_________
Axel
Douglas showed up at my house with a bag of prepared food and two beers in his hands. He didn’t say a word before going to the kitchen and taking everything out. I was a little angry as I watched him. Not at him. Maybe at me. I don’t know. I put the cigarette I was about to light before he arrived behind my ear.
“Bad day, no? Lots of those lately.”
“You don’t say?” I hissed. “Why are you here?”
“Some host you are…”
“It’s not you, it’s just… Don’t worry about it.”
I opened a beer and took a sip. Douglas looked around at the disorder in the house. I hadn’t picked up in days. The floor was full of unfinished paintings, sketches, spots of paint I hadn’t bothered to clean.
All I could feel was frustration. “I just can’t do it. I can’t.”
“That’s not true, Axel. Come on, look at me.”
“You’re right, it’s worse. I don’t want to do it.”
He twisted his beer around in his hand while he looked at me. I saw disappointment in his eyes. I had to hold back from crying like a fucking boy in front of him about all I’d ever wanted to be and would never achieve.
“If you tell me, I’ll understand.”
I got up and ran a hand through my hair. “It’s everything. It’s…this house, this place. The idea I had about what it would be but isn’t. I’m suffocating. It’s like having a noose around my neck the whole damn day.” I walked back and forth, stepping on my paintings, but I didn’t care. “I don’t even know why I wanted to do this. Paint. I’ve forgotten. How can you forget something that was supposedly your dream, Douglas?”
“Tell me just one thing: what is it that comes between you and your canvas?”
“Me, damn it. Me. I don’t feel anything. I don’t have anything to capture, anything I want to record. I don’t want to make just anything. If that’s how it’s going to be, I’d rather never touch a fucking brush again. And the harder I try to find something that’s important enough to me to give it my all, the worse it is; the more frustrated I get. I can’t. I’ve tried for months, and…I can’t. Supposedly this is what I studied for, and I promised you I would do it and I would show my work in a gallery and…”
I brought a hand to my chest, and Douglas got up and hugged me. I held him tight. I needed it; I needed to know that even if I hadn’t done it, even if I hadn’t scratched that goal off the list, he would still be there with me, because painting was one of the strongest things that had brought us together since I was a boy, and I was afraid if I let it go he would pull away from me or something would change.
“That’s enough, son. That’s enough.” He patted me on the back. “You don’t have to do it anymore, hear me? No one’s forcing you. You’ve started a war and you’re only fighting against yourself, and you’re never going to win. Fuck painting. Fuck everything, you hear me? The first thing is to be happy, feel relaxed when you get up every morning.”
I wanted to cry from relief.
I took a deep breath. I breathed, I breathed, I breathed…
Douglas squeezed my shoulder and the disappointment on his face turned to pride. I didn’t know why, but I didn’t ask either, because seeing it was enough. He made the tension disappear, grabbing our dinner and taking the two boxes of noodles out to the porch. We ate our meal in silence, each lost in his own thoughts. I was about to go get some tea when he stopped me with a smile.
“Wait, I’ve got something better.”
“No fucking way.” I started laughing when he took out a bag and shook it before my eyes. “Looks good. Give me that.”
He laughed uproariously there in the nighttime as I took the weed from him and went for a rolling paper. A half hour later, we were both high and sitting on the porch steps with an open bottle of rum, our feet in the grass growing in the sand.
He took a hit and coughed. “I’m too old for this.”
“You’ll never be too old for anything, Douglas. Can a thought get old? I don’t think so. You can always be what you want to be.”
“Don’t get all philosophical on me at this hour, boy.”
I took the joint from his hands. He looked at me askance as I blew out the smoke and observed the smoke rings disappearing in the darkness.
“So fuck painting.”
“Fuck painting!” I repeated, euphoric.
“I always liked that about you, the way you just grab on to life and bend it to your will. You remind me of myself. You know, sometimes there are just two options: go up or go down, move forward or move back, grab on or let go, close or open… Shades of gray are fine, but they’re not everything. Sometimes you’ve got to go big, take risks. Like in love.”
“Screw love,” I mumbled.
“I don’t buy that from you. You’re an easy target, you know. Tell me you know that, Axel. You need to be on guard.”
I looked at him from the corner of my eye and raised a brow. “You’ve smoked too much.”
“No. I’m talking about you, how you are. Trust me, I know what I’m saying.” He brought a hand to his chest, looking happy. “Axel, you paint or don’t, and one day you’ll love or you won’t, because you won’t know how to do things any other way.”
I lay back and looked up at the stars. “Well, love doesn’t seem to be in a rush…”
“There are things it’s worth waiting for.”
“How did you know Rose was the one?”
“How could I not?” He wrinkled his forehead, disconcerted. “Hell, one look at her and the world stopped right as I heard the notes to ‘I Will’ in my head. I never had a doubt.”
“You’re lucky,” I whispered, and then two ideas came together all at once. Maybe it was a coincidence that she popped into my head while we were talking about love. Or maybe not. I would never know. “As far as that promise I made you, since I’ve just been screaming, ‘Fuck painting…’”
“You don’t owe me explanations, Axel.”
“It’s not an explanation, it’s a revelation.” I sat down quickly, a little dizzy. “She’ll do it. Leah. Your daughter. It makes sense, no? Now I understand; it was clear from the beginning. Have you seen what she does? She’ll fill galleries. And I think…I think that’s her destiny, not mine. That’s fucking it.”
“She’s really good, yeah. She’s special.”
“You know what, I think I will keep my promise. I’ll have an exhibition one day; the only thing is, I’ll do it with her. I’ll be the organizer. Same thing, right?”
Douglas laughed, and I did too.
It was almost dawn when I decided to go inside and look for my cell phone in my desk, because, unless I was wrong, I had left it there a day or two back. I found it and called Rose. I told her not to worry, that her husband was going to sleep at my house. But twenty minutes later, she showed up.
“I can’t believe it,” she said when I opened the door and she saw Douglas on the couch.