Eli Albert

The Painting and the Sketch

            Ethan's story starts when he finds a dead girl at the edge of the woods. This is a story about the dead girl, but it's also a story about my failed mid-life crisis. It was a misty morning in April, really a perfect morning, as I recall. I should mention that I'm describing these events based on what he told me later that day, in the county lockup's “visitor center.” He says he was walking along the path on his way to work, almost at the circular driveway, when he saw movement to his left. At the bottom of the Hill something was swinging like a pendulum; he found this perplexing and, not being inquisitive by nature but considering this a part of his job as an orderly, he turned and walked towards the movement. To his horror, he suddenly realized that the swinging shape was a hanged girl, turning gently in the wind. She was wearing a blue and white skirt and a colorful sweater, except everything drooped down, and her neck was at an angle that he hopes he'll never see a neck at again.

            Ethan kept walking towards the woods. Soon he was only a few feet away. He looked about himself reflexively, but no one was watching. He remembers thinking it strange that he be so utterly alone the one time that he could really have used some help. The girl's feet were bare. Ethan stood a moment longer, but his mind was blank. He realized that he had been staring at the ground for some time, and forced himself to look back up at the girl, at which point he vomited his breakfast out onto the ground and onto his shoes.

            He hadn't slept well the night before. Usually he sleeps like a machine, he says, but that night the tenants above had had a small party. They were Russian, and when they had parties they liked to dance and stomp; Ethan had not wanted to ask them to stop. They lived there because Ethan rented out the top two floors of the mansion that his father willed to him. His father didn't will him any money, though. In fact, the night before Ethan found the girl, he remembers getting a call from a realtor. She wanted him to sell the house. “I was wondering if you'd considered my most recent offer,” she'd stated, with only a touch of real-estate slime. Ethan didn't want to sell. He liked his mansion, with its long hallways and dark, dusty rooms. It was the only home he had ever had.

            It was seven in the morning when Ethan found the girl, which goes some way towards explaining why he was the first to see her. Well, that is, if she killed herself. This is what Ethan wondered, he says, as he wiped his shoes in the grass – how did she get herself up that high, six feet off the ground? She might have climbed the tree, he supposed. Ethan was wiping off his left shoe, back straining slightly from bending over for so long, when his eyes caught on an object a few feet away. At first he thought it was one of her shoes, but then he realized that it was a small, leather-bound book. The moment he opened it he found himself assaulted by a heavy scrawl in dark pen. Ethan glanced up at the girl again and could see her face, which he forced himself to examine, although he felt his stomach heave. She was maybe 16 and looked like a young Janis Joplin – that's as best as Ethan can describe her, after thinking about this for a long time. After another moment's pause, he put the book in his inner jacket pocket and walked back towards St. Ives.

            His routine at work involved feeding and checking up on the patients. There were doctors in charge of medicine, guards in charge of conduct, and therapists for other serious problems – orderlies only had to keep the patients clean and fed. Ethan would walk down the long pale-green hallways at Ives, as they all used to call it, pushing his food cart and whistling a bit. He only learned to whistle in his twenties, but once he did, he simply couldn’t stop. It was when he could push his food cart and whistle that he was truly happy.

            That day Ethan was not happy. He wasn't particularly sad, though. He remembers whistling, and then thinking that it was strange to whistle right after seeing what he'd seen, but then continuing to whistle. His first patient, same as every other morning, was the Painter. The Painter had the corner room on the top floor, and the man was a talented artist. Ethan says that in the same way that the fluorescent lights spaced evenly throughout Ives were the most efficient at what they did but lacked overall elegance, this patient was an exact but emotionless painter.

             In his daily rounds, which lasted all day (because by the time he got through all of his assigned sections for the breakfast round, it was lunchtime), Ethan enjoyed visiting the painter. The paintings were fun to examine, despite the fact that they were always subconsciously annoying (like fluorescent lights). Ethan remembers the conversation they had that day, although the fact that the Painter's long and effusive chatter never ceased made it less of a conversation than a lecture. The Painter told him about artistry.

            “My good man” – He would always address Ethan this way – “have you considered what it is to be an artist?” One must not fail to imagine, here, in order to appreciate fully the ‘conversation,’ the British accent, the lack of gaps between sentences, and the frantic painting going on at the same time.

            “Everyone is an artist,” he said. “I have arrived at this conclusion after a careful thought experiment. First, I asked myself, ‘what is art?’ and I concluded, ‘art is anything inspired, regardless of beauty or function.’ Current thinking will tell you that art is any object that can be appreciated for something beyond its practical function. You might appreciate my canvas here for more than the skin it’s surely made of, but this is only a limited description.”

            “Art,” he rushed on, “is anything that comes from anything else. Your wanderings with your cart are Art. What art Art? Are Art art, or are art only fart?” Obviously, not everything that spewed from the Painter's mouth was completely lucid.

            “Everybody is art. Every thing is art. Art cannot be too strictly defined. It must flow free, flow and swirl and spin, swing and slip… Who are we to tell them what it is? Who are they to tell you what I do?” He pranced merrily around his work. He was facing Ethan that morning (he positioned himself and his canvas differently every day, seemingly at random), so Ethan couldn’t see what he was painting.

            “If I paint nothing here before me, is it art? If I am supremely inspired, perhaps by the terrible sounds I hear from the adjacent rooms at night, but my brush entirely misses the canvas, is it art? I have been attempting to answer this question, but all I get is painting after painting, and I HATE THEM ALL!” This last part uncharacteristically and surprisingly yelled. Ethan moved to calm him, then, because he had begun stabbing himself in the chest with his paintbrush, and he was quickly covering himself in red paint. As Ethan  took the man's shoulders the Painter twisted him off, and someone's foot knocked against the easel, dislodging the painting and sending the whole thing to the floor. The easel knocked over a lamp on a nearby table, and the entire affair made quite a noise, not to mention a mess of broken wood and glass.

            The patient started muttering under his breath and twitching slightly, which is what he did when he was too confused to speak aloud. Between them lay his painting, face up. It was a painting of Ethan, without a doubt, pushing his cart through the halls of St. Ives, though it was quite surreal. His limbs were arrayed at strange angles and ended in fur and claws, and from his head extended multiple stalks, like antennae, with long-toothed and screaming mouths on the ends. Overall, it was a dark and completely terrifying painting.

            It was also completely incandescent, if I may return to Ethan's earlier metaphor (at his insistence). It had a real emotion to it. When The Painter caught sight of his work, he briefly stopped muttering. In fact, he stopped talking altogether, which was the first time Ethan had ever seen him silent. Their eyes locked, then, and Ethan saw an intelligence there – and a deep pain – that he had never seen before. After six or seven seconds the Painter looked away and resumed his standard drone. Ethan helped him clean up, collecting the wood and glass on the floor. Unfortunately, he had to bring the debris outside to the garbage chute, and by the time he came back, the painting was out of sight, as if it had never existed.

            “My good man,” the Painter said, “my good man, I’ve kept you much too long, and I’m sure you have carts to push, people to feed. Be gone!” And so Ethan left, paint dripping down his faded-yellow jacket.

            As he pushed his cart down the hall he realized that he had almost forgotten about the girl. How awful! Ethan remembers feeling worse at forgetting than he had at seeing her swinging shape. He hadn't mentioned her to anyone, of course, because he knew she'd be found soon enough. Involving himself in the affair could only bring ruin. As he thought of her tiny bare feet he received another surprise, because he suddenly felt the weight of that book in his pocket. Ethan had involved himself after all, it seemed, although he hoped that perhaps no one would ever find out that he had been there. Deep in thought, Ethan pushed his cart right into one of the head doctors.

            An aside: I think that that very morning, maybe just when Ethan was being yelled at by this doctor, was when my own mid-life crisis reached a sort of peak. I was bored beyond reason. I didn't work because my husband owned a shop and actually did fairly well for us, so there had never been a need. Up to that point I had involved myself in any number of projects, but things were just wearing thin. That morning was special though – that morning it hit. I realized that I didn't really like my friends, that my husband would never surprise me again, that all my daily errands were done, and that it was only 10am.

            Ethan's day was unfolding differently. By lunch time, the girl's book was burning a hole through the inner lining of his jacket and on through to his skin. He tells me that he remembers feeling an urgent and overwhelming need to look at that book. Instead of eating the complementary cafeteria food that they offered employees (which, it turned out, was the same food Ethan brought to the patients), he decided to leave the hospital and sit on one of the wooden benches in front, to read. He was walking out of the main door of the hospital, book already in hand, when the light of the sun hit his eyes. As his vision adjusted Ethan realized that there were flashbulbs snapping, hurried voices, an entire crowd, in fact – and everyone was talking to him at once!

            He stopped. They were everywhere. Actually, there were probably only two or three news crews, but Ethan says he felt disoriented, invaded. Over the heads of the reporters he could make out a fire truck, an ambulance and two police cars in the distance, lights flashing.

            “Who are you?”

            “Did you know the girl?”

            “One witness claims to have seen a black man near the body early this morning. Do you care to comment?”

            “What's the book?”

            “Why are you bloody?”

            It was the red paint. Ethan was holding the book. Ethan is, in fact, black. He stood blinking for a few seconds longer, and then pushed through the crowd and went home without looking back. As I watched his receding figure on the local news, I was suddenly struck with a nostalgia so sharp it hurt. I could feel it in the middle-left of my abdomen, like a bitter-sweet taste in my mind. Elementary School! Middle School! High School! And now it was what, 17 years later? Imagine how I felt then, sprawled on the couch, wondering what to do with myself. In fact, at that very moment, I had been contemplating a highball. This was a message: to think that I would be watching the local news the very moment that my childhood friend might appear! That high forehead, kinked hair, those sharp, darting eyes – that beautiful ass – I had to see him. There was something imploring, particularly about his walk, that made the hairs rise on the back of my neck.

            Of course the police picked him up for questioning later that day. I took that opportunity to visit Ethan in the county jail, and that's where we met again. He was sitting at one of the desks in the small, white-brick visiting room, perhaps wondering who would be coming to visit. I don't think he expected a thirty-five year old housewife. His tired eyes tracked me across the room and then widened, pupils dilating, in that delicious moment of recognition.

            “Marie? Marie?”

            “Ethan! I saw you on the news.”

            “Marie, I, I don't know-” He was really nervous.

            “How ARE you?” I asked. I can say without shame that I felt almost desperate to connect.

            “I'm... in jail.”

            After an awkward few minutes we were laughing and bantering like nothing had changed, although he seemed distracted. I should say that I was laughing like nothing had changed. But I talked and he listened, and I suppose I probably rambled a bit, and to my great relief he started to open up, slowly and haltingly. That's when he recounted his day at the hospital to me, from finding the girl to being ambushed by the news crews. His speech was as refined as it had always been but he had a slight stutter, and I guessed that he had become less talkative since I'd last seen him. While we spoke I noticed that his hands were shaking a little bit. Then after ninety minutes we were cut off, but we made plans to speak again soon.

            The police couldn't charge him, so they released him the next day. Back then they could hold a black man overnight with no trouble. I'd expected him to get out of jail, because it was obvious that they had no evidence, but I had no idea where our acquaintance might lead. I had given him my business card, but the fact was that although he had opened up to me, he'd still seemed distant; distracted. But then he called at 11am that next morning, and I was alone in the house, and I agreed to meet him at the nearby lake to take a walk. He was there waiting when I arrived, and we strolled side by side along the shore. I remember snippets of our conversation:

            He said, “I was thinking about you last night.”

            I answered, “I was thinking about you too.”

            “Why do you have business cards?”

            “Oh - My husband's in the printing business and he prints them up with spare stock.”

            “I could go for some business cards.”

            “Well, let's see now – I think I could get you a discount. How many do you want? 4, 5 thousand?”

            “So he's that kind of printer? Wholesale?”

            “No.”

            “No?”

            “No, I'm just that kind of bargain-driver.”

            We chuckled a lot on that walk. He would get pensive for a second and then ask me these strange semi-philosophical questions out of the blue. Even though his usual speech was hesitant and all his actions seemed tentative, sometimes he would get this look in his eyes, a kind of wild look, and all the hesitation would be gone.

            “If you could work at the circus in any capacity, what job would you want?” He asked.

            “Um... the tightrope walker?” I was suddenly struck by the importance of this question in terms of my own life.

            “Why'd you ask that? What does my answer mean?”

            He just smiled, and said, “I just wanted to see if you would answer at all.”

            “What would you be?” I asked.

            “Some sideshow or other.”

            “Come on, out with it.”

            “A magician.”

            I found myself drawn to his gaze as we walked along the near-deserted river bank. Trees were blooming and birds were singing, but I could hardly look away from his eyes, slightly bloodshot and dark – except that every time he looked straight at me I felt the sudden urge to study the river. In general I did most of the talking, but I felt like he was listening closely. As we kept walking we talked about the conflict in Vietnam, and we talked about women's rights, and we talked about his job a little bit. He hadn't gone to work that day, and he assumed the hospital would understand, though I wasn't so sure. We walked and talked, and then sat and talked, for almost an hour. Infatuation was an intoxicating feeling that hadn't touched me in a decade. At a little before five he walked me home – the whole thing was a replay of the 11^th grade, up to and including my pounding heart.

            “I'd like to see you again,” he said at the door. He was suddenly focused and again wild-eyed.

            “I'd like that too,” I managed to say. There I was, standing on my front porch, and then kissing another man in broad daylight – it felt electric.

            Of course, while infatuated with someone new, you don't think about much of anything else. I doubt my husband noticed, even though Ethan left only an hour before he got home. I could only think about Ethan, and I realized that the daily routine, rather than appearing drab in comparison, was suddenly much more fun! As I cooked dinner I thought about Ethan and wondered whether he could cook (my husband refused). As I washed the dishes I went over the day's events in my head, and the time passed before I noticed. I only had to try not to look too happy.

            The next day, right after I finished the grocery shopping and blew off a PETA meeting, we met again.

            “Come visit me at home,” he said on the phone. “I live in a mansion, I want to show you. And I'll cook you lunch.”

            His house was only a ten minute drive, our small West Virginia town being more like a spread-out village, and I spent the whole way over wondering what was about to happen. Two halves of me vied for attention – my more rational side felt guilty, not at the thought of cheating, but only because perhaps I was moving too fast. The other side of me reminded me that I wasn't getting any younger.

            I found the house, which really was a mansion – long with red bricks, three gables, and a chimney on each side. This was at about noon on that third day. He was waiting for me on the front porch.

            “You know I really like your nose?” This was the first thing he said.

            “You do?”

            “I like how it crinkles sometimes, and how it points daintily out. I can't explain it, but I think I could predict your state of mind by your nose alone.” Obviously, no one had told me about my nose in a long, long time. All I could think about was the proximity of his body. At that point it was obvious that we were going to have an affair. Nothing was holding me back, and I just knew he felt the same way. He took me inside, and it was like a tacit understanding that we could delay the moment, that moment of surrender, as long as we liked. We wouldn't rush straight to bed, because after all we were mature and enjoying ourselves. It was a decadent feeling – we had the world in front of us, just sitting there, and we would take our sweet time.

            Although the house looked fairly normal on the outside, as far as mansions go, inside was another story. All the rooms were small, all the hallways were thin and long, and the place seemed to go on forever. He had already explained that he rented out the upper floors, but he gave me a pleasant tour of the first floor. At home in his mansion he seemed more relaxed, comfortable, and he didn't stutter at all. In fact, he was smiling a lot – we both were.

            He took me to another small room, a kitchen, and removed a fancy-looking egg casserole from the oven.

            “Voilà!” he said, graciously unveiling his masterpiece.

            “It is beautiful, Sir Chef – how do you ever manage?”

            “Madame, this great culinary tradition goes back generations, to my father's father's father. But enough talk – we feast!”

            I think he was the one who brought up the topic of the hanged girl first - I remember conscientiously avoiding any mention of her earlier – but after we had finished eating, sitting at the little table in the old-fashioned kitchen, it did come up, and it seemed like he didn't mind. We had been playing footsie and talking about nothing, working up the courage to move to the bedroom.

            “Are you still shaken by what happened that day?” I asked. He didn't answer for a moment, and he stopped flirting and looked serious.

            “Things happen around mental hospitals,” he finally answered. “Like I told you with the Painter – Sometimes things happen that you just can't explain.” This seemed to me like a terrible explanation. Suddenly something was itching in the back of my mind, and then it dawned on me.

            “Hey,” I said, “did you look at that book? Aren't you going to turn it in to the police?” It still surprises me that I hadn't remembered to ask about the book before. He looked at me strangely, and I thought I saw his eyes dart down near his jacket. He was, in fact, wearing the same jacket. He didn't say anything.

            “Didn't you read it?” I asked again. His hands were fidgeting.

            “Her name was Ayla,” he said eventually, in a soft voice. “She was sixteen.” He looked pained. I could see that he needed me, that he couldn't share her burden alone. I knew the book was in his jacket.

            “Can I see it?” I asked gently. His expression implored me; it seemed like I had asked the right thing, but something in him was holding back. I felt suddenly as if I was dealing with a frightened animal – it was an astonishing change. He reached into his pocket and stopped, and then reached in and drew out the book, that small, brown diary. He handed it to me slowly, his eyes locked with mine the entire time. As I took the book he put a hand on top of mine, and then slowly slid his hand off and motioned that I  look inside.

            I saw the same dark scrawl he had described before, each entry signed identically with a stylized Ayla, the tail of the a wrapping around the name in an oval. The entries got messier as I flipped slowly through, though I only skimmed them – the peculiar thing was that they were all in verse. Lines scanned and rhymed beautifully; I wanted to stop and read it all:

            Today I bought a bag of candy

            Played guitar and cut my hair

            If you see me walking by

            Flag me down and we can share.

            Something made me keep flipping. Then I got to a spot near the middle, and I could see the shadow of a drawing through the paper, on the next page. I turned eagerly and found, to my utter astonishment, a beautiful sketch of Ethan.

            It was definitely him, of that there can be no doubt, looking forward expressionlessly. From the middle of his chest to the tips of his hair, she had captured him perfectly. The care that she had taken was evident, and the minimalist style of the sketch only made this more effective – as if she knew him well enough to capture his essence with just a few lines. She had signed at the bottom, too. I furrowed my brows, looked at him, then back at the picture, and then back at him.

            “You... knew her?” I stuttered. He didn't answer. There was a long pause but he remained silent, as if he had no idea what to say to that, so I flipped to the end where a small, hastily scribbled verse caught my eye.

            I'm sorry and I'd like to wish

            That this won't end in sorrow

            But... Ethan is getting stranger and weirder. I don't know what to do.

            I felt blown apart. He had lied to me – but it was worse than that. How could he have expected me to understand this? I couldn't think straight and I felt tears rushing to my eyes. He still had that same imploring look on his face, but suddenly like a mask slipping away I saw a completely different man. I couldn't stop crying and he sat there looking more and more worried, and then he looked alarmed.

            “I- don't be- Marie...” he didn't know what to say.

            “What?” I sobbed. My world had just imploded. “What does this mean?”

            Actually, the magnitude of what I had just learned was slow to hit me, in fact only hit me about 20 seconds later, but then it did and my world really imploded. I was also struck with fear.

            “Marie...” He reached out his hand, and I fled.