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Your identity, inseparable from your work, was what you’d sell when you went out into the world.
In the drawing, her eyes were downcast, half-closed, her lips slightly parted in an expression of bliss or stupefaction. She wasn’t sure she’d ever made such a face in her life. It was a beautiful drawing, intimate and violating. Down the hall, she heard the shower stop. She closed the sketchbook, stuck it back in Karina’s bag, and went off to a dinner she was no longer hungry for.
Attention was the most valuable resource in the world, more powerful than any drug.
She’d felt this way about other girls before—brief, confusing infatuations that vacillated between attraction and jealousy, between wanting to touch the girl and wanting to be the girl, to slip inside her skin—but never this intensely. She’d never told anyone about these feelings, never acted on them. Her crushes on boys had always felt straightforward in comparison. Easier.
“Can I say why I object to a trigger warning in this instance?” said Leila. “Go ahead,” said Robert wearily. “My feeling is that Palestinians don’t get to opt out of the occupation of their homeland, so why should anyone else?”
And the longer Karina sat in the beam of her gaze, the more she sensed Louisa’s inwardness, the hermetic quality of her mind, the elusive way she glided through the world. Karina watched her—the shifting landscape of her face, the pinched skin between her eyebrows, her mouth tightened in concentration, the thin, strong shoulders, the quick hands. And Karina wanted Louisa to touch her the same way she was touching that painting, gentle one moment and rough the next, smearing the paint with her fingers, working herself into the canvas.
Without stopping to think, Karina took a step forward and closed the distance between them, hip bones and breasts colliding, and kissed her. Louisa made a little noise of surprise in the back of her throat. After a moment she curled her hand around the nape of Karina’s neck, sinking her fingers into her hair. Louisa’s teeth were small and slick. She tasted like Diet Coke and chewing gum. She was so much littler than Karina; her body felt so delicate under Karina’s hands. The newness of it seemed to multiply time, stretching it out, so that by the time Karina fully registered the warmth of
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“Any painter can seduce their model. History is full of artists banging their muses.”
I think it’s easy, when…when you’re neglecting your own happiness, to inadvertently neglect the happiness of the people you love. It’s sort of like you think you’re being selfless or self-sacrificial or something, but really you’re just sowing misery everywhere you go.
Her gaze landed on three of Louisa’s bird woman paintings lined up under the window. She drew closer and examined them. “I didn’t know you did self-portraits.” “They’re not mine,” said Karina. “They’re hers,” and at the same time Louisa said, “They’re mine.” Fiona looked at Louisa and then back at Karina, who held her gaze. At last Fiona said, “Well, no wonder they’re so wonderful. You can always tell when an artist loves her subject.”
Karina pulled away and took Louisa’s face in both of her hands. “Listen to me,” she said, surprising herself with her own vehemence. “It’s not a crime to go after what you want.” But Louisa turned her head away and picked at the grass, tearing the blades into tiny pieces and scattering them in the breeze. “It’s not a crime to have ambition,” Karina insisted. “You’re allowed to want things. You’re allowed to want things that other people don’t think you should want.”
The moment before something terrible happens. The loneliness of being alone in that moment.
“This is a place where I can live a life in service to my art,” she said. “Maybe you can, too?” “Maybe I can what?” Louisa spoke quickly, the words emerging from her in an ecstatic rush: “You can come live here with me. We’d have our own house, our own studio. It’s so beautiful, Karina. You wouldn’t believe how beautiful it is.” Karina was silent. “Are you still there?” “I’m here.” “You don’t have to decide right away,” Louisa said. “I know it’s a lot to take in.” Karina drew in a long breath. “Let me think about it.” It wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t a no, either, and for now that felt like
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She heard her mother’s voice inside her head, the way she always had and always would: Draw slowly. Touch the surfaces of the objects with your eyes. Feel them. Focus on the feeling of touching and drawing being the same action. You don’t even have to think about it.
The book begins as a campus novel about artists, but it explodes into an exploration of our shared humanity—our struggles for independence and identity, and the undeniable fact that none of us can do it alone.
