Impossible

After he drank a martini at the bar, she ordered champagne for them, and toasted him, and then he toasted her. She drank two glasses. Then, without batting an eye, Liam finished the rest. By then, he had told her that he was the black sheep of his family. His father was a banker and lived in San Francisco, his two brothers were a doctor and a lawyer, and they had both married debutantes. Liam said he had always been different right from the start. His brothers had tormented him by telling him he was adopted, which he wasn't. But right from the beginning, he'd been different. He hated all the things they loved, hated sports, didn't do well in school, while they were brilliant students. They were both captains of the varsity teams they played on, in football, basketball, and hockey. Instead, he had sat alone in his room, painting. And they teased him cruelly, by throwing away his paintings. Liam told Sasha that his father had let him know early on that he was a severe disappointment and an embarrassment to them. For a brief nightmarish year, to punish him for bad grades, he had been sent to military school. He had snuck into the cafeteria one night, and painted caricatures of all the teachers on the wall, some of them pornographic, which had been his clever plan to get expelled, which, he told Sasha with a broad grin, had been very effective. And once he got home, the torture at the hands of his family continued. Finally, not knowing what else to do with him, they ignored him completely. They acted as though he didn't exist, forgot to call him to dinner at night, and didn't bother to speak to him when he was in the same room with them. He became a nonperson in his own family, and eventually a total outcast. The worse they treated him, the worse he got, and the more he misbehaved. Since he didn't fit in, or comply with their rules and plans for him, they completely shut him out. More than once, he had heard his father say he had two sons, instead of three. Liam didn't conform to the way his family did things, so they shunned him. And eventually, he acted out his outcast role in school as well. He was called on to paint scenery for the drama club, or if they needed posters or signs. But the rest of the time, no one paid any attention to him, in school or at home. The other students referred to him as “the wacky artist,” which had been a deep insult at first, and then he decided that he liked it, and played it to the hilt. Sometimes, as a teenager, he wondered if he was insane.

“I figured out that if I let myself be just what they said I was, a wacky artist, I could do anything I wanted, so I did. I did whatever I felt like.” And eventually, since he never bothered to study, he got expelled from one school after another. He had dropped out of school finally in his senior year, and never bothered to graduate, until his wife forced him to get his diploma once they were married. But school had meant nothing to him. It was just a place where he was tortured for being different. According to Liam, no one except his mother had ever recognized or cared that he had talent. Art was not an acceptable occupation in his family. Only sports and academics mattered, and he didn't qualify in either, or even attempt to. Sasha wondered if he had had an undetected learning disability to be so resistant to school. Many of her artists did, and it had been a source of deep unhappiness for them, compensated for by their artistic talent. But she didn't know Liam well enough to ask him, so she didn't, and just listened to his story with compassion and interest.

He insisted that he had known he wanted to be an artist from the moment he came out of the womb. Once on Christmas morning, before everyone got up, he had painted a mural in their living room, and after that he painted the grand piano and the couch. The shirt was obviously just a more recent version of the same form of art. He had been seven on that fateful morning, and couldn't understand why no one liked or appreciated what he'd done. His father had spanked him, and in a somewhat disconnected but emotional recital, he explained that after that, his mother had gotten very sick. She died the following summer, and from then on, his life was a nightmare. His only protector, and the only person who loved and accepted him, had vanished. Some nights, they didn't even bother to feed him. It was as though he had died with her. And art became his only comfort, and outlet, his only remaining bond with her, since she loved all that he did. He told Sasha that for years and sometimes even now, he felt as though he was painting for his mother. There were tears in his eyes when he said it. Everyone else in his family acted as though he was crazy, and still did. He said he hadn't seen his father and brothers in years.