Pavel’s studio was so warm it was almost a relief to take off my shirt. He placed couch cushions on the floor, a sheet on top to give a bed’s appearance.
“Lie here,” he said, and I did.
The day after I’d gotten back to our stunned, jittery city, flyers everywhere with photos of missing people we all knew weren’t missing, Pavel called to ask if I was free to sit for a painting.
“For your show?’ I’d asked.
“That opens in a month,” he’d answered. I wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no.
The show should have opened that week, but the attack’s aftermath put elections and sporting events and concerts on hold. Pavel’s opening was postponed until October.
“You could have painted me in an actual bed,” I said.
“No bed in my studio,” Pavel said.
He lifted my chin. A spare brush sat behind one of his large, pale ears.
I told him I wanted to see the painting’s progress; he told me that he didn’t work that way and asked me to stop talking. Outside, a woman yelled at a child or boyfriend or dog, and sirens rose in harried repetition. I closed my eyes.
“Open, please,” he said.
Pavel snapped a photo of me. He adjusted my hips, shifted my chin. The brush in his hand dripped paint onto my back, though he didn’t notice or apologize. I wanted him to press that brush against me until I felt the metal beyond the bristles. I asked what that part on the brush was called and he didn’t answer.
The cell phone Philip had given me on our return home rang. I ignored it. When it rang again right away, Pavel looked over to it and said, “Nicola.”
“Could you pass it to me, please?” I asked.
As soon as Nicola started talking, I knew I had to leave.
“We aren’t finished,” Pavel said, as I put on my shirt and shoes.
“I’ll come back later.”
“There won’t be light later.”
“Tomorrow, then,” I said, and tried to look at the painting, but he shooed me away.
“You know how Nicola is,” I added.
Pavel’s mouth squeezed into a scowl, and I remembered Philip talking about his gifts as a performer. He could have been an actor in period pieces playing a Nazi or a man whittled down by consumption.
“You told me you were free,” Pavel said, helping himself to one of my cigarettes.
“With this job, I’m free, then I’m not.”
“Maybe you should get a better job.”
I walked down his building’s stairs, knowing no other job would allow me to lie shirtless in Pavel’s studio, its only requirements to stay still and look at him. From two floors above, he called my name, his alien handsomeness amplified at that angle.
“Come tomorrow morning early,” he said.
“Like five?” I asked.
“Always joking. Eight.”
I said I’d be there. He answered with a smile so large I didn’t even mind getting up early the next day, or think to tell him that this would’ve been easier had he invited me to sleep over.
Nicola stood in the vestibule, newly, deeply tanned. I waited for his flirty smile, but his face stayed sour. He walked me to the downstairs half bathroom.
“Did you miss us?” I asked.
“Do you hear that?” Nicola asked back. The room was quiet. Then came a plink. “It’s been doing that for days. Please call the plumber.”
“Who’s your plumber?”
In his squint I sensed he didn’t know. The sink plinked again.
“It’s awful,” Nicola said.
Without the warmth of his flirtation, standing so close to him took on an uncomfortable intimacy.
“I heard you charmed everyone on the continent, as it were,” Nicola said, in a spot-on Philip impression.
“I tried to charm,” I said, wanting to amplify that myth, though I’d spent most of my time there waiting until Philip needed to be taken places.
Another plink. I smiled, hoping to resuscitate what had once been playful between us.
“Philip talks about you now like you’re his best friend or something,” Nicola said.
I wanted to know the specifics of what he’d said, if Philip had overstated our closeness to turn Nicola jealous or afraid.
“We did get close,” I said. “But then again we were together during a tragedy.”
“The tragedy was here, not there,” Nicola answered in a voice too loud for the small space we stood in.
One plink, another.
“That sound might drive me mad,” Nicola said.
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Yes, Gordon,” he said, then told me he had things to do.
Pavel took photos of me. He had on the same shirt and shorts from the day before, the same splotches lined his shins.
“You look like you slept here,” I said.
“I did,” he said. “No talking.”
His first significant show was weeks away. There would be reviews in major publications, Pavel a wunderkind or a flop.
He finished the photos, told me I could go. But before I did, he lifted up a canvas. It was the painting from the day before, unfinished, he kept saying, though it looked done to me. Painted-me looked as if he were deciding whether to share a delicious secret.
“I know you’re busy,” he said.
“I can come back later,” I told him.
I hoped these paintings might end up in fancy houses or museums, people making eye contact with painted-me because they felt they had to, though maybe they wanted to as well.
“Good,” Pavel said. “I have other ideas.”
As October began and people emerged from their terrified cocoons and the flyers of missing people began to bleach in the sun or fall off walls and telephone poles, plans for Pavel’s opening were finalized. The gallery rented out the back room of a restaurant for a post-opening dinner. There was a menu to confirm, seating arrangements to be agreed on, a florist to rein in. After each marathon day, I got back to our apartment, saw the machine blinking, and hoped it was Janice, still on her road trip. I checked the mail for flashes of her handwriting, slept in the bed still inhabited by her smell, and tried on her tank tops, loose without her hips and chest to anchor them. I talked out loud to an imaginary her about the thrill of Pavel painting me, also how I didn’t trust that feeling.
One night, Pavel and I worked late. We slurped down Thai food, then continued. At three in the morning, he said we should pause. I was getting ready to leave when he said, “Pausing is not stopping.”
“Sometimes you speak in riddles,” I said, with performed exasperation.
“We nap, then continue.” He paused. “Is that clear?”
We lay on his studio’s sofa. He pressed his back against me. I started to get hard and tried to turn, to hide my interest, but Pavel said, “Glad you enjoy being here,” then went to sleep.
An alarm went off three hours later. Tiredness stung my eyes. “I have an idea,” Pavel said, and painted me lying on the sofa. In his T-shirt and underwear, the pale hair on his legs fuzzy in the sunlight, Pavel told me I didn’t even need to open my eyes.
Afterward, I went straight to the gallery, where Philip wanted to review the dinner’s seating chart. I waited for him in a room they called the library. A shelf of art books rose to the ceiling, and skylights warmed the large table. I worried I might smell.
Nicola and Andrew moved through the room. For a moment, I wondered if it was Andrew who Nicola had stayed home for, though his rulebound nervousness made that unlikely.
“Are you wearing what you wore yesterday?” Nicola asked me.
“Yup,” I answered, and looked at the seating chart where, next to two adjacent names, Philip had written an emphatic No! A nearby phone trilled; Andrew left to answer it.
“Pavel showed us a new painting,” Nicola said. “Well now I know what you’ve been up to, keeping him distracted before his opening. Did Philip ask you to babysit him?”
“I’m not babysitting,” I said.
“The painting isn’t half bad,” Nicola said.
“Thank you.”
“You didn’t paint it!” Nicola smiled, reconsidered, then told me Lola needed to be taken to the vet for her indigestion.
“Wait,” I said. “Didn’t Philip have a maid growing up named Lola?”
In his annoyance, Nicola looked older.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t alive then.”
The gallery was packed. People clustered in front of paintings, though none were of me. I grew embarrassed at how much of the day I’d spent imagining versions of myself on these walls.
Competing conversations swarmed the room. Old women moved between the art and one another, while younger guests gathered in opposite corners, Sharks and Jets with innuendo rather than switchblades. A woman walked in. People gave her space. It was a famous former model I remember seeing on the cover of women’s magazines as a child.
I was in the middle of an invented scenario in which the former model bought a painting of me when Andrew came over and whispered, “What the fuck is he doing here?” into my ear. He must have been scolded by Philip about my name; earlier that evening he’d called me Gordon several times.
He pointed to a tall young man, his face on the precipice between handsome and haggard.
“I don’t know who that is,” I said.
“What do they pay you to do anyway?” Andrew asked.
Andrew was cute enough, though such a killjoy that any possible interest I had in him dried up long ago.
“If you could let me know who that is and what I’m supposed to do about him, that would be helpful,” I said.
“That’s Eric,” Andrew said. He let the name linger, but realized it meant nothing to me. “You really don’t know.”
Andrew walked me to the gallery’s office. He asked for a cigarette, which I begrudgingly gave him, and explained that Eric had been Philip and Nicola’s assistant until his romance with Nicola had become so egregious that Philip had fired Eric and kicked Nicola out. After half a year of traveling, Eric had returned to New York, wooing Nicola with such flirty intensity that they’d picked up where they left off, and then some. “Who do you think Nicola was with when you were in Europe? Eric’s parents have a place on the Cape. Apparently, it was some gross, sandy fuckfest.”
“That doesn’t sound gross,” I said.
“You’ve clearly never had sex on the beach.”
“Just the drink. So this Eric. What am I meant to do about him?”
When I interrupted Nicola’s conversation, he shot me a look of vaudevillian bother.
“Did you invite Eric?” I asked.
“How do you know about—”
“Because he’s over there pretending to look at the painting of the man with a chessboard.”
Nicola’s face was shattered glass. I wished meanness didn’t taste so good to me.
“I told him not to come,” Nicola said. “Fuck.”
“So you want me to get rid of him?”
“How?”
“I’m not calling the cops, if that’s your concern.”
I thought of Philip waiting for Nicola to leave him, and wanted this whole situation to blow up in Nicola’s face.
“If you could make it clear that I’m not asking him to leave,” Nicola said.
He was a coward. Understanding this made things simpler between us, wobblier, too, as there’d be no limit to the maneuvers he might resort to.
I passed the famous former model, also a man who called out the name Natasha, before stopping at Eric’s side. Close up, his haggard qualities took center stage. Protruding eyes. A nose and chin in a drawn-out, narrow set. I looked around to see if Philip had noticed his arrival but couldn’t spot him.
“Hi there,” I said. “I’m Gordon.”
“I’ve heard about you,” Eric answered, with a smugness that annoyed me.
“So we’ve heard about each other.”
Eric examined a painting of one man’s hand resting on another man’s knee.
“I can be here,” he said.
“Technically,” I replied.
He moved to the next painting. I walked with him.
“Pavel’s good,” I said.
Eric shrugged. A waiter zigzagged through the crowd. I leaned in to take in the same detail Eric pretended to be so invested in.
“This is harassment,” he said.
“I’m just looking at the art,” I said.
“No, you’re not.”
“Technically I am.”
He moved to another painting. I mirrored him. His work not to pay me any attention, his consternation of a spoiled child finally told no; I found all of it thrilling and worried it might be the same coldhearted excitement newbie cops felt when they first walked around in their uniforms. Eric sighed, his expression toggling between flustered and meanly pleased.
“Nicola told me you’re an asshole,” Eric said, and left.
Andrew came over shortly after, thanked me for dealing with him. I thanked him back for finally learning my name.
“I didn’t take you for such a bitch,” he said.
You didn’t take me for anything, I wanted to answer. But I grabbed a flute of champagne from a waiter, then walked around in hopes that the famous former model was still there.
Pavel found me, told me he wished we could hide and have a cigarette together. But someone called his name, and his worn-out face switched to delighted.
Nicola’s laugh echoed, Philip and the model huddled in conversation. I moved close, hoping for an introduction. But they kept on talking, and I pictured Eric and Nicola in that barn, Nicola saying to him the same words he’d said to me. It can be a big thing or a small thing or nothing at all.
Then Audrey from their first dinner party arrived. She saw me, smiled, and said, “Good thing they didn’t paint the walls an army green.”
“Good thing they didn’t paint them pea-soup green, either,” I replied, surprised that she’d remembered me.
At the dinner, people flocked around Pavel. The famous former model insisted she sit next to him, though she hadn’t been on our seating chart at all.
In the middle of dinner, as I checked with the restaurant’s manager about dietary restrictions, Pavel came, took my hand, and said he needed me. We went to the restaurant’s garden, empty on that damp night.
“You want a cigarette?” I asked.
He wrapped his arms around me, kissed me, told me he had nothing left.
“I’ve heard many of them have already sold,” I said.
I felt him shrug. I took off the glasses he had on, asked if they were real.
“Aren’t you going to say something?” he asked.
“I am saying something.”
“I mean, a pep talk. Some comfort at least.”
Pavel was wound up. It was nice, in a way, to get a glimpse underneath his unruffled exterior. I kissed him.
“The glasses are real,” he said. “For reading usually, but…”
“There’s an effect you’re going for,” I said.
“Do they not look right?”
“They look perfect,” I answered.
We returned to the dinner. Philip came to double-check that the dessert didn’t have walnuts. I wanted to say that crème brûlée never has walnuts, as the restaurant’s manager had just told me, but told him, “Walnut free,” then, “Seems like tonight’s going really well.”
“Exceeding expectations,” Philip said. He leaned close to me.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Seeing if you’d had a cigarette.”
“Am I not allowed?”
“Maybe you don’t remember,” he said. “In Munich, I think, what you’d said to me. That I could smell you anytime. I was trying for levity.”
Andrew called Philip over.
At the far end of the table, Pavel removed his glasses. Nicola found me to ask about the crème brûlée, too. “Crème brûlée never has walnuts,” I told him, though a few months before I hadn’t known what it was.
The evening wound down, and Philip grew exhausted. Nicola sat in busy conversation with a handful of guests, wooed by their attention.
“Let’s get you a cab,” I said to Philip.
A month before, I’d lifted him into the shower, let him rest his head on my lap as we watched the towers collapse in a loop.
“Nicola hates being alone,” Philip said, once we got outside. I was unsure what brought this comment on, but I wanted to hear more, so I nodded. “The dogs were his idea, so there’d always be some other creature in the house.”
At the dinner, Nicola had barely spoken to him. Only when Philip made a toast did Nicola move next to him to rest a presentational hand on Philip’s back.
“The dogs feel more like yours,” I said.
“Because I remember to feed them.”
A cab passed, already occupied. Headlights struck Philip’s face, and tires hissed across the wet pavement.
“Nicola isn’t a planner unless he’s trying to avoid being alone,” Philip said. “Then he plans like mad.”
“But you’re okay? You and Nicola settled things?”
“Who can say,” Philip answered, and raised a hand. A cab coasted over to us.
Inside, most of the guests were gone. I walked over to Nicola and said, “Philip went home.”
“There’s a surprise,” he said.
The woman next to him guffawed. I decided then that I hated him, also Pavel, who seemed to have left without telling me.
As my cab home bounced over potholes, the driver honking for no obvious reason, Pavel’s aloof charm started to sour. Alan back in Minneapolis was more obviously good-looking. And the redhead I’d slept with a few months before had recently left a message on our machine, just saying hi. The defeat I’d been saddled by in my first days in Europe came back to me, and as we stopped at a red light, I felt ready to end this job.
The cab approached the bridge. Other cars jockeyed to get there first. Taillights stuttered off and on in a glowing row.
My phone vibrated. It was a text from Pavel, showing his apartment’s address, the phrase c u thr? after it. Mom? I wrote back. Ha he responded, then, Y/N? The cab’s radio crackled. The air freshener dangling from the mirror spun.
Y, I answered, and told the driver there was a change of plans. As he grumbled about the illegal U-turn he had to make and I told him it would be worth his while, I felt like I might lift off the ground.
Pavel lived in a narrow building on a narrow street. He buzzed me in. I walked up one flight, another, elated and surprised that this was about to happen, surprised, too, that Pavel lived only a few blocks away from Nicola and Philip.