Drawing From Life

‘You are so beautiful.’

She had heard the words before, so many times; and every time his eyes had looked into hers and she, looking back into his eyes, had seen the universe of meaning that lay behind.

And she felt beautiful; felt her life’s beauty flowing from her to him; from him to the canvas. When she looked there, she could see what he truly saw and knew that she was truly beautiful in his eyes.

Of course, she wanted him to see more of her. She wanted him to see all of her. She wanted that penetrating gaze that saw only beauty to cast its light even in the dark places of her soul, for she knew now that it could only cleanse and purify.

As if beauty is everything that matters.

He was an artist, a poet, a visionary, her lover. She was a waitress in a café, who served at tables and cleared up the greasy plates and cigarette stubs left afterwards. She did not feel so beautiful there.

Until one day.

He was nothing special. Unkempt and carelessly dressed in the way that the young can make look fashionable, he sat at a table with a coffee, a pencil and a paper pad. People who sit alone in cafes and bars use props; it’s a comfort thing.

He was watching her; using his pad as he did so. His eyes followed her continuously as she worked. She was unaware of this at the time, but afterwards, whenever she looked back, she knew that was the way it must have been.

She did not notice him then; he was nothing special, just another customer with little more than the price of a coffee and a sketch pad, so that he would not be seen sitting alone in a café with a coffee and no friends.

‘You are so beautiful.’ And as he said the words, he turned the drawing towards her so that she could see.

And she saw herself, not the false image of the mirror, but herself the way she knew she could be – a way that, until then, she had never known of, but which now, with the evidence before her, she knew was so easily within reach.

It was a simple pencil drawing, but it captured the high cheekbones, the slender tapering of her face towards the chin. Her hair, which she thought of as unkempt dirty blonde, became fine tendrils, framing and highlighting her features in careless carefree curls. The light within her eyes; the slight rounded turn up at the tip of her nose; her lips, soft-curved like rose petals, were all details she recognised, but had never been shown to her like this before.

To an observer, she only glimpsed the sketch before moving on to the next table, but casual observers rarely see what is actually happening. She had, in one timeless moment, studied, memorised and replayed the picture again and again. Even now, as she moved between the tables and the diners, she had not stopped looking; she just no longer needed her eyes to do so.

Catching herself in the mirror, she paused and patted her hair, comparing images. Her reflection was accurate enough, but had no life, no beauty to it and was a heavy leaden thing. She marvelled at how simple pencil lines on paper could show such a better truth and how that truth could fill her with a lightness of spirit that could lift her so completely and effortlessly.

She did not turn to look back at the young man, but away from him and the sketchpad; she could feel the world about her containing only a greyness; a heavy grey ugliness. It was very much like having just, after living a lifetime down a mine, walked into a shaft of sunlight and then passed back into the darkness. She knew her life could never be the same again.

Of course, now she knew about the darkness and about the light that could be hers, it was almost impossible not to act and not to take the steps she needed to take. It was impossible: in less than an hour after seeing that fateful sketch, she had returned to the table and sat down, opposite the young man.

He took her back to his lodgings. It was an apartment, high up in an old building. It was shabby, in an old worn wooden sort of way; just two rooms; one room untidy with artist’s materials. It was so much like her romantic notion of what an artist’s garret should be, that she fell in love with it immediately. It was a grim kind of heaven, but it was a kind of heaven.

He closed the door and took her then, there and without a word. She felt his body hard against hers, his lips tasting her mouth, his cock swollen greedily in his trousers hungry for her body. He took her roughly, bearing her down to the floor and undressing her. She did not resist, but instead gave herself willingly up to the vision of lightness and beauty that had revealed itself to her as being within her reach and to the man who could give that to her.

She let his hands take her, uncovering her, discovering her. As her clothes came away, so did her inhibitions. She helped him free himself, taking his cock, thickly swollen with his need for her and stroking it to stiff promise as his mouth pressed hers and his thumbs coarsely mauled her nipples, freshly exposed from the confines of her clothing and her modesty.

Naked, save for wisps of clothing that could not conceal, but showed how recently her defences had been stripped from her, she lay for him, open for him. She could feel herself, her pussy moistness warm and sticky for him, like her own oils. She wanted to paint herself on him with her own juices that he might then magically transfer to canvas. That is how she thought of it: her sex was the art of her body and she wanted all of it expressed. She writhed and moved against him, below him, making the imprint of her body against his in precise and intimate detail.

Overcome by her sexual heat, he fucked her hard and fast, holding her tight to him and thrusting deep, finding no resistance, just the hot slickness of her welcoming juices. Mistaking her excitement, her eagerness, for desire of him, his own ability to hold back failed and he felt his own thick semen spurting deep into her hot and hungry pit of wanton need.

She felt his release inside, filling her. Holding him tightly against her, feeling the weight of his body and the hot semen inside her, she felt a lightness come upon her as if she were releasing something of herself into him. It was an act of ultimate creation, ultimate sacrifice and in its culmination she felt herself lifted to some other plane of existence, from the grim dark attic into a world of light.

He would take her often like this. He was not a considerate lover: she never achieved true orgasm, but she always achieved that exquisite release she had experienced that first time and in such moments her life seemed to reach a completeness and a fulfilment that she had never before been aware of; never before believed could exist.

He drew her often. And he did paint her. He called her his inspiration. He started a portrait which he said was to be his masterpiece, his La Giaconda, and she posed for him. How could she do otherwise?

They spent much time together. The match between her lust for his art and his lust for her inspiration seemed perfect. Strangely devoid of love, bound by lusts not of the body, the relationship wound up powerful sexual tensions and frustrations, which would express themselves sometimes as intense frenetic sex, sometimes as drawn out extended foreplay, all wrapt up in the cycle of artistic creation.

Sometimes as he stood there working upon the canvas she would lower herself from the posing couch, making her way, on all fours, across the floor to him. While he worked, still seeing her in his mind’s eye fully posed, she would kneel in front of him and open his trousers. It would not distract him, but encouragingly harmonise with him; her tongue and mouth coaxing and caressing his cock as his brush wet and loaded with colour licked across the portrait to bring it gradually to maturity and completion. It was as important that he dipped his cock into her as he dipped his brush into the paint.

Bringing him to final release in her mouth she would look up at him allowing his semen to dribble from her mouth, down over her chin to drop onto the soft curve of her breasts and to follow the contours of her body down to the paint stained floor to mix with the artists other creative fluids. Both semen and paint dribbled and mixed on the plain wooden floor beneath the artist’s easel until they merged and, ultimately, soaked into the dry floorboards whose capacity to absorb them seemed limitless.

She called her mother. It was an impulse: a sudden sense of needing to share, to reach beyond herself and touch the world where once she was known. The phone rang. Once. Twice. Three times.

‘Hello.’

‘Mum, it’s me.’

‘Janey, darling. It’s been so long. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, Mum, just fine. I’m doing well. How are you? How’s Dad?’

‘We’re all just fine, Janey. Your father’s out right now’

‘Mum, I’ve found someone, a man. He’s an artist, a really good artist.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Uh, Dave!’ Flushed, panicked, off-guard. Suddenly shocked that she did not know. Had he told her? She couldn’t remember: so she invented one; ashamed that she did not know; amazed that she did not know; knowing for the first time, that she did not know. Somewhere alarm bells started to ring.

She finished the call quickly after; her senses alerting her to the fact that something was badly wrong. She did not know what exactly that might be, but wrongness now, she knew, surrounded her like a mist and she wondered what else might be lurking hidden, that could not be seen, simply because she had not looked.

She hurried back. She felt that some form of deception had taken place. How could she not know his name? If she had known, how could she have come to forget?

Back at the apartment she looked around for clues: clues to who ‘Dave’ was; clues to who she might be, or have become; clues to a mystery that had appeared like a monstrous abyss of doubt in the space in which her life had, thereto, finally appeared to find some meaning and fulfilment.

She found some letters and papers. His name wasn’t ‘Dave’, it was ‘Darren’, so she had been close in her guess, she told herself. She also found some other, earlier, pictures by the artist.

It was a horror to her. She knew she did not know art, but these daubs she found were not to compare with the fineness the exquisiteness of her own portrait. There was no hint of the masterful brushstrokes, no depth to the subjects, no dimensionality. They were like withered leaves compared to the masterpiece that now, even though incomplete, filled the room with its presence and the life that it had, which was all its own.

Turning to the portrait, so near complete, her understanding failed. It seemed impossible that an artist whose talent, even to her untrained eye, was so lacking could paint such a thing, but paint it he had; she had seen those brushstrokes as they had been applied by the young artist, fresh from her bed with her sexual sweat still upon him, with her intimate scent clear in his nostrils.

This fair beauty, this illuminated truth, could not have come from him. A half-formed notion nudged at the door of her mind and, although it was not granted entry, the fear of the knowledge so palpably hidden spurred her to sudden action and, clutching quickly her coat and the little money she had, she ran into the crepuscular evening world that lay beyond that room.

In the shadows and the gloom of the night that was dull, but safe, on the pavement half-lit by corporation streetlights meanly rationed in number and power, she became aware of another self, herself as she once was, walking beside her.

Together they walked through a timeless place; two ghosts sharing their haunting; haunting each other. She heard again the dreams, the hopes, the longing of the girl whose life she had taken. She once again felt the youthful need to give herself, heart, mind, body and soul to some cause that would redeem and justify her. Heart, mind, body and soul seemed intact, but she felt drained. Shyly, but hoping for some explanation, she revealed herself, weak and depleted, to the gaze of those younger eyes.

Long ago, she had seen herself as a fairytale princess, trapped by the curses of fate to waitress for a living. It was an innocent and private conceit, but one that made sense to her: there would be a knight who would see her, a damsel in distress, and would come to her rescue as brave knights do by custom. He would, of course, turn out to be a handsome prince and they would both live happily ever after.

Somehow, that knight in shining armour had not arrived and she had been seduced not by the radiance of another, but by the radiance of an image of herself and her desire for it. She was both the pawn and the player and playing the game to lose. Perhaps that was the only way she could win.

Even in the light of day she felt the darkness of the pit around her. By night the bright lights were dulled by the knowledge of a brightness elsewhere that was all hers, unbound by the cycle of day and night or the turning of the seasons. There was a prayer deep inside that she would turn one corner and find a light bright enough to heal and she searched long and far.

But it was always shades of dark, and she knew that although it was in darkness she walked, she would need to return to the light. It was with no pleasure that she knew this, but she also knew that the chiaroscuro world in which she now made her private path held nothing for her anymore. It was a place to haunt, not a place to live.

And so it was, after long communion with her past she came back, once again, to those old wooden stairs leading up to the grim garret where she knew she could find the only light that could touch her life.

She could not tell how long she had been away. Time itself had lost meaning and reality, existing as just another canvas upon which she was lightly sketched. So light, indeed, that the wooden stairs could not manage a creak as she passed over them.

She passed through the door: it may or may not have been open. The room seemed to have changed, but maybe it was her. As ever, it was the painting that she went to first. It was finished. Whether in her absence Dave, or was it Darren, had put those final touches or whether by other means completeness had arrived on the canvas, she could not tell.

Or was it yet finished?

Not quite yet, surely.

No, not yet. But it was so close to the full bloom of flowering promise that she could not help wonder what more might be needed. What vital ingredient would put the finishing touch to her masterpiece?

Time was not a substance she had use for anymore. Before the portrait she felt a calm and peace come upon her: it was right that she should be here, now. With the peace came a contentment and tiredness: how long had she been wandering in the shadowlands of her soul?

She let herself into the small back room where there was a bed and, lying down upon it, fell into a deep sleep.

She was awoken by noises from the other room. Stirring from her bed she approached the doorway looking through to the room beyond: first to the picture, and then to the two figures standing before it. It was Darren, or was it Dave, and he had a girl with him.

She could read the intention; see his plan. The girl was clearly entranced by the picture, disarmed by its breathtaking beauty; flattered at being appreciated by a real artist; vulnerable to the hands that, even now, snaked around her body, exploring her curves. Drawing her to him, her mouth to his, he used his advantage to lower her body to the floor, his hands on her clothes; his desire on her flesh.

As she had remembered him doing, once before, she watched him uncloth the young womans body, kissing her neck, unbuttoning her blouse, lifting her skirt.

All this she watched dispassionately, but then she became aware of the portrait. In its beauty it had been used, degraded to be a tool in this sordid seduction. And now, before her eyes, before the beautiful picture, this foul animal act was being played out. There was a clear sacriledge here; an attempt to contaminate purity with base filth. A blasphemy!

The thought stirred her into action.

She screamed and burst into the room, charged with fullest passion. The explosion of rage and righteous anger had invigorated her, as if she had momentarily stepped back into life to fight and defend that which was hers. It was the selfless fury of a protective mother defending with her life her brood; her investment in the future.

The couple started, looking up with horror on their faces. The girl screamed and began gabbling in french, clutching her clothes to her. Darren looking up, equally horrified and confused: didn’t he recognise her?

And then she caught sight of herself in the mirror: the mirror she had never seen before; had never had any cause to use. She saw a pale wasted creature waving thin arms, features contorted by powerful emotion, something beyond human. The reflection stopped her momentarily: the couple hurriedly left, taking advantage. For a moment, she was deceived. And then she turned again to the picture and its timeless reassurance.

She could not leave it again. She could feel the need for her, and was ashamed that she could, so thoughtlessly, have abandoned it; left it in preference for her own selfish fears and doubts.

The easel was heavy, but she could not allow the painting to stand on the dusty floor, so the easel had to be moved too. Her recent emotional rage still burned inside with an empowering fury and she found the strength to move both the easel and the portrait to the back room where it could stand in the corner at the foot of the bed; not too close, but close enough.

She could keep it by her here. She could sleep safe in the knowledge that, should she be needed in the night, she would be there, ready.

* * * *

When she awoke, she arose from the bed with ease.

She looked at the portrait. It was so lifelike. It was as if everything that she had ever been, everything that she had ever owned, everything that she ever could be was there. She could see it in the rounded cheeks flushed with girlish laughter; in the hair, each strand blonde, but subtly unique in the way it curved and coloured in the light; in the teeth, sparkling white and even, except that slightly crooked one that he said made her smile so lovely.

She looked back to the bed. The pale wasted body left there now held nothing for her. It looked so ugly and she wished that the bedclothes could have hidden more of it. She had no use for it anymore. She thought briefly about the ashtrays she had emptied in the café; the grease left behind on the plates after the meal had been consumed. It was someone else’s turn to clean tables.

She turned back to the portrait. It was now the only source of light in the room.

It was everything she had ever wanted and now that it was hers, she gave herself up to it willingly without thought or regret. It was all there. There was no need for anything more. She was beautiful and now would always be so.