The Painter

She had lived years alone, but in only the past day, she’d picked up the phone, seemed to make fast friends with Pierre, the short Parisian painter now standing beside her, who was explaining in person, he was coming out of his solitude after a terminal diagnosis--hoping to share his pearls of great price with anyone who could fully hear.

He’d been struck with a lifting desire in this knowledge of his end, to fully embrace the talent he’d lived, he told her as he stood close, here in the street, his small eyes behind round, wire-framed glasses, gazing up at her in all earnestness.

And though he was asking, it was more of a statement of his desire to paint her, he wanted to attempt his masterpiece born of the heartache and beauty coming from this new perception bestowed only those saying goodbye to life.

When she’d asked how long, he’d said, “I could be gone in as little as two weeks.”

He’d used the online dating service in order to find a subject he felt compelled to paint, a depiction of what he’d dreamed espoused his own femininity and this was probably a good way to find a woman who wouldn’t have a husband putting a stop to the all-night sessions he thought he’d need. Hopefully, in their age range, she wouldn’t be entirely responsible for any children.

He was shortly apologetic about using a more handsome photo, one of his college friends, and lying about his height too, but before she could answer, he held his hand up and admitted too that he’d met two others today and they hadn’t measured up.

The first, a brilliant red head, but there was something phony about the way she carried herself even at fifty, and the next, a far cry from her picture, he hadn’t been looking to paint a depressed peasant with a fairly hardy mustache.

Apparently, she was what he was looking for, tall, still slim, with nice angles to capture, pronounced bends in elbows and hands, a long neck and the pattern of having once been a beauty, still evident there on her face with her symmetrical brows and straight nose.

Would you be willing, he asked?

She sensed a slowing of time, came out of her thoughts, and took in the two of them, essentially strangers, propelled into the intimacy of his impending death, standing just outside the flow of milling people, looking through the chain-linked fence at an expanse of green-park and patches of trees beneath them.

Photo Credit: Muillu/unsplash