Still Life
"That man is as slow as molasses going uphill in the winter!" Delphine Varney often said of her husband. On other occasions, she was heard to remark, "He's got three speeds: slow, slower and stopped."
Her husband, Herman, took her teasing in stride—as he did most everything else. He was a calm man who never once lost his temper. Rather, he stoically plodded along, taking life day by day. Of course, human existence being what it is, he was subject to the same stresses, disappointments and sorrows that affect us all. It was due only to his effective coping mechanism that he was able to sail on such an even keel. What was that mechanism? He drew.
Herman Varney was never the brightest student in school, but he did have a pronounced talent for drawing. Hoping to make the best of their son's natural abilities, his parents enrolled him in art classes where he honed those skills. Upon graduating college, he set out on a career as an artist. No, he did not run off to Paris, lock himself in a garret and paint. His artwork was not a form of self-expression or a product of his imagination. Rather, he became a technical illustrator for a publisher that specialized in instruction manuals and how-to guides. It was a job that required accuracy and meticulous attention to detail, not creativity.
It was in the evenings, when many nine-to-fivers sat in front of their television sets to unwind, that he put his pencil to paper in a more inspired way. His hobby of drawing still life began about two years into his marriage. His wife, the self-designated keeper of the remote control, was watching an episode of Friends and enumerating the reasons why she preferred Courteney Cox to Jennifer Anniston. Bored by both the plot of the sitcom and his wife's never-ending chatter, he picked up a pen and began drawing a tree on the back of his newspaper.
"What's that you're doing?" Delphine asked when she noticed he was no longer paying attention to the program.
"Nothing. Just drawing."
"Seriously? You draw all day in work, and you come home and doodle when you ought to be spending time with your wife."
"I can draw and spend time with you at the same time. Besides, drawing relaxes me," he explained defensively.
"Relaxes you? If you were any more relaxed, you'd be dead!"
Delphine's slur, like so many others, merely rolled off his back. But from that night on, he kept a sketchbook and pencils on the end table beside his seat on the couch. For the next eighteen years, he drew while his wife watched television. Although the couple's house was large enough to incorporate a den or a so-called "man cave," it never occurred to Herman to have a room of his own. Thus, rather than physically separate from his wife in the evenings, he simply mentally withdrew from her.
To say that he ignored her would not be accurate. He heard every word she spoke, but he did not actually listen to her. Maybe if she said something of actual interest, he might have paid more attention. However, in all honesty, he did not care one way or the other who Brad Pitt was currently dating, what fabulous prizes Oprah was giving away to members of her studio audience and which actress had destroyed her looks with too much plastic surgery. His wife's opinions—of which she had a great many!—went in one ear and out the other, remaining in her husband's brain only long enough for him to give a laconic response.
"What do you plan on doing with all those drawings of yours?" she asked one evening when he finished a sketch of a child's tricycle that was sitting out on his neighbor's front lawn.
"Nothing. I just put them in a file folder and stick them in the drawer of my desk."
"Seems like a waste of time and money to me," she said dismissively.
"Paper and pencils don't cost much."
"They're not free either."
"Neither is television. It seems to me our cable bill goes up every year."
"I don't care how much the cable company raises the rates. Watching TV is the only enjoyment I get out of life anymore."
"And I feel the same way about my drawings."
"It just seems to me that you could draw something more pleasing to the eye."
"Like what, for instance?"
"People or perhaps animals."
"I don't like drawing living creatures. I prefer still life."
"It figures!"
Another taunt he let slide.
"I prefer pictures of inanimate objects just like you prefer sitcoms and reality shows to educational documentaries on PBS."
Although Herman had not actually criticized his wife openly, the insinuation was clear. Her choice of television programs was indicative of her plebeian upbringing and lack of culture and education. It was the first time in more than twenty years that he openly revealed the slightest displeasure in the woman he married.
* * *
As Delphine approached her forty-fifth birthday, she decided to stop and hopefully reverse her gradual weight gain. It was a matter of good health, not vanity. She had no desire to fit into a size six, but neither did she want to deal with the medical problems associated with aging.
"I'm cutting down on the amount of carbs I serve," she told her husband as she placed a bowl of vegetable-based pasta on the dinner table one evening. "We've got to watch out for diabetes."
Thankfully, Herman was not a fussy eater. With few exceptions (liver being chief among them), he ate whatever was put in front of him.
"It'll be lean proteins and vegetables from now on," his wife continued. "And more fruit. I went to the farm stand today and bought some peaches. They're in a bowl on the coffee table. I suppose if you don't feel like eating the fruit, you can always draw a picture of it instead."
The beleaguered husband did just that.
After the couple took a walk around the block in a further attempt to combat his wife's unwanted pounds—a resolution Herman was fairly certain would not last long—Delphine plopped down in her favorite chair, the La-Z-Boy recliner. In what resembled a well-rehearsed synchronized dance movement, she reached for the TV remote at the same time her husband reached for his sketchbook and pencil. As she surfed the channels, he studied the peaches in the iridescent blue carnival glass fruit bowl.
Having chosen to watch a celebrity tell-all program on REELZ, she kicked off her shoes, pushed back on her chair and put up her feet. Meanwhile, Herman did a rough outline of the fruit bowl. Once he had the proportions correct, he would add the details. As he drew, his mind quickly processed his wife's comments, giving her a short verbal answer to her questions or laughing at her unamusing jokes whenever it was required. Over the years of their marriage, his lack of attention to his spouse had become second nature to him, like an involuntary reflex action or the scratching of an itch.
"Why do they insist on showing so many food commercials?" Delphine complained after sitting through an ad showing a family devouring a pepperoni pizza. "That's why America has such a problem with obesity. Everywhere you look you see fattening foods."
"Don't watch them if you feel that way."
He had just finished drawing the four stubby legs of the fruit bowl and had moved on to the carved leaves and grapes at the bottom.
"What am I supposed to do? Get up and leave the room during every commercial break?"
"Either that or turn your head away."
"But I'd still have to listen to them."
"Try mentally tuning them out."
"Tune them out! You're a lot of help."
It's easy, he thought. I've been doing that to you for years.
The celebrity tell-all came to an end, but another one followed. Herman, who thought the station's lineup resembled the contents of a tabloid newspaper, paid even less attention to the program than he did to his wife's comments. Once he finished the decorative base of the bowl, he drew the scalloped, fluted section.
"A commercial for Cheetos? Really?" his wife exclaimed. "When is it going to stop?"
"I didn't think you liked Cheetos."
"I don't," Delphine said, trying to get her mind off the bag of Wise potato chips on the top shelf of the pantry. "But it still makes me hungry. Maybe I'll have a piece of fruit to fill me up."
When she reached for a peach in the fruit bowl, Herman had a sudden desire to slap her hand away. Naturally, he did no such thing.
I'm being ridiculous. It's just a peach; it's meant to be eaten. If it sits in the bowl, a few days from now it will be rotten.
No amount of logic, however, could dispel his annoyance that she had altered the subject of his drawing.
* * *
The next evening was day two of Delphine's diet. Dinner was tuna-stuffed tomatoes and a tossed salad with lite dressing. Herman wondered how long it would be before his wife returned to meatloaf, lasagna and fried chicken.
"Aren't we going for a walk?" he asked when she headed toward the living room after doing the dinner dishes.
"Not tonight. It looks like rain."
Herman suppressed a smile. He did not see a cloud in the sky.
"What happened to the peaches?" he asked, reaching for his sketchpad and pencil.
"It was the damnedest thing!" Delphine exclaimed. "They must have gone stale. I tried eating one this afternoon, and it was as hard as a rock. And I just bought them yesterday. I guess I should have kept them in the fridge."
"Peaches don't get hard if you leave them out. Just the opposite. They got soft."
"Well, I don't know what was wrong with them, but they were definitely hard. If you feel like having fruit, there's half a watermelon on the top shelf of the fridge."
Herman went to the kitchen with his pad and pencil, took the watermelon out of the refrigerator and placed it on the kitchen table. Melon on a plain dinner plate was much easier to drawn than peaches in a decorative fruit bowl. In under an hour, he was finishing the sketch by adding the pits to the fleshy part of the melon.
"When you're done drawing it, will you cut me a slice?" his wife called from the living room.
"I'm almost done."
A few minutes later he closed his sketchbook and took a knife out of the drawer.
"How big a slice do you ...? What's wrong with this watermelon?"
"Nothing. I had a piece of it for lunch."
"I can't get the knife through it."
Is this some kind of a joke? he wondered. Has Delphine put a fake piece of fruit in the refrigerator to see my reaction when I tried to cut into it?
But she was in the living room. Surely, if it was meant as a joke, she would be out in the kitchen to enjoy his consternation.
"Has it gone hard like the peaches?" she asked.
"Yes. That's odd. I've never known fruit to get hard like this."
"Why don't you leave it out on the counter? Maybe it will soften up as it gets warm."
The following morning, however, the watermelon was still a solid block of food that no one could cut much less eat.
After several days, Delphine fell back into her old eating habits. It began with her finally giving in to temptation and getting the bag of Wise potato chips from the top shelf of the pantry.
I'll have just one or two, she thought; but when that salty, crisp chip stimulated her taste buds, there was no stopping until she finished nearly half the bag.
She washed that down with a bottle of Coke—not diet but regular. Then when Herman came home from work, he found the pizza deliveryman at the door.
"Pizza?" he asked as the couple set down at the kitchen table. "Are you supposed to be eating that?"
"It won't kill me to cheat once in a while."
"Does that mean no after-dinner walk tonight?"
"I took one earlier, by myself," his wife replied, clearly lying through her teeth. "No offense, but you're just too slow. You're like Stepin Fetchit."
Herman was not surprised then when he walked into the living room after dinner and saw not a bowl of fruit but a dish of M&M's on the coffee table. When his wife cheated on her diet, she really cheated! Next to the candy dish was a vase of lilacs from the bush that grew in their back yard. He breathed in their fragrance and smiled.
It's a shame something that looks so beautiful and smells so good can't last more than a few days.
He sat down on the couch and immediately picked up his sketchpad and pencil, hoping to catch something of the flower's delicate splendor on paper. More than a week later the lilacs remained in their vase on the coffee table. The lavender petals had yet to turn brown and fall off.
"Did you just pick these?" he asked, wondering if his wife had replaced the old flowers with new ones from the bush.
"No. They've been there for a week already. Haven't you noticed? Honestly, sometimes I think you can't see beyond the end of your nose!"
"But lilacs don't last that long."
"Now you're an expert on flowers. Last week it was fruit."
Ignoring the insults his wife hurled at him, Herman walked over to the coffee table, picked up the vase and felt the lilacs. They were firm to his touch, as though the petals and leaves were made of glass or hard plastic.
* * *
When Saturday came a few days later, the lilacs were still pristine in appearance. Yet when Herman went out to the back yard to mow the grass, he noticed that the flowers on the lilac bush had turned brown and most of the blossoms had fallen to the ground. Keats may have written that "a thing of beauty is a joy forever," but in the real world, things of beauty eventually wither and die. Peaches, watermelons and lilacs never last beyond their normal life cycle.
Maybe it's me, he thought jokingly as he followed behind his Troy-Bilt mower. Maybe I'm like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, creating pictures that make living things stay the same while the pictures deteriorate. Who knows, maybe my sketches now show rotten peaches and watermelon and dried-up lilacs.
It was a ridiculous idea, and one he did not take seriously. Nevertheless, as the morning wore on and he exchanged his lawn mower for his Toro weed whacker, the thought kept coming back to him.
Why did none of the other food in the refrigerator turn hard?
For years, he drew only lifeless objects made of glass, wood, stone or metal. Why was it that his three living subjects had all experienced an inexplicable molecular change? This was clearly a question for Bill Nye, the Science Guy, not for a commercial artist who spent his life illustrating how-to guides and user manuals.
By midafternoon, Herman finished his yardwork. When he went into the house to take a quick shower, he passed Delphine in the hall, heading for the door.
"I'm going out," she informed him. "I want to get my hair done and pick up a few things at Target. Why don't I bring home Chinese for dinner?"
"Sounds good. I'll take the General Tso's chicken combo with the fried rice and egg roll."
"You don't need to tell me that. You always get the same thing. Honestly," she laughed, "you're the most predictable man I've ever met."
After showering, Herman made himself a roast beef sandwich and took it into the living room. It was nice having the house to himself, not having to listen to his wife's inane ramblings. As he picked up the remote on the table next to her recliner—something he never did when Delphine was home—he saw the lilacs on the coffee table and was reminded of Dorian Gray.
On impulse, he put down the remote and walked into the spare bedroom that had been converted into a home office. In a folder in the bottom draw of the desk were all the drawings he had made over the years. Beneath his most recent ones, a sketch of the mantel clock and of the lighthouse from the Thomas Kinkade print his wife hung on the living room wall, were the drawings he made of the peaches, watermelon and lilacs.
He shook his head, laughed, and told himself, "Did you really think the pictures changed? You live in Pennsylvania, not the Twilight Zone."
Once an idea had taken hold of his brain, however, there was no letting go, no matter how absurd it was. Rather than spend his Delphine-free afternoon watching the Yankees on the YES Network (another thing he never did when his wife was home), he sat at the kitchen table with his pad and pencil and conducted an experiment. The first thing he drew was a broccoli crown; the second was a ripe, juicy tomato; the third was a pitcher of orange juice. He worked quickly, but still managed to add quite a bit of detail to his pencil sketches.
After finishing his third drawing, he put the pencil on the table and reached for the broccoli crown. While it was normally a firm vegetable, it grew even harder since he had drawn it. The florets were like the lilacs: rigid and unbreakable. The tomato, too, felt as though it were made of stone. Finally, he took a glass out of the cabinet and attempted to pour the orange juice into it; however, it was no longer a liquid.
It IS me!
The realization struck him with the force of a ten-ton weight. Fruit, vegetables, flowers and even juice became petrified like fossilized wood when he drew them.
If I can do this to food and flowers, what would happen if I were ...?
No. He must not even think of such a thing. To attempt to draw an animal would be inhumane. He gathered his three experimental drawings and tore them up. When he picked up the pitcher to toss it in the trash, the juice, once again a liquid, sloshed and nearly spilled.
"What?"
This called for further experimentation. He drew two more pictures of the pitcher of orange juice and tore them both up. The juice thus went from liquid to solid and back to liquid with each attempt he made. There was no need to continue. He had proved to his satisfaction that he had a unique talent.
* * *
"I'm home," Delphine called when she walked into the door just before five o'clock. "Will you get the bags out of the car while I set the table for dinner?"
Herman walked as though in a daze, still stunned by his discovery.
"Sometime today would be nice!" his wife cried, annoyed by his lack of speed.
He brought in the bags and placed them on the kitchen counter. Then he sat at the table and began eating his egg roll.
"You know, it wouldn't have killed you to vacuum the living room while I was gone."
"Sorry," he mumbled.
"What did you do all afternoon?"
"I was drawing."
"Really? It's one thing to doodle while you're watching television, but to waste your time on a Saturday afternoon! What's wrong with you?"
"I don't doodle; I draw."
Later that evening, as the couple sat in their usual places in the living room, Delphine watched an overweight bride select a wedding dress that made her look even heavier.
"With her shape, she shouldn't wear something like that!" she exclaimed, eyeing the dish of M&M's.
As his wife continued to offer a running commentary on the TV program, Herman stared at his sketchpad, afraid to pick it up.
"Did you hear me?" she asked.
"What? I'm sorry. I was thinking ...."
"I don't know why I bother talking to you. I might as well talk to the wall."
"I'm just not interested in bride's dresses."
"You're not interested in anything except those stupid pictures of yours. Why aren't you drawing now? Is it because of what I said at dinner? Go ahead and waste your time. I don't care. Go on," she said, needling him. "Pick up your pencil and draw. You know you want to."
As Delphine glared across the room at him, he reached for the sketchbook.
"I knew it!" she said, shaking her head with disgust as she turned her attention back to the television. "You're so predictable, you're pathetic."
It was at that point that his coping mechanism kicked it. Without fully realizing what he was doing, he opened his sketchpad and deftly wielded his pencil. As he drew, his wife continued to criticize the brides on yet another episode of Say Yes to the Dress.
"Don't any of these women look into a mirror? Isn't that the ugliest gown you ever saw?"
When Herman failed to respond with his usual one-syllable replies or grunts of agreement, he received further criticism from his wife.
"You're not listening to a word I'm saying, are you?"
Still no reply. It was as though her husband were suddenly struck deaf and mute.
"I might as well be sitting here alone for all the company you are."
He did not need to take his eyes off the paper. This time he drew more from memory than from observation. He knew every line, every detail and reproduced them faithfully.
"Look at that girl!" Delphine said, her attention back on the television program. "If I were her size, I wouldn't ...."
Silence. No, not complete silence. He could hear a sales associate from Kleinfeld Bridal speaking on TV. For several minutes, Herman kept his eyes on the drawing, afraid to lift his head up and look across the room. When he finally found the courage to do so, he saw his wife sitting immobile in the La-Z-Boy recliner, the remote control still in her hand.
"Delphine."
The volume of his voice was barely above that of a whisper. Even if she had been capable of answering him, it was doubtful his wife would have heard it.
"Delphine?" he repeated, much louder this time.
But the poor woman neither spoke nor moved. Like the lilacs that were still in the vase on the coffee table, she was as stiff as a statue.
"Oh, my God! What have I done?"
Faced with the terrible consequences of his actions, his brain went on autopilot. Its only thought was to get help, so he ran to the kitchen, picked up the phone and called 911.
* * *
Herman Varney paced the floor of the hospital waiting room for hours. He remained there through the night, drinking several cups of coffee to stay awake. From time to time, a nurse would appear to keep him advised of what medical tests were about to be run on his wife.
He told both the EMTs and the emergency room staff the same story: Delphine was talking and watching TV one minute, and the next she was still and silent. There was no mention of his drawing, as he was fairly certain no one would believe him.
"Mr. Varney?" an older man in scrubs called to him.
"Yes?"
"I'm Dr. Suskind. I wish I had some good news for you, but, quite frankly, I'm baffled. No one here has ever seen a case like this before. It appears to be a form of catatonia. All your wife's vital signs are good. Except for the paralysis, she seems to be in excellent health. We've been able to somewhat relax her muscles with medication, enough for us to adjust the position of her body. However, she is nonresponsive and incapable of voluntary movement."
"What is your prognosis, Doctor?"
"Well, I think it best we keep her here a few days, run a few more tests. Maybe we'll know more when we get the results back."
"Is there anything I can do?"
"No. Why don't you go home and get some sleep? If you come back this evening, you can visit her in her room."
Sleep? he thought as walked through his front door and into the empty house. How can I sleep after what's happened?
As he passed by the living room, he saw his sketchpad lying on the couch, still open to the drawing he had made of Delphine hours earlier. He recalled the experiment he conducted with the pitcher of orange juice. Not once but three times he had reversed the change in its molecular structure by destroying his sketches.
Could I do the same for Delphine? If I tear up her picture, will she return to normal?
Herman walked to the couch, picked up the sketchbook and tore off the top sheet of paper. It really was a good likeness of his wife. He had even got the expression on her face correct, right down to the frown of disapproval that seemed to be perpetually stamped on her mouth. As he carried the drawing into the home office, he recalled the years of verbal abuse he had endured and the barbs his wife hurled at him. He took a pair of scissors out of his desk drawer, cut the drawing down to an eight-by-ten size and put it in the frame that had previously held his college diploma.
Once the drawing was pressed between a piece of thick cardboard and a sheet of glass, where it was unlikely to come to any harm, he placed it on the fireplace mantel. Then he sat down, not on his usual spot on the sofa but on Delphine's—no, now it was his—La-Z-Boy recliner and promptly fell asleep.
Salem is the perfect subject for still life. He rarely moves except at mealtime.
