The only sound in the room, or the only one he heard, was the faint scratch on his pencil on the drawing paper. There were other sounds of course, it was an institution and there was always some sound outside the door, someone walking or rolling down the hall, the staff at their work seeing to the needs of the residents, but he had the old focus, he could shut other things out when at work. Shut would not be the right word, it sounds like an action, and his only action was the drawing, the pencil scratch the only sound, the model the only other thing in the room besides his pad and pencils. A focus on the essentials.
The focus was a part of the skill set he had acquired long ago, in his youth, in another century, another time, surrounded by people who are gone, many long gone. He had been at this over 75 years. He learned from masters whose lineage went back hundreds of years. His teacher’s teacher, already at work in the mid-19th century, that man had actually drawn soldiers during the Civil War.
---
He was drawing a face. He knew everything about the structure of faces, all the bones, muscles, all the cartilage, how a human face is physically put together. How many faces had he drawn, how many had he painted? Countless. He couldn’t begin to figure it out. His work was still out there, much of it collected, in people’s homes, or, by now, in the homes of the children of many of the subjects. A lot of it in storage, in racks, canvas after canvas, row upon row of them.
He had mastered his craft over 50 years ago, but still it was new and growing, alive in him and this drawing now was his most important work, vital and alive in the moment.
“Oh Emily!” he said loudly but gently seeing her nodding off in the chair, “Wake up dear, just a little bit longer and we’re finished.”
She started, “Oh sorry Gene, I was just drifting away.”
“No problem you are a wonderful model and it is an honor to draw you.”
He had said that to all the models for 70 years. Models at the Art Students League, people long since dead or gone, even though many were younger than he. They were all “wonderful models'' and it wasn’t bullshit either. It was the truth, the model and the work were one thing and it was all wonderful, the union, the exchange of energy, the light from their faces and bodies was wonderful, wondrous and they were all wonderful models, because they were there and alive before him. That was really the way he felt about them, the way he remembered it and how he felt about Emily right at this moment.
“Thank you.” said Emily, feeling flattered. “Is this right?”
“If you could turn slightly to the left. . .the window light.”
It was mid afternoon on a bright winter day. The only light in the room from the double hung window, tightly closed to keep the elders warm. The southern light was perfect for what he was doing today and had been doing with this series of drawings. All were quick portraits of only a couple hours, maybe less if the subject tired. He couldn’t paint. They wouldn’t let him have paint in there, not even watercolor. It was not fair but that was the rule so his work now was all drawings. No matter, he could still work, still do what it meant for him to be alive.
Emily was a fine looking woman, still, He didn’t know how old she was. Probably mid 80s, they were all in their 80 or 90s, and mostly women. Men die off sooner. But he didn’t, he hasn’t, and look at him, still working, still alive and vital and now serving his little community here in a very special way. He was “The Artist”, they all know him as “The Artist”, and revered him for it.
They were all isolated here among themselves. The pandemic made it so no one could visit. Those that had loved ones, children who would still come, could not see them now, there was a fear of the infection or bringing something into the home that could kill them all off. It had happened, last spring there were old people’s group homes that were devastated, 50 dead of the 75 residences. It was a serious matter. That was why they were cut off alone together. And even masked among themselves. Isolated, the residents and the staff, the outside friends only on the telephone, the grandchildren, the great grandchildren, dear grade schoolers of the new century, only appeared on the FaceTime of those who had a smartphone and were not intimidated by the 21st Century technology. Cut off for 10 months now and 10 months is the rest of their lives to some of them. Some had passed away naturally in that time and didn’t get to say goodby properly. Couldn’t feel the hand of a beloved daughter as they passed. The Artist had sat with more than three as they passed. He wanted the same thing for himself when the time came, so he showed up for others. Some who passed he had grown close to in the two years he had been here, wherever he was, wherever they deposited him, in Queens somewhere. He didn’t know Queens. But he knew this place now. There was no other place than this. This was his world.
---
It all started naturally, The Artist doing his thing like always, like practically forever, like, 75 years. He was astounded at that number, three quarters of a century. It was something, but he had never set out for that, never thought of that and still doesn’t think about tomorrow. He had always kept busy in the moment, in each day and the days just naturally built one upon the other. That part was out of his hands. What was in his hands was the piece of the moment, the focus on his work, the drawing or painting in front of him, the work and focus that made the clock stop for him. Once he had started, so long ago, as a child really, to seriously learn the craft of it all at age 15 it all just fell into place one drawing and one painting after another, of its own momentum. He never let up. He didn’t have to, there was always at least a pencil and paper, which, like now was all he really needed. He had that here, and though the place was in a sense institutionally bland, there was always something he could draw.
From the first day here, or, maybe the second, the first being moving and settling in and putting his things in order in the limited space, he had been drawing.
That second day he was in the community room. His first drawing there was in that room. People were watching TV. Some of the women knitted and watched TV. He sat off to the side and made a sketch of the room. Figures slouched in the chairs staring at the TV, some kind of talk show human image on the TV. The wall to the side perpendicular with the windows, the light coming through the windows through the venetian blinds, half-closed so the sun wouldn’t make the TV hard to see.
That drawing hung in there in a frame now. It was his establishing of his domain the extension of his territory into this place. His territory anywhere he was with his pad and pencils.
Then he drew his own room and some other rooms. He had always liked to do rooms. He did many drawings and paintings of his studio, his old studio downtown. Sometimes he missed it but there was no use in that, he knew for years it was not forever, only for now. He was amazed with how long he kept that studio. It must have been 37 years. There had been other places before, but that was The Studio. He kept it tidy and organized. He had friends, other artists and writers, who liked to function in a mess, a chaos, but his studio was organized, tidy, he knew at all times where something was and its supply status, when he needed to get another tube of a certain color.
---
People saw the drawings of the rooms and naturally this led to him being asked to draw people. He had done some of the staff first. People loved Georgina, always patient and kind with her Island accent. Jamican, Barbatos, he didn’t really know. The residents delighted at the drawing he made of her. From there it all went on a word-of-mouth momentum of its own.
Some would scowl at what he produced, what he showed them of themselves. They were drawings of very aged, unhappy, disappointed people. It was simply the truth of them, some of them at least. It was the truth of what he saw, what they presented to him.
The turning point was drawing Hal. Hal was around 87 and had rather serious dementia, the kind that made him frustrated and sometimes angry. He had not asked for a portrait himself. His daughter, already around 60 herself would come visit, more often than most relations. This was before the quarantine. She had seen Gene’s drawings on display and asked him to do one of her father Hal.
She was not there when Gene maneuvered his walker into Hal’s room last winter, That ended up being a good thing. Hal, of course, didn’t know who Gene was and what he wanted. “Hi Hal, I’m Gene, The Artist. Your daughter Deborah asked me to come and draw you. So here I am.”
“Deborah. . .Deborah.” was all Hal said.
Gene sat and did the drawing in silence except for the sound of the pencil on the paper and Hal’s deep breathing and occasional heavy frustrated sighs. Once is the middle of it he looked at Gene, “Who are you?”
“I’m Gene, The Artist, Deborah asked me to draw you.”
“Deborah,” he looked about him, “where is little Deborah?”
“She can’t be here right now Hal, she sent me to draw you.”
“Deborah!” He called out, but then seemed to forget what for and drifted away again.
Gene felt sorry for the guy and grateful that he still had his mind and his craft. He had an urge to hurry and get out of there away from this concentration, the focus on the most frightening pain facing them all embodied in this old man. But he left all that aside and did his job, returned to the silence and focused on his work.
There was no more activity from Hal in the 45 minutes it took Gene to finish up. He removed the drawing and piloted his walker the few feet to the subject and handed the sheet to Hal.
Hal looked at the drawing and immediately tore it up.
“Get out, whoever you are! Leave me alone!”
Gene gathered his pencils and pad up, put them in the basket of his walker and backed out of the room.
“Get the fuck out.” Was the last he heard form Hal as, shaken, be headed down the hall.
Gladly, he thought to himself with a mix of emotions, fear, pity, anger at the destruction of a piece of his work, and the reality of There But for Fortune feeling grateful that whatever happened to him he had at least so far escaped that miserable fate. But what would he tell Deborah?
As he moved back to his room and away from the danger, Hal was not a little guy or physically disabled. At that moment the new idea, theme dawned on him. The Happiest Moments. He would ask them to describe the happiest time in their lives and he would draw them as that. He felt that a lot of these people were as he was, in their minds back in their old bodies, with their faces and their hearts and minds, maybe not as children but at least more related to the images of themselves that they had settled in with through the long years of middle age. These old people’s bodies and faces, something new, recently, unexpectedly, and unwelcomely put upon them and only accepted to a certain degree, the hearts being somewhere else, someone else, not this OLD THING. He would have them tell about their happiest moments and draw them more like that then perhaps they actually appeared now before him. He had the skill to technically accomplish this. He knew the structure of the skull, the muscles and the cartilage and he could see in their faces where it would have been before, before this encroachment of old age. He could draw them like that and present them with drawings of themselves at their Happiest Moments.
So here he was with Emily nodding off a bit before him. She can be the first, the experimental subject.
“Emily, talk to me. Tell me about your joyous time of life, your Happiest Moment.”
Emily looked at him as he spoke. Then she glanced to the window. A soft smile passed over her face and he could see, feel, her going back, speeding through time and memory. Her face brightened more and she landed where she had wanted to go and she Gene told her story.
“The first years, it was like sleepwalking, or just doing what I had been told. More like a hypnosis subject than an obedient follower of the rules. I somehow didn’t let myself wake up from what I was given to do. I was too much a good girl, I just wasn’t awake enough to come out of the dull dream that I was in. But it was like someone else's dream, the marriage, right out of school to my college sweetheart, and he was a sweetheart but lost in the dream too. The children right away, two of them, the role of stay at home mom. And I still feel that was the right thing to do for the children is not for Bill and myself. He off to a career, me at home with the kids, home chores, children’s games. It was all fine and good, but somehow, somehow, it was like someone else's dream, someone else's life and not really enough.”
She paused and shook her head and smiled, “But this moment you ask about. . .it was years later when I came into my own, my life, when I was already beyond 40, beyond the children, beyond Bill. That Happiest Moment, if I had to pick one now would be when I got my MA and sociology and really began my own life. My own career. I was so proud of myself, for having the wherewithal, the gumption, energy, and discipline to go back to school and achieve that. Yes that is my Happiest standout Moment. That spring at SUNY, Purchase receiving my degree.”
“Thank you for telling me this and congratulations.” Gene was at the drawing this whole time and was making her as she was and, inside, still is.
“Could you turn a bit more toward the window? That’s enough.”
He kept glancing up at her really seeing her and back to his paper. Had he not heard this story he could not have actually drawn the real her the Emily that she felt she was. She would have been just another old woman nodding off in a chair.
About twenty minutes later he was finished. One thing he learned years ago was to finish, to stop, to not continue to work a piece, there must be an end point or else nothing is ever done and there is no moving on.
“There!” he said at last. He turned his pad around so she could see, after Hall there was not more of handing them the drawing.
Emily beamed! Gene announced, “The graduate!”
It was Emily, unmistakably Emily, but Emily at her Happiest Moment beaming in the drawing as she was beaming at the image now. The picture was true to life, it was not a lie that denied age, yet the energy of Emily of 45 or 50 years ago glowed out from the graphite on paper. It was a bit of magic.
“It is wonderful Gene, that is me, that is as I was, as I am, as I always will be. Thank you!”
“Thank you for sitting with me and sharing your Happiest Moment with me.”
He headed down the hall looking for the room. One of the staff was there as he slowly made his way by, “Georgina, do you know which room Tina is in?”
“I do believe she is number 12, right down there to the left.” Gene liked Georgian’s Caribbean accent. It sounded so flowing and musical.
“Thank you dear, she’s my next subject.”
“I know she will be happy to see you sir, you know she has a hard time getting around these days.”
He walked and rolled three more doors down. Tina’s door was open. He peered in. She appeared to be napping in her bed. He tapped on the door. He wondered if he should just come back later, but they all, including him, tended to nap on and off through the days. He knocked a bit louder, “Oh Tina.”
She awoke and looked around her momentarily and spotted smiling Gene at her door. “Oh hi!” She didn’t say his name. The fact is she couldn’t remember it at the moment, but knew he was The Artist.
“It is a good time for our little portrait?
“Absolutely, no time, like the present. Catch me while I’m still breathing.”
Gene rolled into the room. “I hope you don’t mind me hosting you from bed, it’s just, well, I’m rather stuck here these days.”
“No problem at all, but can we prop you up a bit?”
She pushed herself up and rearranged her three large pillows into a sitting position. Her hand went to her hair that was still not totally white, some dark pigmentation hanging on, “I don’t know. I must look horrible, don’t make me look like a horrible ratty old woman.”
“Not to worry, that is not what this is about. What I’m doing is less a documentary of this moment. What is time anyway?”
“Ok then, have your way with me.” She showed her good humor with a naughty smile.
“Fear not tender maiden,” He was raising to the spirit of the verbal flirtation, “I shall be gentle.”
“Well, how do you want me? I have seen some of your work and it is most interesting, really.”
“Thank you. I hope you feel the same about what we do here today,”
“You know, I heard about that thing with Hal, the poor guy. I have memory lapses but, well. . .poor Hal.”
“Yeah, it kind of shook me up, but what can you do? Not the first disappointed model in what I do with them. Anyway, it made me approach this, from then on, in a more timeless reality sort of way and that is what I would like to do with you. It’s better actually. Hal ended up helping to guide me.”
“OK, what do I need to do, just sit here and shut up?”
“No, first turn your head slightly away from the window light. There, perfect.” He got into position with his pad and pencils and made the first scratch on the paper. “Now. Tell me about your Happiest Moment.”
“Happiest Moment? Let me think.” She sat silent for a minute or two. “Well, it’s been a long life and a lot has gone on wonderful and horrible.”
“Oh it can be anything, I’m not recording what you say just your face through time as you tell me about it, so it really doesn't matter that much. I’m just trying to show some timeless brightness in us old far. . .people.”
She laughed, “You were going to say ‘old farts’, that was what I was most concerned about you coming here. That I would. . well, fart.”
“Feel free to fart, we are all humans here. Would that be it then, your remembrance of farts past?”
“No smart ass,” they were becoming fast friends, “But I have a story that I love to think back on. Nothing serious, like the birth of a child or a life changing moment though.”
“It doesn't have to be something like that, just something that was fun is enough.”
“Well then. I was a contestant on a TV game show.”
“Really, how interesting! Tell me about it.”
“This was in the mid 1960s sometime. I was still a relatively young woman back then.”
“What show was it, something I would know?”
“I was on Password, remember Password? With Alan Ludden?”
“Yes, of course, I didn’t really watch a lot of TV back then, I never have always, making pictures, but yes I remember Password. Weren’t there celebrity players on that?”
“Oh yes. When I was on it was Woody Allen and Nancy Sinatra, Frank’s daughter.”
“Wow, did you win anything?
“Oh yes, it was great fun and exciting. They had us with one celebrity and then we switched sides and played with the other. I did best with Woody, he was, is, I supposed, very bright. We won the round and I got $250 more in the Lightning Round.”
“250? Did you retire on that?”
“Yes, I know, it sounds like chump change now of course, but it didn’t matter, it was just really exciting with all the lights. It was in a studio on 54th Street. Alan Ludden was an elegant man and a charming host, Woody was playful and having fun with it. Nancy was a little distant, but a guess being in the public eye all your life like that, will, I don’t know what it was like, but she was cordal enough. This was before Woody Allen ever made any movies, he was still just a stand up comic.”
“Oh, I know, I saw him perform in one of those clubs in the village long about then. Folk singers and a few comics like Woody. He was very funny, as far as I can remember. Of course we had no idea that there would be all those movies back then.”
“No. Not yet anyway, I went and saw the Merv Griffin Show when he was still in New York, but no I was never on TV. Those studios are a lot different than how they seem on TV with all the lights and technical gear.”
“Oh yes, it was quite something to be in the center of it all AND try to play the game and win.”
They sat in silence with only the soft sound of the pencils on the paper. Gene worked quickly. He hardly had to really think about how to create an image, he had done it so many times. With Tina here he went for something more fun, almost a caricature cartoon, complete with costume and setting. It was like a TV image of her behind the desk of the old TV quiz show, in a dress and hair style very mid-1960s. As he recalled how the show worked and how it looked, He even put in the box that they provided to show the home audience what the word was. Inside the box he put a password, “WINNER”.
He finished up, rather pleased with himself at his own playfulness and looked up. “Done.”
“Well, then let’s see, unless I look like a sad old woman, then I’m not so sure.”
“Oh no! I had fun with this one, I just hope not too much fun.”
“Let’s see.”
He turned his pad to face her. She lit up and she seemed to sit up more. With a little laugh, “Gene, that is wonderful. I am so pleased.”
She looked at it for another minute, “It’s remarkable really. Let me show you something.” She shifted, not without some effort and opened the drawer in her bedside table out of which she pulled an old photo album. Putting it on her lap she quickly turned through the pages. Gene saw the upside down snapshots of a life flash by, family, people, children, vacations.
“Here.” She was filled with joy as she handed the album over to Gene. It was turned to a faded to red color snap shot obviously taken on the set of Password, with Alan Ludden smiling beside Tina and another man handing her a check. “That’s Mark Goodson, the producer, and dear Alan, but look at me.”
“Good lord, incredible.” Gene had pretty much recreated Tina’s look, hair and outfit in his drawing. “It’s amazing.” He knew what he had done but could hardly take credit, it was some kind of magic alchemy between them that had done this. “Thanks so much for showing me this Tina. You make me believe there is something magic about art beyond my conscious control.”
He directed her to the seat as soon as she entered. She came on her own power. He was a bit envious of that being attached to his walker when he moved about.
She sat down and her hand went to her mask. “May I?”
“Oh yes please do, as a matter of fact it is essential for what we are about to do.” This was really the only time they were around other people when they could remove their masks. He had to be granted special administration permission to have people model in his room maskless. His had to remain on, but they could remove theirs. The subjects loved the freeing feeling of that.
“You are Jennifer, correct? I’m Eugene.”
“Yes, that’s what they call me. And of course I know you. You have become a famous person here. The Artist.” This last with a grandiose flourish. She struck him as a Live Wire, something about her.
“Ha! Yeah, that’s what they call me. But anyway, it’s Gene.’ Pointed to the only other chair in his room, “Please have a seat.”
She arranged herself comfortably. “Do I need to be perfectly still?”
“No, well, it would help me if you kept your head at the same angle, direction from the light, but I would like you to talk to me.”
“What will I talk about?”
“I would like you to tell me about the time you felt most happy, content with your life; your happiest moment.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know, when everything felt most like just right.”
“Do I have to tell you about it or just show it with my face?”
“Well, I like to hear people, my friends, talk. . .”
“Am I your friend?”
“You are. At least now, at this moment when you are here in time with me.”
She smiled, shifted, then, relaxed. “Funny that you should mention the moment. I was thinking that too. Everything was a build up to this moment!” She brightened!
“Well, here we are so I guess it has.” he said.
“It's perfect to be here now with you. It all led up to this. To us, strangers all our lives, but now. . .it’s a type of miracle.”
“A pleasant happenstance to say the least.” he smiled.
“I’m not going to sit here and recount dead vague memories, or memories of memories of sometime in the past that I look back longingly on.”
He was a bit puzzled by this. It wasn’t that she was being stubborn and uncooperative. “Well, it was just a suggestion. You don’t hav. . .”
“I made a commitment to myself a long time ago not to live in the past.” She looked at him sweetly with a soft smile,
“Sounds interesting, please go on. How did that occur to you?”
“Oh, I had been like everyone else, this was when I was younger, not THAT young, but still young, if you know what I mean, relatively.”
“Ha! Yeah, I know that well. 60 seems young to me now.”
“Right, but I wasn’t that old yet, still in my 30s when I stopped looking back. The timeline is a bit of a blur to me.”
“To me too, especially if you're not looking back and measuring all the time I would imagine.”
“I did up to that point, for sure I did, and it only led me into heartbreak and longing.” She looks at his pad. “So you started. Should I stop talking?”
“No this is interesting to me. Keep talking, just try to keep your head turned at that angle to the light. It’s good light on you. But don’t worry about it. I'll tell you to turn your head when I need you to. So go on please. What brought on this change of, well, I guess, perspective?”
“Telling you about it now is a form of looking back, but I guess I can make an exception, I mean just to explain.”
He nodded.
“It was an extreme event, I guess what they now call a ‘trauma’ that brought all this on. I was married young, too young, 22 and right away had a child. A boy. Jeff we called him, Jeffery after my husband’s father. To make a long story short, when he was 8 he was out on his bike. He was hit by a car and died three days later in the hospital.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Trauma indeed.”
“Hush now! It doesn’t matter, it was over 55 years ago and I didn’t tell you to gain sympathy. Besides that is not the story.”
There was her voice, and the scratch of his pencil on the paper. That was all there was for him now. He didn’t quite yet know the approach of this particular image. He needed more. Where in the timeline would he place her. “Of course, sorry, go on.”
“This set me in a spin. I thought it was the end of me. I wanted it to be. I thought about Jeff all the time, I kept his room as it was, as a sort of shrine. I knew he was not returning but I couldn’t get rid, give away his things, and repurpose the room. I was morrose, I cried when I woke up to another day without him and hated the world at night, a world that could, would, did, do this to my dear boy.’ She didn’t seem upset by this now, just dispassionately telling a story. “Drove my dear husband crazy. We lived out on Long Island, isolated in suburbia and always driving past the spot where Jeff was hit. . .And Jim, my husband, was really a sweet guy, had a good job, perfect really. Yet I would rage at him if he ever tried to console me, ‘You don’t care! You don’t know what it is like to carry life and then have it snatched away like that. How can you tell me not to cry? I'll never stop crying, ever!’”
She stopped and looked at her hands, sighed and went on. “After a few years of this Jim moved on, away from me, out of my life. I can’t blame him. I was on my own with my pain.”
The Artist was a bit lost with this image. He didn’t know how to put her, what he was seeing from her, really seeing, below the surface. She was telling a tragic story but without the mask of tragedy. She was serene relaxed and present. It was as if she was relating a story that had happened to someone else.
“I had moved into an apartment in Manhattan way uptown, Inwood. It was cheap to live up there then. I was doing copy editing for publishers of, mostly pulp novels. It was a work at home thing, so I rarely even saw other people. I would go on walks in Inwood Hill Park, supposedly dangerous back then, but I didn’t care. I loved the wildness of the place. Ever been up there?”
“No, I don’t think so, maybe as far up as the bridge and the Red lighthouse, which I made a painting of.”
“Well, this is thirty blocks beyond that at the very top of Manhattan, and it’s all woods and rocky cliffs.” She reached over to him with eager eyes. “I can take you there som. . . No, this is our world now nevermind.”
“Yes, I guess we are stuck here. . .for the duration.”
She laughed, “‘The duration’ yes indeed, ‘the duration’. Anyway, back then I would walk in the woods alone in the early morning, sometimes two or three times a day. The neighbors thought I was crazy to go in there, particularly alone.” She had a look of self contained pride with this.
“When was this?”
“The sixties. A couple years after Kennedy was shot and Penn Station was demolished.”
“Ugh! I remember that time will.” And with a hint of sarcasm, “The prime of life.”
She was now in those woods. “There were, are, trails all through the woods, up and down the hills. I would walk them, briskly, I was very fit. There is a part where there are giant old trees, rocks, even caves. One morning I crawled between the rocks into one of the caves and sat there looking out.” She had a dreamy look just now. “I looked out at the giant trees, the leaves, very green, it was early summer, the birds calling. I looked at the rock around me. There were some beer empties in there, kids, but that didn’t matter. I looked out, and I looked at my hands, and I forgot about the stupid novel I was editing, and just knew something then.”
She looked up at him. There was a long silence. He had not started drawing again through all this. Her heavily lined face was placid, with a look of deep contentment, not the disappointment he would see in the faces of so many of the others.
She began again. “You see, that was all there was, I saw that then at that moment, and it never left me. That was all there was, that moment as a creature in a cave in the ancient woods. It’s old original growth up there, those glorious trees. That was all there was, the trees, the birds, the squirrels, even the beer cans showed me. I saw it then for the first time. And I see it now.” She looked at him directly with a soft smile. “This is all there is. You and me, this room, your drawing. This is it, this is life, this is my Happiest Moment.”
The Artist was stunned. He knew, or course that she spoke the truth, and that she had given him a gift, something he needed to hear right now in this place, this place that was the only place, the place of his life, the only place he would likely ever be from here on.
He felt no need to say anything else other than, “Could you turn your head slightly to the right, into the light. Too much. . .That’s it.”
They sat in silence, with the scratching of the pencil as he drew. He looked at her very closely, more closely now than even before more connected than to any of his subjects. He was grateful for the truth she told. He put that truth into the drawing. He sketched her ancient lines, her sparse white hair, the dark growth on her forehead, the reality of her now as she was, an ancient, like himself, but one that contained the knowledge of time, or the moment of life and held that fearlessly within her while showing it to the world in her face.
He worked and they sat for another 2 hours, stopping occasionally to move about. He worked on her longer than the others, He wanted every detail of her now, in her “Happiest Moment”.
“I think I’m finished.” He put his pencil down.
“You think?” She said with an ornery grin. “Let me know when you decide for sure.”
He turned his pad around to her. She gazed at the drawing of herself for a long minute, taking in every line of the highly detailed work. It was a portrait of her now, a 90 year old woman, with lines on her face and light in her eyes.
She gave him a warm smile. “You're very good at this young fellow. You should stick with it.”
“Ha. Yes, I intend to, for the moment anyway.”
They both laughed.
“Perhaps you can draw me again sometime. I’m constantly changing.” Gesturing to the drawing, “I'm different than this already.”
“1-877-kars4kiz” The fake children rock band played on the familiar TV ad. Everyone was assembled in the home’s common room. Everyone who could be was rolled in if they couldn’t get in on their own. It was 10:40AM. They had been told the piece was supposed to be on at 10:42 . Gene was sitting among all the others wondering how this would come off in the editing after yesterday afternoon’s visit.
The anchor man introduced to segment:
“And now Roger Clark with our New Yorker of The Week at an unusual art exhibit in a home for the elderly in Queens.”
A masked man is seen on TV in the very room in which they are sitting:
“I’m here at the Gilded Rest Assisted Living Home where there is an unusual art exhibition here in the common room.”
The shot goes over various drawings of people’s faces on the wall behind him. We hear his voice over:
“This showing is called Happiest Moments. All these drawings of many of the elderly residents here were done by Eugene Sinclair, a resident here himself and a fine artist for practically 80 years. Mr. Sinclair, now in his 90s was one of the artists who did paperback book covers in the 1960s and 70s. Just look at this stuff.”
A painting is shown of a man and a woman in embrace in a setting of blossoming trees. “This one is the cover painting for a romance novel called Blossoming Love.” The image is switched to a bare chested man fighting an alligator in a jungle river. “This one for the cover of a 1963 man’s adventure magazine is called Safari to Death.” The camera is back to the announcer’s face with his COVID mask in the same shot with masked Gene a few feet away. “And here is The Artist himself Eugene Sinclair. Mr. Sinclair can you tell us about this current exhibition?”
The TV switches to a shot of Gene now with his mask down and a microphone extended toward him.
“Well, as you have seen here I have always painted and drawn. I had to come here 2 years ago and I, well, I couldn’t stop myself and I started drawing my fellow residents. This exhibition is called Happiest Moments,” The shot switched to a moving image panning across the wall of drawings. “This represents the work of 8 months. I visited many of my fellow residents and in order the break the ice and create interesting drawings I asked them to tell me of their Happiest Moments and tried my best to, while being true to what they are now, to show what they also are in their minds, minds which somehow do not totally acknowledge time as a continuum.” The shot goes back to Gene. “ We are all, in a way, time travelers here, at the same time in the present moment, in the past, and even in the future.”
Back to a shot Roger Clark, “Thank you Mr. Eugene Sinclar Time Traveler, great artist, and our New Yorker of The Week. Roger Clark here in Queens.”
The program switched to the weather forecast as the residents all applauded Gene and themselves.
As the noise died down Tina shouted. “Gene. You made it on TV. . and you’re a winner!”
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