your face, and everything else

B was, at one point, a handsome, energetic young man. He had clear eyes and a sheepish smile that made strangers want to help him. He and A became friends in college. They had both left small towns and went to the city to study business administration. A was outgoing and personable, and made many friends easily, which was good for B, who tended to latch onto one person. Once, when he  was drunker than he would care to remember, A  remarked that B was like a remora on the underside of a shark. A was serious and practically minded, and would bring B to parties with him with the sole intention of getting him laid. For some time, B played along with this game. In the end, B’s desires were too high flung for A’s amateur matchmaking, and A moved on to other subjects. 

Even at that early age, B couldn’t follow through on his practical pursuits. He fell behind in his classes, despite attending the study groups that A insisted on bringing him to. B began painting in his junior year, and as A graduated with honors, B took classes in an aimless fashion, flirting with academic probation until one year after A’s graduation, when he moved out of the dorm room he had shared with A and into an apartment on the other side of town.

The two friends lost touch for some time. A continued on to business school, while B took a job waiting tables at an upscale restaurant. He would get off work at 2 or 3 in the morning and drink coffee until the sunrise, when he would paint the changing of the light. A was fortunate in his pursuits and became a successful junior executive before his 20’s were through. Pragmatic in all things, he had married young as well. She was a sensible woman with light brown hair and a slow temper, who A liked because she was pretty but didn’t draw too much attention. 

One day, after a few years without any contact, A was out to dinner with his wife and several other junior executives from his firm when he saw B walk up to the table. B was halfway through reciting a script of specials before he recognized A. The two embraced, and immediately the distance between them evaporated. After dinner, A’s wife went home without him, hanging onto the arm of another junior executive that promised to walk her to the door, while A waited at a bar for B to get off. He found B to be changed in a way that he couldn’t describe. He was thin and his hair was greasy, although that had always been the case. The voice and face that belonged to his friend were almost unchanged, but something in his eyes was different. They drank and spoke nonstop for an hour before B revealed anything about himself. 

A asked about B’s paintings, and B began a recollection that turned into unbroken reverie. Over the loud music at the bar, B spoke about his painting, about his singular pursuit of one image that had become burned irreparably into his mind. A leaned closer and tried to follow, but over the music all he could gather were fragments of his friend’s obsession that didn’t seem to connect to one another in any meaningful way. The details faded in and out and A tried to piece them together. B spoke about a woman’s face that he had seen inside of a bus from the street. He said that he had begun to sketch her on the back cover of a novel, but the light turned green before he could finish. He had copied her half-drawn likeness hundreds of times over the next year, and went on to talk about how he rode that bus line to the end dozens of times at all different times, drawing and redrawing her face from one dusty half-remembered memory for over a year. After a few months, he stopped searching for the woman. Just as he had given up looking, she began to come to him. He would see her face in paintings across different eras of history, but only for a moment, winking at him from behind the canvas before disappearing again, only to return months later in the reflection of light on a body of water, before disappearing into the depths. A listened politely at first, but as B went on, he began to experience a strange mix of revulsion and interest. B’s excitement was contagious, and A felt like he was on cocaine, nodding along to the ramblings of this thin, strange man he recognized as his friend.

When the bar had closed, B asked A if he would like to come to his apartment and see his paintings. A said yes, and they stumbled two blocks together in the early hours of the morning, laughing like they were children again. They walked up five flights of stairs, and B dropped his keys three times before finding the deadbolt. A knew his friend was poor, but was shocked at the poverty of his apartment, which to him seemed so deep that it must have been a choice. Canvases leaned up against every inch of wall, and A had to tiptoe between several spread across the floor just to reach the bathroom. B brought a few examples out for A to judge. A looked at them quietly, his mind churning slowly and trying to remember the terms he had written on flashcards in an art history class almost ten years ago. He looked at several canvases of varying sizes and spoke appreciatively of the quality of line and of the composition. He asked several polite questions about the process, not bothering to listen to the answers or perhaps merely too drunk to do so properly. 

A left the apartment and got into a cab. Sitting in the backseat, he thought of his friend. Truthfully, he felt nothing looking at the canvases B showed him. If the paintings had elicited any reaction in him, they had awoken a sense of pity that he had tried to drown. They seemed to be empty, devoid of any real meaning, and unpleasant to look at. He had seen the same face scratched out hundreds of times across the walls, and looked at it until it lost its form, no longer recognizable as anything but a series of clumsy marks. He felt a guilty lump grow in his throat. When he got home, A laid in bed and looked at his wife as she slept. She had gone to bed without brushing her teeth, and he could smell her dinner on her breath. A laid awake, wondering if he ever would have ridden a bus to the end to get a second glance at her face. Soon, his mind wandered to other things and he fell asleep.

Over the next few months, A hosted a series of informal gatherings at his house. He invited colleagues from work, old friends from college, and his wife’s friends, whose husbands came dutifully as if they had leashes around their necks. These parties were held, ostensibly, for specific occasions; housewarming, halloween, Super Bowl Sunday, but in A’s mind, they were held only for B’s benefit. A tried his best to ingratiate B to the other guests, professionals and homemakers who were titillated by their proximity to a painter, a title that sounded bohemian and exotic. At first, B played the role they expected. When they asked about his work he launched into diatribes about the eternal feminine, about Barthes and Balzac and other names they all half-remembered, maneuvering the unexpecting women with his bony hands to explain Contrapposto as the party roared with laughter. As these gatherings went on, his shenanigans were met with less good humor each time. He became a malevolent spirit drinking quietly in the back of the room, a dark cloud that was accepted by the group as an inevitable inconvenience, like rain or traffic. 

At one of his parties, A invited a painter he knew from a friend of a friend, a woman who was mousey and pretty and stood still to hide the fact that she was drunk. He introduced her to B. He’s a romantic, A said, just like you. That’s not at all true, B said, I’m a pragmatist down to my bones. They spoke politely about painting for a few minutes, and B soon quit her to go get a drink. He found A and, as quickly, as if he was catching his breath, told him that he was in love with the painter. He returned to her and began speaking in the manner of an interrogation. After a few minutes of furtive conversation, B leaned in and kissed her on the mouth with authority. The two were inseparable for the next few months, although A never saw them speak a word to one another that wasn’t absolutely necessary. As abruptly as the relationship began, it ended. B said that they had merely fallen apart, but when A ran into the painter at some social gathering, she wasn’t so cavalier. He’s gay, she said. Aren’t you his best friend, shouldn’t you know? 

B became increasingly thin as these months went by. All the weight he lost seemed to go to the bags beneath his eyes, and he stopped bathing regularly. At a party for the Fourth of July, A pulled him aside and asked B if he was doing okay. He said yes, better than okay even, great. He was closer than ever to uncovering the truth in his work. The face, he said, had just been an obstacle, something put in his way to obscure the path to Truth with a capital T. A felt a pit in his stomach harden as he listened. B said he had gotten fired at the restaurant, or stormed out and quit, it was hard to follow his train of thought in those months, and had more time than ever to paint at this pivotal moment, even if he was hard up for cash. A offered to pay B’s rent for a month or two, or failing that, offered him a job at his firm, in the mailroom or something similar. He was earnest in his desire to help, which is perhaps why it stung so much when B began to scream at him. Their fight boiled over into the rest of the party, and eventually the two had to be restrained and B left, screaming insults at all the guests he had never seen in the light of day.

The two lost touch again after their fight on the Fourth of July. A had felt an immediate sense of guilt, but pride compelled him to maintain his distance after his assistance had been refused and his own character rebuked so publicly. He worried about his friend, but the rhythms of his life continued and he soon forgot about the fight. The gatherings at his house resumed as normal after a while, and were better attended than ever before save for one guest. A’s wife became pregnant, and he was so swept up in the bliss of imminent fatherhood that his old friend became resigned to a dusty corner of his memory reserved for old flames and dead relatives. 

One morning in the spring, his wife gave birth to a small boy, with a sallow face and prematurely dark eyebrows, who resembled neither of his parents. His wife lay recovering at the hospital for three days.  A brought his wife and their newborn home on a bright Sunday morning. As he tried to recognize the face of the ruddy creature in its bassinet, he received a phone call from an unknown number. In a gruff voice over the phone, a police officer said that B had committed suicide, and that he had no living family they had been able track down. He said that A’s phone number had been written in sharpie on the face of the refrigerator. He went on to talk about how the refrigerator had been without power for some weeks and how the food had rotted and the smell permeated the apartment, they had only found the body because of the neighbors’ complaints about the odor that had come from the food not the body. This was supposed to be comforting in some perverse way, but A never heard him, he could only hear a sharp ringing coming from someplace deep between his ears.

That morning, A went to visit the apartment and collect B’s things. His wife protested, hand on her stomach, saying that now was not the time for her to be left by herself. A promised to be quick, that he would be back within the hour. A met the superintendent of the apartment building on the street, and walked the five floors up to B’s apartment, where he was let in. The superintendent told him to be quick, they had a cleaning crew coming later that day and a realtor coming in the morning. A said he had somewhere to be anyway and entered the apartment. Somehow, the disarray was worse than the last time he had entered, and there were sketchbooks and canvases and paints stacked on one another around the perimeter of the single room apartment. A saw the contents of the apartment were all arranged to encircle a single item in the middle of the room, with a bare strip of filthy hardwood on each side.

A walked up to the center of the room and picked it up. It was a small canvas, no larger than his chest, and he held it to the light. He saw a series of simple markings, and the longer he stared the more profoundly they appeared to be dug into the canvas. He felt something break inside his stomach, and as he looked into the canvas, he saw his own face, there, alongside everything else, all flattened onto a small rectangle of linen in the dark room, and began to weep, although he knew not for whom.