She used to dream like that, in nothing but lines and patterns and textures. Art was a language of both limitless vocabulary and limited syntax; endless concepts to express with boundless opportunities to express them, but only a finite number of ways to do it. Color, line, shape, space, texture, and value, six elements in total, which was newly revelatory to her until she realized why, running her finger along the edge of the key.
Bees.
She looked down at her forgeries, her elfin imitations.
“I’m going to make something today,” she told them. “Something new.”
They stared unsupportively back at her.
Why him? asked the mimicry from her father’s study.
“Because,” she said. Because I know he’ll sit for me. Because I know he won’t mock me, won’t suffocate me, won’t kill this this fragile little thing I’ve found, this fledgling breath I’ve taken. Because he will know what it means, because he asked me to, because he asked. Because he’s the thing I can’t unsee. Because I don’t know if I can get him right without looking, without proof, but also because I need to know, because I’ve already tried. Because either this is how everything changes, or this is how it ends.
She’d already called the museum and told them she needed the day. They weren’t opposed. They told her to feel better soon, though she’d specifically never said she was unwell. That was the one thing she was not.
She’d already called Marc, too, shortly after the museum.
“It’s cute you found a hobby, babe,” he had said the previous evening, kissing her head while she pulled her sketchbook closer, surreptitiously blocking his view of her drawings with her arm. Would he recognize the hand, the shape of the palm, the angle of the fingers? Had he seen them reflected in her eyes the way she’d seen them in her mind? Probably not, but she wasn’t ready for him to know the outlines of her thoughts, to see the geography of them.
That was all art was, wasn’t it? The blatant exposition of the inside of her head.
“I have therapy today,” she had told him. “Might go shopping for a bit afterwards.”
“Didn’t you just see your psychiatrist?”
“Yes. I just have a lot on my mind.”
She didn’t actually know why she had bothered calling Marc to begin with. It wasn’t as if she didn’t do what she wanted most of the time, or rather, all of it. She supposed she’d wanted him to think: That’s odd; maybe she’d wanted him to say: Are you fine? Possibly she’d wanted him to sense that something was systematically failing; to flag the relevant instincts that might suggest this conversation was not like any others they had had.
She dared him to ask: Are you lying?
What he said was: “Well, good that you’re taking care of yourself,” and then he told her he loved her, that he was heading into a meeting with a prospective client’s firm, and then he promised he’d see her tonight before hanging up, the screen going black in her hand.
Regan eyed the painting from her father’s office, replaying the mechanisms of its conception. She’d stayed up all night working on it, then spent days perfecting it when she got home, then stared at it for hours upon conclusion. The brushstrokes were precisely the artist’s, not hers. It was thievery in every possible aspect of its creation. She had left nothing of herself in its reproduction, merely cloning the vacant starvation that had existed there before, and then she’d done the same another dozen times; proving to herself that, at very least, she could still see, she could still think, she could still interpret.
But that wasn’t enough, and she knew it. Art, a voice buzzed in her ear, was creation. It was dissecting a piece of herself and leaving it out for consumption, for speculation. For the possibility of misinterpretation and the inevitability of judgment. For the abandonment of fear the reward would have to be the possibility of ruin, and that was the inherent sacrifice. That, her mind whispered, was art, and she slid her finger along the edge of the storage room key, the jagged edges like teeth scraping over her skin. You and me, you-and-me, you and me, my heart will burn a hole through my chest until I know, and I am not done, I can’t be done yet, this cannot be the ending.
Which was when she’d picked up the phone, choosing the contact that read, ‘For When You’ve Found It,’ and dialed Rinaldo Damiani.
* * *
SHE WAS AT HIS DOOR WITH a sketchbook and pencils, dressed in a boxy grey sweater and jeans. She was wearing her garnet earrings, he noted, but had foregone any other details. She looked determined, almost defiant, when she opened her mouth and said, still fidgeting, “I want to be clear. This is just me drawing you, nothing else.”