by Ed Bemand
When last we saw him, Antoine was in his studio the night after he met a young student named Lucille. Though nervous, he agreed to meet her again. She had named a statue in the city centre as the location for their meeting in an off-hand way that assumed he must know it. It took him time to find it, so by the time he got there he was late and anxious but he still spent ten minutes being glared at by pigeons before she appeared.
“Come on. Let’s go shopping.”
It wasn’t something that he would normally choose to do but he found himself caught up by her and following her without even thinking about it.
She was so alive.
He avoided crowds and preferred to spend a lot of time alone. Most of the time these days that meant sitting, staring at the walls. Usually drinking too much. He was still painting, of course, but what did that mean but drinking wine and shoving paint around a canvas?
She dragged him in her wake, cutting a swathe through the tightly arranged lines of clothes on rails. She grabbed at things randomly, paying no heed to size or what she had actually claimed to be looking for. She would pull something close to her, stare at it for a few moments then thrust it back in the general direction of where it came from. She made no real attempt to put the hanger back on the rail. Most things ended up on the floor. She didn’t appear to notice.
For someone that didn’t have any money she managed to get through a lot of it. When they left the shop he found himself carrying a bag of her purchases. It had seemed only natural that he should offer to pay for things.
“Now what should we do?”
“Anything you like.”
“I like to walk in the park. Maybe draw the birds on the river.”
They walked, they watched the ducks, they found a café to stop in for a while.
She disappeared into the loos in the café with her bag of purchases and emerged sometime later dressed very differently. Before she had been comfy in scruffy jeans, old boots, a big coat and a woolly hat, now she held her coat over her arm and the rest of her clothes in her bag. She was wearing a dress and had put on some make-up. She still lacked the sheen and perfection of Adrienne’s beauty, but she was unquestionably beautiful in her own imperfect, wonderfully vital way.
Antoine gladly offered to pay for everything. After all, she was a student with no income and he had profited well from his exhibition so far.
They attended a play, a boring amateurish attempt at comedy. Lucille enlivened it for him. At first, when her leg started to press against him it could have been chance, but as the pressure became more focussed he could feel her toes running over the inside of his calf. She reached for his hand naturally enough, and kept hold of it. For a time she pressed it against the bare smooth skin of her thigh, letting her dress ride up higher. Nothing came of it, but the contact was exciting.
They had a few drinks after the play, then went for dinner at a nearby restaurant. It had been a long time since he had partaken of such a simple pleasure as taking a pretty girl for dinner. The main people that he spoke to on a regular basis were the takeaway restaurants that supplied him with what he needed to live. The facilities in his studio were minimalist and he had never learned to cook properly so restaurants that delivered were the main thing standing between Antoine and malnutrition.
Though simple, it was honest pleasure.
It was her that made the move when they were dawdling through the streets after dinner. She tried to kiss him. He flinched away from her.
“I’m sorry, I thought...” She apologised instinctively.
“No, I’m sorry. It’s been a long time since...”
She shushed him, sensing his pain.
She seduced him. She led him to her home, a simple apartment that she shared with another girl. They drank more and then she led him to the privacy of her bedroom. She stripped off her clothes and pulled him onto the bed. She had full breasts and a hint of a tummy. She looked beautiful to him. Alive.
He remained nervous and almost skittish. He was able to offer her little pleasure that night. His arousal was tentative and fleeting and it had taken all of her skills to maintain it. His spending was weak and he was apologetic afterwards. She didn’t seem to mind.
She invited him to spend the night with her but he was reluctant to do so. He wasn’t used to spending so long away from his studio and he felt uncomfortable being around other people for more than a short time.
He was still making his apologies for his inadequate performance when he left.
When he returned to his studio it felt empty and dead.
Antoine half expected that his inability to satisfactorily perform would have put Lucille off wanting to spend time around him again but he was proved wrong. She called him the following afternoon and invited herself to visit his studio.
“It’s messy...” he tried to warn her.
“Of course it is.”
He cautioned her that it was more studio than living space but she had not minded. She seemed to enjoy being surrounded by his half-finished work.
It was a large and almost industrial space. His physical needs had always seemed like an afterthought compared to his need for space to work in. There was an old bathroom and his bed was in an alcove off the studio. When he was working he needed to let it consume him. He couldn’t imagine abandoning his work for trivial pursuits.
It was dingy and squalid, littered with food remnants, empty wine bottles and cast aside fragments of the tools of his art. Discarded canvasses that held some fatal and irreparable flaw in what had been daubed onto them, broken brushes and split tubes of paint. Originally Gautier had brought wine with him whenever he visited the studio, but he increasingly tended to bring food and bin bags.
Even if he had been self-appointed, his agent did seem to show genuine affection for Antoine, and did what he could to ensure that not only did the money keep coming in, but that Antoine was provided for so that he could keep working. Antoine’s needs were pretty simple anyway. He was happy to subsist on bread and wine. His greatest expense had always been the paints and canvasses he needed to keep working.
His clothes were ragged and clumsily repaired. Gautier said it added to his mystique. He had always been scruffy. For a long time he didn’t have much money and didn’t like to waste it on clothes. Now he just didn’t care. His shirts all had paint on the sleeves.
Antoine sat with Lucille in his studio, surrounded by his recent failure to capture inspiration and render it in paint. Lucille held a newspaper clipping that she had pulled from her purse. It was a photo from his trial, of one of his paintings of Adrienne as it had been displayed in the courtroom.
“Your pictures are so powerful. I had to meet the man responsible for them.”
“They’re not romantic. It’s not a love story.”
“You created something astonishing and beautiful, something that people can’t help but feel a reaction to. Isn’t that what art is supposed to be?”
“Maybe so, but what now? If all my years painting were just building up to that, what now? Is that all I am, the man who painted his dead lover? What if she hadn’t died, what would I have been?”
“You know better than that, Antoine. You’re an artist, you always will be. You just need to find that perfect moment to capture and your work will be great again.”
“Of course I can still paint, and Gautier seems to be constantly selling off my third rate daubs. Just the fact that I did them is enough to make people want to waste their money on them. But that isn’t art. That’s just cashing in on the art I did once.”
It seemed that whatever he painted, someone would be willing to pay for it. Mostly it was meaningless crap though. Clumsy daubs that had evolved little from what he had produced back at school, but what had been worthless then Gautier was now able to exact a high price for.
“And what about you, what are you trying to create?”
She laughed.
“I don’t know yet. I’m still just trying to find myself. Maybe when I
do I’ll be able to figure out how to show it to other people.”
“I’d like to see the you you find.”
It was clumsily expressed but she seemed to appreciate the sentiment. She had made a decision to embrace life and she was sticking to it. Lost in a sea of siblings as a child she had felt unnoticed. Now she was trying to find her new place in the world. Since leaving home and commencing her studies she had found herself feeling free in a way that she wasn’t used to. She had moved to a new city where no-one knew her, and save for the occasional phone call and the ongoing deceit of her father as to the nature of her studies, she had little contact with her parents.
For as long as she had known she had been one of the children, obliged to go along with the whims of others, her parents, her siblings, her friends. Now she wasn’t and the experimental nature of her coiffure was just one sign of that.
She was an enthusiastic artist, happy to have a go with any new medium that she learned about, but was she talented? Antoine was no teacher or critic. He was just an artist, so he preferred to avoid making comments on her work, but when she pressed him, reminding him unnecessarily that technical critique wasn’t what matters, it was visceral reaction, what could he say?
He wanted her to keep working, keep trying, keep looking for that special something that she could create that might help to change the world a little, but she hadn’t found it yet. So far she was just another dabbler. Better to be honest about that, than to disingenuously claim that she was a great undiscovered talent, no?
Maybe she would find a way to express herself that could be transcendent and beautiful.
At that time, Lucille favoured clay as a medium for expression. Her flat contained many confusing clay sculptures with forms that appeared sexual to Antoine. She hadn’t been able to work with clay before going to art college so she was still learning her skills but she was enjoying what she did. She was never precious about her own creations. She had no pretences to achieving high art. She was just learning and spending time doing something that she enjoyed. She was driven by the desire to create beauty just as he was. Her beauty was still untouched by the tragedy that had come to define his.
Antoine wasn’t happy when Gautier told him that he was selling the paintings of Adrienne, but he could do little about it. Their arrangement gave Gautier the authority to do what he judged appropriate with Antoine’s work. Anyway, it wasn’t even like he wanted to keep them. He could barely even stand to look at the paintings because of the pain that they stirred in him. He wanted to be able to move on to something else.
It wasn’t easy, but Antoine and Lucille loved each other. They spent a lot of time together, working on their own projects. She still kept her flat, even if she wasn’t there a lot of the time. He was paying her rent now as well as his own. He didn’t mind. Neither of them really thought of her as using him for his money. It was just the reality of the situation. He had money and she didn’t, so why shouldn’t he pay? Doing so meant that she was free to work and be with him, and that was what they both wanted.
Her vitality was touching something that he hadn’t felt for a long time. He began to feel something new. A calmness, a contentment that he hadn’t felt before. It didn’t take long for Antoine to find himself caring for her.
It was nice that they could just spend time together. Maybe Lucille was just using him, hoping to profit from association from an artist more high profile than she was, or just to get the free meals. Maybe that was the case. He didn’t really mind. If she was using him, then what was the harm? Wasn’t he also using her in his own way? He liked the times when hours could pass when he didn’t even catch himself thinking that it was wrong to not be thinking about Adrienne. He felt bad if he didn’t mourn her. He had promised her eternal love, didn’t that mean that he was betraying her if he was made happy by somebody else? But it felt so nice to be able to just spend pleasant and happy moments in the company of a woman when every so often he could just forget about the spectre that his last love cast over everything that he ever did.
Lucille was obviously interested in his art but she seemed to understand that it was something that he preferred to not have to talk about constantly. At least, not the art that Adrienne had become.
He was trying to find the new direction that his art was supposed to take, and she was happy to listen to his ramblings as he talked about it. His prime concern was still finding beauty, but after the celebration of morbidity and past beauty that Adrienne had become he wanted to find something pure and wholesome to depict. His psychiatric evaluations had strongly emphasised that he should avoid a return to that kind of work. His art hadn’t always needed to be so dark. His agent had made it clear that he needed to find his new direction fast if he didn’t intend to just live off the legacy of Adrienne for the rest of his career.
Antoine’s studio was filled with canvasses and sketch books. He spent hours everyday trying to recapture inspiration, to find something truly beautiful that he could depict. He was achieving very little, just pushing paint around on the canvas to keep in practise for when he found something that was really worth painting.
Over the following weeks he struggled with his suppressed emotions and tried to be able to love Lucille. She showed him apparently boundless patience and affection. She aroused him with her mind and body but it was hard to sustain it. It was far too easy for dark thoughts to intrude upon his mind and break the spell, leaving him incapable of finding it again. He knew that he was proving to be a very poor lover for her. She was so young and hungry and full of life, how could she be satisfied with his feeble attempts? He was only a few years older than her but he felt like he was from a different era to her. Antoine could only assume that she had other more capable men to offer her what he was unable to. He never asked. He couldn’t blame her if she was. He did what he could and took great pleasure in his explorations of her body, aiming to offer with the rest of himself what he could not with his cock. She understood that it wasn’t easy for him and she treated him gently. She seemed to gain pleasure from his touch even if it lacked the fire and passion that she might have expected from someone who her imagination had painted as being a great romantic.
With Lucille’s help he felt like he was entering a new stage in his life. It wasn’t even just him getting over the pain of losing Adrienne. This was different. It was like he was learning to deal with the pain that had always been there, even before her. The way that life had always made him feel. Now he was starting to wonder if that wasn’t the only way that he could feel. This change was reflected in his work as well, of course. How could his world changing around him not effect his paintings? He worked with vibrancy, adding bright splashes to every scene. His technique was well-developed by now, and his brushwork was always accomplished, but that was not enough to ensure his work escaped criticism.
“Isn’t his work supposed to be dark? This looks like a bunch of fucking flowers and they’re not even unhappy flowers. Why exactly do you think that I should want to drop sixty grand on fucking flowers? I could just buy flowers. I’d get a fuck-sight more of them for sixty grand too. When I hear Antoine, I hear dark and edgy, like the dead green chick. Those pictures were hot. And those really angry sunsets he used to do, where the sky looked like it was supremely pissed off at the world. I said bring me Antoine and you’ve brought me fucking flowers. Why am I even still talking to you?”
It was a prominent art dealer, a man who had directed most of the funds towards Gautier for Antoine’s earlier work.
On Gautier’s next visit to the studio he told Antoine that he had to regain his edge.
“People expect something from you, it’s what you are.”
“And all that you could ever want me to be?”
“You know it’s not just about money, even for me.”
“What is it then?”
“You produced something beautiful before, something that affected millions. You can do that again. You want to, don’t you?”
Anto
ine decided he should make his next great work be of Lucille. That would help to dispel the ghost of Adrienne. He could show the beauty of his love for Lucille, and he did love her, he was sure of it.
He tried to paint her, hoping to recall the ability to capture life and beauty that had been the essence of his paintings of Adrienne as she had been before the accident. He filled countless sketchbooks and pages torn from them were scattered around his studio. It wasn’t working. If before his work was too pristine and cold to be truly beautiful, now he seemed to be lacking even the skill for technical efficiency. He was just making a mess. He discarded work after work as they failed to satisfy his vision for what should be created. Her soul seemed to evade all of his attempts to capture and portray it. Maybe he just didn’t have the talent any more. Maybe what he had created with Adrienne was just a fluke, and that was all he would ever be able to achieve. He had never wanted to be anything else but an artist. It had been a fundamental part of his being for as long as he could remember. What did he have left without that?
He was embarrassed when Lucille caught sight of the many failed attempts he had made at capturing her likeness. She had seemed touched by it and not bothered by his seeming inability to find the inspiration that he needed in her.
“That’s all that they think I am. The man that painted her.”
They didn’t tend to use her name any more, the third person feminine singular pronoun with emphasis was reserved for her.
“You can paint like that again.”
“I can’t. I don’t feel like I did then. She had only just died, it was all so raw to me. Now the pain is old, sealed over. It’s you I love.”
“Then what is it? Is it because I’m not beautiful like her?”
