Read The Art of My Life Online
Authors: Ann Lee Miller
Tags: #romance, #art, #sailing, #jail, #marijuana abuse
October 16
Why did Monet choose mood
over exact representation? Was Georges Seurat OCD or did he just
like dots? What if Picasso had spent his life painting portraits or
landscapes? How do you make a decision?
Aly at
www.The-Art-Of-My-Life.blogspot.com
Cal sat on the deck, his legs dangling
over the word
Escape
on the transom. He glanced at the
thick, plum-colored sky churning overhead and breathed in the scent
of rain. He’d been an idiot to think Aly would help. Freaking
coincidence that he’d blurted out a prayer, then realized he was
doodling Aly’s face on the pad in front of him.
She said it was the bank that shut him
down, but he couldn’t help thinking Aly wanted nothing to do with
him. And he knew why.
No amount of explaining would erase
the day Aly saw him making out with Evie on the beach more than two
years ago. That he’d been trying to protect Aly in his own skewed
way made no difference.
His mind wandered back to the summer
he got caught smoking weed on New Smyrna Beach Surf and Sailing
Camp property. He didn’t know who had hurt worse—him getting fired
from his annual art teaching gig and losing Raine or Jesse firing
his own brother. Or maybe it had been Aly who thought she was
pregnant with cheating asshole Garner Fritz’s baby.
Aly had found him in Cody’s garage,
Kurt Cobain blaring from the boom box, staring at Raine’s portrait,
halfway between a hangover and getting lit. They tangled in each
other’s arms on the bare sleeper-sofa mattress, her tears smeared
against his.
Aly filled her lungs and released a
shuddering breath. “We could, you know….” She drew circles on his
chest with her finger. “…comfort each other.” Her words were
muffled against the neck of his two-day-old T-shirt.
Even with his emotions fogged with
Raine and days of chemical comfort, the heat of Aly’s suggestion
fisted in his groin, flushing outward all the way to his
fingertips, toes, the skin of his scalp.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t move.
Didn’t breathe. Didn’t dare.
“
It was a dumb idea.
Forget I said it.” She started to roll away.
Cal held on. “Stay here. Let me hold
you. You don’t need another guy to use you right now.”
She relaxed against him, and he
thought about changing his brake pads, estimating how much
turpentine he had left in the can against the wall—anything to keep
his hands from touring her body.
“
I told Raine you and I
were like siblings, but—” He pulled away a little so he could see
her face. “That’s not quite right, is it?”
Not even close.
The wind whipped the river into tiny
whitecaps, bobbing the
Escape
on her anchor line.
He yanked up his sweatshirt
hood.
He’d let Aly think he took her offer
of sex and the
I love you
she blurted out later as
friendship. And two days later when Evie thrust her breasts in his
face at Stoney’s—he touched.
Getting some after twenty-three years
of nada clouded his brain longer than it should have. Instead of
messing with Evie, he wished he’d kept his bong lit till he smoked
Raine out of his gut.
Aly would have pulled him out of his
Raine tail-spin, set him on his feet, and cheered for his success.
Maybe he’d be graduating from college now, getting a real job,
planning forever with Aly.
Instead, next week, the boat would go
up for sale. He’d move back into Henna’s, beg Stoney for his job
back at the Ink Slab. Without a prayer of winning Aly.
He pulled the joint out of his pocket
he’d rolled earlier, ran it under his nose. He wanted to go back to
how he felt with Aly in his arms filling his senses—full of hope,
desire, the future. Marijuana couldn’t take him there, but it
could, for a few hours, make him not care.
Starr stood on the dock and stared
across the water at the
Escape
. Angry clouds boiled and spit
mist from the sky.
Cal hunched over the back of the boat,
his cupped hand moving to his lips, pausing, returning to his
side—a dance she’d watched her parents do till she could watch the
video on the inside of her eyelids. But never Cal. Of course, she
knew he smoked pot. He’d been arrested with a felonious quantity on
his person. But actually seeing him smoke—
She sank to the damp boards of the
dock, winded by the impact of her emotions.
Oh, God, no.
Her
son repeating her father’s life. She clenched her arms across her
waist and tried to pray, but her thoughts seemed to plummet into
the Intercoastal instead.
Gradually, grief receded, and rage
crashed back in its place. She texted Cal to come in and paced the
dock.
Cal palmed his phone, stared at it.
The drawbridge opened, slicing a ribbon of purple sky between the
two halves of the town. Cal pocketed the phone. He turned his face
toward the dock.
Starr halted, hands at her sides. If
Cal didn’t make a move in five minutes, she’d take a dinghy tied
behind one of the larger boats and row out to him.
Cal looked away. A gull swooped toward
the mouth of the Intercoastal and the freedom of the ocean. He
stood, took a long drag, and flicked the remains of the joint into
the river.
Starr watched Cal untie the rope from
the deck and drop into the dinghy, wondering if Cal obeyed because
he felt her fury from across the water.
He rowed with languorous strokes.
Muscles worked across his back, the cords of a man. He wasn’t the
six-year-old who pulled a Calvin and Hobbes prank or the teen who
skipped school. But he was still her son whom she loved with
desperation.
Cal tossed the oars into the bottom of
the boat and grabbed hold of the ladder. He shot a sullen glance at
her, then stared at the barnacle-encrusted piling in front of
him.
“
Evie came over this
morning in hysterics because you and Aly slept together. Didn’t I
teach you better than that?”
Cal raised bloodshot eyes to her. “We
did not have sex.”
She believed him, and she was
surprised. Maybe she was crazy, but something in his eyes, the
flatness of his voice convinced her. A mother knew when her son was
telling the truth. Relief sanded the edge off her anger.
“
I get down here and I see
you smoking weed, something no mother should ever have to witness.
I’m watching a rerun of a bad movie—my dad’s life.”
Cal’s jaw hardened. He stared past her
right ear.
“
People say pot’s not
addictive. That’s bullshit.”
Cal’s head jerked up.
Good. She wanted to shock him. She
probably hadn’t used a coarse word in four decades—since her
girlhood best friend’s mother taught her what they were. “You want
to be Leaf? Well, I have a story to tell you.” She crossed her arms
and stared down at the off-center part in Cal’s hair.
“
My father came home drunk
and fought with my grandfather. Leaf knew he’d never been able to
do anything good enough to please his father. And when he said as
much, my grandfather said, ‘You’re damn straight you haven’t.’
”
Cal’s knuckles whitened on the
ladder.
Starr sighed. “That was the last time
they saw each other—the night of my father’s high school
graduation. I heard the story when I was a teen one night when Dad
was flying particularly high.”
She tucked a wisp of hair behind her
ear that had fallen from her bun and tickled her neck. Her fingers
brushed the slick outline of her scar. “I researched his three
siblings on the Internet—all college graduates with white-collar
jobs. But my father chose a love affair with marijuana instead of a
real life. Pot numbed him from the pain his father generated, but
it also robbed Henna of a deep emotional connection with him. It
robbed me.” Her voice broke. She stopped, filled her lungs with
damp, fishy air.
Cal looked up, his eyes searching
hers. Something inside each of them welded in that
second.
Starr squatted down, shortening the
distance between them to a few feet. “We have an addict’s genes. If
you don’t make a choice, you’ll keep walking down this road.
Someday you’ll be a paranoid old man with no gut-level bond with
another human.
“
Maybe you can live
disconnected from me, but I can’t live disconnected from you. I’ll
starve. Maybe you think you can smoke recreationally. You can’t.
Not with our genes. In fact, I think you’re in too deep now. Only
God can get you out.”
Cal’s expression hardened and her
anger intensified.
“
How’s it working for you,
Cal—without God?” She rose, pirouetted, and walked down the pier as
calmly as if she exited the Nutcracker stage. Her chest and throat
ached to cry all the tears she’d never learned to cry.
The sound of Starr’s voice clanged off
the weed altered fun-house walls of his skull.
God, God, God,
God.
There was something his mother had
said he wanted to remember. But the slapping of the waves against
the dinghy seemed to separate into octaves, punctuated by a pelican
squawk, the deafening bass of wire and rope pummeling masts in the
wind.
Blood careened through his body. He
could feel it pulsing in his veins and capillaries, webbing through
the back of his head and in his throat—intensifying like headlights
recharged by a car’s generator.
The boat bounced in the small swells
of the river where it had drifted. He should thread the oars
through the oarlocks, angle the bow toward the
Escape
, and
row, but the process seemed too complex.
The stench of exposed barnacles filled
his nostrils—like Starr’s tirade. He didn’t want to remember it.
He’d smoked to forget her expectations. Still, something niggled at
him. Something important.
His mind merry-go-rounded to Aly. He
loved Aly’s order—everything in its place—the peace he felt when he
stared at his work, matted and framed on the wall of her condo.
Thoughts materialized, clouded, and wisped through his fingers.
She’d learned to read his art and understand things he didn’t know
how to voice. The guy inside meant something to her.
Aly’s face, the touchdown of his lips
on hers, the forest scent of her sleeping in his arms, the timbre
of her voice when she said she loved him a long time ago…. He’d
banked on Aly’s still caring. But it didn’t matter how she felt if
he had nothing to offer her.
The airplane engine drone of vehicles
crossing the causeway crept to an automobile hum. The crackling of
wind in his ears no longer sounded like maximum decibel radio
static. A musty blanket of dissatisfaction settled on
him.
The boat jostled, and he felt
disoriented. He eyed the marina, North Causeway Marine, the
opposite shore. He’d drifted into the middle of the river. He
shoved one oar through its metal circle. The second. He dug into
the water. Heaved the oars. Glanced over his shoulder at the
Escape
. Levered the dinghy five feet closer.
Starr had come down to the dock why?
His brain slogged through river silt. She’d been pissed. Odd. She
was critical, always. But clamped down. Under control. Because… he
slept with Aly.
Ha. If only.
Something about Cal’s smoking…
reminded her of Leaf.
His head cleared as he neared the
Escape
. He tied the dinghy up and hoisted himself onto the
deck. Leaf’s story. That was the thing he wanted to remember. He
sat on the deck until he scraped all the chad of his grandfather’s
cautionary tale from the fuzz of his memory.
He didn’t want to repeat history any
more than Starr wanted him to. He thought about the hundreds of
times he’d stopped by Leaf’s metal trailer on the beach. He’d
always chuckled at the queasy mix of hot dog and head-shop odors
that spilled out the window. But it wasn’t funny if it smelled like
your future.
He stumbled below to shower and shave
away the leftover lethargy. Lego pieces of a plan stacked one on
top of the other in his head. Starr’s criticism finally did
something other than make him want to quit trying.
October 16, second
post
Why did Van Gogh bleed bold
color and strokes on canvas? Did he go crazy because he chose
wrong? Have you ever made a decision and been plagued with second
thoughts?
Aly at
www.The-Art-Of-My-Life.blogspot.com
Ten minutes after teaching her last
class, Starr climbed the steps of the two-bedroom cement block
bungalow buried in foliage run amok where she grew up. Since she
married Jackson, she’d probably stepped foot into her mother’s
house less times than she’d birthed children.
Stale marijuana smoke crawled around
the door to where Starr stood, conjuring her childhood emptiness.
She hated how smells shot her back decades to a life she’d never
choose to revisit.
She reached a hand toward the door and
hesitated, unsure whether to knock or turn the knob.