You work together in the mornings, silent and focused. But all the while you wait for him, half hoping, half afraid. Sometimes he puts down his brush and comes to look at your work, sometimes he stands close behind you and talks into your ear about the way you’re moving your brush, or what you are doing with the light.
And right now, as you try to add detail to your endless charcoal drawing of the wall, Caleb stands behind you and teases you to see if you can keep your hand steady. If you don’t, you will be starting over again, which has happened four times already.
You try to breathe evenly as his hands move to your waist and under your T-shirt to your abdomen where his thumbs rub in circles, gradually moving upward. You shake with the effort to keep silent and ignore your body’s response as he pulls himself close against your back.
And then he moves and speaks with clarity about the third brick to the left in the top right corner.
You listen and absorb and ache. And keep working.
And then you hear his knees cracking and feel his mouth on the small of your back.
And still, your arm is lifted to the paper and the pencil is in your hand.
His fingers tickle the soft spot below your ankle and then you feel his tongue behind your knee.
You shut your eyes.
His hands... up from your ankles to your knees... under your jean shorts to your hips.
“Keep working,” he says, and you open your eyes. Your arm has fallen. You lift it.
Third fucking brick to the left, and you’re to add texture. You add texture as your button fly is pulled open.
And your shorts and underwear fall to the floor.
And one foot at a time, Caleb, still on his knees behind you, helps you step out of them.
And then, his lips at your hip, his teeth nibbling the back of your thigh, his hands pulling your legs apart, his voice talking to you about bricks, his tongue hovering at your inner thigh...
Your knees buckling, your arms clinging to the easel...
Your upper body falls forward, his tongue draws pictures of want and draws you open and moves along you and in you and over you until you beg and rake your fingernails through the canvas and shake and shudder and finally collapse onto your knees and roll onto your back and see him kneeling over you, covered in stars and magic.
H
ugo taps on the bathroom door. “Mara?”
“Don’t worry,” I call through the door, “I haven’t drowned in the toilet.”
“You okay?”
I snuffle, wipe my eyes and say, “Fine. I’ll be fine.” There is a pause and then he speaks again.
“I’m so sorry, but, uh, Pollock needs to do his thing.” “His—oh. Okay.”
“I don’t want to leave you here though. You think you could come with us? Maybe the fresh air would.. .”
“Turn me into a normal person?” I say. “Was that a joke you just made?” he asks. I open the door.
“Maybe.”
His eyes meet mine and he looks like he’s going to hug me, but I say, “Better not,” and wave my handful of tissue at him, “I might start again.”
“Okay.”
“Walk?”
“Yeah,” he says, “just let me get his leash.”
6
Bernadette is back from camp with a shaved head and a tan and everything she wears is cut off and frayed and tie-dyed. She looks awesome.
You wonder if you should shave your head too. But Caleb loves your hair.
Sometimes he looks at you the way he looks at a finished canvas, his eyes gliding over the edges of you and seeing to the center. The memory of that look makes funny things happen to your breath and it’s all you can do not to bolt out of Baskin-Robbins where you’re sitting with Bernadette and run all the way to his apartment and stand in front of him and make him look.
“How old is he again?” Bernadette says. “Thirty-four.”
“And you don’t think he’s taking advantage of you?” “No.”
“But he says he’s not your boyfriend? Does he have a girlfriend? He could be married.”
“No, Bee, I don’t think so.” “But you don’t know.” “Well, no, but.. .”
“Don’t you think it’s weird that he wants to be with a sixteen-year-old?”
“No. Stop it! Can’t you be happy for me?”
She glares at you, rubs her scalp. “Fine.” She sighs. “Is the sex good?” And then she sees the look on your face. “Ah,” she says, “I see.”
In the month of August you work in the mornings, spend the afternoons with Bernadette, and go back to Caleb’s at night. He doesn’t talk much, but he always wants you. Surely that is enough.
Sometimes you find yourself in North York, standing in front of Mom’s house again. Maybe she’ll come home sick from work and you’ll rush to help her inside and sit by her bed smoothing her forehead with a cool, wet washcloth. “I’m lost without you,” she’ll say. “Please come back.”
Or you might get hit by a car, not badly enough to die, but enough that she finds you on the sidewalk with a broken leg or ankle. You’ll be bleeding, but it won’t actually hurt that much and she will run, panic in her eyes, and gently pick you up and take you to the hospital and call in sick for a week while she helps you get used to the crutches.
But you’re a fool for wishing ill on yourself or Mom. Who knows how powerful your mind might be? If God exists, he or she might take your thoughts as prayers and you could get hit by a car and break your arm instead of your leg and not be able to paint and not get into art school because you have no portfolio. Mom could get sick and die and it would be your fault for thinking of it.
From the want ads you’ve been clipping for him, Dad gets some job interviews. You and Bernadette offer to go with him to give moral support but he sees through you.
“You don’t believe I’ll go,” he accuses.
You say no and Bernadette shakes her head, but Dad sits on what’s-her-name’s couch and stares at the worn-out slippers on his feet.
“Thanks a lot,” he says.
You get a block away, walking in very careful steps with a very stiff back before you burst into tears. Bernadette holds you and lets you soak her shoulder and agrees with you when you blubber that he is SUCH an ASSHOLE.
You stay away for a week, but finally you are too worried.
You find Dad hopping from one foot to another and singing Bee Gees songs. He has a job.
“And not one of those low-life jobs you wanted me to take,” he says. “A real job where they need guys like me— with talent, personality, skills!”
He’s selling TVs and stereo equipment and he’s certain he’ll be running the place six months from now. And that’s not all...
“I went to see Chuck and he hasn’t found a renter for the old place. We can move back!”
“Really?” you say.
“Really. And I think the three of us will get along just fine.”
Which means the girlfriend is coming too. You might have to learn her name.
“I know you like staying at Bernadette’s, honey,” Dad says, “but we wouldn’t want her parents to start thinking you’re a burden.”
“Definitely not.”
“And we wouldn’t want your m—” He stops himself and clears his throat, “We wouldn’t want anyone to think your old man can’t take care of you, right?”
“Right,” you say and try to smile. “When do we move back?”
“September 1st.”
Not only are your morning art lessons about to end, but you have less than three weeks left of sleeping in Caleb’s bed. And then you go back to being a high school girl.
Ugh.
You will have homework. And classes.
And people at home who will know if you’re not there at night.
How long will he keep wanting you?
6
You never see Caleb in the afternoon, but you assume he spends it working. Today you go back early, hoping to find a safe place, hoping to get reassurance. You let yourself in and call his name.
You’ve never been here without him.
You wander into the studio and stand in front of the piece he’s working on, studying the composition and the way he layers his colors.
Beside his easel is a sketch pad where he puts his initial ideas, and you glance over at it to see how the painting com- pares to the original sketch.
Holy shit.
What you are looking at is not the cityscape, but a sketch of you on a bed. There are dark figures around you, one of them possibly Caleb, though it’s hard to tell because the figures are ghostly and indistinct, while your naked body
and face are rendered in detail. You seem a contrast of soft and sharp, made of angles: hip bones, elbows, cheek- bones and knees jutting out, fingers like scissors, hair like needles, splayed out on the pillow. And then your eyes, breasts, belly and mouth are pliable, feathery and round. Your flesh is permissive, vulnerable, while the rest of you forbids with knife-like severity.
And who are the figures around you? None of them is touching you, but there is a sexual feel to the sketch, and something scary. What does it mean? What is it he sees?
You lean closer and then step farther back, the way Caleb has taught you, to see if anything hits you differently, or becomes clearer. From farther away the figure becomes less “you” and more “she.”
From this perspective what strikes you most is the eyes, which are large and shadowed and fragile. They are eyes that ask questions. On a sketch pad, or an easel, they would look directly at the artist himself.
Caleb is not
in
the drawing, but he is in the drawing. And he sees you surrounded by shadows. He knows every angle and curve of your body, knows your face better than you do. That night you grip him hard and taste the salt on his skin and will him to hear what your body is saying because you will never, ever have the words. Nobody, surely, has ever felt
like this.
Afterward, as the drying sweat cools your bodies, you lie beside him and ask him if there’s anything else he wants.
“Meaning?” he says.
“Anything. Anything sexual or... anything else? Is there anything that we haven’t done that you . . .” You look
down at the sheets, feeling suddenly shy. “Just... if there’s anything you want, something I might not know you want, you can tell me and I’ll do it.”
Caleb rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. Some- times, even beside you, he is so far away.
“You’re a piece of work, Sixteen,” he says finally. “What, are you wondering if I want to tie you up and whip you? Bring a friend and double-team you? Have you stick your thumb up my ass or something?”
You can’t tell whether he’s joking, serious, or pissed off. “If, uh, if that’s what you want,” you say.
“It’s not,” he says, and then he shuts his eyes. “Go to sleep.”
“Okay.”
You’re silent for a minute. “Caleb?” you whisper. “Yo.”
“Is there... could you.. .” “What?” he asks.
“Do you like me?” you ask.
He lets out a kind of laugh, a breath through his nose. He turns on his side and looks at you.
“Yeah, you could say that,” he says. “No, but.. .”
“Don’t worry, Sixteen, liking you is not a problem,” he says. “Well, actually it
is
a problem, but not that kind of problem.”
“I’ll be seventeen soon. In October.”
“Happy birthday,” he says and kisses you on the cheek. “In advance.”
“You can say it to me on the day.” “Sure.” He squeezes his eyes shut.
“And then you’ll have to call me Seventeen.”
He chuckles at this and opens his eyes to look at you again.
“How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” you ask. “Relationships are complicated,” he says. “People want
too much from each other. You get into a relationship and then someone wants you to change, to become someone else, cut your hair shorter, see different movies, change your views, your routine, your lifestyle. They want you to pursue their dreams instead of your own.”
“I wouldn’t.” “Wouldn’t what?”
“Expect you to change, ask you to give up your dreams.” “Listen, Sixteen—”
“You could call me Mara.” “Sixteen, I’m not... we can’t.. .”
“Why don’t you ever kiss me? You’ve never kissed me.
Don’t you think that’s weird?” “I—”
“You’re not a bad kisser, are you?” You reach out and put your index finger on his bottom lip and stroke it lightly. “Don’t tell me you don’t know how.”
His breath catches and his eyelids lower. You are on your sides, facing each other, each with your heads cradled on one hand. You can feel the heat coming from his body.
He brings his face close, touches his forehead to yours, and then moves so you are cheek to cheek and you feel his eye- lashes flutter against your temple. You want to put an arm
around him and pull his body closer, but instead you hold yourself completely still. He slides his cheek along yours un- til your lips are centimeters apart. You close your eyes and swallow and hope he can’t feel how nervous you are, because it’s ridiculous, considering the things you have done together, to be so nervous about a kiss.
But you haven’t done this.
You haven’t had his lips pressing onto yours, or heard the deep, low whimper that comes from the back of his throat when your lips move in response. You haven’t had him hold your face in his hands and felt him shudder, and no painful, heated ache has rocketed down from your open lips to your tongue and fired along your nerve endings and made you feel like your body was on fire.
But now you have. And the world is a different place.
Locked together in a tangled embrace, you travel past desire, past time and age and circumstance, past, even, the barriers of body, to a place where you are together, linked in the deepest sense. And for a few timeless moments, you are not alone.
It is grief to come back, though you lie, still warm, in Caleb’s arms. He pulls the covers over you and, for once, does not turn away before he drifts into his dreams.
But the day has changed you and you can’t sleep.
Finally you slide out of Caleb’s grasp and get out of the bed. You pull on a T-shirt and sit on a chair by the window and look out. On Dundas Street a streetcar clicks and whines as it passes by.
You reach your senses out and hold yourself very still. You look up toward the sky and see only dark against the
lamplights, and your mind goes to color and the absence of color that makes black, and the vast universe out there in which you are very small. And those thoughts lead you back to Caleb, behind you in the bed, and the smell of you both, musky, dark, and sweet on your hands and in your breath. Caleb, who channels you with his artist’s eye and hand. Caleb, who is sexy and brilliant and elusive... and yours tonight.