The Painting

Art is held, in the dulled hands of humanity, as something priceless. Its worth exists in a constant whir of opinion, cobbled together by the feelings of those who turn their eyes to it. Real art, the world would argue, is raw. It has power beyond its existence, has the ability to reach out from beyond the press of glass and frame, to grab at parts of ourselves that we keep locked up, to feed the things we have no choice but to starve—the naked things, the disfigured things. Art, when allowed to be real, is given domain over us. Given the ability to change the way we survive.

Sometimes, it is hard to tell the difference between the choices we make for ourselves and the choices that art makes for us. Sometimes, I wonder if there really is a difference between the two at all. I don’t know the limits of art, if there are any limits to what it can reach, what it can prompt. All I know is that, at the heart of the misfortune I suffered as a child, there was one piece of artwork in particular. Artwork, in the traditional sense of the word.

A painting.

The painting was a gift. Or it wasn’t. It had been part of the house long before we lived there. Or it had been something we’d brought along with us. It was placed on the wall at the top of the stairs, against the greying wallpaper. It had been clothed with a gilded frame, bathed in the thin, yellowed light carved into the ceiling above it.

What was the painting of? Well, it was of something grotesquely beautiful. Something uncomfortable, its proportions uncertain and jagged. Something unknown but recognizable, something with a great deal of bright, blank colour. It was, truly, a piece of art. Priceless, when you looked at it. Nothing, when you looked away.

My own mother detested it. At first.

She begged my father to take it down, said that it made her feel sick, unsafe. My father refused, a little guiltily, a little gleefully. Because it scared her—it terrified her, that painting—and there was a part of him that wanted her to be afraid, just a little afraid. It kept her quieter, kept her from meandering out of line. He didn’t even have to raise a hand.

He let the painting hang itself at the top of the stairs, even though he despised it just as much. I was only young, then. No more than six. And, yet, I knew that much. I’d catch him, sometimes, standing at the top of the stairs, glaring up at that canvas, mouth working silently around mute words. Perverse abhorrence pulling at the corners of his mouth, making the muscle twitch and bounce beneath the wrinkled skin. I, even, had the suspicion that he hated it more than my mother.

I don’t remember what I thought of the painting, in the beginning. I knew it was something more than it was. But it didn’t quite hold me prisoner in the same way it did my parents. I think I, mostly, avoided it. And it was happy to let me slip by, small and unfocused, for a while. Until a few years had passed and the painting’s grip grew stronger.

My parents’ marriage was decaying, collapsing from the inside-out. It had been a tremulous structure to begin with, their relationship: a thing built on the thin, deformed legs of fear and necessity. My father was a large, irritable man with no real talent but enough brain to know he needed a stable flow of money. My mother was a small, needling woman with a great bundle of ability but an inability to do anything alone. I was the poor, pale nail that held the whole sham together. And, as I grew, the hole I’d been hammered in to began to strain and splinter around me. Their marriage was going to burst, was going to tear itself.

It would have been easier if they’d divorced. If they’d given up and let me flounder in the sudden sea of change their parting would have ushered in. Instead, I was stuck in no-man’s land, watching them pelt each other, again and again, with a rapid shower of insults and threats that quickly escalated to petty, cruel blinks of violence. There was no shelter for me in their war.

The arguments they used to have were so common and so inane that they blur together, now. There is no particular argument that stands out, except for one—their last one, the one that started over a discrepancy in my mother’s shift timetable and ended with her sudden, whispered threat:

“That painting has to go,” she seethed, hands slammed down on the dinner table. I forked at my pasta, cold on my plate, watching her with wide, quiet eyes, “I won’t look at it any longer, John. I won’t. It has to go.”

My father stared back at her, tiny eyes blinking fast behind his spectacles. He’d fallen quiet in his confusion, left without words for the first time in a long time.

“The painting… on the stairs?” he asked, incredulous. My mother nodded harshly, not quite willing to raise her eyes to his.

“I hate it. You know I hate it.”

“It’s been there for years,” my father bristled, thrown to his feet in his own spell of exasperation, “You don’t mind it anymore.”

“I do!” My mother dared, “I do mind it. You tricked me, told me it would be fine, but it’s not. It’s not fine, it’s—”

Their voices were only rising, and neither registered when I slipped off my chair and scampered up the stairs to my bedroom. When I passed the painting, I remember trying hard not to look at it, suddenly aware of its size, its weight. It looked too big to be on the wall, too heavy. It would fall down, I knew it, and if I was unlucky enough to be around when it happened, it would crush me.

The next morning, when the sun came whittling through the gauzy glaze of clouds in the sky, it was if the argument had never happened. The painting remained and so did my parents, glancing bitterly at each other over breakfast. I rushed myself off down the hill, to the school. Leaving my parents alone in that house, together.

They didn’t argue about the painting again. Not because either had changed their minds. No, because, some time that afternoon, my father killed himself.

My mother was out working when it happened, so I came home to see it—to see him, hanging at the top of the stairs. I stared and stared, unsure. I cried, perhaps. Or I screamed. When I finally tore my eyes away, managed to blink, there were police there with me, gently holding my shoulders, assuring me that everything would be alright. Everything, everything.

The painting stared out from behind my father’s back as he swung there and I wondered why it had never truly scared me before.

My mother was quiet, after that. There was a funeral, a black-clad, stifling sort of affair. I carried on with life as deftly as I could, but there was something stunted in me. The world, which, before, had seemed so vast and interesting, was suddenly a lot more still. And the painting…

I hated it. I would spit at it as I walked by, would glower and sneer, until it started to glower and sneer back. I could feel the heat pulsate off it as I walked by, could feel the warped horror of it against my skin when I passed it.

I moved my room to the ground floor, in the end, just so I wouldn’t have to ever be within its reach.

My mother’s opinion, however, had undertaken a radical transformation. The painting had redeemed itself, somehow, in her eyes. It was a masterpiece, she told me, a priceless possession.

It was around that time that one of the neighborhood boys came over to play. Most children on the street avoided me. As if death was contagious, as if the boy without a father would, if you looked at him too long, take your father too, and then the whole street would be fatherless—

But this little boy was different. He was a few years younger than I was. Shy and uncertain, always trembling and stuttering. His eyes were big and blue, mouth always quivering. He had a name that reminded me of my grandfather, but I don’t remember it now.

We played together in my room, for a while. Making up stories and slotting ourselves into new lives, forcing the air around us to become whatever we wanted it to be. Eventually, when we’d grown hungry enough, we ventured out into the kitchen for dinner. My mother was out at work, so we set about feeding ourselves—pulling pots and pans from cupboards, bread and cheese from the pantry.

“Is your mother always out?” the boy asked me, after we’d fixed ourselves some horrifically mangled meal. We were sitting across from each other at the dinner table, hunched over large, china plates.

I swung my legs beneath me, shrugging, “She has to work.”

There it was, then: death. My father, the blackened moment of my life I never spoke about. The thing that kept the others away from me. The boy only glanced at me, softly, curiously. Like he couldn’t quite comprehend it.

With some clever, gentle prodding, he somehow managed to weasel his way into a conversation about my father. It was the first time I’d spoken about it. It came out in a stunted, stupid rush of words—how I’d known my parents were unhappy, how I knew that that fight was something different. It had been about the painting, after all.

“The painting?” the boy asked me.

I stilled, uneasy. Set my food down. My brain broiled at the thought of it.

But I showed it to him, anyway.

We stood at the top of the stairs, staring up at it. It was the first time in a long time that I’d dared to look it head-on. There was a furious, uneasy pull growing inside my stomach.

“It’s just a painting,” I tried, feebly, as I glanced over to the boy.

The boy met my eye, grinning stupidly. I blinked, feeling unbalanced. Something about his smile didn’t quite match the moment, the air.

“It’s just a painting but they argued about it all the time,” I continued.

“You’re joking,” the boy accused, that grin still on his face.

I shook my head, irritated, “My mother likes it now, though. If you can believe it.”

The boy’s smile trembled and simmered away, skin blanching. His hands curled into small fists at his sides.

“I think I’m going to go home,” he whispered, dropping his gaze. I frowned.

“But—”

“I need to go,” he repeated, turning and tumbling back down the stairs. I followed him, calling out his name—Walt or Whitney or something similarly grey—but he was already putting on his coat, grabbing his shoes.

I let him go, standing at the bottom of the stairs, watching his back out the open front door until he disappeared completely.

I told her when she came home, that night. I hated it, the painting. I couldn’t stand it. She had to take it away or I’d go crazy. My mother only stared, quiet and thin-lipped, until I’d finished my rant, finished my screaming.

She sat me down, rubbed her hand on my back. Told me I needed to calm down, needed to get some sleep, stop staying up so late. The painting was just a painting, she said. And she’d grown fond of it. It reminded her of my father.

The anger only got worse. My mother and I hardly spoke. When we did, we fought. I stopped avoiding the painting, started to confront it. Soon, I couldn’t tell who I was more angry with—my mother or that hideous, disgusting, mesh of a painting.

“I think,” I told it, one day, glaring up at it defiantly, “I think it would be best if you both went. You and my mother. I can’t stand either one of you.”

Something in the painting cracked, then, move with a writhing, jerky elegance. I took a step back. Watched as it stilled again. I rubbed my eyes, convinced I’d imagined it.

It was ridiculous, the longer I thought about it. That I hated the painting. It was only a painting, after all.

I stormed back down the stairs, shoulders hunched. Retreated to my room. I curled up under the covers and waited for something, something I knew was coming. Something I couldn’t quite see, couldn’t quite comprehend.

I found her beneath the painting the next morning, scarlet webbing from her upturned wrists. The blade was on the wood of the stairs, beside her, glistening with rusted, ruby pearls. Her face was pulled into a soft grimace, a whisper of pain. I stared and stared.

Once again, there were officers, policemen, telling me to come with them, that I was safe.

The next month was a blur of police and suits, of tears and consolations and relatives I’d never met before. My aunt took care of me as things, beyond my control, were straightened out. I stayed with her in her little seaside house, far away from the town.

My mother had a funeral, too. I cried, then, hugged her and told her goodbye. Wished she could listen. Wondered if she would. Hoped she couldn’t, as I continued, told her I knew it was my fault. That I was sorry.

My aunt and her daughter took delicate care of me. I began to look at the world with newfound interest. I began to run again, began to play, befriend others. I ate more, talked more. I carried my grief with childish promise, with sudden clarity.

The days I’d spent in my old house, with my mother and my father and that painting… it all seemed far down the tunnel, blurred and incomplete. I’d been so vague and stiff, then.

I never spoke of my time in that town until the day came when I went to collect my things from the house. My aunt and cousin came along, holding my hands, sheltering me between them. But there was no need for any sort of comfort. The town, which had been so stony and flat in my mind, was startlingly normal and bright. The house was less suffocating.

My aunt carried out my things from my bedroom, whilst I showed my cousin around. It was only then that I remembered the painting, that I caught it looking at me from the corner of my eye.

My legs churned to a stop. My cousin, following behind me, slowed, frowned.

“What’s wrong?“ she asked. I kept my gaze focused on the ground, steered her towards the stairs.

I just had to look at it, one more time. Just once more.

My cousin followed me up, side-by-side. Step-by-step. Until we were standing beneath it, that hulking, bubbling blister of a painting, the thing that I couldn’t bring myself to hate any longer, couldn’t trick myself into loving.

“I used to hate it,” I muttered, toeing at the wood of the stairs beneath us.

My cousin was silent beside me, tipping her head up to look at the painting. I had a flash of panic, worried she would run off like that boy did, eons ago.

But she just stared, lips pressed together in that tolerant, straightforward way of hers.

“My mother hated it first,” I explained. I still hadn’t looked at it, hadn’t dared. I slowly, surely, crept my eyes up to look at it. It looked back, grinning. It had missed me. It had been waiting.

I shot my eyes back down, “My dad hated it, too. We all hated it. Until we didn’t. I don’t know why. It’s just a painting.”

There was a long silence.

“What painting?”

I stopped. Peeked at my cousin, trying to understand what sort of joke she was starting.

“The one in front of us,” I insisted, unsure, afraid to look at it. I pointed at it, though, pointing at the breathing swath of canvas on the wall.

“That’s not a painting,” my cousin said, blunt. Naively unbothered, vaguely confused.

“Yes, it is,” I argued. Still behind on the joke.

“No,” she said, “No. That’s just a mirror.”

And when I looked up, I saw it, too. The flat patch of reflective glass, the gilded frame around it. I saw our pale faces in it, staring down at ourselves. Our matching brown eyes. Our opens mouths.

The hate evaporated into sudden, dizzy confusion.

It had been there. I had just seen it. I couldn’t have just… imagined it. It wasn’t possible, because I’d seen it, we’d all seen it… my mother, my father, me…

My cousin tugged at my hand, gentle, “I think we should go.”

I nodded, stiffly, let her lead me back down the stairs, back out of the house. We sat on the doorstep, together, talking in the dry heat of the afternoon sun. Neither of us brought up what we’d seen, what had happened, whatever it was that had happened. Finally, my aunt emerged, smiling and asking if we were ready to go home.

Home.

We rode away in silence. My aunt asked me if I was alright, if I was hungry or thirsty or wanted to see anyone before we left.

I told her I was fine.

I never went back to the town. I never saw it again. I grew up with my aunt, letting her rear me into something stabler, something closer to the line of normal. I let myself grow into something that could face the world without the apathy that had strung itself into the very air I’d breathed as a child. I let myself forget the memories of my parents, my poor parents, and what they’d done to themselves. To each other.

But I have nightmares, still, of that painting. I can never see it, never remember what it looked like. I thought it best to write about it, to tell the story as it happened. To see if it would make me feel better at all.

It has certainly given me some clarity, some relief. Maybe, perhaps, there’ll be a day where I can sleep without seeing it.

But there is a deeper truth than that. I’m not just writing to heal. I’m writing because I don’t want to forget. No matter how cruel and twisted the memories are. I don’t want to wake up and find that I can’t remember it at all. Even if I want to.

Because, sometimes, when I’m alone at night, I wonder if there’ll be a time where the memory will cease to exist, just like the painting itself. That, when I look for it, I’ll find it was something else entirely.

And maybe it always was.

Submitted March 22, 2019 at 12:49PM by montymatzinn https://ift.tt/2Cx3t37