Saving Grace

Grace blinked until her vision cleared but seemed unfazed that she was lying on the hard dining room floor, in the previous day’s clothes, still clutching her Prismacolor pencils. She was exhausted.

Divorce had been harder than she had expected. Well, she mused, it really was just a contract, why had it been so difficult? After a year of marriage, it was clear he was not the man he had portrayed himself to be and yet, she was forced to divide assets that were mostly hers. She kept the apartment and the books; he took the dog and the couch and half the savings (her savings) and that wonderful vintage, woodpecker toothpick-grabber, the one where she could shove the woodpecker’s head into the pile of toothpicks and retrieve one, or sometimes two. If there was any doubt about his lack of character that doubt was erased when he absconded with the woodpecker. There should be a return policy for bad marriages, she thought. Or a cosmic undo button.

Her art would save her. She let herself float in creativity every free minute. Even if she wasn’t creating, she was thinking about creating. She was a free spirit better suited to the late 60’s and early 70’s that had been dominated by hippies, yippies and free love. Despite having a job at the bookstore, a necessary sacrifice, she remained the eternal student. An art student. And what better exemplifies a flower child than an artist.

Grace generally used a variety of pencil grades for sketching and prided herself on having every level of hard or soft leads. Although she reminded herself there is no lead in a lead pencil, it’s a mix of graphite and clay. She would explain this to anyone who would listen. She preferred Prismacolor for her pencil sketching and also used their brand of color pencils, but sometimes she would use a Faber-Castell, if she had to. Alas, she had become a pencil snob.

When she wasn’t working at the bookstore, she was sketching the faces of strangers, watching them from a park bench, or bus stop, or coffee shop. She made extra cash at the Farmers’ Market on weekends sketching the paying tourists. Faces as unique as fingerprints. Round ones, narrow ones, the ugly and the beautiful. She often wondered what secrets hid behind their exteriors. But recently she had begun sketching a man’s face that she was only seeing in her mind. Whether she wanted to sketch it or not, she was compelled to do so.

For months she tried to sketch other faces, but somehow her hand went back to him, a face she had never seen. But here she was, making him up, had made him up, with a composite of features; kind eyes, a Roman nose, a pleasant mouth framed by a curated moustache. Good bone structure. After a detailed line drawing, she would color his skin an olive tone, his hair wild, the color of straw, and his eyes like the clear blue sky. Her Prismacolor strokes gave his arms sinewy muscles, a defined chest and soccer player legs (her favorite). The final touch, which had her smiling, was to add reasonably sized, secondary sexual characteristics.

“Not too small, not too large, just right.”

It was almost too much to bear, she thought. Her perfect man, she thought.

Grace tacked the drawings to the dining room wall which began to look like an ascension of man illustration, except he was not going from a hunched over two-legged creature to an upright homosapien. He was more like a man version of build-a-bear. Build-a-man. She giggled at her invention. She spent time on the drawings before and after work, sometimes not stopping to eat, sometimes wiping away the sweat that had formed on her brow when she became particularly engrossed in the process.

Each time she sketched him she added a new detail. His hands were slender but strong. His nails were manicured. She began to sketch him from the back, beginning with his buttocks which were nicely shaped, not flat like her ex’s ass. His shoulders were broad in a comforting way and there would never be hair on his back like her ex. She added a small heart-shaped mole on the shoulder for no good reason. She imagined her hands sliding over the shoulder to feel the shape of it. When she ran her fingers over her drawing she could almost feel the small bump.

She started to dress him. She gave him jeans, a simple tee, a short leather jacket and hiking boots, then wondered if she should first give him boxers and socks but decided going commando was fine with her.

Upon waking, Grace would begin a new drawing as soon as she was alert enough, adding more details to her imaginary man, like the shape of his ears, flat against his head because her mother always said those were the best ears, or the way his baby toes folded under. She added a proper amount of hair to his forearms. She paid more attention to his lips and decided the moustache had to go. And she felt compelled to add a small scar to his right hand imagining he had gotten it defending the unfortunate. She began to miss days at work.

“A migraine,” she lied. “I should be ok tomorrow.”

Sometimes tomorrow wasn’t ok and she took another day off.

It occurred to her that she should probably give him organs and a brain. She borrowed books from the library and carefully reproduced a male anatomy, layering the muscles, organs and skin and the highways of nerve networks and blood vessels. It took her three months to finish.

She decided to draw him engaged in various activities. Here he was in his castle, eating a full course dinner on a fine set of bone china. Now we see him hiking the Appalachian Trail about to fend off a black bear. She placed him behind the wheel of a sports car negotiating curves, his hair trailing back to show his eye crinkles. She drew him in multiple situations but hid the more risqué images in her bureau.

Her friends were worried about her obsession, but she ignored them. They didn’t understand. She finally relented and agreed to join them for coffee.

Grace showed up at the coffee shop early and secured a table for herself and her companions. She sipped her brew and waited, nervously tapping her foot like a mad woodpecker at this pointless meeting that was taking time away from drawing. From him.

And then, she saw him. It was his wild hair, summer blonde and curly, that first caught her attention, He had a wiry, yet muscular physique. She watched him take a seat at one of the polished tables near the front of the shop. He set down his coffee, opened his backpack and set out a variety of items - an embroidered place mat, a beautiful floral china plate, a set of silver utensils and a linen napkin. He removed the black plastic lid from the cardboard cup and poured the coffee into an exquisite porcelain cup then set it on its matching saucer. From a waxy paper bag, he produced a fancy pastry which he placed in the center of the plate. It was a ritual. Something he must have done a thousand times. She watched his shoulders heave a bit as he took a deep breath, then, he looked up and his sky-blue eyes locked with hers.

Grace stood and kept staring as she moved closer, near missing a customer carrying three large lattes. She stopped at his table having never stopped looking at him.

“Do I know you?”

He took her hand in his and smiled as she ran her finger down the diagonal scar on his right hand.