So, okay, I’m not perfect, but Elise was. Well, almost perfect. Except for her eye. I couldn’t see it from across the auditorium or even that time I bumped into her and she said, Excuse me, or the times I’d follow her from class all the way to her apartment. And it didn’t show up in any of the hundreds of pictures I took of her because they were all too far away, and most people didn’t even notice it, and I didn’t either, not at first, because she was beautiful, what you’d call a real head-turner; like, we’d be walking down the street and guys would do a double take to get another look at her — and I knew they must be thinking: What’s so special about him? They didn’t see my artistic soul, but they didn’t see Elise’s eye either. And really, it wasn’t much, just this tiny little imperfection, a zigzag streak of dark brown in the white of her left eye, a flaw, she called it. No big deal, right? But...
Like this one time — after we’d been together a few weeks — Elise made me watch this old movie with Jack Nicholson and this actress whose name I forget, but it took place in San Francisco, in Chinatown, and at one point Jack’s in bed with the actress and they’ve just had sex and he’s staring into the actress’s face and he says, “Your eye,” and she says, “What about it?” and he says, “There’s something black in the green part of your eye,” and the actress says, “Oh that, it’s a flaw in the iris, sort of a birthmark,” and the reason I know it by heart is because Elise played the scene over and over and over and mouthed the actress’s words while I watched her with the light from the TV screen playing over her beautiful incandescent face, the whole time thinking, It’s just not fair, this beautiful girl ruined by this flaw, and next thing I know the words are tumbling out of my mouth. “Your eye, your flaw, it’s a damn shame,” and Elise gets all cold, her lapis lazuli eyes like icy daggers, and says, “Like you’re perfect, with your leg,” and believe me, that really hurt, but I laughed because I didn’t want to show her how bad it made me feel and I said I was sorry and that she was beautiful, and she said, “You know how many guys I could have?” and I agreed. I mean, Elise could have any guy she wanted, but she chose me because of my sensitive nature and because I’m an artist and because I put her on a pedestal and because I thought she was perfect. Well, almost perfect.
We were together for eight months, one week, and two days, and during that time I made, like, two or three hundred sketches and paintings of her. You could say she inspired me. Then one of her stupid girlfriends said the only reason Elise liked me was because she got off on me making all those paintings of her, because she was vain, and when she told me that I told Elise to get rid of her girlfriend, and she did.
It took me awhile, but eventually I got Elise to give up all of her friends, because I wanted it to be just the two of us, you know, artist and model. She was my muse. I’d say, “Baby, I’m gonna make you famous — I’m gonna make you immortal,” and she loved that. And it was true.
I made all sorts of paintings of her, wild expressive paintings and ones that were delicate and pristine. I painted her life-size on huge canvases, and painted the individual parts of her body — her breasts, legs, arms, and hands — in closeup and sharp detail on smaller ones. But the more I painted her, the more I wanted her to be perfect and the more that eye of hers started to drive me crazy and I couldn’t stop thinking about how she’d look without that nasty flaw.
Sometimes we’d just be sitting around and I’d look over at her wanting to drink in her beauty and then I’d see it, the flaw, and it would ruin everything. I mean, like would the Mona Lisa be beautiful with a pimple on her cheek? So who could blame me for what I did?
I was planning an entire exhibition of my Elise paintings and I told Frank, my art dealer, and he was cool with that. I’d already put a lot of drawings of Elise on my Facebook page and there were, like, tons of comments about how good they were and how beautiful Elise was, which was cool, but of course I never showed her flaw in my artwork.
Right before it happened, we went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was a really cold winter day, everything in the city icy and gray and dead-looking, like the entire city was one big nature mort, you know, but I’d created this special tour for Elise, which I called “icons of beauty.” I started with an Egyptian carving of Queen Nefertiti, which was on loan from some German museum, explaining that the name meant “the beautiful one is here,” and pointed out how perfect Nefertiti was, and Elise knew the piece from art-history class but didn’t know the meaning, which I’d Googled to impress her. Then I showed her a Greek statue of Aphrodite, so smooth, and again, so perfect you could cry. After that, Courbet’s “Woman with a Parrot” and a Picasso portrait of Marie-Thérèse and then a Warhol “Marilyn” painting, pointing out that I’d read how Marilyn Monroe had had a little nose and chin surgery to make her even more perfect, just to plant the idea in Elise’s mind about being perfect, but really subtle — and the whole day I avoided looking at Elise’s eye so my perfection tour wouldn’t be ruined, and when we got home I told her she was as beautiful as any of those artworks, still careful not to say anything about her eye, and she kissed me and we had sex, and afterward Elise was lying there naked, with her eyes closed, and I studied every inch of her face and body, ignoring the few moles and freckles that could ruin everything if I let them, but I didn’t, and it was a pretty perfect moment until she opened her eyes and I saw it, and the moment was ruined and I realized it would always be ruined, and that was it, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I put my hands around her neck and she smiled until I tightened my grip, and when she started to struggle I just stared at that flaw in her eye and kept squeezing tighter and tighter, ignoring all the noises and ugly faces she was making until she finally stopped moving.
Afterward her eyes were open and that damn flaw looked even bigger and nastier, so I got some Krazy Glue and pasted her lids shut, which I once read is what undertakers do so the eyes don’t pop open at funerals, or maybe it’s to keep the bugs out, but it did the trick.
Then I carried her into my studio and laid her out on the floor and spent time arranging her, one arm this way, another that way, her legs just so, like an Ingres “Odalisque,” which are these amazingly beautiful paintings where the girls are naked and all stretched out, but dignified, which is the way I wanted Elise to look.
I mixed whole tubes of Rose Madder and Alizarin Crimson with Naples Yellow and lots of Titanium White and swirled the pigments together with linseed oil until I got the exact shade of Elise’s pale, pale skin. Then, with my widest, softest sable brush I slowly began to cover her flesh with a layer of paint, her pores soaking up the oil until it took on a beautiful glow, even more perfect than it was in real life.