Art Something
4
First Look
MY DREAMS were both vivid and confused. And sexual. I’d only had sexual dreams like this when Fay slept with me. And not always then. I mean… Words! Damnit! How can I explain without words? I call a dream sexual when I wake up with come all over me. That happened three times when Fay slept with me. And it happened this night after my date with Annette. It didn’t happen the last two times Fay slept with me, even though we’d been mostly naked, kissing, and petting before we slept.
I had many dreams that included loving my sister and several that included loving Annette. But they didn’t make me paint such intense passion on the paper. My hand didn’t shake as I shaded the soft curve of their breasts. The colors didn’t leap out at me from the joining of their legs. I’ve studied art. I know anatomy. I’ve seen pictures of women’s sex. When I painted Fay, and could see her pink panties tucked up tight against her slit, I knew what was under them. I knew the parts. Objectively, I could draw a woman’s genitals. But when I painted after a sexual dream, the area was a mystery to me.
And this morning, I painted with abandon. Explosions of color erupted from her… their… our groins. I stepped back to examine the painting. There were too many breasts. There were too many legs. There were too many lips. Yet, they were all the ones that should be there.
Sometimes, it was painful to paint.
Mom greeted Annette with a smile when she answered the door.
My mom… I think we’re related.
Of course, we’re related. That isn’t what I mean. Exactly. I think she sees the world differently than other people. Like I do. I woke up one morning when I was ten or eleven with the most amazing dream. I painted for hours. I couldn’t quit to go to school. I simply couldn’t.
Mom understood. She brought food to my room. She checked throughout the day to see that I had water or if I needed anything. She baked my favorite cookies and brought them to me with a glass of milk. But she would never look at me. She kept her head down. It bothered me. Why was my mother avoiding looking at me? She was doing nice things, but she must be ashamed of me.
At dinner, with Fay sitting beside me and occasionally reaching over to touch my shoulder or pet my hair, I finally couldn’t take it any longer.
“Mom, why won’t you look at me today? Did I do something bad?” Dad sort of snorted and patted my shoulder before turning to embrace Mom.
“No, Arthur. You didn’t do anything bad,” Mom said. “You’ve been shining so brightly today, it hurt my eyes to look at you.”
Mom’s like that. She sees people glow. Sometimes she even shields her eyes a little when she looks at my paintings.
Mom was smiling at Annette when I got downstairs. Annette looked up at me and all of a sudden, Mom was shielding her eyes and turning her head like someone just took a flash picture.
“You two have a nice afternoon,” she said. “I need to run to the grocery store.”
Just then Dad came into the room and looked at the two of us.
“That is not a license to misbehave and do whatever you want. Be respectful of each other and of your parents,” he said sternly. “I’m going to drive your mother.” The two of them left.
“Wow!” Annette said as she stood on tiptoe to kiss my cheek. “Do your parents always leave the house when you have a girl visitor?”
“I guess,” I said. “I’ve never had one visit before.”
“Will you show me your painting?”
“Of course I will.”
We went to my room. The painting was still on the easel. I hadn’t started anything else, so I didn’t need to hang it from the drying line. Annette walked around the room and sort of attacked the painting from different directions. I’d never seen anyone approach a painting like that before.
She went over by the bed and then turned to look at the painting. Then she stalked toward it and stopped a couple of feet away. She backed up a step and turned to the window. At the window, she turned suddenly and stalked toward the painting again. It was like she was a cat investigating some stray bit of lint that had landed in a sunny spot on the rug. Eventually, she backed away from the painting and leaned into my arms.
“You love her so much,” she sighed.
“I, um… What?”
“I know, Arthur. I know you love Morgan,” she said. She leaned heavily on me until I put my arms all the way around her as we looked at the picture. Morgan? I was sure the dream was about Annette, but… yes, I could see the shape of Morgan’s breast over there. Her nipple. It was my turn to sigh.
“I’m so sorry, Annette. It’s true. I love her.”
“It’s all right, Arthur. Baby, it’s all right.” She turned in my arms and kissed me. “I love her, too.”
“But, I…”
“What’s cool is that I can see you love me, too,” she continued. “Like I love you. Don’t say it. This isn’t the time for words. Look. We are both there. Um… my boobs don’t exactly look like that, I don’t think. But you haven’t seen them yet, so all is forgiven. I can still tell that it is me. Look at us, all wound up together and just popping with excitement. Mmm. My nipples are getting hard and my panties are getting wet just looking at the painting. It fills me with so much… hope!”
Annette turned back into my embrace and kissed me again. Deeply. Passionately. She took my breath away. My hand slid from her waist up under her sweater. She pulled back slightly before grabbing the hem and pulling the sweater and camisole off over her head.
“Touch me. Kiss me. Take your shirt off and let our bodies learn to know each other. And look at me. Look and then you will know what to paint tomorrow.”
I had an opportunity to attend a master class with a famous artist in the city a couple of years ago. He talked with a paintbrush in his hand and put shapes on a big pad as he lectured. We all had sketchbooks and tried to keep up with what he was drawing.
“If you can see it in your head, you can paint it,” he declared.
“Anything?” asked a student.
“Anything at all. If you can make it real in your head, you can draw it, paint it, sculpt it.”
“Can you just, like, draw a steam engine?” another student—braver than me—asked.
“I could if I knew what one looked like.” The class laughed. “You see, I have a vague notion of what a steam engine looks like, but I don’t actually have a mental reference for one. I don’t know what it looks like. I have faint understandings. It runs on tracks that are about four or five feet apart, so I have some reference for size.” As he spoke, he used a marker to draw two lines that could be railroad tracks. “In front, I’ve heard of this thing called a ‘cattle-catcher’ that I think of as a snowplow. It has to extend across both tracks to clear them. And I know I’ve seen a round nose and a smokestack. So, there’s the front of a steam engine.” We all laughed because it looked almost like Thomas the Tank Engine. He even put a smile and eyes on the front with a light for a nose.
“What I don’t remember seeing are the details. I’ve never looked at a steam engine with the idea of drawing one. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one. So, I know it has big wheels on the side. How many? More than four. Six? Eight? Well, if all those wheels are under what I assume to be the heavy part of the engine, is there another pair of wheels back here? I can extend the geometric shape of the round front back as a cylinder. Is the engineer inside the cylinder? It must have some kind of house for the engineer to ride in. Or maybe it is a seat like a stagecoach and the engineer whips the engine down the track. You see, I can’t remember having ever seen one, so I don’t know what to draw here. I can invent something, but it probably won’t represent what a real steam engine is like. So, when you ask if I can draw a steam engine, the answer is yes, but it will look like what I see in my head, not necessarily what a real steam engine looks like.”
Annette piled my pillows against the headboard of my bed and leaned back against them. She held her hands demurely in her lap.
“Draw. Now you’ll know what they really look like.”
I drew.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, Annette,” I whispered.
“Are you kidding? Just look at it. Arthur, it’s wonderful. Do I really look that pretty?”
“You look amazing.”
When I finished drawing, I started painting. When I finished painting, Annette was still sitting quietly on my bed. She got up to walk around the painting like she’d done with the one from yesterday. Her catlike approach to a foreign object. Then she wrapped herself around me and we kissed. Eventually, I heard my parents return and we both pulled on our shirts. She didn’t put her sweater over her cami and I wore a T-shirt. We sat on the bed looking at the easel, my arm around her waist. Dad poked his head in to let us know they were home. He looked at the easel and nodded his head. He didn’t say anything about the two of us sitting on the bed. I guess he’d seen Fay and me in that position enough times. Usually, though, it was Fay holding me and not me holding a girl who’d been half naked with me all morning. My hand, under her camisole, slid up to caress her breast again as we kissed.
“I don’t mean the painting,” I said. “I mean us. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
“We’re seventeen. How could we possibly know what we’re doing?” She kissed me again and I felt her hand under my shirt to touch my chest. “I like touching you as much as you like touching me,” she sighed. “I guess that’s what it’s about. When I kissed you the first time, in the backseat of Morgan’s car, I jumped in with both feet. Or both breasts,” she giggled. “After Linda’s attack in the theater, I was afraid you’d just go along with her and it wouldn’t mean anything. I wanted you know that I was the one.”
“The one? Um… What about…?”
“For the past several years, all of your life, Morgan has taught you to see your dreams on canvas. It’s wonderful. I want to read all your paintings. They will become my favorite novel and over the years, I will return to read them again and again. But I’m the one who will teach you to see life.”
“You know so much about it?”
“Nope. I’m going to have to discover every step with you. Arthur, I don’t just mean our bodies. We’ve got time to discover and explore each other. One day, we’ll become lovers. I’m not ready for that yet because there is so much I haven’t discovered with you. We need to enjoy each step along the path and all the little side journeys that go with them,” she said. She liked to punctuate her sentences with kisses. I was lost in her voice and the spell she was weaving. Lovers?
“There is a lot of life out there besides love. There are baseball games and museums and dances. There are picnics, dinners, and breakfasts. There’s school. Maybe we should explore some churches or join a club. There are books to read and oceans to cross. Mountains to climb and rivers to swim. That’s life. That’s what we’ll learn to see together.”
“It sounds like you have our future all planned out,” I said.
“You have your dreams and I have mine. I read your dream in that picture,” she said, pointing to the one she originally came to see. “Is it very different than the one I painted with words?”
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