The painter stirred slightly as she stared at him. She was now nude. Could not even a sleeping man perceive when his environment changed with the addition of a living, breathing, warm person?
He did seem to be slightly aware of her, but he stirred a little as if absorbed in a dream.
She stepped forward and slipped beneath the covers. She reached out and touched him with her hands, then closed her eyes and rubbed her palms over him. She felt as if she were entering a secret world; she concentrated her entire being into her hands. She tried to read every sensation there—texture, temperature, shape, the rhythm of his blood, any tiny movements in his musculature, any indications that he felt and was responding to her touch.
He stirred beside her. She moved her face closer to his, felt the warmth there. She softly pressed her face against the side of his neck and jaw, then opened her lips slightly to kiss him. She let her mouth rest there for a few moment, then moved her tongue between her teeth to taste him, tickle his skin.
He awoke and didn’t say anything. He reached for her. Between some people there are no secrets.
With the morning Sandra awoke intertwined with the painter. She rested there for a few minutes, and considered waking him. She decided not to; he looked peaceful. His face seemed less contradictory, less of a combination of the very old and the very young.
She slipped out of bed and put on her blouse. She left the bedroom and pulled the door almost closed behind her, leaving the sleeping painter behind in darkness.
She went to the bathroom and washed her face, then looked at herself in the mirror. And how many days ago had she looked out her window to see this man painting a naked woman? How many days ago had she stared at the sky and felt like crying under the weight of some vague, displaced sadness? She had the sense that her life was made up in fact of many lives, and that she was at a junction where one was ending and another beginning.
Her hair was a mess, and she didn’t have makeup on. (She never wore it to the night shift.) Still, the memories of last night gave her a look of warmth and vitality she hadn’t seen for years.
She left the bathroom and went back into his studio. The place which had looked in the dim light of last night like a torture chamber now looked like a typical man’s workshop. She looked around and felt teenagerlike feelings of infatuation—these are the brushes he takes in his hands; these are the colors he mixes to his liking.
She felt an urge to see his kitchen. She knew she was being silly, moving way too fast, playing little imagination games. She also knew that she deserved it. Her life wasn’t over.
His kitchen was clean. His cupboard held almost nothing, just a few simple juice glasses. They were all washed and set upside down on a square of white cloth. She picked one up, looking for signs of his lips on the glass. She would very much have liked to place her lips on that slick surface where his had been. But the glass (which was curiously colorless, like laboratory glass, unlike the ferrous or gold-based crystal most people used) had been washed spotless.
Sandra found no food in the kitchen, and found the refrigerator unplugged, its door propped open for ventilation.
The most disappointing discovery was that he had no coffee, no tea, nor anything which looked suitable for boiling water.
She went back into the studio. She glanced into his bedroom through the slightly opened door, and saw that he hadn’t stirred. He was worn out, she thought, and blushed.
She looked at her portrait, nearly finished, sitting on the easel. Her experience of looking into the mirror a few minutes before paled beside her sensations as she glanced into the canvas panel. The flesh tone held, upon close scrutiny, myriad colors of the spectrum, blended in swaths of contradiction and complement. As she looked into the eyes she felt a sudden dizziness, as if she had just glimpsed a great distance, or, more accurately, had glanced downward from a great height.
The textures of her body, ranging from the wet slickness of the eyes to the smooth-wool place between her legs, were all captured perfectly. The temperature of a living body, the warmth, was also captured through his cunning use of undertones and glazes. Looking at the large forms and musculature of her thighs, rib cage, shoulders and breasts, one could see that the pulsing internal structures of night blood indigo had been suggested through an unexplainably skillful use of color.
She broke her gaze away from the image on the canvas. She didn’t feel any of the satisfaction, the ability to name and remember, which a person could usually get from studying a picture closely then looking away. She felt as if she still had some bond to the portrait, some need to look at it. With this feeling of some important thing left undone, she walked away from the easel, almost feeling as if the eyes of the picture (her own eyes) were on her back.
The apartment consisted of the studio, with its enormous windows, and four other rooms which could all be entered from the studio. She had been in the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom, and now there was one door through which she hadn’t walked. For a fleeting moment she felt like a busybody, but she immediately discounted that feeling. She didn’t consider that he might want to keep anything secret from her.
Besides, she wanted to keep occupied until he woke up. They could go out together for some breakfast, or maybe he would want to stay in together for awhile, perhaps even go back to bed, before they started work again on the portrait.
She opened the door to the small room. Her first impression, in the dim light, was that she had entered a room full of strangers. It was as if the light she admitted into the small room (not much more than a walk-in closet, really) startled the people there, revealed them somehow, caught them in some private, not-to-be-shared act. She felt numerous eyes looking at her, expressing an almost unbearable pleading.
But there was nothing strange in that room, nothing for her to fear. There were other portraits, pictures of other women, arranged around the walls and shelves of the small room in rows and tiers, unceremoniously hung or stacked from floor to ceiling. This arrangement was partially to blame for Sandra’s initial impression of entering some chamber occupied by numerous trapped people, the impression of entering a dark prison, of offering pitiful people a glimpse of light and life normally denied them.
“What are you doing in there?”
Sandra jumped, startled. He was awake, and had put on a pair of khaki slacks and an emerald green shirt.
“I was just looking around. How long did it take you to do these?”
He took Sandra by the wrist and—gently—tugged her back from the room and shut the door. As the door closed, Sandra glanced over her shoulder and had the illusory impression that the eyes of the women in the portraits hardened, narrowed with pain and envy. She felt tired and needed some breakfast. It was amazing how susceptible a person could become.
After the door closed the painter led Sandra over to the “subject’s chair.” He looked calm but preoccupied. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.
“I’m sorry. I was just looking around.”
She sat down, slipping her wrist out of his grip. “This isn’t a very nice way to say ‘good morning.’ ” She reached out to put her hand on his chest.
He drew away and she had a sinking feeling. It was all wrong. She’d acted like a horny, love-smitten kid, had forced herself on him, and now she was coming on so strong she scared him. Enter love, exit dignity and common sense.
He walked over to the canvas. Sandra had the weirdest feeling that she was unimportant, that his real interest was in the painting. Tears came to her, and with blurred vision she watched the painter speak to the canvas. “You shouldn’t have done it. You should not have done any of it. Forgive me, please!”