22. Graham
GRAHAM
The spare room upstairs had a window. North-facing. Good light. I stood in the doorway three full seconds before I walked in.
Three days since I'd signed everything away. Three days of sitting in this house that still smelled like her lavender soap in the hallway.
The room was empty except for a desk I'd shoved against the wall years ago and a chair with one wobbly leg. Dust hung in the air, turning slowly in the October sun. I shut the door behind me even though nobody was home. Old habit.
My hands shook when I opened the desk drawer.
The brushes were still there. Sable, sizes four through twelve, wrapped in the same cloth I'd used eight years ago when I put them away for good. The cloth had yellowed. I pulled it out and set it on the desk, then unwrapped it slowly, like I was defusing something.
Eight years.
God, I was an idiot.
The bristles had kept their shape. I'd cleaned them properly before I'd packed them, back when I still thought I might pick them up again someday.
Back when the gallery was just an idea and I told myself I was setting painting aside temporarily, just until the business got off the ground. Just until we were stable.
I picked up the number eight. The handle fit my palm like it had never left.
My throat tightened. I set the brush down, pulled the chair over to the window, and went back downstairs for the rest.
The stretcher bars were in the basement, in a box behind the water heater where Elise wouldn't see them if she ever went down there.
She never did. I'd bought canvas in bulk eight years ago, back when I'd still been painting six days a week and couldn't imagine stopping.
There were twenty-two rolls left. I pulled one out and carried it upstairs with the staple gun and a utility knife.
Building the stretcher calmed me down. Measure twice, cut once. Staple the canvas tight but not so tight it warped the wood. I'd done this hundreds of times. My hands remembered.
When it was done I propped it on the desk and stepped back.
A blank canvas.
Jesus.
I hadn't looked at one of these in eight years. I'd looked at paintings — other people's paintings, paintings I was selling, paintings I was hanging in the gallery so collectors would pay six figures for the name in the corner. But I hadn't looked at a canvas that was mine to fill.
My chest felt like something had cracked open in it.
I wanted to paint.
God, I wanted to paint so badly my hands were shaking again, and I hadn't let myself think it in eight years because thinking it meant admitting I'd given it up, and admitting I'd given it up meant looking at what I'd traded it for.
The gallery. The name. The business. The deals I made over dinner while Elise smiled beside me and turned the conversation to the artist's work when the collector got stuck on price.
I shook my head and went back downstairs for the paints.
They were in the basement too, in a wooden crate I'd shoved behind a stack of boxes Elise had labeled Graham — college in her neat handwriting.
The tubes were dried out, most of them. I threw away everything that was solid and kept the ones that still had give when I squeezed them.
Cadmium red, burnt umber, yellow ochre, ultramarine.
Ivory black. Titanium white. Enough to start.
I brought them upstairs and set them on the desk beside the brushes.
Then I stood there and stared at the canvas for ten minutes like a damn fool.
Paint something.
But what? I didn't know. I'd spent eight years telling other people their work mattered, eight years standing in studios and nodding while they explained their process, their vision, their reasons for the marks they made.
I'd spent eight years building a gallery for their paintings.
I didn't know if I had anything left to say myself.
I picked up the number eight brush again and loaded it with burnt umber, thinned with the bottle of turpentine I'd grabbed from the basement.
The smell hit me hard — sharp and chemical and so familiar my stomach flipped.
I'd painted in turpentine fumes for a decade. I'd forgotten how much I loved it.
The first mark went down crooked.
I frowned at it. Too thick. The paint dragged where it should have glided. I wiped the brush and tried again, lighter this time, just a line to block in a shape I didn't have a name for yet.
It looked like hell.
I kept going anyway.
Shapes first. A horizon line, maybe. Or a figure.
I didn't know. My hand wasn't doing what my brain wanted it to do, and the gap between the two was so wide it made my jaw tight.
I used to paint without thinking. I used to see something in my head and put it on the canvas the same way I'd breathe — automatic, easy, mine.
This wasn't easy.
This was like dragging something heavy uphill with a rope that kept slipping out of my hands.
Every line I put down looked wrong. The proportions were off.
The composition was a mess. I wasn't even sure what I was painting anymore, but I kept going because stopping meant looking at it, and looking at it meant admitting I'd forgotten how to do the one thing I used to be good at.
My wrist ached. I switched hands and kept painting.
An hour in, I realized I was painting a room. Four walls, a window, a door. Empty. The light was wrong and the perspective was broken and the whole thing looked like a sophomore effort from someone who'd just learned what a vanishing point was, but it was a room. I could see it.
I wanted to paint Elise in it.
God, I wanted to put her in the center of it, standing by the window with the light on her hair the way it looked in the mornings when she stood in the kitchen barefoot with coffee in her hands, before she saw me watching.
I didn't.
I kept the room empty. I painted the window brighter, painted the light spilling onto the floor in a shape that didn't make sense because the sun doesn't move like that, but I didn't care. The light was what mattered. The light coming in.
It looked terrible.
I stepped back and wiped my hands on my jeans. Paint smeared across the denim, burnt umber and yellow ochre mixing into a color that looked like dirt. I stared at the canvas.
It was bad. Genuinely bad. Worse than anything I'd painted in my twenties when I was still figuring out how to mix a decent skin tone. The room was lopsided. The light was impossible. The whole thing looked like I'd painted it with my eyes closed.
I didn't care.
I picked up the brush again.
Two hours later my back was screaming and the canvas was worse than when I'd started.
I'd tried to fix the perspective, and fixing the perspective had meant repainting the left wall, and repainting the left wall had thrown off the window, and now the whole thing was a muddy mess of burnt umber and ochre with a white square in the middle that was supposed to be light but looked more like I'd spilled paint thinner and tried to cover it up.
I sat down in the wobbly chair and stared at it.
My hands were covered in paint. There was a streak of ultramarine on my forearm I didn't remember getting. My shoulders hurt. My neck hurt. My wrist hurt. I'd been standing in the same spot for two hours and I hadn't noticed.
I felt better than I had in three days.
No. Longer than that. Better than I'd felt in sixteen days, since Elise had walked out. Better than I'd felt in months, maybe. Since before the gala. Since before Petra.
I looked at the painting again. Still terrible. Still a mess.
I wanted to keep going.
I stood up, loaded the brush with white, and tried to fix the light.
It didn't fix. I made it worse, actually.
The white went on too thick and now it looked like I'd smeared toothpaste in the middle of the canvas.
I scraped it off with the edge of the palette knife and tried again, thinner this time, blending it into the ochre so it looked like light fading into shadow.
It still didn't work. But it was closer.
I kept at it.
By the time the sun started going down outside the real window, I'd repainted the light four times and the canvas looked like something a student would abandon halfway through the semester.
Muddy. Overworked. Confused. The room didn't make sense.
The light didn't make sense. I wasn't even sure the door was in the right place anymore.
I set the brush down and flexed my fingers. They were stiff. Paint had dried under my nails.
I should clean up. I should wrap the brushes, seal the paints, take the canvas off the stretcher and throw it away before anyone saw it.
I didn't.
I left everything where it was — the paints on the desk, the brushes lying across the palette, the canvas propped against the wall with its muddy light and its broken perspective and its empty room that would stay empty because I wasn't going to paint her, I wasn't going to put her in my painting when I couldn't even say her name out loud at my own gallery, when I'd stood at a podium and thanked everyone but her, when I'd let my mother call her a gold digger and let Petra insult her in rooms I should have thrown Petra out of.
I wiped my hands on my jeans again and looked at the painting one last time before I turned off the light and left the room.
It was bad.
I'd come back tomorrow.
I shut the door behind me and stood in the hallway, listening to the house settle. Quiet. Empty. Just me.
I wasn't going to tell Elise. I wasn't going to tell anyone.
This wasn't something I knew how to explain yet, wasn't something I could defend or justify or wrap in words that made sense.
I'd given up painting eight years ago for good reasons.
The gallery had been the right choice. Building something that lasted, something bigger than one man in a room with a canvas — that mattered. That was worth it.
Wasn't it?
I didn't know.
I went downstairs and washed my hands in the kitchen sink, scrubbing the paint off with dish soap until my skin felt raw. The water ran brown, then yellow, then clear. I dried my hands on the towel Elise had left hanging by the stove.
Nobody knew. Not Simon. Not my mother. Not Elise, wherever she was. Not the buyer who'd taken the gallery or the collectors who used to line up for my calls or Petra, who'd probably already moved on to the next man with something she wanted.
Nobody knew I'd gone upstairs to a spare room with north-facing light and painted the worst painting I'd made in twenty years.
Nobody knew I was going to do it again tomorrow.