But you do… want. Not dancing. Just — in its various sensations — want.
#
The studio had been a gift easily given by Chip: a spare room in a spacious place. Chip was good at supporting when it came to financial things. Studio, supplies, shrinks. And it was good to have a pretty girl who had something on her mind to talk about at dinner parties.
Before you – a stool, an easel, and a blank canvas are already set up from the last time you entered. The last time you left without making a mark. When your desire to make that first stroke of the perfect vision in your heart had been constricted by the limitations of the brush, the acrylics, the talent.
Today you pool paint in your palm and smear it across the canvas. This isn’t art. It’s evidence. The cool paint is like congealed blood in your hands.
When you’re done, you’re covered. Yellow and green, chartreuse up your ring finger, periwinkle across your wrist.
You don’t need art right now. Not art as it’s become, choking you with pretension and expectations and the ever pounding, anxious need to be great. And the ever pounding, anxious fear that you never would be; that it was already too late.
No, you just need creation. Something that didn’t exist that now does, with you being that chemical factor. Just you and the canvas and the monstrosity smeared on it.
You hear a knock on the door. Chip leans in the frame in his daytime business button down.
“It’s been a long time since I walked in on you in here,” he says. “I like it.”
You blink, think: pretty girls with something on their mind to talk about at dinner parties. A girl that paints on canvas is better than a girl that just paints on her face.
He steps closer, looking past you, to the canvas. “Would that be… abstract expressionism?”
Oh, you think.
Because Chip hadn’t known anything about art until he met you, and then gallivanted across the city to every museum and gallery you wanted, listened to you talk, and (most important) remembered.
Oh.
You’ve judged him too harshly. You had fallen into a living nightmare illusion where you were unlovable and unloving, so you absorbed what everyone else saw and spat it back out. What else could the magnet attraction between a rich guy and a pretty girl be but tactical self-service?