52 Drafts: 34

(This story will be rewritten & reworked 52 times)

THE EYES OF THE BEHOLDER

“I’m a noble hill!” the millionaire drunkenly barked in his face, manicured fingers tugging on the lapel of his coat. All Mike Dryden could do was stare back into the dark beady eyes and try to catch his breath.

Earlier that night Dryden stood alone on the ferry deck. Lake Michigan was restless, and the stars were hidden behind clouds. Almost as dark as his mood. It had been six months since he graduated from the Chicago Art Institute, and even though he’d done a commission here and there, none of the patrons were pleased enough to recommend him. His career as a portraitist was off to a rocky start. And with his bank account nearing the balance minimum, his career as an artist was possibly grounded before he gave in and got a job at a frame shop. This, he figured, was his last ditch attempt: move to Upper Michigan and paint landscapes. It’d give him a break from faces and be easier to sell at the art fairs that clogged midwestern community calendars every spring and summer.

The door to the dining cabin creaked open. Dryden shuddered. He’d painted a family of Hungarian tourists while waiting for the ferry to show up, and he hoped they weren’t coming to check his progress. He never liked to make small talk before, during, or after the transaction. He just wanted the money for his art, and then to never see them again. He needed this commission to go well. And he needed the money.

It wasn’t the Hungarians. A drunk, disheveled man waltzed his way to the railing. There was no moon, and his upturned collar and wild hair kept the yellow deck lights from revealing who it was. The man grabbed the railing and leaned over the side. Dryden flinched, waiting for the stranger to vomit, but the man just leaned over the edge like he was looking for something out on the water.

Then he was leaning over too far, and Dryden fought the urge to reach out and pull him back onto the deck.

“Maybe you shouldn’t lean out so far,” Dryden said.

Startled, the drunk turned to face him. “Oh yeah? Why should I?”

“I think the water’s pretty cold.”

“You a swimmer?” the drunk slurred back at him.

“No. I’m an artist.”

“Oh yeah? Well I’m a millionaire. My mom hired Michael Phelps’ coach to teach me how to swim. Besides, I go over and they’ll turn this ferry around to fish me back out again. You’re an artist?”

The man swung back onto the deck and into the yellow sodium lights of the ferry and peered at Dryden with two tiny eyes set close together, pulling his face into a pinched look. Then Dryden know who it was. John Beaufort, a socialite known for doing nothing and still having two million followers on Twitter.

“Your mouth is hanging open, but nothing’s coming out,” Beaufort slurred at him. “Does that mean you’re a mime?”

“Yeah. I’m a painter. I paint sublime landscapes,” Dryden said, trying to impress.

“Oh! Fancy!” Beaufort shouted out over the grey water. He hiccuped. “You should paint me.”

The ferry pitched and rolled. Dryden and Beaufort ducked away from the cold spray.

“I paint landscapes,” Dryden said, gritting his teeth against a blast of spray.

“Pretend my face,” Beaufort said, boots sliding on the wet wood, “is a noble hill.”

Beaufort twisted and turned, fumbled with his coat. “I have ten grand in here. Show me something you’ve painted and I’ll hire you, and the ten grand is yours.”

Dryden trembled. He closed his eyes, he saw the number burning bright: $10,000. He thought about what it’d be like to read that number on his bank statement, on the ATM screen. Beaufort pulled out a dirty handkerchief, a sleek new cellphone Dryden had never even seen an ad for, and a zippo. And then out of an inner pocket he pulled out a lump of greasy bills. Hundred dollar bills.

“Ok,” Dryden said, suddenly out of breath.

“Not so fast. Let’s see some paintings. Show me you’re an artist and not a con artist.”

Dryden’s face drained pale.

“I have a painting with me, but I don’t want you to think I couldn’t do your portrait justice.”

“So you phoned it in for someone else?”

The ferry pitched into another trough, deeper than before. “Ok, the painting’s in my locker.”

In the hold of the ferry, Dryden pulled the portrait of the Hungarians out of a wide locker. He didn’t look at it. He couldn’t. He just whispered “ten grand” over and over while he pulled the oil cloth off the canvas and held it up for inspection in the light of the bare bulb beating down.

Beaufort’s small, dark eyes jumped from the painting to Dryden and back to the painting. He lips twisted in one direction, then the other. He squinted deeper into it, then glared right through it and at Dryden with a look Dryden hadn’t seen since art school. A familiar panic crawled up Dryden’s back.

What is it that makes an artist successful? Is it their craft or choice of subject? And can one or the other part of that equation decide their future success? Dryden’s professors all agreed that he was a brilliant artist, but only in technique. None of their other students grasped color and value and shading like he did. It was like he was born with a complete understanding of chiaroscuro. They’d put an apple in front of him, and he’d paint the apple so perfectly, that he planted seeds of doubt in their minds about their long-held post-modernist ideas about platonic ideals and hypostasis. But they also knew his paintings would never end up in a museum, because he didn’t have an eye for a subject. Given the option of a bowl of fruit, he’d pick the lease aesthetically appealing banana, bruised and misshapen.

Dryden looked down at his painting of the Hungarians. It was photographic in its flawlessness. He did it one attribute at a time, starting with an ear, and then blending it into the jawline and misshapen lips, wandering up to the left eye before following the thick unibrow over to the right eye, down to the swollen cheek and then to the awkward nose, jumping to the other ear and then the muddle of hair and rings of the neck in a grotesque patchwork of flesh, their jowls hung loosely on their chin bones, their ears flapped unflatteringly. All of it lovingly capture in exquisite brushwork. Don’t blame him, blame God. This, Dryden would argue, is exactly what they looked like. He painted people, not their vanity.

Unfortunately, beauty is in the eye of the beholder of the pocketbook. Beaufort he shook his head like a drunk shaking off a painful memory, the metal stairs clanging as he climbed back up to the bar.

He didn’t even look him in the eye, Dryden thought as he recovered the painting and slid it back into the locker. It’s always about the eyes. When you run into a stranger and you know instinctively you can trust them, be honest, it’s because of the eyes. When you see someone who reminds you of someone you used to know, it’s because of the eyes. When you want to let someone know something but don’t want to say anything, you use your eyes. They’re the windows to the soul, they’re the poker player’s tell, they’re the dead giveaway. His eyes burned on the edge of tears.

Slowly he dragged his heavy feet up back up the metal stairs to the dining cabin. Through the windows he could see the clouds had cleared in the night sky. Passengers wandered out on the deck in the star spangled night, leaving the bar half empty. Beaufort stood at the bar, sipping a cocktail. Dryden slipped into a back table.

They say beautiful faces are all about symmetry. But if you have a perfectly symmetrical faces but crossed eyes, would you be considered beautiful? What if you had the most compelling blue eyes, like the Hungarian family? They were the color of the Caribbean on those impossible-to-find-but-in-a-magazine tropical beaches. Yes, they were totally off center, off kilter, off the grid of each other, and couched in an awkward pillow of flesh. It was disconcerting, but from the beginning he couldn’t look away because they were so blue, so hypnotic.

The door to the cabin slide open with a cold blast and the Hungarian family came in. Their faces blotchy, their eyes wild and wide and noticeably crossed, they spied Dryden smiled and waved. Dryden sheepishly smiled back.

Then he saw Beaufort, squeezing his drink until his knuckles paled. He stood straight up, suddenly looking as tall and elegant as his pedigree might suggest. The millionaire slammed the glass against the wood deck floor, his eyes as big as saucers. Dryden’s hands trembled. Beaufort tripped on a chair, tumbled over another into Dryden’s table, pressing the money against his dark coat.

“I see it! I see it! Paint me! Paint me! I’m a noble hill!”