Steele 1
Kirsten Steele
Story 1
You Might Call It An Obsession
The paint spilled like a sunset, expanding in fingers across the canvas that soaked it up like a cactus determined to save every drop of water. Ana’s face twisted as she stared at the ruined paintings. Rocio trembled as her eyes slid slowly back to him, a snake’s purposeful movement driven by a focused inescapable attention. Rocio backed around the table as if the wood could protect him, his clumsy adolescent feet bumping and tripping with each step. His guilty hands were hidden behind his back.
Ana’s face smoothed out suddenly, frighteningly, an artist’s clay creation wiped clean. She turned and made her graceful way out of the room, the light from the windows reaching after her and falling silently to the walls and the floor once her shadow passed.
Rocio’s breath slowly left his chest like a baby bird peeking its head up out of the nest to check for safety. He straightened the brushes on the desk next to the paintings and left via the French door opposite Ana’s exit. The canvasses breathed with the breeze from the open door he left behind him as he walked out into the sun that glinted off the snow on the ground. The North Carolina mountains were beautiful this time of year.
Dinner was silent as always, punctuated only by the whisper of Ana’s hand tucking hair behind her ear and the chalkboard scrape of a silver knife cutting through Lean Cuisine chicken. Candles on the table lent an ambience that might have been soft and welcoming in a house or in a relationship accustomed to laughing. At the end of Rocio’s wait for Ana’s glacial eating pace, he cleared the table with less noise and arrogance than a five-star restaurant waiter.
Ana’s gaze was fixed on the candle wax shivering its way down to the base. A faintly erotic image, wasn’t it? The flame flickering gaily held no pull for her. Its show was too obvious. She looked over at Rocio at the sink washing dishes as quietly as that particular task could be performed. There was no dishwasher; she abhorred the sound almost as much as she hated city below them, where other people laughed and walked and went about their business because they were what the world decided to call “normal” when it woke up one day. Rocio was allowed to go down to the city at the end of every week he spent with her. She never asked him what he did—the matters of the city were none of her concern. How he spent his time there was his decision; his return, on the other hand, was hers.
Her chair slid back against the worn carpet, skipping over the pattern of a rug she’d bought at the flea market when her husband was still alive. She left it quickly, moving again with a grace of movement reminiscent of that rare person who can make any place a stage—one of those place where cracked feet on pointe and muscled legs revealed by tutus force a bodily creation of beauty. Far away they are beauty; up close the pain is terror. Her paintings were like that too.
Ana tugged Rocio away from the sink. Her hand was warm, like hard liquor running down an esophagus, a sensation unwelcome until inebriated. In this particular case, there was no inebriation and the feeling of unwelcome was perpetual.
Rocio’s feet moved slowly—scraped really—as he followed Ana. Her gray braid undulated against her back and his eyes followed it the way a baby watches a grandfather clock ticking.
Once they were in the studio at the back of the house, he moved toward the French door and removed his shirt. The cotton slid gently against his skin and the hair on his chest that was beginning to curl caught a little on the material. The shirt dropped to the ground with a familiarity of many times before, leaving his skinny pubescent torso behind. Rocio stood stock-still, focusing on the soft melodic breeze through the trees outside; it seemed to almost sing. It was a nice change from two times ago when he was here and the wind lashed so ferociously at the glass he feared it would shatter. If it had, would she have been able to capture the flying shards hitting his flesh or would his image on canvas have remained still and serene without interruption from the outside world, a bubble of safety surrounding him in oil the way it could not in life?
Lost in the work inside his mind, he did not notice Ana moving stools and other props near to him. Now he noticed and he watched detachedly as she straightened a few of the objects with near-obsessive precision. Then she arranged him, pushing him closer to this stool or that fake plant until she was satisfied, adjusting his arm position and how his head turned. Her hands continually brushed his torso, soft whispers against his skin that made him want to shudder.
Taking up her position before the easel, Ana began to paint with rough strokes, quick and furious as the wind two times ago that he was here. Then she leaned close, picking up smaller brushes and painting more gently. Her teeth chewed on her bottom lip like it was the beef jerky she ate on a daily basis and had shipped to the house every week. Rocio’s face was turned toward the window, but he looked at her every once in a while out of the corner of his eye. When she paused and was staring at her handiwork so far, he cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry about the paintings earlier. Was just trying to get a look at them.”
Ana set down her brushes on the desk, the bamboo handles making the slightest tap on the oak. She tucked her feet underneath her and interlaced her fingers in her lap.
“Were you? Hm. Interesting. I suppose you forgot that’s part of the contract.”
Rocio winced. Her voice was not graceful like her movements but rather a rasp that dipped and tugged at the air, moving around and through it in uncomfortable ways.
“I remember. I was just curious.”
“Hm. I do love curiosity ruining my work.”
“I’m really sorry. Look, if you don’t want me to come for you to paint me anymore, that’s fine. Just give me what you owe me for this time and I’ll leave.”
Ana laughed, a sound he was so unaccustomed to hearing that he jumped, hitting the door. The glass shivered and her laugh was gone. Her next words were sharp like the barbs of the briars in the woods outside.
“Go to bed.”
“Don’t you want to finish the painting?”
His expression was that of a little boy afraid of a spanking. Her face, contorted in unfamiliar laughter a few moments before, was the usual smooth expression now.
“Bed.”
Her tone left no room for argument or denial and he moved past her with a relief tinged with confusion.
Ana stared at the incomplete painting. The outlines of everything in the scene were visible—the stools, the window, the plant, his body. His face had begun to take shape when she had paused. It wasn’t normal for her to pause. His chest hair was curling. She liked it. He hadn’t shuddered when she had touched his chest like the other boys before him. All five of them had been afraid of her. How much was it to ask? A few weeks per year from twelve to fifteen so she could capture the changes...a few snapshots in oil of innocence fading before her eyes. But this one! This one had the gallto apologize for ruining half the series she had done on him before trying to end the contract. She had two more years. Two more years before he was allowed to leave. Two more years of capturing him—on canvas, that is. He dare not leave now when his name on that piece of paper might as well be signed in blood.
Breakfast the next morning was less silent than normal. Rocio kept dropping his fork and then broke a plate in the sink washing up. Ana did not react but instead left the room. Rocio shivered. The residual wintry chill of her presence remained in the room even though she was gone for the next few hours to paint landscapes until lunch. She had not mentioned his comments last night and likely would not. The frustration of not knowing what she was thinking! This house was a suffocating force and he longed to be back in the city at the rowdy table with his brothers and sisters where talk and laughter were taken for granted even though they weren’t sure how full their bellies would be from night to night. It was a place where Spanish was the language and not the southern mountain drawl he was accustomed to here. The colors were bright, not faded, and the touches held the warmth of love and kindness—not this strange alien warmth of Ana’s hand that scared him because it was the uncomforting warmth of an animal’s breath before it attacked, a brief moment of relief before the kill.
At the house in the city, ears filled with sounds all the time not this strange silence that seemed especially true in the mountains where yes, heaven seemed closer than reality but only because death seemed so near. Ana seemed to think that the city was the earthly manifestation of hell but her house seemed to be the ice overlay of a fire within, a boiling furnace of deep-seated anger that showed itself only in defense, like a threatened snake.
“We’re going for a walk.”
Rocio turned, his legs and torso having to catch up awkwardly with his head as he registered Ana standing in the doorway dressed for the snow. Her gray hair was loose, hanging down to her waist. It was never out of the braid and he didn’t quite know what to do with the image in front of him.
“We’ve never been for a walk.”
“It’s snowing,” came the simple response, said as if it were the most natural thing in the world to interrupt the strict routine for something that had been happening for three days out of the five that he had been there. With two days left, an interruption in a routine established a year ago upon arrival was not exactly welcome. But he got his coat, hat and gloves.
“Is that a different coat?”
“Um. Yes…Mama bought it last week from Goodwill when the weatherman said there would be a lot of snow high in the mountains.”
Ana nodded. Rocio tried not to stare, but it was difficult with her hair down and the sudden change in reticence. Was spilling the paint the reason? Was it possible that could have made such a big change? She asked him a few other questions but the rest of the walk passed in relative quiet. He watched as she caught snowflakes in her hands and stared at them melting on her bare palms as if she had never seen snow before in her life. It was like watching his little sister the first time she saw snow. She had the same look of absolute wonder on her face; the innocence in her red-cheeked surprise and snow-sprinkled pigtail braids had tugged at even a thirteen-year-old boy’s heart. Of course, he hadn’t said anything then and he didn’t say anything now, just watched with the odd feeling that he was the older one here.
She painted him again that night, with no interruptions, pauses or questions. Jazz music played softly in the background and Rocio found it hard not to bob his head to the saxophone and drums in the songs. He was going to start learning saxophone this year in school. He almost told her that but then he didn’t. She was in a bubble of artistic fury as paint made its way in some form of organized fashion from the palette to the canvas.
They went for a walk the next day, too, and Rocio found that he liked walking with her outdoors much better than being in the suffocating silence of the house. Outside the house she seemed less inhibited, less like a pouch with the drawstring tied and more like a string of pearls cut loose and rolling around on the floor.
The only problem with pearls being loose is that they’re likely to trip someone up.
Rocio did not model for her that night. He waited for her to take him to the studio as usual, but she never came to get him. Finally, at eleven o’clock he ventured toward the studio door at the back of the house. The oak door was heavy and he cringed at the creak it made when he pushed it ever so carefully. How could a door make that much noise?
She was on the stool near the sliding glass door. Her back was to him but she did not turn around. Her hair was once again unbound, hanging loose in waves. The moonlight from outside blended with the gray in her hair and it shone like a piece of silver reflected faintly around the room, leaving shadows in the corner that seemed alive to him as the trees moved outside and created a playground of fighting, twisting, turning shapes that he found only slightly less disconcerting than Ana herself. He saw that the canvas on the easel was blank, an invitation it seemed to him. But she had probably just become lost in thought and forgotten to come get him.
Still, he brushed against the desk and then touched the brushes ever so lightly, lined up so nice and neat like little soldiers in line ready for duty. Before he was quite aware of it, he was sitting on the stool before the easel and slowly mixing paint on the palette beside him. The hair drew him more than anything…that oblong length of shine was completely unable to be comprehended without a representation. He mixed the silver. He picked up the brush, swirled it in the wetness and touched it to the canvas. He became lost in the flurry of broad strokes and then thin strokes and kind of in-between strokes as he tried to capture the perfection of her gray hair hanging down her back lit with the sun’s reflection.
Rocio didn’t notice her head swivel slowly to look at him, her face illuminated by the moon in such a way that it blended with her hair. He didn’t notice the sad expression on her face, of deep loss and deep need. He didn’t see her move quietly off of the stool and did not see her move toward him until her hand that was warm like liquor reached over the easel and slid across his strokes and blurred them together into one silver, wet mass of moonlit shadow that bled with red on the canvas.
~~~
Ana shivered in disgust at the concrete towering around her. God, she hated cities. People and noise and cars and smoke and smog and all that nastiness the world had decided to become. She continued to post her signs on streetlight poles and community boards as she walked the streets of Asheville. She needed to hurry; she could feel the weather coming in soon. It hadn’t snowed for two months since…anyway, she needed to hurry.
“Mamá, la nieve! Mira!”[1]
Ana turned around slowly like an umbrella caught oddly in a sudden gust of wind. Ten feet from her stood a little girl, perhaps eight, pointing at the sky and laughing. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks were red and her pigtail braids were beginning to catch the first snowflakes. She held out her tongue and spun in a circle, laughing and giggling with that wonderful carefree attitude only unworldly, uncorrupted children can have. Ana cocked her head to the left and her eyes narrowed against the snow now falling on her. She looked down at her posters, took out a pen and changed one word. Then she moved down the street and kept stapling.
“Wanted: Latino immigrant boy girl (8 yrs) to sit for painting series for art exhibition. Payment per visit: $666. Call (919)466-2368.”
[1] Mom, the snow! Look!