Silent Masterpieces

My favourite photograph of myself is not the one that you might think. It’s not the one that a drunk photographer had taken of me just after I had sold Katherine for over five hundred thousand dollars, the picture dizzy and filled with sudden, fantastical movement, me grinning in a suit, hair dishevelled and eyes fanatic with the accomplishment. I felt like a Roman Emperor, a true Caesar on my throne of marble and blood. My mother has that photo framed and hung in her dining room, and not a dinner party goes by where she doesn’t nod at it with pride, “Oh, yes, that was Frank, just after selling one of his pieces for five hundred thousand dollars. Yes, five hundred thousand.”

   It’s the photograph Katherine had taken of me at the beach. I was sheepish, looking off into the distance, bare feet buried in the cool sand, hair ruffled in the beach breeze. I had a can of beer in my left hand, a cigarette in my right. I wasn’t even looking at the camera. 

   The reason that it’s my favourite is because by accident, she had captured her hand, which had just been pointing at me a moment ago, trying to get my attention, to get me to smile, to say cheese, something. Her hand, beautifully slender, archaic and elegant in movement. My only photograph of her.

   I don’t have the photograph hung up anywhere in the house. Nobody but her and I know of its existence. I keep it under my pillow every night. I remember reading somewhere that Oxford students would sleep with their study notes under their pillows right before an important exam, that they claimed that it helped them better absorb the material. As if the scribbled notes written on a wrinkled sheet of looseleaf could somehow crawl off the page in a dance of inky madness and seep into their heads. Never mind how silly it is, I tell myself that if I sleep with it underneath my pillow, perhaps the memory will combat me in a way it never has before, and I’ll find myself transported there, to the land of memory, to hopefully live out the rest of my days. 

I haven’t painted in fifteen years. And why should I? 

I always get strange looks when friends come by my house, because not a single painting can be found anywhere. It’s as if my walls are obscenely naked. Once, my sister’s colleague, who only came round because for some reason she had desperately wanted to sleep with me, looked at me as if I was the strangest creature she had ever come across. 

   “Where are the paintings?” she said after craning her neck into every room she could find, fingers excitedly tapping the air as if I had piano keys floating around my home. 

   “What do you mean?” I asked her, already feeling irritable and was furiously brainstorming a way to politely make her leave. 

   She wrinkled her nose at me. “What kind of famous painter doesn’t have any paintings in his house?”

   My response was curt. “I am not famous. And I am no longer a painter.”

   My mother cries about it sometimes. Ah, my mother, always a theatrical woman. Never to be seen without dabbing the corners of her eyes with a handkerchief. 

 Nobody understands, but I know Katherine would. She’d laugh at me, tell me to stop being so serious about what happened, tragic as it was. 

   That’s what I loved most about Katherine. She could never look at anything as a tragedy. She could look at something horrific, and find something beautiful about it. After the beach, we had walked past a car wreck and she had commented on the symmetry of the automobiles colliding, how one spun so delicately, like a ballerina.

   Her favourite fruit was a tangerine. She had a song she would sing whenever she was peeling one with her small, gracile fingers. “Tangerine, tangerine, you might think I’m so mean, because I slice you up and eat you up but only because you taste so good.” It didn’t rhyme, not really, but it was the sweetest song one could ever hear. If I could paint her again, I’d paint her in a sea of glistening tangerines. 

   I suppose I do have to thank Emilie in a way, because if it weren’t for her, I would’ve never even known of Katherine. 

   I was in one of the worst periods of my life when I met Katherine. I was 29, living at home, scratching away at canvases miserably, every painting that I was able to spit out looked terribly uninspired and loathsome. I was wishing something, like a lightning bolt, would hit me and put me out of my misery. Mama thought I was a bum, and Emilie, who was 14, had a funny habit of pretending that I didn’t exist. And in a way, I didn’t exist. Not in anybody’s life but my own. Until Katherine. 

   Katherine and Emilie weren’t really friends. Emilie had invited her over because they had a school project they had to work on. I could tell Emilie was embarrassed to be seen around Katherine, judging from the fact that Katherine came from a very poor family, and wore baggy, odd-smelling clothes. 

   The first time I saw Katherine, she stared at me for a solid minute. Mama had made dinner for all of us, and Katherine sat across from me, eagle-eyed. She never touched her plate. 

   “I heard you’re a painter,” she said. “I wish I could be a painter.”

   “He’s not a real painter, Katherine,” Emile cut in, scoffing. “He hasn’t even sold anything.”

   My mother shot Emilie a look.

   “You know it’s true.” Emilie muttered. 

   “Could I see one of them?” Katherine asked. Nobody said anything for a moment. “Please?” she added. 

   “Okay.” I said. 

   I took Katherine upstairs to my studio in the attic. I was nervous. I had canvases and paint spilt everywhere, half-finished disasters propped up on lopsided wooden easels. Paint was everywhere. It was everywhere on me too, in my hair, stuck under my fingernails, in the cracks that appeared in the palms of my hands. 

   She said nothing for a few minutes, just tiptoed around, caressing the air in front of each painting with her fingertips, picking up a paintbrush or two, running her thumb through the bristles. She paused in front of one painting in particular, a painting I tried to make of my father, a man I have never met. I was about a quarter way through when I had tossed it off the easel in frustration. How could I possibly paint a portrait of a man whom I’ve never seen before?

   “This one’s my favourite.” she noted. 

   I frowned, confused. “But why?”

   “Oh. Because the man looks so mysterious. He looks like he could be real, but he also couldn’t be. As if…” she struggled to find the right words. “...as if he just stepped out of somebody’s imagination, and is wondering if he should go back or stay.”

   I was breathless. 

   Katherine left the house soon after and Emilie and Mama fell asleep. I stayed in the attic. I picked up the painting and nearly wept. I threw aside whatever had been on my easel and put that one on instead and I finished it. I titled it Mystery Man. It ended up selling at one of the galleries downtown, the first painting I had ever sold. Only for four hundred dollars, mind you, but that kind of money back then was millions for me. I was itching for Emilie to invite Katherine over again so I could tell her. 

   And she did, a week later, so Katherine could help her study for a test. Katherine had come to see me of her own accord. I was painting when I heard a soft, hesitant knock at the door. When I opened it, I saw Katherine standing there, staring up at me.

   “Hello,” she said demurely, “I hope I’m not bothering.”

   “Not at all,” I was nearly grinning from ear to ear to see her again. “Come in, please.”

   I told her about how the painting sold, and she was overjoyed, clapping her hands together excitedly, perched on my painting stool when I told her how much it sold for. 

   “Oh, I knew it was a masterpiece when I saw it! A real work of art, a Da Vinci!”

   I blushed. “It wasn’t that good. I could do better.”

   “That’s true,” she smiled. Her cheeks always turned pink whenever she smiled. “One day, you’ll be selling your paintings for millions.”

   “I don’t know about that,” I laughed wryly. “Nobody thinks I’m worth much. Not anybody I know, anyways.”

   “I think you’re worth so much,” she said softly, and then paused quickly, as if she had regretted saying so. She then crossed her legs at the ankles, cocked her head to the side, and said, “Frank, can I ask you a question?”

   Hearing her say my name was as if I was hearing an angel choir. “Yes.”

   “Could you…perhaps, you know, only if you want to…paint me?” 

   I didn’t know what to say for a moment. I stood quietly, twirling a paintbrush around with my fingers. Suddenly she stood from her stool, and began to walk towards the door, face flaming red. 

   “I should’ve never asked, how silly of me, really, I know you’re-”

   “No, wait,” I said quickly, before she could reach the door. “I-I’d love to paint you.”

   She smiled, and somewhere inside me, nestled inside my ribcage, a flower bloomed. 

   And so it began. Every day, after school, Katherine would accompany Emilie to our house, come upstairs to be painted, dine with the three of us, and then she’d walk home. 

   She had a yellow dress that she would wear for the painting. It looked so lovely on her, and matched her hair so beautifully. She would sit on the stool for hours without complaint, just glowing and flickering like a candle flame. I had a small wicker basket full of tangerines for her to snack on while I painted. She would speak to me sometimes, mostly about her mother. 

   “I love my mother, I really do,” she’d say, eyes glistening, “but sometimes, Frank, I just want to run away. I want to run away to somewhere I can never come back from, and live there instead.”

   “Why?” I asked, gliding my brush across the canvas, its wooden handle glued to my fingers. I wouldn’t have been able to drop it if I tried. 

   Katherine bit her lip. “She hits me sometimes. When I’m mean. Like yesterday, she asked me if I liked her hat, and I told her I didn’t, and she hit me. Mama can’t afford nice things, and that hat was very expensive. She wanted me to say it was beautiful, but for some reason, I couldn’t.” she pulled down her shirtsleeve and revealed a nasty, misshaped ocean blue bruise on her shoulder.

   I frowned, pulling my brush away from the canvas for a moment, staring at her shoulder. “Katherine, it’s not right for her to hit you. You should tell your father.”

   “I don’t know my father,” she said, looking down at her feet. “He died when I was a baby.”

   “That’s okay. I never knew my father either. Regardless, it’s wrong for her to hit you.”

   I never let anybody look at the painting before it was finished. I caught Emilie trying to sneak into the studio one time, tiptoeing upstairs, pushing the creaky door open as carefully as she could muster, peering inside, about to step in, bracing herself, as if she was entering a portal to another world. 

   I watched her enter the room from where I was standing on the staircase, my fingers curling in anger on the cold wooden railing. “You’re not allowed in there, Emilie.”

   She jumped slightly, stumbling into the half open door, throwing out her arms to steady herself. She glanced down at me, wide-eyed in surprise, then her expression turned into a seething glare. “Why not? You let Katherine in all the time.”

   “That’s different.” my jaw tightened. 

   “You’re a creep, Frank,” she spat. “I wonder what you and Katherine really do in the attic.”

   A rage bubbled somewhere inside of me, so searing hot that I was burning alive from the inside out. I stared at her, my little sister, a person I began to realise I’ll never truly know, despite her being my blood. “Emilie. Go downstairs.”

   I finished the painting one night, two in the morning, pinching myself to keep awake. When I finished it, leaning back from my stool in awe, my paintbrush dropping to the floor, I nearly wept. It was beautiful. 

   There was so much gold in the painting. Shimmering on the dress, making the raggedy yellow thing look like it was the smoothest silk anybody could ever run their fingertips across. Gold in her hair, long and flowing past her shoulders, glittering delicately in her brown eyes, reflected in her fingernails. Her expression was perfect, aloof, but still, her gaze was piercing, her smile could render you defenceless and grant you a mortal wound. 

   When I had taken it to the gallery, the curator there insisted that I take it to the auction that they would hold every month or so for exquisite paintings. The auction was in fourteen days. 

   Those two weeks went by in such a blur I can hardly tell you any of it. I titled the piece Katherine, and it sat lonely in the gallery until the day of the auction. However, I do remember taking Katherine to the beach. 

   It was freezing cold, no way in hell either of us were getting in the water. But I do remember tossing my head up to the grey, angry clouds, my heart thumping in my chest at the thought of the auction tomorrow, taking sips of my beer, drags of my cigarette. It was when Katherine took my picture. 

   I hadn’t meant for what happened to have happened. It just did. No words, no explanations, it just did. One moment we were spinning around in the cold sand, the clouds above looming over us, and the next, I had kissed Katherine. It felt like a moment, it felt like a century. It felt like the purest warmth that one could ever be held by. After I had pulled away, she stared up at me, dumbfounded, blinking slowly. 

   “I-I’m sorry,” I said quickly, “I shouldn’t have…” my words trailed off as I waited for her to respond. 

   “Frank, it’s okay,” she said, and we left it at that. I walked her home, went back to my attic, where I slept underneath my easel, shivering cold and filled with anxiety for the next day, while images of Katherine spinning in the sand, her eyes closed as I kissed her, flashed behind my eyelids. 

   Everybody knows what happened the next night at the auction. The painting sold for a whopping half million dollars, bought by a rich art collector who prided himself on buying what he referred to as “silent masterpieces”. I drank enough wine for a lifetime and celebrated my newly found wealth. When I came home, stumbling out of a taxi, I found Katherine’s mother sitting on the couch next to Mama, fuming. As soon as she saw me walk through the front door, she shot up from the couch, eyes blazing, waving her arms around in what I remembered as chaotic, unfiltered rage. 

   “How dare you! How dare you take advantage of my daughter! Months go by and I wonder where she is everyday after school…and she’s been here the entire time with you!”

   “Mona, please, calm down,” my mother said, sniffling, trying to pull Katherine’s mother back down to her seat on the couch. “My son would never-”

   “Katherine told me!” she spun around to face Mama. “She told me that he kissed her yesterday! At the beach! She came home giddy, and I knew something had happened. He took advantage of her for that damn painting!”

   Tears were pooling in Mama’s eyes, streaking down her face. “I refuse to believe any of it, Mona.”

   “And you know what happened next?” the woman roared. I was stuck in the doorway. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t run. “I told her that she was to never see you again-” she jabbed a finger in my direction, “-and in the morning, she was gone. I couldn’t find her anywhere…I had to call the police…”

   “Katherine?” all the excitement, all the feverish delirium I had felt at the auction and the party afterwards had faded so fully and so quickly in that moment, that I was left feeling cold, numb and lost. “Where…where’s Katherine?”

   The woman stood there like a fragile piece of glass suspended above the floor a millisecond before it would drop and shatter into a million pieces. “I don’t know. She disappeared.”   

   There were missing person posters scattered all over the city. Some had photographs of Katherine, but many were photographs of Katherine, the oil painting. It was a strange, alien sensation to see paper copies of my painting everywhere, stapled to trees, left on top of windshields, and passed around in schools. I had Katherine watching me everywhere I went with her golden eyes, her reticent smile. 

   If you’re truly wondering why I stopped painting, it’s because Katherine’s body was found two and a half weeks later, floating facedown in a river that was just outside of the city. A true, tragic death, Ophelia incarnate. 

   Often, I think of Katherine and the painting. One buried six feet underground, one buried in the halls of some rich man’s mansion. Both forever lost to me. So yes, I will never touch a paintbrush for the rest of my days. Because how can an artist exist without his muse?