THE PAINTER

My aunt had a tenant who lived in a one-oor addition above her unit. He had a fat red face and a heavy brow and an accent that sent splinters underneath your fingernails. He was a painter who specialized in pointillism portraits of cherub boys with Fuji-apple-red cheeks, dimples, and ivy leaves between their legs. Hours of detail and perfectionism spent focusing his attention on every little inch of their baby skin and baby limbs. My aunt hung one in her house that I would find myself staring at. Half intrigued by his talent and other times to sit in the stillness of the stirring in my chest as if I were looking at something forbidden. I dreamt about his studio often. Sometimes the screen door would hang open and the smell of oil paints and turpentine and expensive ink pens would waft down the stairs. On hot summer days I would lie in my tank top and shorts, my tight curls tangling themselves like a frayed rug edge in a washing machine. I would stretch across the carpet with cheap pastels and printer paper and draw girls. Mostly faeries. Naked and freckled with long straight owing hair. I drew what I wanted to be, and what was forbidden to me. I wondered if all artists did the same. I would lie there and the fragrance of his studio would travel beneath the door through the crack where the draft came through in the winter. I was never allowed in the painter’s studio. It was a dream that was separated from me by a dark staircase that bled into oblivion like a nightmare where you couldn’t move. My eldest cousin strictly forbade me to enter the dark chasm. I never saw him look the painter in the eye. The staircase to the studio loomed like a stranger in a subway station. It was a yawning fissure that I believed, if I could simply cross, I would become a real artist too. My family fought about the painter. I would hide under the table in the spare room, while angry voices took the shape of shadows and bounced o the tile in the kitchen. I heard some strangers’ names. We didn’t know much about the painter, But we knew he had 3 children. An older daughter named Rebecca who was born addicted to heroin, with longing coursing through veins that couldn’t recognize what was absent from her new life. Too young to understand why she had an erratic aching wound in her heart. We knew his other two children were about my age. But they never came around. One day I was playing in the yard alone. Kicking pebbles with my Skechers and pacing between the broken basketball hoop and the fence that curtained my aunt’s dead-end road from a used-car lot, he called to me from the roof. He was working in vanilla-ice-cream-colored dickies, covered in haphazard smears of color, and holding 2 dirty glasses of sweet tea, and invited me upstairs. So with the conviction of a child exploring terrain formerly unavailable to her, I accepted the invitation and began the approach up the stairs. This would be it. I would burst through the door and run my fingertips across the glossy tubes of oil, and feel the brush hairs separate and fan out across my palm, and I would unlock the secrets to becoming a real artist. Like the painter. But artists love what is forbidden to them, a fact I learned too young; too early. I don’t remember being in his studio. It’s an empty cartridge in my memory. I just remember walking down the stairs like I was holding a basketball between my legs in a relay race, and crawling back onto my aunt’s carpet in the corner like a dying dog who didn’t want to be seen. Years later I was a 15-year-old on Christmas vacation when he came downstairs to our unit to make a plate of old ham and cold mashed potatoes. My aunt was a kind woman who always offered her leftovers. My eldest cousin sat in an armchair across the room and I watched his eyes follow the painter’s journey to the microwave. I saw the darkness of the staircase, and the emptiness of a memory erased in my cousin’s eyes. The same foot planted, firm stare I gave the painter when his back was turned. My cousin and I had many things in common. The same furrowed brow, the same short temper, charming gummy smile, and aversion to touch. And in all of these things I could nally see the difference between what is the blood and what is learned. I knew my cousin had walked the same stairs, he had smelled the oil and touched the brushes, and now we both sat on an antique carpet, cursing the same thing the painter stole from us. I looked up at the wall, at the little naked child made of tiny tiny dots still held captive behind a glass frame on my aunt’s wall, and I wondered what the painter had stolen from that little boy too.