12

The Continuity of Light
by Brent Foster Jones

Richard and I moved into the house on Sunday: a white, two-story in Marina Del Ray that had taken seven months to renovate. He left two days later.
He told me he tried to put her behind him, but he couldn’t. “I tried,” he said. “This house was your dream. Now it’s my turn.”
I walked out onto the balcony and watched him drive away in the Mercedes.
Today is Friday.
There is nothing in the house. The furniture we ordered arrives next week. I wanted to stay in a hotel, but Richard thought it might be romantic to sleep on a mattress and eat take-out. “It might be romantic,” he said.
Now I’m alone.
I walk through the rooms at night, wandering, inhabiting. I step into the living room and run my fingers along the white walls, staring into the large, open space. I picture what it might look like when the furniture arrives: the contrast of the white with the dark walnut of the side chairs. I see the beige cashmere sofa and the silver legs of the cocktail tables. I imagine the sheer curtains, the muted Los Angeles light.
The palette we planned together cools and quiets me.
In the new kitchen – we gutted the previous one – there is a bottle of white wine, cigarettes, prescriptions. The room is white, blank – it has no history. I pour a glass of wine and take an Ambien.
I go out on the balcony in the chiffon nightgown, light a cigarette, and wait for the sleeping pill to set in. I look out towards the hotels, the yachts, the shimmering water, the lampposts. Marina Del Ray was a dream – the plan. This is a place for lovers, for companions.
I step back into the kitchen and turn the outdoor lights on, dimming the recessed bulbs. I get something from this – the glow. The light has an editing quality: it tightens and organizes the features of the doors and balcony. It enhances. It arranges.
I take refuge in false comforts, in constructions: in lines, in light – the shape of a bench, the limb of a small tree, the play of moonlight off glass.
It’s later, and I can’t fall asleep. I’m wide awake. I feel leveled, razed.
I’m standing in the redesigned bathroom, easing the nightgown off my shoulders, looking into the mirror at my breasts.
I turned 47 two months ago. My skin is fair. A friend suggested Botox this summer and now the lines on my face are faint, like traces.
Each month I go to a salon in Beverly Hills to have my hair colored—black.
This morning, I saw a photograph in a magazine of a Washington D.C. socialite whose hair is white, like alabaster. In the picture, she is wearing pearl earrings and a crisp, white blouse. I’m picturing my hair white like hers: elegant, confident, and wise.
I’m a decorator. I arrange things and plan patterns. I bring order to rooms. I pair things. Richard is an architect. He sketches. He creates structures and disrupts them. He rebuilds. We have a practice together, and I’ve agreed to dissolve it next month.
“What should we tell our clients?” Richard asked me yesterday in our office.
I didn’t respond, looking into the icy blue curtains.
“Are you all right?” Richard said.
“I don’t know,” I told him.
He walked over to me and touched my arm. “I want you to be okay,” he said.
“Don’t say that,” I said, angrily. “Don’t ever say that to me.”
To temper what stings, what stuns me, I plan and envision. I pace the house and mentally blueprint each room – the arrangements, the lines. I think about the 1950s chrome lightning fixture for the hallway and the David Tomb charcoal drawing for the dining room. I wait for ideas, for images. I wait for a sense of things.
Now it’s 3:30 in the morning.
I go into the bedroom and lay down under the white sheets. I pull an Ivory cashmere blanket over my legs and stare out the large, rectangular window. I wonder how it happened, where things started to break down between us.
I decide it was either her or me, and he chose her. As I dull from the Ambien, from exhaustion, I imagine that things have righted themselves: that he chose differently – me.
A car door closes softly outside, and I pretend Richard is back. I wait for him to enter the house. I pretend he is lingering outside, admiring our home, his life.
I look down at the contours of my legs, the landscape of my body under the cashmere. I imagine my hair dramatic and white. I feel an earned sexiness – our intimacy – as I pretend he is walking up the stairs. I feel wanted as he reaches the second level, passing the rosewood credenza, moving towards the room. Then I look up. Nothing.
I cry and reason.
I look over at a print from a Japanese gallery that’s still on the floor. It was a gift from Richard. Two black brushstrokes against white. One of the brushstrokes travels across the other, arcing over it, and then it comes back down across it, through it, and to the corner of the print, away.
I turn off the floor lamp next to me.
I close my eyes, and I picture this: I am a line, a piece of light, a direction.

photo by Jason Fuges, photo design by Bernard Kyle.

Brent Foster Jones was born in Texas and raised in Louisiana. He is completing his M.F.A. in writing at California College of the Arts. Brent is the recipient of a California College of the Arts All College Honors Honorable Mention for his fiction writing. He is currently at work on a collection of stories and a play.

Bernard Kyle is a photographer and independent curator and works for Other Minds, a
non-profit. He is a graduate student in the art history and museum studies programs at San
Francisco State University.

Jason Fuges lives in San Francisco and works as the art director at Berkeley Rep.