The Painter

Ray has been painting the Golden Gate Bridge for the last fourteen years. It’s always the same cycle: start at one end, work your way to the other, and back. Each day, as he glides the paint up and down, covering the expanse of the bridge, two thoughts tiptoe through his mind like the movie Groundhog’s Day on Thanksgiving; “she left me” and “it’s this job.”
She left him. One spring, when the Narcissus had started to bloom. She left him with only a lingering scent for him to remember her by. Warm like her body, and sweet like the cups of Jasmine tea she drank each morning.
Janet. Janet had been Ray’s moon; the body that kept him in orbit when the universe would scatter him into bits of oblivion. She had been all those cliché objects; his beacon, his shining star, his ray of hope. Always, each day when he started to smooth the paint across the metal beams, he would think of her face. He once told Don, the man who had helped him paint the bridge all these years, that her eyes were deep pools of cleansing light. He said he could almost dip his hands in them and wash his face. Her eyes cleared away the muck and allowed him to see the redemptive qualities of existence.
Ray and Don were both hired to paint the bridge at about the same time. Don had always been a full figured gentleman, so his responsibility was to raise and lower Ray down the sides of the bridge. During their breaks they talked a lot to each other; Don was a social man and liked to hear about Ray's life outside of bridge painting.
“So what happened?” Don had asked, a year after her departure.
“Nothing,” Ray said, dipping his brush into the tin of red paint.
“What do you mean nothing? You guys were so happy.”
“Nothing happened and that was the trouble. I’d always told her I was gonna get out of this job, really be somebody. But I never did, and I guess after 13 years she just gave up.”
“What’s wrong with being a painter?” Don had asked, resentment rising up his throat, almost blocking the words from leaving his mouth.
“It’s not that she didn’t want me to be a painter. It was the kind of painter she wanted me to be. That I wanted myself to be. Do you think people visit this bridge and think, ‘Thank goodness for the guys who paint this thing’? No. It’s a thankless job for a replaceable soul. She was looking for someone more memorable I guess.”
The day Janet left was unremarkable in any other way. Ray had risen from the bed at five, slammed his hand on the “off” button of his alarm, splashed cool water on his face, and hit “auto brew” on the coffee maker. He shaved the day’s stubble from his chin, put on jeans, a shirt, and then his coveralls, and sipped his coffee at the kitchen table. He measured a cup of Friskies into the cat’s bowl, rinsed his cup, and quietly closed the door behind him, turning the key in the lock slowly to avoid the loud clack it made when he left.
He had returned to where he left off the day before, the second rise of the bridge and down south to the tolls. Don helped him carry the ropes and pulley up to the tower, lowering him down through the dense layer of fog. Ray painted from six to ten, his arm losing feeling with each stroke that pushed it above his head. He finished the second rise, gave the rope two hard yanks, and Don hoisted him back to the top where they sat eating the sandwiches their wives had made the night before. Somehow the soggy Wonderbread and salami never got old for Ray, even though Janet could barely stomach the preparation anymore. It was another part of the routine that sustained him; paint, sandwich, paint, Janet.
When he got home that night there were no lights on in the house, no dinner cooking in the oven. Ray searched his memory for a forgotten conversation, one that would tell him she was out having drinks with Barb or leading the discussion in her book group. He found nothing in his memory bank to cash in, so he searched the house for clues. The first thing he noticed was the absence of the Brahms sheet music from the piano. Janet’s favorite songs were heavy-handed romantic movements from the mid 1800’s, and there had not been a day in his memory when the music hadn’t been on the piano stand, opened to the fifth movement of Piano Concerto #2.
Ray checked the piano bench and noticed that almost everything was missing; she had only left the beginner books from the first months of their marriage. Ray thought back to that time, the golden start of their lives together, when he had promised her that he would one day be a famous painter if only she would play songs for him all day long.
What happened? he wondered as he flipped through pages of Aura Lee and Jingle Bells.
Ray’s search then led him into the dining room, where he noticed that the painting he’d made of her parents was no longer nailed to the white stucco walls. There was an imprint of the painting on the wall, a brighter white where the canvas had been, and Ray made a note that the walls would have to be repainted soon.
Two things which Janet held dear were gone. Ray’s heart began to race. The signs were adding into an equation which he didn’t want to the answer to. He moved to the sink to pour himself a glass of water, and there found the note.

Ray,
I am sorry. For months I have been trying to imagine the best way to do this. The best way to keep both our hearts intact. Searching, but finding no better solution. Do you remember what you told me when we got engaged? You told me I was your muse. That with me, you would make your way through this life and build yourself up to be somebody worth remembering. It’s a promise that has sustained me all these years. But Ray, I wonder what has happened?
You’re a painter, Ray. But you’re painting the wrong canvas. I would be happy even if you never made it big with your art, as long as you were doing it. But you haven’t picked up your brushes and oils for years. I have waited for you to gain the confidence to really pursue your talents, but as the years go by, you have created less and less, and now you create nothing. I can only think that you have lost inspiration, and an uninspired love is one I’ve lived with far too long.
I’m sorry to leave you here. It’s time we lived life though, don’t you think? I just don’t think we should do it together.

Here, Ray set the letter down on the kitchen table, slid into the wooden chair beside it, and let his head fall back so his gaze hit the ceiling. He didn’t move to read the last words of the letter, didn’t fix himself anything to eat even though his stomach turned with hunger, he just stayed there till the sun had set.
The note left no number to reach her at, no place to find her. Janet had disappeared from Ray’s life entirely. In September he unpacked his easel, paints and canvas, but it wasn’t until December that he started the painting. With each day, he added a new layer. First it was the sky, hints of blue behind fog. Then it was the water, silver gray and choppy. Soon he added the two masses of land, the Marin Headlands and the Presidio, and then began to paint the red arcs of the bridge that connected the two. He put more care into this painting than he had ever used before. The painting was to be proof that his life's work could be made into something beautiful and meaningful. He obsessed over the painting, sometimes pacing back and forth in front of it for hours, questioning how accurate his strokes were. In the months it took him to paint the place he’d spent so much of his adult life, he began to imagine a life within the painting.
Ray started to believe that Janet was somewhere within the painting, on a boat, sailing cobalt paint strokes as the wind ran through her long black hair. He imagined himself on the bridge, looking out after her. If only I could get down to the water, I could find her.
Don didn’t broach the subject of Janet again. He had been hurt by Ray’s lack of conviction in their life’s work, and hurt to find that the job he loved could be enough to separate a loving couple. He saw, too, that the discussion had only made Ray more distant. From that point forward he tried to keep what conversation they did have to the tamer topics of NCAA playoffs, the Stanley Cup, and prime time television. He noticed too that Ray was getting clumsier, with his work and with his safety. There were beginning to be many close calls, and Don didn’t fail to notice how Ray would look at the waves below as they sat together eating sandwiches.
On a Tuesday in July Don lowered Ray down into the dense layer of fog. From where he stood, it seemed as if he were the only living thing atop a sea of gray. He watched the wind carry the mist, sweeping it up in tufts and pushing it to past the shores of Berkeley, to dissolve in the heat of the valley. Don felt Ray’s weight bounce in the rope several times and then felt it go slack. He wondered whether Ray was already signaling to come up.
“Ray! You done already?”
The sound of the early morning commuters was all that echoed up to Don.
“Ray! Can you hear me? Do you need to come up?”
After several minutes had passed without any reply, Don started slowly pulling the rope back up. When he realized that there was considerably less weight, he started to pull faster. Soon, the swing seat with its paint buckets and brushes came into view. It took a moment for Don to register what he was seeing. When he did, he dropped the rope and sunk to his knees. Ray was not there.