Canvas

3| The Artist

Charles Cartwright was a respectable young man. It’s how his mother and father raised him, how he was expected to behave. He was eighteen and wealthy, handsome—tall with a prominent jaw that he inherited from his grandfather—and strong. His mother liked to brag, to other women at the swanky parties she hosted in their apartment at The Madison, that she was the wife of a senator. But none of that mattered to Charles. Social standing did him no favors.

“My James—he’s what the people need in a time like this,” she would croon with a flute of bubbling ginger ale pinched between her thin fingers that she would sip only occasionally. “My dear husband, he has these grand notions of pulling even the poorest out of poverty. To restore America to the great country she once was. Put Americans back to work.”

Charles would roll his eyes. His father didn’t care about the poor. The poor were lucky if he didn’t spit on them, kick them while they’re down.

“Our young Charles will be following in my dear James’s footsteps. He’ll be the voice of his generation, I’m sure of it.” She’d grab his face gently in her warm hands and kiss his forehead, leaving behind the waxy feel of lipstick. “Such a handsome young boy. So smart. He’s eighteen, you know?”

At this, his mother’s friends would pat his knee, or smile at him from across the room, saying they simply must introduce their daughters to him, which are always reported to be beautiful, proper and the perfect potential wife. Charles would smile back tightly. He didn’t care about looks if the beauty was hollow. The girls he was introduced to were always shells of people, perfectly sculpted personalities with no opinions of their own. They were pretty parrots, repeating his opinions through their sticky red lips, staring back at him with glassy eyes. 

“Proper women,” his mother had told him once, after he returned from a particularly painful dinner with a girl she had insisted he meet, “understand their place in this world. You should consider yourself lucky to not have to put up with those wild flapper girls. Their behavior is utterly disgraceful. Charles, you will have a perfect, pretty wife and, if you follow in your father’s footsteps, your life, too, will be perfect.”

He didn’t want perfect. Not if it was fake. He wanted reckless, he wanted fun, he wanted honesty. He wanted someone who didn’t just mirror his opinion. He wanted to be challenged. He did not want to be called Charles. Charlie. His name was Charlie, and he wanted to be an artist. 

The one thing Charlie loved most in this world was art. Sculptures, oil paintings, landscapes and cityscapes… That was the beauty he cared about. He dreamed of being a famous painter one day, like Vincent van Gogh—whose paintings of stars and sunflowers made him dizzy—or Salvador Dali—whose fascinating surrealism slipped into his subconsciousness and reappeared in his dreams. He could stare at Edward Hopper’s painting, Automat, until his eyes became bleary with exhaustion. MC Escher’s art was strange and fantastic and he always had the urge to step into the frame and live within the painting. 

That’s what he wanted to be. Strange and fantastic. An artist. He was pretty good, too. He’d taught himself from a young age, and watched the street artists paint when he was a child, before his mother would tug him away from the canvases of color. 

Try as she might to hide art from him, he was still able to find it everywhere around him. In the sunset over the towering buildings in New York, his first home. In the shifting smoke in a gin club, the dazzling sparkle of light off of the beaded costumes of Ziegfeld’s dancers. In the smudgy embraces of strangers at dusk.

He sculpted small squares of clay into abstract shapes, like he’d seen in museums. With charcoal, he sketched the dark and shadowy nightclubs of the city. When he first arrived in D.C. with his mother and father, he painted a fractured sunset that looked bruised and sad.