THE BREAD LOAF JOURNAL
The Artist CLEO AUKLAND | VERMONT In the hazy morning, the plane bobs and dips, small enough to be buffeted by pockets of air. The artist stands at his bedroom window, watching; the clouds are pulled wool blushing pink and gold, and the plane slips between them as it putters toward the island. The artist yawns, closes his curtains which are in dangerously close proximity to his smoldering cigarette, and turns away. They’re early. He has been called moody by many people: reporters, fellow artists, spiteful photographers, neighbors, stylists, his mother. He broods on this: moody. Capricious is a word he likes better. He’ll sit and look out of the window with a burnt out cigarette dangling from his lips, feet in worn slippers, his hair unkempt. He’ll squint in brilliant blue sunlight, ponder depths of night skies. All on purpose. All with a very specific aura, of course, but also because it’s comfortable and what he likes to do. None of them understood why he wanted to go to the island in the first place, so he spent a lot of time squinting at them through his sheen of hair, shuffling. It gets very cold in the winter, they said. You’ll be cut off from the mainland a lot. You know you and your isolation drama, his mother had told him, rattling her bracelets. His apartment is one of twelve on Main Street in the village, and he lives on the top floor in a building which houses an ice cream shop on the street level. From his window, he can see the harbor, cupped in an inlet and pocked with lobster boats. Sometimes he wakes up early enough to watch the fishermen motor to their steers, start engines, yell greetings over the wake. They follow one another out of the harbor and the water froths for minutes after as though a myriad of angry monsters has been awakened. Or so the artist would like to think. He doesn’t understand their hardiness, the fishermans’. He can’t stand the cold that they know in their bones, mapped like constellations into their genes while he feels like a child when he layers sweaters and long underwear and scarves and vests and cashmere and things that seem too fancy, superfluous and insulting to the rudimentary port. You are lavish, the artist tells himself, sweeping one arm of the scarf over his shoulder and staring at the water with petulence. His cheeks redden in ugly patches and his hands crack, and he is careful to think that he should not become bitter. He has chosen this, after all. Capricious. Moody.
24 | VOLUME VIII
