Facing the bed was a triptych Salo had traveled to London to buy in an auction. The three paintings were of heads, grotesque and distorted on a dark background, each facing in a different direction, each with features swirling into chaos. Johanna, left alone with it （them） day after day, had moved past her initial alarm and even repulsion toward this painting and into an even more problematic way of looking at it. She had begun to think of those three heads as bad fairy counterparts to the three babies kicking her （and one another） throughout each day and night, the warped faces becoming proxies for her fears—fears that plagued her and which must not be permitted to cross the placenta and attach to her actual children. And what, exactly, were the fears of a woman who had waited so long and tried so hard （and yes, suffered so much） to be in precisely the position she now occupied? Simply this: it had occurred to our mother, almost at the moment of those three cacophonous heartbeats in Dr. Lorenz Pritchard’s ultrasound room, that for all her yearning and despite the years of pills and shots and blown-out fallopian tubes and egg extractions and waiting and failure … she had no idea how to be a parent. None. She knew only, thanks to her own parents, how not to be one. Years of effort, she slowly came to understand, had only pressed her into quicksand, and now here she was, sinking and alone. And what made it worse for her was the fact that our father had found a path of his own—a path he seemed determined to walk without her company and a path she had not recognized soon enough as a path. If only she had, she would have tried harder to understand those squiggles of crayon or the hard blocks of color, or even—though she loathed them—the twisted faces at the foot of her own bed. But it was too late to understand, or even pretend to understand, how these pictures spoke to her husband, and what he heard them say.
By this time our father had acquired fourteen paintings （sixteen, if you counted the triptych as three） and they were everywhere in the house. After work, after the tray and the dinner, after bringing the dishes back downstairs and offering pleasantries to Gloria, Salo’s great preoccupation and delight was assigning individual works to the various rooms, and then positioning them within the rooms. This was a ceaseless project, since whatever contentment he felt at the sight of his orange scrawls or gray solid canvases or crosshatch patterns on a neutral wall was always followed, sometimes very quickly, by an absolute conviction that there was a better pairing of room and painting to be found, or a better position within that room, or an idea about something he didn’t even own yet which would, on its arrival, topple every domino and set off an epic reshuffling.
Then, one evening as she neared the Holy Grail of her eighth month, Salo set the tray down on the bed beside his mountainous wife and announced that he had purchased a warehouse in some distant wasteland of their adopted borough, and he would be moving every one of his paintings out of the house. A few of them were becoming rather valuable, he told our mother （who was frankly incredulous at hearing this）， and he was beginning to get invitations from some of the dealers he’d bought paintings from, a gesture he did not appreciate. Also, a museum in London had actually extracted his name from that Turin gallery and asked to buy the Twombly, which felt like a shot across the bow. Our father had found himself worrying about these works, and their safety in the house, with its nonexistent security and fluctuating old-building temperature. Not to mention the combined impact of six toddler hands, flailing, feeling, examining, perhaps adorned with food or grime as they did so. Or three children stumbling into them as they learned to walk. Or, later, the book bags and backpacks, the carelessly handled sporting equipment （they were expecting two boys, after all）， or just the number of bodies that were going to share the space with these works of art—passing, crowding, perhaps merely moving the air around them.
“But, if the paintings aren’t in the house, you won’t be able to see them.”
“I’ll see them in the warehouse.” It was being worked on, he told her then, set up with the proper security, the necessary temperature controls. He could go out there when he wanted to look at them. They both could!
So he had had this in mind for some time, she understood, and the project was well along. She could not say that made her happy, but her job, as ever, was to try to understand, and she did that. The paintings were a joy for him in a way she was quite sure they never would be for her, and in fact there were several she would be actively pleased not to have to see every day.