In the morning she left the shit boyfriend asleep in the bed and went out without even taking a shower. She had a night of sex on her, and she liked carrying it around with her, completely. Today you’ll get me like this, dear Jasper Gwyn, let’s see what effect it has on you.
For four hours, every morning, she still went to work for Tom. She revered that man. Three years earlier, a car accident had confined him to a wheelchair, and he had built up around himself an enormous office, a kind of country, where he was God. He was surrounded by workers of all kinds, some very old, some completely mad. He was always stuck to the telephone. He paid little and seldom, but that was a detail. He had such energy, and generated so much life, that people adored him. He was the sort of person who, if you happened to die, would take it as a personal insult.
About the matter of the portrait he had never said anything to her. Only once, when Rebecca had been going to Jasper Gwyn’s for several days, he had come by in his wheelchair and, stopping in front of her desk, had said:
“If I ask you something, tell me to fuck off.”
“Okay.”
“How is old Jasper behaving?”
“Fuck off.”
“Perfect.”
So at one o’clock she got up, took her stuff, and, on the way out, said goodbye to Tom. They both knew where she was going, but they pretended it was nothing. Every so often he glanced at how she was dressed. Maybe he thought he could deduce something from that, who knows.
She went to Jasper Gwyn’s studio on the Underground, but she always got out one stop earlier, to walk a little before going in. On the street, she turned the key over and over in her hand. And that was her way of starting work. Another thing she did was to think in what order she would take her clothes off. It was strange, but, being close to that man every single day, she had learned a sort of precision in her gestures that she had never imagined necessary. He led you to believe that everything wasn’t equivalent, and that someone, somewhere, was recording our every action—one day, likely, he would ask us to account for it.
She turned the key in the lock and entered.
She couldn’t tell right away if he was already there. She had learned that it wasn’t important. Yet she didn’t feel safe until she saw him—or tranquil until he was looking at her. She could never have imagined it before, but really the most ridiculous thing—that that man should stare at her—had become the thing she needed, and without which she could find nothing of herself. She realized, to her surprise, that she was aware of being naked only when she was alone, or he wasn’t looking at her. Whereas it seemed natural when he stared at her; she felt clothed, then, and complete, like a job well done. As the days passed, she was startled to find herself wishing that he would get closer, and often the way he stayed leaning against the wall frustrated her, his reluctance to take what she would have granted him without any trouble. Then it might happen that she approached him, but it wasn’t simple, you had to be capable of avoiding any position that might seem a seduction—the gesture ended up being brusque, and inexact. It was always he who regained a painless distance.
The day she arrived with her night of sex on her, Jasper Gwyn didn’t show up. Rebecca had time to calculate: eighteen days had passed since they began. She thought that the number of bulbs hanging from the ceiling was also eighteen. Mad as he was, it was even possible that Jasper Gwyn attributed some meaning to the circumstance—maybe that was why he hadn’t come. She got dressed, exactly at eight, and then she took a long time getting home—it was as if she expected that something should first be restored to her.