Page 3 of Portrait of A Lost Artist
Before Renna could say anything else, my other manager speaks from his position, laying against one of the thick columns of my mansion. Simon has blonde hair with speckles of salt-colored strands, wrinkles coming with age and time, barely perceptible in his fifty-something face. He always holds a Cheshire-smile for the public, but with me, Simon becomes the personification of ‘stoic and tough’ learning.
“He’s not the one that needs to talk. I want to do the talking for once.” Simon explains. My parents never knew just how tough Simon could get. How he’d swat food away from my hands when I was younger, only because his beliefs relayed on looks. How he had crafted my life to reflect what he wanted, but never asked me what I really yearned for.
“You’re out of control, Nate, and you’re taking us all with you. You can’t spend a single week without getting shitfaced and now, you’re once again in a scandal dealing with death. We had to talk to police—”
He speaks as if I wasn’t there, giving my side of the story, being held unimpeachable only because of the recordings from Miles’ household that showed that he was all alone when he tossed himself out of the window. I had lived through every word the police officers had said, while both grieving for a friend—though not as close as one would have imagined—and also battling with my own thoughts.
“I don’t think that’s fair to him.” Renna gives her input, always butting heads with Simon. I can’t help but keep my eyes closed, and they must think I’m falling asleep because of this.
“Here you come with your fucking licentiousness. Renna, the adults here are talking—”
She’s thirty-seven. Celebrated it with me and Jun’s family—including his daughter, who had worn Renna’s shoes—over a month ago. I think that’s the only party I’ve gone to in the last few years in which I can recall everything that happened.
“Nate needs help. We have hidden the obvious here, trying to mend his relationship with the public with his own fake union with Jane Rae, putting him in front of cameras, trying to prove that he’s fine, but he hasn’t been fine in a while.” Renna speaks out the truth in quick mannerisms, allowing me to open my eyes just when I hear Simon scoff.
“His relationship with Jane is what has saved him.” Simon explains. “The public doesn’t see how much of a drunkard he has become just because of the moves that I have done.”
“You won’t have anybody to represent here on if we don’t offer him the help he needs—”
“Oh, my fucking God. What do you do in this equation, Renna?” Simon asks, looking down at my other manager. He flares his nostrils, squaring his shoulders in his always-suit-clad body before he shakes his head. “You haven’t gotten him to paint. I’m making him thrive off of what we have left. If he has no talent, then we still have his fame. It’s why he’s still someone to the public eye.”
I know Renna should look for other clients. She is living off what I had already made, thankfully, but it’s only a matter of time that she’s dragged down with my dying art career. Help needed, I run away from it. My lack of request, combined with its never being offered, is the reason. Whenever the thoughts in my head get too loud, I grab the nearest bottle I have and get away with whatever person dares call themselves my friend. Sometimes, it’s Jane Rae and her expensive friends, who talk shit about everyone through sips of whiskey and take pictures of us so Jane can post them on her Instagram account.
Though, anyone with enough knowledge to call themselves human would notice that I haven’t been okay for a while. Not since the accident happened, losing myself alongside her.
For the longest while, I had thought of what would happen to me. What I would become, or what waited for me at the end of the line. I thought that the pain I felt would lose itself with the more bottles I poured in my body, that not knowing where I was would also make the misconceptions of me disappear. None of that happened, and I realized when I got out of the police station and there were cameras waiting for me. Flashing. Stripping me.
Ridding me of my title as a person.
“I don’t need help.” I mutter, sitting up and downing the rest of my coffee that had turned lukewarm during the conversation. The blonde man smiles at me, as if enchanted by my words, but I shake my head. “I need to get away.”
“Excuse me?” Simon asks, trailing behind me as I stumble up the stairs and go to the nearest computer. I think I left my laptop in my room. “Nate, I’m talking to you. Where do you think you’re going?”
“Anywhere but here. Los Angeles is drowning the insignificant life left in me.” The doors open at my entrance once I jot down the code on the screen next to it. I go past the beige couches that I have around a TV screen, getting to the king-sized bed with white sheets on top of it before opening my laptop and sitting comfortably.
Simon shakes his head. “You can’t do that. Jane’s big modelling event is coming up, and we have planned the entirety of November for you. You can’t miss that—”
Renna enters the room with quickened steps, widening her eyes upon seeing me. I had never acted like this with Simon, following his every word. She’d always make fun of me because of it. After all, the first words my mom told me at the mere age of eleven were ‘you’ll listen and do everything Simon tells you, alright?’.
It’s time for me to change that.
I lurk through the computer, searching on Google for ‘cheap and homely travelling spots’. Travelled the places everyone wished for and jotted down on their diaries; I have, but I am tired of what I have always known. What I need is something different. To wake up to the scent of petrichor, and brew my coffee for the sake of it. Burn the first pile of rice that I make, and laugh about it just because I can.
“Nathan Matthew Calderwood, listen to me.” Something about Simon is that he never asks, so when he reaches for my laptop to shut it closed, I move away, accidentally pressing on a button that leads me to an article that matches my search.
Why did Havana change my life?
I don’t know what gets to me. Maybe I’m in a post-drunken bliss that has me looking for the first flight I can get to Havana. I’ve never visited it, nor do I know much about it apart from that film with Diego Luna in it, but I respond to Simon as I’m doing this.
“I have made my mind up, there’s no changing that.” Moving without knowing much of travelling or planning, for I always have Simon do that for me; I book the first flight I see before closing my laptop with a bang. “I’ll be leaving for some place for the next few months and I won’t have anything to do with you or this place or my brand. That’s settled.”
Simon tries to get the laptop away from me, but I push it under my pillow. “Give me that.”
“I have a flight in three days, Simon. So, if you could just get out of my room so I can start preparing, that’d be nice.”
He licks the inside of his cheek as if I had just kicked him in the shin. Retracing by giving a few steps back, he gets his phone out of his pocket before sighing. “Diane will hear from this.”
“I’m twenty-six. That threat doesn’t work on me anymore. Why would I even fucking care?”
