The Old Artist on the Train

The hairs of his thick white mustache bristled back and forth with each swivel of his head, and he made many, stealing far too many glances at his subject while the thick black marker trapped between his fingers skated across the page of his hand-held notebook. With each scan of his muse, flickers of youth swam behind his eyes as the spirit of past artisans guided his hand without the slight tremble of his bones.
In a moment, he pushed his rectangular glasses up the bridge of his nose, held together only by the thinnest copper wire, and reveled in his work, but only for a moment; there were other subjects on the train, he saw. In fact, everyone was his subject, including the young beauty next to him.
With a straightening of his black newsboy cap and a lick of his lips, his marker was off once again, racing across the page while the old man drew the likeness of his neighbor. She, like the old man's other neighbors, looked on curiously, trying to restrain their childlike grins and excitement at the notion of an artist amongst them.
In another few seconds, the drawing was finished, and he tore it out of his notebook and handed it to the beauty. She smiled, brushing the stray blond hair from her face that poked out from under her winter hat, and thanked the man.
"Is a, is a motion," he said in his broken English, motioning to how he drew her. "Is a, how I see through my eyes, is a concept. Ah, look."
In a second he was drawing again, squinting his eyes towards a passenger in the distance. The other woman next to him, someone who was trying too hard to hide their obvious fascination, smirked wider than she intended. He finished the drawing and smiled, spreading the hairs of his mustache into a comb.
"Is instant concept. In my studio, in Romania, is many drawings, many paintings, I see people, person, and imagine how they look inside, as people, not as person. Are you artist?"
"I guess," said the girl with a shy grin. She clutched the drawing in between her mittened fingers. The old man shook his head in a quick jitter and pulled on the end of his worn out black leather jacket.
"No no, artist is or is not, but there, eh, there many people who artists but, don't see it! Ah, don't see it! All people artists if they like, just need to search for, eh, eh, inspiration! Ha!" His eyes darted to another subject, and like a well-practiced horse, his hand was off to the races, moving across his small piece of paper before the beauty could realize it. There were times that he paused in his movements to take in the subject, or when his hand would move across the paper freely without his eyes tracing its path, but at every moment, he was captivated by his subject.
"All people artists, all people art," he said, turning the page. "You see this?" he asked the beauty, pointing to the drawing he gave her. She nodded.
"It is how your face is not, but it makes your painting more natural. Ah, ah, the, ah, bone in the face, it is not true to the person, yes? How you see yourself, yes? Only if your bones matched you!" He chuckled, but his eye caught yet another subject, and with rapt attention, he took to the page once again.
The beauty watched in glee as this man made no other attention towards anything but his subject, a young man whose youth was spiraling down the drain of his late-night coffee-addled job. The gentle lines underneath his eyes, like waves of skin, belied the hardened edges of his fingers where, even decades earlier, one might have found the artist dabbling away with a pen and a notebook.
"It is the, the ah, the pain, the tired, in him. He is tired," he said, pushing his glasses up and pointing to the drawing. "It is not how he wants to be, but, ah, how he has made himself."
He flipped the page yet again.
"It is how, ah, he is, ah, in, in prison, in his eyes."
The beauty's smile flickered, and her eyes darted briefly to the subject. The smallest bit of empathy betrayed her gaze, and perhaps she understood, at least underneath the simplicity of the moment, the emotion that the artist saw.