Short Story
The Sketch
artwork by kanta
The painter sat in front of the empty canvas. He knew exactly what he was going to put on it. It was to be a portrait of a woman: of women. It had come to him inexplicably earlier that day. He was bored at his job at Seven-Eleven and started writing on a pad he found lying on the counter. He started out with nothing to say but then his eyes turned to a magazine standing on the rack on the corner. The cover was a picture of a supermodel giving her trademark pout face, her blue steel. He thought it was amusing and he started to write about it. But then the writing started to take on a life of its own; the words began to drop out of him in spasms as if he were coughing them out. Soon what the essay described read nothing like the picture of the woman - more so, the girl - on the magazine cover. It talked about a vision half blurred in shadows and hazes. It was the image drawn from a memory: one he knew he must have had and had completely forgotten. He rushed out from behind the booth and started walking briskly towards his apartment four blocks away. He knew it was not cool to leave his post like that, especially since he was only one working. But he did not care. He knew he would get a lot of shit for it from the manager and might even get fired. But he just did not care: it was not important. Anyway his shift would end soon and, Colleen, his replacement, would be there then. She took her job seriously. To her, it was her career. She was cool like that. He hoped that it would all work out and the store would not be robbed or burn down. But now, he knew he did not want to focus on what might happen. He hoped that it would work out and that was all he could do. To him, what was more important - what was sacrosanct - was the vision he had of the picture. As he walked, he focused more and more on it. He tried like a man holding on with his entire mind to the memory of a dream before it slipped out of waking life. When he reached his house, he dropped himself right down in front of the easel. He did not even notice that he still had his work uniform on and was covered in sweat. He took up a pencil and started to draw the lines and then rub them out again. He knew what the woman-women looked like. It was an image he clearly understood but could not articulate onto the canvas. No matter how much he tried he felt that it was wrong. That even a single line, drawn by the pencil- without reason or cognition- was wrong. The frustration began to show on his face and his exuberance began to wane, to be replaced by irritation and a red face of anger. He felt himself become more and more conscious again of his surroundings: the 4-B pencil in his hand, the grime of his ill-kept apartment. He knew that he was losing the picture and that soon it was going to disappear. But then he looked at his hand, and became aware that he was holding a 4-B pencil. And he understood. He felt that this was going to have to be a charcoal sketch, that it was only coal that could smear the ripping lines over the white canvas. They had to be dirty and they had to be stains. That was what the picture demanded: that was the only way it would be honest. It was what he saw in his memory. He grabbed a piece of coal and began to run it over the paper. He was satisfied now. He knew that was it: everything felt right again. The lines, the dirt, the black turning to ash: it all fit. That was the way it was supposed to be. He felt free in the moment. His hand had a life of its own and he did not even pay attention to the page: the luxury of muscle memory took over, he let his mind drift. He wondered how strange it was that writing gave him the picture. He had begun writing as a way of relaxing over the toils of painting and drawing. It gave him a release that was unimportant and a hobby. He wondered whether it would have all been different if he had taken up the pen before he had taken up the brush, whether he would been a writer rather than a painter. But it was too late for him to switch his voice from the canvas to the page now. Painting was all he really understood: it was all. In those hours when he spent torturing himself over what was wrong and what was askew on his drawings, he knew that was what made it matter. For him writing was instantly gratifying, he found no faults in what he wrote, he did not bother to dwell on it more than that. From the easy pleasure it gave him, it was clear that writing was just a casual thing and it did not really matter. What was important was what generated fear and concern. As his mind drifted on and on, his eyes suddenly caught sight of the image on the canvas, and he remembered it all. It was the picture of a woman. Looking at it he could not tell whether she was European, African, Asian or what. It was all a mix. The blank white of the page and the black smudged lines conveyed no color at all: she could have been white or black or brown or yellow. She was more than a woman. To him, she was all of them. The face of the woman covered the entire canvas, but it was slightly tilted to the right. It gave the picture an angle and the pose a lack of affectation. It was a picture that said that the woman was not conscious of any watching eyes, not conscious of even herself. She had long eyelashes that curled up to meet the lines of her eyebrows. Her eyes were large and deep, but not enough to be like those of Hindu goddesses. Her nose was long and sharp, but it was not the European nose: it could have been anything at all. The soft lines of her jaw made it seem as if the face might have been oval if looked from straight on, but that was merely a hint. There was nothing solid in her face. The thick messy lines of charcoal obliterated all sense of singularity. Looking at it he was acutely conscious of the one blank spot on the top right corner of the painting. It was the part where there should have been a tuft of hair. But he knew that he could not have a single strand of hair in that picture - even though a woman is so much her hair. Maybe that was it, if he showed hair she would be drawn back to a singularity again. That the viewer would be able to tell what she was: that from the lines of her hair, she was a one thing. Here he was suddenly stuck. Looking at it he thought about what his first art teacher in grade school had told him - him and every other one after that: that a white spot on the canvas was death to the painting. There is nothing white anywhere in existence, so there can be nothing white in art either. White was the absence of all things, and therefore it was an anathema to any creation. He suddenly averted his gaze. He could not stare at those eyes any longer: it was too erotic. He turned away as if the desire he felt for her at that moment was an obscenity, a desecration: it was rape. He looked around for something else to look at and he could not help his urge for a cigarette. But he had quit a week ago: he just could not take the weight upon his lungs anymore. But he was too weak. If he did not have a smoke he would go back to the picture, which would be unbearable. He got up and ran out. He ran as fast as he could, he ran down the four blocks and back to the Seven Eleven. He ran in and went behind the counter, to where they kept the cigarettes. He fumbled around over the stacks, trying to grab for a pack of Marlboro lights. He dropped several of them on the floor. As he bent over to pick them up he heard the bing of the doors sliding open. He stood straight up to look and saw Colleen. "Hey, how's it going?" she said. "Pretty good. Kinda slow night." "Good. I've got this crossword I want to do today. I hope no one shows up. It'll help me get it done." "Okay. I think you might be in luck today. There hasn't been anyone in yet." "Ok then." He pocketed the pack, walked out from behind the counter and left - completely forgetting to clock out. He was suddenly conscious of how lucky he had been. He had just gotten in on time to catch her coming in. Looking around him, he spied that everything was exactly as he had left it: even the pen next to the pad was exactly where he had left it. So now there was probably no chance of anyone ever finding out he had snuck out. Not unless they checked the surveillance tapes, and they never did that unless someone got shot. He took his time walking back, smoking the cigarette with gusto. There was no rush, he had no ideas about how to finish the sketch, it was all blank now. The moment was gone. He looked around at the trees and the buildings and the sidewalk; he did not see anything interesting. He meandered for a while and it took him another twenty minutes to get back to his apartment. Once there he sat back down in front of the face. It did not seem so important now. The face was just another face, although a thoroughly striking one. He looked at it as he palmed a piece of coal. He rested the flat of the lump on the top right corner, where there was the blank spot and then he pushed in and dragged down, creating a single bar of solid black. The bar covered up the white spot and a part of the face, but that did not seem important. In fact, it was exactly what he was looking for. He was happy again. He drew another bar on the other end, a much thinner one, one that did not block any of the features or even much of the picture at all. That was all that was needed. He pressed harder till the black was completely solid and not a single absence remained. He worked assiduously on this last part and then with palette and a brush, he started painting black over the coal lines where it was needed. When it was all done, he took some base oil and carefully spread it over the picture, setting it as much as if it were in stone. Then he was completely spent, tired but now that did not matter. He was satisfied. He looked at the picture. It looked like the face from his dream, an image that he could see from the hollow between the two black lines. He called it My Window.
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