“No, I’m just passing through, actually.”
“Jared!” She put her arms around me again and put her forehead against my chest. “Rub the back of my neck.”
Without wondering why, I did what she asked. “Like this?”
“God, goodness yes, like that.” She rested her cheek against me.
I thought of Oryn. He was probably wondering why I hadn’t returned from taking out the trash.
“What are you on?” I asked Shelly.
“Oh, it’s so good, Jared.” She backed up and looked me up and down, still smiling. “Come. I want you to meet my friends.” She pointed. “They’re sitting over there.” Her smile vanished. “Wait. Fuck, Rich might get bitchy if I bring you over.”
Without looking toward the ticket window, I knew that Rich was in earshot. We weren’t that far. Shelly was talking as though I were all the way down by the subway entrance. I turned around and sure enough there was a guy wearing pants in the same vein as Shelly’s, leaning up against the newspaper recycling bin and pretending not to look at us.
“Yeah, I should probably let you go, then,” I said. I wanted to sneak back into her parents’ house on Long Island and spend the next day with her in her room.
“Listen,” she said, her smile magically reappearing, “come by sometime.”
“You still in the same dorm?”
“Yeah, so come by, like, whenever.” She threw her arms around me again and kissed my cheek, then walked backward over to the booth, the whole time facing me and smiling, her Rich an insecure blur in the background.
Smoking in front of Madison Square Garden where the warm night air smelled like car exhaust and fried food, I remembered the first time I went to the city, and the air had had that same smell in pockets of heat along the sidewalk. On the way home from that trip, Sinatra’s “New York, New York” came on the radio while I looked at the collage of city lights through the back window of my parents’ car as we passed over a bridge, probably the Williamsburg. I remember thinking that since it was the city, “New York, New York” probably always played on the radio when you were leaving, as though the city were saying, “Farewell, and come again.”
When Shelly had hugged me, I could smell her deodorant, which was the same brand she wore for as long as I’d known her. The first thing she would do when she came out of the shower was put her deodorant on, so when she hugged me at the station I had an image of her naked and wet in her bedroom, which made me think again of the bath I drew for her on that cold day in November years ago.
“No, really, I’m an artist. Look in my bag.”
She was sitting alone at the Irish pub in Penn Station, fifty or so with sun-spotted skin and long, muscular fingers. She held a Marlboro Light like a wand. A big red kiss was embroidered on her white tank top, smack across her breasts, which moved freely under the fabric when she swayed. She was drunk—either that, or on some pills. I couldn’t tell which.
“You don’t look like an artist,” she said.
“What does an artist look like?”
“Well, for one, they don’t usually wear college sweaters. You look more like a fraternity boy.” She reached her arm across the bar, held her cigarette above the ashtray, and tapped the ash off the head. The ash landed on the bar.
“But I’m a different kind of artist,” I said. “I paint things to be their opposite. This way, I myself am a work of art because I’m wearing a college sweater. It’s unexpected.”
She looked me up and down. If she were younger, her sunken cheeks might have been exotic, but now they made her look emaciated. “Where do you show your work?”
“All over the place. I give it to my friends, and they hang them up in their apartments.”
“It doesn’t sound very lucrative.”
“I’m not in it for the money. I paint for the love of it. I’ll set up in someone’s apartment, and they’ll let me crash on their couch for a week, maybe feed me some, and at the end of the week they get one of the finest works of art they’ll ever own.”
There was a critical moment here, and I missed it while it happened, but a change came over her. In hindsight, I recall her looking off in the distance, then looking at me. She stamped her cigarette in the ashtray, her movements now suddenly languid.
“You’re not super eloquent,” she said. Then she leaned forward, conspiratorially. “I can tell you’re raw. Your talent must be raw, too. I know, because let me tell you something.” She slipped a little off her stool, caught her balance, and repositioned herself. “Artists are attracted to me—always have been, always will be. I’m a muse.”
“That’s the word I was going to use. You look like a muse.”
“And rightly so.” She smiled in that fashion-model way, where the lips flatten, as though she were about to apply liner. “Of course, you know Andy Warhol.”
“The great Andy,” I said. I’d heard of him.
“Yes, the great Andy. And I can say so from firsthand experience. He discovered me when I was fifteen. There are photos of me—photos Andy took. They’re quite controversial and you could find them out in the world, in museums . . . private collections, I suppose.”
“Really? Which museums?”
“I’m sure you’d find them at the Met. Look in the archives.” She had another cigarette out. She slid the package over to me. “Controversial because”—she leaned in closer—“my genitalia are in the photos. My fifteen-year-old genitalia.”
“He took pictures of your—”
“Yes. My pussy. My name, by the way, is Vanlisa.”
She lived in Williamsburg. She insisted on sitting across from me on the subway, so I could study her. She arched her back, parted her legs, put a hand on each knee, and threw her head back, but her eyes, the whole time, were cast down on me. People stopped before crossing the invisible thread connecting us across the aisle.
After a few stations, she said, “Are you going to sketch me?”
“It’s too bumpy,” I said. “I’m taking mental notes.”
Outside her apartment door, a young girl with a backpack slouched on the floor. The dim hallway was lit by tiny track bulbs lining the tops of both walls. The girl looked up to Vanlisa expectantly. A telephone rang inside the apartment.
Vanlisa stepped over the girl, unlocked her door, and bade me to enter. The two windowed walls were brick, the wood floors polished to a wet shine. In the center of the room a slab of petrified wood was the table, and the seating arrangement consisted of green fur draped over structures in all stages of becoming sofas and chairs. The windows along one wall glowed softly with Manhattan’s skyline. Vanlisa left me standing there while she went to answer her phone, which was in a room behind a wall made of smoky panes of glass.
“You weren’t at the station,” she said into the phone. “Yes. No. Your problems. I . . . Yes, Bartos, I’m being a bitch for very good reasons.”
There was no art on the walls. It looked as though she’d just moved in.
“Then come tomorrow.”
When she came back into the main room, foot in front of clacking high-heeled foot, I asked her if her place was new.
“That is the wall you’ll paint,” she said, gesturing toward the one white wall that took up half of one side of the apartment, the other half opening to a