Naked Portraits Pt. 05

"Come on. I need you to listen," I said trying to be serious.

He stopped goofing and listened as I told of my out of body experiences.

"So? Do you think I'm crazy?" I asked.

"Yeah, but I thought that before all this," he said to be funny.

"Stay serious," I insisted with a little whine.

"Okay, okay. You said this all began after the break up with your best friend, that Betty Nagata chick?"

"Yes ... and no," I said thinking of the line up of events for the first time. "My first memorable dream was on the day that triggered the break up with Betty. Betty and I were still friends. We would split weeks later."

"So something else on that day must have triggered things. List anything odd," Paul said.

"I posed nude for a painting with a tall hot redhead named Venus and Betty painted us. I discovered a box of porn movies at Betty's party. Because of the pron, I went on line to research facial cumshots where I discovered some guy named Peter North and watched hours of vids of him ejaculating on girl's faces. After that I simulated my own facial cumshot and boy was that a disaster."

Paul looked at me, blinked several times then dropped his head in his hands again.

"I'm so fucking horny," he whispered with another mock sob ... although it sounded almost real this time.

"Stop it this is serious," I said, but couldn't help laughing a little too for all sounded so absurd.

"All right, all right," he said looking up again. "That first thing has got to be it, that posing nude with the goddess chick."

"Her name just happen to be Venus, she was no goddess," I corrected.

"So she was ugly?"

"No she was beautiful just not a goddess."

"So you decided that you where going to pose naked for a portrait earlier in the day with a hot redhead for your friend Betty?"

"No it kinda sorta happened," I said remembering how it all came together. "I was alone working on a painting of the Venus chick."

"You had arranged for Venus to pose that day?" Paul asked.

"No. We were alone because the air conditioner had broken down and the class was canceled. I wasn't officially in the figure painting class so I didn't get the email. Venus was a replacement on that day so she didn't get the cancellation notice either. She didn't seem to care that I was the only one there so I went to work. Betty showed up just as I got started."

"Betty always hang out to watch you paint?"

"No," I said. "That was weird. It was kind of out of the blue?"

"So just like that you got up and posed naked for Betty so she could paint and the Venus chick?" Paul asked.

"No, I had started my paint the week before with a different model and had made the decision to continue working using Venus. The painting basically sucked. At one point Betty just pushed her way in and took over the painting."

"And right after that you posed naked for her?"

I shook my head. "I know you'll find this hard to believe but there was a time in my life that I wasn't so adventurous about getting naked. But Betty had this amazing ability to make me do the most stupid things just by calling me chicken."

"I had a friend named Nero," Paul said with a nod. "You could make him do fuckin' anything if you call him chicken."

"I'm not that bad. Only Betty had that power over me. Anyway, there I was posing naked and who should step in but Hawk."

"What's so crazy about that?" Paul asked.

"At the time, Hawk was dating Betty and a total stranger to me."

"Whoa!, Really?" Paul asked. "That whole thing must have blown your mind."

"Fuck yeah," I said.

It was nearing ten in the evening and the bartender shouted for last call. The campus bar always shuts down at ten.

"What happened to the painting?" Paul asked.

"I don't know," I said honestly. "Betty must have it." I thought for a second and said, "Or dose she?" Thinking back, I remember distinctly teller her to put my painting stuff away. If she didn't take the painting home she would have left it in the figure studio's painting rack. I looked at Paul and said wide eyed, "Is it possible that it's still sitting there?"

"Guess we can check it out tomorrow," Paul said.

"Let's go," I said to Paul and grabbed my backpack.

"Aren't we gonna have last call?" he asked bewildered.

Chapter 38 Betty's Painting

I didn't answer, paid the bill with the money I had earned from Meka and then headed to the art building at a fast clip. We stood outside the figure painting studio's door on the third floor.

"You gonna pose naked for me?" Paul asked like he was joking but I could tell there was a hint of hope in there.

"In your dreams," I told him.

Paul tried the door and of course it was locked. "Should have stayed for last call."

"I have my own private studio so I don't use the classrooms too often," I said. "But if I need to, there's a community key in locker twenty two?"

I led Paul down to the end of the corridor to a bank of lockers. At locker number twenty two, I dailed the numbers on an old beat up combination lock. 22, 22, 22. In the locker was a single item and I pulled it out. "The gate to painter's country," I said dangling a key attached to a roughly carved wooden human ear.

"Why the ear?" Paul asked.

"Van Gogh the paint departments patron saint."

I led Paul back to the figure painting studio.

"You think your friend's painting is still in there after all these months?" Paul asked as I turned the lock.

"Don't know"

We entered the dark room. I didn't use any of the overhead lights and turned on just one spotlight focused on the posing platform. It gave off enough glow to blanket the large room in weak yellow light.

"Is it okay for us to be here," Paul asked seeing my caution.

"Yeah ... well no. You have to sign up to use a studio after hours a day in advance and then you have to call campus security to tell them how long you'll be here. We're here for just a quick look so no need to call in the rent-a-cops."

Paul shrugged, apparently unperturbed about breaking the rules.

I stared at the empty posing platform. "I stood up there with naked, tall, freckled Venus," I said, compelled to reconstruct the scene for Paul. I pointed to a spot in the center of the room. "Betty, in her black skimpy bra and boy-short panties stood behind an easel right here."

"Your friend was almost naked too?" Paul asked with interest.

"The air conditioner was down and it was hot," I said absently. I walked to the painting rack at the back of the room and pulled out the painting from slot number two, the one I used back then. It was a nude of a guy.

"Not here," I said disappointed.

"You'd make a shitty detective," Paul said and started looking in rack number one. "There ain't no name tags just numbers. Betty may have used any of theses slots."

"Maybe," I said as my disappointment turning to excitement again. I started searching at the end of the rack starting with slot number thirty.

"Bingo!" Paul yelled at rack number eleven eleven.

He walked the twenty four by thirty six inch painting to the posing platform and leaned it against a stool in the pool of light. Venus stood on the left, me on the right, both figures close, almost touching and looking out at the viewer. The candy apple red Volkswagen Carman Ghia dominated the background then came the deep olive pensive forest and finally the turbulent blue sky.

"This isn't possible," I whispered with my heart in my throat.

"Nobody ever cleans out these painting racks I bet," Paul said, "There's probably shit going back years."

"No, I mean the painting, it's wrong," I said with my heart in my throat.

"This ain't the one?"

"It is!" I said impatiently. "but Betty must have changed it."

"How?"

"That is the short haired version of me I've been seeing in my dreams," I said.

"Well, there you go," Paul stated. "Now you know where that's coming from."

I looked at Paul my eyes wide with fear and close to tears. Barely above a whisper, I said, "Paul, the last time I saw this painting, that naked portrait of me had long hair." I grabbed a handful of of my long brown hair for emphasis. "Betty changed it."

"So what?" Paul asked, confused by my apparent dismay.

I looked back at the painting still gripping a hand full on my hair. "How could Betty have possibly painted this short-haired version of me when she only exists in my dreams?"

***

"You sure you wanna drink this?" Paul asked as he handed me a paper cup.

I took the cup and swallowed the shot of vodka. We had come to Paul's grad studio because of the vodka. As I made a face of disgust, I looked around Paul's studio at the assorted sculptures in various stages of completeness. A piece consisting of a dog's food bowl and a computer mother board occupied his work table like a invading foreign army. He certainly has shot his wad with the dead cats I thought.

"You sure you never laid eyes on this painting until now?" Paul asked. We had brought Betty's painting with us and it leaned against Paul's studio door.

"Not this version of it."

"This short hair chick, you don't know her?"

"I told you, only in my dreams," I said as I eyed the vodka bottle resting next to the computerized dog bowl. Paul took the hint and poured me another shot.

"You ever had hair short like that?"

"Never in my life even as a kid," I said with a weak vodka burnt throat.

"What about your friend Betty?"

"Same, always long." I frowned at his line of questions. "You think that this short haired version of me is some kind of manifestation of my longing for my ex-friend?"

"You said it not me."

"Don't pull psychology crap on me!" I snapped.

He shrugged, unruffled. "You said that your world changed starting with this painting."

I nodded. "Sorry I snapped at you."

"You kiddin'? I'm from new York. That was polite conversation." He splashed vodka into a paper cup for himself, drink it without flinching and kept right on talking. "The way I see it everything is linked: this painting, your break up with your best friend, hooking up with Hawk, you painting nudes, the dreams, the hallucinations and the ... " he paused for a second apparently looking for words. "Sexual promiscuity," he finally said.

"None of that explains why or how Betty painted this chick I see only in my dreams," I reminded him.

"Is there anyway you saw this version of the painting and somehow forgot?"

"You asking if I'm crazy or asking if I'm lying?"

He proved too smart to answer that question and instead steered the conversation to a different place. "Wanna have a look at how you dream?" he asked.

"What you mean?" I asked suspicious. I shook my cup at him hinting that I wanted another shot. He gave me a disapproving look but splashed a half inch in my cup.

"I saw on line that the psych department is looking for people to participate in a dream study," he said.

I gave him a dubious look then knocked back the vodka. I cringed, shivered and made several yucky faces. "They gonna open my head and look inside?" I asked with a raspy voice.

"They don't dissect people at Psychology, dufus," he said. "They hook you up to a machine to see what your brain is doing when you dream. Then they wake you up and ask you to write down what you were dreaming. They pay if you get accepted in the study."

"They pay? How much," I asked now interested.

"A hundred to three hundred a session depending I think."

"They pay you three hundred dollars to sleep?" I asked incredulously.

"Sounds like slacker heaven. All we gotta do now is find someone to pay us to drink," Paul said with a smile. I"ll sign up with you if you like."

"Maybe. I'll check it out," I said absently as I picked up Betty's painting and stood. Paul got up and held the door for me. "Thanks for listening to my craziness," I said.

"Why don't you thank me for breathing," he joked.

"Thanks for breathing," I said seriously and kissed his cheek.