Regain the Freedom That is Your Right

The painting was bad. Worse, I couldn't lie in person.

I braced myself for the question that all the painters I had dated (quite a masochistic bunch) felt inclined to ask. If only he didn't have such nice shoulders. And good hair. Good hair was hard to come by.

"So, what do you think?"

When about to lie, I tended to get an itch somewhere on my body that had to be addressed ferociously. This one was on my ankle and I said "Ooh, ooh" and bent forward. I wanted to say: Show me the good stuff, (believing there was some), the work that makes you cry when you look at it because you can't believe it came out of you.

I scratched my ankle until a little blood rose to the surface and then I looked hard at the man and the child and the sandpiper on the beach, in pastel oil paint. I wanted to write a slogan for an antidepressant: Regain the freedom that is your right. I had never written a slogan for a drug, but I had written lots of others. Suddenly, all I could think of were slogans. Makes you feel like new, over and over again. For the first time, it's easier done than said.

"It's soft," I said. "Very soft."

So soft you might be ruined for other softeners.

He squinted as if my words came with a very harsh glow that hurt his eyes.

Our lenses are so real, your eyes will be jealous.

His studio was very quiet and wooded and we were very alone.

"Is it the kind of painting you would hang on a wall in your own home?" he asked, still squinting.

My coccyx began to itch so badly it throbbed. I couldn't bend all the way backwards though to scratch it.

"Look," I said. "I have to tell you something. I lie by profession…"

"A lawyer, eh?"

"Ha-ha. No…Advertising."

He made that grimace people make when you say you are in advertising, which makes them look as foul as I felt doing the job.

"I don't even really know what I like anymore, what I really feel about things. Whether I say yes or no, you can't believe me anyway."

He picked up a very wide paintbrush and placed the bristle end on my forehead, like I was being anointed. Then he used the paintbrush like a pointer and trained it on the painting, my eyes following along.

"This painting," he said, pausing thoughtfully. "Is a piece of shit."

I was so overwhelmed with relief I couldn't help myself, I said: "We won't settle, so why should you?"

Jordan is the host of the radio show "Word by Word", on NPR-affiliate, KRCB in California. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the Summerset Review, Pindeldyboz, Word Riot, The Blue Moon Review, Haypenny, InkPot, Skyline, Moxie Magazine and more work is forthcoming at NFG, Storyhouse, The Petaluma Magazine and The Floridian. You can read more at her blogspot, www.jordansmuse.blogspot.com.

Or you can email her at writelife@earthlink.net.