Pavel’s apartment was sparsely decorated: white furniture and bare walls, a mattress centered on the floor of its largest room.
“You survived,” I said.
Pavel kissed me hard, his jaw scraping against mine, and pulled off my shirt. His teeth traced my chest, my stomach, and he took me into his mouth until he gagged. As he undressed, his pale body glowed, the look of wanting on his face so thrilling to see that I let out a noise. He slid a condom onto my dick and whispered, “I’ve thought about this.” Though I’d thought about it, too, with worrying frequency, I answered, “I know.” When Pavel came, he gasped as if being flogged, croaked out, “Keep going,” when I asked if I should stop. After, he patted my chest. I worried I was being dismissed, but he didn’t ask me to leave.
“You fascinate me,” Pavel said.
“I’m just unfamiliar,” I said. I knew I was right, though I wanted to be wrong, for his fascination to hold as I moved from novel to ordinary. Pavel rolled me onto my stomach, told me it was his turn. I stopped caring about anything beyond his body moving on top of mine.
The next morning, after the two of us lay in bed reading reviews of his show, one calling him “a bit of a rock star,” Pavel asked what I was doing later.
“No firm plans,” I said.
“I’ll see you tonight then?” he asked.
I stared at the ceiling, the answer he wanted hovering in my throat.
“Okay, rock star,” I said finally.
Pavel held the hair at the back of my head, pulling it as he kissed me.
Each day, Pavel wanted to squeeze more painting in. Sometimes in the evening, or at morning’s earliest edge. For one, I posed in my underwear. In another, I leaned on my forearms. He got annoyed whenever I needed to take a break.
A week later, he asked to paint me naked. I undressed and worried I’d get hard, my greatest fear after middle school gym class when all the boys were forced to shower in one mildewed room.
Pavel took out his camera.
“You’re taking pictures?” I asked.
He’d done the same for the other paintings. But Pavel having photos of my dick to evaluate or share left me nervous. I didn’t trust this would last, could picture a future moment when he referred to me as a guy he used to paint, while I stayed stuck in the slog of pining for him. In his studio, with me naked and the radiator’s scolding hiss, it felt like he and I had already ended.
“I destroy the photos when a painting is done,” Pavel said. “Try to keep still.”
I took the camera from his hands. When I first snapped a picture of him, he looked annoyed. I took two more. Annoyance turned to interest, and he peeled off his clothes. I took another picture. I put a finger inside him, took a picture of that, too, told him these pictures would get destroyed. He nodded. And just when I was about to move on top of him, he grabbed his sketch pad and began to draw, his hard-on brushing up against the paper.
I’d come to drop off packages when I heard raised voices upstairs. It was noon, a time Philip and Nicola were rarely home.
“You can’t make new rules,” Nicola said, voice punching down the stairs.
“There aren’t new rules,” Philip said back. “But you’ve reinterpreted, as it were.”
“As it were not, old man!” Nicola shouted.
There was quiet for a time. Dust lazed in the sun angling through the windows. Then Philip said, “You’ve always known how old I am.”
I was about to leave when the dogs emerged from the kitchen, barking excitedly in my direction.
“Anybody home?” I called out.
Philip moved halfway down the stairs.
“Thought you’d be at the gallery,” I said.
“Is my presence an inconvenience?” he asked.
“Of course not. I’ve brought packages.”
Nicola appeared behind him, all smiles as he said my name, like some soft-boned sea creature, able to move into seemingly impossible spaces. He asked if I wanted coffee. I lied and said I had a dentist appointment.
Philip looked tired. I wanted him to tell Nicola to leave, me there to witness Nicola’s stunned fear as he understood what he’d pushed to an ending.
“Call if you need anything,” I said.
I went to Pavel’s studio and found him waiting for me. Rather than get right to painting, he pushed me against a wall, yanked my pants down, and began to fuck me. His teeth pinched my shoulder. Fingers dug into my hips. He finished with his usual choking noises, then told me not to move. A condom drooped at my heel, the aching relief of just being fucked all I could consider. I heard the soft flip of his sketch pad being opened, a pencil scratching across one of its pages. I told him I needed to go to the bathroom. He asked if I really needed to or could wait.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Try hard,” he answered, and went to find his camera.
At home I played the latest message from my father. He talked about a time our pipes burst and the walls looked like they were weeping, how Mom had gotten fed up and gone to her sister’s while Dad and I cut holes into the wall. “We kept peeling back more wall, looking for the busted pipe,” Dad said, pausing to take a breath. “And you stood behind me the whole time, in your winter coat. Kept telling me how you could see your breath, how it reminded you of Mom’s smoking. You stayed with me as I opened up walls, saying, ‘maybe this one,’ when I wanted to give up. I remember wanting to give up, also you behind me.”
I remembered, too, how startled I was each time Dad’s sledgehammer had sounded, my words as much encouragement as a hope he’d stop. We went out for Chinese after and ate wonton soup so hot I felt it snaking down my chest. And when we got back to our apartment’s half dozen cavernous holes, I said, “Maybe we shouldn’t have done this,” and Dad looked at me like I was hurting him.
I erased his message.
Janice’s last postcard had just come in from the Rockies (its entire message was the words I MISS YOU SO MUCH in all caps; I’d cried when it arrived), so I broke her rule and smoked in the apartment. I didn’t want to stay home alone. But when I called Pavel, he didn’t pick up. So I got on the subway, took it to my former Bay Ridge stop. I walked past my old apartment (I saw lights on, felt for whomever had ended up there) and stopped outside Food Land. Inside was a cashier I recognized, another I didn’t. The sign’s demise continued, mostly vowels remained. I thought I heard my phone ring, but when I pulled it out, there was nothing. It wasn’t until I got home that it rang for real. I felt a flood of relief, sure Pavel was calling me back. It was Philip.
“You okay?” I said, in lieu of a hello.
“You sound winded,” he said. “Out for a run?”
“Yes,” I answered, lying my shorthand.
He told me that he and Nicola were going upstate for a few days and wanted to leave the dogs with me.
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
“We’re already in the car.”
I wanted to be angry at how they considered my availability only in afterthought, though I did the same thing.
I called Pavel again, got his voice mail, and left him a message to let him know I’d be staying a few blocks away. I didn’t hear back from him until the next day. As I posed for him then, I noticed that in the finished paintings he’d exaggerated my scrawniness so that I looked angry and infirm.
Things sped up after that. Pavel and I were together most nights, meeting his artist friends, listening to their confident opinions.
At one party, a woman named Gretchen asked me what I did. I told her.
“So you’re an art dealer?” she asked.
The apartment we were in was large, a grand piano in a corner buried in guests’ coats.
“No. I, like, pick up their dry cleaning and give their dogs worm pills.”
“That’s hilarious,” Gretchen said.
A few minutes later, she asked if I had a spare cigarette.
“I’m all out,” I said, despite the pack’s outline bulging in my shirt pocket.
I went to a different room, tried and failed to engage in conversation with a man and a woman who first asked me if I knew Dagmar, second if I’d gone to school with them.
“Who’s Gretchen?” I asked Pavel in the cab home.
“A rich girl who thinks she’s a painter,” he answered.
“She’s not?”
“I mean, she paints,” Pavel said.
He described her work, talking about how most of it featured open windows. He told me next that several were set on dark streets, how some included a river, details meant to convey how bad it was.
“Got it,” I said, though I didn’t, and wondered how Pavel described me to other people.
“I used to work at a grocery store,” I said one night as I posed. He had me slouched in a chair.
Pavel shushed me, but I kept going. I talked about Thor/Vince, Marcy’s crush on me.
“I had a job one summer in high school, in the typing pool at my mom’s bank,” he said.
“This wasn’t in high school,” I said, and realized Pavel rarely asked me questions.
An hour later, the painting as far as he could take it then, Pavel told me he needed to walk. We left the apartment at three in the morning, holding hands even when someone in a passing car shouted obvious, awful things at us. Getting to Gramercy Park, he moved his hand between the narrow, iron railings and pulled a key from under a rock.
“Trespassing,” I said.
He kissed the back of my neck.
We went into the empty park. A statue of a man stood in its center, head bowed in proud submission.
“Was this a soldier?” I asked.
“Actor,” he said.
I climbed the statue’s pedestal, sat in the carved chair he held on to. I leaned back so that the actor’s hand touched my cheek. Pavel lifted up his camera. It clicked as he took one shot, another, as he moved close to get a detail of the actor’s hand on my cheek. It would turn out to be the only well-known painting in this series, this one called G. and the Actor. I looked it up recently and read that it’s in a private collection.
We went back to Pavel’s, slept for a few hours. Then I left to walk and feed the dogs. I called after to see if he was doing more painting. He didn’t answer. When I finally saw him two days later, he told me he’d been in that part of the process where he needed to be alone.
“You understand,” Pavel said.
We were at a bar in the East Village, new candles pressed on top of old ones to make waxy mountains, everyone in the room candlelit and beautiful.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “But I’m not an artist. I don’t have particular times I need to be alone. Unless, you know, I’m doing something in the bathroom.”
Pavel smiled at my dumb joke, and the bartender refilled our glasses. I didn’t tell Pavel that for the two days I thought he’d been done with me I’d flipped between the shock of being dropped and the surprise that he’d ever been interested. He stayed quiet for several minutes. When he finally did talk, he played with the wax on the candle in front of him.
“I have to tell you something,” he said.
“Do you have it?” I asked.
“What?” he asked back.
“Is this the ‘I’m sick’ talk?”
“What?” he said again, then, “No,” surprised that I’d even considered that possibility.
He told me we should go outside, for cigarettes and privacy, and turned to the bartender to say we’d be back. I felt reassured by the “we” in his statement, though I also sensed that the we was ending.