Via Dolorosa(42)
“I’m a lot of everything.”
Eyes closed (what did it matter?), he felt his hand trace the length of the canvas, creating lines and curves and depth and vision. While he painted, Isabella approached him in the darkness. He could smell her and feel the closeness of her body, the heat of her body radiating in waves out to him, while he painted. He did not know when it had happened (and he wasn’t quite sure why he was so convinced of the fact) but at one point he became aware of Isabella’s absolute nakedness—that she, at some point and with whatever intention, had allowed the terrycloth robe to slip from her caramel shoulders and thump in a heap to the carpeted floor. Perhaps it was in the way she smelled, or the surge of her body heat, unforgiving and irresponsible, suddenly so close to him, but he found himself suddenly the bearer of this new, intimidating knowledge: Isabella Rosales—bare—against him—very nearly against him…
Moving about the room like a ghost, Isabella Rosales said nothing. Her breathing was the fluttering of insect wings, and equally as mobile. At one point, she brought her face so close to his he could feel her breath cascading down his cheek, his neck, down the tent of his shirt collar like water. This close, he could almost taste her mouth, could almost distinguish what she tasted like. Eyes still closed, he found himself lost in some deep, recessed cross-section of her, like a hopeless and insignificant creature suddenly fallen into an icy crevice, ribs and legs shattered, lungs punctured, and doomed to die a slow and agonizing death. Her proximity freed something in him, though, and the concept of time lost all semblance of rationale. How long had he been standing before the canvas, painting in the dark? How long had Isabella Rosales been dancing naked about him like a nymph, a storybook fairy…something from a dream?
“Paint with your heart,” Isabella said to him from somewhere, ghostlike, in the room. She seemed to be both nowhere and everywhere at once. “Don’t see with your eyes—see with your heart. Paint, my Nicholas. Paint what comes.”
Yes, he thought. Paint what comes.
Again, as had happened once before while painting the hotel mural, he was overtaken. He allowed his hand to move, to be manipulated by some greater, misunderstood force. It was not his hand any longer—he was rid of it, rid of the damnable ruined thing, the busted and ruined and useless bastard of a thing that had once been the possessor of pure artistic talent…
Paint what comes.
He painted what came. And he did not know what that was because, as is the way with possession, he was unaware of his actions, his thoughts, his motives.
“Yes,” he heard Isabella whisper…and was it even her voice now? Or was it Emma’s? Or someone else’s? Or perhaps the combined voices of a thousand archangels, speaking all at once? “You have it now. You are so brave. You have it now, my Nicholas-Nicholas-Nicholas…”
What comes, he thought. What comes…
She was against him, touching him: vaguely, he could feel what must have been fingers rummaging through the hair at the back of his head. To see them there, this maudlin couple (if one were to see anything in the lightlessness), would be to see a pantomime kata—an assemblage of movement done not merely with the body but with the mind, moving both separate but unitary in synchronization—the lovemaking of ghosts, ancient ghosts—
For a moment, in his mind, they were making love. He could feel it, taste it, sense it all. Without hesitation, her nakedness was no longer in question. His brain summoned the feverish jutting of her brown nipples, the swell of each dark breast finely washed in a light spray of freckles and tiny hesitant hairs, each standing at attention, awaiting the soft crop-dusting drive-by of his flattened, open palm. Her skin tasted of sulfur and was gritty with sand. Without pause, he rushed her entire being with the forcefulness of youth’s angst and a priest’s unquestioning devotion to the ultimate fantastic, all intermingled, entwined…cornucopian in its fullness, its scope. Without—
Without—
But he was painting, only painting. And as he felt the aura of her nudity pull away from him in the darkness, he was suddenly aware that she had not touched him at all—that she had never touched him, and it had all been very vivid but also very much inside his own head. There was a strong rupture of sadness associated with this realization…quickly replaced, though, by a stronger wave of relief.
When he actually finished, he did not know. In fact, setting the brushes down, taking a step in the darkness away from the canvas he could not see, something inside him had simply signified the completion. He had no idea what he had painted and had no idea what it looked like, either.
Breathing heavy, the darkness of the room pressing hard against his back, he half-whispered, “I’m finished.”
“And you are,” Isabella said.
“Should we turn on a light?”
“No,” she said. “We stand here and suck it all in blindly.”
Uncertain if she were being serious or not, he only remained standing in front of the canvas (without seeing it, any of it) and let his breathing settle down. He had no more words for her. The act of painting, too, had engulfed him (just as it once had), and had exhausted him. It was a marathon.
“Tell me,” Isabella said now. Her voice seemed to come from her place on the bed…and in hearing it, Nick wondered if she had actually ever gotten up at all, and if it had all been his imagination. He felt something akin to drunkenness begin to sway his body—a frond in the wind. “Tell me,” she said, “what you thought when painting? Did you summon my body in your mind?”