With wide, what-the-fuck-are-you-doing eyes, Jess looked at me and teased, “What’s up, baby? Afraid I’ll find your teenage porn stash?”
My dad threw his head back and guffawed. Then, following Jess’s lead, he quipped, “I can’t imagine teenage Ben with a porn stash. But if he had one, it was probably something completely unidentifiable as porn to the naked eye—like clippings of people carrying cleaning supplies.”
Jess put her hand over her mouth to cover her laughter for a second before asking, “Wait, are you telling me Ben has a cleaning kink?” She put her hands on her hips. “No wonder he’s always sidling up behind me when I’m doing the dishes.”
Grinning, my father pulled open the studio door and ushered Jess inside. Once again, Jess had charmed her way into my life with her balance of brazen boldness and warmth.
Having pointed out that there were fresh towels in the linen closet and bottles of water in the mini fridge, my dad left us to get settled and washed up before joining my family and friends for dinner later. He exited by squeezing his way out the door like an old-time vaudevillian star, with his head popped through the crack in the door until the very last second. Once he was gone, Jess and I were both quiet. She stood there fingering a loose thread at the base of the blouse she was wearing. And then after a beat she sighed before saying, “Listen, Ben, I’m… uh, I’m sorry about whatever.” I didn’t know exactly why she was apologizing. And I wished she wasn’t. It felt weird to see her uncomfortable. I didn't like it. “I get carried away sometimes, and if, you know, you feel like I’m taking it too far, just give me the evil eye or like pinch me.”
“Stop,” I said firmly. “You’ve done nothing wrong. You are wonderful at this. Honestly, you should be an actress.”
She looked down, trying to hide her blush, but I could still make out the sweet rosy pink that tarnished the apples of her cheeks. God, she was sort of irresistible, a tawdry balance of wild and sweet. I wanted to cover her in sugar icing and eat her alive. But she wasn’t mine that way, no matter how it felt right now. Needing to reaffirm the boundary between us, I teased, “Honestly, you are gifted and clearly, an actress is a much more legitimate pursuit than photography.”
Devilishly, her eyes snapped up and she scoffed. “Please,” she snarled churlishly. “Don’t speak to what you don’t really know about.”
Even as I condemned her passion, my timbre was light and jovial. “Do tell. What is it that the photographer creates?”
She shook her head at me like many before her, and then she said, “We’re not going to have this conversation. But I want to be clear, that is not because I think you're right or because I don’t have the chutzpah to go toe to toe with you on this topic. We are not going to have this conversation because I’d rather not remember your utter dismissal of the thing that defines me as a person, while I’m pretending to be crazy about you.”
I shook my head, unable to move on. “I just don’t get it. How can photography define someone? Where is the artistry? The technique?”
Her nostrils flared, signaling that rage had begun to percolate under her skin. “You’re being ignorant, Ben. The camera is a tool, just like your paintbrush. How did you study all over the world—in places that clearly embrace a century of photographic artistry—and still maintain this incredibly narrow-minded perspective?” Watching her spirit catch fire was enthralling; it made my heart pound and my cock hard. She went from zero to sixty in a matter of milliseconds, and she was smart doing it. I should have been getting angry, but instead I was turned on, picturing her naked astride my lap, screaming her pleasure with the same willfulness she was displaying now. “A photographer must be concerned with all the elements you concern yourself with—color, shape, line, composition. But even if that wasn’t true, isn’t there an argument that the job of the artist is to present something that renders the art lover changed.”
I couldn’t help myself, I kept pushing her. “The job of the artist is tocreatesomething that renders the art lover changed.”
“Argh. You are so incredibly literal. It’s utterly infuriating,” she harrumphed, tossing her purse on the table next to her. “Once again, we are not having this conversation.” She sighed and rubbed her eyes, seemingly trying to find her calm, before she asked, “What’s the plan for sleeping?”
I wanted to continue arguing. In a matter of mere hours, I’d gone from finding her personality grating to thinking arguments with her were the most fun I’d had in a very long time. But also, her insistence on maintaining decorum grounded me in the reality of our situation.
“I will sleep on the couch, of course,” I consented gentlemanly.
She looked around the room and then quizzically asked, “What couch?”
I crossed the room and pulled open the door just to her left. She must not have realized that the guesthouse had multiple rooms because she sort of gasped, “Oh,” as I revealed the space, and then her eyes centered on the room beyond the door. It was the actual studio. The room filled with my early work. The work that I showed to no one. Captivated by what she was looking at, she didn’t ask my permission before crossing the threshold. She just stepped past me, entering the space.
I watched her, drifting from one painting to the next as if in a trance. The way she looked at them didn’t feel like judgment. She didn’t seem to be aching to voice her critique or render one better than another. Instead, she seemed to bask in them. She stood before each as if they spoke to her, whispering secrets that they had never even taken the time to tell me.
She turned to me, her body framed by a neon abstract I painted as a teen, reminding me of the Virgin Guadalupe, as she said, “Why have I never seen these before?”
Silence settled around us as I searched my mind for a way to answer that wasn’t embarrassing or uncomfortable. I couldn’t come up with one, so finally I told the truth. “No one has seen them.”
Her brow furrowed before she turned back to my paintings, and then incredulously throwing her arms in the air, she exclaimed, “Oh God, why not?”
The tone of her voice made me feel like she was literally in pain.
“They are just my teenage musings.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“No? What do you mean, no?”
“These are your masterpieces, Ben. These are the paintings that prove you are the best of our generation. You cannot hide these from the world.”
I laughed. My father felt the same way and it was ludicrous. I loved the paintings in my studio, I did. They were the outpourings of my heart as a young man. They spoke to my grief at being different from my parents and the turmoil of growing up gifted and being an outcast because of it. They were absolutely a part of my soul, but they weren’t masterpieces. They lacked technique and structure. They were just explosions of emotion.
“Why are you laughing?” she asked, markedly upset by my response.
I swung my hand before me, indicating the paintings in the room. “These are the musings of a boy, not masterpieces.”