Dead Artist by Ivan Jenson

Author:Ivan Jenson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Hen House Press
Published: 2011-06-23T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Dead artists did not come like archangels to visit his brother as he meticulously primed the walls of another home like a madman priming the walls of his asylum.

He was pressing some wealthy man's wife up against the plasterboard as she revealed to him that her husband hardly touched her and that she would surely soon be leaving him, but it was not the practical thing to do at this time. Now she backed him up against the wall, which kicked up a little white cocaine-like plaster dust. He already felt cornered by fate, which had rendered him talentless. He too tried his hand at painting, but due to a lack of draftsmanship ability, he was doomed to a world of abstraction. Not out of choice, because if he had a choice he would make the paintings that he saw in his dreams. He wished he could paint sci-fi fantasies where Herculean men floated in cosmos with their voluptuous female counterparts, scantily-clad like Greek slaves. As he kissed this other woman, Ray thought of his wife and her fashionable but prematurely white hair and how it seemed to him that she too was having an affair, not with a man but with her indulgent need to compete in poetry slams with performers half her age. As he lay this other man’s wife down on the tarp of the interior of her unfurnished home, and began the monotony of undressing her, Ray found himself preoccupied by a plan. His flight to Gold Haven was already booked for 6:45 that evening. The plan was simple, and it was to destroy his brother’s chance at new found success.

Before, it had been Milo who was obsessed with his sister Becky's success as a director of TV ads. In fact Milo had let the thought of his sister's financial success snowball inside him. It had become so extreme, that whenever he closed his eyes, he would see her smiling tightly from a recent face lift. Milo never understood until then how simple reoccurring thoughts can grow into disturbing concepts so big that they enter the mind like the foot of Goya’s giant, destroying everything else, including the rational thoughts that come into their path.

During a particular drought in his finances Becky had sent him a check for fifteen grand and that loving gift had siphoned off all the manhood within him. When Milo deposited the check, he studied the word “gift” written on it, and it dawned on him he that would never make any real money in his lifetime. And he remembered how she had once said to him, “If I had to live in that tiny studio of yours I would have killed myself a long time ago.” He had heard that refrain before.

Again Milo’s thoughts were filled with suspicion that reality was orchestrated in such a way that after he created a magnificent body of work and shipped it to New York, he would die in some inexplicable manner and then a gallery exhibit would be held posthumously and yield enormous wealth.

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