Author's notes: Bear with me at my first attempt at X-Philes fanfic. I
have written other types of fics but Mulder and Scully are, as you no
doubt know, a bit hard to fully understand enough to write about. I
think I finally got it, but that is not for me to judge.
Disclaimer: These characters don't belong to me. Mulder and Scully are
the sole property of Chris Carter and his Peoples. But the artist belongs to me.
I like to watch people.
THE PAINTERS AND THE PAINTED
by Molly Grue
saras@earthlink.net
I'm not a stalker, not a serial killer, I'm not even a violent person. I'm an artist, and people fascinate me. That sounds stupid and too dramatic, I know.
I sit in the park with my pencils and a sketch book, and I draw any one
who takes my fancy. Mostly skinny women and old men.
I have a few long term subjects that I've been sketching for months now, and I have my favorites. Usually not the skinny women or the old men. My favorites have been well chosen.
They're one man and one woman. The man is tall and has an air of resolute bewilderment about him, and the woman is small and strong as the crest of a wave on a stormy ocean - to be poetic about it. His hair is dark and her hair is red. Very red. They are both beautiful, but none of these previous facts really capture my imagination. Almost everyone is beautiful, and it's dull.
The way that they look at each other is what got me. The way they touch, the way they stand, the very air between them is what I want to be able to draw. And I have trouble doing it. Maybe I'm too serious about my art, and random splashes of paint would work - but then I always thought that was cheap. Maybe I'm just not as good as I thought I was. Years of being the only artistically bound member of the Port Chester High School can swell your head. Maybe no one can draw the air between a man and a woman . . . wow. Profound. I should write that down somewhere.
Tonight it's just the man. He's standing, not too far away, leaning up against a wall of the bar. Very Bogey of him, I might add. He's watching people too. I can't help but pick up a pencil and begin to sketch his wonderfully spooky face. I always begin with his nose, because it's so dominant. That's being polite, and I'm done with that - let me refine my statement by referring to him as Cyrano the Second. He has a lovely nose, come to think of it. I think I'll call this sketch "Waiting." He looks as though he's waiting - I would know. Probably for her. How strange, how strange. At first, I thought they were siblings. They seemed to be made of one flesh, one person, split in two. When they stand apart, their bodies turn inwards, towards each other. When he touches her, I half expect his fingers to meld onto her back, I expect their skin will combine like fusing metals. They walk so close to each other, I wonder if they realize how close they always are. He wears a constant expression of "just about to" when he's with her. That, or an expression of uncertain devoutness.
She never really seems to react. I could slap her - in the height of my
occasional jealousy.
That's why she's so much more difficult to paint. I've seen apparent fear, rage, disappointment, and sadness on her face, but it was a long time before I saw her smile for the first time. I don't know what it was he said to her, but she turned around and smiled at him. I saw his shoulders tense, and watched as his hand, ready to fuse to her back, stopped in mid air, as if he thought contact would shatter her brief happiness. I wished he had touched her. There was another time, when, on a rainy day, they came in together, and he was carrying an umbrella for the both of them. He turned around to throw it in the rack, and her eyes fairly poured out a great storm of warm tenderness for him. He missed it. I didn't. I made it into a painting, and I called it "If." Forgive me for the corniness - I had just read Gatsby for the eighteenth time.
Today he's alone. People entering the bar give him a wide berth, for a reason that only they and their guts could tell. Maybe it's because he looks like a coiled wire, ready to spring. Christ, that was an awful simile - all of mine are. It's why I became an artist. Writing is too hard, you are constantly that close to utter hypocrisy and insipidness. Art is more . . . free.
Back to Mr. Nose. He also looks very tired. Very, very tired. I read somewhere once, that there are only four kinds of people in this world: the pursuers, the
pursued, the busy, and the tired. I put him down as a pursuer the first day I saw him. He was drunk as a skunk, and still drinking. He was muttering and I could have sworn I saw tears on his stubbled cheeks. He looked like a man about to kill himself, or at least somebody else. I drew him, then, for the first time. He was crying, muttering, drunk, and had a simple gold chain in his right hand. He was dangling it in front of his nose, and staring at it as if the answers to everything anyone would ever want to know were hidden in the gleam of the little gold cross. That one was dubbed "Without." I was pretty drunk too.
The next time I saw him, he was with her, the redhead. And she was wearing the cross. And he was staring at her every time she looked away. Staring as if she was a ghost, or an angel, or maybe both. I know that look. I use it often enough. She looked very tired. But I think, after watching her for so long, that she is also a pursuer. But she is tired, and he is pursued. They have edge, and I like edge. Most people like what they lack. Maybe they're lovers. Maybe they're married. I don't know. All I know is that, together, they are a strange medley of sexual desire in it's most oblique form, simple friendship, a bond of trust, and some unknown ingredient. Maybe that missing link is the key to capturing the essence that I strive for. Is it just me, or do I constantly fall into 'Marvel Major Villain' speech? Never mind. It doesn't matter. I gave up on words.
I've shown my sketches of the man and woman to a friend of mine who owns a New York gallery, and he's sure I'll get a show. But I can't display their portraits without their permission. So, I decided I'd ask them today. I can't bring myself to talk to him, though. In my own way, I envy him, and her, so much that it's almost like pain. They are shrapnel in my skin. I want whatever it is that they have together. I know I can't "have" it, so I draw them. Attempting to capture, and failing. Danger, Will Robinson. Danger.
Maybe talking to him would help. Exercise the lessons taught you by
'Seventh Heaven.'
I get up nervously, and the sound of my chair squeaking against the tiled floor makes me flinch. I steel my shoulder-blades, and march right up to where Mr. Nose is sitting. His back is hunched, and he's staring into his beverage. His mouth conveys a sense of disappointment, his eyes eagerness, and his nose . . . bewilderment. I watched him for a brief moment, and then tentatively spoke up.
"Sir?"
He turned his face upwards, and opened his mouth very slightly. His eyes
still eager, but now suspicious as well, he tilted his jaw at me. I took
that as a sign to continue.
"I know this must sound odd, but I'm an artist and I would like to . . .
ask your permission to . . . draw you." I was stammering and I knew it. For some odd reason, I was actually blushing, as if I was a child caught with her hand in the cookie jar. His chin remained tilted, and his eyes narrowed.
"Actually," I continued, "I've already drawn you. Many times. And the
woman that's with you, your . . . "
"Partner," he said. I hadn't known what his voice sounded like. It was
wonderfully graveled, and also soft at the same time. He spoke, I realized, like a child in a man's body.
"Your partner. Yes. Well, ummn, do I have your permission to . . . show
the drawings to . . . other people? In an art show?"
His chin, which had been going, slowly, back to it's point of origin, tilted again, but there was a spark of sympathetic understanding, and laughter, in his eyes.
"I wouldn't use your names, because, well, I don't know them, and, well. . ."
"You can draw me, it's OK," he said, kindly now, making me feel once more like a child, "But I'll have to ask Scull . . . my partner . . .if it's OK with her."
"Thank you! Thank you so . . ."
"On one condition," he cut me off.
I tilted my chin at him, and waited for the blow, trying not to think - just to speak. When I think I slip into cynicism.
"Can I see the . . . drawings that you've made?"
I nodded vigorously and almost sprinted my way across the diner to get at my portfolio, still lying on the table. I ran back to the man and dumped the contents of the manila folder onto the table in front of him. There were quite a few. Charcoal, pencil, ink, oil, water color. I had drawn them every way I knew how. His eyes widened, as did the gap between his lower and upper lip. His forehead seemed to grow, and I knew he was puzzled.
"I hope you're not . . . what I meant to say was, I . . . find you and your partner very fascinating. As an artist, I mean. You are . . . difficult to draw."
He was staring at me now, and the word "partner" seemed to have inspired some hostility in his demeanor. I didn't know what else to verbally offer, so I looked down. He watched my face for a few moments, I could feel his eyes on me, and then his fingertips closed in on the corner of a drawing. He pulled it out, and regarded it with great scrutiny. I craned my neck to see which one it was. A watercolor of him and the woman, from the back. She was in front, wearing a long trench coat. He was in back of her, taking up most of the "frame." Her orange hair was spilled across her coat, and she was looking back at him. Her face was almost gold, I had tried to portray her luminescence with color, and she was smiling like a Mona Lisa in love. His face wasn't visible, but fingers were pressed against the small of her back.
It was, if I do say so myself - which I do, a good one.
He stared at it. And stared at it. I became uncomfortable, and grabbed another sheet, which I slid in front of the one he was so interested in. It was one of her, by herself, just a face. I had done it because she had just cut her hair. It was shorter then I had ever seen it, and, well, her face was . . . haunting. She looked as though she had just read her own death sentence. Very dramatic stuff. Wins the Oscar. Grey tears were brimming in the penciled eyes, and her black mouth was clenched in resolution. He became very stiff, and I quickly reached for another. This was one of only their hands, in charcoal. His larger, longer fingers were resting above her small, neater ones. It was a
beautiful sketch, and I'm not usually satisfied with anything I do. He relaxed slightly. I got out another, and another, and so on for . . . I don't know how long. He became more relaxed as we went through them. He actually laughed outright at a few: one in which he was giving her a very goofy grin, and she was covering her smile with a newspaper. One which showed her laughing, and just the laughing made him laugh too. One - him sporting a puppy-dog look, and her, arms crossed, staring himdown, eyebrow lifted.
A few made him wince, single portraits of him, drunk and melancholy. Singles of her, sober and melancholy.
We had gone through the entire pack, with only two left to go. I knew which ones they were, and I looked at him hungrily to catch the initial response. The first one, my luckiest capture. I brought a camera, one day, to try and catch the more fleeting glances between them. The best had been immortal. Necks up only.
His index finger was perched on her jaw line. His arm was raised above the table, and hers were crossed. His eyes held only one real identifiable emotion in them, and it was obvious. Lust. They fairly glowed with it. She had the same . . . glow in her own glance, which rested on his outstretched arm. I drew it lightly, so that nothing except the bare theme of the image would come through. The effect that the lightness conveyed was strange. It looked like a dream, even
supernatural in a bizarre sort of way. I had also drawn his arm bare, and her throat the same way. His reaction was good. He was caught off guard, and real shock played with his features for a moment. I don't think he had ever realized how often they looked at each other with physical desire. But there it was, on the page, preserved forever.
He dropped the paper as if it had been on fire, and took out the last one himself. They were literally locked in a bear hug, and it was raining. They were outside, and I had, again, brought my camera. People milled all around them, the rain poured down in sheets, but they were oblivious to it all. He looked up at me for the first time since I had handed him the portfolio. I prepared to be sued or read my rights.
"Can I have a few?"I exhaled.
"Actually, these are all copies. The originals are at my apartment. You can have them all, if you like. That's why I brought them." There was a pause, and I added - almost grudgingly, "Show them to her, please. I want her to have that last one."
He nodded, and shuffled the sheets in silence, sliding them carefully into the folder. He stood, and put the folder inside his trench coat. He looked down at me from his substantial height, and I couldn't tell if he was angry or embarrassed.
"You can display them. They're . . . ," he faltered, looking for the right words.
"They're beautiful, I know." The words slipped out my mouth. His lids
lowered, and I opened my mouth again - having no idea what would come out. "But that's only because I was drawing something . . . ," I faltered, looking for the right words, or any words.
He stared at me, his head crooked in seeming worry at what I might say. I shrugged, he smiled, and then walked out the doorway with a quick step - almost a jog.
I watched him go, and exhaled as the door closed. I was standing up when the door reopened, and he ran inside. He jogged to me, and shook my hand briskly. "Thank you," he said, and then ran out again. I shook my head, and contemplated. For some reason or other, I felt a smile coming on.
Sometimes I wonder if anyone might ever paint me. Standing alone, the world passing by me left and right, smiling at a closed door. Make a hell of a painting.
If you enjoyed that, help me have some enjoyment in my dull existance without Mulder and Scully. :) FEEDBACK!! saras@earthlink.net
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