Painter
915 Words
“An artist, hmm?” He could scarcely imagine anyone else sharing his fiancée’s peculiar tastes.
Jack paid him no heed, his hand moving swiftly in strokes and sweeps until, in but a short while, a vivid likeness of Cal emerged upon the sketch paper—handsome in attire, yet with an expression contorted into a near-grotesque snarl. His brow furrowed into a deep, fierce crease; his head lowered while his eyes glinted upward from beneath his lashes, the coldness in his gaze almost tangible.
Cal could not suppress a laugh. He struck Jack a playful blow and snatched the sketchpad from his grasp.
“The first day aboard, I happened to see you—dark grey overcoat, russet leather gloves, redwood cane tapping smartly against the deck…” Jack conjured the memory with theatrical flair, puffing out his chest and strutting in imitation. “A bowler hat, and—”
“You recall it so precisely?” Cal’s vanity swelled.
“An artist must possess keen sight and memory—just as a capitalist must wield cunning and ruthlessness,” Jack retorted with equal sharpness.
In matters of art, Cal was a staunch traditionalist—content to revere Da Vinci and Raphael, yet unwilling to embrace Rose’s passion for Picasso or Monet. The chaotic and uncanny styles flourishing in the new century’s art world were, to him, nothing short of an assault on good taste.
Thus, beholding Jack’s meticulous realism, he breathed easier.
In that dim sketchbook lay a world teeming with life.
Though rendered in black and white, the pencil lines breathed vitality into every figure.
“Only portraits?” Cal asked, tapping the page with the air of a connoisseur.
“No, Cal—I would call this a sketch.”
“Oh, a sketch. But of course.”
He seated himself beside Jack, peering into a reality utterly unlike his own—into a soul he could not claim to understand.
A mother nursing her child, their hands clasped in tender bond; a father cradling his daughter, his face etched with both hardship and love; scenes along the roadside, the wharf…
“Not bad,” Cal murmured, almost absently.
Yet as he looked, it was as though some unknown weight settled in his chest. Life, in all its myriad forms, danced within these pages.
A long-forgotten stir of vitality began to gather in his heart.
Art moves the soul—had Rose once said this?
Something within him strained to break through, something new, alien, and perhaps a little frightening.
“Paris wasn’t quite so fond of them,” Jack said with a wry smile.
“Paris? You’ve been to more places than I’d expect for a man of… modest means.” Cal stumbled over the word.
“Broke, you mean. You could say that. After leaving the fishing boats in Monterey, I went to Los Angeles, sketching portraits on the docks for ten cents apiece.” Jack laughed aloud.
Cal laughed as well, continuing to leaf through the sketches.
Ten cents a piece.
Ten cents.
He had been born swathed in silk, accustomed to excess without a thought… and yet others—
“Ah—” He snapped the pad shut, letting a passing gentleman walk by before opening it again.
Jack leaned over, clapping him on the shoulder. “A life study.”
The dark-haired, dark-eyed gentleman had not yet recovered from his shock.
“It’s hardly the Venus de Milo. Must I explain to you the beauty of the human form?”
Cal smoothed the curls at his temple, concealing the sudden flush in his cheeks, and forced himself to look again.
A reclining nude.
Others standing, smoking, lounging.
Each rendered with exquisite detail and uncanny truth.
“That’s the charm of Paris—the girls don’t mind shedding their clothes.”
“Quite the indulgence, my boy. But doesn’t one grow weary of it?” Cal teased.
“True beauty,” Jack said simply, “is never tiresome.”
“You haven’t been carrying on some scandalous affair with this woman, have you? You’ve sketched her so many times.”
“No, no, no… nothing of the sort. Only with her hands—look at them, aren’t they beautiful? Of course, your hands are beautiful as well.” Jack chuckled as he turned back a few pages. “She’s a courtesan—one-legged.”
Cal started in surprise.
How pitiless life could be—he realized it then for the first time.
A woman of grace and loveliness, driven by fate into the mire.
A radiant young beauty, robbed by God Himself of a limb.
“She has a fine sense of humor,” Jack said at last, his voice clear and ringing. “See here—every night she sits in the bar, wearing every jewel she owns, waiting for the distant lover who left her long ago to return. We call her the Jewel Lady… yet her dress is riddled with holes.”
In that moment Cal became aware of the poverty of his own speech—that the most ornate turns of phrase, the most intricate structures, the loftiest words, the subtlest shifts in grammar, all seemed pale and impotent.
The woman’s eyes were steeped in sorrow and despair. Cal turned his head aside, yet her gaze clung to him still, as though he were the very man who had abandoned her.
All he could say was, “Jack… you understand people deeply.”
- Writer
