Portrait

He takes his seat opposite me at the little table and clumsily scoots his chair forward, filling the little restaurant with a sound like a child playing the trumpet. For a moment, as he tries to pretend he’s not embarrassed, I can’t remember if I swiped him, DM’ed him, or found him in a box full of farmers, Christians, or cupids; which is distantly irritating.

“Wow, this is, so awkward,” he says and laughs. His eyes crinkle at the corners and the awkwardness is clearly genuine, which is sweet in a way. Oh god, what was his name again?

“I know, I’ll never get used to the whole app-based dating thing,” I lie. Someone in the back drops a glass and the whole room flinches, but it’s just the waitstaff, now arguing over who’s to blame. It’s busy here tonight. The locals so loud I catch myself shouting over the noise. The sounds of silverware and drunken laughter mingle with the smell of tomato sauce and the faces of bored teens trying to hide from it all in their phones.

“I’m glad it’s not just me,” Charles says. Charles? Is that it? It can’t be. Nothing about him screams x-men. No, that’s not it. Something with a B. “It just feels so impersonal, you know, like buying something online. Or ordering off a menu,” he says, smirking as he points at a table where a family is arguing over which picture of dinner looks the best. “Oh, yes, I’ll have the complete stranger, in a sauce of cute pictures, hold the budding full-life-together fantasy please.”

I snort at that, the nonalcoholic wine a sweet burn in my sinuses. He’s smiling and nodding as I dab my mouth with a napkin. The waitress comes over with a basket of warm freshly made bread, filling the immediate space with a sour-sweet smell that I can taste. She takes our orders and I swear she is flirting with this guy, Bradey? Doesn’t look like a Bradey. Bradey looks like he lived his best days on the high school football team and everything since has just been a distraction. The man across from me smiles easily, has brown eyes and wears glasses. His hair is dark and swept back, he’s a little pudgy but in a cute, non-self-conscious way. It’s a body that looks more and more familiar the older I get, and at thirty-two, it’s either this or some self-absorbed gym rat that lives to spread the word of boner pills and optimized workout routines. The waitress finally leaves, and he doesn’t glance back at her. He’s looking at me.

“So,” he says, nibbling on a piece of bread as he rests his elbows on the table and leans towards me. While shifting, his gaze catches on my breasts, for a flickering moment, and he looks embarrassed to meet my eyes. If this top didn’t invite attention I wouldn’t have bothered wearing it. It’s not really a test, more a sampling, like ordering miniscule paint tubes from a new company. I lean in, matching his pose, making sure to squeeze my arms together for full effect. At only two glasses in I’m sending signals. His eyes are locked on mine. He’s smiling, nervously. “How did you end up in the online scene,” he asks.

“Ha” I smile, “girls just want to have fun.” I shoot him my best two-glasses-in come hither. He laughs, and it seems genuine. Is this his play, then? The warm-hearted simpleton? Will that be the title of the portrait?

“Yeah, I get that. Seems everyone on these things is just looking for a hookup, a,” he stumbles and looks at everything but me, “booty call. It took two dates with two different women to figure that out. Don’t look at me like that, I just though I was coming into my own, you know, finally ripened into something mature and undeniably irresistible.” He makes a funny little pose at that, sweeping his hand over himself like he’s an exhibit, then laughs and shakes his head. “If I’m being honest, I almost didn’t respond to you. I mean, I wanted to, obviously, but this whole thing,” he points at his phone on the table and looks a little disgusted, “it was starting to feel like prostitution or something.”

“Are you calling me a hoe,” I ask, trying to find the right degree of coy to get a reaction.

“Oh, no! Sorry, bad comparison. I don’t know, it just, it was more like I was hunting for a Russian bride, a mail order wife, something like that. A product, not a person. You know?”

I’m stuck for a moment, stumbling. I have to turn it into something else. What do I know about Russians? “Dah,” I let it drawl, channeling my best Romanov consort. It’s almost a fucking moan and he just smirks and takes another bite of his bread. I’m starting to lose faith in this particular model, in his appropriateness for the collection. Still, there’s plenty of time for him to prove me wrong. I draw my hair back, artfully left loose to allow for the sensual correction I make in tucking it behind my ear, a silky insinuation that I caress back with promise.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about, right there,” he says and smiles. He’s looking at me; not what I’m doing, not what I want him too. Is he missing the signals or just stupid, or, what, misinterpreting? Is it willful? Is he trying to lure me into a false sense of security, safety, submission? Submission? Submission to what? He doesn’t seem to need me to be anything. But I’ve dealt with those like him, three perfect renditions of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I’d sold one of those paintings to a private buyer for sixty grand. Alright, what do you see then?

He starts up again, “everything is just down to this show, right. Or play, maybe. Everyone goes out of their way to present these idealized versions of themselves on there, to take the selfies at just the right angle with just the right light and a background that says look at me, my life is more interesting than yours. But at the end of the day, it’s just an act. It’s not a person. It feels like they all think they need to sell themselves; you know? Convince someone to buy. Which seems kinda fucked up to me. And then everyone else has to go harder to prove they are worth more, until no one in the pictures or the bios or the chat is even real. Not like, in a corny, fake way. More like in a washed-out nothing-left-but-the-game way… so, ok, maybe in a fake way. But sadder, somehow…”

Is he negging me? No, that’s not it. Or not on purpose. Fine, he wants to sound enlightened, I’ll give him a pat on the head. “Wow, that’s just so, insightful,” a quick half giggle as I order another glass and wait to see if he checks out the waitress. Nothing. “I just think smart people are so hot,” said with just the right amount of suggestion. He’s laughing… at himself?

“I wish I was either of those,” he chuckles, “but as a man in my thirties, meeting up with real life profile pics, I know damn well that I’m neither smart nor hot. My thing now is to come to terms with that, and hopefully find someone with similar goals, you know? Honestly, I’m looking for someone who can laugh at it all with me,” he looks flustered, then, “sorry, that’s all a bit much. Besides, I’ve already thrown out my best me’isms, there’s not much else in there. What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Tell me something about yourself.”

Shit, ok. Well, why the hell can’t I think of anything now? Not a damn thing. It’s like all my memories fell out of existence and all I have left are the memory shaped holes where they used to be. What is your deal? Fuck, I don’t think I’m going to be able to paint you. Where would I even begin? The light? The history? The time of you is so vanilla, so innocuous, so lazily endearing that you would stick out in the collection like raver at a catholic mass. Damnit, I’m nearly done with the series, work with me here!

Tell me about yourself? “Like what,” I ask, trying to make it… what: suggestive, flirtatious, enticing? It just sounds confused.

“Well, what do you do?”

Powerplay? Dominance. ‘Oh, that’s cute, you play working woman. Well, as an investment banker who moves twenty million fuck-you’s a day’. Sure, let’s do this. “I’m an artist, actually.” Why the hell can’t I remember your name? Fucking Beetlejuice!

“Really? What kind,” he asks, clearing room for the plates of fettuccine.

You’re a lost cause, maybe I can scare you off with the truth. “It’s a sort of hybrid painting slash activism slash social experiment.” He scoffs, dribbling a bit of white sauce and bringing a napkin to his face. Maybe there’s hope yet.

“God, that’s amazing. Look, I have a hard time just making a doodle, you know? I can’t even conceptualize the layers aspect, it’s this and also this with hints of that as well. Literally, I’m like, it’s a stick figure, and if someone else agrees with me, I call it a win.” He shakes his head. “Ok, artistic genius, awesome. What are you working on now?”

I take a long sip from my glass, watching him from the corner of my eye. I twist to the side, arch my back as I raise the glass, stretching just so. It’s an absurd way to drink anything but it makes everything pop. He glances, but again, he looks… what? Ashamed? All right, you want to know what I’m working on, I’ll tell you what I’m working on.

“My current series is focused on portraits of predatory men, moments after they’ve tried to attack a person. They draw from real life instances and actual perpetrators, and in general show them in a state of distress, or defeat, but never surrender. The goal of the project is not simply to expose, or to seek revenge or catharsis or anything like that, but to mediate change by labeling and shining a light on these people, and their actions, and in doing so, paint them right out of reality. The social element is that these are real people, and they do often disappear after the portraits are released. So, the question I’m exploring is, can art function as an apex predator, in a way that affects and controls lower tier predators, in any ‘real’ sense.” Let’s see; shock, anger, shame, confusion, and now, something else. What are you going to do with that, Billy Bob? Going to bite?

“Well,” he thought for a moment, “shit.” Brilliant, a poet for the ages. I don’t have a brush small enough to capture the insignificance of that reaction. “I mean,” he goes on, face scrunched as he works out his next move. “Look, I get it, I think, or as much as I can. But honestly, I’ve never been a fan of public shaming. It always seemed to miss the point, you know, to bypass all the lines of justice, well, or what should be justice. It sort of sounds like there’s an extrajudicial element here, and I wonder, honestly, if that doesn’t cheapen the whole thing.”

Not quite what I was expecting. Usually, I pull out The Artist and they all just see a man-hating-feminazi and discreetly slip out the door on their way to the bathroom. That almost always works. It’s like he’s actually trying to talk about it, which kind of pisses me off. “How so,” I ask.

“Well, look. The whole point of the system is to prove wrongdoing, right? So that everyone can see it, so everyone can understand the gravity, the reality, of it. But you… you kind of bypass that, don’t you? Or have these people already gone through the system?”

“No, they have not. And they won’t be. But they each earned their place in the collection.”

“Right, but how do you know? For sure, I mean. How do you know it was true and not, made up, or exaggerated, or even the wrong guy? How can you be sure they deserve that,” he asks.

 Are you asking me if I have the right? How do I know? I can see them all, in my apartment. Reaching, grabbing, hitting, forcing, demanding. And not just me, not the first time, but only a verification of all the other times. I see them, too, when they realize they made a mistake. When I break them, fry them, hit them, stab them, tie them up and paint them. Most of them are alive when I start to paint. I do not judge them; any more than a trap judges a mouse for tripping it. But like the mousetrap, I do not tolerate trespass. I don’t tell them what they are, they tell me.

“I’m always sure,” I say, over my glass of faux red, unwilling to give him more than that. “And you put too much faith in the system, in justice.” He flinches. He’s not trying to deny it. So, he knows too. He looks… sad.

“Can I see,” he asks, his face an emulsion of hope and dread. So, I pulled up a few of the prints on my phone, and hand it over. I watch his face as he looks. Horrified, confused, interpreting, seeking. Only four, but he takes his time. A man, tied to a chair, his eyes all but dripping with hate, his head a blur of motion as I paint him. Next, a slender man, cold eyes, colder for being dead; twice he’d slipped pills into my drink that night. The third is a big man, apparently excited by denial, his leg sits at an odd angle under him on the floor and he can’t quite reach the painter. And four, high on something, several glittering taser wires drip from his body.

He sighs and gives me an appraising look that surprises me as he hands me back the phone. “I don’t know. I don’t think I get it, outside of retribution. I guess, I’m just hoping people are better than that, you know. Just, we can’t all be that, can we?” Is he asking me, god, or himself? “Don’t get me wrong, the art itself is mind blowing. The painting looks more real than a photo, more like a bug in resin, there is a depth there that I can’t even begin to comprehend. You are an amazing artist. I have to ask, though, have you shown these to your dad?”

“Why would that matter?”

“It doesn’t, I’m just curious how that would even go.”

I see him, after he’s served his time. For drunk driving, of course. Not for the other things he’d done. The jury had blanched as I’d hinted at it, described around the edges of his many offenses. But in the end what stuck was the easiest to prove. A drunk man on a cop’s camera, falling out of his car on the freeway. Three years later he was free, and home. When he found out I’d taken up painting he insisted I paint him. He was my first.

“That bad,” the man asks. God damnit! What the hell is your name?

“Huh,” I ask, caught off guard until I see something familiar in his eyes, a history scared into his self. I can’t paint him. I won’t lie to him. “Yes.”

The rest of the meal passes by in gloomy silence with a half-hearted conversation that mingles with the ghosts of unsaid things. I paid the bill, to his surprise, and amusement. Really, it’s to make sure no one sees what I was drinking. I get up, and he follows me outside. I’m surprised he doesn’t just walk away.

He turns to me and says, “so, look. That kind of went sideways. I’d like to give it another try, maybe something light and stupid?”

“Really,” sarcasm acting as a buffer to my confusion.

“Yeah,” he says, smiling.

“Why?”

“This was, I’m not going to lie, a nightmare, worst case scenario date. But it was still far more real than anything I’ve been on so far. And besides, maybe I can get you to paint me like one of your French girls,” his grin is shit eating pleased, and I laugh. “What do you say? Do over?”

“I’ll think about it,” I say. He nods and walks off toward his car.

Later that night I’m sitting at home, on my stool, with a paint smeared glass of the good stuff resting precariously on the edge of my easel. The paint flows, as the man from yesterday squirms in his cocoon of ropes. I’d been surprised to find him alive when I got home. So his portrait is blurring with the motion. I paint all of him into it. All his history, his actions, his choices, and his violations. I build him up layer by layer like I’m painting him through time, and maybe that’s what I’m doing. He’s fading, on the ground, curdling from tangible to phantasmic, some portions vanishing faster than others. Until, with a stroke, he exists only in the canvas. And I regret painting the ropes. I’m running out of shops that won’t ask questions about excessive rope-based purchases.

I can’t help but smile at how he looks in this painting, like a grub blindly trying to bite at a world it’s no longer a part of.

Michael!

That’s it. I’m looking at the painting but I’m thinking of him; the absurdity of him, the naiveite, the earnestness, the almost willful blindness, the pain. Ok, Michael… I’m thinking about it.