Her chipped nails tickled his palm. His mother had never done that. “It’s okay. What was your name again?”
He swallowed, tried to make it sound utterly unimportant. “Ellis. Ellis Schmidt.” His roommate freshman year had insisted on calling him Ellis Shit. What’s up, Shit? You suck anyone’s dick this weekend, Shit? Shit popped a boner in his sleep again last night.
La Artista downed the last bite of her croissant and followed it with another ice cube. “You want to drive me home, Ellis Schmidt?”
* * *
He spent the next two nights at La Artista’s apartment. The first night he kept his socks on; the second, he let her strip him entirely. Confessing her age to be forty-four, La Artista was too self-conscious to leave the light on, but she had no aversions to standing in the full moonlight of the window to let him examine her. He left no inch unsearched.
Her body wasn’t quite what he expected, nor was it what he’d become accustomed to those three times with Karen. Too many ventures outside in varying necklines and no sunscreen had left her complexion uneven and her abdomen was soft and convex. Her arms looked too thin; her buttocks and thighs boasted ample cellulite for her frame. Her breasts sagged just a little. Not enough to turn him off, not enough, he expected, to turn any man off. But looking at her he simultaneously realized why he’d never wanted Karen and why La Artista, for all her obsession with nudity in her own work, never painted a self-portrait.
He still couldn’t say her name. He mumbled incoherently in its place and she never seemed to notice. In bed, his hand moving clumsily between her parted legs, he asked “Can I call you Vivien?” and she said yes.
The bedroom was the only place he used that name at first. He seemed to remember knowing that Vivien Leigh had died years ago but he wasn’t sure, and even if she were still alive and thus completely unaware that he used her identity for his own sexual gratification, it felt nonetheless disrespectful.
The second night, after they made love, she ordered him not to put his clothes back on and handed him a cigarette.
“I c-can’t,” he said helplessly. The dumb smile wouldn’t leave his face.
“You don’t have to light it. Just stick it in your mouth.”
He obeyed. “Can I say that to you later?” He thought of calling his mother and telling her about this conversation but worried she’d faint on the stairs or in the kitchen and break her skull on the table.
“You can say it right now, kid.”
With Karen there had only been one position; with La Artista, they were innumerable. He fucked her more times in those two days than his old roommate had fucked his girlfriend the entire first semester. He cried a few times; she laughed once. She moaned loudly when he wanted her to, when he told her to, and held her breath when he pushed his hand over her mouth or her face into the pillow. One time, her belly down and her ass pressing into him invitingly, he wrapped her bra around her neck and looped its strap over the bedpost. Her hips bucked under him like those of an unbroken horse in a western movie. He yelled Vivien Leigh’s name into her ear and put bruises down her spine.
Around 3 AM the second night La Artista awoke crying. “A nightmare,” she whispered when he enfolded her into his trembling arms. “Nothing more, my love. We’ll paint tomorrow.”
He kissed her damp forehead and coaxed her back down into the cold sheets.
* * *
The third morning they caught a bus downtown to her studio. His car had run out of gas. He’d had half a tank when he arrived at the restaurant where they met and her apartment was only twenty-five minutes away in heavy traffic, but when he went out to the parking lot he found his gas gauge fluttering below the bright green E. Maybe someone had siphoned the rest of it. With gas prices the way there were, he could hardly blame them.
The ride to her studio took them past campus. Passing the east dormitories where he’d spent his first two years, Ellis realized he’d missed a midterm exam while holed up in La Artista’s apartment. For a moment he felt sick with terror—he never missed class, never, except for that one time last year when he’d eaten bad Chinese and got the runs, and his mother was going to kill him, she would really do it this time…but no one was going to call his mother. No one cared what he did anymore.
He grabbed La Artista’s hand and kissed the back of it. The way she smiled at him wasn’t quite the way he believed a woman usually smiled at her lover, but it was far from maternal.
There was a wreck at the intersection two blocks from campus. It didn’t look very bad from the bus but traffic was stopped for more than half an hour. When the ambulance arrived La Artista threw her long red coat over both of them and he slid his hand between her thighs, pushing aside her thin panties less awkwardly than he’d ever believed possible. She laughed quietly and disguised her surreptitious moans by telling him cheap ethnic jokes under her breath. Her smile made her look twenty years younger and he felt like telling her so.
“Let’s go out for dr-drinks later,” he said. “But bring your ID or they’ll n-never bel-l-lieve you’re twenty-one.”
She laughed louder and gave his neck a gentle bite.
Her studio was on the third floor of a rather shoddy building, not at all what he had hoped for. Two other artists, she told him, of even greater popularity than she, rented spaces near hers. Maybe it helped the creative process to work in such an unassuming environment. He didn’t dare tell her he hadn’t painted of his own volition in over a year and did so now only to fulfill his required studio credits.
He followed her up the metal stairs, not thinking until it was too late to try to look up her skirt. The entire building smelled of oils and mineral spirits. La Artista began throwing off her outer layers before they even entered her personal studio, shedding her coat, scarf, and gloves on the floor for him to pick up. By the time he came into the room she’d dropped her sweater and was rolling up her sleeves to begin working.
Half a dozen paintings stood on their easels, scattered throughout the large, cold space, each one concealed under heavy linen sheets. Ellis wondered if anyone else had seen these pieces yet; La Artista didn’t seem particularly close to her management personnel. He wanted to go to every one of them and throw off their coverings, to press his hands and face into the canvas but was afraid to ask her permission.
An empty frame stood on the far side of the room, a large wooden square. La Artista laid it down on the floor and pulled a spare sheet over it. “Do you stretch your own canvases?” she asked with her back to him. She looked so thin with her blouse tucked into her skirt that he was reminded of Vivien Leigh again.
“Uh-huh. I mean, sometimes. It’s a l-lot more conv-v-venient t-to buy them r-ready-made.”
“Not as fun, though.” If she’d looked younger on the bus, she sounded it now. Her calves, clothed only in black nylons, arched deliciously as she moved over the frame.
He paced the room for several minutes, looking out each small window. Nothing but street and traffic and brightly-dressed strangers outside. La Artista hummed to herself quietly but didn’t speak to him and it made him nervous. He went to the easel nearest her and placed his hand on the linen. “Are these really new?” In the vacuum of the studio his voice sounded small, childish.
La Artista pushed her sleeves up again and looked over her shoulder at him. “Yeah. I finished that one about three months ago”
“H-has anyone seen them?”
“My agent’s seen a couple.”
He felt a pang of jealousy. “Can I see them?”
La Artista stared at him, narrowed her eyes almost suspiciously. At last she smiled, baring her teeth, and nodded. “Go ahead.”
He felt a stirring between his legs. “Can I t-touch them?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Don’t do anything to them that you haven’t done to me.” She returned to birthing her canvas. Maybe she didn’t want to see his reactions to her work. Maybe she’d already seen the reactions of someone else and felt bored by new eyes.
He ripped the sheet from the easel and draped it over his shoulders like a cape. The painting was a rather small one, perhaps two-and-a-half feet in height. Another one of her studies of the human figure. A man, a shadowy figure, lay across a bed shaped like a violin, his eyes closed, his arms stretched out over the edge as if reaching toward the floor. He appeared to be nude. This piece was less abstract than usual but every line was still soft and gently blurred with the very edge of a fan brush so that each component seemed to bleed into its surroundings. The man was swallowing the sheets which were swallowing him.