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The Painting

by 
Bill Stoll

Lanae Tyler lay splayed in her Spartan living room, her head and back buttressed by a worn-out beanbag chair.  The beanbag, a painting and Lanae alone decorated the room.  Three weeks passed since her father’s wake, one since the reading of his will.  Her two brothers walked handsomely away with a bundle of cash and a car apiece.  Lanae, the starving artist and oddity in a family otherwise skewed toward conventional lives, had been bequeathed only the painting and a handful of books for the little girl who now likes art and liked to read way back when. 

She inhaled the oils with her eyes, studying every detail and the subtle balance of color.  An odd rendering, it depicted a room she vaguely remembered from her Great Grandmother Mae’s house.  She was five when the matriarch passed on at the age of ninety-four.  Forty-one now, it seemed to Lanae to be an eon ago.  She pushed her brain cells to their limit trying to recollect the wallpaper style, carpeting and furniture.  Her middle-aged mind remembered only the purpose of the room (it was her great grandfather’s study) and its smell.  To describe the unique aroma alone in one of her own stories would demand a chapter of its own to do it properly.  Strange she would commit gray matter for that useless purpose. 

Every visit to any city opened and ended with Lanae’s visit to the local art museums.  She anchored her visits with a first stop at the metropolitan gallery, meandering progressively through bohemian galleries and beat houses where starvation motivated the brush and pen.  Lanae’s life work testified on the one hand to the wisdom of her instincts, and on the other, to the futility of her tack in the years before Maggie.  Her three-room apartment remained heavily unfurnished, thanks to principles a little too noble. 

The call buzzer broke the spell into which she had fallen, attempting to divine the reasons her father gifted his sons a pocketful of cash and wheels for the road, leaving the old homestead’s mantle art for the family artist. 

"It’s Maggie.  Are you decent?" 

"Come on up," Lanae replied, pressing the red button beside the speaker. 

Moments later, her publisher let herself in. 

"Nice.  Very, very nice," Maggie remarked appreciatively, drawn instantly to the new objet d’art centering Lanae’s room.  "So this is your inheritance." 

Maggie drew closer to appraise the work.  She invested several minutes viewing it from various angles before offering her concerned opinion. 

"I’ve never seen anything quite like this, I must say." She nodded approvingly, saddling her chin in the cup of a lightly fisted hand.  The hand opened to point, as though summoning a thought she never had a chance to fully form. 

"Coffee?  I was just about to press a cup for myself," Lanae offered. 

"Sure.  If you’re making some anyway." 

Maggie opened the hallway closet to hang her coat. 

"How’s the book coming?  Back on schedule?" 

The question lingered unanswered as Lanae clattered in the kitchen, grinding beans, readying the coffee press, opening and closing cabinets and drawers in search of coffee accouterments. 

"This is why 7-11s are so popular you know," Lanae declared without solicitation.  She twisted the gas knob to heat the kettle.  When she achieved control, she answered the question at hand. 

"I’m close.  Maybe two weeks away." 

"Not good enough.  I need it in one.  I put my name out there for you, Lanae.  I know you’ve really been through it.  And you know you have my deepest sympathy and support; but you have to get your head back into your work now," Maggie reminded her, her attention currently refocused on the painting above the barren fireplace mantle. 

Lanae’s head had been out of the game for nearly three months.  Her father’s health failed – not at once – but over a protracted period due to Type 1 diabetes complications.  Every conceivable malady, from kidney failure to the loss of his left leg, manifested in a progressive deterioration.  The lonely upside was the relative painlessness of his demise, at least until the amputation.  Her brothers were off tending families and jobs, living uninterrupted, normal lives.  Beatnik Lanae held the emotional baton by default.  She was expected to pull her female weight.  She never confessed it was a labor of love, and never would.  The one who needed to know, knew.  But her work, her shot at being first published, was held hostage to the emotional invoice the ordeal imposed.  Icing the cake was the economic injustice of the will proceeds.  Her father, in the end, must have been the hypocritical sexist she never suspected.  She let it pass.  The material mattered less to her. 

She had to focus. 

"I’ve got a suspicion about this painting," Maggie claimed, as the kettle steamed into action.  Responding as though a dinner bell rang, she headed toward the kitchen. 

"I have a few friends who routinely shop Christie's and Sotheby's.  Mind if they drop over and give an opinion about value for this piece?" 

"Maggie, please.  My great grandmother painted this when she was in her early 30s.  This isn’t exactly a Van Gogh or Da Vinci original.  It’s Grandma’s Mother’s . . . probably paint by numbers if we look closely enough." 

"Yeah, so," Maggie replied, emptying half a blue packet into her black coffee before sampling for its sweetness quotient.  Her expression certified perfection on the first round.  "Van Gogh was nobody’s Granddaddy?  Is that what you’re telling me?" 

"No.  I’m just telling you she was very normal.  Very average.  Spooned a mean baby cereal as I recall.  That’s all." 

"Yes, yes.  You were no doubt quite the precocious baby.  Then you have no problem with my idea." 

Lanae reached for her checkbook on the counter, checked the last posted balance and snapped it shut.  She was down to three hundred dollars, but had too much pride to ask her brothers for a dime. 

"Is it free?" 

A sip. 

"My gift to you on this, the week before your first child is born.  And may it be a masculine child," she said mimicking Marlon Brando’s cottony voice from the original Godfather with a pitiable imitation. 

"That was the worst impression I’ve ever heard," she said wide-eyed, in mock shock over the bludgeoned attempt.  "I’ll be here all day," she added on the breath of a deep, cleansing sigh. 

Maggie produced her cell phone, thumbed its built-in directory with the notched wheel and placed a call.  Her administrative assistant would orchestrate the appraisal this afternoon, times to be confirmed when known. 

"Now listen to me.  I’ll be back this afternoon.  I’ll expect to see the room adrift in notes and progress.   I want to see you sitting there, pecking industriously at that little keyboard of yours with these ten prolific fingers, you hear me?  We have to move on." 

Maggie held her prodigy by her shoulders and held her gaze tightly as she dispensed parental caliber advice.  Truth told, Maggie was Lanae’s elder by seven brief years and was better suited as the sister she never had.  Maggie’s talent was recognizing talent, and her checkbook confirmed she was good at it.   Lanae listened to her words, and nodded agreement.  She had another emotional trump card to buy a little more time if she wanted to play it, but the veil was wearing thin.  She had to get on with her life. 

~ 

Her first appraiser stopped by at two on the nose.  It was the woman from Christie's.  She invested less than five minutes examining the work.  Several entries were entered in the tiny notebook she carried.  She asked permission to take a digital photograph of the piece.  Permission granted. 

The man from Sotheby's wrote nothing down, committing every required aspect to memory. 

Before five the same day, the walk-by appraisals were in.  The net value of the painting was assessed in the one-to-five thousand dollar range, depending on who showed to bid.  Lanae was counseled she should be honored the piece passed the famous auction house admission hurdle.  Sotheby's advised a low end price expectation to be the wisest use of her hopes.  Though this was one of the better offerings he had seen, paintings by an Unknown - no matter how talented, were wild cards under the auctioneer’s gavel. 

Lanae withdrew the painting from both offerings the next morning for sentimental reasons.   The memory preservation in the end mattered more.  She would sell it on the sidewalk if she had to, to stave off homelessness or starvation.  If it came to that, what was a few extra bucks one way or the other anyway? 

~ 

On the last hour of the seventh day in the week Maggie had given her, Lanae pressed the d of The End with a flourish.  She was finished.   Her living room wore note cards as decoration.  A sea of mindless words were strewn about in meaningless patterns except for the final outline in her mind that comprised the novel she now considered complete. 

Maggie would be pleased. 

Her reading public would as well, she hoped.  This work finally followed the rules, with a hook, a middle and a logical, emotionally charged resolution.  Her prior pattern had been to please herself, readers be damned if they did not like what she had to say.  Post Maggie, the public wallet mattered for "They paid her bills," Maggie counseled.   Lanae thought of herself today as a reasonable party to a negotiation rather than a lost artist with abandoned high art values.  "Being twenty percent more conventional" was the price of admission.  Once in play, she could do what she wanted.  Lanae caved to the necessary extent.  When she was famous, she could publish the unedited version.  Attracting sufficiently high weekly sales receipts for Messrs. Barnes and Noble represented her short term objective. 

Her eyes swept the sea of random words on the index card carpet surrounding her.  Completing her assessment of her literal home office, her eyes drifted upward to reconsider the heirloom art adorning her wall. 

As though mesmerized by a Magic Eye computer drawing at the local mall, she was drawn into the disarray of objects in the painting seeking order from its parts.  Her eye settled on the oiled rendering of a bookshelf.  The titles, though mottled in a blurred, painted setting, were each drawn with crystal clarity in pen, as though intentional to center the work.  They were Dickens titles all.  Copies of these books had been first given to her by her Grandmother.  Her Dad nurtured her love of reading, and through it, writing.  Great Expectations.  Oliver Twist.  A Tale of Two Cities.  A Christmas Carol. All in a line on the center shelf of the bookcase behind great granddad’s elaborate mahogany desk.

The memory dispatched a chill through her spine, goose flesh on her arm.  Misty eyes and a quickened heartbeat followed.  It suddenly clicked. 

A trip to the closet confirmed her suspicion. Nestled in a carefully packed, canvas bag on the hat shelf above her coats and sweaters sat seven, signed first editions, each nearly one hundred and fifty years old.  The pristine volumes seemed preserved "as new" except for their antique binding and Neanderthal fonts of the day.  The aroma of Great Grandmother’s home and cooking lingered in the volumes, rekindling Lanae’s earliest memories of her visits to their home.  "Sketches by Boz" was among the titles, the very first work of Mr. Dickens circa 1836, describing London life in his time.   A Tale of Two Cities, her favorite, had been inscribed "For Mae Weathers, You are my Love, Charles." 

She later added the name Tyler in a requited love Lanae knew by photograph as Great Granddad.  "Whatever happened there," she wondered aloud. 

Lanae’s net worth rocketed skyward with more zeroes than her mind could comprehend.  It was more than she would ever need or spend. 

Lanae’s first novel would meet critical success with the critic’s eye and reading public’s opinion.  Therein lied the pleasure in composition.  She turned the corner, maintaining a "personal values" high road, absent a clip to meet a publisher’s press. 

She dropped lazily into her beanbag, looked anew at the painting she studied too closely before to discover the treasure it held for her.   She delicately opened her favorite story, A Tale of Two Cities, and turned to its first page and words. 

"Now isn’t that the truth." she declared aloud, to the angels she sensed beside her in the room.

 

A Tale of Two Cities 
By Charles Dickens 
Chapter 1 - The Period 

IT WAS the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. 

 

The Painting is a tale drawn from various events in my life, inspired one late winter Sunday by a persistent freezing rain.  How one's subconscious winds its way into their written word is an amazing process.  I hope it continues invading my head for a long time to come. 

I am a Mortgage Banker by profession, and love composition (words and music).  I've written seventeen short stories and essays to date; and recently wrote, published, (formed a band) and performed for a CD one song, available on my web site.  I, of course, have the proverbial unfinished novel to which I dedicate an hour of my life every day. 

Twenty-six years ago, I met and married Carolyn (not the same day, but almost).  We soon produced two delightful daughters: Jenn (22) just graduated from Bucknell, now work-world bound; and Janis (21), finishing up Washington University, medical school bound.   Carolyn is a quilter (She is quite good at it and passionate about it!) and keeps our family sane.  Many of our antics wile their way into my stories. 

I love writing . . . and reading, the unavoidable complement to the former.  Thank you for investing time reading my work.  I'd love to hear from you.

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