Restoration

A short story
by Rachelle Rogers

Unable to sleep, Julian shifted from side to side, poking angles of himself through the covers. He'd only recently moved to the mountains of North Carolina, and the haunting of owls and screeching drone of cicadas disturbed him more than the city traffic had outside his Upper West Side apartment.

When Sam was alive, New York seemed the ideal place to live. Museums, theater, ballet, great restaurants, good friends—they'd shared these things for nine years. "He was remarkable," Julian heard himself say so often in the last months. "Even when the cancer had gotten the best of his body, Sam never let it destroy his spirit."

It had been ten months since Sam's death, ten months since Julian last touched brush to canvas. Without his art, sleep became shallow, agitated; dreams disappeared. And everywhere Julian turned, Sam was missing. He was missing from the breakfast table, with his dark, tousled hair and soulful eyes, attempting to smile through the remnants of a late evening of champagne and museum fundraising. He was missing from Julian's bed when he reached for him in the night, when a slant of light illuminated the now empty place where they'd once held each other's dreams. He was missing in a vacant toothbrush slot, the glaring order of a desk, the ten thousand things that wore his imprint in their home, in Julian's life.

For weeks after Sam's cremation, Julian ate meals out, and more often than not, let himself fall asleep on the living room sofa, where he'd remain until morning. The memory of Sam's frail body, the same body that had once navigated the slopes of Aspen, filled Julian with impossible grief. Over and over, he relived those last hours by his lover's side, his hand wrapped around Sam's bony fingers, struggling to let him go. A tightness took up permanent residence in the hollow of Julian's chest, magnifying the guilt he felt for every breath.

Julian lay in the dark, trailing shadows, stroking the miniature gold key he wore around his neck. Sam had given it to him the night they'd moved in together. They'd met two months before at a Soho gallery. Tired from painting, Julian had debated whether or not to go to his friend CJ's opening, yet a sense of something important cajoled him. When he arrived, he was immediately drawn to a man with dark hair standing alone, studying a painting. Several inches shy of Julian's six feet, he wore a black jacket over blue jeans and a black silk shirt. He seemed a few years older than Julian's thirty-one.

Who are you? Julian had formed the thought and launched it on a mental wave. Slowly, the man turned, a look of concentration on his face as if he thought he'd heard someone call to him faintly or from a distance. He smiled and walked toward Julian. "Sam Keaton," he said. Julian noticed Sam's eyes were different colors—one blue, one hazel flecked with yellow. He wondered if he saw the world through a broader spectrum. Together they gazed at the canvas in front of them. Like the moment, the painting, too, was surreal—a maze of black and white passages with a tiny gold key shining at its center. "The key is everything," Sam had said.

With Sam's death, Julian realized he didn't know himself apart from their relationship. Even his art, he admitted, wasn't pure, had often been calculated to please his lover. Not that it had to. But what Sam, as a curator for the Museum of Modern Art and himself a fine painter, thought of Julian's work mattered to Julian. Perhaps too much, and the feeling of being estranged from his own authenticity tugged at him.

Why am I so afraid to look inside my own skin? Julian had thought in a courageous moment. Too distraught to search further, he'd drowned his questions in the cacophony of a busy life, hiding his pain beneath a spurious façade, appearing as solid as Da Vinci, when, slippery as Dali, he was dripping over his own edges. Without Sam, there was no one to anchor him, nothing to root him to a city filled with ghostly memories. He needed something primal, with presence and permanence, and the ancient peaks of the Blue Ridge called to him. There he hoped to find himself again. Or maybe for the first time.

The clock on the night table glowed 12:47. Julian turned on the lamp. Next to it he kept a photograph of him and Sam in a matte black frame. Their heads were slanted toward each other. They were smiling. They were happy.

Julian picked up the photo and held it to his chest. It had been taken a few hours before his first gallery show. An abstract canvas hovered in the background, glaring, all edges and angles, defined geometry. Julian now thought the painting . . . untrue. He remembered the control with which he'd executed the placement of each line, each stroke, remembered how he'd squelched the blurry-edged swirl of emotion that spiraled within him, threatening to explode. It frightened him. If he gave it free rein, his work might appear capricious, artistically undisciplined. What would Sam have thought?

Julian traced Sam's image through the glass. To the eye it was flat and motionless, a frozen slice of ordinary late afternoon, a unique but unspectacular moment pressed in two dimensions. But looked at through the heart, it was round and warm and moving, a reflection Julian could fall into, a cloud of living memory floating him back to a time before death had dared to show its face. He pressed his lips to the vibrant, beautiful Sam who had once been.

"I love you forever," he said.

Carefully setting the photo down, Julian slipped out of bed.  He felt his way along the dark hallway into the kitchen to put on the tea kettle.  Recessed overhead lighting lent a soft glow to the white refrigerator and range and the oak cabinets with their white porcelain knobs.  When the kettle whistled, Julian fixed himself a cup of tea.  He leaned against the pantry, sipping, remembering—how Sam had coaxed him into midnight outings in search of cappuccino ice cream on a chocolate waffle cone, the endearing notes he'd left for Julian taped to the bathroom mirror, the way Sam's cheeks flushed when he fluffed the punch line to a joke.

Suddenly a voice interrupted. It's time, it whispered. Julian could have sworn it was Sam. He often talked to Sam to ease the loneliness on sleepless nights, but Sam had never talked back. It's time. The words echoed in Julian's mind. Sound floated back to him from every corner. It's time . . . time . . . time.

Trembling, Julian sensed a creative urgency overtake him. Something larger than himself directed him to the laundry room where he'd stored a stack of unpacked boxes. A painting was straining for life. That's what was happening. He hardly remembered what it felt like.

Everything, he thought, had died with Sam, and not painting had become Julian's self-inflicted punishment for still drawing breath. Besides, he'd felt sure his work had been marked by nothing more than triviality, that it made a mockery of art. Eventually, the Muses gave up trying to cajole him out of endless mourning. Inspiration dried to dust. Now, despite himself, he was slipping through the season of endings. A spring of imagination was stirring, welling from its center, luring him with its prism of possibility.

Barefooted, wearing only briefs, numb to the chill of midnight, Julian ripped packing tape off several cartons marked "art materials" and fished in the crumpled newsprint with his hands. After locating what he was looking for, he lifted two boxes and followed the unfamiliar path to his easel propped in a corner of the spare bedroom. His last stretched canvas leaned beside it. From one carton he chose several tubes, squeezed large ribbons of acrylic onto a palette—sienna, crimson, ebony, ash. With broad strokes, he began sweeping pigment across the canvas. He moved free and wild, an urgent, uncensored inspiration resounding, as if some part of him knew where he was heading.

Life, the voice said, louder this time, more insistent. As if in a trance, Julian added to his pallet cerulean, emerald, violet, fuchsia, gamboge—colors of sky and sea and summer meadow, of wildflowers and sunrise. Then, craving more than earthly hues, he searched for opalescent pearl, metallic silver.

By the time he put down his brushes, the first light of day had pierced a thin layer of cloud. Julian stepped back to see what had birthed itself.

Before him was a visionary symphony—rich, textured patterns receding, swelling; shimmering, iridescent overlays that seemed to take on more dimension than the medium could allow. Impressions of an ideal, they suggested an atmosphere where reality was not about the well-defined detail and diminishing perspective of the eye, but about the nebulous and infinite landscapes of the heart.

Julian had never worked like that before, never been so unaware of what translated itself onto his canvas. It was as if it had not been his own hand that painted. At least not the overcautious, self-critical one he was used to. What he saw before him was filled with vitality and promise. Sam would have approved, he was sure. "Now you're on to something, Jul," he would have said.

Exhilarated, Julian felt he'd opened his eyes after a long dark sleep. His body, down to its molecules, seemed rearranged and unsteady in its newness. Shivering, Julian searched in the closet for a blanket, found one, and draped it around his shoulders. He lowered himself onto the rug. With more than his eyes, he navigated the artistic universe before him, riding a wave, a spiral, a cluster, ravenous for what might be revealed at every turn.

For the first time since Sam's death, Julian breathed freely, and tears flowed from the unexpected lightness of it.

Copyright 2007 by Rachelle Rogers