![[I saw three ships]](../img/2010icon.png)
"Honey, I'm getting a cramp," Elizabeth murmured, careful to stay as still as she could for him. She barely moved her lips. (Who knew that she was such a skilled ventriloquist?) She was in that awkward position for more than a half hour now, and Neal, in his focus on the canvas, hadn't even realized it.
"Neal," Peter tried to get his attention from his corner. He was always banished to the corner when Neal decided to try to paint El. He wasn't allowed to watch, nor comment, nor move in a way that might block Neal's light or otherwise interfere with his "process." But when El was in pain, it was time for him to act. "Neal!"
Neal still didn't hear him. Nor Elizabeth, who whimpered. Just a little. He'd been inspired the morning before, watching Elizabeth as she got ready for work, perching on the edge of the sofa to fasten her fabulous strappy sandals, light spilling over her shoulder in a sleeveless dress. She was the perfect modern image of one of his favorite Renoirs, brunette instead of titian.
He had whispered the idea to her the night before, as they washed dishes together. Peter was watching a Yankees game, which meant that they could discuss — and plot and scheme — without interruption. Neal detailed the scene, they planned her wardrobe and hair, and setting the scene together while Peter just waved them off when they blocked the TV screen, oblivious.
Now, in the bright light of morning, she was perched on the edge of the stepstool from the kitchen, a cushion in place to protect her from the nubby non-slip rubber treads. Neal was having a hard time capturing the swell of her breast just the way he'd like.
Neal was having a hard time not getting lost in her cleavage.
"Neal, my hip," Elizabeth tried again, squirming a little. She could swear that she could feel the treads on the stool through the pillow and her skirt, like she'll have the texture imprinted on her skin.
"Dammit, Caffrey," Peter was out of his corner and right up against Neal's back, his lips against the shell of Neal's ear. "Did you not hear El say that her hip is cramping? Are you being intentionally obtuse or are you trying to cause my wife pain in the name of art, or some such nonsense?"
Neal shook his head then, as if coming out of a stupor, or, Peter thought rather unkindly, like Satchmo, waking from a nap.
"Pain? El?" Neal peered around the canvas to his model, lovely in the pose but wavering, obviously ready to go down for the count. "Oh El! El, no! I'm sorry." He dropped his brush and rushed to her, beaten by Peter by half a stride. Together they eased her up from the stool and over to the sofa, Neal kneeling at her feet. "I'm so sorry El, I was… in the zone."
"Yeah? Did you get it?" Her eyes brightened as she rolled to the side a little, flexing her leg. Peter massaged away the muscle ache as Neal brushed a stray tendril of hair from her face.
"Better. I got you." Neal beamed. "You can see it… tomorrow morning, if it doesn't cloud over." The forecast called for rain.
"This one had better be good, Neal," Peter warned, but there was no bite to the words. "Making my wife suffer…"
It was good, better than, actually. Neal was well rewarded for what he created, both Elizabeth and Peter returning to it again and again through the day to marvel at Elizabeth's likeness in the middle of a scene from a hundred years before her birth.
Peter bought a simple, gorgeous frame for the painting and hung it across from their bed, right where it would be the first thing he saw when he arose every morning.
"Now that's a view you ought to paint," Peter suggested, pointing to El as she strolled ahead of them through the woods surrounding the cabin they'd rented for a week-long getaway. "Isn't she beautiful?"
"Ellie, my darling," Neal called to her. "You look like," he paused. There were a lot of ways he could finish that sentence. "A goddess." "Perfection." "Everything I never knew that I always wanted." "Everything I never knew that I always needed." But instead, he went with what was always available at the tip of his tongue: "art. A work of art."
"Who this time, Neal? Sargent?" Elizabeth stopped, leaning on the long branch she had found and decided to use as a walking stick, just because it felt like it was the thing to do, using a branch as a walking stick when you were ambling through the trees in the middle of nowhere, Connecticut.
She was a little peevish. This rural thing wasn't her bag. She was a city girl, through and through. She wanted to go to San Francisco, Seattle, maybe Chicago. Somewhere with museums (which Neal loved and Peter looked at with trepidation, even now) and restaurants and places that would let her show off the additions to her spring wardrobe, a fabulous LBD she could wear out dancing in a place where they wouldn't have to care what people thought if she danced with both of her men, or maybe even if the men danced with one another. Neal was inclined to agree with her, but voted with Peter, trying to stay in his good graces after a trying week at the office.
So here she was, under some tree with fluffy white petals floating down on her every time the wind blew, sticking to her hat and her sweater. And it was chilly. And Neal was trying his charm and it was trying her. "Maybe Alma-Tadema? Campin? Taubman?" Neal loved to stump her with obscure masters that no one had heard of but whose paintings commanded hundreds of thousands at auction. "Maybe something more obvious? Degas? Rembrandt? Manet!" She propped her hand on her hip and fixed him with a look that said he'd better make this one good.
"Not Manet." Neal laughed and caught up with her, brushing a kiss across her cheek. "Monet. Claude Oscar."
"The water lilies guy?" Peter was still a few steps behind, smiling, always loving it when El didn't let Neal get away with anything, even if it was transference. "El is beautiful, but she's not exactly a floating flower."
"No," Neal explained patiently, not giving into El's bad mood or Peter's attempt at baiting him. Today he'll play peacemaker. "He did portraits sometimes, really beautiful ones, more beautiful than the water lilies any day. Here, Peter, give me the camera, I'll show you." Neal reached out to Peter. "El, stay just as you are, just like that, for me?"
"Make it snappy."
A week after they returned home, after Elizabeth's mosquito bites had faded and Peter's sunburn was a distant memory, Neal finished the small canvas. It was his morning to get up early, walk Satch, start breakfast, so he left it propped on his pillow for Elizabeth to find when she woke up, a print of the digital photo alongside, for comparison. The match in mood made Elizabeth laugh so long and so loud that Neal and Peter could hear her over the sizzle of the bacon.
The painting went to her office, where it lived right above her desk. Elizabeth, bonafide urbanite, began referring to that week in Connecticut as the best vacation she'd ever taken.
When Peter's father came to visit, Neal marveled at how many different ways the younger Burke was the polar opposite of the elder. Andrew Burke had been a career FBI agent, running up through the ranks at a slow and steady pace, never distinguishing himself overly, but excelling at the bureaucracy and politics such that he eventually ran the bureau office in Cleveland.
He was as by the book, law and order first and foremost, as they came, and both Peter and Elizabeth seemed a little frightened of him, which set Neal aback. Andrew was a staunch Republican, of the bellicose variety, supporting the Coburn and Kyl wing of the modern party but truly idolizing Eisenhower. He lamented the "losses" in Iraq and Afghanistan, gays in the military, day cares in public schools, women on the Supreme Court and everything else remotely related to any sort of progress beyond the America of the 1950s that he didn't actually have memories of, but idealized in a slightly frightening way. He didn't really know Peter, his only son, didn't understand him, and didn't much care to. Telling kids that you cared about them, loved them, that was for mothers. He was there, that was enough.
Neal's presence in the house was explained as an austerity measure. In the wake of the great foreclosure crisis, it seemed reasonable to take in someone who could help pay the bills, make sure that there was always an extra shoring in the Burke household finances. Andrew didn't give Neal time of day. But he did hold forth shortly after their meeting that he thought it suspicious that the FBI wasn't paying Peter enough to maintain a household without a "lodger" (especially since, as he pointed out with a sneer, Elizabeth "had some sort of little job" as well) but allowed that the cost of living in New York City was much higher than Cleveland's. In fact, it was an obscene cost of living, he opined, that it could possibly be so pricey to bring things into such a bustling metropolis, so well served with all manner of transportation. He gawped at the prices on the menu at the moderate steakhouse where they took him for dinner, wondering if the cows were hand-fed gold bouillon their whole lives. (Peter and El went right to bed when they got home, no more socializing that evening. Neal got their leftovers. Satchmo was most displeased.) Why would gasoline be so much more expensive here, Andrew held forth, loudly, when they stopped to fill up. The refineries were right next door in New Jersey, weren't they?
Neal had wondered that himself, a time or two. But he heard the story second hand, much later, and he didn't dare say so, not then.
The entire week of the visit was tense. Very little was to Andrew's liking, and though Peter and El had both taken the full week off to spend time with him, nothing that they planned or suggested was of any interest. More often than not, they were stuck in the house with Andrew and his protracted sermons about all that was wrong in the house, in the city, in the country, in the world, ad infinitum. And though he was spending as much time away from the house as he could, prolonged hours at the office, dinners with Jones and Diana and Moz, Neal was caught in the fray. When he was at home, he was stuck in "his" room, no opportunities to soothe anyone's frazzled nerves with so much as a passing cuddle.
There was only one thing that shifted the mood in the household, one brief window of the day when there was no bickering or awkward silences. When Neal arrived home during the respite one evening, he peered into a door left ajar, unable to hide his smile when he saw the scene inside. Elizabeth found him in the hallway, and when he pressed his finger to his lips, she crept over on tiptoes to see what he saw. He felt, more than heard, as her breath caught in her chest. She pulled him away from the scene, quickly moving downstairs before they were discovered spying.
Two months after the visit, Peter's sister called, late on a Tuesday night. Andrew Burke had suffered a heart attack. He was gone.
While Neal was alone in the house, left behind while the official Burkes went to Ohio to pay their last respects, he did his first and only full-sized canvas in sepia, a version of the scene he happened upon, the one Andrew Burke had never intended anyone to see, grandfather caught in the act of peacefully napping, his two year old granddaughter slung over his lap.
The painting broke open something hidden and protected deep in Peter's chest. He turned away from it and Neal hurriedly stashed it away, determined to never mention it again, to protect Peter from whatever emotional storm the image had unleashed.
But a couple of weeks later, Neal found Peter hanging the painting over the mantel. Peter had unearthed it from what Neal had thought was a pretty good hiding spot, and Neal worried over that until Peter came down from the stepstool to admire the work from a distance. "You know why I put it up?"
"Tell me," Neal shook his head, still not sure how to deal with the whole family thing. Family beyond their walls, at least.
An arm slid around Neal's waist and Peter bent low, the words just for the two of them. "To remind us what kinds of dads we don't ever want to be."
Neal had plenty of memories that illustrated that concept far better than his version of an Albert Anker, but he just took the warning on board with a nod. "Let's go find Amy, then, and be the dads we are."
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