Peter Heller - The Painter

She gave the head one more friendly squeeze and took my hand and led me through the screen door into the bedroom.

Context is funny. How things hit you. Like on one planet there is gravity and you are walking along, then there is no gravity and you are airborne, sort of flying in slow parabolic leaps. I had seen Sofia undress probably a dozen times. Had seen her stretch out naked. Had paid attention to the curves and the colors and living heat of her body, the potential for movement there, and rhythm, even when she was very still. She was never still. Even immobile she had the sprung tautness, the restrained leap of a deer, one at dusk who lifts her head from the grass and is—listening. For threat I suppose.

With Sofia it was as if her body were listening, but it was for some inner laughter. That’s how it seemed when I painted her. That thing where color and form become almost like a music, something rhythmic and flowing, and somewhere in there I lose myself. When I am really painting, when I am painting well. I lose myself and may not wake up for hours, for most of a day. What I loved was how Sofia understood that and gently took her leave. And in that, when I was really painting and in it, and if she was modeling for me, I would see her and not see her. I would not see her as a young woman, naked, open, waiting for me to make love to her. I would not see her as a nude girl coyly, just barely covering, enticing the next move in the game. It was not a game, ever, it was completely, wonderfully serious, and it was never about sex. The boner thing was when I needed a break, got hungry, snapped out of it.

As she tugged me into the bedroom the screen door clapped behind me. I thought: Punctuation. A period on the last long paragraph of my life.

“You look like you are being led to slaughter,” she said.

She turned and pulled off her thin jersey blouse, unclipped the bra from the front and loosed her generous breasts. Wriggled out of her cutoff shorts, let them fall. Pushed down on the elastic of her little thong and worked it down to her knees where it relinquished itself also to the floor. She smiled up at me, as open and guileless as before. Her eyes about five different colors, blues, grays, greens, warm browns. Then she took my hands as she had before, hers small and warm and assured, and she placed them open on her collarbones, still smiling, and stood straight and still and closed her eyes. Something about that gesture. So simple, so joyful, so trusting. I felt a surge of something simple and clean, something like happiness. Felt myself rouse and reach with a sympathetic attention. I was up against her, my dick was touching her belly and she reached and pushed it down so that it was against her, her crack, sort of sprung against it, and I could feel the brush of her curly hair, the pressure where she clamped me there. And we stood. And we looked at each other and laughed. And my hands moved along her collarbones, the delicate birdlike architecture. And down over her breasts and back up to her slender neck, the perfect ears. Over her strong shoulders. And her hands down over my hips, around to the front, stroking and pressing me into her, up against her. I lost myself again. But this time it was to a euphoria with a different gravity. I think I was laughing. She pulled me toward the bed and fell backward and suddenly all the angles were right and she was moist and open and I was in her and it was that shock. The shock that never dulls. Of being inside another. And her laughter was overtaken by breath and we rocked together in a pure and simple delight. That’s what I remember: the simplicity, the lightness.

How often is anything that simple?

We lay in the coolness from the open door. I could hear the burble of the water running through cattails down into the pond. A cricket warming to the morning on the ramada. Her head was in the crook of my arm and I thought she might be asleep. This much peace vouchsafed to any one man. The luck of it. That’s what I thought. Drifting in it. And as I drifted I was open and careless in my thoughts and I bumped up against something barnacle sharp and ugly. Dellwood Siminoe, swinging the club against the little mare like she was a piñata. The candy spilling, and I knew the candy for him was the pain and terror of the other. Clotted and dribbling, then pouring onto the road in a shiny gush. How many terrified horses like that? Enough to make a business of shipping those broken to Arizona. What Bob told me.

Fuck it. I pushed it away. Pushed my nose into the warm mass of Sofia’s dark hair, breathed it, pushed everything else away.

I made omelets and we shared a trout, fried in butter with a little salt and pepper, lemon. Made another pot of coffee. Sat on the ramada.

She said, “I thought of doing that a few times.” She smiled, her hand curled on my thigh. “Doing you .”

“Really? When?”

“When you were painting me.”

“Workplace harassment.”

“I know, that’s why I didn’t. I knew on some level it would have made you mad. I almost didn’t care.”

We made love again. This time it was me who asked. Lying there again, on the bed, this time with heat, almost an oven heat, coming through the screen, and sweat instead of tears, I wondered how simple we really are. That we can do the same things again and again and again and find them interesting, even fascinating, and seek the repetition with a hunger as avid. How fishing was like that, and painting. And this time as we lay quiet and listening, our pulses coming through now and then like the drumming of a distant village, this time I kept the boat of my thoughts sailing along from one tack to the next on a course I could control.

Somehow the day passed like that. We made more food, went for a walk to the far pond, I read her the lines from the Four Quartets I had copied down and stuck into the breast pocket of my Carhartt barn coat:

I don’t know, it made me feel better. Another way of saying, Keep it simple. You don’t even have to pray, just kneel where there’s prayer and I’m beginning to think there is prayer everywhere. I had written down another bunch of lines and tucked them in there, too—about how crazy hard is the journey of getting to where you have never been. That too rang bells for me in this new place, trying to paint something good. Sofia’s cell phone buzzed a few times and she finally picked it up and I heard her telling Dugar she wouldn’t be coming home for a couple of days, he could move in with that hippy chick from the orchard he’d been banging for who knew how long, she didn’t give a shit, and I stared at her, checking the checklist, was any of that okay with me, I mean she hadn’t said she was staying here , had she? But come on Jim, this is not your first rodeo, you know exactly where she’s staying tonight, but she hadn’t telegraphed or acted in any way like she wanted anything more than this, not one inch past what I could give freely. Right? Why don’t you try trusting her for a second?

She rummaged through the fridge, the cabinets, began putting together a spaghetti dinner. Said her mother was half Italian. I took a small pre-stretched canvas from the stack against the wall, about two by three, and propped it on the empty easel. Picked up a piece of fiberboard and taped a flipped for sale sign over it and squeezed out turquoise, cobalt violet, white, a stiff white close to the lead white I can’t get anymore. Yellow. I wanted cool yellow. My favorite lemon yellow was used up, so I put out cadmium yellow light, which is not as sharp or cold. Good for now, maybe better. Terre verte, cobalt blue. Joyful colors.