by Ed Bemand
Most of the pictures that he would have preferred to throw away or burn, Gautier wanted to try and sell. At least that meant that Antoine didn’t have to look at them again. He didn’t like being surrounded by his failure.
Over the course of the interminable talks and question and answer sessions that he was forced to give as the exhibition of his work was toured through the great galleries of the world he had found that the public knowledge of his acts far from precluding him from ever finding another woman, made it easier.
To some, he was a vile deviant, a disgusting monster that should never have been allowed back into polite society. To others he was a romantic, a lover that had tried to resist the power of death for the sake of the girl that meant so much to him. He was like a modern Orpheus, battling through the underworld to reclaim his Eurydice. When he first heard himself called that he laughed bitterly. It seemed ludicrous. His story wasn’t a grand tale, it was just a small and very personal tragedy. The shattering of his world by the cruel whims of his fate as they had led to her death trapped in a car upside down in a river was something that the rest of the world didn’t have any stake in. It wasn’t them that had lost their love. His pain was purely his. He wasn’t interested in the women that wanted to exploit him, just so they could tell the media that they had fucked him. Anyway, it seemed that his libido had completely died with Adrienne, that even his lusts had been consumed by the fires that had finally destroyed her body. He had not fucked anyone since the time he had spent in his studio with her preserved corpse posed on his bed, struggling in vain to refill her with life with his paintbrush on the canvas and his cock in her necrotic pussy.
It was during one of his interminable gallery appearances that he met Lucille.
His introduction had been effusive, and applause greeted him onto the platform. He tried to not notice the people staring at him. He spoke nervously, reading from cards the same speech that he habitually used at these occasions.
Afterwards, when the assembled were wandering around the exhibition, muttering between themselves about his work, Antoine found himself, as usual, at a loose end. He was far past having any desire to even look at the paintings that he had created during the traumatic interlude that he spent with the rotting corpse of his love posed on his bed. He found wine and drank several glasses, hoping to calm his nerves.
Occasionally during previous such moments he had found himself approached by people who wanted to talk more with him about what he had done but he had no desire to do so. These vultures were given free reign to explore enough of his pain as it was, why would he want to grant them any additional insight that they might judge him further and reduce what he had done to such a base sensation? He had adopted an attitude that was designed to deter people from bothering him. He was the creator of the works that they were seeing and judging, but that did no entitle them to judge or critique him. The paintings were what they were there to see and he was merely their introducer.
When Lucille approached him it was with an open and nervous smile. She did not look at him as a freak but as an equal. They were both artists and her curiosity about his work was open and humane. She wanted to learn about him for the sake of learning and improving herself, not because of prurient desire for sensationalism. She was a young art student, maybe twenty at the most. She was nothing like Adrienne. She was a mess of confusion and uncertainty, torn between childish clumsiness and womanly grace, lingering naivety against the growing force of exquisite sexualised femininity that was driving her to adulthood.
Lucille was short and a tiny bit chubby. Her hair was ragged and colourful. On a more mature woman her hair would have been considered disastrous, a ragged mess of mistakes piled one atop the other. It bore the tints of many previous colouring attempts, here and there a smidgen of red, blue or purple, amongst the mostly mid-brown but black in certain lights, or was that ginger? of her natural shade. It was a combination of colours that could never consciously have been planned. It reacted to the light and changed its form spontaneously. It was hard to just pick a single colour to try to claim for it. It was all of them.
She lacked the seemingly effortless perfection that Adrienne had always displayed, that dancer-like grace, the ability to somehow know exactly which angle she could hold an ankle at that would illicit the most thrill from those around her, the flow of mahogany hair and the flawless skin, the mixture of girlish pettishness and raw sex that she exuded with every movement of her lips. Adrienne had not been that tall but she didn’t need height to captivate.
Lucille was not a work of art, an expression of poetry in motion in the way that Adrienne had been. She caught his eye because of the questions she asked. Did Antoine consider what he had done romantic? Of course he did. It had been love that had driven him, not deviance. It was not because she was a corpse that he had worked so hard to capture Adrienne in his creations, it was because he had loved her, because to him she was the very epitome of beauty, love and sex.
She too seemed ill at ease in the company of so many gawpers and journalists and despite her obvious desire to spend time studying his work she suggested that they leave and go somewhere else. His agent wasn’t watching him, so he accepted her invitation and they slipped out unnoticed, leaving the vultures to pick over his carrion without him having to watch it.
They found themselves in a bar close to the gallery and at first Antoine was able to forget the circumstances. He was just a man that had been given the opportunity to spend time with a pretty girl and what man could reasonably refuse such an opportunity? He wasn’t the troubled specimen that had unleashed powerful but disturbing art upon the world, he was just a man.
It didn’t take long for the illusion to shatter. Once they were sat with their drinks she started asking him questions. He should have expected it really. She told him that she had read about his work and been fascinated by it, as much by the story as the work itself. It depressed him to think that she was just like the others. Surely the art had to be worth more than the artist, else what was the art?
Initially she had assumed that his reticence about his work was driven by modesty or a pretentious desire for inscrutability but before the end of their first drink she realised that there was something more to it than that and that she could learn much more about him by just talking to him than by forcing their conversation to be about just the limited interlude that had driven him to create the works in the exhibition. He was still a man and an artist without Adrienne’s spectre haunting him, she had just been the raw material in his life that he had been able to process and reflect to form the one set of images that was now making him famous.
The one-sided nature of their conversation also clearly made him uncomfortable. Just because he was an artist that had works being displayed did not give people the entitlement to rummage in his soul. She had no more right to ask him about his pain than she did to expect strangers to bare their souls to her on the bus. Things were easier once she accepted this and started to treat the occasion as what it was, a man and a woman sharing their company over a drink.
“I’m being rude. I keep asking you questions. I’ll stop.” It seemed that he wasn’t hiding his emotions very well.
“Tell me something about yourself.” He asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Like what?”
“Anything. Tell me a secret.”
“A secret?” She giggled. “Why should I tell you my secrets?”
“Because you already know about mine. It’s your turn.”
“What secret would you like to know?”
“Tell me about your first love.”
“My first love, or my first...?” She left it hanging, unsaid.
“You choose.”
She told him how as a teenager she had lost her virginity to a friend’s older step-brother. In the process she discovered the secret crush that her friend had nurtured for him, and ruined their friendship. For a time Lucille blamed herself, thought she had done something horribly wrong
and driven her friend away. Later she had come to realise that it wasn’t her fault. She had been take advantage of and stumbled across an angry secret in the process.
She didn’t let what had happened bother her any more. It was part of her past, but she was happier now that she was detached enough that it was just a funny story that she could tell someone. The years had changed her and most of the girl that that had happened to had been left behind.
She blushed in the telling and he found himself aroused by what she was saying. He couldn’t remember the last time that he had felt such a reaction to anything. Or rather he could, but the recollection brought with it all the pain of his experiences with Adrienne. It was far simpler to just try to forget. He had thought that love and sex had died for him with her and to find such feelings re-awoken in him by Lucille made him feel uncomfortable.
When she started to tell him of herself it warmed him. Hearing of the trivia of her life was a comfort after so much time spent around people that only wanted to probe his secrets without sharing their own.
By the second drink Lucille was happily telling him stories from her life. She wasn’t trying to talk of great things, they were just little tales, anecdotes. The time when as a child her father had realised her passion for painting and had told her not to be absurd, to focus her talents on something more useful. All he had achieved was making sure that she continued to paint in secret. She had hidden her talent for years. Even now her father thought that she was at secretarial school.
She was the middle of five children in a busy household who had been the quiet one, always overborne by her noisy siblings and friends. She had been encouraged to mind her manners and was now enjoying the relative freedom that student life offered her. She had no-one immediately keeping an eye on her and her studies so far hadn’t proved particularly demanding. Her life wasn’t all that wild but she was experiencing new things and getting to indulge her artistic passions.
Going to a gallery to see an exhibition and hearing a talk from the controversial artist was the kind of minor adventure that she was now able to enjoy, that she had found herself drinking with him afterwards was an unexpected bonus. It made him uncomfortable when she referred to him in the third person like that.
She didn’t really know what she wanted to be when she grew up, she just knew that she enjoyed what she was doing. Despite everything, she was still rather shy and nervous, like she felt perpetually slightly embarrassed that anyone had noticed her. She was just determined enough to not let nerves stop her.
They stayed in the bar until it closed.
Before parting, Lucille suggested that they could meet up the day after and “do something” as she vaguely described it.
How could he refuse? They arranged to meet by a famous statue of a long dead general who had done something or other heroic.
Her lips brushed his cheek in farewell and she was gone into the night, leaving him standing there. He realised just how fast his heart was beating, the effect that her fleeting contact had had on him.
He returned to his studio, struck by the new emptiness of the space. He had grown so used to being alone that he didn’t usually think about it, days could go by when he spoke to no-one. For the first time, he felt lonely and the hours ’til they were going to meet up seemed too many.
He found himself wondering what Adrienne would be like now if she hadn’t been in the car crash. The few years that had passed were enough that she would have changed in them, maybe she would have lost that lingering wonderful trace of girlishness that had stopped her womanhood from fully maturing. She would still be only twenty-five. Would her beauty have proved to be the ageless kind that would grow and develop through her life, or would it have been a fleeting and elusive thing that would abandon her and leave her to become just another lumpen woman trudging the path of the mother to the crone?
Lucille was so much more real, flawed and beautiful and most of all alive. That had to be better, didn’t it?
Eight: What love did to Lewis
To many Julian looked pretentious. His long wavy hair and pointy little beard were far from the current mode. To Lewis they spoke of an earlier time, when passions were higher and heroes were common. He had heard Julian described disparagingly as looking like a “gay pirate” but to Lewis it made him seem Byronic and even romantic. Of course, he had Julian to thank that he even knew what Byronic meant.
It wasn’t that Lewis was into boys or anything. His peers had always made it clear that that was worse than practically anything else that you could do. To be honest, so far he had never really been into anything.
He was used to hearing the boastful stories from his mates, who, if what they said was to be taken at face value, were each shagging at least one new girl a week, which Lewis found hard to believe. He wasn’t even jealous of their alleged conquests. It wasn’t of fumbled moments with dumpy tarts that he thought when he nervously tugged at his cock in bed at night.
He had always felt somehow set apart from them, as a teenager he had been embarrassed that the boys around him all grew hairier and rougher while he remained smooth. Chief among his embarrassments was his manly endowment, a soft finger of flesh that seemed truly inadequate against the thick, hairy shafts of his classmates that he had glimpsed furtively in the showers. He couldn’t help but wish his was more like theirs’ when he held it in his hand and sought pleasure.
Lewis was at college. His exams when he had left school hadn’t gone well so he had to study some of his subjects again in the hope of getting less depressing results. How had he even failed at maths and English? He could count and speak the language, what else did he need to know? He had never found school easy, even though he tried. It took all of his effort for him to be able to just scrape by. Too often his mates were smug and gloating when they failed to do their homework, whereas he could labour for hours and just not understand what he was supposed to do.
Some of his old mates were at the same college, but they were all doing courses that sounded much more interesting and grown up than his, learning useful things like carpentry, plumbing and mechanics. Learning trades that were sure to get them suitably masculine jobs at the end of it. The kind of stuff they could admit to girls. When anyone asked Lewis what he did, he found it embarrassing to admit to dividing the majority of his time between working in a discount shop in town and relearning stuff that everyone else had learned ages ago.
He hadn’t really got a big plan in mind for what he was going to do with himself. He had never been good at manual labour of any kind. He was too weak and uncoordinated for it.
Peer pressure had always led him to at least half-hearted participation in the leisure activities of the group of so-called friends he was a part of. His incompetence at all sport was a long-standing joke to them. As was his incapability to go drink-for-drink with anyone and keep it down. Sometimes he wished he was more like them. Like a real man.
Julian was his teacher for English literature. Lewis hadn’t really been interested in the subject back at school. His teacher there had been Mrs. Finnegan, a middle-aged Irish woman who didn’t believe that they had studied a poem unless she had laboriously explained exactly what every word meant, something which always seemed to manage to make the whole thing meaningless to him. It didn’t always matter if you understood everything, it was the feeling that the whole poem or play or whatever gave you that mattered. Poetry wasn’t supposed to be a foreign language. Mrs. Finnegan had given him a bollocking when he had tried to explain that to here before his exams. She had told him that that sort of bland evasions wasn’t what the examiners would want to hear about it. His grades seemed to imply that she had been right, which he didn’t like to admit.
It was alright now though. Julian seemed to get it. He didn’t insist on tearing everything apart. He let them read and see what they felt. If someone asked him what something meant he told them what he thought it meant, but he didn’t mind if they thought it meant something different.
&nbs
p; “Poetry isn’t about just one meaning. Everyone can see something different in the same poem.” Julian had said that during their first poetry lesson. Lewis had written it on a piece of paper and stuck it to the inside of the folder he kept his notes for the course in.
He found himself enjoying the romantic poets in a way that he had never been able to before. Something about the way that Julian read the words made them resonate for him and have actual meaning. He was very glad that none of his mates had been there to see him getting choked up during a particularly evocative recitation last week.
He was trying hard to keep up with all the reading and the work that they had to do for the class. It wasn’t easy but he felt like he was doing much better than he had in school. He knew that a lot of that was down to Julian.
Julian had set them all a homework task a few weeks ago. They had to write a love poem. What kind of love they wrote about was their choice, it could be about anything from romantic love to a passion for sport he’d said.
Lewis wrote his poem to Julian. It wasn’t supposed to be romantic, it was more an expression of the admiration and gratitude that he had for him. Julian was making it so much easier to learn things that had seemed almost impossible before. Without Julian, he wouldn’t even have been able to understand romantic poetry, let alone feel able to write it.
In their next class, Julian told them that they were all going to read their poems aloud. Lewis wished he could hide under his desk. Somebody volunteered to go first. Lewis was too nervous to listen to what she had written. When she was done Julian paused for a moment, then thanked her and signalled for somebody else to stand up.