Someone Else's Muse (Portrait of Eloise)

 Someone Else’s Muse (Portrait of Eloise)

 

I think, I have always been lonely.

 Not alone, of course, that would be ridiculous. There are plenty others here with me, in this sea of faces, oil and wax and bronze, both lively and deadlike by turn. None of them match me. I am lucky that way – the Untitleds across the room continually bicker for having the same subject, insisting each one is the true Henry or Robert or whatever the man’s name is. I think it is Henry. For a man who spends so much time in this room he speaks very little.

 Henry is new to me. I once lived in a very different house with my subject and a man, much shorter than Henry, with a tangle of ginger hair. I don’t like mess in the slightest, but for some reason he reminded me of the lighthouse on the leftmost wall, a tumbling, turbulent space with distant thunder. After I was born, and lived there, he always matched that ferocity in his walk, his speech. I think my subject knew that, towards the end. Anyone could hear him screaming at the white coated people that drifted though the house, with spectacles and clipboards.

 My subject spent a lot of time in my room. Or perhaps it was her room. She didn’t sleep there, but the time she spent curled up next to the window like a sunbathing cat oozed ownership. Always with a book, either for reading or writing in. I watched her fumble it to the floor once, pages fluttering with graceful, lovely shapes adorning the pages. I had never seen flowers before, in any form, and the idea captivated me. I imagined myself in a room full of them, climbing the walls and framing all of us in the room with such delicacy.

 There are still flowers in this room, too – live ones, on a table by the door. I assume they’re flowers, at least. Cup shaped and a deep red, not the lilies she spoke so fondly of, but beautiful in their own right. The colorless man a few pieces down from me informs me that they’re called roses. He’s a strange one – no one I’ve seen before either – although the scar on his face tells me his subject, at least, is interesting.

 The ginger man had a scar as well, when he finally returned. Him and my subject had left together, her face barely visible on the bed with wheels. He returned alone, much later. We had all whispered among ourselves – the little girl chasing a kite wondered, in her morbid way, if he had hurt her. The man holding a guitar shushed her, saying he’d never do such a thing. But we all wondered, nevertheless. As young as I still was, I believed her, and when he did return, a scar on his lower arm, I took it as proof. Yet in my heart – be it from my subject or my own intuition – I know this is not the case.

 Most of us left the next day – me and the girl and the lighthouse, and a few others from different rooms. We were carried into another wheel-borne thing, a jolting, dark box that at times jostled so badly I feared I might tear in two. The only word I could make out in the hushed conversations between the man and two others in overalls was “estate”.

 When we arrived, they removed us with much gentler hands, carrying us, one by one, into a cavernous, quiet space with somber faces in rows, stretching to the very back wall. There were too many eyes – all focused on us, watching. Waiting. A man stepped up next to us and began to speak – a slew of complicated words strung together – bereaved, mourning, next of kin. And he read names. Portia, Michael, Alexia, Lee. And one by one, people stood and came forward, and we left, delivered into their waiting hands. The girl was so scared, whispering a quiet farewell as an older woman carried her away. I don’t think I had ever truly looked at her eyes before – blue and watery and somehow, just as terrified as I was.

 And then there was Henry. He had been staring ever since we had arrived – a little taller than the people around him, and something in his gaze seemed like he was somewhere else, somehow. He was one of the last to stand, picking me up with hands shakier than his voice.

“It looks just like her.”

 He was so careful, and this wheeled – car, they called it? – was brighter, with windows. The sky flew by, and the trees. It was so vast, so open, that it unnerved me. Was this where people walked around? How didn’t they freeze, overwhelmed by the size of everything? I was so thankful to be inside again that I could have cried. It was larger than the home I was used to, yes, but anything was better than the void outside.

 I took my time, speaking to the others. The ones here were brighter, more angular – an elephant here, a gruff warrior on another wall, drawn in the same bold, angular hand, so at odds with Henry’s colorless appearance. And the Untitleds, of course – one angular, one soft, and one somewhere inbetween, of that thin, colorless face. But most are animals – elephants and swans and some vermillion and goldenrod colored mass called a fish.

 I do miss my subject – how she was always so quiet, a simple presence of peace. Henry is silent, but he brings such a weight to him that blurs of the girl’s eyes, or the smeared coal black of a mountain forest. I am accustomed to it – he sits for hours on end, sitting and watching us with those distant eyes. You may call me vain, but he looks to me the most.

 It’s become such a nice thing, being looked at, that I wonder why the past people did not do it before.

Being known, and seen, and loved.

 And I would put up with any amount of bickering for that.