“There’s this collection of essays I love by the curator Hans Ulrich Obrist,” said Cleo. “It’s called Sharp Tongues, Loose Lips, Open Eyes … I can’t remember the rest.”
“A man of few words.”
“Oh, have you read him?”
“No, it’s just, that title is—never mind. I keep meaning to read more,” he conceded.
Cleo shrugged. “Just buy a book and read it.”
“Right. I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Anyway, in one of the essays he talks about being able to tell how giving a person is as a lover by how curious they are. You’re meant to actually count in your head how many questions they ask you in a minute. If they ask four or more, then they like to please.”
“And if they ask none?”
“Then you can pretty much assume they don’t eat pussy. Or, you know, dick, if that’s your bag.”
“Pussy,” said Frank quickly. “Is my bag.”
She gave him another of her amused looks.
“I sort of figured.”
“And you?”
“My bag? Dick.” She laughed, then tilted her head to consider this further. “Maybe with a side bag of pussy. But just a small one. Like one of those little clutches you wear to the opera.”
Frank nodded. “An evening purse of pussy.”
“Exactly. As opposed to, like, a duffel bag of dick.”
“A portmanteau of penis.”
“A carry-all of cock.”
“A backpack of boners.”
Cleo’s face lit up with laughter, and then she burrowed it into her hands as though snuffing out a match.
“God, I sound carnivorous. Let’s change the subject, please.”
“So …” Frank took a deep breath. “What do you do? Where are you from? When did you move to New York? Do you have brothers and sisters? When’s your birthday? What’s your horoscope? Birthstone? Shoe size?”
Cleo exhaled another peal of laughter. Frank grinned.
“Go on then,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“You really want to know all that about me?”
“I want to know everything about you,” he said, and was surprised to find he meant it.
Cleo told him that she’d moved around a lot growing up, but her family eventually settled in South London. Her parents split up when she was a teenager, and her father, an affable but distant engineer, quickly remarried and adopted his new wife’s son. Her mother died in Cleo’s last year of university at Central Saint Martins. She still had not found a way to talk about it. She had no close family back home, which left her feeling untethered but also, she added quickly, completely free.
With nothing tying her to London and a small inheritance from her mother that could cover a flight and two years of cheap rent, she’d applied for a scholarship to study painting at a graduate program in New York. She arrived when she was twenty-one. For her, that MFA meant two years in a smooth orbit from her bed, to a canvas, to bars, to other people’s beds, and back to a canvas. She’d graduated the previous spring and had been freelancing as a textile designer for a fashion brand ever since. The pay wasn’t great, and they didn’t provide benefits, but it gave her enough money and free time to rent a sizable room in the East Village, which she also used as her painting studio. Her biggest fear now was that her student visa was up at the beginning of the summer, and she had no plan for what to do next.
“Do you paint every day?” asked Frank.
“Everyone always asks that. I try to. But it’s hard.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes the process is like … Okay, you know when you’re tidying up a cupboard—”
“Is that a closet?”
“Yes, you American, a closet. First, you have to pull everything out of it, and there’s this moment when you’re looking around and it’s a total mess. And you feel like, Shit, why did I even start this? It’s worse than before I began. And then slowly, piece by piece, you put it all away. But before you can create order, you have to make a mess.”
“I’m following.”
“That’s what painting is like for me. Inevitably, there’s a moment when I’ve pulled everything out of me, and it’s just … it’s chaos on canvas. I feel like I should never have started. But then I keep going, and somehow things find their order. I know when I’ve finished because I feel … I feel this click that means everything’s in its place. It’s all where it should be. Total peace.”