Page 94 of All That We Are Together
“Why’d you do all this?”
“I already told you. It’s a gift. I thought you’d like it; I thought it would help you get your work done. Listen, Leah…” He looked away, picked up a record, and placed it carefully on the turntable. “If you have to paint something you don’t think I’ll like, just do it. There are artists who paint external things, landscapes, or faces, but you’re not like that. That doesn’t work for you. Just pay attention to that tattoo of yours and let be whatever has to be. Understand? Because it’s a problem if you repress what you feel when your feelings are the basis of your art. And they always have been.” He set the needle down as he finished talking.
“My Way” by Frank Sinatra started playing.
“I think I can find a solution.”
“I’m glad,” he said, apparently relieved.
“What about you?” I asked. “Are you ever going to be able to do it?”
“What?”
“You know. It. Paint.”
He laughed humorlessly and shook his head.
“I gave up a long time ago.”
I saw then a change in his expression as he realized what he’d just said, how he recognized all at once that those were the same words he’d once used with reference to us.
“I didn’t mean… This is different, Leah. I wish I could, but…”
“How about you let me try something?” I said, tense as a bowstring.
His eyes were suspicious, but he didn’t put up much resistance when I asked him to sit on the wooden stool in front of a canvas. I stood behind him.
“Relax.”
“I know more effective techniques than this…”
“Shhhh. Wait a moment.”
“What are you trying to do, exactly?”
“Paint through you. Or with you. I don’t know.”
“This is a bad idea.”
I held his shoulders down when he tried to get up, and he yielded again with a sigh. I grabbed my palette and looked down at the still-damp colors. What tone was Axel? Red, certainly. Intense red. Like a cherry. Or a red sundown, more enigmatic. I dipped the tip of the brush into the paint.
He was so close that my body could feel his back, and the scent of his hair distracted me. I grabbed his hand when he closed it around the brush. Frank Sinatra’s voice boomed in the walls of that attic somewhere in the middle of Paris, and for a perfect second, I felt we were alone in that phantom city. Axel, me, color, music, the rough skin of his fingertips…
“Close your eyes; you need to feel it.”
It was stirring to see him so powerless, so defenseless.
“Why do you take so long?” he growled.
“Picasso said something one time,‘The paint is stronger than I am; it always gets me to do what it wants, That’s exactly how it is when I sit down in front of a canvas, and I’d like that to happen to you too. Don’t tell me you don’t want that, Axel.” I closed my fingers tighter around his hand and guided him to the canvas. He obeyed, eyes closed, breathing slowly. “It would be so wonderful if you could wake up one day and get all the things you feel out there somehow, all those feelings you have trapped inside…” His hand glided beneath mine, and lines of color filled the canvas. They spoke of inhibition, survival, dread. “You know what? Sometimes I’ve been afraid of being close to you when that happens. The day you finally pick a brush back up of your own free will. You think that will ever happen?”
“Goddammit, Leah, don’t do this.”
“Open your eyes. Isn’t it pretty?”
It was just splatters and red lines, some pressed down harder than others, thin ones, thick ones, some self-assured, some diffident, but all of them shaped by his hands. Our hands. For an eternal minute, Axel said nothing.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.