A memoir that looks at the author's relationships as seen through the art of Claude Monet. The Color of the Sunset makes a gesture toward Impressionism and toward impressions of a life viewed near the end of middle age. Marie Masters successfully braids her own history with Monet's legacy of "beauty, love and light" These two elements contrast each other, creating an energy that wouldn't exist if either were presented alone. For anyone who has ever wondered about life beyond divorce and failed relationships, here is a realistic but hopeful story about trying again. * Explore how relationships factor into life's metamorphosis. * See how art expresses the most fleeting, transformative moments. * Experience the heartache and the bliss of searching for love. "This memoir presents the author's relationships to various men and to the paintings of Claude Monet in thoughtful and interesting ways. Masters awakens insights into herself and courageously reveals some of her own flaws as well" Daniel Minock author of Thistle Journal: And Other Essays

THE Color of the Sunset

By MARIE MASTERS

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2012 Marie Masters
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4685-4967-6

Chapter One

Mardi Gras (c. 1960s & 1970s)

My world before Claude Monet was steel blue. Gunmetal gray. Camouflage green. The color of machinery. My hometown's name, Roseville, was a misnomer, with its harsh square grids of streets and rows of ranch homes. There was no abundance of roses, except in my mother's well-tended garden. I don't remember any significant parks in this bedroom community, except industrial parks with tool shops housing smoke-sputtering machines that sheered metal and extruded plastic into car parts. In nearby Detroit, gray and brown skyscrapers, weather-wasted houses and spray-can art.

Graffiti has its own raw beauty. I've seen it all my life when driving through the city of Detroit. And whenever I take the train to Chicago, the tracks run through a virtual outdoor gallery of colorful words and cartoon-like pictures as we approach Union Station. Wherever I go, graffiti reminds me of home and the notion that art cannot be contained. It can only be expressed.

Early on, I exhibited a talent for excessive art silliness, sketching rabbits with too-large ears and dogs with tongues spastically protruding from their snouts. In grade school, kids sat near me to see what ridiculousness my "art" would render next. Teachers did not appreciate this talent. That familiar clenched jaw look meant I should return to reading about the anti-climactic adventures of Dick and Jane (yawn and stare out the window as the two dreary protagonists played ball with Spot and visited a "real" farm).

Then in ninth grade, my first French class artistically liberated me. I don't recall being introduced to Claude Monet while taking this class with a jet-haired Greek woman named Miss Stamatelos, unless his work graced her disheveled bulletin board. But Miss Stamatelos demanded that I speak French every day and hang onto her every utterance, lest she would lob a chalkboard eraser in my direction. Even under such duress, I managed to create my first work of notable art in her class.

My first English-to-French publication boasted a unique use of construction paper tied together with chunky yellow yarn. Various hues of paper differentiated sections of the rough-hewn booklet. Red and orange pages depicted fashion items clipped from magazines, and captions written in English and French described the pictures. Brown and green paper featured things in nature, such as African elephants and roses, such opposites oddly paired together for no particular reason.

My attempt at a French picture book might not have impressed the likes of Claude Monet, but it did garner third-prize in the Arts and Sciences Fair at Edgar A. Guest Junior High. I never claimed my prize. When the eraser whizzed by my head as Miss Stamatelos announced we had a winner in our midst, I thought the chalk obliterator was intended for someone else's noggin, so someone else must have won. Momentarily, I relished the idea that she missed and felt a small victory.

Then, while looking squarely into my eyes, she angrily growled through her teeth, "Someone in our class won third prize. And had she been at the fair, would have received a ribbon."

There was a ribbon? I didn't know she entered my floppy paged book of many colors. She had suggested my parents take me to the fair, but I was never sure why. I probably found my way to a street baseball game after school on fair day; playing in the street let us dodge cars and thumb our noses at drivers. Mom might have been chasing my cute but active six-year-old sister. And Dad worked 16-hour days at his tool-and-die business. He often ate a plate of eggs for dinner while watching the 11 o'clock news. I doubted he had time.

That same school year, I also took perspective drawing. The art teacher was a tall, fragile-looking man with a four o'clock shadow at eight o'clock in the morning. He expressed intense concern for every pottery ashtray that exploded in his kiln. "You've got to get the air out," he dramatically tsk-tsk'd every time he opened the kiln to find another ashtray fired to smithereens. It was like he had found a dead body. I'm positive this fear of killing ashtrays is what has kept me from pursuing fine arts all these years.

I kept drawing, though. I mean, how much damage could I do with a pencil? Despondent from the pottery we demolished, the same lanky and muttering art teacher who tried to teach us the joys of ashtray sculpture shuffled around the room, looking for pieces of fruit, bottles, boxes, anything that had shape or form. With these everyday items, he constructed the ugliest possible still-lifes. Nothing I drew could improve his blasé compositions. Still, an apple never looked bigger than a bucket or a wine bottle, and for that, I thank him.

It was a middle-school drafting teacher, however, who finally nixed my artistic ambitions. The engineer-turned-instructor hovered like a hornet. We waited for his stinging comments, disappointed hum and accompanying head-shake to show his dislike. I'm convinced that's why people don't sit down and draft. You stand up at attention, waiting for the buzz that surely comes to tell you what you did wrong.

"You're not designing a skyscraper, for God's sake. Just keep the lines smooth and straight," he reminded. "Twirl your pencil. That's it, twirl your pencil so it stays sharp as you run it along the ruler."

I can still draw a straight line, while sharpening a pencil at a ruler blade, with the best of them.

Claude Monet and Impressionism were not yet familiar to me when I reached high school. But like Dorothy searching for her Emerald City, I sought a colorized and fantastical world beyond the rainbows that arched even over the lunch-bucket city of Roseville from time to time. I began craving "the good things."

* * *

By the time I could drive, I couldn't wait to get away from my hometown. Residential homes were tucked in between industrial "parks," a strange reference considering the environmental pollution these businesses created when shaping metal and plastic into parts that fed hungry assembly lines. During the Sixties and Seventies, mom-and-pop businesses (my mother's and father's included) cropped up near such suburbs, so people could escape man-eating factories and work minutes from home in smaller spin-offs of the Big Three automotive factories.

In our neighborhood, homes were built in a few basic designs, the only distinction between them the color of the brick—red, gray, yellow-ish, or pink. There was a nurturing claustrophobia to this cookie-cutter sameness. Once I'd seen a few of my friends' homes, I had seen them all. Most suburbanites were living the dream just by owning one, but it wasn't my dream. I lacked the "go industrial" gene and developed a healthy disrespect for the people who worked with metal and machines just to pay a mortgage. My mother claimed, "You always thought you were better than the rest of us." The truth was that terms like Luxury Sedans, Captains of Industry, and Gross National Product meant nothing to me. I was a kid, and these concepts were too huge for my pea brain.

To escape, I took teenage loner trips in my first car, a dented and dinged Pontiac Bonneville that was more like a boat on wheels. I'd drive to Lexington, a town situated on a stretch of beach located an hour north of Detroit and its suburbs. There I sat on the dock, sketched pictures of driftwood and wrote terrible poetry. "Earthy claws pulling at me" may have reflected my perceptions, but no one wanted to read about mental and emotional stagnation. My English teacher was torn between entering this melodramatic poem in a newspaper-sponsored contest and sending me to the one-and-only school counselor (after all, it was the Seventies, and not everybody had his or her designated psychologist yet). "Is everything okay with you?" this chronically hyperactive teacher worried, as if I had contemplated suicide.

I only tried to express how sometimes other people's expectations run counter to those we have for ourselves, I assured her. If I had to explain the "claws" reference today, I'd say it's like a Pterodactyl snatching up a player in a virtual reality game; other people's ideas swoop down from nowhere and dictate, "This is what you must learn in school" and "You will work as a bookkeeper or a corporate secretary." I'd rather have been carried off by a giant Pterodactyl to The Lost World than to work in a dead-end automotive-related job.

My parents complained that my head was always "in the clouds." Writing and drawing pictures, they explained, would not make me a living.

There were lots of people—an entire middle class—making plenty of money at the auto companies back then. It was true. But no one saw the people behind the scenes of slick designs trotted out with a buxom blond on the hood at auto shows. A good friend of mine delivered blueprints between Chrysler plants on the midnight shift. For this, she received $25 an hour, discounts on a vehicle necessary to do her job, and she dropped out of school. My boyfriend drove a truck delivering many-ton machine parts that would be installed on automotive assembly lines. I took a job encoding the magnetic strips of credit cards at Manufacturer's Bank. I qualified because of my rapid typing skill.

Living the blue-collar life meant partying with likewise career-stunted friends. Lost weekends featured beer, wine, marijuana, large quantities of Doritos and rock music amped up to room-shaking levels to erase memories of the work week ... machines stamping parts, saws buzzing through metal, phones ringing endless orders for parts, and other annoyingly repetitive sounds programming our brains. Anesthetized by drugs and alcohol, card games helped us stay giddy and coherent enough to drive home.

As an alternative to these same-old-thing weekends, another escape from the ho-hum might include "cruising" Jefferson Avenue, a road that sidled the Detroit River and led out of the city and into affluent suburbs called "The Pointes." The e-ending evoked what was ostentatious and European. After all, the city of Detroit (DAY-TOI) had French beginnings. Automotive money families lived in Grosse Pointe, Grosse Pointe Farms, Grosse Pointe Park and Grosse Pointe Shores—Ford and other big auto money names.

Art must have covered the walls of their mansions, some with servants' cottages bigger than my family's ranch home, but I never saw any of it. Each monolithic home sat back from the lakeshore drive, and front yards warded off trespassers with privet hedges and brick-and-mortar walls. For all the blandness outside, I imagined glorious profusions of color and artful embellishments inside.

Jefferson Avenue found fame in Clint Eastwood's 2008 movie Gran Torino. In the film, A Hmong boy, who is bequeathed the dead hero's prized vehicle, tools down the lakeshore as if he has finally realized success by possessing the classic car. Seeing the movie brought back memories of countless rides with my nose pressed against a friend's used-car window to see what rich people had that I did not: gardeners, elbow-rubbing cocktail parties and "No Through Traffic" signs. We could look, but only from a distance. I wanted to touch and possess this lifestyle.

* * *

The first time I cruised, my foxy friend Patty wore enough cheap perfume to drown anyone within several yards. She smelled clean and fresh, like tropical fruit. We were hormonal and looking for boys to notice us. But if I was vanilla—and I might have been with a cherry on top my only flavor enhancer—Patty was pineapple-mango surprise. Boys could not help but notice her, which was one of the reasons I put up with her self-indulgence and the fact that she borrowed my clothes and looked better in them than I did. She wiggled that beautifully sleek and tanned body. Her skin shone like luminescent silk. And her thick auburn hair swung this-way-and-that when she walked. She was my ticket out of the boredom. That night, one look at Patty's mischievous smile told me to hang on tight for the carnival ride that would follow.

She had found an older boy to drive us down Jefferson. She sat in the front seat of the beat-up but clean Dodge Dart with the driver, who treated us girls like we were equals, even if I was sequestered into the back seat when Patty winked in John's direction and then pushed the seat down and ushered me next to a nameless boy who raised his hand to wave me in rather than to look at me. I didn't have Patty's sheen, scent, and cosmetics acumen. The back-seat passenger made that clear by ignoring me.

If my so-called date that night had a name, it didn't matter. When we hit Jefferson, a Midwestern Camelot rushed by the car window, and nothing and nobody else mattered. The moon shone on the water, glistening tiny waves and ripples and whitening the foam at the shoreline. It didn't seem fair that Pointes people had more stars than those hovering over my postage-stamp backyard. Homes didn't have a single porch light like the one Dad left on until I got home; their closely clipped bushes, topiary trees, and outdoor objets d'art had special lighting to showcase the grounds. I squinted at well-lit cavernous rooms inside, trying to see people eating canapés or sipping champagne.

Patty jolted me back from a dreamer's fog. There was that glint again. "Take off your shirt. C'mon, take it off right now. Do it with me, please," she begged, while jerking up her shirt until her belly showed. She stopped below the bra line. "C'mon. Ready?"

I looked at her near-perfect body and imagined perky breasts ready to spring out. I had more of everything under my shirt and was not sure it would be fully appreciated.

The no-name boy next to me smiled for the first time, as if to say, Go ahead. Maybe the evening won't be a complete loss. Then he dared me. "Do it. What, you afraid?"

Meantime, the driver glanced over his shoulder. He wore a half-smile because he knew Patty would do it, but would I? He seemed to be waiting more for me to disrobe as if he knew it was my first time exposing my everything. He didn't want to miss my corruption.

"Okay," I said, prodding Patty along. Poising my hands at my shirt's hem as if ready to yank it off, I said, "Let's go."

"All right. Ready, set ... one, two, three," said Patty, whose spirited laugh filled the car. Her stark white bra turned neon in the darkness. Half-naked, she bopped to the Beach Boys on the radio and risked getting a ticket for indecent exposure. She waved her shirt out the window and howled like that stiff-collared neighborhood probably never heard before. "Good, good, good, good vibrations," she defiantly sang as loudly as she could.

My lips were not moving, but I sang every word with her.

"You didn't take yours off," Patty said when the song stopped and she quit bouncing around the front seat. But she didn't really care. The attention had been hers, and she made us all feel free for a minute.

Ironically, the boy in the front seat with Patty became my first husband when I was one month shy of eighteen. The marriage would last a whopping three years—one of those "girl has first kiss and thinks it's love" things. We thought we knew love; we only knew the basest sensations and vibrations. Apparently, his over-the-shoulder look had noted how I would not undress before strangers, only him. But John did ... undress in front of strangers, that is. Too many of them. I played demure wife to his cavalier, rock-star persona until I could not anymore. Did I mention he was desperately good-looking in a hippie sort of way?

I recently learned the meaning of regret. It is not the mistakes I made, such as marrying a high-school fling who made my hormonal motor whir. I don't regret the first and only time I drank whiskey, which resulted in spending the night using the toilet rim as a life preserver. John sweetly covered my shoulders with a bath towel, said good-night and left me there.

I regret not taking off my shirt that first night I cruised Jefferson with Patty, John and Whoever He Was. Not doing so has led to a more conventional life. I cared too much about the disappointment in my mother's eyes when I came in late and about dispelling the rumors sure to fly at school the following Monday. I wish John would have taken me home that night instead of Patty, never to take her out again because he knew he couldn't tame her. She was a fox or a tiger, wild and feline. Instead, I was a cocker spaniel, eager to please and obey. Easy prey.

Given another chance, I'd do things differently. If I could go back, I'd let my spirit soar and proudly flash my freak flags in a single life-affirming Mardi gras moment.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE Color of the Sunsetby MARIE MASTERS Copyright © 2012 by Marie Masters. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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