You walked in long after the sun had set. The only light on in the apartment faced my easel. You had undone the top button of your shirt and slung your tie around your neck like a sash.
“A butterfly,” you said. The sudden sound of your voice startled me.
“I didn’t hear you come in,” I said and touched my cheek with the back of my hand. “Right. Yes. A clown at the paint store did it.”
You placed your hand on my neck. It was cold and stiff, like you’d been writing on a chalkboard for too long. It made my shoulders tense.
“I won’t ask about the clown,” you said, amused. “What are you painting?”
Surrounding me were four canvas faces staring back at us, all at various stages of dry.
“I’m just practicing right now.”
“Practicing? These look like more than just practice.”
You began to reach for one, but I held on to your hand.
“Can we not just yet?” I said. “I don’t feel ready.”
You gave me a bothered look and pulled your tie from your neck, then shrugged and left for the kitchen to find the dinner that Marta had prepared. Potato and ghee soup.
Marta herself was very pleased, I think, that I had found a way to occupy my time so that she could occupy her own time as she pleased. When she arrived at the apartment in the morning, I was already settled in at my canvas, and would continue to be there until after she left for the day. I felt as though I had found a time portal within the canvas—a day passed with the same energy as fifteen minutes. Marta and I interacted only when she checked to see if I needed food, water, or coffee.
You and I, however, had not reached the same symmetry. The further I slipped into my painting world, the more curious you grew, as I had discovered something that didn’t involve you, and this provoked your interest.
And what was it that I had found? For the first time in perhaps all my life, I had the space to explore my own thoughts without guilt or anxiety. As I constructed a woman on the canvas, visualizing her face in parts, memories entered my mind in flashes: the smell of my mother’s travel-sized Dior perfume, which I wasn’t allowed to touch; her taking me to see All About Eve at a vintage movie theater with red velvet curtains; the biting tug on my hairline as she gave me French braids. Slowly I was reconstructing a past that I had always neglected.
I remembered the first time I went to the beach. My father decided to bring our family to Cape Cod. The sun was deliriously hot and we’d forgotten the umbrella, which he couldn’t make sense of. “I rested it against the trunk,” he kept saying, and spent the day swatting away seagulls trying to steal the marshmallow–and–peanut butter sandwiches my mother had packed in tinfoil wrap.
I must have been about eleven, and I remember it was the first time I wore a bikini. I had growing thighs, new stretch marks, painful breasts. I’d found a pubic hair sprouting the week earlier. When I saw my father wasn’t paying attention, I looked down at my body’s transformation, now visible to the world, and pinched the inside of my arm to restrain the discomfort. My mother sat reclined on a beach chair, refusing to take her clothes off. She wore a pair of camouflage pants, an oversize T-shirt with Mickey Mouse on the front, and a floppy hat.
“I’m too skinny,” she told me, and lit a cigarette.
Not even a year later, she met a rancher through a personal ad in the newspaper, divorced my dad, and moved to the ranch. Her body swelled, even her nose and the skin underneath her eyes, like she had been filled with something she didn’t have before. She grew her hair out and wore it in a gray braid that swung between her shoulder blades. I spent my teenage years living with my father in Hartford. I saw my mother on alternating holidays, and every time we did see each other, we were each surprised by how much the other had changed.
* * *
—
One morning I woke up to find you standing in front of my easel, your face a few inches from one of my paintings, inspecting the woman reclined on a couch, her breasts conical and splayed to the sides. I recoiled.
“What are you doing?”
You turned and took a sip of your coffee.
“Just looking.”
Then you gave the room a sweeping pass with your hand.
“These are incredible, Lin,” you said and offered your assessment of each painting.
I stood silent in my pajamas. All I could think to say was thank you, then I moved closer to try to wedge distance between you and my work.
You pointed at a smaller canvas, one of the first faces I’d done, and took another sip of your coffee.
“Who is she?” you asked.
“Who is who?” I asked back.
“The woman in these paintings.” You pointed to each, one by one, showing me the similarity in the hair and the eyes and the turn in her nose. “It’s the same woman over and over again.”
“Oh,” I said, and leaned in closer to inspect them myself. That’s when I saw what you saw—the lithe frame and full features, the wildness in her gaze. It was Celia. How had I not realized before? I felt my face flush and tried to conceal my embarrassment by covering my neck with my hands.
“It does look like the same woman.” I frowned, pretending to be bemused, and told you I didn’t know. I scrambled, plotted an escape. “I think I need some coffee,” I said and boiled more water in the kitchen.
* * *
—
Once you’d made me aware that I had been unconsciously rendering Celia in my paintings, I felt increasingly that I was hiding in plain sight. I stacked the canvases with their backs facing out so that you couldn’t look at them, then would steal glances at night after you’d gone to bed. I’d stop painting midstroke with the sensation that you or Marta was standing behind me. A few times I honestly thought I’d felt a breath blow against my shoulder and would turn to find no one there.
Your interest in my Celia paintings didn’t wane. It was the first thing you’d ask when you got home from school. “How did painting go today?” Every time you asked, I felt the warm space inside me, open and tender from a day at the easel, begin to constrict.
“I’m making progress,” I’d say, and you’d nod with approval.
You collected flyers from the university bulletin board advertising campus art contests.
“They’re open to the public too,” you hinted. You inquired about me auditing art history lectures and fine art classes. You brought me supplies I didn’t need: elaborate measuring tools, organic cotton rags, and artisanal brush cleaners.
I couldn’t distinguish between what was genuine support, and what was your competitiveness hidden behind enthusiasm. “Why can’t you just leave it alone?” I wanted to say every time I saw you look at a half-finished painting. Your push to get my art into the world began to feel like a desire to expose me, like you didn’t want painting to be precious and safe, that you wanted to make it public so I would flounder in a way you never had. I imagined the exposure would prove to you that you were comparatively better at your craft than I was at mine; that you had won the awards I was incapable of winning. But I didn’t confront you, I couldn’t, because there was a part of me that knew I was overreacting. Whenever I pictured the conversation in my mind, you appeared as an innocent cherub boy only wanting the best for me, and I appeared as a warted witch, lurching over my paintings, waving my cane at anyone who came near. Maybe you just wanted to help and I had taken you for granted. The multiple conflicting possibilities, the dialectic of it all, made the confusion even worse.