Still Life

“I don’t care if it pays a thousand dollars an hour, I’m not going to paint portraits.” I half-listened to my brother’s pleas for me to consider a wealthy woman’s very generous offer, which I expected had more than a few strings attached. I told him I’d get a job with a boss if I wanted someone to tell me what to be. I returned to the kitchen to finish the dishes in the sink, and I was still rinsing when a pair of tanned legs flickered up the stairs to my studio. I dropped the dishrag into the sink and sprinted up the spiral to unlock the door. A twentyish blonde was picking at a scab on her knee when I opened the door.

“Are you Chris Johnson?” She straightened her spine and gave me a skeptical once-over.

“I am. And you are . . . ?”

“Veronica. If this is a bad time I can come back.”

“No, no. Not at all. What can I do for you?”

“Well,” Scarlet toenails wiggled inside her sandals. “I want to learn how to paint. Can you teach me?”

I hadn’t taught since I left the university, but my last show hadn’t been as successful as anticipated, and I was on the verge of reusing tea bags. Veronica’s tattered cutoffs, faded t-shirt, and bare face didn’t promise much of a fee. Her eyes met mine and held them.

“I don’t have any supplies or any idea of what to buy, so I was hoping I could leave you a check to cover the expenses.” She grinned all the way up to her eyebrows. “That is, if you don’t mind doing my shopping for me.”

“What kind of painting did you have in mind?” I hadn’t touched anything but oils in a decade.

“Rivers. I want to paint rivers so I can always have one near me.”

“No, I meant what kind of paint.”

“Oh.” She rolled her eyes and finger-combed her golden hair. “I don’t know. Oils or acrylics or something like that. No watercolors or pastels. I’m just not into that whole muted thing.”

“Wonderful. I use oils, so why don’t we go with that.”

She scrawled out a check for three hundred dollars and handed it to me. There were little skips in the ink where strands of her hair had crossed the pen’s path, and she had crossed out the printed address and phone number and handwritten her current ones next to them. I planned to cash it at her bank instead of running it through mine. Better safe than sorry, but her check was good.

I had a couple of friends over that night to drink beer and watch the Braves game. They wanted to know where I got the cash to spring for the beer, as I had been bitching about being broke for longer than I want to admit. I don’t know why I didn’t tell them about Veronica, but I lied and said that I sold a painting to a pretentious old man that afternoon.

Veronica called two days later and we scheduled her first lesson for the following Tuesday. She brought an armload of fingerpaintings, and, after pulling them apart, I was captivated. After examining most of her work, I presented her new paintbrushes and told her a little about how to use each one. She wanted to start painting immediately. But I insisted on first explaining how to use light and create depth, things she would need to incorporate in river landscapes. She backstroked through my eyes, and I sensed she wasn’t so much listening to my words as absorbing my thoughts. Something in the light on the curve of Veronica’s neck caught my eye and derailed my train of thought. I only remember wanting to stroke her collarbone. Maybe she realized my discomfort; she left before her hour was up.

I sat in the studio until I couldn’t smell the honeysuckle of her skin anymore. When I finally went downstairs, the sun was setting, and the pink-orange rays nearly blinded me as I stepped out of the shadows of the staircase and into the kitchen.

For dinner, I inhaled a tuna sandwich, then I sifted through the hall closet for my spare easel, trying to push Veronica from my mind.

After watching Dateline, I climbed the stairs again and organized a palette. I hadn’t painted in months, and the sensation of manipulating the paint on the canvas electrified me. The muse danced inside me, and I could melt reds. Light became my lover, and I worked through the night and well into the morning without a single lapse in creativity.

At 10 a.m., the jangle of the phone crashed me back to earth.

“I’m taking you to the river today,” Veronica commanded. “Be ready in thirty minutes.”

She pulled up in an ancient pickup truck thirty-eight minutes later and lit a joint as soon as we backed out of the driveway. When she passed it to me, I accepted, hitting it lightly and coughing anyway.”

“Sorry it’s so harsh, but really, it’s the finest Tex-Mex dirtweed money can buy.” Veronica took the joint and handed me her root beer. It was warm from nestling between her legs.

She parked in a field of red clay, and I followed her down a rain-rutted path, tripping over rocks and scampering to keep up.

“Watch out for snakes,” she hollered back at me, glancing over her shoulder.

The river sidled up to us in the silt, and Veronica was out of her clothes and in the river before I could take in the view. Slanted sunlight gilded her, breaking into rays in the water around her. She waded out and dove under, droplets of water clinging to her skin as she frolicked in the current. I saw Eve at the moment of creation, and something deep in my soul told me that I was no artist if I didn’t transcribe my vision of her. In retrospect, maybe my vision of her was the problem.

“Come on, what are you waiting for?” Veronica sauntered over to me (impressive in the flowing river), wrapped her arms around my neck, and kissed me, tracing my teeth with her tongue and tasting like the river. She unbuttoned my shirt and draped it across a log before leading me through the icy water to a massive outcrop of river shoal. I stretched out in the sun, and Veronica stood in the water behind me, pressing her chin against my nose when she lowered her lips to mine. When I reached out to touch her, she swam away. I sat up and watched her as she dove under again and again, swimming farther and farther into the current.

“Aren’t you coming? Veronica emerged, facing me. I slid off the rock and set out to follow her, expecting her to wait, but she dove back under before I was completely in the water. I didn’t catch up with her until she stopped on the beach of a small island. A pair of hawks wheeled in the air above the cypress trees. I flopped down beside her in the sand, and she laughed at my breathlessness, kissing me again. The strings on her bathing suit stretched before sliding out of their bows, and the blue triangles of fabric clung to my chest when Veronica sat up, one knee on each side of me. I opened my eyes and suggested that we head back to my place.

“Why? There’s nobody out here.”

“No, but someone could come by in a boat or something.”

She told me I was being ridiculous and needed to lighten up. I don’t now if it was the effect of Veronica. The pot, or the river itself, but I felt like she had pulled me under the water to a different world where I didn’t even know how to breathe. All I could do was give in and blindly follow her through a maze of turquoise.

Two weeks passed without me drowning, and, on the fourteenth of April, Veronica excavated a jumble of papers and a dilapidated box of crayons from beneath the floor mats of her truck and sorted them on my coffee table. “Chris, do you think they’ll give back any of my money?” She pulled a Crayola from the ancient box of 64. Thistle.

“I doubt it. Hey, you can’t do your taxes in crayon.”

“I always do my taxes in crayon.” She frowned at her 1040. “Usually red. Whaddaya say we go get liquored up? I can deal with the IRS later. I’m craving bourbon and CCR. She tilted her head and mischief danced blue and green into my eyes. Last week it was martinis and Mozart, before that Allman Brothers and beer, reggae and rum, etc. She matches her music to her spirits and drinks them both. She even sips her cigarettes.

“Veronica, it is later. If you don’t get that in the mail by midnight, it’s going to cost you.”

“I don’t see why they want to get everybody’s stuff all on the same day,” Veronica grumbled as she spread her W-2s, 1040s, and 550s across the floor. It took a total of twenty-nine minutes to complete both state and federal. Getting ready to leave consumed another forty-five, most of which was spent searching for Veronica’s keys, which were sandwiched between two pillows on my unmade bed.

Inside the package shop, the Braves were annihilating Cincinnati. Veronica wrapped unmanicured fingers around a Wild Turkey neck and engaged the counter boy in baseball banter while I paid.

Turpentine and paint fumes assaulted us at my front door, and Veronica threw her head back and attempted to suck the smells out of the air while twirling around like a six-year-old. I fetched two glasses and a bucket of ice while she giggled at her dizziness.

Bourbon in hand, she loaded Chronicle into the disc player. I sat to watch her dance. She found the bass line with her hips and allowed the rest of the music to consume her, It was a most enchanting sight, She dirty-bopped across the hardwood floor and lost her balance.

“Oop!” She landed on her butt and laughed at her clumsiness. I offered her my hand, but instead of pulling herself up, she brought me to my knees in front of her. “Hey, sailor.” Her arms wound around my neck, and her lips were raspberries in my mouth. She drew herself into me, and I saw my reflection in her pupils.

She rubbed my back in bed, and I slid into an aquamarine world filled with mermaids and starfish. The mermaids sang and fed me oysters, then the most beautiful one of them all took my hand, and we swam toward the surface, her silver-teal tail shimmering in the sunlight.

I awoke from my dream in the middle of the night, remembering that first afternoon at the river with Veronica, who still had yet to put paint on canvas, and climbed the stairs to my studio. I painted her as she had looked on the beach of that little island, knees disappearing into the sand with the green of the river contrasting the pink undertones of her skin. By the time I finished, the sun had been up for hours.

I tiptoed downstairs and started a pot of coffee. By the time it was ready, I had stashed the bourbon on top of the fridge, washed the glasses, and straightened the living room. I had just poured my second cup when Veronica stumbled into the kitchen. She extracted a bottle of Absolut from the freezer and made herself a stiff Bloody Mary, muttering about the Kentucky flu. After she sucked down about two-thirds of her drink, she opened her eyes and said good morning.

“Ooh, you painted last night.” Her eyes flicked over my splattered chest, and she rose from her chair, nearly knocking it over as she clambered over to the staircase.

“Veronica, no.” Something whisper-screamed inside my brain, telling me not to let her see it.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she answered, bounding up the stairs with amazing energy, her hangover either cured or forgotten. I dumped some vodka in my coffee and straggled up the stairs behind her, just in time to see her drink slip out of her hand and shattered on the floor, tomato juice bouncing off the shards of glass.

“Did you plan on telling me about this?” Her voice was soft.

“I guess so.” I gulped the rest of my coffee, the alcohol burning my tastebuds numb.

“Or were you going to put it in a show and let some stranger buy it?” She whirled around to face me, her voice spiraling up in accusation.

“I don’t even have a show coming up. I may never have another show.”

“Answer my question. Are you planning on showing this? Or selling it?” She folded her arms under her breasts and tapped her bare foot in the broken glass.

“I don’t know, Veronica. I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.”

“You’re on the bridge now. I don’t know that you’re going to make it all the way across. But believe you me, you’re not putting me in a frame and slapping your name on it.”

“It’s my painting,”

“Oh, that’s a good one.”

“You’re telling me that I can’t show my own work?” I moved between Veronica and the painting, being careful not to slice my foot on a piece of glass.

“It’s not just your work. That’s me on that canvas, not some figment of your imagination.”

“No, it’s an image of you. An image that I created.”

“No, it’s a part of me that I shared with you. Privately.” She slammed the door behind her, her last words echoing in my empty space. “You did not invent me, Chris.”

I crawled back into bed and buried my throbbing head under Veronica’s pillow. I’m not sure how long I slept, but when I got out of bed again, the coffeepot had burned, and the leftover bourbon was gone. I climbed the stairs to my studio, hoping that the little voice in the back of my mind was wrong, but sunlight streamed through a ragged hole in the middle of the canvas where she cut herself out.

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