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Saskia’s gaze drifted to her new work drying on the easel. It was a scene from the club they’d been at the previous night—everything she could call forth from memory of the rows of bird cages with women inside.
Yes, he’d held her hand and walked her through each step of blocking things out and what to paint on top of what and when. The hardest part was not muddying the colors because she was used to not having to worry about that much at all. She disagreed with him that they were starting at square one. After all, she’d learned to draw in art school. She’d learned color mixing and canvas prepping and brush strokes. She’d been briefly taught wet-on-wet, but admittedly her instructor in that technique hadn’t been very good at teaching it. Not like Quill was. He seemed to anticipate her every question and frustration moments before she reached it.
She hadn’t been able to remember the women clearly enough to paint them right because she’d had a hard time looking at them. The faces she painted instead were generic, invented in her mind. But even then... she’d been away from her own work for too long. Outside of forgeries, she was out of the practice of calling a vision forth from absolutely nothing and turning it into something worth looking at.
“It’s a start,” Quill said, as he studied the finished piece hours after she’d blocked in the first bird cage. “We have a long road ahead of us, but it’s something. No promises, but I think I can work with this.”
At least he got to paint a live person in front of him. Creating someone from imagination or re-creating them from a snapshot in one’s mind was a whole other skill set. He expected too much from her. He was the one with the track record—proof the world cared about his work. Saskia had no such encouragement beyond his word that it was inside her. But how could he possibly know what was inside her when she wasn’t sure herself?
Quill returned with a cloth-covered first-aid wrap with a clay pack inside. He wound the cold pack around her hand. “I realize that was more than you expected to do today. I’ll try not to go so hard on you in the future. I know it’s been a long time for you.” He bent to stroke the side of her face. “It’s been a long time for me, too.”
He could fuck or play with a hundred women, but painting together was an intimacy he couldn’t and wouldn’t replace with another. It didn’t come close to forgiving the stalking, but a part of her understood the longing he’d felt to connect with someone on that level. To find someone to create with. In a way it was what everyone else did. Only others created babies, while she and Quill made art.
She still couldn’t believe the first thing he’d painted after such a long hiatus, had been her. It was right out of her silly daydreams.
“Rest your hand. Marcus is on his way to take care of you for the night.”
Quill paused in the door on his way out. “For what it’s worth, I think you’re on to the right subject matter. I just don’t think you’re giving me everything. You’re playing too safe. You’re notsayinganything. I don’t feel anything from you. You’re just documenting. Learning a new technique aside, what you gave me today is not the kind of thing that can make your name. You have to be willing to give more. I guess the real question is, how badly do you want it, Saskia?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. If someone had asked her five years ago what she wanted, the answer would have been easy: To meet Joseph Quill. To paint like him. To become an artist who could live off her work while she was actually still living.
Like him.
Even if it turned out that most of his money came from running a tech company, it was still clear from the extraordinarily high prices his work fetched that he could have lived easily on just his painting if he’d wanted to. Though perhaps not to the same degree of comfort he enjoyed now as adead artist. Or a living tech tycoon.
He certainly wasn’t the only artist who hadn’t had to become a pretty corpse before making it, but he was the one whose work excited her the most—who most closely echoed what she wanted to be. With all her still lifes and innocent portraits and landscapes, she’d been dancing around the things she really wanted to paint. She wanted to paint the darkness, not the light... the shadows under the surface of a civilized world barely contained by rule of law.
She was afraid to paint the things she felt, to be that exposed on the canvas. Even with the way Quill painted her, it wasn’t the same as extracting her own soul by her own hand and allowing others to see. It felt like a kind of psychic suicide. Far too dangerous to commit to.
She couldn’t give him what he wanted on that canvas. The closest she could get was abandoning sunsets and apples in a bowl. She could only look through a dirt-smudged window and bring back the shifting shadows she saw there. Saskia wasn’t sure what it would take to open her soul and set the artist free. But she knew Quill would go to any lengths to bring it out. A thought which both terrified and excited her.
She’d felt his frustration as he’d cleaned the artistic debris. But what did he expect? She was surprised she’d let him in this much. If she’d met him in a normal way and he’d wanted to teach her, this wouldn’t have been what she painted. It would have been a flower or a waterfall or something nice and sweet and innocent. Something that could hang in a hotel lobby without fear of the slightest offense.
Not a single person would look at it and panic or clutch at pearls.
Even knowing what he painted, she wouldn’t have been able to be so bold if he hadn’t already stripped her bare in other ways. It was hard to work up much shame for what she wanted to create after that. It wasn’t Quill she worried about seeing her work. It was others.
She jumped when she realized Marcus leaned in the doorway, quietly watching. He pushed off the door frame and joined her.
“Let me look at that.” Marcus unwrapped her hand from the ice pack and pressed lightly against her skin in various places.
Saskia winced.
“These muscles are really tight. Do you want to soak it in the tub in the salts? It might help.”
“Yes, sir.”
Marcus helped her up and led her back to the bathroom. As water filled the tub he said, “I like your painting.”
“Thanks. He doesn’t.”
“He doesn’t know everything. Did you do that from memory?”
She nodded.
“Impressive. You’re practically a camera.” He must have been to the club before to see the original cages.
Somehow Saskia doubted having such a great visual memory meant much to Quill. A machine could create a photo copy. Copies weren’t art. Quill was right. He was being generous. The painting was dead. It had no heart or honesty. It was hours and hours of work that showcased technical skill but no true artistry because she didn’t have the courage to say what she felt.
