Monet

During the day we painted terrible watercolors. We’d watched, or half-watched, a lengthy documentary about the work of Monet. Like most people, we didn’t just want to see something beautiful, yellow streetlights wavering on dark masses of water, we wanted to personify it, to create it, and in some way justify our own existence, which, when compared with Monet’s up to this point, probably wouldn’t be resulting in any documentaries.

The hardest part about the painting is that I was terrible at it. I had no eye for color, or shapes, the play of different dimensions in space. In truth, the only thing that I can do well from an artistic point is draw a very small bird, primarily using semi-circles and frown emoticons that I learned how to do from a children’s book. My painting didn’t even end up looking like a cheap imitation, which is the best we could have hoped for. Really, we were hoping that it would at least bear some resemblance.

I’d devolve here, if I had the patience, into a lengthy discussion of whether it was hubris or entirely within the realm of human effort to assume that I would have been good at painting Monet. I’ve since learned that Picasso is the easiest to copy, perhaps I’d have had more success there. Relatedly, whether any human being has the ability to transcend the conventions, tracks, paintings, tracts, sermons, afternoon walks through gorse by Irish seas that have been lived and laid out before them, which is to say, would it have been better to have been doing an original painting poorly, or imitating a master and failing utterly? Such is the human condition for those of a religious bent, destined to fall short of the master, unable to escape that infinite shadow. This is all relatively immaterial as it pertains to the real crux of the story. My apologies.  

The difficult part came after Sarah left. I stood at the window for a moment, watching some cedars and juvenile oaks trembling in the wind. It was the sort of time that I wished that I smoked, if just to have something to do with my hands as I watched the streets and the clouds scuttling across thin blue skies. I walked back to the paintings and looked at Sarah’s, and what I saw immediately stunned me. I could see a certain artistry in her strokes that was absent in mine. The copy was clunky, sure, but within it, among the derivative shades of blue and pictures of wildflowers I detected, in a line above the women’s nose, the shape of the right side of her bottom lip, the underside of the clouds, an aesthetic, an eye I suppose that outpaced anything I’d achieved during the exercise.

There is nothing that delights me more than failing at something in good company. If I’m honest, watching myself fail while my companion succeeded felt a bit like drowning as they swam past, and I was thereby placed in a strange kind of dilemma, whether to tell her that her eye was something that should be cultivated, admitting in the process that my own was not, or whether to let the afternoon pass, to try and talk her into a walk down forty ninth among the pines, or a short jaunt to the park to throw bread at pigeons, ignoring in the process, the fact that she had done something of merit and thereby rendering it obsolete. Or near obsolete. (I’m not even sure what obsolete means in this context. Is a piece of art or a skill made obsolete if it remains unacknowledged? What of the works of Kafka had been destroyed, or if the world’s greatest write left all of his manuscripts locked away in a chest beneath his bed? Perhaps it is only in inaction that the skill or art is useless. I don’t know. I prattle. I prattle. At parties, I drink too much and say things that I cannot possibly mean).

Years later I ran into Sarah at an opera in a city that reminded me of Vienna without the ostentation. She was standing in the foyer, beneath a white marble pillar, fanning herself, and looking out into the droves of people standing around, looking intelligent and bored, as if she knew someone. I recognized her at once but thought at first to avoid the interaction. We had not parted on strange or unpleasant terms. I’d found work in another city, reviewing second rate theater shows for a small newspaper, and neither one of us had ever expected our relations to last beyond the point when their convenience was exhausted.

We started talking that evening, after getting through some polite formalities, reminding one another who we had once been, who is to say what went through her mind, if she had the same flash of recognition, of a thousand moments, the moment of our parting flooding her mind as she politely smiled and told me of her husband and children. Maybe she thought nothing of it at all. As she talked, I was that she had grown conventional in her old age. Not nearly as much a crime as it might sound. It has happened to a great deal of my friends who once were interesting and would stay up half the night drinking wine and debating the merits of the socialist state. Clods now, most of them, who are lucky to make it past ten before they begin nervously checking their watches and talking of wives, or children or girlfriends or work obligations.

I found myself profoundly bored as she talked to me of her children and husband, what they were doing now in school, an upcoming vacation to see family in Idaho. And yet, I must say that a heavy weight of something, guilt I suppose, sat in the forefront of my mind. She had grown conventional, not amounted to anything more than someone else’s wife and someone else’s mother in a thoroughly conventional city. What part had I played in that decision? I found it impossible not to wonder, not to wonder if I’d consigned her to that life all those years ago, when she’d wandered back into the room, bits of blue paint on her high cheekbones and a flush in her cheeks of youthful excitement, “Let’s go feed pigeons,” I said, handing her a light jacket and wetting my thumb to wipe away the paint from her cheek. “These are terrible anyway.” And we’d walked down the street and never talked of painting again, and three months later I’d be leaving.

Her husband eventually arrived, a run of the mill sort of guy, neatly parted hair, a job and a 403b. We shook hands and soon parted ways. I looked over my shoulder as I left her that once promising woman, bent at the waist, whispering something now to her husband, talking furiously, fiercely, as she’d once done with me.