dontravis.com blog post #543
Taking the coward's way out these next few weeks. Life keeps getting in the way and I can see disaster looming over the month of March, so am going to do a repost of a five-part story I did just about one year ago. It's an original story I particularly like, partially because it could have taken place in the little Oklahoma town where I grew up, and partially because it sort of marries the two parts of my own life... being gay in a little lumber and farming town and growing out of the limitations placed by that culture.
PORTRAIT
OF MISS EMMALEE
The first moment I cast eyes on the painting, I knew I had to have it. Yet, for the life of me, I couldn’t explain why the portrait of Emmalee Vanderport called to me so strongly. While serving in the army, I’d once stood at the Louvre admiring Leonardo DaVinci’s Mona Lisa without suffering such an emotional tug. But like Cornel Wilde in the movie Laura, I was struck dumb by pigments of varicolored oils dabbed on canvas.
After haggling over the price
with the estate sale manager, I gritted my teeth and robbed my savings of three
thousand dollars to acquire it. Carrying the three by four painting to the car,
I stowed it lovingly in the back of my GMC Terrain, giving it one last glance
before closing the hatch and crawling behind the steering wheel. All the way
home, I chastised myself, asking why, why, why?
But when I hung it over the
mantlepiece in the stead of the seascape that had graced that space, I was
again made rapt, and the questions fell away… except for what to do with the
seascape, really, a very good piece itself. I stowed the usurped painting out
of sight, and sat in my recliner to view the new acquisition.
Immediately, the enchantment
returned. The portrait, obviously done in the bower at the rear of the
Vanderport mansion, showed a slightly pouty young, swan-necked woman with brown
hair in a formal coiffure, her green eyes peering from beneath slightly drawn brows.
Emmalee Vanderport looked comfortable over my fireplace. And I was comfortable
having her there.
That evening, as I sat
rereading James Lee Burke’s Creole Belle, Dave Robicheau’s preoccupation
with a Cajun girl named Tee Jolie Melton made me vaguely uncomfortable with my
obsession over the Vanderport portrait. I dropped the book in my lap and lifted
my eyes to meet the emerald orbs of the painting and puzzle once again over the
slightly knitted brows. What was bothering that lovely woman as she sat
patiently—or perhaps impatiently—for the artist reproducing her features on
canvas like a geomancer rendering beauty from ugly oil pots. Was I smitten?
I experienced no lust upon
viewing the painting, and I usually equated the two. No, I wasn’t in love with
the image of Miss Emmalee—as the whole town knew her—I was puzzled by it. And a
puzzle calls for solving.
The next morning, I set about
that task by revisiting the Vanderport mansion on the north side of town to
find the sale winding down. All the prime pieces were gone, and the few
prospective buyers wandering about were simply looking for some small token they
could claim once belonged to the town’s most notable family. In some of the
tellings, the item would become a gift bestowed in gratitude for some imaginary
favor, in others, simply tokens of friendship. I doubted many would admit they
picked it up for a song at an estate sale. We humans tend toward hubris and
self-delusions, I fear.
A rather jaundiced view for a
man only twenty-eight, but it was dictated by my own history. And perhaps that’s
why I wanted to know the reason for Miss Emmalee’s shaded look. I’d been on my
own since I was seventeen when in a fit of unwarranted honesty with my father, I
admitted my attraction to one of my male schoolmates. Dad, a frustrated jock
and insincere evangelist, tossed me out without thinking about it twice and
thwarted all Mom’s efforts to bring me back into the fold. I still recall one
odd exchange from that fateful day.
“You can’t throw the boy out, Henry.
It violates the contract,” my mother shouted as it became clear my father was
serious about banishing me from home.
“Contract be damned,’ he
yelled back at her. “I’ll not have a pansy… a queer contaminating our family.”
As traumatized as I was, I managed
to ask my mother what she meant about a contract. I recall her answer, her last
words to me on that day. “Contract? Oh, honey, all I meant was that there’s an
unwritten contract between parents and child. The parents nurture and protect.
The child learns to behave and grow.”
Unable to lash out in any
meaningful way at my father, I took it out on her. “So I guess I violated the contract
first by turning out queer!” I used the hateful word deliberately. I’ll
forever regret my cruelty to the one person fighting for me.
The first few years were
difficult. After my secret Adonis yielded to my passionate pursuit, the event
left something to be desired, and to make matters worse, he promptly wrote me
off as a conquest and moved on. Out of desperation, I sold myself to some men
on the street for a meal or a roof over my head for the night, but that always
left me feeling unclean.
Rescue came quickly when one
of my teachers learned I was homeless and put me up in a one-room apartment—if
that’s the proper name for it—over his garage and steered me to an after-school
job at a local car parts store. That saw me through graduation without further
degrading myself, and after that, I joined the Army, spending some time serving
in Germany. I worked like hell earning college credits whenever possible and took
my bachelor’s degree within a few months of leaving the service.
And then my old man did me a
favor. He died. Finally free to do so, Mom reached out to me, and I moved back
into my old room. Beyond that, she used some of Dad’s insurance money to stake
me in my own business. I started buying old cars—classics when I could find
them—and restoring the vehicles before selling them for a profit. Life was good
again. Then Mom died, leaving me the rest of the money and the house. Since
then, my shop had prospered enough to move into a proper business site.
But I digress. The estate
manager, who turned out to be a Vanderport cousin, took the time to fill me in
on some of Miss Emmalee’s background. She’d been born in this house some
eighty-odd years ago, graduated from a women’s college back east, and returned
to live out her life as an unmarried spinster, living off the family’s wealth
and occupying herself by volunteering both time and money to the community.
Aha! Was the fact she was
unmarried the source of the sadness I discerned in those painted eyes? Perhaps.
As the cousin could contribute nothing more, I thanked her for visiting with me
and returned to working on a Porsche I’d found as a near ruin and was on the
verge of rendering into a classic. When I sold this one, it alone would make
the nut for the next month.
Sounds
like Miss Emmalee’s portrait has grabbed hold of our unnamed protagonist in a
serious way. Why? Because it hints at secrets, and there’s nothing—short of sex—that
pushes our buttons than learning other people’s secrets. Wonder what happens
next? We’ll find out next week.
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Don
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