Andrea DeAngelis
PUSHED/PAINT CLOT EXCERPT
Damion knew Jules had forgotten him even though she said she never would, denying him
the hollow satisfaction of an “I told you so” since there was no Jules to tell it to.
“I missed you when you were dead,” Damion discovered out loud. “But I missed you when
you were all mine,” he started to say to her.
Eight blank canvases, large and small, naked of paint and effort, taunted him for weeks with
their knowing voids; what could they have been had he actually attempted?
“She was never really with you.” In his worst moments, his dark thoughts interbred,
spawning an incestuous loneliness.
Once, he couldn’t work with her giant blank need but now he found he couldn’t work
without its static.
“She couldn’t have forgotten you since she never knew you. You didn’t allow her to.” His
mind was buzzing unbearably now. He felt raw and roughened by its violent honesty.
“She never wanted to know you as you wanted to be known.”
As an artist first, a friend second, and a lover only sometimes, when it wasn’t too painful to
be skin on skin, when it wasn’t the right skin. With such closeness came touch and so many times
Damion had been scalded by the wrong touch.
He could see her standing there in the crooked door frame for just an instant bathed in this
peakish light, adding her unexpected opinion, “I like that one”. But she wasn’t here with him now
in his all too clean studio. With order came empty space.
“Are you painting?” She would often ask. How could he paint if his brain matter felt
blackened and buried? Not that long ago, before she left, Jules had stopped asking him. She wasn’t
like that back in college. She had been insistent of their live wire connection in a way that both
disturbed and excited him.
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Andrea DeAngelis
“There can’t be nothing in your head,” she said, drinking her heavily adulterated coffee in
the café near campus. She dumped so much milk and sugar in it that the liquid turned a light beige,
ecru even. Why did she drink coffee at all if she tampered with it so? He had wondered. She
reached out to mime knocking on his head while clucking her tongue. At the time he felt relieved
that she was so certain. He remembered grinning even.
“How do you know what’s in my head?” Damion now called out to empty space. It was so
quiet he could hear the coffee pot hissing.
“How do I not?” she sighed. “I think of you all the time so it obliterates me.”
He had wanted to answer the first letter she sent him after that final semester. But he
couldn’t. Words couldn’t be trusted. She couldn’t be trusted. She didn’t know him then. Jules only
knew him when he was mad, desperate and drowning. She didn’t know how he could be normal
most of the time because that Damion was long gone.
By the end of school he was so out of control, he’d forget entire days. He would wake not
knowing if it was Saturday or Wednesday morning. On Wednesday mornings, he needed to be in
his Contemporary American Poetry class, a class where he sharpened his remarks. “I don’t think
you even read Williams Carlos Williams,” he accused one know-it-all.
It was worse now he didn’t have any scheduled place to be, he only had work he should be
doing. Work that wanted him but he found himself not wanting because the paint always wanted
too much.
Her first letter had been so juvenile, he thought. She hadn’t really experienced the love she
was assuming. It made him feel unexpectedly angry, unexpected because he didn’t expect to feel
anything.
“I’m going to say the words you’re afraid to,” she had written him.
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Andrea DeAngelis
Jules’ audacity was astounding at times; she actually believed she knew what he felt or
perhaps she didn’t care what he felt. She only cared when it fit into what she wanted.
“Did you read my letter?” she asked him. Why did he come to the phone that summer after?
His mother, swathed in her own constricting depression, had weakly called him over to the
phone. Her eyes looked like two gunshot wounds. Damion was surprised. Who was calling him?
No one ever called him. He had hemorrhaged so many friends he simply gave up even attempting a
connection. “Who,” he snapped.
“Some girl named Jules.” His mother dropped the handset, missing his hands but Damion
managed to catch it before it banged on the floor. Both of their limbs appeared watery to him as if
they were swimming towards human interaction but couldn’t quite make shore. He started to
untwist the tangled cord.
“Did you miss me, glum-glum?”
But he was relieved again when he heard her voice. Her warmth was comforting in his
parents’ home of shouted glass. Her lips always felt surprisingly hot when he kissed them. He
briefly considered the origin of her confusion. He remembered how dirty his hands were when he
last touched her and swore they were almost dirty again.
Damion remembered that conflicted moment on that sagging porch off-campus. He squinted
trying to force the memory, to remember what he had said; that her belief they couldn’t be together
because he was afraid just wasn’t accurate. It wasn’t that he was afraid; it was that he had nothing
left.
He walked over to his compact kitchen on the other end of the apartment, clicking off the
burned down coffee. Then he remembered the shoebox squeezed between the ceiling and the
cabinets. The last month of that last semester, Jules forced him into saying something he didn’t
quite mean. Her feverish kisses demanded such answers and explanations.
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Andrea DeAngelis
“I can’t. I can’t,” he whispered huskily.
She hadn’t said anything, she just kept touching him and soon they were twisting and
turning on the warped wood, almost waking her kooky landlady.
“I can’t fall in love again,” he shuddered into her neck.
He had told her what he could not do but Jules complicated his confession, thinking that
can’t meant could.
He walked back to the empty canvases. He tried to lift a paint brush now but was seized by
painful indecision. He had nothing left; both of them had taken it from him, the compulsion and
drive of creation was gone, everything had been drained from his lips, his fingers, his mind.
Someone, not Jules, was once his everything and that was never to be again and had been
chipped away by violence and by paint. He refused to think of her name. If he thought of her name,
he’d start to remember the details - her puffy squeezable forearms and fertile moles everywhere.
Beatrice, who didn’t miss him at all. Beatrice, who had never written him. The details came
trembling, a fragmented vision, his hands caught in the agitated corkscrews of her dark gold bob,
smiling. The pain would become his center again and eclipse any possibility of the present or of
work. A clotted emotion so distorted and compacted that it wasn’t an emotion at all. It was an
abortion of feeling. Why had he been so abandoned?
He paced back to the kitchen nook and scaled the narrow counter and cabinets to reach the
box of letters. He cradled the aged shoebox and sunk against the sink, lifting the lid and fondling
the first letter in the stack lightly. He opened it.
So really, what could this piece of paper withstand? This letter where Jules declared she
loved him and she knew he felt the same. Well, Jules didn’t know anything he thought and folded
the letter over and over, horizontal, vertical and diagonal until the original paper was as soft as a
coarse tissue.
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Andrea DeAngelis
“You don’t love me, Jules, because you don’t really know me. You only know moments
from my life. I would prefer it if you stopped writing to me since these moments are less than
everything.” Damion wrote what no one would ever read. He was in his mind almost all the time
now.
She wrote him letters he would never answer. He knew that any answer he gave she would
re-interpret and thicken the meaning into what she wanted. But unfortunately, no answer was also
an answer to Jules. She thought he was afraid, that he felt as she felt but couldn’t say anything. But
Jules was wrong. It wasn’t a powerful connection, he thought, but a barely defused disconnect.
When she finally stopped writing him, after a summer of no response, Damion found he
missed the distraction, despite her childish romantic tics. She talked about her life as if he cared,
and he realized he had started to.
Once, she sent him a leaf she found startling. Of course, its bright color had been battered
before it got to him. But he marveled over her enthusiasm.
“It is life! Can’t you see? Have you ever seen such a green? The aura remains even when I
close my eyes,” she described. He could see her stretching to pluck the leaf off a branch, smiling.
But now all communication had stopped when he hadn’t expected to need it. A long
distance that felt like no distance at all but now was infinite.
*****
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