Me and My Matisse

Tim hung the painting from a nail that was already in the wall. It was a rental and he didn’t want to patch it later. Every wall in the apartment was blank white and appeared to have been freshly painted before his arrival two weeks earlier.

He’d bought the painting at an estate sale while looking for silverware and dishes. It was probably 48 inches wide and a foot tall and had a chipping blue plastic frame. The artist had recreated Matisse’s La Dance, but instead of five dancers with linked hands going around grass, it had been squashed to fit on a skinnier rectangle of canvas and the dancers were all blue. It was art and Tim had been tired of staring at white walls. The painting was too high off the ground and made little sense to be where he had hung it, but he left it there.

When he got separated after battling for months to try to not get separated, he had surrendered the energy to take anything with him when he moved out. The exertion and anxiety of attempting to stay married when his wife did not see the point had drained him into bag of passive aggressive meat with a paunch. He didn’t take the forks and blankets he needed or much beyond the Overstock.com leather couch from the basement. His pleas and tears could not make his wife cry or change her mind, so he had moved onto trying to make her feel guilty by making him leave with nothing.

Tim chose to ignore that she had not made him leave with nothing. That had been his choice and one that felt right at the time. He didn’t want evidence of his previous life when he left. He wanted a clean start, even if that meant 20 white walls and no forks.

But now he had his own Matisse.

He walked around the apartment again, looking for something to do. There were boxes of stuff to unpack, but that felt a bit like admitting that he would live here for a long time, and he wasn’t ready to admit that.

For now, the room his kids would stay in was the only room that looked like an adult had done something to it. The bunk beds were in place and Star Wars blankets graced the mattresses. He had put up artwork from school that he had taken from one of those drawers at his old house where you put artwork after its refrigerator time is expired.

The floor was already a mess with new toys from Christmas morning, which had been eight hours ago.

That had been very odd. The kids came to his little apartment, which had no tree, and opened presents. Their mom dropped them off in their minivan, which Tim had to keep making payments on for two more years.

They got out and gave him enthusiastic hugs that virtually screamed childhood trauma. All Tim could think of was that movie Inside Out and a sad core memory being created in the parking lot of his nice, but not that nice apartment building.

The kids had been there before, but he hadn’t seen them in almost a week and they had already had Christmas with their mother at their real house – the one where he had lived for eight years and had done a seemingly endless number of repair projects.

They happily tore through their gifts and he tried to make them lunch, but they were stuffed from their mom’s house. She had made Belgian waffles and bacon. They did eat one of the cinnamon rolls Tim made from those cylindrical cans.

And then they were gone. His ex was taking them to grandma’s house. It had been planned already, so, could they go? Sure. Of course. They will want to see their grandma. Can’t be selfish.

Tim had played Xbox for awhile, but the game he had bought himself for Christmas was too hard. What was he thinking? It was a game his ex would not have liked because it was very, very violent. It was dumb and hard and he was bad at it.

He picked up the Men’s Health he had subscribed to. It felt good to read it. Maybe there was a chapter on how to be amazing all the time. Was there a chapter on early middle-aged men and why they were awesome. He flipped to a page on starting a new workout routine.

After studying the diagram, he did 10 sit ups and took off his shirt to stare at the mirror.

“You are a work in progress,” he said to the universe. He did not continue with the exercises.

He thought about calling his mom. She would talk to him. Or maybe his sister? She had heard from him a lot lately. He wasn’t sure what he would say to her that was new. “Hey, I am sad. I bought a painting.”

Alcohol. That would be something to do. He went to the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. His stomach gurgled with something. Is that depression or anxiety? Or indigestion? Maybe no alcohol for now, he thought.

He wandered to his bedroom and sat in front of the computer. When he was very lonely, before his ex had told him that she didn’t want to be with him anymore, but after she had stopped any sort of intimacy, he had browsed online dating sites. He felt like he was cheating on her even though he had only viewed a few pages and even admitted it during their single ill-fated counseling visit. She hadn’t cared. That’s when he knew things were truly wrong.

So, he pulled up one of the free ones and started making a dating profile. But after two attempts to describe himself in a way that didn’t horrify himself, he gave up. He was pretty certain that pathetic man with two kids who failed at marriage and lives in an apartment with a bad Matisse recreation was not going to turn any heads. And worse, what would he do if someone actually did like him?

That’s when he put on The Smiths.

Please, please, please let me, let me, let me, let me get what I want this time

Then Tim posted that he was listening to The Smiths. It was a cry for help, he knew. It was Christmas night. He was alone in a very dark and austere room with only the light of his computer, reading the comments section on The Smiths YouTube channel.

His phone buzzed with a text.

“stop fucking listening to the smiths.” It was his friend. He lived in another state.

“do you want me to call”

“No i’m good sorry if I am being a douche”

“Not a douche don’t listen to the smiths - this is a tribe called quest sort of night”

Tim put on Midnight Marauders and skipped to Electric Relaxation. It was then that he felt well enough to drink the beer in his refrigerator until he became sleepy.

He slipped under the covers of his inflatable mattress. His Costco mattress would arrive in a week. He thought about the last night he tucked in his 4-year-old in his old house. Tim knew it would be the last night, but his son didn’t know. Tim had stayed lying next to him well after he had fallen asleep.

It was too early to go to sleep, but Tim wanted this day to be over. Tomorrow he planned to hit the Salvation Army to look for another painting. He had found a nail sticking out of the wall in his bedroom and it was begging for some art.