* * *
He went into the studio early the next morning, though his head did not feel great. He left again after ten minutes and went walking instead. He was more methodical than on the previous day, tracing the streets in a grid pattern. He saw houses he’d never noticed before, though none that looked cheap. He saw a somewhat run-down motor vehicle, but it was vintage rather than simply old.
He still saw no one to disturb the ineffable calm of the locals. No one who smelled. No one sitting with their hand held out, slumped beside a cardboard sign and a patient hound. No one with a battered acoustic guitar on their lap. No one with dreadlocks or dusty clothes.
At one point he thought he saw someone in a long black coat, some distance away, in shadows down a side street. Not just a coat, but wearing a dark and crooked hat, too.
This seemed sufficiently distinctive—and out of keeping with the locals’ usual pastel modes of dress—that he hurried down the street to get a better look, but either the person had moved on or had never been more than a trick of the light.
David considered himself no bleeding-heart liberal. He’d volunteered for neither soup kitchen nor shelter in his life. When confronted with such people on his home turf in the city, he experienced the same feelings of discomfort, fear and irritation as everyone else. Here, though… here, it niggled at him. He wasn’t sure why.
It wasn’t that the town was pissing him off. He liked it well enough, and still hoped to do good work in it. It simply seemed… strange. Could you really have a town in which there were no off-notes, nobody wonky, no misfits? Did such a policy have to be enforced, or was Carmel somehow self-regulating, a delightful painting in which no discordant elements had been incorporated, and for which there was simply no room—a work of living art rendered from a fixed palette in which there were no colors to evoke the discordant?
In the afternoon he went to Bonnie’s once more. He hadn’t intended to, had in fact grown bored of looking at the wall there, and believed he already knew what he needed to put in front of it. He seemed to have become mildly addicted to their coffee, however, and as he was about to pay, he realised something else might come of his visit.
“Do you live here?” he asked the barista girl.
“All my life.”
“Like it?”
“Well… sure.”
“There ever been any homeless people here? That you’ve seen?”
She stared at him for a moment, then laughed.
He went home, but he did not paint.
* * *
He’d told himself he put the second bottle in the basket just so he wouldn’t have to come by the market again the next day. By the time the first was finished, however, he was no longer that guy. He was the other guy. He knew there must be a link between these two men, some way one flowed into the next, but he’d never been able to spot the point where one ended and the other began.
It wasn’t like he had a drinking problem. Sometimes he simply drank too much. It tended to make him cheerful and mischievous rather than depressed or maudlin. The problem lay not with how he was when he was drunk, but how he felt the following day.
If there’s anything that breaks the chain of creation, it’s a hangover. Try telling that to The Other Guy, though. He won’t listen. It may well be from him that inspiration comes in the first place, but he’s not the guy who has to stand there making stroke follow stroke in the hours of daylight, and so he just doesn’t care.
About a third of the way through the second bottle, the idea dropped into David’s head. He could see right away that it was dangerously close to the kind of thing some of his long-ago art college buddies might have undertaken, far too seriously. It was unlike anything he’d ever done. Unlike painting at all, in fact.
This wouldn’t be art, though. This would be research. A step towards finishing the painting that was beginning to languish in the temporary studio. Sometimes the artist has to step into his work, after all. Perhaps it is that process that provides the solution in which events float.
He went indoors, colliding with the doorframe on the way, and made the remainder of the wine last as he worked.
* * *
As he walked up the street the next morning, David realised that he’d unintentionally added extra touches to his work in progress.
Doesn’t matter how long you brush your teeth, when you’ve consumed two bottles of wine you’re going to be exuding it the next morning one way or another. It seeps out of your pores. His head hurt, causing him to squint against the shafts of sunlight that made it down through the trees on his way toward the centre of the village. He’d slept terribly, too—it turned out the floor of the garage was just as uncomfortable as it looked—which conferred valuable extra detail. Often when you create something it’s the unintentional or unconscious touches that make all the difference—so long, of course, as the chain is operating.
He got his first sideways glance just as he made it onto the main street. A man wearing immaculate blue shorts, a blue shirt, and a blue cap looked at him, then away, and then back again. He seemed like he wanted to say something.
David looked back and grinned.
The man stayed silent, but walked quickly away.
Score, David thought.
He continued up the street, concentrating on shambling. It wasn’t hard, given how rough he felt. Just before he turned down the alley toward Bonnie’s, he coughed. It was supposed to be merely a throat-clearer, but the vast number of cigarettes he’d smoked the night before elevated it into a consumptive cacophony that lasted twenty seconds, and culminated in hawking a mouthful of beige phlegm into a flowerbed.
Looking up, head swirling, David saw that a middle-aged couple had stopped in their tracks and were staring at him with identical looks on their faces. It was hard to describe their expressions, though if you came home to find the dog had shat in the middle of your bed, you’d probably make something similar.
David waved, and lurched off up the alley.
The girl behind the counter watched his approach. He knew this was going to be an interesting test. She’d seen him the day before. They’d even had a conversation.
He stepped up to the counter, swaying slightly as he peered up at the board.
“Just a coffee,” he said. “Twelve ounce.”
She reached behind for a cup, not taking her eyes off him. He pulled out the motley handful of loose coins he’d put in his pocket in preparation. It took him quite a while to count out the correct amount. The girl watched, holding back on handing over the cup until he was done.
He filled the cup, added milk and a lot of sugar. Smiled crookedly at the girl as he left. She was still watching, and had not said a single word.
Out in the courtyard he sat at the table in front of the white wall. Had she really not recognised David? Hard to tell. Could be that she’d been left speechless by the transformation. He didn’t think so, though. He was pretty good at his job. He thought she had no idea who he was, and her reaction had been to what he appeared to be.
It’d taken him five hours. First thing he’d tackled were his clothes. At first he’d thought he might be able to get away with using some of his painting gear, but one glance told him that—to his eye—they were too obviously what they were: clothes someone had used to paint in. The balance and distribution of the colours weren’t right.
So he’d gone into the bedroom and found his second pair of jeans and an old-ish shirt. The jeans had always been kind of long in the leg and so the bottoms were ragged and a little dirty, a good start. The shirt was white and in good condition, but he’d worn it on the drive down from San Francisco and it had lain crumpled at the bottom of the linen basket ever since.
Working slowly and methodically—within the confines of the fact that he’d been well on the way to shit-faced drunk by then—he’d tested colours and textures, and then, when satisfied, got to work, layer by layer.