THE CHILD, Part One

The friends returned to the house, and Omar, never one to dally, left Michael waving at the curb. The resident contemplated painting before his intended rendezvous with Emma, though was struck by the perverse irony of it: The barista inspired him to be creative, even as the very idea of her undermined his powers of concentration. Yet somewhere between Schubert’s wistful D664 piano sonata and his majestic D960, he picked up a brush.

The process of artistic creation was unfathomable to the painter, emerging as it did from a part of the brain not entirely visible to light. Painting was largely a perceptual undertaking, and the more one bore down into the bare bolts of seeing, the more miraculous the mundane was sure to be. This notwithstanding, much of Michael's conscious brain was left un-tasked in his labor and thus free to float into remote regions of thought and memory. These excursions often resembled acts of self-flagellation, like a tongue drawn to a mouth ulcer over and over. Regrets invariably surfaced while at the easel: some fresh, some thought long forgotten. Perhaps such contrition was essential to “empty the vessel” for work. Regardless, on this occasion the artist was thinking about Brae and his neglect of her in recent self-absorbed days. It was, after all, Halloween Eve, and there was the promise to take the child trick-or-treating.

Prodded more by penitence than a need for holiday preparedness, he walked up the street to the Quickmart after putting away his brushes to buy a bag of Halloween candy. There he ran into Jacques’ undergraduate assistant, who asked the painter if he would be attending the memorial service; Michael said yes.

“I have something to give you,” the young man told him. “Something Jacques left in his studio.”

“Oh?”

“I got to Arbor Hall before the police carted everything away, so I could gather up footage for the tribute. He left a package for you there.”

Michael used the occasion to pry. “About the videotape… the one Jacques stole…”

“You mean the one of Seth Bowles?”

“Then it was Seth’s?”

The assistant was free with the sordidness. “Professor Bowles has apparently videotaped his sexual escapades with undergrads for years. But now the shit’s hit the fan, and I’ve heard he’s been suspended pending a full inquiry by the college’s ethics committee.”

Michael could hardly be sympathetic.

The fellow passed to the door with a shrug, leaving the painter at the register with his bag of candy corn.

With a little time left before phoning Emma, Michael’s days-long tiredness caught up with him. He put his head down on the pillow, but would not nap for fear of oversleeping. Facing the open door, he studied Monet’s painting in the darkening hall floor. The late afternoon light was on the other side of the house, and the edgy shadows mirrored his state of mind. His eyes were notorious for playing tricks on him in half-light, but he was certain, after several torturous minutes of study, that a mouse along the baseboard was sniffing at the frame of the fallen painting. With a mind to shoo it, he gestured forward on the bed. The rodent immediately latched onto the corner of the artwork in an unnatural way and began tugging at it. The improbability of this did not completely sink in before the frame fell face down on the floor with a smack. The petrified man watched the mouse drag the heavy object toward the staircase, finally realizing what he was looking at was not a rodent at all but a hand: a child’s hand…

Thump. The backend of the painting dropped down the first stair step…

Thump. The second stair step…

Thump. The third…

Thump. The fourth…

Thump. The fifth…

Thump. The sixth…

Thump. The seventh…

“Brae…?” he called out.

The painting, no longer in sight, stopped its descent.

Michael tore free of his paralysis and bounded down the stairway. He saw nothing of the framed Monet, or the child dragging it. The phone rang upstairs, and looking back to the top step, the artwork was seen still leaning against the hall wall. The phone rang again, closer this time to his head. The napping man sat up on the bed and lifted the receiver to his ear.

“You were supposed to call me at four-thirty,” Emma reminded him.

He stared groggily at his wristwatch; it was four forty-five.

With the all clear, Michael drove to the young woman’s apartment. The front door was ajar, and no lights were on. He poked his way through to the bedroom; Emma was lying on her bed and wrapped up sleepily in his sweater.

“Did your friend leave?” she asked.

He stepped closer to follow her long bare legs up to the hem of the cardigan, wondering what may have played out between her and Evan in the room before he arrived. Emma slithered over with an expandable backbone, folding her arms around his legs and burying her face in a thigh with a yawn. Her voice was thin and tired. “What did you and your friend talk about?”

Michael, needing something to say, drew her into some details. “Omar thinks my inheritance is part of a reality TV show.”

“A reality TV show?” she echoed. “That sounds farfetched, don’t you think?”

“But it makes sense.” (Michael was not sure it did, but felt compelled to defend the idea.)

“And you believe it? Simply because he tells you it’s the truth?”

“Yes.” He jumped in further. “Is there something wrong with that?”

“It’s just that you have to be your own man at some point.”

Michael went prickly in her embrace. “Omar is more than a friend.”

“And so am I.”

He reeled at her gall, grunting, “Yes. You’re a friend with privileges.”

She peered up his long body. “Why do you say that with such sarcasm?”

His rare candor left him exposed, but he would not expand on the complaint.

Emma planted her head against his stomach with a plaintive sigh. “I told Evan I would drive out after seven.”

Michael glanced at his wristwatch, as if it could be seen in the dark. “We should go then.”

She giggled. “I don’t want to go to the memorial service, silly.”

He was confused.

She took his hand, letting her wet words pour through his fingers. “We’ve got two hours.”

Michael felt the bony protrusions under his skull as his brain commenced cartwheels. This is surely what he wanted: to be the kept man. Yet he resisted her attempt to melt his body like an ice cube over the bed. She crawled up to mirror his torso, allowing the ends of the sweater to open and reveal bra and panties underneath. His fingers were again squeezed in a controlling way while she panted inside his shirt collar. At first he thought it was more of her shameless acting, but then he remembered what Omar said back at the coffeehouse. There was something stilted in Emma’s sexual manner. He saw it briefly during their invasion of the seedy motel room, and then again during their lovemaking the night before. Michael was no expert in these matters, but knew from his limited experience of dating women in graduate school how cloistered and inexperienced they could be. Instead of being emboldened by his opportunity, he felt strangely resentful, even cuckolded. It was like he was being used in a comparative test. The room smelled of Glade’s baby powder air freshener, undoubtedly slathered over the bed to clean her palate of one lover while she prepared to sample the other. He pulled away from her arms.

“I have to go to the service,” he announced flatly. “I told Jacques’ assistant I would.”

She squatted in the middle of the bed, pouting as she had done that morning. “You can blow him off.”

“But I told him I would go.”

Emma, seeing he was not in the mood, pulled the ends of the sweater tight around her. “Then we’ll go.”

The pall of a late overcast sky made for reflective company on the car ride over to the chapel, and even convinced the streetlights to turn on early. Light rain commenced once the couple pulled onto the church lot, but a small crowd meant they did not have to park far from the doors. The few people who assembled for the service included professor-types, who were probably not on the best of terms with the performance artist. Michael and Emma slid into a pew near the front, although there was more frostiness in the air than what they brought with them. The painter looked around to appreciate how they appeared to be an item of peculiar interest. Most eyes fell on Emma, but it was fair to say they were eyes that judged him as well, and the two of them together. These departmental people had doubtless met her fiancé, and Michael was remiss in realizing he exposed the woman to rumor by insisting they come; the photographer, however, did not seem to feel the stares.

The video tribute started playing on a large, flat-panel TV screen at the front of the church, redirecting everyone’s attention. It was a montage of some of Jacques’ statuesque performances in people’s yards. No sound accompanied the images, and given there was no action outside the occasional disgruntled homeowner waving a fist, or some kid throwing a rock, the dwarf mostly resembled a premature headstone to his grave. The performance artist’s painful repose forced the painter to face what was his own hopeless predicament. If the key to life was not to know it too well, then both Jacques and he had failed that test. Perhaps Michael possessed more talent than the graduate student, more internal resources to distract himself from his loneliness, but it was no less real or heart wrenching. It was only on these rare occasions when the painter’s happiness was unwittingly tied to something other than his own diversion that he felt any frailty at all. A few people of his acquaintance admired his life choices—admired how he endured poverty and neglect for his art. Yet Michael would be the last to confuse his obstinate nature with virtue. His one saving grace, he thought, was he always gave all because he always believed in all he did, even if what he chose to believe in invariably isolated him. Despite his insatiable need to be surrounded by complete strangers in coffeehouses, the outsider needed others too little; and was poorer for it. He never learned duty from family, or patience from a child, or grace from a friend. His creative endeavors were more than a testament to an indomitable Don Quixote spirit. They were the resourceful means by which one man saved himself from his own impoverished company.

Michael gradually drifted back into the film, although he was slow to acknowledge a tether. It was an accumulative impression, but unmistakably intended by Jacques. In the background of each of his frozen poses, concealed distantly among trees or dissolved in glare, a little girl played by herself. Little more than a mote, she was the only thing ever in motion. The painter was certain it was Brae, and wondered if all of the performance artist’s tapes were in some perverse or obsessive way secretly about the child.

Emma was clearly distraught by the film, even weeping as she watched the little man who either intentionally or unintentionally embroiled her in his unseemly death; Michael could not fathom her empathy. He looked around in the chapel to find only dry eyes.

One set belonged to Erica, who sat alone on a backbench.

Chapter Twenty-four, Section Two/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.