Sleep Artist (Bishop from F1 to C4)

We started in the middle of things, the pale belly of the matter, and despite the art I don't know where it will end. Our feet and heads are often at odds. I think of this now while Anna sleeps in the loft, her red hair shocking in the moonlight, the curtain in breeze. Something of it reminds me of the painting I bought unfinished from a street artist in Florence – light blue sketch-lines ghost down from bright watercolor into open white paper, and a golden basilica and deep sky arch like a prayer above a lonely street – motion, space, the possibility of completion. But not tonight. Tonight something resisted all painting.

I climb quietly down the ladder to my study where the canvas stands as I left it, a dark emptiness in the night surrounded by tubes of titanium white and scarlet, my brushes lined up neatly and waiting.

Her face, her face and tapered neck and her coils of auburn hair! I only saw her for a moment, when I left the company's office and passed her in the waiting room. They want it finished, and on time. They will pay me only then. I suppose if you commission art you can be as secretive and rigid as you want. And I'm so hard up I’ll take any commission, even one I don't understand. Was that a camera bag under that envelope?

On the way to the kitchen I pause in front of the framed Italian painting. I can barely see my reflection. My fingers leave vertical marks on the glass, and I remember her legs, two swift lines of bare skin in the shape of a tall letter x, a red patterned dress pulled tight above her knee. Lips to match the dress, but glossier. A hand at rest. A ring?

I need a beer.

It’s hard to eat when you haven't had a sale in months. The beer goes right to my head and I know I won’t get any work done tonight. Sometimes a cigarette will do the trick, but not this time. I light another one and sit in the dim light of the kitchen, while the clock on the oven cycles through the blue hours, and the orange tip of the smoke darts periodically towards the ashtray like a small fish.

Then the bed-springs groan and I hear soft feet on the wood floor, and I know Anna is coming down. The ladder creaks. She’s wearing one of my favorite old button-ups, the light blue one flecked with paint. Her Irish legs glow as she pads up and wraps her long arms around my shoulders. Her breath is heavy with sleep when she kisses me, and her arms are tinged a delicate blue, and yet though her touch has the weight of a prayer, my mind holds still to the other woman, and the kitchen feels suddenly cold.