He did not feel particularly talented when it came to love. In fact, Henry’s aptitude for anything, including studies at his college, showed little promise either. During the first three years, he drifted between majors, first genetics, then public health, before that fell apart too. He attended classes in art on the side, sitting in the back of the lecture hall where he wrote down the names of famous painters, people far older than him and long gone.
It was not exactly Henry who introduced his grandfather to Rothko’s paintings. The art book, crammed with over two hundred pages on analysis and prints of the American painter’s works, was left gathering dust on the kitchen dining table. His grandfather had become so enamored with the colors and unique shapes of the paintings that he took it with him to the nursing home.
The nursing home was situated in the middle of New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Henry happened to attend college at Rutgers. The visits were often peaceful before the evening set. The windows would be open in the springtime, and the Raritan River just outside traveled all the way south to Princeton. His grandfather would often comment on the smell of the river, carrying notes of honeysuckle and barbecue smoke from the neighboring parks.
The Rothko book sat on the small wooden table that all nursing home residents received, often with a pile of medications in the middle.
The paintings, composed entirely of blocks of color, were almost without a nation. They were simply alive, vibrant with brushstrokes so densely packed that it could have been colored by a printer. Henry’s grandfather was particularly entranced by Red On Pink On Pink, which had one section filled with a dull and intense color of red.
“I like this one,” his grandfather said in Chinese. “This one especially, I keep going back to.” He would point with his finger right onto the page. Henry would later look up on his laptop the exact shade of red— vermillion.
Henry would be curious about this choice, Rothko’s paintings ranged widely in the use of red, there were often bright shades like crimson, or darker and more severe forms, such as maroon. Rothko, who was more than thirty years his grandfather’s senior. Rothko, whose father had fled Russia due to the Cossacks targeting the Jewish.
Henry’s grandfather had stayed exactly in the same spot during the Cultural Revolution. Whatever symptoms Mao had brought to the country as well as the city of Nanning, his grandfather took on. He would assure his grandson that the vermillion had not much to do with the color of flags, or the body.
“It’s just a color,” he said in Chinese, “that I can keep looking at without my eyes hurting.” His grandfather laughed again. “Colors like blue or yellow, they make me feel too slow. Sometimes blue even makes me sad. But this color,” he indicated the vermillion, “it is calm, but strong. I feel like this color.”
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Henry’s grandfather did not seem especially lonely. Meanwhile, to avoid thinking about his failing grades, Henry spent time away, going on dates on the Raritan river bank or the Zimmerli Art Museum with Laurie.
Laurie, who did not go to Rutgers but had taken a year off to take night school classes in neighboring New York City. She was taking on a number of artistic disciplines from sculpting to painting to printmaking. Laurie would often list out artists that Henry had never heard of. Ana Mendieta, Carolee Schneemann. He would read about them later on his own.
“These days, it’s not like people are painting old wooden ships. Artists today can discuss their personality, their spirit.” Laurie said one day in the Zimmerli, in front of the Soviet art exhibit.
He thought of the many talents she possessed within her hand alone, and how they could work expertly with clay or bronze, blue paint or yellow paint and perhaps even vermillion.
Laurie told him about her plans after graduation. Her big dreams, including her own apartment, and an amount of savings before she turned thirty. She wanted to fly to Europe and attend graduate school in Germany, or work at a gallery in Eastern Europe. Meanwhile, Henry had no answer to his professors why he had skipped class for two weeks straight. He could not even see beyond his homework assignments.
When she asked him if he’d ever consider graduate school, his face turned gray. The topic faded away as they went on more walks along the rivers and beaches in New Jersey. He was too afraid to ask about the future. Flunking in his many classes of different topics, Henry felt he only knew how to start but not continue.
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Upon request, Henry’s mother started to bring his grandfather painting supplies. The paintbrushes stuck out proudly after the packaging was unwrapped. There were also the four-foot tall canvases, built from inexpensive pine so that several could be bought at a time.
Of course, there was also the red and vermillion paint, which was brought in either tubes or buckets, depending on which was for sale in different art stores.
Henry’s grandfather had set up the easel near the center of the living room, where a large tan cloth was laid out to protect the floor. The practice was to make a new painting every week, emulating Rothko.
While Henry had assumed the entire art book was to be studied, he quickly realized that his grandfather would paint the same work by Rothko every time, Red On Pink On Pink. For months, he watched as his grandfather create the same painting over and over again, with the borders left white and unattended as a square of vermillion formed.
Before long, the brushes no longer kept their hairs white, as they were continually dipped into reds. Some darkened into carmine when left out in the sun for too long unattended.
Henry asked his grandfather about the repetition of the painting. His grandfather smiled.
“Why would I want to paint anything else?”
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Even in a wheelchair, his grandfather found ways to soothe Henry. Before the end of every visit, he would take his paintbrush and tap it onto Henry’s hand, leaving a small dot of vermillion.
“It’s for good luck,” his grandfather said. Henry would be careful washing his hand the next day, making sure not to smudge it.
Laurie would laugh about the vermillion dot on Henry’s hand whenever she saw it. Although she’d ask if she’d ever be able to meet his grandfather and see the paintings Henry talked occasionally about, he avoided the topic.
It made him nervous for her to meet his family. It would be an act of commitment, and they had not talked about their relationship often. Despite how often he switched his majors in school, he was afraid of changing what he had with Laurie. He simply wanted to spend time going on dates with her and hearing about her life in New York a little bit longer.
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During the days his grandfather lived with the rest of the family, he would watch the clouds above the New Jersey sky with his wife, Henry’s grandmother. They would watch the sky turn light orange from the setting sun as a plane above flew to either LaGuardia or Newark.
They had both been meteorologists during their days working, before the mandatory retirement that came to all workers in China over a certain age.
Henry’s grandmother, who was in better health, would later return to China alone. His grandfather, with the broken hip, would video call his wife during the evenings and mornings. The phone was always on, and they would often eat breakfast and dinner together, perfectly synchronized. His grandmother would chat alongside her husband as he painted, and he would show her Red On Pink On Pink, pointing out the different hues.
Henry’s grandmother had suffered cataracts in her early sixties, brought on by a severe change in her diabetes. To counter this, his grandfather would explain the darker and light tones within the Rothko paintings, often using complicated Chinese that Henry couldn’t pick up. His grandmother would watch from the laptop screen, smiling as her husband chatted away.
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The summer before Henry entered college, he returned back from a jog to find his grandmother on the family house’s living room floor, writhing in pain. She had suffered a stroke, having laid there holding his grandfather’s hand for thirty minutes. His grandfather was kneeling over her, watching with fear over his eyes.
“Don’t call the hospital. Please,” his grandmother said in Chinese. His grandfather took Henry to the other room, and pleaded for him to call the ambulance.
“I can’t be the one to do it,” he said to his grandson. “It would scare her far too much.”
As Henry called the ambulance, he looked over to see his grandfather holding his grandmother in his arms, cradling her. The two sat on the floor together, her back resting on her husband’s chest.
Henry’s grandfather sang, quietly in her ear, as if it was only the two of them in the world. Henry looked away, shocked by the tenderness and suddenly ashamed. He did not have the courage to look, let alone understand more than what he felt in that moment.
He talked often to Laurie later in college about his grandfather, but never about this. Perhaps he was worried about divulging a private moment. But the truth was, he did not know how to hold another person like that. How many decades, how many hours and years and nights, would it take to be someone like that?
Laurie pointed out one day about the old masters of painting, how they spent their whole lives honing their craft.
Henry, with no end in sight for his degree or any semblance of a career path, could only think of perfection and the long and absolute road it seemed to be.
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The year transitioned into the next, and the winter gave no signs of an early spring. In February, Henry’s grandfather passed away. His cardiovascular issues had gotten worse, and the quick stay in hospice care took him away from the paintings in the nursing home.
“Everything will be okay in heaven,” his grandfather said. The morphine kept the pain away and when the time came it was not Henry but his mother, who would stay by his side.
At the funeral, a larger congregation of family friends were at attendance. A large assortment of letters came from China, from his former meteorology students, writing their condolences.
Henry’s grandmother had been on the phone with his grandfather during the latter’s final days. The phone calls would often count over six hours, before they ended the call to switch devices to prevent the phones from overheating. The two slept at the same time, coordinating time zones.
In the last week, under the hospital’s small fluorescent lamp, the two almost whispered to each other at night. She cried for two days straight after his passing, and Henry’s uncle would sleep on her couch in China, giving Henry frequent updates about her recovery.
They moved the sixteen paintings that his grandfather had created in his time at the nursing home back to the family house. In the bedroom of the house he had previously lived in before he broke his hip, the family placed them on the ground, without frames as he wanted them, and had them face the door.
By then, Laurie and Henry had stopped seeing each other as much. She was preparing for her graduate school applications for overseas study, and Henry failed another round of exams despite the extra time his professors had provided him. He grieved quietly in his room, and when she called him, he ignored her. After a few weeks of missed calls, she seemed to have given up.
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Five years passed, and Henry turned twenty-six by the time he graduated. He stayed in his parent’s house, unable to find a job. He laid in his bed often, imagining being a person filled with energy and vigor.
Henry received a text message one day from Laurie, who had returned to New Jersey after attending an artist’s residency in Germany. They hadn’t spoken in some time after she graduated, flying first to Amsterdam to travel and then London to study painting.
He met her at the local park in Metuchen and they walked around. She told him about Berlin, not commenting on dating at all. They rested on a green park bench, where Laurie sat with her back straight and peeking to her side at Henry. In the distance, ducks in the pond were making sounds as if they were laughing together.
“I was in a crowd full of Russian artists three weeks ago. One man was eighty. He had just finished a completely new series of sculptures, the size of two minivans on top of each other. He couldn’t stop smiling, and I thought about the grandpa you told me about, and those paintings of his.”
Surprised that she remembered, Henry bit his lip to stop it from shaking.
“Have you been traveling?” she asked, carefully and with her eyes lowered.
He suddenly felt only the desire to apologize. That he did not ever get to see Europe for himself, that he was afraid to fly on airplanes these days, having spent so much time alone in his bedroom. Henry had no idea how to tell her that for him, nothing had changed, that he only continued living here in this little spot in America, so far away from all the places she had seen. He felt only the strength of being able to ask one question.
“Do you want to see my grandpa’s paintings, finally? If that’s okay, of course.”
She turned her head to face him, their ears almost touching, smiling in a way that was almost sad.
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It was early in the afternoon when they got to his house, so his parents were away for work and her sister was far away in Tennessee for college. The two went upstairs, alone in the house together. Henry opened the door to his grandfather’s room.
He could feel his hands sweating. He dragged a chair from the corner and set it in the middle of the room, offering it to Laurie. She smiled and said no, instead gazing carefully at one painting and then the next.
Laurie scrunched her eyebrows. “You said he painted this all by himself, with no training?”
“He was a meteorologist.” He said this quickly, as if it were a confession.
She shook her head. “That’s not it. Although that too, sounds difficult.” Laurie pointed towards the details of the color blocks.
“Difficult?”
“These paintings are all vastly different. Each one uses a completely different process. It’s as if sixteen different people painted them. This one here, he must’ve used a wide brush, painted it using only the edges of the brush at times.”
Henry stared at the paintings, quiet.
“This one here, do you see it? He did this one with an extremely thin brush, making super long strokes. You can’t see it easily, because your grandfather did it so many times.”
She put one knee on the ground, resting her elbow on it so her hand could slightly cover her mouth.
“This is the work of someone who’s incredibly dynamic. Most artists develop a pattern or a habit. But he must have deviated from his own process several times over.”
Laurie kept staring, moving her other hand so that she placed her hand in his. One finger rotated on his knuckle as if to assure him.
“It could have been exhausting, but it didn’t sound like it took much out of him. He only got better. You said he did this with a tremor in his hand?
Henry let out a single yes, before swallowing air. His eyebrows were lowered.
“Your grandfather was amazing.” Laurie said. She looked up at him after this from her crouching position, her finger carefully balancing one of the paintings perfectly upright.
Henry blinked in surprise. “That’s a silly thing to say, Laurie,” he said while letting out a little laugh. “I knew that already.”
He thought about the little dot of vermillion that his grandfather would paint on his hand every time he saw him.
Laurie touched his elbow gently as his face relaxed. In the moment, the low sun bathed the room with an orange glow. The shades of red, for a moment, were encased in light.