchange for filling the holes in Leon and Clara’s teeth. Aldous’s teeth are perfect. Shouldn’t that count for something? It doesn’t; we’re still paying off the salmonella bill.
Stowed away in the linen closet beside the empty bottle of Maotai, the undeveloped China film awaits funding in a shoe box. Some nights I take it down from its shelf and hold it in my lap while I practice my narration on the back porch. It’s quiet out there, crickets chirping and TV sounds from next door. Everything will begin with a wide shot of Beijing harbor.
My whole adult life, I’ve weighed 120 pounds. In China, I was able to gain weight.
As always, peace is shattered. Churning up the street towards my studio, Aldous on Clara’s bike, handlebar streamers cutting a glittering wake through the neighborhood. If I don’t give him the satisfaction of being seen, he might just coast home. Leon and Clara are supposed to be feeding him dinner. Ever since the pasta water incident, Aldous is forbidden from the stove. I say,
Socialize knowledge! Let the kid learn by doing! Jill says,
He’s only eight.
Clara’s pretty much an adult these days anyway; hair down to her ass, frown unreadable. Her face didn’t change when she walked in on me and Carina the other day, naked amidst charcoal studies and discarded clothes. I can’t convince Clara otherwise; she’s been throwing up every meal Jill makes her and going steady with some Mormon named Andres. He’s the spawn of converts from the Pacific island of Yap, where the people use massive stone wheels for currency. Ah, the insidiousness of capitalism! Clara doesn’t care about the Struggle. Leon pretends to. He’s been eating acid with University students, a whole handful of lovely hippie chicks including Carina, or so I’ve heard. She must think he’s terribly political for his age, wearing my red bandana around his neck, my black ribbon on his arm.
And then there’s Aldous. Half a block away he slows down and, losing momentum, tips over. I darken a blue shadow in Carina’s armpit; add a translucent sheen to her abductor. As long as you know a woman’s anatomy, you can’t go wrong painting her. In that way, a woman is like a horse. Gabilan and Nellie, my first models, knickering magnificent in the lavender-green sage brush as my father approached with grain. Not until art school in Salt Lake did I paint a woman. I can still see Jill in her Maidenform, poised on that fruit crate at the center of the classroom. Together, we resisted the war. Back then, it was all very new.
Aldous’s little hand slams against my window. I stare assiduously at tit.
Dad! His voice is muffled through the glass. Before this was my studio, it was a mechanic’s garage. The oily floor stains are monuments to their nobile labor. Dad! I step away from the canvas to consider the whole, toppled column of Carina’s body. I back all the way up until I’m pressed against the cold metal of the studio door. When I open it a crack, Aldous slithers through.
Calm down! I say, grabbing him and lifting him up to sit on the model stand, urgency is a handmaiden of unjust industrial hierarchy!
I know, he says, catching his breath while I add detail to Carina’s mons. Dad, says Aldous, we have to go home.
I’ll be home in a few hours, I tell him, there are raw whole grains soaking in the fridge.
No, Aldous says.
If you’re quiet, I tell him, you can wait and I’ll drive you.
Clara and Leon are fighting, he says, as if it’s something new. In my opinion, Clara’s got a stick up her ass and Leon, for all his effort, is more reactionary than revolutionary. I swivel my easel towards Aldous.
What do you think, is the torso too long? Aldous can draw a perfect circle. He draws thousands and thousands of them. It worries Jill and his teachers, but I believe it indicates an uncommonly well developed sense of proportion and scale.
Yeah, he says, momentarily distracted. Is that Carina? Carina babysits Aldous when Jill and I are at Party meetings and Clara’s with Andres. Leon’s not to be trusted with the stove either.
Yeah, I say, beautiful. The only thing more beautiful than a naked woman; a mountain. Maybe the ocean, too but I’ve never seen it except for that short weekend in Qingdao, red roofed buildings sidling right up to the Yellow Sea.
Dad, Aldous repeats, please.
Clara can handle it, I say.
She locked herself in the closet, says Aldous, Leon’s banging down the door.
Which closet, I ask.
Linen, says Aldous.
Our whole city is gridded out, numbered and lettered. God fearing American fuckin’ hive-mind ingenuity. None of the elegance of Chinese central planning, none of the luscious history. Thirty years ago, this was all farmland. Overnight, everyone seems to have installed a novelty mailbox. I lock up the studio, kick Clara’s bike into the bushes, throw Aldous in the front seat, and drive fast.
Night is falling and through every golden window, the evening news flickers. Two great, rolling pandas arrive safely in DC, a gift from Premier Zhou to Pat Nixon and the American people. Chinese cigarette tins have pandas on the front; I brought one back for Aldous and he keeps crayons in it. He can draw a perfect circle; he can draw a thousand. When we reach our house, all the streetlights on the block ignite in a single inhale.
Leon’s jacket is missing from its hook by the open front door and Clara’s standing in the kitchen, absently feeding herself puffed spelt with one hand and holding the other high above her head.
Leon broke your Chinese bottle, she says. Blood’s drying like a shadow in the crook of her raised arm. Across her palm, there’s dripping, black gash.
Jesus, I say, want to apply some direct pressure to that?
I told Leon about Carina, Clara says, and he broke your Chinese bottle.
Is your mother home? I ask.
No, says Clara.
Back when we were uncompromised, childless radicals, Jill and I attended a clandestine Revolutionary Action Training in a basement on the East side of town. We spent the weekend rolling cigarettes and learning to resist interrogation and practice battleground first aid. An AWOL military doctor brought a garbage bag full of mangled pig’s feet for us to practice on. Jill held a fleshy hoof steady while I used a long, curved needle to sew shut a jagged gash that ran its pink length. We giggled, our hands slippery with coagulated blood. Jill was already pregnant with Clara but we didn’t know it yet.
Hang on, I tell Clara, keep it elevated. On the stairs, there’s more blood spattered plus shards of the Maotai bottle. The linen closet door hangs off its hinges. Unspooled everywhere, all the film.
At the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, I saw the body of a Party Leader wrapped in crimson silk. Kneeling on the hall carpet, I think of his wife and daughter; their matter-of-fact tears, the wreath of yellow chrysanthemums above their bowed heads, centered in the shot. I stand, gather the scattered contents of Jill’s sewing basket– the long, curved needle, the Cobalt Blue thread –and return to the kitchen to fulfill my duty.
About the Author
Silas Jones grew up in Arizona and Washington. Their writing has appeared in Hobart, Foglifter, The Account and the Los Angeles Review. They are an MFA candidate in fiction at Hunter College in New York City.
