Blind Date
By: Einstein Shrugged
Tags: Fiction, Love, Dark Fiction, Art, Painting

Dark fiction about an artist and her muse, her masterpiece.

Original photo by Amanda Dalbjörn on Unsplash

“Didn’t Charlotte tell you?”

I nodded dumbly, then coughed.

“Uh, no,” I finally sputtered, “no she hadn’t, uh, mentioned it at all.”

Helen nodded and arched an eyebrow which, for some reason, struck me as ridiculous. I stuck out my tongue at her just to see what would happen.

“I hope it won’t be an issue,” she said, staring somewhere over my left shoulder. I wanted to ask her if she just saw black but then wondered if she’d know what black looked like.

That’s the moment it happened. The moment I didn’t ask her the question.

That’s the moment I fell madly, passionately, head over heels in love with her.

Charlotte hadn’t told me about Helen’s blindness, it’s true. But she also hadn’t told Helen I’m an artist. The idea of painting for the blind struck me in that moment and I leaned over, elbows on the table, head in my hands, and stared at her. Really stared. Because Why Not? It didn’t matter.

I asked her about her work. What did she do for a living?I don’t know what I imagined, but it wasn’t this. She was a professor of Mathematics at a local university. My jaw dropped when she said it and she seemed to sense it.

“Are you surprised?” Her smile was infectious and I felt it seeping through my brain.

“I suppose I am,” I laughed nervously, not wanting to hide with her, not feeling the need to. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” she laughed. “I think most people probably don’t realize how much we can actually do now. Hell, when I was 15, I had resigned myself to a life of dish washing jobs,” she paused then, a wry smile on those painfully kissable lips. “And even then, I thought I’d only get it if I was lucky.”

I felt a surge of anger, of wanting to grab that 16 year old version of her and shake her, screaming “You can do ANYTHING!” into her vacant eyes.

I shook the thought away, tuned back in to what she was saying.

“… teach theoretical mathematics, so that helps,” the smile again, a shrug, “Plus I have a full time teaching assistant and a part time PA, so it’s not like I’m exactly challenged,” another laugh. She asked what I did and I told her. She paused for a moment and asked me what medium I used.

“Painting, mostly,” her eyes were the most wonderful shade of turquoise and cobalt blue. I thought of the art history lessons I slept through. The ones about pigments causing blindness, madness, and death.

I wanted to kiss her.

I heard myself talking. “I’ve done some sculpture, some video work. But I always go back to painting. It makes me feel …” I stumbled then, not exactly sure how to finish because I’d never really thought about it before.

Already she was changing me, make me better, making me whole.

She smiled and, for a moment, I thought I felt pity coming from her.

Pity that I relied so heavily on my eyes. Pity that I couldn’t move past it.

She became my muse.

I started painting for her. I used thick slabs of paint. Raised edges and globs of built up over layers. I slapped on bits of fabric, feather, Styrofoam, whatever I could find.

Helen would come over, run her lickable little fingers over the canvas and smile. “I can see this one,” she’d whisper to me, as though it was a secret we couldn’t let out.

At night I’d run my hands over her smooth, white skin.

My love for her is all consuming, even now. She’s everything, the only thing I can think of and I’ve never hesitated to pay any price.

A few months after we met, she came over when I was in the middle of a project. I ran for the door, recognizing the sound of her key in the lock. She stumbled in, hair dangling into her eyes and I knew she couldn’t bother shoving it away. Nothing mattered.

“Busy?” she sniffed; smelled the paint but not the tell-tale scent of turpentine that signaled the end of my sessions.

“Not especially, just finishing a piece for the Textile Exhibit over at MOMA. How did you manage to get away so early?”

She grinned and gave me a sexy little shrug, “Decided to schluff everything off on Miriam and Dexter. Wanted to get back here. Fancy the company?”

“Of course,” I leaned in and kissed her softly. Then again, as urgently as I felt.

She pushed me away lazily, “Finish what you’re doing, I want to change anyway.”

She emerged later as I was scraping knife-fulls of emerald green onto the canvas. She stood for a moment, listening to the scrape of my knife, feeling the glow of my smile.

She walked over, touched me on the shoulder and stood a pace or so away, “Put one of those in front of me.”

I immediately moved her a foot or so over to a clear wall and leaned a canvas onto it, filled a palette and shoved a few brushes and a knife into her hands. I scurried over and shoved my easel around, grabbed a fresh canvas and began painting her as she set to work.

She scraped some colors on, scared at first. Then suddenly sure. She abandoned the brushes and the knife. Scooped finger-fulls up and smeared them across, molded them into what she wanted with a fingernail. Every time I heard the sound of her fingers on the canvas I shuddered.

When she finished, her canvas was a dripping cacophony of colors and ridges. She pressed me up against it and kissed me. My hands flew over her body and she pulled me away. We made love on the faded sheets I used to cover the floors.

When I woke up, I saw her painting. The explosion of colors and textures marred only by the frantic outline of my body.

That painting still hangs here. I saw it the other day and sighed.

Things are different now, of course. That day awakened something in her I don’t think she ever realized had been there.

When we met I thought she was my muse.

As it turns out, I was hers.

Things changed.

She left her job, sold a few pieces, rode the publicity. I still painted with her, but only as a prop. My own exhibits tapered off because I couldn’t be bothered. The clients to whom I had regularly sold pieces fell off one by one. After awhile I was nothing, in her shadow, happy and content basking in her glow.

That’s when she asked me. Asked me to be her ultimate masterpiece. A breathing piece of art, something new and amazing.

She starved me for months — diet of beans and rice, apple juice if I was good. I flexed for her, felt her fingertips dancing over my exaggerated bone lines, my stretched out tendons.

And tonight we finish the project.

Tonight she opens me up and puts me on canvas. Tonight I come immortal.

Tonight I finally become what I always have been: I become hers.