Moon Roof

The memorial took place the second weekend in March, although the actual anniversary fell on a Wednesday. Nine people showed up, which wasn’t a lot when you thought about how big Sonia’s circle had been. All the Beautiful People, the members of her art collective, her coop gallery, her classmates from Pratt — where were they?

Louisa’s brother came over early that morning, and together they took down everything on Louisa's living room walls. It was a big, bright room, the rear wall dominated by multi-paned windows that gave onto the backyard cityscape of Brooklyn, the edge of the blue sky jigsawed by brownstone rooflines, deck railings, wooden water towers and sycamore branches that bent like the elbows of giants. Sonia'd had a daily practice of doing five-minute watercolor sketches of the view from that room in a bound book. You could see seasons pass, when you flipped the pages. She’d said the windows were a painting that changed with the season and the time of day.

Once the walls of the living room were bare, the view out the windows seemed even more vivid, but Louisa wasn’t in the mood for looking at reality. She unzipped the big portfolio Victor had found the previous spring in a disused flat file at the back of a supply room at Pratt. Victor was teaching there, now. It was strange to think how the rest of them had moved ahead in time, gone from students to teachers or employees, but Sonia never even graduated. The file contained ten of the massive Moon & Sky drawings Sonia made for her MFA thesis show, an event that never happened. The graphite on the rag paper was so black it sucked the light right out of you. Sonia's mother had taken the eleventh drawing back to Florida with her, after she came to Brooklyn to collect the body. Sonia’d just finished that one, and it was up on her easel in their living room, basking in the starlight from the row of multi-paned windows, the night Sonia died. The twelfth drawing had existed only in Sonia's mind, unless you counted a rough sketch in one of her little black notebooks.

They’d asked around at Pratt about the other pictures, but the Art Department chair had no idea and told Victor they generally discarded abandoned student work. It wasn’t till a year later, when he got the adjunct job teaching undergrads Intro to Color Theory, that he’d happened upon the flat file. For the past eleven months, the portfolio had been living under Sonia’s old bed, along with a dusty Monopoly game whose box was also too large to fit on any shelf. Some nights, Louisa went into Sonia's room and looked at the drawings. It helped distract her from the images that flashed sporadically through her mind: Sonia’s body in that catsuit on that rusty stretcher only partly covered by the EMTs’ white sheet, a knife in a fist, a forearm raised, a yellowed eye white, the black hole of Sonia's open throat, the blue and tan tiles of the hallway flooded with red.

"I'm so glad we have the drawings," Louisa said to her brother. "It's almost like she'll be here."

They raised the side of the big, black Naugahyde portfolio, revealing the top image. Sonia had juxtaposed a dark expanse of star-speckled space against a bright lunar surface.

"Yeah, I'm just happy I found them," said Vic. And then, "Did she ever tell you she was planning to do the moonscapes in oil at first?"

"What?" said Louisa.

She couldn't imagine that bright, dry dust, those craters, rendered in glistening pigment. Sonia’d been obsessed with graphite ever since the waiting room at Hazelden, where she’d stumbled on an article about it in the journal Science. She could go on ad nauseam about how carbon, along with oxygen, was created by the death of the universe's first stars, setting the eventual stage for life, 13 billion years later. The opening section of the Artist's Statement for her thesis was all about graphite, the crystalline and most stable form of carbon, and how it represented rebirth because of its origins, communication because of its use in pencils, and resiliency, which was why they used it in fishing rods and tennis racquets. Louisa had proofread every draft. She'd been living with Sonia the entire time she was in art school, and even if Victor had been taking classes with her, Louisa was certain he was wrong. Sonia had long since given up any interest in oil paint by then.

"Yeah," said Victor. "I remember encouraging her to try using pencils instead of paints, when she started at Pratt. I'd say it was the right choice."

Louisa turned away, picked up her hammer and banged a three-inch nail into the plaster. Then another, a foot further down. She thought about the day Sonia told her she’d gotten into Pratt. Louisa had cringed inwardly, not wanting to lose her again. Vic had been part of Sonia’s problem. But she made herself shut up and just hugged Sonia. Then Sonia went to Pratt and stayed clean the whole time and even brushed off Victor’s inevitable advances. She’d managed to be just his friend — both their friends.

Vic attached several clips to each drawing. They had to use every inch of wall and even covered the bookshelves, but they hung all ten drawings. When they were up, Louisa stood in the middle of the room and turned slowly in place. The effect was eerie. She felt like an astronaut on a spacewalk.

Around six, the doorbell started ringing.

They didn't have any sort of formal agenda. Everyone caught up with each other and looked at the pictures. Eventually, Victor tapped a spoon on his glass, the room quieted, and he told how the story of how Sonia got dragged out of MoMA and arrested for giving a guerrilla docent tour that deconstructed the museum's collection, revealing its racist, sexist and elitist underpinnings. One old friend described the spring Sonia’d raked up a trash bag full of condoms, syringes and crack vials from the yard of the abandoned building on their block and planted it with dozens of glowing white impatiens. Another remembered they way she could dance for hours without pause. When Louisa stood up, she was planning to tell a story that would illustrate the keenness of Sonia's eye, her uncanny luck, and her generosity.

The previous fall, Sonia'd bought an old pewter mug for $1.50 at a church thrift shop one weekend afternoon, intending to use it for her pencils. When she got it home and looked more closely, it seemed too fine and heavy to be nothing. She'd stuck it in her backpack, and she and Louisa walked down to the big antique shop on Atlantic Avenue.

"No, this isn’t anything special," said the dealer, looking at the bottom through a loop. But then, "Well … gimme a sec." He went into the back room and came out with an enormous, frayed tome, which he flipped through for several minutes. Finally, he looked up.

"It's a Meyer Meyers.”

"What’s a Meyer Meyers?" asked Sonia.

"He was just the Jewish Paul Revere. I wouldn't even know how to find the right buyer for that piece."

As Louisa stood there in the apartment they'd shared, among Sonia’s drawings, in the middle of outer space, she realized she couldn't do it. She couldn't tell a funny story that would typify her dead friend. How could any single story sum up a life? What was the point of even trying? So she kept it to herself how the antiques dealer had referred them to Sotheby's, how a private collector outbid the Jewish Museum, how Sonia kept $20,000 to pay off her student loans but gave the bulk of the proceeds to the homeless outreach program of the church where she bought the cup.

"People," said Louisa, "by Yevgeny Yevtushenko." It had been rattling around in her brain for weeks. It was all she had. "No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet."

She got all the way to the end before she started crying.

At 8:00 p.m., they all walked down to the Promenade, where the city's lights sparked across the river, and lit twenty-five votive candles in tall glass jars, one for each year of Sonia's life, with the idea they'd gutter out around dawn. It was probably against the law to leave the flames untended, but who cared?

Back at the apartment, Louisa found a mixed tape of Sonia's with everything from Led Zeppelin to the Violent Femmes, the Sugar Hill Gang to Madonna, and they turned it up, loud. Alice was the first to start dancing. Then Louisa joined in. By the time Chaka Khan asked, "Won't you tell me what you wanna do," everyone was pulsing and undulating. Their eyes glazed over. It was about the rhythm, the memories of other nights, the fact that they were still alive, even if Sonia was dead. Their sweat heated the room, and they threw the window sashes high, but it wasn't enough, so Louisa climbed the red fire ladder in the hall and opened the hatch to the roof. The moon hung fat in the square of sky above it, like another one of Sonia's paintings, neither full nor half, somewhere in between. Louisa felt the cool air draft in with the moonlight, and it seemed like a message from Sonia: Let's dance.