Warmth (ii)
She was painting a picture of him, she had told him earlier across a table. Art feeding art. Life feeding art, criss-crossing across the way. Her breath had been warm, beer-tainted, warm. Two mornings later he changed the sheets on his bed, an hour after rising. They were still warm. Would he have been able to tell the difference between the warmth of two bodies having slept in that bed and just one? In a way, in mind only, there had been another person in that bed, a phantom of imagination. The bed was warm when he woke; comfortable; phallus erectus. He had not arisen immediately, but there had been no sleight of hand and no spring of warm, wet, pleasure-sensation, just a dull longing.
He stood and dressed. Grey sky. Hot tea. Paint peeled on the garden shed, wind blew leaves, rain hung back warily. Either of the girls (young-adult university students) would do. Neither seemed ideal, in a way just place-holders, diverting if not holding back the waves of sensation, the ebbing and flowing, waxing and waning of each day, until the next crush came along. Did two half-crushes make a whole? Not really. In the same way that an earthworm cut down the middle would continue to squirm, but would be unlikely to limp on alive as either segment.
Another sat down at the table, silhouetted moodily by a free-standing lamp above his head. Her eyes dart away, attention drawn. They have the same coloured hair, the same fancy dress. There is a murmuring in the bar, a warm sway of bodies. The low-lights are cosy, the music rhythmic, far away. She is talking to him. They’re always together. This is before she’s a face half-looked for in a crowd. She will stand soon, light-up eyes flickering , sparkling in the room, their warmth permeating her breath. She’s a firefly drawn like a moth to him, the one beneath the lamp, to them, the people around, to paint, to shiny glittering mechanical things, to soft cotton clothes and fresh-ripe fruits. She’s a mirror too.
A mirror, infinitely detailed: She’d be one of those old-fashioned gold-shining brass-framed mirrors, with black-green tarnish in amongst the deep-set grooves of the sculpted surround. And in her he would see whatever he wanted to see. If she was friendly, if she was taking an interest, if she was painting a picture of him, she fancied him. If she spent all her time with someone else, or even seemed to, then she fancied that someone else. And if she, or anyone else, was too shy to talk to him because they fancied him, then they didn’t fancy him. And how did he feel?
He looked for her in a crowd. He walked to her house the next day, saw the painting, saw her, saw the other, but no others. Alone. The three of them. They talked. The two that were not him told stories in the manner of a couple, with exchanged glances, editing and referencing and confirming each others narratives. They were the characters, they were the themes. Tea was offered and consumed. He was already over any jealousy, he had never committed any feelings anyway, rather, he had let them all be swept away, purged by the wave.
He might be wrong: paintings and light-up eyes, bedrooms and phone numbers. It would take hours to finish that painting. Hours staring at the same face, assessing and recreating every feature with minute detail, with sweeping, bold, confident brush strokes, and timid, delicate dabs of paint. How could you not fall in love with a face like that? Without love, without affection and dedication, the painting would fall lifeless or remain unfinished, like the glimpse caught in a mirror’s shard. Love. Love and dedication. When he wrote he loved every one of his subjects. He loved all his objects too. They were all beautiful and breathing: they had to be, otherwise they would be ugly and stale. The writer, like the artist was polygamous, even if the person wasn’t. She understood.
He left her house. He had judged it time to leave. He didn’t have a toothbrush there. There was a park near where he lived. It would be so nice to have someone to walk through with, he had thought the other day. That had been the first, and so far only time he had been there, having just moved to his new student-house. It had been evening when he had gone. Acute angle low orange bright sunlight, long sharp shadows. A woman read a paper on one of the benches that surrounded an inactive fountain. Further into the park his shadow stretched across a waist-high still-water toy yacht pond with lilies in the corner. Idyllic, somehow as if the park was unchanged since the nineteen-fifties.
There was a miniature railway track too, all criss-crossing metal veins stretching out under gates, behind fences across paths, like ridges of gnarled horse-chestnut leaves. Like abandoned coastal beach huts, faded autumn sun, the cold reflective toy yacht pond and an inactive fountain were indicative of out-of-season entropy. It was beautiful. He had sat by the toy yacht pond, leaning against its waist-high edge, to text his ex-girlfriend. She would have appreciated this park, a walk in this park, arms linked, steps in time, and he wished for someone else to experience it, even second hand, even though he would just have soon as been alone in that park, as he was, or at least alone apart from the woman reading the paper, some dog-walkers, some cyclists, a group of children playing football.
He stood and walked away from the toy yacht pond. There was more park to see and the sun was setting. As he walked he thought of the one he had thought of a few days later in his warm, comfortable morning bed. Could friends, a male and a female, walk like that through a park? Could they walk arm in arm and be nothing more, but maybe be something more, but more likely stay as friends? Perhaps he would ask her sometime. Perhaps there would be times in the coming months when he would walk her home, or they might stop after lessons for a cup of tea or some other hot drink and sit across the table from each other and talk easily, not as couples tell a story but as friends share a joke. Perhaps when they stopped at her door she might wrap her arms around him to say goodbye, or he might stoop a little and she move onto her tip-toes, leaning up for a quick kiss, on the cheek, on the lips.
Even if they both wanted that, it would take time, weeks, months. The sun was setting. There wouldn’t be many more days like this, warm enough to walk late in parks without wrapping up, hurrying steps, breathing misted breath. And that was if they both wanted that, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to be with anyone, except at times like then, walking alone in that park, because if he was with someone, then someone else would be experiencing this beautiful, quaint place with him, validating, in a way, his own experience. But what about after, and tomorrow? There were moments he wanted someone, moments he felt unworthy of someone, and moments he was content on his own. The sensations ran together.
He was attracted to the lustre of eyes lit up, like he was to the low autumn sun, and he was attracted to the warmth of another body, in a bed, linked through his arm, but these were sensations and not people. He could afford, as a writer, an artist, to be polygamous with sensations, but as a person, he could not commit, not until he was someone different and less different, to a person, even someone who understood. Would that change when the painting was complete? That was days away, many days and many waves, who could say how he would feel then? Most likely, nothing would change, because the painting, even if she fell in love with it, with those affectionate oil eyes staring back at her, would be a fiction, and not a person. He was the person, and he was in love with his own fictions, just as she was in love with hers.
He left the park. Crowds were made of many people, many bodies, many faces, hers was just one, just as anyone else’s was just one face. If he looked hard enough into a crowd, just as if he looked hard enough into a mirror, or at a person’s actions, he would see whatever he wanted to see, pick out whatever he wanted to pick out. That wouldn’t necessarily be an accurate representation, just an interpretation, and, like a phantom girl in a warm bed or eye-makeup and a fancy dress costume, it would just be a fiction.
Tags: art, autumn, Fiction, images, life, narrative, original fiction, sensation, stories, themes, warmth
