The Prodigal
Part V
Forty-nine
RIO EXCUSED HERSELF soon after being thoroughly kissed by each person there.
“I want to be home at whatever hour Matt comes dragging in,” she said. “Besides, I think this party is headed where I don’t need to go without his okay. Which, by the way, he will probably give, so watch out!”
We all laughed and when she left, we started cleaning up the mess. With only nine of us at the party, it was easy to put the house back in order. I came in from taking the recycling out to find the seven remaining ladies in a huddle.
“No orgy tonight,” Lissa laughed. “Maybe tomorrow.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
“You and Kate get the big bed tonight,” Melody said. “Lissa is taking Allison and Whitney to Kate’s old room. I get Wendy and Bree in the closet formerly known as Wendy’s room. But don’t be surprised if things get switched around in the middle of the night!”
Kate might have said she was going to fuck my lights out, but the fact was that we were already near lights out by the time we made it to bed. Still, we couldn’t stop ourselves from making love. We whispered our dreams. I was all for getting married the next day if we could find a preacher, but Kate shut me up with a kiss that warmed my heart.
“We have to plan this and make sure our friends and families can be with us. I’m only getting married once. It doesn’t need to be big, but I want my family with us. I’m not about to get on Deb and Saul’s bad side. I don’t want to go to Nebraska for Christmas and find a double-king-size bed in the guest room and a sleeping bag in the hall for me.”
“What do you think about the Fourth of July?”
“Tony, that’s such a special date for you and the whole family and I still feel bad about not being present for Melody and Lissa. Do you think they’d be okay with it?”
“I think they’d be thrilled.”
“So would I, darling. And if you move just a little deeper, I’ll be even more thrilled right now.” I obliged my Kitten and pushed into her more deeply, rubbing my pubic bone firmly against her clit. She went over into a long, sighing orgasm during which she whispered, “My husband. My husband. My husband.”
I awoke at four in the morning after sleeping with my fiancée for nearly three hours. I opened my eyes and found Wendy looking at me across Kate. She smiled at me and nodded. I kissed Kate on the forehead and she stirred, hugging me to her.
“Kitten,” I whispered. “Darling, I have to go paint.” Her eyes fluttered open sleepily.
“Mmmhmm. Of course you do. I’m surprised you lasted this long.”
“It’s so hard to leave you in bed, though,” I sighed, kissing her.
“Tiger? Will you stay with me while my husband abandons me for his studio?”
Wendy snuggled closer, displacing my hand over Kate’s breast.
“Mmmhmm. ’Night.” I slipped out of bed, dressed and headed for the studio.
Parrish blues and yellows filled my canvas as I hummed and sang along with a Keith Jarrett album that was pumping through my baby speakers into the studio. The male reclined. I knew it was male, though slender and smooth. Ethereal. Floating on a cloud of… Not like a cloud in the sky. More like a feather bed—fluffy and filled with light.
Next to the male a female form—the curve of her hips accented by his straight slender lines. Her leg thrown across him with his leg parting her thighs.
I’d begun buying white and extenders in quart cans, almost like the house paint we’d used on the wall. The extenders gave the oil a translucency that enhanced the depths of the built-up colors. I was glad I had them. This vision burst on me as we made love. It was irrepressible and when I got to the studio, I’d grabbed a huge canvas to sling onto the easel. Forty inches wide and thirty tall, it was easily the largest canvas I’d ever used to paint in this style. Squeezing Prussian blue directly onto it had sent a chill down my spine when I began. Each dollop of paint on my palette knife made the breath catch in my throat as I imagined the sheer scope of disaster that could befall with one misplaced stroke.
His head was thrown back. He was in death throes, the expression on his face a cross between pain and pleasure. I worked my way up the canvas, working progressively from foreground to background rather than the typical background forward. A third figure emerged as I moved up. She was pulled out of their bodies, a blur of motion between them as if she had been a part of them. Her back arched with her breasts thrust upward, the expression on her face pure joy as she experiences her first breath. A rising spirit. A burst of sunlight through the upper clouds that highlights the slight mound at her sex, then tapers to legs that have not yet fully emerged.
The lover with a hand raised, the spirit’s hand emerging from it as she ascends, is no less in climax than she.
Climax. Yes. Not death, but the little death. The moment when the spirit transcends the mortal and two people—no, three people—are more than the sum of their parts. They have reached the moment.
Ecstasy.
I smelled the coffee before I felt the lips caressing mine. I opened my lips to hers and for a moment basked in the feeling I’d had as I painted and felt my love poured onto the canvas. I opened my eyes and Kate looked deeply into them. I was lost in her power over me.
“I love you, darling,” she said. “I love you with all my heart.” She moved aside slowly to let Wendy have my lips.
“So beautiful, master,” she said softly. “So wonderful.” When she pulled herself away from me, Melody and Lissa rushed in to fill the void. I wasn’t sure if I was awake or still dreaming as they bathed my face with kisses and probed my mouth with their tongues.
“Our love,” Melody whispered.
“Our joy,” Lissa replied.
“Coffee?” Wendy asked. We all broke out laughing. Well, I guess I was awake. I’d fallen asleep in the recliner at the studio after I’d finished painting. That had been about eleven this morning. It had taken six hours to paint.
“What time is it?” I croaked.
“Nearly one,” Kate said. “We got worried that you hadn’t come home yet or called. But none of us got out of bed—well, except to change beds—before noon, so we just grabbed coffee and came over to the studio when Bree, Allie, and Whitney left.”
“I had to paint.”
“You sure did. This is so emotional it makes me want to cry and dance and sing and make love all at once,” Melody said. She was standing in front of the easel with Lissa. Kate and Wendy pulled me to my feet and held me as we joined them in front of the canvas.
“How do you do it?” Kate asked. “I wish I could understand.”
“Don’t worship my paintings, Kitten. I’m as much in awe of yours.”
“No. I understand that, finally. It took a while to get it through my thick head. I don’t feel inferior—no more than I feel inferior that my body is female and yours is male. I love mine, but I love yours, too.”
“How many now?” Melody asked.
“Uh… this makes seven.” Eight, but we won’t count Rage.
“You should exhibit.”
“Seven in a year. I can’t produce this commercially. And I don’t know how long it will last. I don’t understand where they come from, so I don’t know how many are there.”
“For now, you’re right,” Lissa said. “You can’t show these yet. Though, the family would like a private showing of all of them someday soon. You can trust us not to pressure you to do more. Even if this is the last one you ever do like this, it will always be precious to us.”
“Using the Trips was brilliant,” Kate sighed. I jerked around to look at her. The Trips? I looked at the painting again. I’d captured the ecstasy that I felt when Kate and I were together. Wendy was a catalyst that bound us. It was the same as when Lissa and I were making a baby and Melody was with us. But as I looked at the painting, I could clearly see the shapes and face of Willow with Sunday emerging as ecstasy from his joining with Rainbow.
“I thought it was… us,” I sighed.
“It is, darling,” Wendy whispered. “It’s our spirit. It’s their bodies.”
“Though when they see it, you will never convince them that it isn’t theirs,” Kate said. “Tony, you give us more reasons to love you every day.”
We spent the rest of New Year’s Day relaxing at home. The boys had spent New Year’s Eve on a play date with Jimmy and Ella James, so we spent a lot of time in the spa and big bed before they got home. Classes weren’t to start at PCAD until the thirteenth, so none of us were motivated to do anything on Thursday either. It wasn’t until Friday that I went back to the chapel to paint again.
It was a slower process without Adolfo and Morgan prepping the surface for me. Kate came to help as she had before Christmas, but all she could do was help hold the cartoon in place while I powdered it with charcoal dust and then offer moral support and conversation as I painted. It had taken me twice as long to apply the intonaco plaster coat as it would have taken my assistants.
Being “engaged,” didn’t solve every little problem in life. Somehow, I thought that slipping that diamond on her finger would make it a done deal. But life was still happening and adding planning our wedding to the mix just made it that much more complicated. Melody and Lissa jumped all over the idea of a July 4 wedding. The whole event had a life of its own and I was swept up in it as soon as we announced our engagement at the party New Year’s Eve. Remarkably, Kate and I were relaxed about it. She thought the church where we held Melody and Lissa’s wedding was perfect. I took an unscheduled break while we made out up on the scissor lift. We got ourselves back together when we heard voices and a couple of priests entered the chapel.
It was a long day before I finished painting the panel.
I only got one panel painted that week and two the next week. I started the ninth panel on Wednesday, but only plastered and painted half of it, trusting that I could blend things in smoothly on Thursday. It didn’t turn out badly, but I was glad I wasn’t doing a single big wall like this. It took as much time to feather the edges as it did to plaster the panel.
“At what time do you complete your giornata tomorrow?” Doctor Bychkova asked after the first class of the semester on Monday. For being his teaching assistant, we didn’t talk all that often except for me to hand off papers that I thought he’d be interested in or that I had questions about. He did ask often about progress on my project, but never anything specific.
“I should be finished about six o’clock,” I said. “Andy—that’s Father Andrew—usually comes by about that time to listen to the story.”
“I’ll visit if you don’t object.” Object to Bychkova coming to inspect my art? Hardly!
“That would be great.”
“What are you painting tomorrow?”
“Three homeless people sitting in front of a tent.”
“That should be interesting.”
“Homelessness is a favorite theme of yours, Tony—almost as much as beautiful nudes,” Andy said. “Tell us about this.” Doctor Bychkova stood back, just in hearing. Kate watched with Morgan and Adolfo.
“For local people, this will bring back a recollection of the burning of the tent camp two years ago. It was here on the college campus that a madman set off a gas explosion that killed three people and injured fifty others. We called the memorial mural Leaving the World a Better Place than we Found It. Most people just call it The Wall. The crazy man was sentenced to life without parole, though I hear there is talk of another appeal. We all shook our heads sadly, gave our nickels and dimes and dollars to help with the problem. There is still no place for these homeless people. In fact, there is one more tent encampment in the area now than there was when this one was attacked.”
“But this isn’t a picture of camp,” Andy said.
“No. These three people—we’ll call them Emily, Paulie, and Sal—these are homeless people who died. Only they didn’t. They’re still standing on a street corner in Seattle. Emily is huddled next to a little fire trying to keep warm while she reads one of her favorite books. Paulie is telling a joke no one is listening to. Sal is peeing in the gutter. I passed them all on the way here this morning, or yesterday, or tomorrow. Like everybody else, I walked ten feet out of my way so I wouldn’t come too close. I even crossed the street. That’s me in the shadows.”
Everyone, other than the three homeless people, was in the shadows. That’s the thing about paintings that are twelve feet up and only three feet across. You can’t show a ton of people in detail. They are just shapes with a bit of color and shadow that I tell the story about. I don’t even point at the painting as I tell the story. I let people fill in the details with their imaginations. I can almost see Andy categorizing the shadows as I speak—deciding which shadow I mean.
“The person you can hardly see on the left is talking on a cell phone. She not only doesn’t see the three homeless people, she doesn’t see anyone else on the street. The guy by the lamppost is thinking the government ought to do something about the homeless problem and get these people off the street. The lady with the dog had a fleeting thought that the bomber might have had the right idea. Most of the rest of these people in the shadows and the background don’t have a conscious thought about the three homeless people in the middle. Except that one. He put a dollar in Paulie’s bucket and then ran across the street to get a four-dollar cup of coffee at Starbucks. Those three with a makeshift tent made out of blankets and cardboard will never change. Not until all the people in the shadows have emerged. Including me.”
“It’s a touching story, if a little on the dystopian side. It all seems hopeless,” Andy said. “What’s the parable reference?”
“I thought about ‘The poor you have with you always.’ But a couple months ago, you told me the story of the rich man and Lazarus. I kept hearing Luke 16:31: If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead. I wanted The Wall to make a difference, but it all seems so hopeless.”
It did feel hopeless and depressing. I’d worked myself into a real funk. Doctor Bychkova caught me before I caught up with Kate. She was on her phone. He suggested that in the book I include a picture of The Wall as a reference. He also wanted to know my plan for editing.
“Father Andrew records me telling the stories and correlates them to Bible passages. We brainstorm together and I write up a draft. I still have a dozen to write. It’s getting harder. Maybe I haven’t learned forty lessons yet. I haven’t thought about editing.”
“I’ll volunteer. You’re a good storyteller, but you tend to wander a little. The stories should be as meaningful as the artwork.”
“Do you have time?” He had both the Art History and the Art and Storytelling classes and that accounted for over a hundred students.
“Oh yes. I have a teaching assistant who does my other reading for me.” He grinned. I’d never heard Doctor Bychkova make a joke before.
He left and I caught up with Kate as she hung up her phone.
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