“Imagine anything you like,” she whispered. “I can be anyone or anything you want.”
I found her on the steps of my apartment building. She was shivering, though the day was warm. Her light brown hair hung in strands about her face. Her cheekbones stretched her pale skin. I almost walked by her. I thought she was just another of the bag ladies who frequented my area. Then she looked up at me.
She had extraordinary eyes. They were black—two black lightless pupils. I had to paint those eyes. I had to paint her.
I am not certain how I got her to come up to my apartment. I know I promised food. Whatever I said, she followed me into the building and to my apartment.
Once inside, I asked her her name. She did not answer. I told her to make herself at home while I started dinner. I had spaghetti sauce from the day before, so I put it on the stove and started water to boil for noodles.
She stood in the middle of my living room which doubled as my studio because of the huge picture windows. I had several paintings on easels and two leaned against the wall. She walked over to them and touched the edges of each one with the tips of her fingers. She did it almost reverently.
“An artist,” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said. I glanced at her. Although her body was bent and her face lined, I guessed she was not even thirty years old.
She turned and looked at me with those huge black eyes.
“An artist,” she said again.
I wondered then if I had latched on to some very strange person. She could utter only two words: An artist. Maybe she had been in love with a painter once and he had killed himself because she left him—or something equally as dramatic.
She came and stood close to me while I cooked and watched me stir sauce and break noodles into the boiling water. Once she reached out tentatively and touched my arm with one finger. Poor girl, I thought, she hasn’t eaten in days and she’s grateful to me.
“Leila,” she said.
At first I did not know what she was saying, and then I realized she was answering my first question.
“I’m Matthew McClean. Matthew means ‘Gift of God,’ ” I said, as I pulled two plates from the cupboard. “I was the sixth child after five girls. You can see why they thought I was a godsend.” I laughed. She did not even smile.
“Leila means ‘dark as night.’ ”
That was all she said. No story behind it. Was she born on a stormy night? Was her grandmother’s name Leila? She’s not much of a conversationalist, I thought, but that was all right. I hated chatterbox models.
I told her to sit down, and we ate our first meal together. Neither of us said much. I was curious about her, but I did not want to pry and scare her away. I was getting more and more excited about the prospect of painting her: the mysterious woman lost in strands of greasy hair and ragged clothes.
She was more animated by the end of the meal. Color returned to her cheeks. She pushed her hair behind her ears, and I saw she was not unattractive. When she had finished her meal (she didn’t eat much), she looked over at me. She smiled and said, “Well, Matthew, you want to paint me, don’t you?”
I nodded.
“What will I get in return?” she asked.
I impulsively looked toward the door, wondering where the cowering waif was who had walked into the room a mere hour ago.
“I can pay you my standard rate for models.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want money. I need other things.” She gazed at me. “How long have you been an artist?”
I was a little annoyed by her tone. First I had practically scraped her off my steps and put food into her starving body and now she was asking for my qualifications.
“I have been an artist all of my life,” I said. “I have been commercially successful the last five.” I was proud of that. Pretty good for only being thirty years old.
She nodded. “Young,” she said. She sat quietly for a moment, looking around the room, and then she rested her fingers lightly on my arm. The hair on my arms stood up, as if drawn to her fingertips. Her touch was cool and pleasant.
“I want to stay here.”
“Here? Don’t you have a place to stay?”
“No.”
Normally I would have tossed her out then and there. Several women had wanted to move in with me at different times and I had always said no, except once, and that had been a terrible mistake. I hardly painted at all until she moved out.
“Please, Matthew, I won’t be any trouble. Just for a while, until you finish painting me.” Suddenly she was the waif again.
I smiled and said, “Okay.”
I made a sketch of her that night. She sat on my couch with her hands folded demurely in her lap. The sun was setting. The walls of the room turned gold and red. The gold touched Leila’s head. For a moment her hair was flaxen, Rapunzel reincarnate. And then the red tinged her skin and she was like some fiery goddess, her hair gold snakes snapping at dust particles in the air.
The next morning I found her padding around the kitchen in a pair of my jeans and a T-shirt.
“I lifted them while you slept,” she said. “I took a shower and washed my clothes. I’m making an omelet for us.”
She appeared taller than she had the night before, probably because she had bathed, eaten, and had a good night’s sleep. My sofa bed was more comfortable than my own bed. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks rosy. She looked like a well-scrubbed college kid.
“Thanks,” I said. “I am hungry.”
I sat at the table and rubbed my eyes sleepily. What had possessed me to let this woman stay with me? I glanced up at her as she put the omelet in front of me. It’s those damn eyes, I reminded myself.
She was a good model. She sat very still and looked off into some place within herself. The natural light from the overhead windows flattered her. Work went slowly. It was hard to capture the quality in her that had first attracted me. I could not get the eyes. They were too black. On canvas, they looked like huge holes in her face: she looked like a zombie, or as if she did not have a soul, something queer like that.
“What do you do when you aren’t hanging around apartment buildings?” I asked while we ate lunch.
“I do things.”
She continued eating, apparently not interested in answering my questions. I glanced out the window. Clouds had covered the sun and it looked like a summer storm was approaching.
“There goes the day’s painting,” I said.
“That’s all right,” she said. “We can spend the day getting to know each other.”
I was surprised she wanted to talk, but when she got up and went to the couch, I followed and sat beside her. I began talking about myself. She held my hand loosely in hers and listened while I told her about my life, my crowded but happy childhood filled with dreams of becoming a famous artist, my time spent traveling before college, my successful years as an artist. For some reason I poured out my life to her as if it were some kind of liquid she could drink. It frightened me a little, letting someone know so much about me. She probed me for details—gently squeezing my hand when I was not sure what I wanted to say. As the storm washed against the windows, Leila seemed to grow more beautiful. Her voice became stronger, more assured. She was no longer the trembling bag lady I had met yesterday. I was amazed at the difference and chalked it up to my company and good food.
We talked the afternoon away (or rather I talked; she mostly listened). When we got hungry, she suggested a pizza. We ran outside into the rain, laughing and splashing in puddles as we made our way to the neighborhood pizza joint. I forgot she was a bit strange, forgot she was a hobo, and realized I had found a new friend: someone who liked to listen. My artist friends were not big on listening; they liked to talk and talk, mostly about their own work. Leila wanted to know more about me and I loved it. I sat with her in the pizza place, sipping a malt and pushing strings of cheese into my mouth, and I wondered why I had not found someone like her before.
When we got back to my apartment, Leila stood in the middle of the living room and began undressing. I sat on the couch and watched her. My stomach tingled. Soon she stood before me naked. She was beautiful. How could I have thought she was ugly? She came to me and I put my arms around her and pulled her toward me. My clothes slipped away and we were side by side on the couch.
“Imagine anything you like,” she whispered. “I can be anyone or anything you want. Let yourself go.”
For that moment, Leila was all I wanted. Her movements were gentle at first and then she was astride me, pushing herself down hard on me. She bent to bite my chest. She kissed my ear, her tongue darting in and out. “Imagine,” she whispered, and she loomed up before me, her golden hair clinging to her breasts like hundreds of tiny fingers.
The next day I tried the portrait again. The work was frustratingly poor. I finally threw my paintbrushes down in a mock fit and cried, “You are impossible to paint!”
She laughed and put her arms around me and kissed the top of my head.
“Why don’t you try something else?” she suggested.
“You don’t want me to finish your portrait because you think I’ll make you leave,” I said, turning around to hug her.
“I hope you won’t make me leave,” she said quietly. I glanced up at her. She was staring at something I could not see, somewhere in her mind, and it made me uncomfortable. I knew so little about her.
In the days and weeks to follow I came to love Leila with an intensity I had never known. We did everything together. I wanted her with me all of the time. Nights we made love and then sat up for hours, talking about my current project. During the day, I often looked up from a difficult piece to see Leila dancing around the living room, swirling her skirts like some exotic dancer.
I learned little about her past. Sometimes she gazed out the window toward the heart of the city. She looked frightened. Her eyes paled, as if the life were slipping from them. When I went to her, she clung to me, seeming to draw life from my presence.
“What’s out there?” I asked her.
“Nothing,” she answered, turning to me. “All those people who don’t know or care about me.”
We stayed to ourselves most of the time. Leila wanted to meet my friends, but I always found an excuse not to call anyone. I liked having her all to myself.
A few weeks after I first met Leila, I went into a painting slump. And then Leila began to wane. That is the only word I can use. As my paintings grew worse, she changed. I urged her to go out while I tried to paint, but she would not. She stayed on the couch, sometimes biting her fingernails, sometimes looking out the window. When I asked her what was wrong, she just shook her head.
One day she said, “Leave me alone, Matthew. It’s you, don’t you understand? You’ve changed.” She went to the bedroom and closed the door.
I stared at her unfinished portrait and wondered what I could have done. What was happening to us—to her? She had been such a vivacious person. Now she was withering away.
I stopped dreaming.
Leila and I grew further apart. Though we still slept together, she spent most nights hugging her side of the bed and would not let me near her. Those were the worst times. I felt so alone. Other nights she turned and made love to me furiously. No longer the golden goddess. A fury. Or a gorgon. Medusa’s child.
Things worsened, and I was afraid she would leave me. I still loved her. I sat down and tried to figure out why. We never talked; she only listened. I never learned anything new from her. She was beautiful. Or was she? Had she ever stood tall? Was her hair golden? Had she danced for me?
“I need to meet new people,” she told me one afternoon. “I feel like a prisoner here.”
I sat at my easel turning one of my dark blobs of paint into a spider. Tracing a line here. Putting meat on it there.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll have a party Sunday.”
She chewed her fingernails. How tired she looked. Was it really my fault? Was I somehow draining her of energy?
For the party, Leila wore a black floor-length, V-neck gown. I had bought it for her weeks earlier. I remembered the pleasure I had gotten seeing it on her then—and later off her. The silk had clung to her body, moving as she moved. Now the black dress hung unattractively on her, barely touching her skin anywhere.
Poets, artists, writers, and dilettantes filled the apartment. Ice hit the sides of glasses and twirled madly in baths of gin, vodka, or rum. I passed around hors d’oeuvres, shrugging when anyone asked how the work went.
Leila was everywhere. Touching. Listening. The color returned to her face. She was animated, laughing, touching, listening.
Something was not right.
“I’ve met her before.” A fellow artist, Pete Dobson, was tapping my arm.
“Really?” I turned to him.
“She looks a bit different, but it’s her.”
Leila was striding to another group. Tall and lithesome. Her golden hair shone and caught the light . . .
“Do you remember Franc de Winter?” Pete was talking to me again.
“Yeah, I think so. Isn’t he in California?”
“He was.” He sipped his drink and watched Leila. Her fingers lightly stroked the bare skin in the V of her dress.
“Leila used to live with him,” Pete said. “Saw her at a party there. I’m pretty sure it was her.”
Her eyes were dark holes, bright with life.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember? He stopped working. Artist’s block or something. She sort of disappeared right before he died—he killed himself.”
Everything stopped. The people. The smoke. Time. For a split second, only Leila and I were in the room. She turned those horrible eyes on me and she knew I knew.
The terror and repulsion were with me all evening. I felt as if I were sinking into a quagmire and no one would help me out. I drank too much; someone gave me a pill and I swallowed it. Somehow I got through the evening. I kept wondering how she could have done it. She pretended to love me and had taken away all that made me me.
Leila was putting her things together before the last guest left. In fact, one man sat in my living room. A poet I barely knew.
“Where are you going?” I demanded.
“With Henry.” Henry? The poet.
“So you can do to him what you did to me?”
She stared at me. I turned away. I could not look at those eyes.
“What have I done to you?” she asked. I was silent. She shrugged. Her indifference infuriated me. I wanted to smash my fists into her eyes.
She shut the suitcase and clicked the locks. “I’m leaving.”
I grabbed the suitcase—it was mine, after all—and hurled it against the wall.
“Are you all right, Leila?” A voice came from the other room.
Didn’t the little twit know she would ruin him? I charged into the living room. Before the man had a chance to react I had him up against a wall. I was not prone to violence, but Leila had bled me, and I was not going to let her off easily.
“Get out of here, you creep,” I said.
“Leila?” he asked, his voice suddenly very high.
“It’s all right, Henry,” Leila said as she came out of the bedroom. “I’ll catch up with you later.”
The door slammed. She looked at me. “This is silly, Matthew.”
There was no emotion in her voice. She had used me; now it was time to let me go. Suddenly I felt tired, worn. How long can a person live without dreams?
“Will I ever get it back?” I asked. “Or will I end up like Franc de Winter?”
“Get what back?” she asked. “Who’s Franc de Winter?” She went to the window and looked out.
“You just take, don’t you?” I said. “You find people like me and you drain them of their imagination, their creativity.”
She laughed harshly. “Is that what you want to believe? First I was your muse and then I became some kind of monster sucking away your life? Believe what you want! When you took me into your apartment that first night you were going to paint me, make a masterpiece, use me, and then send me away with a cheese sandwich, weren’t you? Woman does not live on bread alone.” She laughed again. The sound was horrible.
“You disgust me,” I said.
“I wasn’t always this way,” she said. “There was a time when I could take care of myself. You artists and your pomposity. You think you are the best dreamers? The most creative? My first love was an artist, too. I was a child. All he did was take from me, cage me with his love, keep me to himself. I had to do something to save myself. I learned to please him.” She turned and stared at me. “I gave you what you wanted, didn’t I? And when you couldn’t paint anymore, you blamed me.”
She looked back at the city.
“I lived the longest with an old Mexican woman. Five years,” she said. “She could build an entire world around a worm hole.”
“And you took that from her, didn’t you?”
She shook her head. “No, Matthew, she gave herself to me freely.”
She went back into the bedroom and returned with the suitcase.
“You can’t leave, Leila.” Maybe she could give it back to me; I didn’t know for sure, but I could not let her go.
She sighed. “You will tire of this, Matthew. There is nothing left between us.”
She tried to leave several times, but I threw her back. The hours turned into days. I locked her in the bedroom at night and only let her out after I slept. I spent the days pleading with her to give back what she had taken.
“I can’t live without dreams, without my art,” I told her.
“I don’t care,” she said.
I was without reason, I believe, during those days. I did not let her eat very much. I wandered around my apartment looking at my painting. I thought of Franc de Winter, I thought of the Leila I had loved. Everything was crumbling around me. The woman in the apartment was not the Leila I had known. With each hour she grew more sullen and ugly and nervous.
“I’m begging you! Please let me go,” she said. Her eyes were dead, her hair straggly, her mouth cruel. “I’m dying.” She stared out the window.
“I don’t care,” I said.
I realized then why the city frightened her. All those mindless people going to their mindless jobs. They were so frightened, so dazed; many of them thought of how to get home at night and little else. They had no imagination. Leila would die in that city.
“If I could help you paint again I would,” she said on the fifth day, “but I can’t.”
On the tenth day I was tired and I believed her. She had emptied my soul and no humanity remained. I took her out of the building and led her into the heart of the city. She did not have the energy to struggle; she let herself be pulled along.
We walked down the stairway and into the subway station where hundreds of people waited to board the morning trains. I pushed Leila into the crowd. The people paid no attention to us. They stood on the gray floor in their gray suits waiting for the train.
Leila stumbled and almost fell into a man reading the paper. He sighed and moved out of her way. She touched his arm and peered into his eyes. “Help me,” she whispered. “This man is crazy.” She veered from him and into another person. I stood apart from them. Leila’s face crinkled in pain again as a woman pulled her arm away. She bumped into one person after another. They ignored her or pulled away. Lines of pain ran down Leila’s face and into her body. The emptiness of the place was devouring her. She began sobbing. “Someone help me, please,” I heard her cry. She touched another person and he pushed her. She fell against the wall and crumbled to the concrete floor. Her head bobbed. Her mouth slackened. Saliva dribbled over her lip and down her chin. Her eyes were black stones. People kept a neat distance from her, either pretending she did not exist, or else not caring.
I did not care either. Not anymore. She had taken that from me. Foul air rushed around me as the train approached.
I climbed the stairs as the train pulled in. I heard people shuffle to get aboard, heard the doors swish closed. I stepped out onto the streets and walked toward home.
My dreams returned. Rather I should say: I dream now. Just one dream. I close my eyes and sleep comes and with it Leila. The dream is always the same. Leila sits on the cold concrete floor of the subway, lifeless, people walking around her. Saliva drips from her mouth, slowly at first, and then more rapidly, and suddenly the clear liquid is red, it is blood, and the blood pours from her mouth until the whole subway station is filled and though I am on the steps, the blood follows me, envelops me, and finally fills my lungs and drowns me.
When I awaken from this nightmare, alone in the dark, I am terrified for a few moments, wondering if I could have been wrong. And then I close my eyes and dream again.