Company

Contributed by Matthew Hartwell on 04/03/09

“My current desktop is a picture of a bowl of blueberries in a girl’s lap, as she lounges in a bikini. It’s very artistic. Very sexual. Very pop, too. Bright stripes bikini, blue bowl, blue berries. It screams ‘Let me be an album cover.’”

“It screams cheesecake.”

“On several levels, but the point is, it’s my friend. Not the picture, since the ages of animism and stashing porn magazines under the mattress never overlapped in my upbringing. The girl in the picture. It’s someone I know, and she’s not sexualized for me, though the image is sexy.”

“If the image is sexy, the girl is sexualized.”

“No, the girl is still Gretchen. Gretchen is, in my persistent, personal model of reality, not a sexual being.”

“Because she won’t sleep with you.”

“Context is irrelevant. She’s-”

“She slept with Gary.”

“She slept with Gary?”

“Yeah, a few times.”

“That’s hor- that’s not relevant. She does sexual things, sure, but in my view, she’s not a sexual being.”

“Because you don’t ascribe the acts she performs to sexuality?”

“Because I don’t view her in a sexual manner.”

“Because she won’t have sex with you.”

“Context is irrelevant. Let’s not go in circles. The picture and the content, are for me, separate entities.”

“So you find the girl in the picture attractive, but not Gretchen in real life?”

“I find Gretchen attractive in real life.”

“But you said-”

“You did a painting of this girl you hung out with once at the bar.”

“We’ve seen each other before.”

“Mutually, in a social interaction sense, or you glanced around a public event, and noticed her, and if so, she was either simultaneously noticing or not noticing you?”

“We both go on 80s night.”

“Okay, and though you both dance once a week to the sweet sounds of Duran Duran and The Cure and horrible power-pop you pretend is good if you can appreciate it through a lens of nostalgia, even though you weren’t a music consumer, or probably even a real person as much as a combination of your parents conflicting commands at that time, you’ve only talked to her that one night.”

“I mean, for two hours. We both had the same English teacher, just two years apart.”

“Missed connection on Craigslist, that is. But you painted her.”

“I sketched her first, while we were talking. Before, actually, on a napkin, just doodling, and then I pocketed them while we talked. Didn’t want to come across as that drawing weirdo.”

“God forbid.”

“After I got home, I was gonna throw them away, but they seemed really spot on.”

“Captured her essence, huh?”

“No, they were just really spot on. Her posture, facial structure, that sort of thing. I’m not usually that good with the details, so it was kind of cool.”

“And how long did it take to put her on the canvas?”

“I only worked on it this week.”

“Give me a ballpark.”

“After details, and going back over it to fix a few issues I had with the color and lighting, I’d say 16 hours.”

“That’s 8 times your face-time with the girl. You’ve spent more time with the painting, by now, then you would in 7 more nights at the bar with her. A week’s worth of bar-nights with her, which you would, by that point, call dating.”

“Yeah, but we’re great together.”

“You’re great with her on canvas. Where she’s quiet. Where you can suss out her mood from one second into infinity. You’ve spent a lot of time with this other girl that doesn’t really exist.”

“Then I’ll get to know the real one.”

“You don’t want to do that. That’s dangerous.”

“That’s stupid. She’s funny and hot. Do you know how rare that is? She’s the kind of girl who would wake you up on your birthday to read Doctor Seuss.”

“But here’s the problem. You’ve already got an idea of who she is in your head, and normally, when you date a girl, that’s no problem. You spend more time with her, and you start to recognize her habits and the way she thinks, and you rewrite that initial impression.”

“If it’s wrong.”

“Yeah. If it’s wrong. But while you’re getting to know this girl, getting a feel for her, sounding out the waters, you’ll occasionally catch a flash of that girl in your painting, and you know exactly how she would and should act. And this girl may not do that. And that’s going to bother you. She’ll pout her lip the way she does on that napkin, and you’re going to say what the girl in your sketch wants to hear, but a different girl will be hearing you. Eventually, you’ll be unable to reconcile the two into one person, and you’re going to have to kill one off in your heart. And let’s face it, you’re not going to kill the better of the two.”