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she wanted to be like Ines; she wanted to be an artist who drew on her fire escape.
She often caught herself half thinking of Karina. Sometimes, on the subway or the street corner,
she’d catch a glint of silvery hair and her stomach would do a little flip, but then she’d blink and Karina would be gone, her face replaced by a stranger’s.
She kept thinking of that line from The Picture of Dorian Gray, which she’d read last year in an English class at SLCC: The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the colored canvas, reveals himself.
She was pretty in a jagged, punky sort of way,
Men shouldn’t be allowed to get old and successful. One or the other, fine—but not both.
the prints appeared to be glowing from within—like windows, Karina thought wildly. Windows onto other worlds. Almost all the photos depicted women of various ages, though in many the subjects’ faces were blurred or hidden, and their bodies had a ghostly, disintegrating quality that reminded Karina of stereoscopic prints from the Victorian era.
Louisa wondered how she appeared in the photograph. Did she look, as she often did in pictures, like a drab, washed-out version of the person she felt herself to be?
“Her name’s Karina Piontek. Does that ring a bell?” Louisa couldn’t speak. Her heart soared; her throat grew thick.
It was strange, living with people who didn’t care about you. It made you feel like you didn’t fully exist.
She felt insane for letting Karina have this kind of hold over her. She felt insane for wanting to call her.
Karina laughed again, and Louisa felt herself spinning toward her, a satellite pulled into her orbit. “I’d like to see you,” Louisa said.
On the other end, Karina exhaled. “Because you want to smoke my cigarettes?” “Well, yes,” said Louisa. “But not only that.”
She was thin and pale and tired-looking, but still lovely.
She stared at her, this beautiful girl with uncombed hair, and even though the evening was warm and the gin
blazed in her belly, Karina began to tremble.
“You seem realer to me now.” “Realer?” “I can see the shape of you.”
She didn’t want to hear about how she existed for other people. She wanted to exist for Louisa. For the past few weeks she’d felt ferociously, dementedly happy. Now she wondered how long it could last.
To have come this far is no small achievement: what you have done already is a glorious thing.”
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.”
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.
