The heat came in through the rolled down windows the summer I drove to Eden with my brother Sebastian.  It settled around our heads like halos and we excused our blunderings, blaming it on the dry wild grasses.

We were gypsies, my brother and I.  It was a choice he made, and it was out of total devotion to him that I followed.  In those early times we wondered from place to place, finding fairs and contests for Sebastian.  We slept in our run-down Jeep Cherokee or at the homes of woman he’d charm and seduce for some warm soup, a warm bed and a shower.  He was a painter.

I didn’t expect to stay in Eden long, although the name was hopeful enough and I was becoming restless.  Half of the time I longed for roots to take hold of my feet and plant me in the ground.  I wanted steadiness; some familiar.  The rest of the time I looked for birds to teach me how to fly away.  It wouldn’t have mattered at all if I could have followed Sebastian always, but greatness is fleeting and impossible to cage.

Eden was the most unlikely of places to put on hold our transitory ways, but the people liked my brother and believed in God’s service.  The countryside was full of lonely families and Sebastian traded portraits and a little excitement for a room with a window.  I wanted so much to be an artist like my brother.  I’d steal scraps of paper or thrown away drawings and draw the birds and trees.  I’d draw how the mountains looked at mid-day or anything else I noticed, right over his drawings of the wife or the family dog.  I didn’t want Sebastian to feel obligated to teach me so I tried to keep it from him.  One day he found me sitting on some large rocks drawing a sunflower patch. 

“God Lu, is this what you run off to do all the time?”  He took the drawing out of my hand.  I looked down at the charcoals in my hands; I’d stolen them from his back.

My face flushed with shame, “I’m sorry Sebastian.”

“What could you be sorry about?”  He looked out at the sunflowers, noticing how the sun made the deep shadows on the leaves, how it kissed the petals with light and warm values.  He looked back at the drawing and smiled, “And Mrs. Brown looks much better with a sunflower growing out of her head.”

After that he was generous with his supplies.  We’d draw each other drawing each other.  Mine were not very good though, even after some time.  And suddenly I didn’t draw or paint anymore.  I’d sit for hours staring out the small window that overlooked a grove of willow trees.  I was withdrawing into the shadows of those trees; I was living in the crevices, making myself small.  He’d continue to draw and paint me when I became that way.  Sebastian tried to find the place I went to; looking for it in my eyes, in the way my lips protruded out, in the way my eyebrows shifted.

“Where do you go?”  He asked after a long sitting one day.

“Sebastian.”  And I looked at him, a blurred figure.  His dark hair blended with his eyes, his clothes, and his arms that were reaching out toward me.  He was just a daze.  I was crying; tears, tears, like an unexpected drip.  “The question is too big for me and I’m giving it up.”

“The question?”

“Yes, why paint?  It’s too big for me.”

Sebastian took me by my shoulders gently and looked into my eyes.  We could have been twins, although he was five years older and stronger and more beautiful.

“Maybe it’s not big enough.  Not only must you ask yourself, why paint?  You must also ask yourself why write stories?  Why play instruments and sing and dance?  Why breathe and wake each day?  It is all the same question.  Then the answer becomes obvious.”

“But it can’t be that easy, can it?  It would be because we must, to survive?”

“Not just survive Lulu, to live!  And there’s nothing easy about that.”

“If you never picked up a brush again, it would not kill you.”

Sebastian said, “But what about my soul?  My soul would shrivel up and my insides would turn black and my brain would suffocate,” he was smiling, “and that is why I must keep painting.”

“Well that is why you are so good then, you’re life depends on it,” I said solemnly.

“I only need three things in life to be happy.  You, painting, and sex.”

I started to laugh.

“What does your soul need Lu?”  He asked and he was serious again.  I couldn’t think of an answer.

Gone.  Gone, but I remembered him so clearly now as I walked into the gallery.  It was a small enclosure of a room.  The walls were white, the lights on the ceiling shone on four large canvases.  I stood in front of the painting titled, “The Tree Woman”.  It was a portrait of a redhead from the
shoulders up.  Her long hair melted into the branches of a tree, or the branches melted into her hair.  Either (cont'd from the print edition) way, they existed in a seamless way with leaves in thick greens and yellows and oranges.  The colors of a fall morning that fades with the heat; burning the colors, turning them to ash.  Her complexion was fair and she had intense green eyes.  They were muddied in the center like little specks of golden fog.  Her expression was sullen and veins of the earth in blue and green flowed through her face beginning at her chin and reaching toward her hairline.

I was in fact the woman in the painting.  I shared her old eyes.  Sebastian said I had them every since I was a baby, like I already knew too much of the world and that’s why I cried so much.  I had the same full lips and the same temperament.  I wondered why he had turned me into “The Tree Woman”.  Was it because like trees my moods changed with the seasons, becoming dark with the uncomfortable heat and darker with the unbearable cold?  Or had he somehow known my thoughts as I used to stare at the trees in Eden?

A man approached the painting, standing beside me.  He was very tall and he wore jeans and a button up flannel shirt.  His thick dark hair partially covered his eyes and occasionally he moved his head to one side as if he had a song turning in his ears.  The man seemed deep in thought but I could sense that his attention was not focused on the painting.  Finally he spoke, “Excuse me, but are you a model?  This is you isn’t?”

I looked at the man and then looked at the canvas.  In the lower right hand corner was the signature of Sebastian Tallow.  I looked at the woman again; I saw those eyes every time I looked into a mirror.

“I’m a painter.”

“You must have known him though.”

“Yes, I did.”

“He was incredible,” he moved close to the painting, “how did he communicate such grief?  I wonder, was it your grief or his own?”

I stood with my hands against my stomach, I pulled at my fingers and picked at some dried paint that had burrowed in the creases of my fingernails, “Perhaps it was shared between us.”

“Michel Alexander, I’m a painter as well.”  He said and he held out his hand.

“Lulu Tallow, Sebastian was my brother.”  I took his hand in mine and lingered there a moment.

As a mediocre painter, I have great company, but that does not comfort me.  I’d trade anything for a pair of painter hands.  They’re something you’re born with, I think.  Sebastian had them, and I coveted his long slender fingers; the way he held a brush.  It doesn’t matter why he is gone, only that he did not leave his hands behind for me.

Michel’s hands were large and strong.  I wanted to see his work immediately and wondered where he was going.

                     

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