(a note from the shutter muse: My apologies for the vagueness of connection from the story to the photograph. My mind works in mysterious ways and the only actual connection from this to the story is the stolen flower in the last line. However all things ephemeral- such as a flower bloom that lasts a mere day or two- reminds me of Addie's fleeting but powerful beauty.)
Addie loved her art the way sailors love the sea. She revered it, respected it, feared it, and ultimately would have died for it. She lived her life covered in toxins from oil paint, seeping into her pores from where she used the side of her palm to blend the perfect line on a discarded milk carton and the backs of her bare thighs where she wiped it afterwards. Maybe in the end, it was the fumes from everything that crept inside her mind like snake smoke tendrils, wrapping around her vital nerves and squeezing them until they became something else: new, grotesque, and utterly misshapen.
She had a delicate constitution though—like the softest leather. So useful and elegant, but unsuitable for practical work. Because of this she couldn’t keep a job, not that she hadn’t tried. There was not a realistic or practical bone in Addie’s body but with me at a editing firm making barely minimum wage to edit intern generated garbage, it was no secret that (even in only her tiny loft) we couldn’t afford to live this way. I learned quickly just how durable I was in contrast to Addie’s hollow bones. In the span of three months Addie held three different jobs, none of which she enjoyed and only one of which she quit. The first, and overall most promising, was a substitute art teacher at the local church for a brief summer program.
“Paid to watch them paint?” Addie had laughed the day she’d gotten the job, as if the idea was ludicrous. I was happy for her—thinking maybe her innocent spirit, pure like newly seeded flowers or a bubble hovering at the tip of a child’s wand, might be kindred to artistically inclined children. I, as usual, drastically misjudged Addie’s excitement and returned home to find her sobbing on the floor, paint covering her hands and streaming down her cheeks, which were already wet with tears.
“None of them cared,” she shrieked when I dropped to my knees beside her, paint staining my last clean pair of jeans, while vaguely I wondered how much paint and water was soaked into these floorboards. When Adeline cried, she became a Greek goddess, crying rivers and streams enough to almost free the world from drought, if only they weren’t made of her salty tears. A deathly practical joke for those with dry swollen tongues and chapped lips who praised the heavens and believed themselves saved.
I couldn’t get her to explain for another hour, until she had cried herself dry and eaten the sandwich I’d made for her. Then she began to woefully recount, with the flair of a well-seasoned actress (although Addie never acted, only felt feelings stronger than others like an intravenous drug) her experiences of the day.
“They weren’t artists…” She began, with a face that looked strained. When Addie had arrived to her work, more or less punctually considering she abhorred timepieces and therefore told her time by emotions, the desires of her stomach, and (out of mere necessity) from the position of the sun, she had been handed a list of activities. That was the first bad omen, she told me somberly, because on the list were petty activities including but not exclusively: making color wheels, drawing stories through pictures, and worst and most insulting of all, Pictionary. The woman in charge had told her in a tone that was wrung of all enthusiasm like the crunchy hollow chrysalis of a butterfly, that the most important thing was that the children had fun, considering most of them were rich church member’s children who were here for the summer and donating substantially. Addie had nodded but disdainfully crossed many things off the list with her peacock feather pen she kept tucked in her fedora.
When the children arrived they came penless, inspirationless, and with listless stares and gum which they snapped loudly and stuck under their seats. A heard of spoiled brats, Addie had realized, and she hadn’t been expecting them to only want to play Pictionary. She was able to begin though, steeling her mind for the onslaught of angry auras that seemed to be plummeting her with massless bullets, exploding in her cerebral cortex and spreading a feeling of doubt and discouragement. The color wheel went over poorly and they refused to tell stories so Addie resorted to an assignment of her own.
“Paint your thoughts. Anything you perhaps have been thinking of. You may use any object in the room as your canvas, providing you don’t harm others or yourself.” With that Addie had dropped into her chair and begun her intricate finger-painting on the syllabus. This she had pulled out of her pocket while she told me her story. It was a crumpled mess of paint and colors, but Addie never left her art behind. She created art like mothers shape their children, and she couldn’t abandon even the smallest doodle, the tiniest painting on a diner napkin drawn with the color rubbed from old flowers, condiment stains, and carefully manipulated coffee rings.
The children had, she admitted, complied loudly and chattily, smashing vases and painting terrible words on the shards, drawing crude stick figures between the pages of thesauruses and atlases. Addie knew then that they weren’t artists but at least they weren’t yelling at her anymore. Before she knew it though, the director had burst in and declared the class over, shouting at Addie until her voice had grown hoarse from the strain. Addie had told her that art was expression and that they had begun, today, to try to express their feelings visually. At least that was a start.
“She fired me on the spot, and kept my paycheck to cover the damage.” Addie finished, exhausted, and I smiled. I knew she could not have been expected to entertain people who mocked the very roots from which she grew, the expressionist art that indeed ruined many of our household items that were not, she explained, meant to be in that shape. But things were simply things, I always said, and if they needed to be crushed and ground into glass dust to sprinkle on top of painted hubcaps and manhole coverings, then let them be.
Her second job had been as a waitress. A small diner down the street was desperate for help and Addie was desperate for new tubes of paint. She started on a Tuesday and had the job for a little less than a week. She didn’t mind the long hours and the fact that she earned hardly any money besides the tips suited her just fine. She came home with pocketfuls of change and spare buttons (which were soon incorporated into art) with which we bought groceries, small bottles of vodka, but mostly just tubes of oil paint. I required very little to be content. Addie’s smiles filled my heart to the brim and her kisses filled my stomach. We ate fresh fruit in the morning and leftover pastries in the evening, which Addie bought behind the café after closing for a fraction of the price. When Addie “dove” for new canvases, somewhere even I would not follow, she would bring back canned fruit and vegetables and soups that had barely passed their sell-by dates.
The waitressing was vigorous and a cutthroat profession though, Addie confessed to me, returning home from work late on her fifth day, pockets full of change that jingled like bells on the ankles and hips of Arabian belly dancers when she walked down the street. She felt as if her creative energy had been drained from her and she lost the will to talk to the butterflies on the fire escape, or paint on our paper plates with leftover condiments stolen from restaurants and squeezed from their packages with sticky fingers. Her artist was incarcerated in a jail scented with fried food and the derogatory words from customers, their angry auras, coiled around her ankles like shackles and rose on her like copper scented quicksand, the pressure building in handfuls.
As she spoke, I could tell—feel with the tips of my eyelashes and the scabs on my knees—that she could not go on like this. At my request she quit the next day, coming home with armfuls of ingredients given to her by Gerald (the chef) who had taken a liking to her. Thus ended her second short-lived career, and renewed her spirit. For when I returned from work the next day she was paint-smudged and laughing on the fire escape, speaking in hushed tones to a butterfly perched on a stolen flower.
(To Be Continued...)
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