…The painter stood entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet gazed he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast and crying with a loud voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned suddenly to regard his beloved:--She was dead!"
- Edgar Allen Poe, The Oval Portrait

He kept the door closed and would not let her in. She did not understand it- He was by far the most open person she had ever known. He told her that it was she who had opened him, turned him outward, forced him to recognize the world outside. It was she who made him notice the plants in the garden, to identify them by their names- azalea, gladiolus, wisteria; to take note of the wind chimes dangling from her porch, crystal bluebirds gleaming in the sun; to hear the piano music floating out from a neighbor’s open window; to feel the gentle May heat. He worked as an insurance broker; he had always been a no-nonsense man who bought no flowers and did not remember anniversaries. Perhaps that was why none of his previous relationships- including a two-year marriage several years ago- had lasted very long.

But she was different. As soon as she moved into the big blue house next door, as soon as she began waving to him each day, as soon as they began talking over the fence about local politics and the school system (it turned out she was a music teacher; a job offer at the high school had brought her to this small town) he saw that she was different. After some months she invited him to a play she’d directed – The kids have worked so hard for this, please come - He knew he could not refuse. And so he sat through off-key song, each inaudible line; he congratulated the students afterwards, snapped her picture as she was summoned to the stage and presented with a bouquet of flowers.

As they walked back to her house that night- he was her next door neighbor- she undid the bouquet and placed a flower in each mailbox they passed as they walked through the town, past the hardware store, the bakery, Fran’s Coffee Shop, his own insurance office. She was talking of something, of her own school plays back in Philadelphia when she was a kid, of her happiness at trading the big city for a small town…And he found he could not hold back any longer; he stopped walking. She stopped beside him, a question in her eyes…He stopped and touched her hair. He told her that he remembered her- not that she reminded him of a mother or sister or childhood love, but that he knew her from an even earlier time, before he could call anyone his mother, before he knew that such a person existed. Upon hearing this she drew back a little, raising her eyebrows in concern. With a blush he laughed and said he was just joking; perhaps he’d seen too many bad movies. And so they walked on…But, at her door he kissed her, and as the autumn days passed on, their two houses became as one. They cooked together and read the great poets- Milton, Shelley, T.S. Eliot- aloud; she sang for him and played her compositions on the piano. On weekends they spent hours curled together, staring out at the falling snow, a pile of uncorrected music theory papers and insurance claims before them. They did not give any thought to marrying; both of them had one marriage behind them and did not feel the need for another. Together but apart, with freedom and intimacy- In this way, they were content.

But, come spring, things began to change. As soon as the snow started melting, she could feel that he was beginning to turn from her, to spend more and more time in the concealed upper room. She knew what he was doing in there- He told her that as a child he’d liked to paint, that upon entering adulthood he’d given it up, that after meeting her he felt inspired to paint again. This in itself was not a problem, but it hurt her that he refused to show her his work. “I’m a composer, and I play you all the pieces I write. Why won’t you show me your work?”

He muttered something in response; he said it was different, that most of his paintings were not very good. “I highly doubt that,” she responded. “And besides, you hear my songs- They’re as amateurish as it gets.”

Of course he did not agree with that, and all he could do was to shake his head and promise that some day, when his work was finished, she would see it. But, as spring progressed he began to spend more and more time away. Come April he’d moved his things out of her house and no longer stayed with her there; at times she came to stay with him, but she somehow knew that she no longer was welcome. “To be an artist was a dream of mine…a dream that I gave up,” he confessed. “No one thought I had any talent.” And with that statement, he retreated. He refused to answer her calls; when she knocked he did not open the door; he went to and from work without so much as a glance in her direction. She did not understand it- What on earth had gone wrong? She declined her principal’s offer to return to the school the following September; she put in an application to the Philadelphia system she’d left; she informed her landlord that she’d not be renewing her lease on the house.

She still had the key to his house; though she’d not dared to enter since the beginning of spring, now that she knew she was leaving, now that she’d begun to pack her things, she was determined. It was a Wednesday morning; she knew he was at work. She let herself into the small kitchen, climbed the wooden stairs, and tried the door to the upper room, which to her surprise, was not locked. She entered to find it bare of all furniture, of anything except a pile of newspapers on the floor covered with brushes and paints. And there, on the wall before her, she saw it. Her face. And yet, it was somehow more than her face, more than her wide-set eyes and chin-length hair. All of a sudden, the image changed, colors swirling like those of a kaleidoscope, shapes expanding, opening, revealing other faces, earlier faces she’d tried to forget. She saw herself as a child, on the sidewalk on sweltering August afternoon, struggling to move on her roller skates, clutching the car to maintain her balance. She saw the careless summers when her parents took her to visit her grandmother in the country; she watched herself wandering alongside the brook behind the house, picking Queen Anne’s lace and standing absolutely still, waiting for the daring butterfly that would brush against her hand. She witnessed again her parents’ wedding; they had not married until she was three years old, and her mother had carried her, rather than a bouquet, down the aisle. She saw her childhood love, his eyes the color of blueberries; she experienced that same electric shudder as he took her hand, again for the first time.

And then she began to see even more distant things, scenes from before her birth: her father’s boyhood in the country, the ship that had brought her grandparents over from Italy to New York, the farm they kept…In every brushstroke he had discovered another moment of her life- all that had been, and somewhere, hidden more deeply, still unclear to her, all that was to be. She stared at this image, more real, more authentic than she herself had ever been or could ever hope to be, years of history, births and deaths and loves united in one simple face. Now she understood why he had turned from her-After weeks of staring at this image, this flawless Platonic form, how could the changing, ephemeral version ever be enough? He had fallen in love with the total her, the essential her that did not exist in this realm. She knew that toward the end his eyes had gleamed with devotion, but not for her, not for what she was now, and this filled her with an anger so scathing, and envy more bitter than that which she’d felt for any woman- Without thought, she reached for the brush, dipped it in black, and slashed across that lovely face, blotted out those eyes, scribbled over the hair, then dropped the brush and ran.

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Jeannine Pitas is a writer and teacher from Buffalo, NY.