One Girl Shy/She Don’t Look Back

Wpom-One Girl Shy/She Don’t Look Back, 4pp

5/20/17, 11:48am, Saturday, 1700 words

He had graciously offered her the use of his barn.  One of those brilliant moments of inspiration he had where he could fit two needs into one. He needed her to be near him, for inspiration, for sex, for her, but he couldn’t think of a good enough excuse.  He knew that she liked her art thing, whatever it was and although she wanted to move to the city, art, especially HER art required a lot of space.  One day, he had brought her out to the barn, and they were both amazed at the amount of space revealed by the dusty barn door.

She already had a lot of her junk stored at his house.  He had allowed her a certain amount of space from their last journeys, and since she was a packrat after his own heart, he let her grow into his domain.  She had dragged it into one of the kid’s old bedrooms on the first floor, a few boxes.  But somehow those boxes grew into complaints the last time the kid visited.

He never even visited the barn.  He used it daily, looking out from the kitchen window, it sat very pretty on the horizon and he always smiled to himself, thinking of the picture it would make.  She heard that line one too many times and sketched it out for him, and hung it just above the sink.  A bit redundant actually, but he liked it as a joke. That way, even at night, he still had a view of the barn.  It didn’t get old, no matter how many times he told it over the next few decades.

When he inherited his parents’ house, he had dreams of turning it into a music studio, of having concerts there and parties. But the cost was insane, to redo the floors, to run the electricity, to make it “nice” for visiting musicians.  But all the musicians he knew preferred comfortable furniture and a close bathroom.  

She wasn’t picky.

Her investment in the renovation included about $40 of extension chords and cheap pipes (to insulate them from the rain) that ran from the garage to the barn.  It was enough for a light and a radio, and a sense that she didn’t have to run back to the house when it got dark or lonely.

She’d run back anyway.  Only liked creating during daylight hours anyway, so she said.  He left her out there to paint and rig up all sorts of sculptures with “found objects” from their trips, or things she scavenged from his house or a nearby junk shop.  The barn had beautiful giant crossbeams, and although they were 20 feet off the ground, she never asked for help from him to hang her sculptures.  One was a brilliantly shiny set of corkscrew curls that she had cut from tin cans.  Their sharpness sparkled in the dusty barn light and somehow made the room appear brighter, like a disco ball. (It was the first piece to sell)

He admired her shadowy paintings she hung on the walls, the ones that contained abstract images of her dead fiance.  They were just vague enough that she could call them something else, or someone else.   She had other canvases full of colors, her playing with paint.  Sometimes she’d give him a canvas, like a child, and show him how she painted.  Once, he complained too much of being a klutz with a brush and she let him fingerpaint a whole canvas.  They had made love that afternoon, after making too much of a game of getting the paint on each other.  Afterwards, in bed, he was still making jokes, but she was especially quiet.

“I drew on him once,” she said, into the afternoon light.

“I had just grabbed a pen.  I had started with his hands and then he rolled up his sleeves.  And then he took off his shirt.  And then his pants. I even did his face. It was like a giant tattoo. He didn’t even mind that it lasted for days, he was like that.  Sweet in that way. Encouraging.  I think I still have some pictures of that, somewhere.  I can’t bear to look for them in my stuff, but I know I will never throw them away.”

==

He felt a deep pang of jealousy at that.  Hat she could still love a dead man in a way that he could never offer her. He didn’t want to have to ever explain away a body tattoo like that.  All it takes is one photo and…. Plus, he didn’t like the idea of it somehow. It was hearing her say out loud how much she loved another man, that P arranged for her to meet an Art Dealer friend of his.  Someone from High School, local enough to know the barn, and accomplished enough to be spending his real life in the City.

His name was Simon, and ironically enough, he ran a little free digest in Soho called ‘Simon Sez”.  His wife was tall and beautiful and had rasta-braids instead of the beautiful long blonde hair he remembered sleeping with.  Simon also had a bevy of “interns”, young women who got paid little to no money for helping him run errands or edit copy or take photos.  He joked that he paid them mostly in Kiehl’s shampoo and gestured to a closet that was filled with gift boxes from the store.  Certainly given as some kind of trade.  The barter system at work.  He gave the girls fancy soap and a place to have their names published in an art magazine.  They gave him god knows what.  Maybe he also made some introductions.

He came over for a “showing”, something very casual.  It was a lunch, actually, and even she treated the invitation to the barn as an afterthought.  But when they arrived, the barn was clean and shiny.  Everything was arranged carefully, and it actually looked like its own museum to her, with a workspace that was carefully tidied, yet “in use”.  “This is where the amazing painter worked.  This is where she created her masterpiece.  Oh, and she could sing, too,”

The Art Dealer liked the stuff.  Or was kind enough to compliment it, at least.  

P took his encouraging words as evidence that her work was ready for prime time.  Over the next few weeks, a series of machinations allowed for the rental of some musical electricity for the band to perform, for him to throw a party, and for an unknown number of potential art buyers to be invited.

===

The night of the party, she seemed excited.  She had already announced ahead of time that she didn’t WANT to put on her singing hat, that she wanted to take in the full experience of being a visual artist, for just one night.  He agreed, thinking that she’d at least do an encore or two when she saw how much fun he’d be having.

But as the first few people arrived, she was nowhere to be seen.

He did a quick tour of the property and finally found her on his kid’s old bed.  Her chosen outfit was a gorgeous purple silk dress and pigtails.  She reminded him of a child on her birthday.

He asked what was wrong. She blinked at him.  Almost crying.

He knew she was shy, those crippling moments when she was younger, but he thought it was one of those issues that had disappeared after a certain amount of maturity.  And 10,000 miles of shows.

She shook her head.  “I can’t do it.  I CAN’T talk about my art. One of the reporters asked me a question and I froze…”

“Reporters?”

“Yeah, Simon said/SIMON SEZ, that he had invited a shit-ton of reporters and…”

He held her for a few minutes and then said that she didn’t have to talk to the reporters.  She looked at him disbelievingly.  He told her that she’d be more mysterious if she appeared and pretended she didn’t understand their language. ‘Works all the time,” he said.

She fiddled with the roll of blue painters’ tape that she had worn like a bracelet for the past few months.

==

She sold everything. Not all that night, but most of it then.  The rest was gobbled up by the people in the City who had seen the press.  She had made the front page of the Arts Section, her purple dress, her pigtails and a giant strip of blue tape over her mouth.  

It was a gimmick. And it worked.

“The artist gave a sly look everytime a question was thrown at her.  Occaisionally, her “partner in crime”, a musician, would offer an answer and thus started a pantomime of interpretation.  One could never tell if he was just inventing a story to make us all laugh or if it was true.  The artist wasn’t telling.”

When he saw himself credited as “a musician”, he just laughed.  He was especially sensitive to billing and at any other time might have blown up.  But here, they didn’t even get his name.  The Barn was given a title he hadn’t heard of, it was almost as if Simon were trying to keep his name out of the papers.

He didn’t mind.  He loved giving her this moment.  He loved seeing her happier than he had ever seen her onstage.  She WAS happy onstage, but there was something else that stopped it from being her highest level of happiness.  THAT was reserved for their car trips, for the getting there, for their journeys.  He was thinking about that as she came out to him on the porch.

“I got the final check!” she said, like a schoolgirl with a fabulous report card.  And he was proud of her.  Enough money, plenty of money for her to DO something.  Down payment on a something, a trip around the world, school.  It was plenty of money for her to escape from the pitiful future that he could offer her in touring.  He was thinking over a goodbye speech when she interrupted his thoughts.

“Is that enough for an album?”