Pop Artist

Pop Artist

Her face stares at me from every last corner of the room. The ceiling, the walls, the floor, her vivid colors are splattered all over my smock - blackest black, iciest blue, the purest seashell- belly pink. Each and every painting, grand-scale or petite and precious, her face and her scandalously sculpted body burned into the canvas by my hands. The walls behind are white, all white, inescapably white with a stiff row windows only high, high up and one door that I know is locked. My latest painting celebrates my wife's viola-carved back with a spine as strong and supple as a river's timeless flow. She is naked, always naked, so unlike her genuine flesh-and-blood self pinned up in tailored black lady suits and her thick silk curtain of blackest black pressed into her head. Her gaze penetrates to her side, swan neck, her chin so defined I might have just slashed the canvas with a knife. Her hair is spilling down, midnight oil spilling down and around the pearl-smooth contour of her body. The beauty rips at my stomach and tears churn in my throat. Devastatingly beautiful. I should feel exalted, I should feel fulfilled. But there is only emptiness like the glass of once-water toppled across the only table in the room. This one will sell like fresh water in the heart of desert land, as all the others do. A local celebrity, my wife's image seizes the dreams of lustful men and even women like wildfire. Little girls preen and coo and pretend they are talking into a video camera like she does, pretend they are delivering hope to the city as gentle as a cascade of spring rain. I catch a glimpse of a black bird gliding slashing by the windows and allow my memory to wander to the one and only time that I asked her of the feelings she harbored with this burgeoning career. "Exponentially successful," she calls herself as she speaks to me without facing me after I let the question spill, any gentleness in her voice shot and hung up far away from our home. And just after that she – No, no. Focus, Cecil, focus. Look sharp, look enthralled. Stare into that brilliant, brilliant blue, let the pinprick pupils enrapture your soul. I know the time is coming by how the strip of sun is creeping closer and closer to the west side of the room. Click. Scrape. A mechanical yawn. The door opens and my wife Sylvia glides in, minx-smug smile on her face as she audaciously drinks in her surroundings.
“It’s 7:30, husband. Your work is done today, darling, and by the looks of it done well. Come, the butler has your dinner on the table. Can’t have my loving muse go dying on me now, can I?”
The mention of food sends tumbleweeds of hunger tossing through my stomach, hollowing out my throat. I have not eaten since early, early morning, when my wife laid a single bare bagel and a glass of water across the table inside the room I would not leave until now. Her attention is fixated on the paint-and-canvas mirrors of herself, and she misses my short-lived wince by just a hair. Twisting on a thorn stiletto, she wades through the doorway, and with an unfolding of fingertips she beckons me behind. Always behind. I follow.
Cool, calm, and collected. My wife has had her fire stripped from her inside, although I cannot remember a time when she ebbed deeply with passion. But I know she must have. I could not have had my heart ravaged into such a split-open, docile creature by the shell of a woman that sits compactly across from me for this dinner identical to all other dinners. Our eyes do not meet once as she lifts her fork up and down, her salad vanishing neatly in precise intervals. The silence-wrapped room is stiff like dead water, and my body mimics it, bound in gnawing fear that a free movement might tip the balance and send disapproval crashing down. But then she speaks. My mouth halts mid-chew. Look. Look at her. I tear my stare from the safe spot and look.
“I need to return to the office for the night to tie up some loose ends before the Summer Solstice Festival. You’re to go to the store and pick up everything on this list. I would ask the house servant, but she will be preoccupied with childbirth and will be fired promptly afterwards,” She pauses to slide the perfectly crisp sheet of paper onto the table, “Take the Lexus. Do not waste time and do not wander. Am I clear? Of course. You would never disobey me.” Sylvia’s footsteps pierced the quiet like bullet cartridges clanging onto the marble floor, the aftermath of how her chillingly lovely voice shot me over and over with each solid word, driving the collision of her request deeper and deeper. Out there … I have not been out there on my own since I succumbed to marriage. Since … since before Sylvia, before her reign poured down and filled every crevice, filled every breathing hole. Anxiety is a tough, tough substance to swallow.
Maneuvering a car feels as awkward and sluggish as accustoming my tongue for speech with a life-filled human being with a face capable for frowning and smiling has become. The control I must grapple onto feels crash, almost shameful. Leaves a lump in my throat and a cold weight on my head that keeps my head stooped low. Choosing my direction, my speed … choice, so much choice that a gritty intoxication seeps into me and I am not sure if it is acceptable to enjoy such a sensation. With Sylvia in the place that I live, my feet can only take me to my cot, to my studio, to her dining room. Nowhere else. She keeps this entrapment secure, the entire building wired, the entire staff watching and listening, enforcing. But this … this is … suddenly I realize the car in front of me is going slower, too slow … the surge of discomfort and anger that ceases me just briefly frightens me as I reduce speed to join the grunting, shouting throng of traffic oozing alongside the wrought-iron gate of the zoo. Flashing lights and a pile of smoke up ahead informs me of the why, and I find myself shifting in the seat. My seat. All that one can do now is wait, right? Accidents happen, accidents happen here in the never-stop-pumping heart of the city. Just wait, Cecil, wait. I catch a few glimpses of mulling animals through the fence, people browsing to find their most entertaining creature to gawk at. I should keep my eyes on the road. No, better yet … I should burn this list into my memory to cut down time. Estee Lauder Ideal Duel-Action Refinishing Treatment. Pesticide-free oranges. Kerastase Mousse Volumactive Amplifying Perfecting Mousse for Fine, Vulnerable Hair. A lioness roar shatters my focus. I glance over. The animals are closer than I thought … I bet if I open this window I could smell the rawness of the meat the lioness is devouring. Don’t even think about it. Three packages of mixed dried fruit. Chanel Teint Innocence Foundation. The lioness keeps chewing, apathetic eyes drifting across her audience on the other side of the habitat. Forget it. Sirloin steak. 10-pack whole-wheat bagels. The traffic has not budged. Teeth tearing through as effortlessly as swans float atop lakes. Did the lioness just stare me down? Does she want me there? The list tumbles from my fingers as I climb out of the car and leave it right there in the middle of the road, my exit blasted by honky New Yorker jeers but I keep on going, my limbs lanky and swinging in the newfound open air. It did not take me long to have my fingers wrapped around the bars of her cell. The lioness stares me down as if she knows I am a kindred soul, as if she feels the same energy that she has bundled up and compressed in tight knots in me. Big, dripping, glistening eyes. I cannot look at her long much at all, with her stare that punctures clean through my repression clouds and shines a searing, scorching light on me. I leave in a direction that takes me farther than the Lexus. A vendor spouts, “Popcorn, get it hot!” and, “Get your cool, refreshing pop here!” I step forward, clumsy, tug Sylvia’s money out of my pocket and do it. Just do it. A fresh rush of thrill gushes over me as I hand him the bill, exchanged for a bag of popcorn. Even the first crunch excites me, the butter basting me in this raw, raunchy satisfaction. My first purchase since I became Sylvia’s husband. I devour it all, savor it, devour all but one piece. A full-bodied, multi-puffed piece that I let lounge in the palm of my hand as I gaze at it. I turn and head back to the car.
Sylvia comes back to home deep, deep into the night. Her hair is still perfection, her makeup still dewy and pointedly professional. She wants to bathe in the fresh linen scented bubble bath potion that was on the near-top of her list, so she seeks out Cecil who surely delivered as he was told. Not in his cot. Not in the dining room. She cocks her head, her only expression of curiosity. Making her way to the studio, her pace continues to be smooth and steady. The light activates to the sound of her voice. Before her stands a massive painting of a piece of popcorn, enveloped in a scorching red paint backdrop. The same red blasts through all of her portraits, in drips, drops, smears, splatters, streaks, spills. No harmony. No control.
No control.
Sylvia plummets to her knees and lets loose a blood-curdling scream.