#### The Tube
The painting is in a closet on the third floor of a building that has never been in a newspaper. It stands in a tube I paid too much for, wrapped in paper that is supposed to be kinder than air. Until last week I had not opened the paper in three years. I did not need to. I can see the harbor without the canvas.
The water is the color of a bruise that has decided to stay. There is a breakwater, a dark line that does not quite meet the left edge. There is a boat that has already lost the argument with the weather. The sky is doing most of the work: a dirty pewter, the rain coming sideways as if the sea had a wrist. A warehouse wall the color of wet bread. No figures, or one, depending on the hour I remember it. I have spent seven years disagreeing with myself about the figure.
It is small. That is the first true thing. Fifty-one by sixty-six centimeters, oil on a linen that was lined once in a century when lining was a kind of optimism. Small enough to carry. I carried it. The civic collection that owned it called it the best thing they had, which in a regional gallery with a leaky skylight and a board that still argues about Sunday hours is not a small sentence. The papers, after, said fifty million. Fifty million is a number that happens to a painting when a city is embarrassed and an insurer is asked to perform seriousness. In a clean room, with paddles and two people who wanted a harbor, it might have been another number. I do not live in a clean room. I live with the newspaper.
I used to say Luxembourg. I said it in a hotel bar to a dealer who had already decided I was a type, because the Grand Duchy sounds like a sentence a serious person would finish. I rented a climate locker there for fourteen months. I have the invoices in a folder Catherine has asked me not to keep and that I have kept anyway. Nothing of mine ever went through that door. The locker was a story I told so the closet would sound like a temporary arrangement. It was not. It is not. I am writing this in the rented room, in a city that extradites, which is most cities. There is a radiator that ticks. There is a light well the color of old tea. There is a closet, and in the closet a tube, and in the tube a harbor that cannot go to a sale any more than I can go back to being the man who only wrote condition reports. The tube is a paperweight on that life.