His Obsession (6 page)

I'd been posing for him. When he'd abruptly screamed with frustration and thrown the sketchbook in a rage it had skidded across the deck to my feet. I would not look at someone else's work without permission, but now I could not help it. The salty sea wind caught the pages and flipped and fluttered them, back and forth.

Stunning sketches flashed before me, each one shocking in the life it exuded. Slowly I knelt down and watched the images fly by. Me as a butterfly. Me as a mermaid, swimming in the sea, my hair floating around me. Me as Ophelia. Me lying on the couch in the sitting room, snoozing in the sun like a cat. Me arching, twisting in the throes of ecstasy. Me, me, me, and every one almost technically perfect.

But he was right. Something was missing. I couldn't put my finger on it.

"Have you taken classes before?" I said.

My voice jerked him out of his enraged stupor and he glanced at me, his eyes cold. "No," he said. "I told you, I am good at everything." A hand ran through his hair, fingers tangling. "Except
this!"

He turned and stalked toward me, and I saw immediately that he meant to toss the sketchbook into the sea as well. I did what I rarely did now and defied him. Wrapping my arms around it, I curled over, protecting it with my body. His bare feet came to rest beneath my eyes as he loomed over me.

"Give me the book, Sadie."

"Don't throw it away."

"I can't get it right. Sketching isn't
it."

"Isn't
what?"

"My masterpiece. I will never make a masterpiece with... with pencils and paper!" Anger burst out of him, raw and humiliated. "Perfection is impossible with imperfect materials!" He knelt down in front of me and put his hand on the sketchbook as he tried to tug it from my grasp.

I was too interested in what he had said to protest, and he took it from me. "Perfection?" I said, sitting up as he took the book and coldly, precisely put it in order before closing it. "Why does it need to be perfect?"

His cherrywood eyes met mine, and I shivered, they were so hard and cold. "What is the point if it isn't perfect? I must leave behind perfection. I lived my life perfectly, and my masterpiece must reflect that."

If you lived your life perfectly,
I wanted to say,
then why are you so miserable?

But I didn't. Instead I just said, "Perfection isn't the goal of art. You'll drive yourself crazy if that's what you want."

"I should be the
first,"
he said. "The first to reach that goal. I'll live forever if I could just—get it—
right!"

And as he spoke he stood and flung the sketchbook overboard.

Like a dying bird it flew through the air, its pages struggling to catch the wind like broken wings. Then it fell to the sea and sank beneath the waves.

––––––––

"You're really drunk, Malcolm."

"I certainly hope so."

"No, I'm serious. I'm worried about you. You haven't been eating and now you're downing the scotch like water. You're half way to dead."

"I've been worse."

"Yeah, I have, too. Coming back isn't fun at all."

"Your throat."

"...Yes. My throat."

"Someone slit your throat."

"Yes, they did."

"Then why am I the one who's drunk instead of you?"

"Because you are acting like a child. Get up. I'm putting some food in you."

"Not waffles. Anything but waffles."

"No, not waffles."

"Good, I love waffles."

"You told me you hated waffles!"

"I told you that so you would feel better about murdering perfectly good waffles. What you do to waffles is a crime against humanity."

"You know what? Now you're getting waffles."

"No... no, don't..."

"Yeah. Bet you wish you weren't too drunk to resist my magnetic wiles now."

"I never can, anyway."

––––––––

I made him waffles. They were atrocious.

He ate them anyway, to make me happy.

––––––––

"Sorry about those waffles."

"They are with God now."

"If by God you mean the fish, then yeah, that's where they are."

"Even the fish, I think, will not eat bile- and Scotch-soaked burned waffle bits. Only the Lord will have pity on them."

"Yeah? You think he'll have pity on you when you kill yourself?"

"...A shot across the bow. And no. I don't deserve it."

"So to Hell, then?"

"The devil knows I'll take over. I will wander the world as a hungry ghost. Perhaps I will haunt you."

"I'll leave some waffles out for you."

––––––––

"Tell me about your parents," he said one day as I stretched on the deck in the sun, assuming various yoga positions I'd seen once or twice. I don't have time to do yoga back home, and apparently it's harder than it looks. My hamstrings screeched in protest. Malcolm sat by, watching me intently as he attempted to capture my dynamic poses on his canvas in strokes of broad, abstract color before I switched to something new.

"Jeez. Just go straight for the Freud," I told him. "You're not very subtle."

"Why would I be subtle?" he replied. "You're on a boat in the middle of the Adriatic. There's nowhere for you to hide."

"Awfully Bond-villain of you."

He smiled at that. "I would have made an excellent Bond villain. Or an excellent Bond."

"I thought you might be Batman the first time I saw you."

His laugh boomed over the deck. "You had me pegged," he said. "Batman is a damaged megalomaniac in latex and leather." He stroked slash of color over the canvas as I tried to do downward-facing dog. I saw stars. "So anyway," he continued. "Tell me about your parents."

"What about my parents?" I asked him. "They were parents."

"Everyone's parents screwed up," he said. "It's a law of modern life. You already know a little something about my parents. How'd your parents do it?"

From my inverted position it was hard to discern his expression. "I'm not ready to tell you yet."

He didn't respond and I straightened up. The sun beat down and the wind whistled past my ears as I tried to stand on one leg. The pitch and roll of the deck was wreaking havoc on my balance. Malcolm was quiet for a second.

"Then tell me about the least objectionable parent," he said at last.

I fell over. It was the sea, I swear. I gave up trying to yoga and laid down on the deck, staring up at the sky. The sea breeze wormed its way beneath the boxers and fine linen shirt I wore. The sun baked me.

I sighed. He'd been open with me. "I suppose my mother," I said. "She..." I trailed off. "She didn't know how to exist in this world."

"What do you mean?"

"She was kindhearted. Tender. Soft where you need to be hard sometimes. She liked to dance, and she made the most amazing chocolate cake. She always put coffee in the chocolate frosting. It was amazing. But she wasn't very with it. I had to keep the house cleaned up and in order, and I was the one who kept things organized in our home. She was kind, but scattered, so I had to pick up the slack. She liked to cook so I never really learned how... Which I guess explains my waffles..."

I could tell this wasn't what he wanted to hear about. He wasted no time getting down to the bones of it. "You speak as if she's dead," he said to me."

I closed my eyes. The sun burned red behind my eyelids. "She is."

"I'm sorry."

I shrugged. "It was a long time ago," I said.

"Does it have anything to do with your scars?"

The question rocked me, but I refused to show it. "You could say that," I told him.

He was quiet and the sound of paint slapping on canvas paused. "I've upset you," he said after a few seconds.

"It takes more than that to upset me," I told him.

Malcolm sighed. "Yes," he said. "I should have guessed that it does." He resumed painting, and I fell asleep.

When I awoke, I was warm all over, and my hand was outstretched, as it always was, reaching for the bedside table that was no longer there. Customary flash of panic, and then I remembered where I was. I looked back to where Malcolm was sitting, painting. I hadn't been asleep for long. The light had barely changed, but he was giving me a curious look.

"You do that in bed, too," he said. "You always reach for something that isn't there. What is it?"

My gun. My safety.
"Nothing," I said.

"You are not like your mother," he said. "You are hard in many places." He sighed and picked up the canvas before putting his foot through it. "Start over again," he said. "Always, always I'm starting over again with you."

––––––––

"The coffee you make is almost as atrocious as your waffles."

"What? No it isn't. I demand satisfaction."

"Satisfaction... like this?"

"...
Oh."

––––––––

"So what's so great about Don?" I asked him one day as we soaked in the hot tub. I couldn't remember how long ago we'd slipped into it and I was vaguely, distantly worried that I was somehow boiling my insides. However, beneath the luxurious pounding of the jets, my body had relaxed enough that I doubted my own ability to move.

"There's nothing particularly great about him," Malcolm replied after what seemed like a long, thoughtful pause, although perhaps he was just coming back from being asleep. "He is like a brother to me."

"How so, if he's so mediocre and you're so awesome?"

He laughed at that. "One can't choose family. Don and I met in Kindergarten, if you can believe that. His parents were very abusive. Terrible. Absolutely terrible. He still has burns on his body from the cigarette butts they put out on him."

I opened my eyes. "Holy shit. Really?" I'd heard of that sort of thing happening, but I'd never seen it in person.

"Really. They were the worst. My mother liked to take in stray animals, and she thought of Don as a stray. So he spent more and more time at our house, until he was basically moved in. My family took him in and my father took us both under his wing." His head was tilted back, soaking in the rays of the sun. I don't think he knew I was watching him, because he frowned slightly. "Although now that I think about it, that's kind of a dubious honor. My father was a little fucked up, I think."

"Oh? You
think?"

"Yeah. I do. He taught us both about how to succeed in life, and everything we did had to be a competition against each other. I always won, but Don was more ruthless." A humorless smile passed across his face. "That's the strange thing. My father liked him more because he was willing to do whatever it took, and I always found myself on the defensive. Just like now, I suppose."

"So... he's like your brother, but the brother who's always trying to fuck you over and take the family inheritance."

Malcolm sat up and looked at me. "I suppose so."

I sat up, too, turning toward him and putting my elbow on the side of the tub. "You guys are like some kind of screwy Shakespearean family. Right down to you trusting him enough to give him control of the company."

His lips thinned. "He's like my brother."

"You are fucked up. He's a fucked up brother. You know what you do with people like that in your life? You cut them off. You never talk to them again."

His brows raised. "If I recall correctly, you acted horrified when I suggested you cut me off."

"Yeah... because you're not batshit insane and trying to destroy me." At least... I didn't think so. I didn't feel particularly under assault, and I knew what that felt like so I was pretty sure his talk of going to war with me over his ultimate fate was just that—talk. I'd never seen a guy with more unresolved business in the world, and given his perfectionist nature there was no way he was going to off himself before he set it all right. I was as good as victor in our 'battle.' "Cutting people off who become toxic, who make you feel like shit all the time? That's fine. That's
good.
Healthy."

"But..." His face was pained. "When we were younger, we'd band together against my father. We'd trick him into thinking one or the other of us had won whatever stupid challenge he'd put before us." I noted his use of the word 'stupid' to refer to challenges. "We looked out for each other. Saved each other's asses all the time. I don't know what happened..."

Again that lost look on his face, the one that came whenever I'd made him think of something uncomfortable, something so at odds with the way he had accepted the world that it caused him physical pain.

I could see it, too. A kid alone in a house with a frivolous mother and a father who thought of the world as a place to be sectioned up and sold off, piece by piece? I would have leapt on the first person who presented themselves as an ally, too, and I probably would have clung to them in exactly the same way. The only difference between Malcolm and I was that I'd never found someone as desperate as me to latch on to. I'd always been alone.

I moved across the hot tub and extended a hand to soothe the lines from Malcolm's brow, but abruptly he stood and got out of the tub.

I watched him walk away.

––––––––

"I'm tired, Sadie. Nothing ever comes out right except fucking you."

"I thought you were good at everything."

"I don't think so any more."

"Then maybe you should adjust your expectations."

––––––––

"Where are we going?" I asked one day.

"I don't know," Malcolm said. "Away."

"Surely we'll have to stop for fuel at some point."

He just smiled at that. "Surely we will," he said, and leaned in and kissed me. We were naked, lying in his bed, and his hand came up and stroked the inside of my thigh, lazily. "Have you ever seen the sculpture of the lovers?" he asked me.

"The Rodin?" I said. "Of course. I mean... in books, I guess."

He leaned in, pushing me onto my back. "It is extraordinary in person. The flesh gives way so easily in stone." And he put a hand to my breast and squeezed lightly, as though to emphasize his point.

I laughed, an old, familiar self-deprecating thing. "Oh, sure," I said, "if I had any flesh there to give way."