I palmed my eyes. “She’s Tristan’s girlfriend anyway.”
“I swear you’re about to be that man’s thirteenth reason why.”
I looked at Nia’s text again, feeling forlorn now. Tristan had all but ordered me to stay away. But also: What power did he actually have over me? I was already deeply rooted in the tradition of doing what the fuck I wanted. And it was a portrait! I was supporting another woman artist! It was almost a worse sin than my original one, denying her this request, because what was more important than her work? Someone might even argue that elevating Tristan’s desires over hers, over my own, would be sexist. Maybe, in a twisted way, sitting for her was how I could begin to redeem myself.
Turning to Milan, I asked, “Should I go?”
“For the plot, yes. For your mental health, no.”
“Okay, I’m going.”
“I’ll be praying for you.”
Nia was smashing something with a hammer. The concentrated line of her mouth didn’t lift when my fist rapped on her studio door.
“It’s stained glass from an abandoned church,” she explained. “I’ve been trying to figure out how I could use it for weeks.” She shook her head, pieces of hair falling from her clipped-back bun. “I don’t know. I just picked up my hammer today and started smashing it.”
I idled in the doorway, terrified this was some kind of metaphor. It struck me that maybe she knew about me and Tristan, and I was about to get set the fuck up.
She waved me over, a jerky, hopped-up-on-caffeine gesture. “Come, come,” dragging her stool from beneath her desk.
I carefully lowered myself, trying to gauge the situation, whether I’d made a mistake in coming. “What’s up?”
“I sorted the stuff out with the author but”—she wiped a streak of sweat from her forehead, thin gold bracelet tinkling on her wrist—“you look like someone’s pointing a gun at you. What? I told you I’d text when I was ready to do the portrait, didn’t I?”
“You did!”
She watched me with amused pity, like I was someone’s last-minute third-grade science fair project. “Anyway, I’ve honestly been depressed, more depressed than I’ve ever been in my life.” She said this so casually that I might not have taken her seriously had I not understood how someone could keep emotions shoved so deeply inside they became flattened by forgetting.
Nia went on, “I haven’t wanted to paint for weeks because of it, but then, whenCowboy Carterwon Album of the Year, it changedeverything. I want to do something like that with you. The whole Southern Americana but with a spin. Aren’t your people from Louisiana too?” Before I could ask how she knew this, she said, “Imagine: a black-black background, you with a totally empty expression but that contains everything in it—very faux-strong-Black-woman-coded. I don’t want it to be sexy, I want it to be stoic. Like those old-fashioned photographs where the people don’t smile. I want it to be like,oh, this woman is hiding something in plain sight.”
She was gesturing with her hands, excitement gathering in the air. Her big smile was like a rope around my body, tightening, tightening, taking the breath from me. I couldn’t see her vision, and it didn’t matter. I wanted to help her realize it. I wanted to give her whatever she wanted. I thought, weirdly, what I felt then was how it might feel the moment you decided to have a child with someone—heady, terrifying, charged with the understanding that you couldn’t turn back. It was kind of hot, being so definitive about your desire that the sound of a door closing behind you carried no power at all.
When she dragged a massive canvas from behind her cabinet, so big it felt not like a container but a clearing, I knew I’d no longer calculate the cost of being there. This was as much for me as it was for her. I wanted to see what she would do with me.
She got wordlessly to work, preparing her canvas with a thick substance. While it dried, she studied her brushes spread on a towel, plucking the ones she needed with the delighted but focused quickness of picking dandelions. As a child, when I thought of an artist, this is whatI imagined. Nia’s posture of confidence, the touch of relentlessness in it. She was not someone who dithered about the meaning of art. Its value was not up for litigation, and thus neither was the amount of time she spent making it. At least that was the aura she radiated. Some adolescent part of me hoped I could absorb the absolute faith she had and incorporate it into myself.
She said, “Sorry for writing in your book by the way. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Sometimes I start doing something and don’t realize what I’ve done.”
She was talking aboutArt Monsters.I’d forgotten about it until I reached into my bag for Janine’s notes a few weeks ago and found Nia’s handwriting in the margins. I felt violated at first, but violation transformed into recognition. Who didn’t dream of their work being ripped through, ruined, out of love?
“Don’t apologize.”
Her eyes swept over me with a cool neutrality before returning to the painting.
“I actually liked seeing what you highlighted,” I added.
She perked up. “Like what?”
“Everything!”
“Okay, but tell me one thing.”
“The story about that suffragette who used a meat cleaver to slash some famous painting to protest the government. I might be messing up the story.”
“No, it was a meat cleaver,” she said. “I have one. Tristan came over to cook last night and was using it. I told him the story. He thought it was hilarious.”
Hoping to steer the conversation away from Tristan, I said, “How’d you start painting?”
