The Portrait

Maria slowly, gently, rose into consciousness, gradually becoming aware of her surroundings. The curtains glowed warm and golden, draping the room in a delicate veil of light – irradiating it with the spark of dawn’s anxious energy. A clement breeze sailed softly through the open window, cresting and falling across the room. She stretched out her arms and legs, easing her palms high towards the ceiling, a wave of comfort flowing along her entire length. Lucas breathed deeply next to her, fast asleep. She rolled over to face him – his tanned skin, his dark curly hair, the short, neat beard. Placing her head against his and her hand on his chest, she exhaled fully and relaxed, feeling his strong, steady heartbeat. This was her heaven, her Eden: her divine kingdom around which the rest of the world could orbit. A palace where she was queen, and she had her king – and a fortress where no evil could abide.

Lucas opened his eyes - his beautiful, olive-green eyes – and rested a hand over Maria’s squeezing ever-so-slightly.

“Good morning”, came a whisper, his soft Italian accent rolling over the syllables. She reached up and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Hey, handsome”, her own accent reflecting his.

They lay for a while, elated in each other’s company.

“We should get up, today will be busy.”

Today: the party. Maria’s stomach turned upside down at the thought of it. Visions of the future permeated her mind: demons swooping through her soul, a resolute darkness descending upon her, dragging her mind to a place where no angel could follow. Shadows pressing upon her, conceptual beings forged of unalloyed terror, her hollow body cowering in weakness and in fear.  A frenzied attack threatening to rupture the walls of her castle and tear down her precarious mind. From which domain these wicked imps came, Maria did not know. They haunted her every chance they got – a determined, inspired evil that preceded and dominated every human interaction she enjoyed so dearly.

But not here, in her harbour, where she could keep at bay the tsunamis of fear and serpents of malice. Not here, in the mundane realm, where the breeze softly sailed and the creatures buzzed with natural joy.

“Yeah, you’re right”, she sighed.

“You’re stressing already.” Lucas always knew, somehow.

“Mm hmm…”

“Don’t do that.” He knew it wasn’t that easy, he was just trying to lighten her mood.

“Yeah, I know.” His hand squeezed hers again as he kissed her forehead.

Stretching again, she yawned a deep, wide yawn, and slowly crawled out from under the covers.  She pulled on crumpled, paint-splattered shirt and trousers and brushed her silky brown hair, letting it hang freely around her shoulders. Lucas wrapped an arm around her waist and hugged her, forcing the tension she was feeling down her back, into her toes and out of her body entirely. He whispered in her ear,

“It’ll be okay”, and she trusted him. It always was okay, in the end.

***

They moved downstairs into the kitchen and prepared a simple meal of warm, fresh bread, and jam. This was a favourite of Maria’s; it was simple and filling – an elegant solution to the problem of breakfast.

Lucas always dressed smartly in a light grey suit and deep red tie.  He tidied away his plate and leant over to kiss his partner,

“My phone is on”. This was a stupid sentence – his phone was always on – he was just letting her know he was there if she needed him. Maria already knew this, of course, but it was comforting beyond belief to hear him say it. He grabbed his keys from the bowl and with one last kiss and an “I love you”, he walked down the hall and stepped through the door into the morning breeze.

Lucas was very good at his job, and he made a good living out of it. Enough that Maria could stay home and focus on her true passion: her art. She was a talented artist, and people paid good money for commissions, but that was never the point. She had found something that she truly loved doing, and the quiet thrill of chasing perfection was far more important to her than any amount of money. And so that is what she did, day after day, pursuing but never capturing the perfect piece of art. It was an obviously impossible task, and that was the idea – she had found an infinite source of unrelenting delight – a source she could tap and tap and tap again without it ever running dry.

She cleared away the remaining breakfast pots and wandered idly through into her studio. Stacks of paintings lined the room, sequestering every available patch of wall. A large collection of unfinished portraits stared longingly at her from their easels. Portraits were her favourite thing to paint because people fascinated her. In the early days of her art career, she had become obsessed with the idea that there was a small, finite number of what she called “elemental humans”: sets of fundamental, invariable traits over which people consciously hung their messy, complicated personalities. These embryonic virtues became the true subject of her portraits, and her infatuation with people deepened. She began to note quite quickly that her clients responded very predictably to this idea. One category of people found comfort in being intrinsically similar to others, while the second category despised being grouped at all. This irony amused Maria, and it often worked its way into her art. None of them ever noticed.

Today’s commission was a simple portrait; she’d painted this type of man dozens of times. She began, as she always did, with a pencil sketch. So, she perched upon her stool and commenced the process of turning her client’s photograph into a graphite twin.

A short while later, she took a step back to critique her work. It was horrible. But not to worry, she made mistakes all the time, and she began again. Still wrong. She tried again. A third time, all that remained on the paper was a hideous, grotesque version of her photograph. Again and again she tried, but could only produce nasty, terrible figures with lifeless eyes and no soul. Upset and ashamed, she searched her drawing for a mistake, some technical error on which she could pin blame, but she saw none. Only that ghastly grey creature glaring back at her, boring a hole through the paper. Suddenly it hit her: the party. She was stressing about the party. She checked in with her body, her shoulders and hands were tense, her jaw clenched, her heart rate through the roof. Staring deeply into her work, those vicious imps, those unhallowed serpents circled around the periphery of her mind. Suppressing the urge to throw something or else curl up and cry, she looked away and glanced at the clock. 5:02 pm. Time had got the best of her, and an entire day had been wasted on this futile effort. This happened often, her art taking up so much of her brain that everything else simply passed her by, but today those ungodly demons had managed to seep in, pervading her subconscious.

The noise of the door opening jolted her out of her head. She dropped her pencil and all but ran to Lucas, who caught her in his arms.

“How are you?” Came his soothing voice. She hugged him tighter.

***

Lucas drove the two of them to the hosts’ home, listening intently to what Maria told him about the picture, and her feelings about the party. He repeated that they could cancel, that they could just go home, but Maria insisted that she wanted to go. And so, they left the car and approached the house.  Lucas took her hand in his, smiled, and rang the doorbell.