The Fall of Never(48)

“Are you cold?”

“Maybe a little,” she said. “But it’s nice out.”

“I can take you home whenever you get too tired.”

She thought about home—about the compound, that looming black structure with its conical towers and obelisk roofs, its yawning doorways and narrow, powder-stained windows. And the woods, dark and brooding and solid with frost. She had no desire to return to the house any time soon.

“I wouldn’t mind seeing some of your work,” she said to him.



Gabriel Farmer lived in a single-bedroom apartment south of downtown Spires. It was a small place with a one-window view of a thick shade of trees (which blocked what could have been a beautiful though distant view of Lake Champlain) and a star-cluttered night sky. Stepping inside the apartment, it struck Kelly as odd to imagine that little boy with glasses and bleeding knees down by the brook to have grown up. And here—the walls natural wood paneling; the tiny entranceway and living area as pristine as one could want; obscure paintings on the far wall, hung in almost a functional formation. It was the fastidious home of a perfectionist.

“This is nice,” she said, following Gabriel to a small love seat.

“Quaint,” he said, shrugging.

“You make quaint sound bad.”

“It’s usually what people say when they mean ‘barely adequate.’”

“I didn’t say quaint. I said nice.”

“Noted.”

She watched him disappear into the tiny kitchen nook and hit the refrigerator. “What can I get you?” he called.

“A beer will be fine.”

Her eyes wandered over the paintings on the walls. There were also some more in the narrow hallway leading to what was most likely the bathroom and bedroom. Some were abstract, a wash of monochromatic tones that reminded her of soft jazz, particularly the sounds of brass instruments. Other paintings depicted cottage-like houses in the middles of dense forest, their doors and windows and sidings painted the sharp and jarring colors of penny-candy.

“Are some of these yours?”

He returned with two bottles of Amstel Light, handed one to Kelly and remained standing. “The paintings? Yes.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Stages,” he said. “From high school on up. I hit a certain mood and I just couldn’t shake it. The only way to move on is to let it take over. Those colors in that painting there? Those—”

“Yes.”

“My ‘wind’ phase.”

“Oh?”

“Damn thoughts hit you sometimes and you know it’s going to be a pain in the ass. It’s like describing the color blue to a person who has been blind their whole life. How the hell do you do it? Those colors—it dawned on me one afternoon to paint wind. Not leaves or plastic bags or anything blowing in the wind, but actually paint the wind itself. As colors. So that first one there—that blue one—was the first one I painted. Because the day was cold, I painted it blue and was mildly satisfied. Then a month later it started getting warmer and I happened to glance at the painting and think, no way, wind isn’t blue, it’s red, and what the heck had I been thinking painting it blue. So that’s where the red one comes into play. God, I was so na?ve then…”

Kelly laughed. “Yes,” she said, “and the green and the yellow and the orange and the black?”

“All there. Days have a way of changing. I figured wind is just days. Or days changing. I don’t know, I guess that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sure it does.”

“Well, you’re just a crazy artist like me.”

She shook her head, looked at the mouth of her beer bottle. “No, not like you.”

“Sure.” He maneuvered around the side of the love seat and hefted two canvases from against the wall. He turned them around so Kelly could get a good look. “Just a glimpse of what I was telling you about.”

The first painting was of an elderly woman seated in a straight-back chair before a window, her silvery head bent down and resting on her left collarbone, eyes closed. One hand hung loosely over the chair and dangled. A yellow bar of sunlight came in through the window and cast an eerie, angelic glow over the woman’s body.

The second painting was only half finished, and depicted an old man positioned in a similar fashion on a park bench beneath the gentle sway of a weeping willow.

“They’re both dead,” she marveled. “My God, they’re so beautiful.”

Gabriel smiled. “Then I’ve succeeded.”

“You certainly did. You have such a great talent, Gabe. You always did.”

“No,” he said, replacing the paintings back against the wall, “I just have an excellent Muse.”

He took a seat beside her on the love seat, also staring at his own beer. Kelly sensed there was something important on his mind before he even started speaking again.

“I hope I don’t come off as too forward or anything now,” Gabriel began, his eyes still down in his lap, “but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought about you after you left. And, well, it was never really clear to me why…I don’t think…” He cleared his throat, tried again. This time, he brought his eyes up to meet her. “For a long time after you went away, I tried to understand a few things.”