We left the gallery together that night and headed straight to his bed.
Reckless. That’s what I called it then, what I know it to be with even more certainty after all this time and heartache later.
But that night isn’t the beginning Nick is taking me back to. I realize this as he continues farther into the gallery, toward a darkened hallway away from the main exhibition area.
I can sense there is something more that I don’t know, something bigger. Something I may not want to see any more than he seems eager to show me.
At the end of the hall we reach a closed door with a small metal sign marked PRIVATE.
Nick stops here and glances at me. “I haven’t been in here in almost two years. No one has.”
For the first time, I see doubt in his eyes.
I see shame.
I don’t know what lurks behind the door to this room, but based on his bleak expression I’m already dreading what I’ll find. “Nick, please. You’re scaring me. Tell me what this is about.”
“The truth.”
There is a keypad panel on the wall. He taps a five-digit code and I hear a soft snick as the lock disengages. I don’t move, can hardly draw air into my lungs as he opens the door then walks inside the pitch-dark room.
I take a hesitant step behind him just as he flicks on the lights.
Bright fluorescents burst to life overhead. My vision goes white momentarily, shocked by the sudden explosion of light in the darkness.
And then another kind of shock settles over me.
The room is a small private office. At least it appears it had been at one time. A cherry-wood desk lies broken, upturned in the center of the room. The chair that likely used to sit behind it has been savaged, too, little more than a splintered heap of tinder amid a sea of scattered paper, books, and smashed objets d’art.
Paint covers everything. Everywhere I look, violent splashes of red and black and a dozen other dark colors have congealed and dried wherever they were thrown. There is so much rage in this room, so much wreckage, I can’t hold back my gasp as I take it all in.
And then I see it.
The easel tilted drunkenly in the far corner of all this savagery.
A canvas barely clings to its perch on the wooden stand. It, too, has been brutalized.
Beneath the furious brush marks that strive to conceal it is a painting rendered in crude, halting movement. There is no finesse in the half-completed work, only frustration. It’s been abandoned. Aborted.
Ruthlessly destroyed.
Just like the rest of this room.
At my side, Nick watches me absorb the totality of the destruction before me.
“You did this.” I look at him in question, struggling to reconcile the strong, powerful man next to me and the utter lack of control manifested in this space.
I can’t fathom the despair, the hopelessness.
He moves away from me, deeper into the awful time capsule of violence and ruin. “I don’t recall what made me decide to come here that night,” he says, his voice toneless, his spine rigid. “It was late. I was drunk.”
As he speaks, I notice the empty liquor bottle nestled among the debris. Not the high-brow single malt whisky I’ve seen him drink from time to time, but a cheap fifth of rotgut that likely didn’t cost him more than twenty dollars.
He pivots, raking his palm over the top of his dark hair as he surveys the room. “Evidently, I decided it was a good night to paint. You can see how well that went.”
He chuckles humorlessly and holds up his scarred right hand, the one he nearly lost many years ago during an argument with his father. That careless altercation when Nick was eighteen—and whatever spurred it—isn’t something he has shared with me in any great detail. All I know is that in the end his father slammed him through a plate glass window.
Nick could have died. He was fortunate in that, but his injuries were horrific enough. Much of his arm and most of the tendons in his hand were shredded. The hand Nick used to paint with ruined in one irreparable moment.