“This is all a bit new to me,” she said.
“What is?”
“Using that term,” she said, adding in a hushed tone, “asexual.”
“Are you?”
“I think so.” She stared at the disintegrating swan in her coffee, then added, “Yes, I am.”
Fifteen years ago, in high school, she’d had a boyfriend. She had known him since she was five and, as a result, she had trusted him. He cheated on her the summer before she left for college, with her best friend. She remembered him touching her in pleasurable ways, but she wondered now, had she ever been more than cerebral in her passion? Maybe she had just loved him as an inexperienced teenage girl. She had assumed with time their physical intimacy would feel transcendent. It never had, and then he transcended with Sarah. If she were honest, a part of her had always expected him to hurt her.
“So the new part is just saying it?” Frank said.
“I’m glad,” she said, “that there’s a word for it.”
She asked Frank out to lunch the next Saturday. They ate Cuban sandwiches at one of the food stalls in the Grand Central Market. He wiped off the mustard and removed the pickles. It seemed finicky, but he ate the rest, and she mentally noted how easygoing he was. He spoke with enthusiasm about finishing his PhD and someday getting a professorship. He mentioned books she had never heard of. This thrilled her. She shared ownership of a bookstore downtown with an old college buddy. Her friend took on more of the financial burden but relied on Amanda to run it. The Last Booksellers they’d jokingly called it as they drew up plans — how silly to open a bookstore when so many were closing, surrendering to internet sales — but the name stuck. And the neighborhood of artists supported it. They held readings, hosted exhibits during Art Walk, and sold rare editions that bolstered profits. She had lucked into quite a few famous first editions when relatives of the recently deceased at the nearby assisted living facilities donated boxes of literary leftovers, unaware of their value, dusty hard covers with names like Proust and Faulkner embossed on the spines.
He asked to see her store, so they walked across downtown, through Pershing Square where the city was setting up for the weekly movie screening. Tonight, it was Vertigo. He insisted they go. She showed him the store, and they browsed together until the movie started. They bought wine at the corner market and reclined next to each other on the grass beneath the palm trees, getting a little drunk and watching the movie as the sky turned from dark indigo to the midnight rust that characterized downtown’s light-polluted nights.
She invited him back to her loft, and they stayed up late playing records. She fell asleep on the floor and woke to him cradling her in his arms, carrying her to bed.
“I’m sorry I fell asleep,” she said as he lay her down.
“Sweet dreams,” he said, then turned to leave.
“Stay with me.”
He climbed in beside her. Within minutes, he fell into deep sleep and rolled away so that his back was to hers. They slept together at least a few nights a week after that. Knowing that there was nothing more that he wanted from her made her feel safe. She thought she knew what they were, and by that logic, they couldn’t change.
In the mornings, the sun shines on the building across the street, reflecting bronze off the windows, obscuring the possibility of spying. She never told Frank about her late-night observations. She knew that those nights satisfied her in some erotic way, but she also knew she compartmentalized such feelings, that they may not translate in real life. She told herself that to touch him would mean nothing, would do nothing for her. But she knew for Frank these feelings would call into question the premise of their relationship.
This morning, she brews coffee and scrambles eggs to ease Frank’s mood after disturbing his sleep. He stares at her as he chews, his pale eyes revealing each shift of the pupil, each dilation. It was normally a comfort that she could feel his gaze.
“You smoked last night,” he says.
“Just one.” She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, sniffing her fingers for the scent of tobacco.
“You never told me that you smoked. But here you are, a full-fledged smoker all of a sudden?”
“Just on occasion. When my nerves are fried.”
“What’s wrong?”
She takes a slow sip of her coffee and squints in the morning light. “Business has been slow lately.”
He nods. He pats her on the shoulder as a goodbye gesture, pours his coffee into a thermos, and leaves for the campus fifteen minutes south of downtown.
When the painter walks into the store, Amanda is cutting open a box of books to shelve in the used fiction section. She hears the bell chime over the door, peers over a row of thick anthologies, and there he is. Dried paint splatters his jeans, but otherwise, he’s cleaned himself up, combed his hair, put on a button-down shirt. Instead of perusing the books or the magazine rack, like most customers, he heads straight for the desk and stands there, waiting with a manila envelope.
“May I help you?” She steps into view but maintains distance, worrying that he’ll recognize her.
“I’m hosting a sort of informal exhibit at my loft for some of my paintings at the next Art Walk. I was wondering if I could leave some flyers here? Post them on a bulletin board or something?” His voice is softer than she expected. When painting, his posture always seems so self-assured, but now he hunches his shoulders and fumbles the flyers out of the envelope, like he’s apologizing for intruding.
She steps closer to see the flyer, which lists his name in bold font: Ryan Bethea. She recognizes one of the two paintings featured. An appendectomy scar glistening against the matte bronze muscles of a young woman’s abdomen. It looks fresh, as if the doctor was careless of her beauty. The scar sinks deep, tugging at the surrounding skin, framed by spidery, purple stitch marks.
“Why do you paint scars?” she says.
“I don’t always,” he says. “She just happened to have one.”
“But you focus on it,” she says. He gives her a perplexed look, and she says, “At least in this painting, it looks like the scar is the whole point. Why?”
“I’ve been painting nudes lately. I wanted to avoid objectifying the image, so I focused on women’s stomachs rather than the more obvious anatomy.” He adds, “I think it’s still sexual, just as any aspect of being physical, of having a body, can be.”
Up close, she can see that Ryan is older than she previously assessed. A peppering of gray hair marks his temples, and a wrinkle divides his brow, perhaps from hours of concentrating over an easel. She thinks of all the bodies he has known, all those years of nudes, all those years of talking like this.
She says, “Is that something they teach you in art school or do you really believe that?”
“I’m self-taught,” he says.
“Really?” She averts her eyes to the flyer. The other painting is of a rib cage emerging like an island from still water, the exposed skin the chilled texture of gooseflesh.
“Why don’t you exhibit at any of the galleries?” she says, “You’re better than showing paintings out of your own place.”
“Thank you.” He wraps an arm across his chest, grabbing his own elbow. “I just moved, so I haven’t really figured things out yet.”
“You could show your work here. It’s not a gallery, but we do that sometimes, and we get lots of people who stop by during Art Walk.”
“Are you serious?” He smiles and hugs her. “Thank you so much,” he says.
She stands stiff and still until he lets go. He apologizes, and she assures him that it’s okay.
When Amanda visits Ryan’s loft to help with the Art Walk selection, she discovers details she could not notice from her former vantage point. The floor is rough concrete. The ceiling is unfinished, a tangle of air ducts and pipes. Just a few shirts and pants hang from a freestanding clothes rack in the corner. There are no closets. No separations or demarcations of space. Across the street, she can see her
window. She forgot to turn off the kitchen light. She can see the gray cabinets but not her bed or her chair by the ledge. Maybe some nights he could see her shadow, sitting there, but it’s impossible to know.
There are eight large canvases lined up along the wall. She’s seen them all before.
“I could paint you,” he says, “if you’d like.”
She wonders what type of subject he thinks she will be for him. Does he expect perfection? Or rather some unexpected wound, some damaged ideal that he can fixate on?
“Now?” she asks.
“Or whenever you’d like.”
“Would I have to be naked?”
“I could work around it, if that makes you too uncomfortable,” he says.
He walks toward her. His hands hover down by his sides, poised and careful. Like he’s trying not to scare me off, she thinks.
“May I show you?” he asks, gesturing at her stomach.
She nods, pulling the hem of her shirt up to reveal a couple inches of smooth skin. He lifts the shirt farther. His rough knuckles skim her belly, and she feels her body tense. Before the fabric slides past her rib cage, she tugs the shirt down.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
She recalls other women on other nights looking eager and then sated by him. She liked the idea of them, or she thought she had, when she watched from afar.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I have a boyfriend,” she says. “I have to go.”
She grabs her purse and hurries out the door. He catches her at the elevator.
“I didn’t know,” he says. “You didn’t tell me.”
“I’m sorry.” She hits the down button repeatedly. “I know.”
“Are you okay?”
She won’t look at him.
“Are you still going to put my paintings up?”
“Of course,” she says, boarding the elevator. When the doors close, the unseen gears shift, and she feels her stomach drop.
When Frank comes over, she’s a few bourbons in and smoking her third cigarette. She can feel the stiff saltiness of dried tears on her cheek.
“What happened?” he says. He drops his beaten-up briefcase and his jacket on the foot of her bed, then sits beside her on the window ledge.
“Nothing,” she says.
“Then why are you upset?”
She grabs an extra glass from the kitchenette and returns to him. “Drink with me,” she says, pouring him a few ounces. He leans forward to take the drink, and she notices how the veins skim the surface of his hands, blue threads over delicate bones. If she stares hard enough, she bets she could read his pulse. She places her palm on top of his hand, and although he keeps his hand still, she sees his shoulders stiffen as he braces himself.
“This is hard for you,” she says, nodding to their hands. “Even this bothers you, doesn’t it?”
“I like being with you,” he says. “I thought you understood that.”
She slides her hand to his knee. “Does this feel bad?” She moves her hand higher. “Or this?”
He stands up fast, sloshing the drink down his shirt. “Why are you testing me?”
She says, “I thought I didn’t care, but maybe I do. Maybe I want you to touch me more than you do. Couldn’t you try?”
She takes the glass out of his hand and puts it on the counter. “Maybe it’ll be different with us.”
In the dark room, his eyes reflect nothing. She grips his hair and guides his face to hers. Her lips glide over his. She lingers there. This is not new territory. He has let their lips meet briefly before. She deepens the kiss.
Normally, when kissing someone, she would taste the sourness of his saliva or feel viscosity on the tongue. She could not separate the act from her distant analysis of the act. It became animal, inferior, and repellant. But now, she tastes some amalgamation of him that she cannot separate into its parts. He tastes familiar. She wants him to grab her, to dig his fingers into her.
He turns away and wipes his mouth.
He says, “I’ve been nothing but honest with you. I never misled you. I thought you felt the same way.”
She returns to the ledge and pours herself another drink. Across the street, the painter’s window is dark. She recalls his touch, how her body stiffened. Then a sudden memory of drinking vodka in a dorm room with a friend, the kind of friend you only have your freshman year and then lose track of. She couldn’t remember that friend’s last name now, but she could still see the concern on her face when she told her about the kidnapping. “No wonder you have issues,” she’d said, and they had both laughed. When you’re eighteen, maybe it’s easier to laugh at the things that derail your life because you think it can’t be forever.
She says, “Maybe how we feel isn’t natural at all. We’re just damaged, and we don’t bother fixing ourselves.”
“My life’s work is legitimizing how I feel and showing that this is natural,” he says.
“I’m sure it is for some people.”
“But not for you.”
“I don’t know.”
“You need to know,” he says, reaching for her and squeezing her hand, despite everything. “I need you to know.”
She asks him to stay, but he grabs his coat and briefcase off the bed and leaves. Hours later, when she pulls back the covers, she notices the small gift box he must have meant to give her that night. She unwraps it to find an electronic cigarette with a note: I hear these are safer.
The night before the exhibit, Ryan shows up at the bookstore to help hang his paintings. All his words are perfunctory. Hold this corner. Place this to the left. Lift it higher. He barely speaks to her. When they finish and Amanda is turning off the lights, he thanks her. “I’m sorry for any weirdness I caused,” he says. “I didn’t mean anything.”
“It wasn’t you at all,” she says.
That night, she watches as he primes a canvas. He primes it black. Whoever he paints on it will look like a ghost, she thinks, like something half-submerged in dark lake water.
He looks surprised when he opens his door and sees her. “Can you paint me now?” she says.
“What about your boyfriend?”
“I’m not sure I have one anymore,” she says, and it’s true. Although she and Frank exchanged a couple of brief messages, they were sterile and functional. He asked to meet her for a drink, which seemed like an abnormal step back. She suggested dinner, and he took hours to respond. She told him it would have to be after the exhibit, that she was swamped with preparations. Secretly, she wanted the time and space to map out her confusion.
Ryan widens the door and lets her into his loft.
She strips to her underwear, functional beige cotton. “Is this enough?”
“Whatever you want,” he says.
She wants to contradict her body, to expose it, to deny it safekeeping. She takes off her bra, then her panties, conscious of the way her skin doubles on itself as she bends to pull the underwear over her feet.
When she straightens, she knows her stomach is smooth. No lines or birthmarks.
“Paint me with scars,” she says.
“You don’t have any.” He scrutinizes her skin, and she feels less and less inside herself.
“But you can paint them,” she says, “here and here.” She touches just beneath her breast and right above her navel. The marks of a dead girl. The girl they found after they caught the man who had her — an Amber Alert, they caught him fast, before he got her to his place, before he could touch her the way he intended. The other girl was stabbed after he’d had her a year. When the news sensationalized the case, Amanda saw leaked photos. She saw how he’d dismantled the girl who had the same dark eyes as her. But it didn’t happen to her. She knows that.
Now the easel stands between her and a man wielding a palette knife caked in creamy acrylics the color of her flesh. From this angle, she can only see the bare wooden frame and, stapled to it, the tattered edges of the canvas. Light passes through the fabric, faint
and diffused, until he paints the first layer of her body, a growing shadow of torso.
“Did you use black or white primer?” she asks.
“I didn’t prime it.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll be good,” he says. “Don’t worry.”
When he mixes a violet red on his palette, his gaze skims over her. He studies her like the scar is real, like he can transfer the wound from her skin to his canvas. Her feet begin to ache against the cold concrete.
At her shifting, he asks, “Need a break?”
“Please.”
“Come here.”
He waves her to his side where she can see the painting. The contours of her midsection emerge, scratchy and inchoate against the unprimed canvas. Smudginess breaks the lines and blurs the shadows against a backdrop of dry-brushed gray. He has only finished one scar. It distinguishes itself, precise and saturated amidst the gauzy flesh.
“Is this what you pictured?” he asks.
“It’s close.” She resists the impulse to touch the red, to smear it wider.
“Is it too much?”
She stares at the vivid freshness of the barely healed wound.
He touches her elbow. The gesture is gentle. She can feel the crust of dried paint on his fingertips. She tells him then about the man who took her and about the girl who died. About the scar, she says, “Make it deep, like it was me.”
Most people go to Art Walk to let loose. Local galleries are complaining, some branching off to plan an alternate Art Walk that focuses more on art and less on parties. Revelers drink free wine and eat free hors d’oeuvres, and fewer paintings sell than expected for an event with ten thousand attendees.
By nine that evening, Ryan has only sold one painting, the portrait of Amanda. He insisted on bringing it, placing a fan on the acrylic paint throughout the night and carrying it to the store himself in the morning.
What Makes You Think You're Awake? Page 10