The City You Live In

The painting arrived at Calvin LeDuke’s gallery on a flatbed truck with an “Oversize Load” sign on the bumper. It came with none of the usual paperwork, only a small box containing a jeweler’s lens and a slip of paper reading, “The City You Live In.” There was nothing else that indicated where it had come from, who had painted it, and why Calvin was receiving it. 

A battalion of men in hard hats maneuvered the massive frame through a loading dock and into the gallery, where they left it propped against the gallery’s back wall. 

“What am I supposed to do with this monstrosity?” Calvin said to himself. He was three days removed from the disastrous opening of his own portrait series, “Muse at Dusk”, and perhaps two months from complete financial ruin. With his fiftieth birthday looming, he had been struggling with the possibility that he was not only a failed artist, but a failed gallerist as well. 

When the colossus was free of its packaging, Calvin thought he had been gifted a simple photograph of the city at sunset, taken from a great height and blown up to a preposterous size. It was only when he looked through the jeweler’s lens and saw the delicate, almost imperceptible brush strokes that he realized what an astonishing work of art this truly was. 

“Ouh la la, what is this?” Calvin had been examining the new painting for over an hour when his fiancée, Clémence, entered the gallery. Clémence taught figure painting at the university, was half his age, and was deliriously French. She was also beautiful in the way deliriously French women tend to be. As the subject of “Muse at Dusk”, a dozen versions of Clémence in vermilion and dioxazine purple hung from the gallery walls. “Have you been keeping secrets from me, Calvin?”

“It just arrived today. Isn’t it remarkable?” 

She stood behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder. “Oui.” Her breath smelled of cigarettes, which meant she had been painting in her studio at the school. She only ever smoked when she was painting, or right after they made love.

“Search for a corner of the city that holds your heart,” he said, handing her the jeweler’s lens. 

She gave him a look of playful curiosity, then turned to the canvas. After a moment’s searching, she leaned in over a spot where the river gently bent south. She put the lens to her eye, leaned in, and gasped.

“Incredible, isn’t it?”

“Mon dieu! The detail is unbelievable! It must have taken a decade to paint. I’ve never seen such skill.” 

Hearing Clémence gush in a way she’d never done for his work filled his gorge with sudden resentment for an artist whose identity remained a mystery. Before he indulged in the urge to defend himself, she exclaimed loudly. 

“Calvin, I think I found you!”

Clémence gestured to a white smudge further down the canvas that was the size of a tooth. Through the lens, Calvin saw unmistakable details burst forth. It was without question the gallery, lit brightly from within, a crowd gathered on the sidewalk outside. 

“Where am I supposed to be?” he said. 

“You are coming through the door, silly!” 

He looked again and found in the doorway a dozen, maybe two dozen microscopic brushstrokes which created an arrangement of colors that formed an image that could possibly be him. 

“Do you think it is really me?” 

“Of course it is! It is carrying your paint palette, no?” 

On a second glance, there was something in the figure’s hand that could be a palette. He squinted. Yes, he could see it now. There was no question, he was looking at an image of himself. 

“Impossible,” he muttered. “Clémence darling, where are you?” 

“That is a mystery we will have to solve,” she said, gently pulling him away from the canvas. “Calvin, you must have an exhibition. Everyone must see this.” 

He sighed. “It is monstrous though, isn’t it? I would be like a carnival barker selling tickets to a freak show.” 

Clémence rested her head on his shoulder, shushing him gently. “It must be shown.” 

“The City You Live In” officially opened a week later. The first showing was lightly attended. There were the usual faces, people like Mrs. Odenkirk and Mr. Quincy, regular patrons of the arts who came to every event but never bought anything. A few of Clémence’s students and colleagues came by as a favor. The lone art critic at the show was Harry Brashear. Despite having been one of the harshest critics of “Muse at Dusk”, Calvin greeted him like a king, ushering him before the painting and personally handing him the lens. 

“Mr. Brashear, I invite you to search your mind for a corner of the city that holds your heart.”

Harry gave him a look of mild irritation before peering into the lens. When he gasped, the crowd around the painting laughed lightly, and a few people clapped. 

“Extraordinary! I can see my reading chair,” he exclaimed, which elicited more applause. He then scanned the canvas for something else, requested a stepladder so that he might reach a point higher up, and then set the lens to his eye. 

The smile on Calvin’s face as he beamed up at the critic wilted as Brashear’s heavy jowls went from pink to red to crimson. A moment later the critic pushed his way through the crowd, muttering and cursing under his breath. 

“What do you think he saw?” Clémence said later that night, after they closed the gallery. She sat at a stool in front of the painting, the jeweler’s lens held up to one eye, a pink flush in her cheeks from too much champagne. 

“Who can know?” Calvin said. “Perhaps he saw his husband in the bath with his editor.”

“But why would he want to see that?”

“Because he’s a miserable villain,” Calvin said playfully. “Have you found yourself yet?” 

“I am a Waldo,” she said glumly. “Where am I, Waldo?” 

That night, after they made love, as Clémence softly snored at his side, Calvin’s mind returned to Brashear, and what he had seen in the painting. He hoped whatever it was hadn’t spoiled his chance for a decent review.

Brashear’s review was printed in the weekend edition, and it was scathing. In it he called the painting a piece of unconvincing tripe, and Calvin a modern huckster only interested in having a laugh at the expense of the community he so desperately wanted to respect him. 

“He is an old fool,” Clémence said over breakfast. 

“He’s a hack, that’s what he is.” Calvin let the newspaper drop onto his eggs benedict. “He has no concept of what we artists go through for our craft! He completely misunderstood “Muse at Dusk”. Do you remember? He wanted to see something to criticize in The City because he has no respect for me, it’s as simple as that.” A comet trail of hollandaise sauce arced through the air when he threw the paper across the room. Clemence reached across the table and stroked his hand. 

“The problem with art is that people only see what they want to see,” Calvin said. 

Any concern Calvin had that the review would hurt business ended up being unfounded. The popularity of The City You Live In only grew, despite the review, and soon the gallery was full from open to close with people dying to find themselves through the jeweler’s lens. And yet, despite the steady flow of patrons, he still hadn’t sold any of his paintings. 

“I have the most popular exhibit in town and I’m going to lose everything.”

“I have an idea,” Clémence said. “Do you remember Adrien? From the university?” 

He had a memory of being introduced to an insufferably good-looking man with a swimmer’s build and primer under his fingernails. “I don’t recall.”

“He is a painter too.” 

“Everybody’s a painter,” Calvin scoffed. 

“But he is good! Not as good as you, of course.” She squeezed his arm reassuringly. “If you hung a few of his paintings, I’m sure you could negotiate an excellent percentage on any sales.”

The thought of sharing his gallery with some bohemian from the university made Calvin’s skin crawl, but if he didn’t get his debts in order, he would have to consider selling his prize attraction just to break even. 

“Okay, fine,” barked Calvin. He shrugged Clémence’s hand off his shoulder and wandered the warehouse trying to strike up a conversation with anyone standing near his portraits. 

Later that evening, the crowd buzzed with the news that Harry Brashear had just been arrested for the murder of his husband. The air sizzled with speculation, but Calvin found his gaze returning to the painting, and the memory of Harry growing enraged by something he saw through the jeweler’s lens. 

The next morning, Adrien met Calvin and Clémence at the gallery with some of his canvases. Adrien was the worst kind of struggling artist: he was so handsome he could get anything he wanted, and so talented he didn’t need to rely on his looks to find success. Worst of all, he made Clémence laugh. After settling on a generous percentage on sales, Clémence and Adrien began pulling down a selection of his portraits to replace with the new pieces. Calvin watched their obvious chemistry and grew more despondent every time the gallery echoed with her laughter.

In just two nights, all of Adrien’s paintings had sold out. The proceeds would be enough to pay down most of Calvin’s debts. He should have felt relieved, but instead felt worse than ever. 

“This is wonderful, no?” Clémence said. “Adrien wants to celebrate. He has invited us to a party tonight at his loft.” 

He kissed Clémence on the cheek. “You go, love.”

“Without you?” 

“I’m tired,” he said. 

“Are you sure?” 

He hugged her, breathed deep the natural perfume of her hair. “Go. Have fun.” 

“I will not stay late,” she said. When everyone had left, he returned to The City with the jeweler’s lens and a bottle of wine. He looked for Harry Brashear, but after some time, his gaze returned to the image of gallery and the tiny version of himself standing outside. When he looked at it now, he could see that the figures standing outside were the many patrons and dealers who came every night to his gallery but never bought his works. It also seemed that he had misinterpreted what his own figure was doing. Now, it appeared that he was bursting out of the studio. Where could he be off to in such a rush? To find Clémence? 

“Where are you, Waldo?” he said to himself. He suddenly remembered her first moment before the painting. Her first look was not at the gallery, but somewhere else, by the river. He found the gentle curve in the river, and let the lens move up to about where he guessed she had looked. 

An apartment slid into view. The sun’s light on the river behind the building made it appear as though it were surrounded by flames. The top floor featured floor-to-ceiling windows, giving a clear view of a figure standing at an easel. He was shirtless, but his height, the broadness of his shoulders, and the infinitesimal swirl of yellow ochre, titanium white, and burnt umber on top of his head left no question in Calvin’s mind that he was looking at Adrien. Deeper in the room, another figure sat in bed, a cigarette in her hand but all other details were lost in shadow. Calvin’s heart hammered in his chest. He squinted, and now he was sure the shape of her head was familiar, and the way her hair fell over one shoulder looked just like—

“You’re being crazy,” he said to himself. Much later, he was so drunk when he came home that he did not even realize Clémence was not in bed with him until he was awoken by the sound of her keys rattling in the front door. He said nothing as she slipped into bed, and she made no attempt to wake him. But long after she had started softly snoring, Calvin lay awake, shaken by the unmistakable smell of cigarettes in her hair. 

In the weeks that followed, Calvin withdrew further into his anxieties. Adrien’s success continued, and soon Calvin relented to Clémence’s wishes to show more of his pieces. He suspected she wanted to remove all of his portraits and make the space exclusive to Adrien, but out of love or pity, she never asked. 

Most evenings he lingered long after the gallery closed to study The City among an audience of his unsold paintings. Every night he discovered some new, taudry secret about the people in his social circles. He saw Mrs. Odenkirk, beating her grandchild with a cane. He found Mr. Quincy molesting a small boy in the city park. Clémence stopped asking when he’d be home, and he took that as a further sign she was having an affair. 

He’d begun drinking to excess and would often wake Clémence with self-pitying rants and half-hearted apologies. He still had not found her in The City, which made him even more certain she was the figure in Adrien’s loft. On one such night, his suspicions spilled out in a torrent of wine-soaked accusations.

“You think I am cheating on you? Because of that painting?” 

“Where are you, Waldo?” Calvin sing-songed in her face. 

“You have lost your mind.” 

“You don’t deny it, then?” he slurred. “Just admit it, you conniving whore,” Her lip quivered, and for a moment it looked as if she might fall to pieces. But then the graceful lines of her face hardened into bold, daring angles.

“You shit!” she said. “Miserable, pathetic shit! How dare you?” She threw her pillow at him. “I support you always, and you say this to me? Go to hell!”

She started opening drawers, tossing contents seemingly at random into her yoga bag.

“Tell me, is it because he’s more handsome than me or because he's a better painter?” Calvin shouted. Clémence screeched and threw a bottle across the room. 

“When did you become like this? ‘Oh boo hoo, I have no talent why doesn’t anyone like my shitty paintings?’ It is pitiful. I ask myself; how could I love such a man? And now this? You pathetic shit, I am done with you.” 

When he tried to stop her, she spit at him and slapped him across the face. Later, when she was gone, Calvin sat on the bed, satisfied with himself for having destroyed the last good thing in his life. 

He did not open the gallery the next morning. Instead, he spent the day in front of The City You Live In, searching for Clémence and getting drunk. At one point he passed out, and when he woke, the light filtering in through the front window suggested it was nearly dusk. Empty wine bottles rolled across the gallery floor as he stumbled to his feet. He squinted at the painting and found Adrien’s loft with ease. In a gesture that had become automatic, he held the lens to his eye. 

Through the lens, he saw Adrien’s apartment building in flames. ‘No, that wasn’t right,’ he thought. It was the river behind the building that created the illusion of flames. 

And yet. 

He looked again. A chaotic swirl of Cadmium Yellow and Alizarin Crimson had fully engulfed the building. Calvin wondered how he could have interpreted it in any other way. There was no doubt in his mind that the building was on fire. 

In the upper floor, he saw Adrien, stripped to the waist, and the woman smoking in bed. It was the painting on the easel that bothered him so much, for it looked now to be a portrait of a woman in the style of “Muse at Dusk”. As though Adrien and Clémence were mocking him directly to his face, through the painting. His eyes burned with hot tears.

The seed of an idea took root in the rich soil of his suspicions and flowered in an instant. Had she gone straight to Adrien’s last night? Was she there now? He screamed, bent and threw a wine bottle at one of his portraits. He then destroyed the rest with a pair of shears. Blind with rage, he stumbled out of the gallery with one tattered canvas in his hand, fell into his car and drove off, the setting sun burning like twin fires in his eyes.

Weeks later, Clémence entered the darkened gallery. It was her first time in the building since the fire and Calvin’s arrest. She had received a letter from Calvin’s lawyer transferring ownership of the gallery and The City You Live In to her. The transfer of ownership papers came with a note that simply read: “Sell the painting. I love you. I’m so sorry.” 

She gazed up at the painting, the lines of her face deeper than before. Her elegant fingertips drifted over the surface of the painting until it found what she was looking for, and then she brought the jeweler’s lens to her eye. Through the lens, Clémence could see the prison and the prison yard. If she squinted just right, gentle teasings of color came together in the shape of a man in the yard wearing prison grays, standing before an easel, looking up to the sky.