Vines

Just last year i discovered that I had an entire closet filled with things that I had no practical use for, things that I had accumulated over the years but wasn't ready to part with yet. One of the things in this closet was a small painting by an ex-girlfriend of mine who had since died of cancer. The ex-girlfriend's name was Maya, and she had died two years earlier at the age of forty-three. The painting was one of the last paintings she made before she stopped making paintings altogether.

At the time that Maya gave me this painting we were living together in a small garage apartment on the south side of San Antonio, just a few blocks up from the old Pioneer Flour Mills, an area of the city called King William that was famous for its historic homes. The home that our apartment was attached to, though, wasn't historic. It was just a modest one-story house owned by a man named Lionel Merritt, who had purchased it in the late eighties when he'd taught printmaking out at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Lionel had kept the house even after his daughter had left and his wife had died and he had retired from teaching. He had three bedrooms in the main house and a large studio out at the far end of the backyard that he let Maya use in the evenings.

Lionel did his own work in the early mornings, sometimes waking as early 4:00 am to get started. He liked to work when it was still dark out, he said, when he was still only half-awake, when he still had half a foot in his own dreams. As the sun gradually rose in the large oval-shaped window at the far end of the studio, he'd feel himself waking up, returning to the world of the living, as he put it, and by the time the sun had fully risen he'd be winding down and getting ready to stop.

When I'd come down from our garage apartment in the morning, I'd often find him sitting out there on one of the small metal chairs outside the studio, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee, his work for the day already done.

Back in his youth, Lionel had made a bit of a name for himself as a printmaker, but now he was doing mostly watercolors, figurative paintings, many of them very sexual in nature and often somewhat strange. He kept these pieces locked away in a large locker at the back of the studio, but occasionally he'd leave a few out to dry and Maya and I would come across them when she went in there in the evenings to work. I remember the first time we came across one of his nudes sitting out on a large, white worktable. The figure in the painting was turned away from the viewer, but I could tell right away who it was. It was a girl we'd seen going into his studio in the early mornings, two or three times a week over the past month—a blond girl, probably no older than twenty-five, with long limbs and a striking face. A sort of sun-drenched beauty. Lionel had never introduced us to this girl, and so we'd spent a lot of time in the late evenings, drinking beer and speculating about who she was: A wayward daughter? A niece? A former student? A lover? It was kind of like a game we played, and Maya would often get carried away with her theories, piecing together evidence from all of the things she'd observed. Sometimes she smokes with him, she'd say, picking up her beer. She probably wouldn't smoke with him if she was his daughter, right? He wouldn't let her.

But now, with the nude sitting right there before us, all of these theories seemed to go out the window.

"Probably just a model," I said. "Someone he's paying, right...