eleison
|
Here In Modernity(Please note: Chapter is incomplete.)
Chapter One- Her
Alan Smith was my first real acquaintance upon moving to the city. He had been talking with Cecelia, the dull girl across the hall from my new apartment, when I arrived at the top of the stairs. I was carrying the last of my meager belongings: a few rolled up canvases and a battered tin of oil paints.
“An artiste!” The obvious fakery in his voice was strangely charismatic, and I quickly looked up to find its owner. “Cecelia, why did you not tell me you were expecting a new neighbor?”
He was not nearly as interesting to look at as his voice had implied. His face was one easily dismissed as plain. It was a boy’s face, with an ironic mustache, the sort that had been all the rage at the turn of the century but now looked quite ridiculous. His suit was threadbare and coatless, his shoes well scuffed with the occasional hole. All in all he was unremarkable- and yet I found him interesting enough to forget my purpose in that hallway.
I had also, apparently, temporarily forgotten how to listen, for the next thing I heard was the end of a conversation of which I knew nothing.
“Anyway, Cecelia, do remember to invite her along with you tonight when she comes to her senses.”
In the weeks that followed I was to see him more- by his own arrangement, of course. He was an odd sort of man. He was an admitted socialist, but he seemed to define socialism differently. For one thing, he was social. He had a habit of adopting protégés, like myself, whom he sometimes called his “children.” He was keen on sharing all his resources and, as such, he was often hard up for cash and was occasionally without shelter. Not that we, his children, were ever to know that.
He owned three threadbare costumes: the coatless suit I met him in, an equally coatless tuxedo that he wore when he played the saxophone at the local jazz clubs, and a particularly outdated brown suit that matched his only suit coat. This, too, we were not meant to notice. And, other than the initial observation of the first suit, I knew of none of it until years later when a young Chinese woman told me his secrets over a hand of Mahjong.
What we did know of him was this: he knew everybody of relative and artistic importance and he was a hopeless flirt. Cecelia, I was to learn, was just one of many deluded women who believed he was in love with them. There were still more women who knew he did not and longed to hate him for it, only to find again and again that they could not. He was too charming. That, perhaps, is why even those of us closest to him knew so little about him.
As I was much in non-financial debt to him, Alan had the right to commission paintings without paying. At least that is how my pride would put it. In reality debt had very little to do with it- Alan could ask nearly anything of me and get it. He just chose to ask so rarely.
I was schooled primarily in landscapes and for some time these “commissions” stayed within the area of my expertise. I knew they would not stay there, though, as he was fond of expanding horizons. In any case, the locations he brought me to were archaic, rusty, and generally in various states of decay. Somewhere beneath his charming surface I liked to think he was familiar with death. I often tried to imagine what it was exactly that caused this out of place fascination with death. Of course, it never occurred to me then to ask him outright.
She was much like his other commissions- only human, of course. I could see them advancing on the pavement below and guess their purpose at my building. For all he was a flirt, Alan was not the sort to flaunt ladies in front of others. As such, they could hardly be headed to see Cecelia. He and the mysterious female were clearly destined for my apartment and I was to be commissioned my first portrait.
True to this prophecy, Alan’s familiar three knocks- one long, two short- brought to my awareness that they were already in my rooms.
“This, my dear, is a Miss Emily Starling.” He said, elongating each word with practiced struggle as he gestured vaguely to the lady. She, in turn, did an unstaged curtsy- lifting ever so slightly her long flounced skirt to reveal a bizarre lack of footwear.
“I found her on Mayberry Street and thought to myself: ‘Oh my, Quince simply must paint this delightful treasure.’” He continued without looking up. Then again, he never looked anyone in the eye when he spoke, preferring to look at them through the corner of his eye- as if looking past his audience. “So I swooped her up and brought her to you directly.”
“So I see.”
And I did see. I saw long Grecian black curls tucked in a frame around a cherubic feminine face. Her body was as curved and round as her cheeks, and yet there was more to it than that. She possessed a sort of beauty that had gone out of fashion about the same time as Alan’s mustache.
She was bewitching in the same strange way the boarded up houses and abandoned train yards had been. But there was something more to her spell. Perhaps it was the human element that seemed to attract my attention to her alone and not to the usual wondering about Alan’s fascination with the dying.
|
