Inimitable Blue

Some ideas should never share air with us. Like the innocent blue blood in our veins unborn ideas are present, quiet, unnoticed—until the skin is pierced. Then, loudly red and irrevocable, they are among us. In the case of bread, electricity, the photograph, there is joy in the permanence. In others, there is misery.

The Painter came to prominence in an American state you’ve heard of but never stepped foot in. As a child he was unextraordinary at unextraordinary things—paint-by-number, coloring books, stale art class assignments, the yearbook cover. Fixation was where he excelled. With an artistic task in front of him the world was blurred and disposable, like the water that cleaned his brushes. One teacher, concerned, described his temperament as “artistic” once. This was enough to propel him into art school.   

As an art school student his oil on canvas was wildly adequate. Professors only had to embellish a little when they penned critiques. Along the way he amassed an entourage that was impressive in number, but unimpressively like the creatures that attach themselves to whales. That he was a force was undeniable, but it was not a force of talent like he thought. It was belief.

He encountered The Pear posing in a figurative drawing class he attended by accident. He was twenty-two and had never seen a naked woman before. When she dropped her robe, the realization was sudden and dizzying, like he’d just remembered something important he’d forgotten to do. When the shock ebbed and he began to draw, her lines were so like a bowl of fruit that he became irritated when she drew breath. The resulting drawing was unsettlingly still, like the inspiration behind it had been a statue.

He approached her without fear because he feared nothing but things within himself. In bed she felt small and trembled. In bed he hurried, inspired by pleasure, anxious to pick up a brush. And when he did paint her eventually, he expressed his love soon after, in part because it had taken him several hours to find the blue of her eyes on his palette.

But she loved him. She loved him like you love your favorite work of art—at a distance, apart, not understanding but desperately wanting to. They married. He’d proposed one rainy day in his studio, particularly cluttered and dank with damp and paint.

“Be my wife,” he’d said, looking around at the stained palettes adrift on the floor. “I don’t care where I live, but I must have beauty around me.” Her difficult-to-capture blues welled as she accepted, misunderstanding.

Her pregnancy coincided with the Painter’s rise to fame. His thesis—an oil on canvas of The Pear contemplating an apple—had, along with the curtains, been set alight one night by a providential cigarette butt. By the time the flame was put out, all that was left of The Pear’s head was an ashy wasteland. The Painter with his oceanic belief submitted the work anyway, and when he did, professors took up their pens with a flourish, critics, then investors took notice, and soon The Painter’s works of ruins had a gallery of their own.

Through all of this, The Painter took more of an interest in her pregnancy than The Pear had anticipated. When she wasn’t tidying the studio or cooking his meals, she was posing. He delighted in her curves and the growing hint of a thing he’d created.

“Like Prometheus, I steal fire!” The Painter would say when it was time to burn the brushstrokes he’d sweated over. This “Creation in Ruins” series made waves.

But when The Daughter was born she was slimy and red and vexed. She was not beautiful, and The Painter did not love her. In a matter of weeks he’d swapped The Pear for The Spiral, a dark, curly-haired business student with high aspirations for her net worth. They fled to a state that could be your own. The Painter’s work continued to burn.

The Pear, too, fled, but to the abyss. His hatred she could have tolerated. His indifference was unbearable. As though her hands were bound by it she rarely touched The Daughter, and, because the abyss is loveless, she could not love her. The Daughter grew up like a flower pushing through cracks in the sidewalk. She was pretty and kind. She was also lonely, but did not know it.

When as a young woman The Daughter met a violent death at the hands of a stranger under circumstances we’ve allowed to become commonplace, The Pear wrote The Painter. By then he’d swapped galleries for museums and a professorship (whales adore professorships), an apartment for an estate. The photograph that fell to the floor when he opened the letter made his eyes well with something he could not name. He lay awake on the floor of his studio that night, shivering, watching moonlight move over his life’s work.

   In the days that followed The Spiral did not know him. He wept. Even though he would not leave his studio, his brushes were stiff and dry. An ember of something ugly began to form in her belly, the same ugly thing that makes spoiled children flush when asked to share.

The Painter did not attend the funeral. He spent the day staring at a blank canvas instead, his heart beating in fits and starts, poisoned. Her death—and the photograph that stayed behind to taunt him—had inspired a new love, the sudden, violent kind. He loved her, and not because she was beautiful. He loved her with a force beyond beauty. He’d never dreamed there was anything at all beyond beauty, and the liquid of this new love boiled painfully with the grief and guilt around his heart. Arsenic would have been preferable.

The Idea came to him after her ashes arrived on his doorstep. The urn was cheap and impossibly small, discarded by a discarded woman, her tenderness swallowed up by the abyss.

At first he built a sort of shrine for the urn, hoping that the faith and rites of others would dissolve the poison around his heart. But his only faith was in himself. The shrine did nothing but anger The Spiral.

Next he took a pilgrimage to the ocean to scatter her. But once he reached it, it occurred to him that, in life, she might have feared the water. The uncertainty paralyzed him. He took her home.

The Idea was born one moonless night in his studio. The candles he typically used to set his creations alight he was using instead in vigil. Clutching her urn, sick with poison, desperate, it struck him like only true inspiration can. He could speak to her. He could look her in the eye. He could beg forgiveness. Re-creation. Resurrection through art! And he did not even need fire to do it!

When dawn began to kiss the walls the next morning, his work was complete. On his easel stood The Daughter’s likeness in her own ashes, a dark, dusty replica of the photograph he kept in his lapel. A likeness in ashes save her eyes, which were the same nearly inimitable blue as her mother’s. He’d searched for the blue on his palette, and found it, eventually. He’d found a little regret, too.

The Daughter recreated, he stood in the morning light, prepared to look into her nearly inimitable blue eyes and spill the poisonous ache from his heart through his lips. He closed his eyes—it was just a little more than a blink, really—searching for something within himself that could do something he had never done before: apologize.

But when he opened his eyes again, the earth stood still. Even the poison circling his heart stopped, as though to look.

The Daughter’s likeness had closed her eyes. The nearly inimitable blue (that still stained his palette) was buried under ash.

The Painter, once with a belief as immense and undeniable as a whale, cowered before her. He didn’t dare speak to her with her eyes closed. He didn’t dare close his own eyes. One blink and he could miss her! She could open her eyes again at any moment!

The thirst came first. Then the hunger, accompanied by knocking on the studio door that was a soft echo by the time it reached him, a whisper from another world that evaporated on impact. He stood for days, waiting, wide-eyed.

When they removed his body, The Spiral was perplexed to discover his life’s work erased. The prized canvases that had lined the walls of the studio were burnt beyond recognition. Frames and a few tatters remained, blowing in the wind like pirate sails as she walked past.

One was spared. It was a portrait she’d never seen before. The Daughter. Why had he painted her with her eyes shut?

The portrait was held as evidence for several months and in storage for years. When The Spiral died, it made its way to a museum, where it resides to this day.

Who knows? It could be a museum you frequent. Next time you visit, keep your eyes wide for a portrait in ash of an unloved Daughter with her eyes shut tight.

But if you find yourself there with an unpure, poisoned heart, and see the slightest hint of a nearly inimitable blue—beware.