Fiction About Art

For my Novels About Art class the assignment was to write a short, factual or fictional piece about a painting in the MoMA, and today we took a trip to the MoMA to read our pieces in front of the artwork. Here's mine:

Edward Hopper. Gas. 1940

MoMA, Floor 5, 519

During the spring and late summers from 1937 to 1939, I was hired to drive Ed and Jo Hopper to and from South Truro on Cape Cod and the Wagon Wheels Farm in South Royalton, Vermont. Jo said that Ed often tired himself out of the scenery at the shore and needed to be reminded of the dense green forests of inner America, the golden browns of dry roadside crabgrass, the deep, cyanic blue of a horizonless sky overhead. He also said that people were never themselves at the beach, that they took on personas of vacation, and had trouble capturing them. Similarly, he would get tired of the farm, say that he needed more life outside of the country, what he referred to as "pure color." I got the sense he became fonder of the drives more than anything. On the road, he would sit up front with me, Jo asleep in the back, and take in the drifting landscapes. We would talk and smoke cigarettes, he always groaned about his own aimlessness, feeling like an outsider in life, never able to be or exist within the daily routines of people which attracted him so much. He was drawn to people, workers especially. Back in the city, he would often sit in the barbershop for hours after having his hair cut, just listening, watching the barber; during the morning rush hour he would ride the subway to the end of the line and back, taking notes of the suits the businessmen wore and how the secretaries did their hair. This was before Nighthawks, when most of his watercolors hardly had any people in them, he hadn't yet been able to project that sense of alienation out onto the canvas, hadn't yet been able to step back and view himself from the distance of an observer.

            On those drives to and from the coast, we often stopped for gas. My '35 Blue Streak started to putter out about every hundred miles, so we'd end up stopping at a roadside pump station two to three times each trip. Ed would always fawn over what he called the fantastic glow of the future, the way the illuminated pump signs were like dim stars against a twilight-softened sky, how the clean light of the station house reached out into the lot like an invitation. To Ed, color wasn't just mood but a drama for our attention, and that the poppy reds of the pump stalls with their sleek chrome detailing and the comforting greens and grays of the sale racks all made us, the consumer, take on a sort of inspired power, that not only were we fueling up our car, but our sense within this driving economy, that taking part in the role of industry gave us a sense of belonging. Ed once said, it was in the late hours, in the remote rural stations, when the lots were desolate and not a single car would pass that we could catch a glimpse of the other side of this belonging, the loneliness inside of capitalism.

            "The loneliness?" I asked

            "Of a gas attendant with no car to gas," he said.