The Painting
Last year Timothy and I went to Art Basel Miami. I insisted, actually, Timothy knowing less than nothing about art and my obsession with painting. In the hotness of Florida, the sun melted my makeup, leaving striped marks down my cheeks, and caused Timothy’s bald head to glisten like a marble dropped in oil. We stepped inside a gallery with the typical whitewashed walls and lazily arranged ourselves near the AC vent. I thought we were ready to leave but Timothy wandered off. He positioned himself next to a painting entitled Girl in a bar.
“Lexi, we must get this.”
“Are you nuts? It’s forty thousand dollars and she has protuberant fish lips,” I said. I remember feeling unwell while looking at the painting. There was nothing attractive about the girl, yet I could feel the intensity burning from my husband. Her lazy, drunk eyes, glazing across the view, demanding to be noticed. I saw the demented look on my husband’s face and pictured him feeding maraschino cherries to her greedy mouth.
* * *
A month after our Miami trip, Timothy and I sat on our white sofa flecked with red wine stains.
“Guess what?” he said.
“You know I don’t enjoy surprises,” I said.
He brought over a wooden crate. “Do the honors.”
I imagined all of the things inside: a lamp that I casually said I liked. An Instapot. I opened the container and fisted the Styrofoam popcorn until I retrieved the gift. The painting.
“Are you out of your mind?” I laughed when I saw how disappointed he was, lips curled into an upside-down U. Below my carefree exterior I seethed with the selfishness of his gift.
* * *
The next morning I awoke to find the painting already hung next to the window overlooking the gray interior of the alley. Her lips glistened with what I imagined was spittle, and her eyes asked me to judge her. So I did.
I thought of my Aunt Lela, who owned an aviary shop that specialized in rare birds. As a child, I had the bad habit of sticking my fingers in between the cold metal bars of the cage in hopes that I could win their trust.
“Don’t touch,” my aunt would say, afraid that the parrots would snap off a peanut-sized finger with their beaks. I was, however, allowed to sing the birds songs and cover their cages with blankets that made them fall asleep.
I walked over to my couch, picked up a Mayan blanket, and draped it over the painting.
“Night-night.”
I quietly dared the lady in the painting not to fall asleep.
* * *
After my morning run, with a little more headspace, I was ready for a cup of green tea. My keys scratched against the door in anticipation of a shower, and once inside the apartment I kicked off my sneakers, one landing on the couch. There Timothy sat, gazing at the painting, with no acknowledgment of my return. Dumbstruck, his eyes blazed with adoration, and he said, “I wonder how your lips taste.”
I noticed that the edges of his pants bulged into a salutation. With horror, I stood still and prayed he wouldn’t turn around before I could slip away. Thankfully, he didn’t.
* * *
For the next three days, everything was normal. We cooked tacos together one evening, dabbing little blobs of sour cream on each other’s noses. He put his hands on my lower back, undoing my apron strings. Everything felt good, really good, until he muttered into my ear:
“I want to make you go wild, Sabine.”
“Who the fuck is Sabine?”
“Oh, for fun. Just pretend you’re her. The girl in the painting.”
I slapped his insistent hands away. So now she had a name.
* * *
“This can’t go on,” I said to my husband. On the third night of awakening to a cold spot in the bed and then wandering to the living room, I watched his lips pursed in what looked like a question for Sabine. I removed the sticky wine glass from his hand and thought this, too, shall pass. I suggested a game of chess, something we used to enjoy most nights, but he shook his head no. After encouraging him to wash off layers of delusion and droplets of red wine, I stared at the painting hard. There was a hint of a smile on her lips that wasn’t there before. She knew that if this was a game, then she was the favored one. I thought of all the things I could do to make the painting disappear: set fire to it, throw it out the window, sell it on eBay—not that a bidding war would ensue. None of these options would ensure what I wanted: to make Sabine suffer.
Sleeplessness makes people do strange things. Everyone has heard of sleeping sickness, which unluckily I once contracted while I visited Egypt for a photography course, pre-Timothy. The light. The sun. The night air. I was enchanted until days and nights offered no distinction because I couldn’t sleep after my first week. My body temperature always runs hot. It could be snowing out and my jacket is much lighter than everyone else’s. So instead of wearing long sleeves and long pants during that trip, I donned the smallest shorts and spaghetti-strapped tops. Of course I was the one who got bitten. I stalked the fields at night, praying to sleep, burning with fever.
On my last night in Africa, before I was sent home for further medical treatment, I went into the center of town. I was told there was a local woman who purported to have special powers, and for a small amount of money, she’d read your palm and look at the ridges on your tongue. Apparently, each night she wandered down the dusty lanes in a white robe that collected dust and bits of feathers, but I had never seen her. On this night, however, as I sat on a chipped bench, exhausted, she appeared in her white robe. I stood up and asked for her name, but she refused to tell me. She encouraged me to sit back down and took my hand in hers, but then pointed to my mouth and stuck out her tongue, so I did the same. She got up close enough to kiss me, then told me I would soon be tested by an extraordinary trial. After looking at my hand again, she gave me a pill to reduce my temperature; my fever broke the next day.
Now, as I thought back to that time, I realized my current situation was just as dire. A cursory search on Google showed me the typical fortunetellers, psychics, even someone called an evil spirit vanquisher. I tapped my chipped nails against the desk and decided on the more pleasant-sounding name: Andrada: Spiritual Advisor. I stabbed the numbers into my phone and hoped no one would answer; it was 2 a.m.
“Yes, you need guidance?” a smoke-filled voice said.
I told her the pathetic story—how he fell in love with a painting of a fleshy-lipped woman that he named.
“She is smiling at me now. I’m sure,” I said.
“Yes, I’ve seen before. She is growing in strength. I charge seventeen hundred dollars to make her go away. This is too much?” she asked aggressively.
I felt like the spiritual counselor hated me, but I told her my address, and she promised that in a few hours, she would bring powerful black candles. They came from her hometown, and only these anointed candles would ensure the ending of my husband’s obsession. Of her.
* * *
An hour before Andrada arrived, I looked through old photos of Timothy and me, needing the reminder that we were once happy. In love. I needed the proof that I didn’t confabulate the entire narrative for our relationship. We took many photos, at my insistence. My favorite photo, still, is the one of the two of us at a Halloween party. He is dressed as a monster, with fake blood splattered across his face and sharp teeth. I, the princess. In the photos he holds my hand between his furred paws, and you can tell he thinks my hands were not meant for heavy lifting but for kissing.
In the private chambers of my mind, I always heard that I might be supplanted by someone else, someone new. “Too uptight” is how a college boyfriend described me when we broke up during our senior year. I always turned the lights off when we decided to have sex. He flicked them back on. It was similar to that old infomercial for The Clapper, where people joyfully smacked their hands together, turning their lights on and off. At the end I always won, preferring the cataract glare of the moon coming through the blinds. I wring my hands with anger, imagining Sabine welcoming our harsh fluorescent lights broadcasting her every curve.
When Andrada knocked on the door, I thought how I didn’t need to open it. But I did.
“Let’s get started,” she said. She looked like she was made of glass: everything shimmered on her, as if shellacked with diamond sparkles.
“I get paid first, so there’s no funny business. Then you get answers.”
I counted out all the money, and she stuck it underneath her skirt, snapping her garter.
“Can you make the attraction go away?”
She ignored me for a while and leaned into the painting. She twitched her nose at the canvas, which gave the illusion she was sniffing the paint for clues.
“It might cost more,” she said and placed her hand over her heart.
After I gave her an extra $500, I was told that I needed to light the black candles every day for a week.
“Capiche?” she said.
After she left I was convinced that I paid a lot of money to a Romanian traveler, one who stupidly used Italian. As if I wouldn’t know the difference. I lined up the three black candles in front of the painting. They stunk of broken promises and mold, but I made sure that they were lit, kept away from the drafty window. I must have nodded off for a while because when I jerked awake, the room was pitch dark, save for the glow of the candles. My husband sat in front of the painting, eating a jar of maraschino cherries. His eyes were closed. I died just a little more when I saw a maraschino-shaped kissed imprinted on Sabine’s come-hither lips.
* * *
A week passed while I burned Andrada’s sulfurous candles day and night. But it was useless, as Timothy’s obsession seemed to grow stronger. Aside from work he didn’t leave the house; he didn’t sleep in our bed. One morning after Timothy left for work, I walked into the living room and saw hundreds of flowers. Bouquets. Jam jars stuffed with magnolias and rose petals strewn about the carpet. “Ouch,” I yelled, picking a thorn out of my heel. The flowers were an offering almost. Some of the bouquets had helium balloons attached that said Sorry for your loss and Congratulations on the new baby, as if Timothy grabbed the flowers in a fugue state.
While I fingered the balloon that said Happy 40th birthday, I thought back to five months ago. Ever since I was diagnosed with polycystic ovarian syndrome during my first year in college, doctors had warned me that getting pregnant would be difficult, even unlikely. To my surprise, I found my body astounding me: I was pregnant. Despite the pendulous breasts and nausea lasting all day, I was overjoyed. We both were. After two months a butterfly-shaped mark appeared on my white skirt. I stood in the shower, fists pounding on the tiled walls, watching the remainder of my pregnancy wash down the drain.
* * *
I never realized that I made a decision until my fingers pulled open the desk drawer and found a lone hairpin with a dragonfly clasp. The hairclip I wore for our wedding.
I twirled my pin around and around, imagining how it would look on Sabine, the light reflecting better on the dragonfly because of her red hair. Was she stronger than I with her curvy hips and zaftig legs? Would her baby wash down the drain?
After I pried the hairpin open, I pricked tiny holes into the center of her eye and eased back when a hissing sound emerged from the canvas, a sound like the sigh of a thousand angels. Suddenly I felt a burning sensation that flooded my eyes with white-hot pain. I rubbed them and wondered if I was being punished. Still I continued to wiggle the needle back and forth, imagining it bypassing the artificiality of the oil paints and the canvas. I fixated on the center of Sabine’s actual eye, deadening the signals to her optic nerve.
I settled with the marring of her face and left a whitish mark that latticed down her left blue eye. I felt compelled to examine my reflection in our antique mirror and saw that it juxtaposed the scratched girl’s face and mine. The contrast was remarkable, highlighting the symmetrical care that went into my face alone. But that didn’t matter enough, at least in love.
The problem all along was that mouth, which tormented me with that cupid’s bow and glistened under the special art lights that Timothy had installed. When asked why someone has chosen a particular painting or wished they could lay claim to it, the common refrain is: it spoke to me. The painting that spoke to me was created by the owner of that Miami art gallery, named Clark Dinderson. He entitled the painting The Unmasking. During the Art Basel trip with Timothy, I stood transfixed while his mind was hijacked by the sight of Sabine. The Unmasking showed a man approaching middle age, who had several versions of his face visible to the viewer. Each layer of his face was painted side by side, with a slight overlap from left to right. The first layer of his face was of lordly features, with a smile that was proud. The next layer or image of his face showed his proud face, but the brushstrokes were more wild, feral. The viewer saw the cracks and fissures in his haughty countenance and understood the artificiality of his shiny veneer. Lastly you saw his face unmasked, mostly stripped of the scaffolding: his muscles and bones. His mouth was left intact, except it was twisted into a scream. His tongue was long and twisted, partially burned. If one peered closer at his tongue, there was a small sign that said the word stop. At that moment I, too, synthesized his scream, shared his horrors.
My own stop sign was probably broken because I imagined that her lips emitted a tiny sound. I leaned into the painting and waited for her words. Maybe an explanation? What I heard instead were her torments and cruel assumptions. But I knew how to make her shut up and take away her smile. The colors blue, green, or red couldn’t work. I threaded a needle with black thread, with hopes that it would exaggerate her lips painted that frightening vermillion-tinged red.
By the time I finished, her once proud lips were forced into submission, the canvas puckered and pulled like a jack-o’-lantern grin.
“Smile, Sabine,” I told her, but she couldn’t.
I wonder what he will say when he sees her, beautiful no more. I picture a giant die rolling through the apartment, but it is a die that only has three choices; the other sides are blank.
His hand will have a slight tremor upon discovering his newly stitched-up Sabine. The air inside the apartment will be silent, holy, while he waits for the answer on the three-sided die.
Maybe he’ll think she is no longer to his taste.
Maybe he’ll say he wishes my lips were twined with thread instead.
Maybe he’ll imagine what it would be like if she could have been real, her hand reaching through the canvas, fingertipping up his thigh.
Or worse: maybe he would think I ruined the chances of him ever having a son or daughter to hold tight.
But the version I prefer, the one that makes me smile, is that he rolls the die, and it spells out my name. And only mine.
Noelle Shoemate has taken writing classes at NYU, Gotham , Catapult , and The New School. She holds a master’s degree in clinical counseling and has worked as a psychotherapist with an emphasis on treating both women and girls. Her therapeutic background informs her writing, which focuses on issues of sexuality, relationships and trauma. She enjoys yoga and hiking with her husband and their pet Schnoodle, Oscar.
