Painting Catarina
By Forrest Rapier
John Paul was six-foot-six and said she didn’t have to pay rent. He had a 10x10 semi-permanent wall position in a prominent midtown gallery. His wall faced the street-level window where one-day-out-of-thirty some impulsive busybody with a checkbook would see his craze and call it brilliance. He’d do strange things in the kitchen like lick the yolk off both sides of a serrated knife after cutting her bagel sandwich in-half. He never said, “Stop watching me,” even though she side-eyed him while he hovered over the oil-splattered kitchen counter weighing coffee beans one-by-one on a digital scale. To the gram. She watched him from fifty-feet down the hall from a plush widow’s chair she found at what was advertised to be an estate sale but was actually just a dead woman’s furniture sitting curbside. One day after putting the yolk-knife halfway to his uvula, she watched him take it over to his corner to dip the blade in a paint bucket. He started carving the sad whiskered jowls of a blue dog in a pirate hat. If she rose from her cozy perch to go out for crullers and baguettes, she’d come back to find him naked with the canvas on the floor, or he’d be upside-down underneath the refrigerator door, arm extended to the flip-switch that made the light go OFF. She wouldn’t pick him up or say a word; she’d step over him and take a cruller back to her yarn. Humming melodies to the wordless daydream. Despite being on the tenth-floor of a brick high rise on a fairly busy avenue, the corner apartment was never loud in the daytime which made John Paul’s brushwork the furious clockwork that governed the pace of the room’s mood. He never sat down. The only other chair in the apartment was a beat-to-hell barstool he kicked around from light-to-light as the sun moved. He moved with it like it had him on a leash. In the evenings, the sunsets dropped citrus-shaded bombs across the West-facing windows, then John Paul would act as though dusk released him from his daily slog. When dusk fell, it was like a yoke was taken off an ox. He’d get on his knees in front of her lap and ask her to watch the sky with him. Cash was hidden inside all of his books. Catarina opened The Tempest and three-hundred dollars spat out of Miranda’s passage. She put the play back and took out Beginning Figure Drawing: sixty-five dollars spilled out of a page of charcoal arms and hands. She put back all of the money except for a twenty. She went out and bought a cactus, two lemon pepper roasted chickens, toilet tissue and lotion with aloe vera. That night, when he kneeled before her lap she shut his eyes and told him to hush. She took his hands and began to lather lotion on his palms and between his fingers. He tried to pull away like a kid facing down a hot bath. When she told him he could go, she followed him into the kitchen. Catarina set out two plates of chicken on the counter. He took them both and crashed them against the floor. Why did he want to eat her right now? Why did she looked freaked out right now. I can’t believe you right now.
Forrest Rapier has appeared in Best New Poets, Cold Mountain Review, Levee, and many other journals. His debut poetry collection, As the Den Burns, has recently released with Texas Review Press.