Art was not on the curriculum at Devon. I liked to draw just the same, now and then.
It was a few days before we biked to the beach, the first time I drew him. I did it without him knowing. It was a view of the back of him while he wrote a letter home. That's how you draw someone who interests you in ways he's not supposed to - surreptitiously.
Doing this was an act of resistance to the proper part of me. The part of me that echoes with "Gene Forrester is a different sort of person from that". This was the problem part of me, and it was stronger than I knew.
I wanted to make, and to have, a tangible souvenir of this person. There was a wrong in that, the echoes told me, but I wanted what I wanted and that was that, so I drew. It was a harmless thing to do I told the echoes.
It was warm and he was bare to the waist. My drawing stunk.
I didn't draw him again for a long time.
After the tree, while he was at home with the leg I broke, I would draw his face from memory - regularly, almost every night. After a bit, I evolved a recognizable formula, always pretty much the same; a sort of icon. Every sketch I destroyed once finished. I would light a match and burn them, like some ancient sacrifice. To have to explain one if discovered was unthinkable. This is a picture of my roommate, I drew it to make him not so far away. To turn the clock back. To make him not know.
After his second fall, when he was back, in our room, for the first time I mustered the courage to ask him to hold still so I could draw him. He didn't seem to think it was anything out of the ordinary.
"How long?" he asked.
"Ten minutes." First we sat simply looking at one another. Out of somewhere, from inside us both, I suppose, there was a moment of, what? Intensity, more than anything. Then he cocked an eyebrow and I took a deep breath and started to draw. The dorm went silent, or seemed to. I felt as calm as a glass of milk. The likeness wasn't terrible.
"Eyes are too far apart" he said. And, yes, he was right.
Then we were separated by the war. Having snapshots of him in the dull, usually dry (in every sense the word) places I was stationed might have made more sketching superfluous. But it was not so. To put the line of his nose or lip on a piece of paper was almost to conjure a caress. Even the time spent on the many less accurate attempts were as time alone with him. Sometimes I wondered just how alone he would stay, in my absence, who might be touching that lip, ruffling his hair.
I wondered this sometimes, but not with much sense of jealousy. I had been there first, after all, and might probably be back someday.