I planned to work from front to back, at first, to stagger and rotate the drying times, and I made a chart, of what to do on what day, how to move forward, how to take one step at a time, but I was nervous anyway. No—I was more than nervous. I was terrified.

The chart directed that I should start with the base layers of Humility and Chastity. Both required large quantities of beeswax, petroleum, and resin in the medium. I’d tested the proportions with Galkyd and it had come out clean. Everything would be fine.

There was no reason to be nervous. I knew exactly what to do.

Yet—when I went to heat the beeswax, my fingers on the wheel of the lighter, I was overcome. First my hands went slack, and the things they held fell to the ground. Pearls of wax rolled across the concrete. Immobilized, watching the beads run from me, a crack of pain formed in my right clavicle and my breath stopped. Then the studio became a collapsing balloon, its walls and floor turning to rubber, rushing at me, deflating fast, impervious, airless. It felt as though the air itself was a plastic bag over my mouth and I could not breathe.

I stared at the white ocean of gessoed wood in front of me. Carey had once filled this hangar, too, painting, glazing, and firing a veritable terra-cotta army into realistic facsimiles of dead bodies. My mind boggled to think about how much work that must have been: molding, casting, bisque firing, glaze firing, mistake after mistake, loss after loss. Yet: She wasn’t afraid to work so hard.

I didn’t need to be either.

I reminded myself that I had felt the weight of chastity, once. I had felt the forced perspective of humility, the delirium of purity, the rage of temperance, the blinding resentment of obedience, the shame of modesty, the regret of prudence. I had felt the burden of all those words on my body, in my body, through my brush; I could do it again. I was thirty-four years old and I was going to get my work done, and I was going to keep forming the life that belonged only to me.

I swept the beeswax into a corner—the fallen pearls were dirty now, and I could not use them—and poured a fresh batch. This time, my thumb pulled the wheel, and the flame took on the burner, and the wax melted, and the resin poured into a bucket, the Galkyd ran like honey from its bottle, the petroleum scraped down, the pigment swirled, the medium was made.

When it came out waxy and thick—translucent and matte, exactly as I wanted—I was ecstatic with relief.

And then I fell into my paintings again, and time was suspended, like always.

*  *  *