“Speak for yourself!” Raffi insists, taking an enormous gulp of wine and then painting blue blobby tears dripping out of the whale’s eyes. “I’m painting for my life over here.”
It’s a joke, and the woman laughs. I, on the other hand, don’t laugh. Because also it’s not a joke.
Heispainting for his life. Just like he jogs for his life every morning and showers for his life before work. Just like he got a pedicure for his life and let birds attack his hands at the Bronx Zoo, for his life.
Those tears Raff is painting onto the whale may look comically juvenile, but, look, it’s been an epically shit year for us. He does anything he can to keep moving forward.
Raff empties the rest of his bottle of wine into his glass, nearly overflowing it. “It’s missing something,” he muses about his painting. “It needs a touch more emotional impact.”
“More emotional impact? You’ve already harpooned a whale!”
“Oh!” He has an epiphany. “I know! The whale needs a buddy.” He quickly paints in another whale, tiny in the distance. Trapped in its own life in the water, unable to get to its loved one dying on the beach.
“This is supposed to befun,” I gripe at him. Not humiliating. I’m not supposed to get misty in public over a whale painted so badly it looks like a wool sock.
“Is it?” he asks. He turns to me with a quizzical expression in place.
“Quit it!” I scold him. He’s convinced I’ve got an ocean of tears dammed up on the inside. A dying whale sinking to the bottom of my gut. He’s certain that I’m just one bad painting away from baring my soul and finally getting over this terrible year.
Well, he’s in for a surprise when he finds out Vin’s leavingme.
I turn my eye back to my own painting of Raff. Well, it’s not really a painting. It’s more like a drawing that happens to be with a paintbrush. But still…
“I’m building him, huh? Part by part…” I’m remembering what Daniel the drawing teacher said about my bad drawing of the model.
“What’d you say?” Raff asks.
“Nothing. Just this thing that someone said to me…” I almost don’t tell him. But I’m straining under the pressure of all the things I’m not saying to Raff. So, “I wandered into this figure drawing class yesterday.”
He immediately perks up. “Really! So cool!”
“The instructor actually seemed to like my drawing. He said something about how instead of trying to draw a likeness of the model, I was putting him together on the paper. Piece by piece.”
“That fits.”
“What do you mean?”
He shrugs. “I mean…that’s what you do. You’re not trying to make anything look pretty. You’re trying to fit it all together. So it works.”
I chew on this.
“Are you gonna go back to the art class? I think you should!” Raff insists. Nothing would make him happier than me embarking on a journey of personal growth.
The instructor comes over to look at Raff’s whales, and he turns his attention to charming the pants off her (likely literally, as there’s a fifty-fifty chance she goes home with him tonight, if history is any indicator), so I take an unobserved second to lift my paintbrush again. There’s a big patch of white in the bottom corner. I decide to fill it with another blue Raff, smaller this time. I catch him gesticulating, a familiar posture. The thing I paint doesn’t look like a human, exactly, and certainly not a specific human. But there’s something there, a slant of line, that does, in fact, call Raff to mind.
The paint is somehow both blobby and too thin. Unwieldy.I don’t think I’m doing myself any favors with jumping headfirst into painting. On a whim (or maybe with Daniel’s voice still in my head), I reach into the art supplies basket and just grab a Sharpie.
I try one more Raff, this one in marker and almost microscopic in order to fit in the white space. As I draw him, I spike up his hair, give him all ten fingers.
It’s not a likeness. But it is Raff. The idea of him, at least. Constructed and alive, on the page.
For the first time since I found that lease, I realize my brain is calm, my thoughts are quiet. I take a long breath and it washes down all the way to my toes.
Ugh. It’s annoying when your friends actually know what’s good for you. I’d rather rot in my own despair.
It’s time to leave now. The instructor, I realize, is actually all dolled up. A glossy black blowout and cat-eye makeup. She’s shooing us out of the classroom, I’m assuming she has a big date with someone she thinks might be her whole future. Or maybe she just wants to get laid. Either way, class is over and once again my possibilities are limited. The world is narrowing in again. She pushes us out onto the street. We’re halfway down the block when I realize I left my painting behind.
It’s fitting really, that I managed to capture someone I love, ensconce them safely on a canvas, and then I leave it behind by accident. I want the dim, tipsy classroom back. I don’t want to be out here, in reality, in a world where I don’t even know where my husband is.
