Perfect

Eric forced off his shoes at the heels, too impatient to untie the black laces. Eric always tended towards black. Black jeans, black t-shirt, a long black jacket, the trappings of grief. That he rarely smiled made the display more convincing. He was not expressive; there was no point. There were too many in the world already that had loosed their hold on their emotions. Eric kept his truest feelings well hidden. He’d learned from an early age that most people only wove their way into his intimacy to extract something they needed from it, like mosquitoes of the soul. He’d grown tired of scratching the welts close human contact constantly left him with, so he held the world at arm’s length where it could be safely analyzed and predicted. Swatted, if need be.

All that remained to fascinate him, then, were images. Photographs, paintings, sketches, etchings, prints: time suspended within two dimensions, framed and displayed. The stuff of dreams, perfect moments forever captured, to be experienced as much or as little as one wished. It was Eric’s one indulgence, aside from music, to collect such images. Most times he was relatively frugal about it: magazines, and the occasional book were usually sufficient. But this morning, and the three days leading up to it, had been different.

He picked up the brown-papered rectangle and carried it to his bedroom, where he laid it out carefully upon the heap and tangle of his unmade bed. He knelt down at the bedside, as if to pray, so that he could better work at the covering. The prize was well -concealed, bound in heavy twine and fastened with packing tape. The clerk at the shop had really wanted him to struggle for it at the last. Reaching into his jeans and pulling from the pocket a Swiss Army knife, Eric carefully cut away at the bindings, then along the edge of the tape. The paper fell away with a rasp, left exposed to the grey light from the bedroom window a gilded frame of carved leaves and roses and entwining vines, rendered with such excruciating attention to detail, they seemed as if wind would set the blossoms to bobbing. But more astonishing than the frame was the prize it held, for hedged within it was a woman’s face. The most beautiful face Eric had ever seen.

Eric had known his share of women in his time. He’d even fallen for a few of them. But his passions, when he allowed them, were easily spent, for no one woman was ever enough to be remembered as anything more than a photograph, to be recalled when an injection of fantasy was needed. At the end of his affairs, he usually kept the face and body intact in his memories, and discarded the rest, all the untidy neediness and jealousy and upheaval that women harboured in their hearts. Even so, the faces and forms faded with time, became more difficult to recall clearly, or entangled in the net of other visions, so that they appeared more as hybrids, collages of the past.

But this face: the face of the painting. This face had stayed with him, haunting the landscapes of his mind, sweeping away all other possibilities. It was strange when he’d first laid eyes upon it, in the back corner of a small framing gallery in a finer part of town. He looked up, and did not discover the face so much as fondly remember it, as if he had known it all his life, and buried it deep in the most secret corner of his heart.