When Julio was jonesing for a smoke, he stood in front of one of the large abstract canvases that occupied the front and back walls of the Ellipsis Gallery, because something about them spoke to his craving. These paintings, emitting a slightly acrid smell, hummed with significance. The first was a wash of yellows and oranges in overlapping pools, with a dark blue slash along the bottom edge, suggesting a cloudscape above the ocean, light above shadow. The other was the inverse with superimposed blue washes above a low horizon of ochres and pale green, like a bank of storms above a sun-swept prairie. These two canvases, by the American abstract-expressionist Helen Frankenthaler, were Julio’s favorites of the temporary pieces on loan from a private collection, and he often found himself standing before one or the other when the gallery was quiet. He wanted a cigarette but he couldn’t duck outside until closing time. The gallery’s owner, Ms. Khartoumi, was away in Europe on an acquisitions tour, and Julio was determined to deliver on the trust placed in him.
Most of the people who wandered into the gallery were tourists or the dinner crowd, heading to one of the fancy fusion places in the building, which had been repurposed from an old flour mill, back when this had been the industrial part of downtown Los Angeles. The place had factory bones, iron columns and vaulted skylights, now adorned with pinpoint lights and gleaming concrete floors. Visitors meandered through the glass panel door and strolled the hushed gallery, most with no idea that they were in the presence of two grand works from one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. Twin Lichtenstein prints captivated people, boldly printed cartoon panels in swirls of Ben-Day dots with dialogue bubbles (“Oh Jeff, I love you too, but…”). People posed for selfies in front of these, and occasionally bought the postcards. Unremarked, the Frankenthalers loomed like indoor weather at both ends of the long room, too big to take in at a glance. Their acrid smell seemed to repel people.
Julio, whose job it was to linger importantly in the gallery, answering questions, directing monied types to the prints room, spent all day under the spotlights. Circulating in his steel gray Tom Ford, hair slicked back and shiny, tiny hoop earrings glittering, tattoos concealed, hands clasped behind his back while wearing infinite grooves in the polished floor. He’d become accustomed to the medicinal odor of the vast Frankenthalers and no longer perceived the smell. But something about the effect on his sinuses both awakened and soothed his desire for a cigarette, and this was what increasingly filled his mind on the long weekday shifts when he was alone and couldn’t step outside for a smoke.
That all changed when Carrie Fisher showed up.
She wore a burgundy long coat over a smart skirt and blouse, accented with chunky but tasteful costume jewelry and an impeccable blowout on her brunette bob. It wasn’t really the famous actress—Julio googled to make sure that Carrie Fisher was, in fact, dead—but a close enough doppelgänger of her late-career look. A stylish woman on her way to the theater. She came in alone with an air of melancholy and self-possession, meeting eyes with no one as she sat on the concrete bench facing the yellow-orange Frankenthaler. And then she just sat there, contemplating. Other visitors wandered past. Julio watched from his post by the gallery’s central column. This chick gets it. That’s how you’re supposed to look at this shit.
She didn’t move or make a peep. Twenty minutes later, her phone alarm chirped. She stirred as if awakened from an eyes-wide nap, rose to primp and brush crumbs from her coat—had she been eating?—and then left without another glance.
The next day she returned, and the day after that. The gallery was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Julio pulled his usual Lyft shifts, but she was back on Wednesday during the afternoon lull. Ms. Khartoumi wouldn’t have put up with that shit, but Julio didn’t mind as long as she didn’t make a scene. Watching people was one of the perks of this job, and what she was doing was, in fact, the opposite of a scene. A study in concentration. Perched on the bench, unslumped, deep in contemplation of the luminous abstract that towered over her like a stained-glass window. This time when her alarm sounded, her coat was dusted with powdered sugar. Julio, who’d been keeping a close eye, was sure she hadn’t been munching on donuts while she’d been sitting motionless on the bench.
Holding the door open as she made to leave, he brushed his own lapel and signaled to the spot on her coat where she’d missed a bit of white powder. She flicked it off while giving him a look. “Oh jeez,” she winked. “Look at me, covered in cocaine.”
Julio raised an eyebrow. “Not what I was expecting you to say, ma’am.” And were her pupils actually dilated?
“Don’t call me that.” Her eyes darted up and down the sidewalk, jaw working side to side. Cracked-out as fuck, in Julio’s expert-enough opinion. She assessed him with a quick once-over. “You’re here every day, aren’t you?”
“I am. Seems like you are too, lately.” There was a question in this observation and she acknowledged it with a rapid nod.
“I’m very fond of that one.” She waved at her Frankenthaler, then narrowed her eyes at him. “You seem like a together kind of guy. Tell me—is there anything you want but can’t have?”
His eyebrows peaked. Together was not a word he would have applied to himself; he usually felt much closer to apart. But he knew he looked good in this suit, and that was more than half the battle. Too bad this lady was old enough to be his mother. Plus, she was clearly crazy. LA was full of them, even or especially the wealthy ones. Harmless flirtation was guaranteed currency in cases like this. “Girl, don’t I look like I have everything I need?”
“Girl,” she mimicked. Jaw working. “I like that.” She flicked her eyes over his trim figure, his polished shoes. “Well, we all want something.”
“What I want,” Julio said, peeling what he knew was a winning smile, “is to show you the prints we have in the collectors gallery. You seem like a person of refined taste, and I’m certain—”
She stopped him with a hand on his sleeve. “Think of something small and simple but unattainable. I don’t know—a candy you loved as a child. A song you haven’t heard in a long time. The best cup of coffee you ever had—that kind of thing.”
He tilted his head as all those things tumbled in his mind.
She went on. “Write it on a piece of paper and hold it in your hand. That’s it.”
Julio had no reply for that. He stared as the lady squeezed his arm and then stepped away down the sidewalk. She turned back. “Just do what I do. Breathe deep, no more than twenty minutes.” This last part she punctuated with a strict finger as she clacked away. Down the street, the lights of a silver Tesla flashed on her approach. “Try the blue one,” she called over her shoulder.
Julio watched her drive away, shaking his head. Then he lit up to take advantage of the free moment. The downtown towers glittered beyond the rooftops. “Sunny place for shady people,” he muttered as smoke spilled from his lips under the neon gallery sign.
But he mulled over the encounter as he paced the empty gallery. A memory had jumped into his mind when she mentioned the thing about the coffee. What could it hurt? He was spending all day in the gallery anyway. Shouldn’t he get to know the art as best he could?
There didn’t seem to be anything complicated about it. He plucked a sticky note from Ms. Khartoumi’s desk, jotted down a phrase and folded it into his hand. Then he pulled a chair over and sat in front of the blue-purple canvas, a body length away. Set a timer on his phone. Laid his hands on his knees, took a deep breath. Whiff of turpentine. Stared into the deep wash of blue.
It was more than a whiff, actually. With his gaze fixed into the indeterminate distance within the painting, his senses seemed to adjust and the smell sharpened. Frankenthaler thinned her oil paints with turpentine, achieving a luminous watercolor effect with hypnotic depth and movement within the pools of translucent pigment. Now, decades later, the chemical scent was still biting. His eyes watered. As he blinked and squinted, his vision clarified and there was more than just the canvas in front of him. Shapes seemed to reside within the color field. A canted horizon of rooftops, crests of trees. Figures moving in silhouette, people’s backs where they sat spectating a wide plaza. Lines of aluminum chairs, the shining coins of metallic café tables under a Mediterranean sun. The terrace outside the Café Zurich, Barcelona, at the high end of La Rambla. Julio was there, breathing the sea-scented air tinged with the aroma of a warm croissant from the next table over. Not wanting to break the spell, he kept his eyes forward. The sky beyond the cityscape was Frankenthaler’s blue, but everything else resolved into crystalline clarity: he was there.
A waiter arrived and set an espresso on Julio’s table in a saucer that also bore a small package of sugar cubes. Julio unwrapped them, dipped one and then the other into the crema, sucked the coffee out of the dissolving sugar. Licked his fingertips. Sipped down the remaining shot. Only when the cup was empty did he pull the pack of Delicados from his pocket, shook out a smoke, lit up. As the first exhale tumbled from his lips, a dark-haired woman passed with a flowing pink scarf. Her eyes flashed, just for a moment, over his. She walked away, hips swaying, and stole a glance back over her shoulder. It all combined—the coffee, the sugar, the sun, the tobacco, the woman—to create a cut diamond of a moment. He sat within this jewel, breathing deep. Far more than twenty minutes passed—or maybe time hadn’t moved at all and the moment was eternal?—and then the smell of turpentine seeped in as the phone alarm sounded. He fumbled for it, broke eye contact with the canvas. The sky poured over the rooftops, filled the plaza, submerged the tables, swallowed it all up until the world and the moment snapped back into place. Downtown LA, the Ellipsis Gallery, the blue Frankenthaler, today and no other day.
Julio looked around. A couple had wandered in without his noticing, but they strolled unthreateningly past the Lichtensteins. He stood and found that he had flakes of ashes on one lapel. He brushed them off and smelled the cigarette on his fingers. Alarmed, he looked under his chair for a telltale butt, finding nothing. Unfolding the crinkled note in his hand, he puzzled over its blankness. He’d written Espresso and Delicado at the Café Zurich on the paper, but now it looked like no words had ever been there.
●
Ms. Fisher returned the following day, as he knew she would. “What’s up with the Frankenthalers?” he said as soon as she took her spot on the bench in front of the yellow-orange one.
She showed him a tired expression. She looked hungover from yesterday’s coke bender. “See, this is why I hesitated to even say anything.”
“Is it a hallucination? Some kind of optical illusion thing, like, I don’t know, one of those magic-eye posters?”
“Yes,” she said, and fixed her gaze on her canvas, inhaling deeply.
He threw up his hands. “That’s it? That’s your explanation?”
She looked up at him. “What did you pick? The thing you wanted.”
“A coffee and a cigarette.”
She held his eyes. “Have you smoked today? Or had a cup of coffee?”
By this point in the afternoon, he’d usually smoked one with his morning joe, another on the sidewalk outside before opening up, and a third after lunch in the building’s courtyard. But today he’d slept late, bought an americano to go—and just realized that he’d left it untouched in the car’s console. After lunch, he’d stood outside under the gallery sign watching passersby, a pack of American Spirits forgotten in his blazer pocket. “So what are you saying? It makes me forget stuff?”
She sighed as if explaining things to a child. “You don’t want those things anymore.”
●
After she’d gone, closing time, he locked the gallery door and stood on the stoop of the old flour mill watching the after-dinner crowd stroll back to their cars. Out of habit, he tapped out a cigarette from the pack and snapped open his lighter. Even before he inhaled the heat, something in the taste was off. He spat, sniffed the unlit cigarette. It smelled as if it had been dipped in paint thinner. He lit up anyway, took a drag and hacked out a cough as the chemical stink invaded his lungs. Threw the smoke into the empty planter that served as an ashtray. The whole pack smelled like that. He decided to pick up a fresh pack on the way home.
Except that he forgot. When he pulled into the carport of his bungalow in Los Feliz, he dumped out the cold coffee that had been sitting in the car all day, which smelled as though it contained pure turpentine. He left the car windows cracked overnight to air it out.
●
One of the things that made Julio so good at his job was his ability to chat up the visitors, drawing out who had a new house, a new color scheme in the living room, or a thing for Jasper Johns or Robert Motherwell, how much money they might have to play with. He’d grown up poor, watching his mother scramble between three shit jobs every day, and he understood the power of wealth and the codes of privilege. The keys to escaping destitution. It was all about how you carried yourself in the world, the face you presented. Just playing the part had gotten him far.
And so he refrained from being overeager when Ms. Fisher returned, knowing that a light touch was often the key to opening up guarded souls. Let her take the next step, see where things led. She averted her eyes as she entered, and headed straight to the concrete bench facing her favorite Frankenthaler. Even as other visitors wandered the gallery, she jotted something on a scrap of paper, closed her hand around it, and aimed her gaze into the center of the large canvas. It was like watching someone meditate in a busy shopping mall, outside the flow of time.
Her mood when she emerged from her reverie varied. Some days she seemed elated, turning a radiant smile on him as she brushed crumbs from her coat or smoothed her hair, which had somehow gotten mussed. Other days, she seemed vexed, wiping her hands on a handkerchief, jaw tight like a fist. “My third husband,” she muttered through clenched teeth when she noticed Julio lingering by the column. “Three times worse than the other two. You’d think the math would sink in at some point.”
“Sorry,” he offered.
She flicked a hand to dismiss that. “I’ll figure it out,” she said and swept through the door without another glance. The glass panel door swung silently back into place.
“Well and truly fucked up lady,” he said to no one.
●
He delayed a few days before he tried it again. His smokes still stank of turpentine, as did every cup of coffee he encountered, and he hadn’t touched either since that phenomenal vision of the Café Zurich—a place he’d actually visited nearly ten years ago on a study-abroad program, a fond memory that somehow resided within the blue-purple canvas. What else did he want to revisit, knowing that he might also shed its hold on him? He waited until he was alone in the gallery on a drizzly evening, then wrote on a scrap of paper: Jaguar tattoo.
Twenty minutes later, when his phone chirped, his arm was sore. He removed his blazer and found spots of blood pinpricking through his white shirt sleeve. The tattoo was there, freshly inked on his left shoulder in the patch of open skin among the seven other tattoos that illustrated his upper body. The jaguar was beautifully rendered, with fierce eyes and whiskers that made it look as if it was running at speed, leaping from his body—good enough to be his last tattoo.
The next day, he tried again: Abuela’s chicken mole. He snapped out of it, sated, with sauce staining his lips and the napkin he’d wisely tucked into his collar. And did the colors on the canvas seem a little less vivid now?
But still vivid enough. Sex with Jazmín. When his head cleared he was out of breath, sweaty, the waistband of his trousers sticky with spunk. Later, when he tried to bring up the memory of his first love, her silken body, all he could summon was a hot breath that reeked of turpentine, all desire for her extinguished.
Driving a Ferrari across the salt flats.
A threesome with the next-door neighbors.
And the paintings were changing, both of them. Naked canvas showed through in patches that had previously been painted, their luminosity diminished. No one else seemed to notice, but he could see it. And yet he kept going.
Doing mushrooms in Joshua Tree.
Betting on the Broncos in Super Bowl L.
Not all these reveries left detectable traces in the present, aside from the hint of a hickey, sore knuckles, or an extra twenty in his wallet that he was sure hadn’t been there before. The main result was more of a feeling. As soon as he exited whatever space the painting made for him, the scrap of paper in his hand was blank, and the desire for whatever had been written there no longer existed. Later, sitting on the stoop of his rented bungalow, he realized that he was simplifying his life, the very thing that generations of new-age weirdos and rich people aspired to in their rehab clinics and spa treatments and meditation retreats. He slept better. His mind drifted toward new ideas instead of circling around regrets and missed opportunities. His appetites softened, and he felt energized. But there was still something more he needed to shed, something that went deeper.
●
Julio knew he wouldn’t recognize the guy, having never laid eyes on him before, but he hoped there might be a resemblance. An inkling. It was a grimy bathroom in a bar somewhere, white ceramic tile on the walls, piss-puddled concrete floor, graffiti in Spanish and English on the metal stalls. He found himself standing at a urinal staring into the tiny letters of the phrase El chiste esta en tu mano penned into the grout between tiles. A flyer taped at eye level advertised a rodeo in Bakersfield. His dick was out and he was pissing, misting himself with it. Country music throbbed from a distant room. A man stepped up to the urinal two spots away, unzipped and starting pissing. Julio glanced at the man’s profile and saw it right away: how the hair swept back from the temple, the peaked eyebrow, the deep grooves in the whiskered cheek. Julio’s grooves were just dimples, a step down from this guy’s lined and weathered face. The man slid an eye over, narrowed, then turned his head to face him with a toss of the chin and a stormy brow. “Que traes, pendejo?” the guy said. Clipped and nasal. Not friendly words.
Julio cleared his throat. “Nada, disculpe,” he offered, looking back into the tile, the rodeo flyer. They both went on pissing, the man’s stream more forceful, somehow angry-sounding. Without looking at him again, Julio began, “I’m—” and then cut himself off. He wanted to tell the man about how his mother had saved up from her cement-factory job in Monterrey, how she shepherded little Julio across the border, how her hands had bled and cracked from cleaning houses and sewing school uniforms to pay their rent in motel room after motel room. How he’d studied as hard as she worked, earned a scholarship to a private high school, then a study abroad program in Spain where his disused Spanish became inflected with Castillian. How he’d fallen in love with a Catalan girl named Jazmín in Barcelona, she of the flowing pink scarf, who’d shattered his innocent heart. Dropping out of school, working in gas stations and convenience stores in Anaheim. His mother marrying a retired cop and settling down in Simi Valley. How he visited her only on the holidays, not as much as he knew he should but she just didn’t understand his choices. How he’d convinced an oil-change customer to give him a shot at working in her art gallery, the chunk of savings he’d spent on one steel gray Tom Ford suit, how proud he felt when he wore it. A self-made man. And yet, made by this other man, this stranger pissing next to him in a Bakersfield toilet. He said none of this.
The man finished, shook himself off, zipped up and headed for the door without washing. Still peeing, Julio turned to watch him go. “Excuse me,” he called.
The guy stopped with his hand on the door handle. Swung his head around, cocked at an angle that suggested a bull, aggression barely in check. “Qué chingados, güey?”
Julio pushed sincerity into his affect as he said, “I just want to know—this might sound crazy but I think I need to hear it from you. Am I going to be OK?”
The guy stared, at a loss, then recovered with, “Pinche marica motherfucker—”
The throb of the distant bass line became a more urgent sound, staccato and piercing. The white tiles began to show through with the texture of naked canvas and the colors drained away even as the man stepped forward, fists clenched, fading into nothing. Julio found himself reaching toward the painting and staring at a blank canvas. Pants soaked with urine. The folded paper fell from his hand. He scooped it up to find that what he’d written there—Meet my father—had vanished.
He sat motionless for a while longer, sadness washing through him, but also a sense of quiet and relief. His heart was as blank and featureless as the canvas. Even the smell of turpentine was gone, replaced by the tang of piss.
●
Time with the Frankenthalers was running out. The canvases were going to be packed into their shipping crates and readied for auction first thing Monday when Ms. Khartoumi returned. Carrie Fisher came in for the last time just before closing on that Sunday night. She asked him to lock up and leave her there, but of course he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he kicked out the last lingering visitors, bolted the gallery door. Ms. Fisher was already on her bench staring deeply into her painting, which had faded significantly but hadn’t gone completely blank. He ducked away to the office to allow her some privacy. He couldn’t help but notice that his own Frankenthaler appeared in full color and form on the video feed from the security cameras. Ms. Khartoumi wouldn’t notice shit. But when he peeked into the gallery, the canvas was as naked in the spotlight as if it had never been touched by paint.
He comforted himself with the certainty that he was hallucinating.
A clatter caught his attention. Ms. Fisher slumped on her bench, making a keening sound. A long kitchen knife lay at her feet.
Julio rushed to her even as her phone alarm sounded. She dropped to her knees, waving her hands, mouthing words she didn’t say. The knife on the concrete before her glistened with blood all the way to the handle. It beaded and pooled on the shining floor, brilliant as any color he’d ever seen.
He grasped her by the shoulders as her eyes searched the room. “Are you hurt?” he said, but he already knew that the blood wasn’t hers. With palpable effort, she focused on him. A glint of triumph shone in her eyes. The set to her jaw softened, a burden melting away.
The once yellow-orange Frankenthaler before them had gone blank. Ms. Fisher, who moments from now would be reduced to a sobbing mess because of a few simple words, turned her glistening eyes up to him. Julio, who nearly meant it because he almost believed it, said, “Girl, you’re going to be OK.” ◼️
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