Picture Us In The Light(3)
And then: nothing. Nothing comes.
Mostly, I draw portraits. From a distance, if you hold them at arm’s length or tack them up on a wall, they look like fairly standard realistic renderings, but up close the forms dissolve and you see that what you thought was wavy hair or an earlobe is really a tangle of small vignettes that make up the person’s life—a crumpled sheet of homework, say, a discarded candy wrapper, a plate of cupcakes that spell out PROM? I’ve always liked objects left behind.
But this is what’s been haunting me the past two months: I can’t draw anymore. At first I thought maybe it was that I was afraid of drawing something better than what I turned in for my applications, which would make me hate myself for doing early decision. But then it lasted, and keeps lasting, and I’m worried now that the truth is that something’s empty at the core of me. That whatever well you’re supposed to draw from to put anything worthwhile into the world—mine’s run dry.
Once, a few years after we moved here, my dad came home with a new pack of sidewalk chalk for me. It was one of the really good packs, with twenty-four colors and sharp ends, and right away I had the idea that I’d make a gallery out of the sidewalk in front of the house. I’d use the lines in the sidewalk as frames.
I spent hours out there. I was working on a picture of my old best friend Ethan’s dog, Trophy, when a man walking down the sidewalk stopped and loomed over me.
I smiled and said hi (in Texas you’re friendly like that, and for a while it stuck with me). He was in his sixties, probably, white with gray hair and a gray beard and walking with a cane.
“Crawling all over our sidewalks,” he muttered. He jabbed his cane toward me and raised his voice. “You don’t own this neighborhood. It’s not yours to make a mess all over. That’s the problem with you people. You think you can come in here and take over. You tell your parents we don’t want you here. You go back where you came from.”
The world closed around me. I went inside. I never saw him again.
I never told anyone about it (what would I say?), but for days after that I tried to draw him. I probably had some vague idea that I could turn him into some kind of caricature, just a random old guy frothing at the mouth who didn’t matter. Maybe you think if you can take something you’re bothered by and make it your own somehow you sap it of its power. So I worked on that sneer on his face as he looked at me, those shoulders puffed up with his own rightness. I drew pages and pages of him, and I named him Mr. X.
But he wouldn’t fade away. Now he leers at me from several places on my wall, which I’ve been drawing on with Sharpies since we moved in, and whispers all the uglier things inside my head. I don’t know why I keep him around. I guess I think art should probe the things you’re afraid of and the things you can’t let go of, but maybe that’s just because deep down I want to believe you can conquer them, which might not actually be true.
Anyway. Lately I’m a reverse Midas, everything I touch turning to crap, and so good old Mr. X has been louder lately: You’re a fraud, you peaked, it’s all downhill from here. The world doesn’t need your art. Get a real job.
But now I have concrete proof I’m not a fraud, or at the very least I’m an extremely convincing one. Which should change everything, right? The fog should lift.
I just need to start producing again—prove getting in wasn’t a fluke. Prove I do have the future I’m supposed to after all. Prove I deserve my future, at the very least. Not everyone gets one; I know that. It isn’t something you can squander.
“Let’s surprise her.”
“Huh?” I look up. My dad’s hovering in my doorway, joy radiating off him. He’s changed into khakis and a collared shirt, his hair combed. I say, “Where are you going?”
“We’ll go to dinner to celebrate when your mother gets home. We’ll surprise her.”
My dad has always loved surprises. Once, the summer I was eleven, he woke me up in the middle of the night and brought me, groggy, into the garage. On top of his car there was a telltale white paper sack, and he pointed to it.
“I went to Donut Wheel,” he said. “A bribe for you for after.”
“Um, for after—”
“Daniel.” He looked very serious. “On Saturday is Robin Cheung’s wedding.”
My parents had been taking a ballroom dance class at the rec center for a few years; it was my mom’s favorite hobby. (Weird, but: she also, every Summer Olympics, arranges her sleep schedule around the rhythmic gymnastics.) Their friends’ son was getting married and my mom had at one point expressed a shy desire to show off the fox-trot they were learning at the wedding, but my dad, apparently, was having trouble with the moves.
“So fast,” he complained. The naked light bulb swayed overhead, throwing his shadow self across the bare wooden walls. I was barefoot and in my pajamas. “The tango I can do, the cha-cha, but this one—too fast.”
“Um, so you want me to—”
“I bought you donuts,” he said quickly, seeing the look on my face. “What else do you want me to buy? I’ll buy you new pens. Do you want new pens? I’ll buy you whatever you want. And I won’t tell your friends. I promise.”
I am easily bought. I spent all night out there with him, my elbow resting on his and our hands interlaced as he led me around and around the concrete, his jaw tight with concentration. That weekend at the wedding—it was in the banquet hall at Dynasty, steamed bass and lobster noodles and pink neon uplights that made the lines of everyone’s faces look dramatic and sharp—I could see him tapping his fingers impatiently all through the dinner, all through the toasts. When the music started, he leapt up and held out a hand to my mom. I watched them on the dance floor, holding my breath, waiting to see if he’d pull it off. He did. Afterward she was beaming and out of breath, and they went to the open bar and came back with Manhattans for them and a Coke for me and they excitedly recapped all their steps, complimenting each other on their technique and form. I won’t lie: it was pretty damn cute. I want them to be that way—that sparkling, that effervescent—all the time.