The Ghosting
My studio hides itself in an unfinished section of an otherwise finished basement. It’s hemmed in by concrete walls that are adorned, if you want to call it that, by my paintings, which hang somewhat precariously from picture moulding from which twined wire dangles from brass hooks.
The pictures spill into the finished rooms of the cellar and continue up the steps that lead to where most of the vital activity of my household occurs. My wife, Claratine, and her two teenage children, who have renamed themselves Aoxamoxomaxoa and Ng, sometimes venture downstairs, not to view my art’s progress, but to reset the internet connection and, on a few occasions, try on my wife’s old costumes left over from her stage career and preen before the mirror I use for self-portraits.
Though I am not an Impressionist, I sometimes consent to being labeled as such in order to procure sales, which have become quite rare in this age of lit screens and luscious lattes. If someone is buying, I will label myself a Futurist, a Calvinist or even a Trappist monk if it hastens the emergence of a checkbook and a pen. On one occasion I donned a fez, hoping to strike an eccentric image, but the would-be collector furrowed her brow and got out of there quickly.
A few years ago, in that basement, I experienced an unexplained occurrence that has left me flustered to this day. Though I portray a man of mystery while making art, I step willingly out of that role in everyday life; events that defy logic cause me a kind of distress that leaves me dazed, flummoxed, unable to adequately express myself verbally.
One late morning, everyone else out of the house doing the things they do, or claim to, I completed a session of painting, and was just plunging my last brush into some acrid liquid, when the temperature within my studio seemed to plummet. I registered a cold breeze across my face, looked around and noticed my suspended pictures swinging to and fro. My fan was switched off, and no doors to the outside were open. The paintings moved in unison, as if swaying to music I could not hear — though it is true I had airpods in my ear canals as a podcast, Things You Already Know, But Whatever, played. There may have been really scary music playing, somehow, but I’ll never know for sure.
As my skin braced against the cold breeze that had no source, a creeping sense of disappointment slowly enveloped me. Not for anything I had or hadn’t done, but for the world’s lack of appreciation of me. The feeling may have been unrelated to the change in temperature, for it was the same feeling I’d been experiencing daily for years. It usually happened in my studio.
Wiping the oil paint from my hands onto a towel my wife used to use, I stood up and investigated. Though the light in the next room, a sort of music studio converted to a workout space that was really a warehouse of abandoned projects, was dim, I saw a faint image of a woman facing the far wall. She seemed lit from within, and to move along with the swaying painting at which she was apparently viewing.
As a rule, I never disturb anyone who takes the time to behold the fruits of my creative labor. As I intimated earlier, these last twenty years or so have been tough on the visual artist, who must now compete with technology even more formidable than the horseless carriage or the bell. However, this was not any mere art appreciator, and definitely not a person currently residing in my house. No one, even the children, would ever wear such a mishmash of pretentious nineteenth-century costumery. Perplexed, entranced and wary, I stood and observed the observer observing.
At some point, perhaps after noticing my deft, gestural brushwork rendering an arrangement of huckleberries and turnips, the figure turned slowly and smiled in my direction. Through her, I could see the swaying still-life, and I realized one of the huckleberries looked kind of squarish. However, I refuse to believe, to this day, that the four-cornered huckleberry was what caused the apparition’s smile.
No, it was appreciation, that long-lost factor in the equation of fine art. She smiled as if to thank me, and I returned the gesture with a smile of my own, one that my wife often mistakes for an annoyed grimace. We faced each other, smiling, for what seemed like a few minutes, until my smile started to feel a bit false and I had to make a different expression.
I chose inquisitiveness. “Are you interested in the painting?” I asked.
The figure nodded slowly.
“Well, it was done last year, probably in the late spring, and is done with gouache paint on cotton duck, with a rabbit-skin primer.”
Her expression morphed to one of bafflement.
“It’s just paint on paper, really,” I assured her.
Her smile returned. I noticed then how low her front teeth were and how much of her gum the smile revealed. There was too much of it, as if death had dried her outer palate to the point where her top lip, instead of sliding easily down her gum, hung up on a ridge and lodged there like a stage curtain catching on a Styrofoam prop. It was frightening.
She floated to the landing of the stairs, seemingly to regard a different painting, this one a nude of a crazy guy who used to show up at our pastel drawing group and start disrobing and posing before anyone could say or do anything.
My ghostly visitor’s visage turned a horrid scarlet, and she turned around again, this time not quite facing me. “I, I…” I stammered, sorry for the breech of her modesty. “It’s a pastel.”
I was guessing from her attire she’d never seen a nude before, artistically speaking (I could divine little about her sex life), especially not a bold-colored chalk rendering of a man whose penis was probably larger (and, okay, more erect) than most you might see.
“You’ll probably like the next one more,” I offered, and she floated a few steps higher to the next painting, a pastoral scene featuring a guy working a horse-drawn plow. My guest’s head began to glow with a goldish-orange phosphorescence, as if someone had just lit her brain on fire.
When she turned around, her smile was heavenly — except, again, for the upper gum. Even though it was as luminescent as the rest of her head, it repulsed me as much as before. I tried to ignore it, and barely succeeded. “Like that one?” I asked.
Her whole figure seemed to nod, and vibrate in a way that excited me.
“Well, I am quite flattered.” The creeping sense of lack of appreciation was creeping away. “If you like it, I mean….”
Here is where I got nervous, the same point in a sales scenario that always rendered me tongue-tied and unsure of how to proceed.
But then she reached somehow into her costumery and produced what looked to be a purse. It was made from the finest ectoplasm, ringed with pulsating appliques, and there was other colorful stuff stuck to it. She looked at me expectantly.
“Well, if you’re interested,” I said, feeling bolder now, “I suppose I would sell it.” I told her my price in as confidently flippant a tone as I could muster. (I would divulge to you the actual price, but these details, even in a case such as this, are between the seller and the buyer. I promise you, however, it was a fair price.)
The glow of her head began to fade, slowly at first, then undeniably. Her formerly luminous smile seemed strained, and her upper gum seemed even more pronounced than before. Her mood, betrayed by her posture and brightness level, seemed wary, almost fearful. Her purse dissolved, then vanished.
“Of course,” I said, trying not to sound too desperate, “you could make payments.” Naturally, I wasn’t thinking this through. How would such an arrangement be structured in a case such as this? How would I remind her she’d missed a payment? Did she even know the term “layaway?”
She turned from me and continued up the staircase, not bothering to look at the next picture, a watercolor of a duck stepping brazenly out of a pond, or the next one, another nude of that same weirdo.
As she turned the corner and began ascending the next set of stairs, she slipped from my view. I didn’t bother to follow. By the absence of breeze and swaying pictures, I knew she was gone.
Many people over the ages have reported on ghost sightings; usually they are daily or at least weekly occurrences, repeating themselves to the point of familiarity and even comfort. This was not one of those cases. I never saw her again.
