Anthropometry

The paint is cold. My loft, capacious and drafty as September’s winds lay a deliberate siege upon its thin walls. Leaves drift softly up from the street, brush against my enormous glass windows, and then re-enter into an easy, contained vortex above a gutter.

I smear it on the area just below her navel, and then up around it. The paint drips a little, cold I-K blue running viscous down towards warmer parts, and I can feel her shudder and tighten. I tell her to relax.

I have been experimenting.

Everything is grey. Except for the paint and her hair, it seems everything in the loft is grey or made grey by the empty light streaming through my windows. That light is the sum of a spectrum of color? This is inexplicable.

There is a sudden change in pressure—Rotraut has told me that I have a deep and perceptive sense for three things and three things alone: color, weather systems, and impending doom—and the air is pulled inside, whistling.

When I see the skin rise and pinch around her nipples, I apologize. But on whose behalf, the disinterested wind? It was her idea. When I told her of my vision, she begged me. She is quiet and though keen and tasteful, I find her enthusiasm dubious. Women spend their lives painting themselves, layer upon layer upon layer. One more coat Rotraut? And from a man, who those momentarily caught in their fashionable and tedious fascination with the “avant-garde,” have taken to calling a genius. A master?

She has been trying to make a good impression. No doubt. I believe I have at least a fourth sense, R., for desperation. She desperately wants me to like her. I needn’t tell you that this is very different from actually liking a person. Painfully different. She needs me to like her. She so badly needs my approval. She is at my mercy. Blind with this primal need, climbing Maslow’s hierarchy, my own character, the very words I speak, the intent I have in painting her body, become incidental. It is my admiration she seeks, not me, not even my artistry. Bli