Work Text:
Clay is an artist.
He’s never sold a painting, never had his name passed around in the circles of well-dressed men in cigar rooms as they smoke and drink, never had anyone pose for him while he draws them, but it’s 1919, the Great War is over and Clay is an artist in New York. One day he’ll have his own exhibition and people will look at his art; maybe he’ll make someone feel something. Maybe he’ll make them smile at a sketch of a newborn, or weep at a painting of a veteran, or fall in love with a statue of someone they’ve never met, immortalised in marble as he makes his stamp on the world.
Clay is here and, no matter what it takes, he wants to be remembered for something.
Yet he’d throw it all away in a heartbeat for the man he sees at the chess tables in Central Park.
The man isn’t playing, just studying a rook in one tanned hand. He looks dishevelled, dark hair brushing his shoulders but starting to get greasy at the roots, a smudge of dirt high on one cheekbone. Clay wants to sketch him, draw his broad shoulders in sweeping strokes, his stubble and long eyelashes with delicate movements. He wants to paint him as he is now, down to the shadow of grime on his sharp cheekbone and the bruise under his eye.
Clay places a hand on the seat opposite the man, yet he doesn’t look up until Clay speaks, “May I?”
The man startles, stammering for a second before he closes his mouth and silently gestures at the chair. There’s a cut on his bottom lip, half-healed; maybe it would heal if the man didn’t continuously chew at his lips, which he does now as Clay sits.
“I apologise for frightening you,” he says when the man still doesn’t speak.
“It’s okay,” comes the reply, and Clay cocks an eyebrow at his voice. His words are heavily accented, something European; not French or Spanish, he knows. “I thought you were bringing trouble.”
Clay shakes his head, smiling slightly when the man looks up. “I try to stay out of trouble actually. You just looked interesting, sitting at a chess table alone. You caught my eye. Do you play?”
The man looks at Clay warily, hesitating for a moment as he places the rook he was fiddling with back in its rightful place. “I do. But I’m not very good.”
“Your English is,” Clay comments. “It’s very good, I mean. Where is your accent from?”
“I- Thank you. My mother taught me.” The man flushes as he answers, rubbing his nose with the back of his hand. “I’m from Greece, a tiny village of a hundred people you’ve never heard of. I only arrived in America a week ago.”
“It sounds fascinating,” he says, and he’s never been more honest about anything in his life. His interest in the man has nothing to do with how he wants to paint the line of his jaw with gold. “Welcome to New York.”
“It’s… not what I imagined it would be. It’s so loud all the time and so many people. I like it though. Feeling invisible, just another face in millions of people.”
Clay could listen to the man speak about everything and nothing, philosophy or politics or anything under the sun. He’s in awe of how the man’s lips form words, wonders how he could transfer it onto a canvas. “That’s where we’re different, it seems. I don’t want to be invisible. I’m an artist, I want to leave my mark on the face of the Earth with portraits that people will see in a hundred years from now and think that this long-dead person is beautiful and I must have loved them very much to paint them like this. I want to be… permanent.”
“How many people have sat in our very seats and said those same things? Thousands of people before you have said they will be the person who is remembered.” The man says it so simply like he’s commenting on the weather, and something stings in Clay’s ego for a moment. “You talk with passion and ambition, you have the backbone to follow through with what you say you’ll do. You will be remembered, stranger. Whether it’s by the entire population of this country as they come from miles around to see you in a museum, or by one person. Maybe you’ll be the man in the fairy tale I tell my children about the stranger who told me his dreams at a chessboard.”
Clay is silent as the words sink into his brain. His ego isn’t wounded anymore, but the man’s sentences did nothing to soothe his pride either. He feels like he’s being challenged, like the man knows Clay’s capabilities but he wants to see them in action. Clay will prove it. “Let me paint you.”
“Why?” the man asks, his tone casual like he knew Clay would make this demand. He reaches out, moves a pawn on the chessboard forward. “Play me.”
“Because I will be remembered. And I want to fill sketchbooks and exhibits with you, and keep to myself charcoal studies by candlelight so only I see them and paint you with the wax.” There’s something burning in his chest, the strongest emotion he’s felt since moving to New York. He feels invincible, he feels like a god, and if he goes to hell for thinking like that, he’ll walk into Satan’s open arms with a smile only once he knows every part of this man and is safe in the knowledge that he’s his. “Let me paint you.”
The man smiles like he knows Clay’s darkest secrets and most private thoughts; if he asked, Clay would tell him, say it over the chessboard or whisper it in bed or scream it from a rooftop.
“Beat me at chess. And I will let you,” the man says.
“I’m very good at chess,” Clay tells him, and finally moves his pawn.
The man just shrugs, reaching out to move his piece. “Prove it to me then. You will prove you’re good at chess, you will prove you will be remembered. Make people wonder who the Greek man in your paintings are and why you have hidden away the best art you’ve ever done because you wanted to keep some things private. History doesn’t look kindly on men like us.”
Clay leans forward, “I have little care for how history may look at me when I’m dead. If they still look at my art and it makes them feel anything, even disgust at my preferences, I’m winning. I know what I want.”
“And you will get it,” the man promises. “Now shut up and play the game.”
Clay plays.
He wins.
Later, he will leave possessive shadows of bruises with charcoal-stained fingertips.