Painting the Nude
There the thing stands, like some obscene mannequin, all angular limbs and jumbled geometries. I haven’t brought myself to taking that sheet away; to facing what I’ve spent all these months painting in the dark of my room. Only the erect legs of the easel remain visible beneath the paisley bed covers, and the hands-on-hips confidence of the thing makes it look like an actor posing before delivering another line. She stands on the canvas beneath, unthinking, as I shudder.
How long have I been in this box room with this eyeless thing leering at me? A few months, a year, maybe? Sleep comes whenever I lose consciousness and though I eat on occasion, I can feel my ribs whenever I give my chest a quick scratch. The brushes cast tall, oblique shadows that lurch strangely against the wall damp, and the taut smell of solvents has permeated everything I own: the beaten mattress on the floor, the thinly humming light bulb, the pores of my goose-flesh skin.
I pull off the sheet and suddenly she’s standing naked there in the room with me, every inch of her tense and real. I have no photographs, no references to work from, but I’ve known where to place each microscopic feature: The centipede scar crawling up her hip, those nibbles on the anaemic fingernails, the pointed hollow form of her skull. I know every muscle and hair of her body, the weight and lustre of her cool flesh.
It’s just… the face. Somehow it seems as though it’s formed into an almost indistinguishable sneer, the eyes contemptuous under thin lids and the lips turned up at the edges in an air of mockery. There is hate there, in so innocent and calm a face that it makes me ill. My belly sinks as the whine of the electric light bulb throbs louder and louder in my ears. The walls fall away in sluggish sloughs to darkness and I see myself step back, aghast, and fall into a wretched, unconscious heap on the crumpled mattress.
I met her on one of those nights when the sky fractures like glass with cracks of thunder. I got caught in the rain as I was heading home, so I slipped into an alleyway that I’d never noticed and found myself descending some stone steps to a bar, weakly advertised in neon as ‘Järvi’. Shaking off the cold, I ordered a drink from a terse barman wearing a black moustache who seemed to take great pleasure in the rain water dripping off of my nose. The place was dimly lit but I could make out a stage at the end of the room and two or three quiet groups sat faceless around low tables in the gloom. I made my way to a shaded corner and took painful sips of cheap bourbon from a greasy high ball glass.
The tinny music stopped, the lights went low, and everything fell silent, save the crackle of the rain on the windows. I thought that there’d been a power cut and was about to set off back into the storm when a spotlight shot on to the stage and a woman wearing a plain, white dress and a diminutive guitar strapped neatly around her little body, sprang daintily into the light. The room was solid with quiet and darkness, and after a few deep breaths into the microphone, she closed her eyes, touched lightly at the strings, and sang.
Every moment of this first contact remains with me, almost photographically. Every drawn refrain and lilting note, the pitch and timbre of her clear voice, the still rigidity of her pale frame in the blank glare of the spotlight. During one’s life, one’s entire being is occasionally coalesced into a few beating seconds. Every mote of matter, every sound and vibration reverberates and galvanizes into a present state, whilst all sequences of prior events and time form into something tenable, immutable, and real. Such was that time for me: the time that it took for her to sing her song in that murky place. Here was the warmth of her voice, so delicate and still amid the swirling crash of the rain outside. I sat quietly as my nerves relaxed and stretched out into the very air. When she fell silent and gave a wave to the sporadic applause, I felt the echoes of every organ slowly working in my body. She tip-tap-toed across the moon of the spotlight, sending up specks of dust to float hazily as she hopped down from the stage. The rain eked through the walls and somewhere, a nervous window wept.
And so, I had to speak with her. I bought us glasses of the whiskey which seemed to have a damp, muddy taste to it, introduced myself with fatalistic confidence, and told her that I had never truly felt alive before hearing her sing. Her eyebrows arched, and she gave a soft laugh in a voice so small that I had to move closer. The moment seemed moulded in wax; I was aware that I would remember every sensation in exquisite detail at a later date. I touched at the arches of the warm glass on my fingers, studied the coarsely scribbled eyebrows of the barman, and breathed in the faint, sour odour of bleach and varnished oak that accompanies sleepy, hidden bars. The whiskey worked through to my head and my limbs started to feel muffled. I told her that my whole life had led to this meeting and that I would never forgive myself if I didn’t kiss her. She gave another imperceptible laugh but leaned in slowly, took my cold hand in hers and pressed her lips against my own.
When she spoke, it was barely a whisper. Sotto voce.
“You’ve got lips like sugar.”
Out in the streets, she danced home with me. Puddles laid in splotchy shapes and the storm drains gurgled merrily.
I loved her all through that spring until the late summer. I told her everything that I could about how much she meant to me. In the days, I showed her my work, wheeling her around the private galleries down town, and in the nights, we lounged in the carmine dream of her double bed. She was always quiet, almost mute besides when she sang, and this afforded me the opportunity to tell her everything about myself. No other person had shared the recesses of my soul in such a way and her presence always left me feeling cooled, quiescent, and fresh.
The last time that I saw her, we were walking by the lake. It was rare for us to venture out of the city, but I had sensed a certain tension in her at being so confined amongst the gravel and cement of the metropolis and had driven her out to the nearby park. For the first time, I was acutely aware of her reticence as a presence of its own, oppressive to the extent that I could feel it wind around the thin bodies of the nearby pines. She seemed transfixed on the swans as they glided in looping parabolas besides one another on the still, dark blue of the lake, and her deep, pinkly ringed eyes skimmed across the surface of the water, up into the wide, empty sky. I asked her if anything was wrong and she flashed me a strange look, exhaling violently through flaring nostrils before running off into the woods, out of sight. I spent days searching for her in old bars and galleries, but I never saw her again. Her room was deserted, and the landlord knew nothing about where she might have gone. She left my life as quickly as she’d entered it, stage left and out of the spotlight.
I come awake to a light rapping on the door. Oscar, unmistakably; his hands have that slender, pedicured quality so he knocks mildly if he can’t avoid it. I get to my feet, sheepishly replacing the sheet onto the easel without looking at it, and stumble through clinking bottles to open the door.
Oscar Tremayne stands sharp suited before me. The man has been my patron for four years, now, and as curator of the city gallery, he has diligently paid the upkeep for my box room in return for my body of work. I met Oscar whilst circulating throughout a nouveau riche crowd at a pop-up gallery in the upper Eastside, and since then, he has personally curated exhibitions of my pieces with an enthusiasm which he describes as a ‘spiritual obligation’. As a favour, I once let him model for me as Tyndareus: effete and unknowing besides the raw copulation of my Leda anthology, and indeed, there was a time when I produced a lot for him: portraits and landscapes that seemed to capture his imagination. I’ve never asked the man much about himself but, I find him cloying, effeminately posh, and predictably urbane at the best of times.
“Good God, Lou, you look horrendous. Whatever’s the matter?”
“Just tired, that’s all.”
I manage a smile, I think. He makes to come in, but I keep my arm across the door frame until he awkwardly steps back into the hallway.
“I’m afraid that I have to talk to you about this arrangement, Lou. The board of directors are getting down my throat since I’ve stopped bringing them your paintings. I need a piece from you today or they say I’m finished. I just can’t afford to do this anymore. I don’t have much left at all, you see. Things have been so tight, what with Anna being in the hospital.”
He trails off as his eyes scan the floor for a second. He is speaking so quickly, as though he’s ashamed of the words. His ascot is askew.
“Have you painted anything since the last time I was here? Anything at all? I really need this, please. You used to be incredible, but no one’s even seen you in months.”
How bizarre to see Oscar so worked up. He keeps trembling all over and his thin lips are working in knots beneath his smile. I feel a sting of some emotion, but it passes, and I see him again, geometrical and anatomical as ever.
“Well, I haven’t really been working on anything recently, Oscar. I don’t think that I can help.”
For a second, he seems on the verge of tears, but he sniffs at the air. The old dog knows that smell. His gaze quickly works past me and lights up again as it rests on the covered canvas.
“Oh, Louie Cobb, you diamond. You almost killed me just then. ‘Haven’t really been working on anything’, well what the devil could that be lurking under those sheets?”
He slips beneath my arm with a childish grin and crisply side steps the spirits (paint thinner and vodka) that line the sides of my room. I grope after him slowly, but my body doesn’t seem able to manage much more than a light lifting of my sluggish arms and a weak totter. Oscar stands, already enraptured by the mystery of the thing, with one hand on his chin as he looks over the dimensions. He speaks in breathlessly thankful whispers.
“Thank God you’ve been working on something. Just the one painting is going to be hard to sell as the headlining exhibition but it’s better than nothing.”
He pulls off the sheet and I shrink back with my eyes fixed resolutely on the floor. For a few seconds I can almost hear the aqueous scanning of his eyeballs over the canvas as he takes it in. He clasps his hands together with a theatrical gasp.
“It’s beautiful, Lou. Nice and sinister, I love it.”
He peers closer at the brushstrokes and starts in recognition.
“Say, isn’t this that beautiful little thing that I saw you with last year? I could have sworn she was a brunette. I barely recognised her with all that loathing on her face. That reminds me, actually, we got a letter at the gallery from her, but I’d filed it away and forgotten the damn thing when you stopped coming in. Sorry about that. I don’t think that the poor dear knew your address. I’ve got it on me now though. Here we are.”
I feel a surge of animal energy as I claw the small envelope from Oscar’s fingers and he turns back to the canvas, a little bemused. Some correspondence, some touch of her life in mine again. It’s almost unbearable that this sacred thing has laid, unread, in some little cabinet in Oscar’s office all this time. I fight back the urge to punch him in the stomach and take in the loopy curvature of my name and the gallery’s address written in her familiar hand.
“Lou.
I don’t want to see you again. You’re a boor and a brute and I’m sorry that I ever gave you that kiss in the Järvi. You just looked so sad and lonely at that bar; I couldn’t help but pity you. Don’t look for me. You never knew me. I couldn’t bear the thought of being around you anymore.
Elsa Penn.”
The letter floats to the floor in that strange, zig-zag pattern that dropped pieces of paper tend to have. Solvents play in wafting stings at my nostrils. I swallow spittle.
“I recall her being rather charming when I met her at that exhibition out in the Eastside, a while back, but I haven’t seen the both of you in so long, I figured that you’d been shacked up together all this time.”
He turns back to me, but my eyes are locked on the canvas now, blazing into Elsa’s as she giggles maliciously in her painted form. I had tried, all these months, to get something back of her, get the essence of her back in the room with me, but the woman stood before me now is an utter stranger, no matter the weeks spent painting and re-painting the play of shadow across her septum, her lips, her fathomless beryl eyes. I can’t understand why I’ve made her this way. Why have I done that?
Oscar laughs nervously in the still of the room, taking the corners of the canvas in his hands as he makes to leave. His hands are trembling, and I note a strange look of indistinct apprehension on his face when he speaks to me again.
“Erhm, anyway, I must be off, Lou. I’ve got to get this back as soon as possible before the big-wigs at the gallery throw me out for good. Thanks again, though, eh? I’ll send you the details of the valuation once I’ve got it all set up.”
I see Elsa recline at an angle, lewdly naked and bizarrely two-dimensional, as Oscar takes her up in his slim hands. I can hear her tittering as the two float about my room, as though he and she are dancing a sweeping waltz out towards my door. I choke and slump against the mildewed walls. I want to scream and tear Oscar back: re-paint her, try again, make her right somehow, but when it comes to it, my throat rasps empty: inchoate. I try again, but the air leaves my lungs without so much as a murmur. I can’t move. My limbs are atrophied, torpid under the heavy glare of the electric light bulb, and I simply watch them fly out of my life. The easel stands bereft and the tattered paisley sheet lays on the floor. For the first time in a long time, I can feel just how silent and empty my room really is.
© Theo Beecroft 2019
