“I love you,” Ellis mumbled, either to La Artista or to the painting itself, and began following the boldest brushstrokes with his fingertips. When La Artista said nothing he embraced the painting and licked the center of it. The dried paint tasted slightly of old vinegar.
He felt La Artista’s hand on his ankle. “Save some of that for me tonight, baby,” she whispered.
* * *
Ellis checked his email at an internet café three weeks after their first meeting. He didn’t dare use the campus library, afraid he might encounter one of his professors or, even worse, one of the many classmates who insulted his stutter. Fifty-six new messages. He deleted them all without reading them. No one in the café recognized him and he felt perfectly confident ordering a small espresso and an apple-and-walnut croissant.
He missed another exam and the deadline to register for classes next semester. La Artista owned neither a computer nor a proper calendar, checking her email account and website only when it suited her. Once in the past two weeks her agent had visited and La Artista shoved Ellis, naked, into her bedroom, where he could hear everything without being seen. The agent, a young-sounding woman with a Brooklyn accent, wanted La Artista to do some kind of publicity event.
“No,” La Artista said calmly, punctuating her refusal by flicking the switch of her lighter. “I’m working on something new.”
“And you’ve got eight new pieces lying around collecting dust.”
“I said I’m working on something new.”
“Honey, you’re not big enough to go on sabbatical. They’ll forget you in a fucking heartbeat if you don’t put yourself out there again.”
Ellis shifted uncomfortably behind the door. It made him nervous to hear someone speaking so forcefully to her. Even in bed, ordering her around, he was never so very impolite to her, so disrespectful. His hand worked into a fist at his side.
“Please,” La Artista said finally, “just get out of here. Call me tomorrow and we’ll talk about it. Just leave now.” She sounded tired, old. It frightened him. Tonight, he decided, he’d take her out for dinner, not where they’d met but someplace really nice, someplace with wine by the bottle and everything. He’d ask her to wear that tight little cocktail dress and he’d massage her thighs under the table.
Money wasn’t a problem for him now. Last week he found a wallet in the parking lot outside La Artista’s apartment building. Perhaps it had already been pilfered—there was no cash left, but tucked under two insurance cards and a business card was a thin piece of plastic proudly labeled American Express. The name on the card was Carlos Breuer and he had signed Mr. Breuer’s name ever since. The card met with no suspicion or denial; perhaps Mr. Breuer had met an Artista of his own and dropped all identification then and there to better immerse himself in her. People went missing all the time these days.
The agent left. La Artista came slowly back to the bedroom, eyes red and not at all like Vivien Leigh’s. He begged her to do the thing with her eyebrow again. After a minute of protestation she did and pulled him onto the bed with her. “Make me feel better,” she whispered.
“I c-can try.”
* * *
When cars full of suitcases and tanned girls began pouring back into city Ellis realized spring break had come and gone. Before La Artista, he’d intended to use that week off to get ahead on his academic work, if not to finish another studio piece. He’d done nothing instead. He followed La Artista to her studio, to her appointments, to the opening of a new exhibit at La Galería, which, she told him, only featured the most cutting-edge new artists, usually the ones she didn’t like. No one questioned his presence, at least not that he was aware. La Artista never left him alone long enough for him to get suspicious. Other men flirted with her, brought her glasses of champagne and asked her out for dinner. Ellis held firmly onto her arm or sometimes, when they were sufficiently intoxicated, placed his hand on her breast. She liked his possessive nature, she assured him; it made him a man. He was sure his mother would have agreed, the bitch. Once when another man, some budding artist who looked fresh out of grad school (older than Ellis but not, he thought, as handsome) tried to proposition her, she’d laid her hand across her stomach and announced, “We’re expecting.” Ellis didn’t have the guts to ask if this were true. He didn’t know if women could conceive at her age, though if she could, there was certainly the potential for pregnancy, for they had never used a condom and he knew her routine well enough to know she wasn’t on the pill.
His stutter was improving daily. It seemed barely noticeable now, at least in comparison to how it had been before La Artista. She gave him a present for each day in which he managed not to stutter at all, usually some trinket—a bracelet or a tie, perhaps—or a blowjob in the shower. She told him she loved him before they fell asleep at night. She told him he was a god in bed.
He stopped checking his email.
The night before classes resumed the two of them got drunk and went out onto the cheap metal balcony in their bathrobes to yell at the students who lined the streets, enjoying their last night of freedom for the next two months. “Whores!” he yelled at them, raising his bottle of Grey Goose. “Pigs! Dirty, filthy pigs!” La Artista merely laughed at his side.
A few of them yelled back. Obscenities, mostly, things he wouldn’t even say to La Artista during their most brutal couplings. No one recognized him. Whatever they called him from down below, he was a stranger. Ellis Shit—if he had ever even existed—was dead to them.
* * *
“I’m afraid you’ll leave me,” La Artista said to him over breakfast in late April. She wore only a green silk nightdress and no panties. She’d shaved her legs before he woke up and streaks of dried blood ran down from her knees. A cigarette hung between her lips.
“I have to go, baby.” He knelt beside her, kissed her bare thigh. She tasted of salt and lavender moisturizer. “I have to, I have to, I have to. I’ll come right back, I promise.”
“You won’t. You’re leaving me.” She didn’t sound scared, only tired and nervous. She was taking pills now, some kind of anti-anxiety shit. Her agent was snooping around again, trying to get her to give up her new paintings, one of which included a portrait of a young man who looked like Ellis she’d entitled The Real Difference Between ‘Sit’ and ‘Set.’ Their sex life was still great, he felt. They were happy together. She just had her low points sometimes.
“Hush, dear heart.” He rose to his feet and kissed her forehead. “I’ll be back before 1:00 if I leave now. I’ll be back in time for lunch.” He went to the door and took his lightest jacket from the rack, slid his arms into it. He felt like a husband suddenly. A husband in one of those old movies his mother watched, in which the men put on their long coats and went to work on Wall Street and came back to wives with short, curled hair and red, red lips who danced to jazz music. When he came home later he’d take La Artista out dancing. That would get her spirits up.
He tried to smile for her, but it was hard to smile when she looked so depressed. “I’ll be home before you know it. Go to the studio and paint something for me, okay? I’ll be back, 3:00 at the latest.”
La Artista pushed herself up from the chair. “You want a statement? You still need an issue? Here, baby.” She hooked her fingers under the edge of the nightdress and lifted it up over her head, tossed it carelessly onto the floor. Her naked body was pale, almost blue, in the morning sunlight. Christ, she was beautiful, and her beauty was hideous. “Here’s your issue: nudity in American art. We’re the only Western country that hates it, you know. Here. Look at me. I’m not ugly, damn it. Nobody is. I know what they say about me, I’m not that much of a fucking recluse. I’m a degenerate. Whore. Dyke. Pornographer. Just because I paint people, I paint people as they truly are, without all this shit on them. And that makes me a fucking criminal to them. It doesn’t matter what the message is or what the artist thinks of it. It’s what they think of it. Every little brush stroke, every drop of paint—that’s what it all comes down to. Use that for your issue.”
He wanted to feel moved and couldn’t. It all sounded like something he’d heard before, even coming out of her mouth. He wanted to kiss her to shut her up, to keep himself from speaking. He didn’t dare remind her that there had never been a presentation.
“Thanks, Viv,” he said after a moment and finally she smiled. “I’m coming back.”
Her smile faded as quickly as it appeared. “You can always leave me. You’ve got money.”