scents and things found in the shared bathroom or the trash. Then came the night he was at the window, painting, and just happened to glance down at the sidewalk as she was glancing up.
Her face was like that Ezra Pound poem: a petal on a wet black bough. Now detached from its nourishment, now destined for decay.
A few minutes later there was a faint, strengthless knocking on his door. At first he ignored it out of habit. Although it didn’t get louder it remained insistent, so eventually he wiped the paint off his hands and went to answer.
Her slight figure was made more so by a subtle forward slump. She gazed up at him with large eyes. “I’m your neighbour,” she said, “could I come inside for a few minutes?”
He was reluctant — in fact he glanced too obviously at his unfinished painting — but it never occurred to him to say no. She glided in, the scarf hanging from her neck imbued with a perfume he’d smelled before in the hall. Her dress was slip-like, and purple, and might have been silk, and was most definitely feminine. Ribbons of her dull black hair appeared in the cracks among multiple scarves covering her head. She sat down on a chair right by his easel, as if she expected him to paint her.
“You’re an artist,” she said.
“Well, I want to be. I don’t think I’m good enough yet, but maybe I will be.”
“I’ll let you paint me sometime.” He stumbled for a reply and couldn’t find one. “I have no talents. For anything. But it makes me feel better to be around men who do.”
She didn’t say anything more for a while, and he just stood there, not knowing what to do. But he kept thinking about options, and finally said, “Can I get you something to eat?”
There was a slight shift in her expression, a strained quality in the skin around the mouth and nose. “I don’t eat in front of other people,” she finally said. “I can’t — it doesn’t matter how hungry I am. And I’m always hungry.”
“I’m sorry — I was just trying to be a good host.”
She looked at him with what he thought might be amusement, but the expression seemed uncomfortable on her lips. “I imagine you apologise a lot, don’t you?”
His face warmed. “Yes. I guess I really do.”
“I’d like to watch you paint, if that’s okay.”
“Well, I guess. It’ll probably be a little boring. Sometimes I do a section, and then I just stare at the canvas for a while, feeling my way through the whole, making adjustments, or just being scared I’ll mess it up.”
“I’d like to watch. I’m not easily bored.”
And so she sat a couple of hours as if frozen in place, watching him. He might have thought she was sleeping if not for the uncomfortably infrequent blinking. Now and then he would glance at her, and although she was looking at him, he wasn’t sure somehow that she was seeing him. And his dual focus on her and on his painting was rapidly fatiguing him. He appreciated her silence, however — he might not have been able to work at all if she’d said anything. It occurred to him she smelled differently. Under the perfume was a kind of staleness — or gaminess for lack of a better word. Like a fur brought out of storage and warming up quickly. Finally it was he who spoke.
“You’re great company.” It was the first time he’d ever said such a thing. “But I’m feeling so tired, I don’t know why, but I think I might just fall over. I’m sorry — I usually can work a lot longer.”
“You should lie down.” She stood and led him to the bed in the other room of the small apartment. So quickly there hardly seemed a transition. Despite her slightness she forced him down into a reclining position. And without a word lay down beside him, close against him like a child. But even if she had said something, even if she had asked, he would not have said no. And of course he didn’t stop her when she first removed his clothes, then threw off her own. It was all such a stupid cliche, he would think later, and again and again, for the six months or so their relationship lasted, and for years afterward. All the bad jokes about how men could not really be seduced, because they were always ready to have sex with anyone, with anything — it was just part of their nature. They couldn’t help themselves. It embarrassed him, he felt ashamed. He’d never thought it was true, and now look at how he was behaving.
For there was this other sad truth. Men who never expected to be loved, who’d never even felt much like men, had a hard time saying no when the opportunity arrived, because when would it ever come again?
At least he had never been able to fool himself into believing that she actually enjoyed what they were doing. Most of the time she lay there with her eyes closed, as if pretending to be asleep or in some drug-induced semi- consciousness. He was never quite sure if he was hurting her, the way her body rose off the bed as if slapped or stabbed, her back arching, breath coming out in explosions from her as-if wounded lungs, eyes occasionally snapping open to stare from the bottom of some vast and empty place. Certainly there couldn’t be any passion in her for it, as dry as she was, her pubic hair like a bit of thrown-out carpet, so that at some point every time they did it he lost his ability to maintain the illusion, so much it was like fucking a pile of garbage, artfully arranged layers of gristle and skin, tried to escape, but like that moment in the horror movies when the skeleton reaches up and embraces you, she always pulled her bony arms around him, squeezing so hard he could feel her flailing heart right through the fragile web of her ribcage, as they continued to rock and bump the tender hangings of their flesh until bruised and bloody.
“Daddy! I
“I know, honey,” he said. “I heard you.”
“No you didn’t! You weren’t paying attention!”
He looked at Elaine, maybe for support, or maybe just for confirmation that he had screwed up. She offered neither, was carefully studying the food on her plate. “Honey, I’m sorry. Sometimes I don’t sleep too well, and the next day I have a hard time focusing, so by the time I get home from work I’m really very tired. But I’m going to listen really closely to you, okay? Please tell me all about it.”
Apparently she was willing, because she began again, telling a long story about monkeys, and thrown food, and how Brian got on the bus and started throwing pieces of his lunch like
Even though at the corners of his eyes his view of the dining room, and his daughter speaking at the centre of it, was breaking down into discordancy, into a swarm of tiny black and white pixels, and even though Miri’s face was at one edge of the dining room window, peering in, before her silhouette coiled and fell away.
So that by the end of his daughter’s little story he had closed his eyes by necessity, and spoke to her as if in prayer. “That’s a really nice story, sweetheart, thanks so much for telling it. But you know you really must eat. Why, tonight you’ve hardly touched anything on your plate. That little piece of meat hung up in the edge of your mouth — I can’t tell if it’s even food. But you have to keep your strength up, you’re really going to need every bit of strength you can find.”
The rest of the evening was awkward, with Elaine pleading with him to see a doctor. “You’re not here with me anymore,” she was saying, or was that Miri, and that was the problem, wasn’t it? He no longer knew when or with whom he was. It was all he could do to keep his eyes in the same day and place for more than a few minutes at a time.
By the end Rick had known Miriam for six months or so. He’d told Matt about her, but then had been reluctant to share more than a very few of the actual details. He just wanted someone to know, in case — but he didn’t understand in case of what. Matt ran into them once, when Rick had tried to drive her to a restaurant. He’d been so stupid about it — he should have been driving her to a hospital instead. She’d lost enough fat in her face by then that when she reacted to anything he couldn’t quite tell what the emotion was — everything looked like a grimace on her. When she walked she was constantly clicking her teeth together and there was a disturbing wobble in her gait. He knew she must eat — how could she not? But it could not be much, and she had to be doing it in secret because he’d never actually seen her put anything into her mouth except a little bit of water.
When she breathed sometimes it was as if she were attempting to devour the space around her — her entire frame shook with the effort. When he first experienced this he tried to touch her, pull her in to comfort a distress he simply could not understand. But soon he learned to keep his distance, after getting close enough he felt he might
