Jerusalem
Meredith burst into the den. She was breathless from her sprint down the hallway. “Come … watch … CNN …” She panted. ”Breaking news, an attack on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem, eight reported dead so far.”
Ed did not look up from the watercolor he was working on, a rather crude impression of the fabled Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz. “Send the envoy,” he sang, adding a dab of color to the little Gothic towers and grand arches
“What?” Meredith loomed in the doorway, a racehorse at the gate, the blaring plasma TV restlessly awaiting her return to the living room.
“It’s a Warren Zevon tune, The Envoy.” He was disappointed with the painting. He considered burning the canvas in the fireplace and starting over.
“Never heard of it.”
“Whenever there’s a crisis/The President sends his envoy/Guns in Damascus/Whooooa, Jersusalem …”
Meredith blinked and frowned. “Uh-huh. Well, sorry to interrupt your precious painting.”
“Sometimes you take the world far too seriously, Meredith,” Ed called out to her retreating shadow. Not once had his gaze wandered from the canvas.
Ed gently removed his glasses and dabbed at his moist eyes with the pale blue silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He absently stared out the window at the rose garden, his labored breathing falling like footsteps in the quiet of the den.
Ed’s hand was shaking as he reached for the steak knife resting on the small workbench next to the easel. He plunged the sharpened blade into the canvas and began his butchery.
March 7, 2008 at 3:59 am
In this household, five doors from the Shakespeare Bridge, “Meredith” does all the destroying—of “Ed”’s watercolors. When there’s a big one and she doesn’t like it, she just cuts it down to feature a fragment of it that she likes a little better. She never gets Ed’s permission. She calls this “cropping.”
Onetime precious Ed was painting a precious lotus that was far too small for Meredith’s tastes. So Meredith, who has been painting for textile prints for over twenty years, whipped one out in about a minute, using a brush about one-inch thick, paint flying off the paper, strokes uncontainable even on an 11×14 sheet. Then after a minute she held up the enormous lotus in one hand and dinky lotus in another and said, as though to a class:
“All right. Now who…would you…rather…be?”
~~~
FWIW, Ed got even smaller with his flowers. He bought a pack of ten watercolor postcards, and that’s been his medium of choice for flowers ever since.
March 7, 2008 at 9:33 am
This episode of Mr. Mailander’s Neighborhood has been brought you by an endowment from the Chubb Foundation, the Modelo Brewing Company, the National Mental Health Alliance, and viewers like you.
March 7, 2008 at 8:44 pm
I can relate to Ed’s frustration and the ease in which he dismisses the world around him. It’s so easy to get lost, and unless life is all up in your face, the muse mustn’t be ignored!
March 7, 2008 at 8:58 pm
But should the artist ignore the world around him?
March 8, 2008 at 6:25 am
Sometimes it isn’t so much a conscious choice, but rather a means of survival.
March 8, 2008 at 11:13 am
I think information overload cannot be dismissed as well — turning all that information into white noise as a means of survival.
May 20, 2008 at 3:43 pm
[...] Jersualem is a nice piece of L.A.-based flash fiction that helped launch the fledgling Artists Tales series; [...]