Above All Else (part 2)
March 9, 2007
Jarrett Lerner is the winner of the 2007 Observer Short Story Competition. This is part II of III of his winning story. The conclusion will be published on March 30. If you missed the first installment, read it here.
He cleared his lungs of a drag of smoke and lightly told her he did not allow people, especially the subjects of his paintings, in his studio while he worked. She apologized. Yet then, steered by her nervousness, guided by a vague sense that, against the painter’s claim, she belonged there, she felt her feet begin to move, and so paced the studio, lifting cloths that covered canvases, fingering through piles of sketches, surveying the catalogue of women the young Ava Effran could only assume had shared a similar experience as she with the artist. He followed her, taking small pouts of his cigarette, until she finished her tour in front of the painting of herself. The stool beside it bore a saucer filled with ashes, and a cup with thin stripes of brown ringing the inside—evidence he had been up all night, painting and repainting. Even so, a section at the base of the canvas remained uncolored. Like blackened bones, her ankles and feet were still only thin rubs of charcoal. There she was, sitting in profile, clutching her elbow with her opposite hand. The paint of the body was thick, fresh, and embraced by a background of washy purple. It was difficult to make out the colors, especially those of her upper half, the light charging in from the door she had let herself in spilling white across their wetness. Dima Janiszewski appeared at her elbow and patted out his cigarette in the saucer. He positioned himself behind her, eclipsing the mischievous outside light. For a moment, before he spoke, Ava Effran looked at the picture of herself, devoured and digested and delivered by this man whose hand now rested on her shoulder. It was a simple picture, yet one that seemed to effortlessly describe her in full, seemed to comprehend everything about her—everything that would someday be about her—better than she could ever hope to. She blushed to think of who else could know her so intimately, and so immediately. Anyone with eyes. A shiver dragged up her body at the sudden awareness of this vulnerability. She felt feeble, raw, open all over. You must leave, came the voice of Dima Janiszewski. I am carrying your child, Ava Effran told him. You still must leave.
* * * * *
Alan and Ava arrived early to help Ava’s mother set up the reception room. She bounded up to them as soon as they entered, flustered and fussing with a cellphone. She wedged it between her shoulder and ear and called into it, “No. It’s Marilyn.” Then she handed Ava a bag full of tablecloths and gestured toward the bare tables behind them.
“She organizes these things every year?” Alan asked as he tossed one end of a cloth over the table to Ava. “Yep. Since before I was born. Except she’s more…” Ava bit her lip, trying to squeeze out the right word. “More crazy, this year.” She shook her fingertips about her head, illustrating her mother’s recent state.
As Alan opened and unfolded another cloth, he surveyed the room. The rectangular tables that lined the walls were laden with platters of fruits and vegetables, like sprawling still lifes, and silver trays with heaters burning blue beneath, and paper plates and napkins with the same floral pattern hedging their edges. Bins of plastic utensils sat at the head of one table. They were a mild purple color, the same as the festive letters on the banner draped above the entrance, reading Taylor Family Reunion, the same as the tablecloths they covered the round eating tables with. And waiting to be placed atop these tables were woven baskets inlaid with purple napkins, filled with cookies and brownies, balloons tied to their handles.
He tossed one end of the cloth to Ava, saying, “I love the colors.”
* * * * *
Dima Janiszewski ended his peregrinations at the edge of the earth, when he could no longer advance westward—in Monterey, California. He settled into a studio a few blocks from the shore. With his slim funds he crossed the country, by turns hitchhiking and, when the fares were reasonable, riding a bus into the next city. Something about the journey, he believed, had done him harm. He no longer felt confident enough to saunter about the streets, nor assured enough to approach women and inform them of their marvelous beauty. Aware that he needed some source of income, and of course itching to paint, Dima Janiszewski tried his hand at genres besides portraiture, attempting landscapes and seascapes, city streets and still lifes. After struggling for a few months with sketches of his new subjects, he impetuously attempted a canvas. He set up an easel at the edge of a parking lot overlooking the beach. He brought along a book, Manet and the Sea, for guidance. Within the hour however, he abandoned the canvas, feeding it to the elusive, devouring ocean. He did not love the water, the crowded streets. He did not love the bundles of fruit and vases of flowers he arranged on his table during the sleepless nights and slow evenings. He painted less and less, spending most of his days at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, watching the tanks of jellyfish with his hands in his pockets. Teachers and chaperones on tours with schoolchildren often mistook him for an employee, asking him to explain the limp graceful beings behind the glass. I’m only an admirer, he would explain, a fan. He eventually found employment at a nearby elementary school’s after-school program. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, he walked to the school, gave each kid a handful of pretzels, a cup of grape juice, and sometimes, if they chose to, sat with them to finger-paint.
* * * * *
With the tables all covered, the ballooned baskets of sweets set atop them, Alan and Ava took a seat to wait for Ava’s mother to bustle back in with a new task for them. “So,” Alan eventually started, “that guy e-mailed me some pictures of the apartment.” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah. It’s pretty nice. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen. A little living room. And there’s a spare room. He’s using it right now as another bedroom, but it’s big enough to paint in. Two windows too, so I can keep it aired out and everything.”
Ava nodded. She dragged her sleeve up and itched her arm.
Alan reached for a cookie. He stuck the entire thing into his mouth.
* * * * *
A few months after Dima Janiszewski left Boston—when he was more than halfway across the country, well into his journey one critic would later refer to as his “career killer”—Ava Effran gave birth to a baby girl. She named her Marilyn. Ava Effran’s parents, disturbed and distressed upon discovering their daughter’s secret, informed her in advance that they would be offering the baby up for adoption. The young mother-to-be protested until the end. Yet she returned home from the hospital with her tiny arms empty. Within a week, a young couple, Tom and Clarissa Taylor, took in the infant.
* * * * *
No one can be a painter unless he cares for painting above all else, Alan would think. And for a moment, his going to California, his pursuing his dream of studying under his hero, it seemed of unassailable importance—the indispensable next step in his life as an artist.
But what if…
And did caring for painting above all else exclude caring for anything else?
Ava was so different. Alan didn’t run into the problems with her that he had with every other girl. Previous to Ava he dated a girl who was an aspiring poet. She had a routine, reading and writing all morning, sometimes into the afternoon or early evening. They practiced their respective crafts and enjoyed one another’s company afterwards. One night, however, after he cancelled dinner plans for their two-month anniversary—he had a breakthrough: he had to spend the night working—she arrived at his apartment and barged into his studio. She was upset, she said, at the meager slice of time he gave her—a crumb of burnt crust on the pie baked for painting. Also, she confessed her love for him. He told her he was flattered, especially at her effort constructing such a metaphor about him and his priorities, but that they were through, that she could use the extra time productively to improve her poetry. Others had been dropped after they had been too assuming. They would help themselves to pajamas and slip into his bed, lounge around the next day, cook an omelet for the two of them to share, bite into his morning—his most productive hours—or devour his whole day.
But Ava was different. She contented herself to wait outside his studio while he finished the day’s painting. He would often come out of his room—fluorescent with the proud glow of progress, famished after the effort to attain it—to find her asleep with a book splayed on her chest, two sandwiches on a plate (hers half eaten), having let herself in sometime earlier, silently, without his noticing.
And then he would wake her, shake her from sleep with those hands still singing from recent accomplishment. And he would attend to her with the same zeal he had just offered his canvas. His mind agape, his eyes sharp—to have the attention of those gifted eyes, that was enough for her. But then he’d speak. He’d make her feel beautiful, singularly beautiful, proudly singularly beautiful—worthy herself of being painted and praised. In some lights, he’d say, your skin is composed of fifteen different colors. He would point out details of her body she never noticed, as if describing a foreign land he’d just returned from. Twenty-four years she had spent with this body, and he found so many more wonders in it. Like the freckles on her inner thigh, how they mimicked the stars of the constellation Ursa Minor. When she posed for him, she felt an excitement that flirted with terror. She would lie on the couch while he sketched, and sometimes he would approach, investigating a swath of skin, staring as he stared at his favorites in the museum. But at her. And he would get closer and she would want to break her pose and embrace him and shut his active eyes and pull him towards her, and she would almost think she wouldn’t have to because he was on the verge too, because he was about to enfold her in his arms and engulf and overwhelm her and take her up to those heights to be there sizzling along beside him and—and then the door would slam, opening her eyes, as he, having found the detail he needed, retreated to his studio.
* * * * *
If it took Marilyn Taylor over two decades to contact Dima Janiszewski, it was not out of fear alone. But fear colored with disgust and shaded by an uncertainty as to whether she truly wanted to meet the man—that is, if he would consent to meet her, if he even knew of her. At the age of twenty, when she, with the assistance of her adoptive parents, contacted Ava Effran and learned the story of her birth, she purchased the few books she could find on her father, the artist. She spent her days devouring and redevouring the books. Her grades began to slip. She took the T to the museum and sat beneath the only painting of Dima Janiszewski’s on display, “lady brushes her hair.” She took the train to New York, to the MoMA, hoping they would hang one of the dozen Dima Janiszewski’s they had banished to storage. She had dreams in which she (as Ava Effran told her she had) walked the streets carrying bags of groceries. And Dima Janiszewski would approach her. This man whose face she was forced to conjure, there being no public photographs, this man whose features she had to suppose she inherited, he would speak to her. He would tell her she was the most delightful creature he had ever seen. He would take her packages into his arms and follow her into her bedroom. Then he’d paint her. Then make love to her. And he would flick his initials into the corner of the canvas. And on the back he would assign a name: “lady lays atop her covers.” And then he’d leave, return to his studio to paint and repaint her body, until he had known her more completely than she herself could ever hope to.
* * * * *
Ava’s mother had still not returned. After finishing a brownie Ava wiped her hands together, and, after a pensive stare, a scrape at her arm, she ended the silence with this: “I don’t want you to go.” Immediately, she held her fingers to her lips.Alan stood abruptly and stomped off. “What are you doing?” Ava called after him.
“Going to the bathroom,” he said.Through the doors and down the hallway he seethed, his insides writhing, angry and unsure and itchy. He burst into the bathroom. Inside an old man was perched atop the toilet—he’d left the stall door open. He looked over at Alan. And although he wasn’t aware, Alan looked back at his hero, Dima Janiszewski.
Jarrett Lerner is a sophomore majoring in English. “Above All Else” will continue in the April 1 issue of the Observer.