Babette’s Painting
I am walking down a long, dirt path, kicking up clouds. I pull my kerchief up over my mouth and nose, in the vain and desperate hope of filtering out the chalky dust. I stop to look back and assess my progress. I’ve walked about a mile; only half a mile left to Babette’s place. I parked my car at the foot of her road because it’s supposed to rain this afternoon, which could bemire my car in a muddy rut, and I don’t want to end up stuck.
Babette lives in a rustic white-washed house her grandfather built. It’s more of an elaborate shack. Her folks only managed to get electric installed last year. No running water, but they do have a well. We call it the Swell Well. I have been to Babette’s place three times before. About eight years ago, when she graduated from high school and her folks threw her a party for any of her friends dedicated to her enough to make the trek out to her shack in the woods, again about five years ago when they hosted some sort of pagan dance festival with her father’s home-brewed cannabis-infused beer, and… wait, that’s it. This will be the third time.
I come up to the house and it’s quiet as a ghost ship. No car, so her parents must be out. Approaching the door, I hear faint music from within. A country version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I recognize it because it’s a recording of my band, Visiting Breeze. We specialize in country covers of classical, punk, reggae… anything we can alter to try to hold close to our hearts. The songs never work. We destroy their intrinsic beauty every time.
Babette is in her room painting. Not on a canvas, but painting the room itself — the wooden floors, walls and ceiling. I ask her why she’s painting over her old paintings. “Time for a change,” she says without looking up. She’s even painting her antique chiffonier, atop of which is her cassette player, playing my band’s tape. She’s wearing paint-splattered overalls and a baggy, grey sweatshirt. Sexy as hell.
I tell her she has terrible taste in music and she tells me that she likes my band. She says she’s not playing it for me, it’s just the tape that she happened to pick at random out of the pile. It’s always infuriated me that she can love all music equally, that there is no genre that she dwells in as her own. It strikes me as superficial, but I am also jealous of the freedom it affords her. She can be comfortable at any party, any club, anywhere where people are enjoying music.
I see how beautiful her abstract floor painting is. “When you paint your way out of the room, where are you going to sleep? Would you like to come over to my place tonight while the paint dries?”
She tells me that she might just sleep on the wet paint, and see what marks her sleeping body makes on the floor. I tell her she might get stuck in the paint when it dries and she laughs and agrees to come over to my house.
We walk down the long road toward my car. It’s not quite raining yet, but the sky looks green and there’s a smell of heavy moisture. “Your paintings are great,” I tell her. “I can take stills of them and you could sell them on my website.”
“No thanks.”
“We could open up an art gallery together and you could sell them there.”
“No thanks.”
It was drizzling by the time we get to my car. I tell her I parked way down here so I wouldn’t get stuck.
“I know,” she says. “That’s why I don’t have a car.”
