Page 24 of The Light House

They went down the hallway and stood together in the studio, suddenly like renovators mapping out grand plans with animated waves of their arms as they shared ideas and thoughts.

“I’ll move the easel,” Blake said. “Maybe that bench as well,” he added. His eyes were narrowed, scheming, understanding the intricacies of the process and seeing the room, not as it was, but how it must be. “And then I’ll have you standing here,” he gripped her lightly by the shoulders, moved her on shuffling feet like a mannequin until she was positioned at the window, leaning on the wooden sill and staring out into the blackness.

Connie glanced sideways at him. “Where will you paint me from?”

Blake took a couple of steps away from her, his eyes everywhere at once. “Here,” he said decisively, and he scraped his heel across the old floorboards, making a faint mark through the film of grey dust. “The light will spill across your face and your arms and then filter across the far wall, fading gradually.”

“Props?” Connie asked.

Blake blinked. He hadn’t considered the possibility. He thought for a moment, and then shook his head. “No, it needs to be you – your face, your shoulders. Nothing else matters. Anything more and the painting will become confused.

“What should I wear? What about jewelry?”

“Do you have any?”

That made Connie arch her eyebrows in uncertainty. She had a jewelry box. It was buried under blankets and clothes in the trunk of the car, but nothing expensive, nothing exquisite enough for a painting. She shook her head slowly. “No,” she said at last. “Nothing that would be worth painting.”

Blake nodded. It wasn’t important. The more he played the vision in his mind, the more he understood the need for simplicity. “I’ll need to paint your bare shoulders,” he said and drew a line across his own chest, level with his armpits, using the flat edge of his hand.

“You want me topless?” Connie’s voice was a panicked squeak.

“No,” Blake reassured her. “But maybe in a bra, with the straps off your shoulders. Would you be comfortable with that?”

Connie’s eyes became glazed for a moment of modesty, and then she gave a little shrug of her shoulders. “Yes.”

Blake grabbed at the easel, set it on the mark he had scraped across the floor, and then went striding purposefully across to the rack where the rows of canvases were stored. He ran his finger along the shelf, and then snatched at a canvas. It was three feet high, and two feet wide. He took the canvas back to the easel and set it vertically on the crossbar. Connie left her place at the window and peeked curiously.

“It’s orange!” she said.

Blake looked up, so distracted that the sound of her voice came as a surprise. “Huh?”

Connie pointed. “The canvas is orange.”

“Yes,” Blake said.

“But it’s bright orange, Blake. Surely you can’t paint on that!”

The canvas had been painted the same bright color as a ripe piece of the fruit.

Blake smiled indulgently. “Tips and techniques,” he said vaguely. “Every one of my paintings was prepared the same way – under every canvas I showed you was this same shade of orange.”

She didn’t believe him and it wasn’t until he selected several of the paintings she remembered so well and pointed to the edges of the gallery wrap where there was still orange residue that she finally lapsed into incredulous silence.

“White canvas is a common amateur mistake,” Blake explained. “But for an artist who wants to paint realism, it just doesn’t work. The finished painting always lacks something intangible.”

“Which is?”

“Warmth,” Blake said. “The warmth of the sun, the light. Everything in nature gives off warmth – even fence posts and innocuous inanimate objects. So I prepare the canvas and then lay down an undercoat of orange. Then, as I begin to work the painting, some of that orange color glows through the top layers, no matter how thickly the paint is applied. It just seems to radiate – and that’s how I create depth and a sense of realism that maybe some other painters can’t capture.”

“But in a portrait?”

“It’s just as important as it is in a seascape – maybe more,” Blake said. “We’ll find that out the day after tomorrow when we start work.”

30.

The next morning Connie left early for Hoyt Harbor to collect the clothes and personal items she had left at the rental house, while Blake dusted Chloe’s bedroom and changed the sheets.

He felt a burden lifted from his shoulders today; an unexpected sense of lightness that came from having shared the pain of Chloe’s tragic death, and the shadow that incident had cast over his life. The grief never went away; the sorrow still seeped from him – and it always would – but now he sensed a glimpse of his old self emerging, rising up slowly to the surface from the darkness of despair.

He went to the bedroom window and stared out at the sweeping view of the beach. The morning was warm, the shadows across the sand shortening as the sun began to climb higher across the sky. Out on the ocean he could see the far off specks of fishing boats, bobbing like little corks on the swells, and closer to shore, the waves that curled before the beach were a translucent, vivid green.

It was a perfect summer’s day – and with a shock, Blake realized suddenly how lonely he was.

It was Connie of course – she had infused herself into his life, coming bright and smiling like a high wind through a house and sweeping away the gloom and the sadness so that he missed her when she was gone. He stayed at the window but now the view became blank, replaced by a vision of her, and the poignant understanding in her face as she had wept for him the night before.

He was lonely, and he was alone. And he didn’t want to feel like that any more. No matter how briefly Connie would be in his life, Blake decided it was at last time to make fresh memories – happy ones to fill the space in his heart he had given over to darkness.

He was also infected with an unexpected enthusiasm for painting once more. There was a tingle of anticipation in his fingers, and a feeling of daunting anxiety at the prospect of picking up his brushes and resurrecting the skills he had honed, directing them to a fresh challenge that was untainted by his memories. Never again would he paint the ocean, but now, at last, he would paint again. Maybe one last time – one last chance to create the perfect work, for always the looming threat of blindness hung over him.

He finished in Chloe’s room, drew the window wide open and let the breeze off the ocean scour the walls of tears and sadness. The light spilled over the dark corners, chased away the ghosts of his regret, and then he closed the door quietly behind him.

Connie returned after lunch and came bursting and banging through the front door, calling out to him in gasps of laughter with a cardboard box in her arms. “I’m back!” she cried out. “Did you miss me?”

Her hair was awry, flicked across her face by the breeze and her cheeks were flushed pink. She dropped the box to the ground with a theatrical groan and stood back with her hands on her hips, breathing hard, her breasts beneath the tight cotton of her t-shirt rising and falling. She pouted her lips, blew the errant tendrils away from her face, and Blake couldn’t help but smile.

“That’s all of it?” he asked, glancing down at the box.

She nodded. “I’m the kind of girl who likes to travel light,” she smiled playfully. “Everything else I own is in the trunk of the car.”

Blake carried the box into the bedroom and stood back. Connie stepped across the threshold and cast her eyes around the room, taking it all in with a single glance. She went to the window as if drawn there, and stared out across the beach, standing on her tiptoes to see past the low shrubs so that Blake could not help but notice the cheeky clench of her bottom within the tightness of her jeans.

“The view is beautiful,” Connie’s voice brimmed with enthusiasm. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen something quite so perfect.”

“Nor

me,” Blake said with feeling.

31.

They spent the rest of the day cleaning out the studio, re-arranging furniture, and sweeping away great billowing clouds of dust so thick on the ground that when Thad Ryan arrived in the afternoon with the weekly delivery of groceries, he thought for a moment that the house had caught fire.

It was late in the afternoon when Blake stood back satisfied. His sleeves were rolled up high on his forearms and his shirt clung to his back with sweat. Connie was cleaning the window and she turned to him at last, exhausted, with dust on her face like a pale powdered mask.

“Enough,” Blake decided and Connie threw down the cleaning rag into a bucket of dirty brown water.

They went down to the beach in a solemn procession at sunset and then Connie took charge of the kitchen with a subtle feminine propriety. She grilled steaks, gave Blake orders, and cooked ground beef for Ned. For the first time in as long as they could remember, both man and dog ate a meal that had not come from a can.

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