embroidered on her white tank top, smack across her breasts, which moved freely under the fabric when she swayed. She was drunk—either that, or on some pills. I couldn’t tell which.
“You don’t look like an artist,” she said.
“What does an artist look like?”
“Well, for one, they don’t usually wear college sweaters. You look more like a fraternity boy.” She reached her arm across the bar, held her cigarette above the ashtray, and tapped the ash off the head. The ash landed on the bar.
“But I’m a different kind of artist,” I said. “I paint things to be their opposite. This way, I myself am a work of art because I’m wearing a college sweater. It’s unexpected.”
She looked me up and down. If she were younger, her sunken cheeks might have been exotic, but now they made her look emaciated. “Where do you show your work?”
“All over the place. I give it to my friends, and they hang them up in their apartments.”
“It doesn’t sound very lucrative.”
“I’m not in it for the money. I paint for the love of it. I’ll set up in someone’s apartment, and they’ll let me crash on their couch for a week, maybe feed me some, and at the end of the week they get one of the finest works of art they’ll ever own.”
There was a critical moment here, and I missed it while it happened, but a change came over her. In hindsight, I recall her looking off in the distance, then looking at me. She stamped her cigarette in the ashtray, her movements now suddenly languid.
“You’re not super eloquent,” she said. Then she leaned forward, conspiratorially. “I can tell you’re raw. Your talent must be raw, too. I know, because let me tell you something.” She slipped a little off her stool, caught her balance, and repositioned herself. “Artists are attracted to me—always have been, always will be. I’m a muse.”
“That’s the word I was going to use. You look like a muse.”
“And rightly so.” She smiled in that fashion-model way, where the lips flatten, as though she were about to apply liner. “Of course, you know Andy Warhol.”
“The great Andy,” I said. I’d heard of him.
“Yes, the great Andy. And I can say so from firsthand experience. He discovered me when I was fifteen. There are photos of me—photos Andy took. They’re quite controversial and you could find them out in the world, in museums . . . private collections, I suppose.”
“Really? Which museums?”
“I’m sure you’d find them at the Met. Look in the archives.” She had another cigarette out. She slid the package over to me. “Controversial because”—she leaned in closer—“my genitalia are in the photos. My fifteen-year-old genitalia.”
“He took pictures of your—”
“Yes. My pussy. My name, by the way, is Vanlisa.”
She lived in Williamsburg. She insisted on sitting across from me on the subway, so I could study her. She arched her back, parted her legs, put a hand on each knee, and threw her head back, but her eyes, the whole time, were cast down on me. People stopped before crossing the invisible thread connecting us across the aisle.
After a few stations, she said, “Are you going to sketch me?”
“It’s too bumpy,” I said. “I’m taking mental notes.”
Outside her apartment door, a young girl with a backpack slouched on the floor. The dim hallway was lit by tiny track bulbs lining the tops of both walls. The girl looked up to Vanlisa expectantly. A telephone rang inside the apartment.
Vanlisa stepped over the girl, unlocked her door, and bade me to enter. The two windowed walls were brick, the wood floors polished to a wet shine. In the center of the room a slab of petrified wood was the table, and the seating arrangement consisted of green fur draped over structures in all stages of becoming sofas and chairs. The windows along one wall glowed softly with Manhattan’s skyline. Vanlisa left me standing there while she went to answer her phone, which was in a room behind a wall made of smoky panes of glass.
“You weren’t at the station,” she said into the phone. “Yes. No. Your problems. I . . . Yes, Bartos, I’m being a bitch for very good reasons.”
There was no art on the walls. It looked as though she’d just moved in.
“Then come tomorrow.”
When she came back into the main room, foot in front of clacking high-heeled foot, I asked her if her place was new.
“That is the wall you’ll paint,” she said, gesturing toward the one white wall that took up half of one side of the apartment, the other half opening to a kitchen.
“That’s a big wall.”
“Then you’ll be a big painter,” she said, walking toward one of the smaller couch-like masses. She plunked down and took her shirt off. Her breasts sagged and rounded out. She kicked off her shoes, lifted her legs, pushed her pants down, and kicked them off. She opened her legs and placed her feet apart on the sofa structure.
I couldn’t make sense of her genitalia.
“Andy was fascinated, too,” she said.
“Did he really take your picture?” I didn’t know what else to say. It had dawned on me that I was to paint her right then—that she expected this—and I had no idea what I was doing.
“I went to his studio with my older sister. He wanted us to piss on some paintings of his.”
“Why would he want you to do that?”
“Oxidation: paint reacts chemically with piss.”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.”
“Andy was photographing men having sex on the floor. Then he took some pictures of me.”
“Pissing on his work?”
“After I pissed on his work.”
I couldn’t comprehend the white wall I turned to face, nor the tubes of paint I then took from my garbage bag and lined up on the floor while Vanlisa sat there watching me, waiting for my magic. All my brushes were too small. I stepped back and did some looking up and down along the wall. I stepped closer and crouched, looking up the flatness. The ceiling was so far away.
“So,” I said. “So how did Andy do his work with all that distraction? Because for me, I work alone. It’s sort of a private experience. I can’t start if you’re watching me, I mean.”
She took a cigarette from the pack on the petrified table and lit it. “This is what I thought about you in the station,” she said. “That you are a fraud. You are a harmless and gutless little fraud. Is that true?” She got up and walked over to me. She squeezed a tube of red paint into her hand and smeared a giant red V on the wall. Then, with black paint, she patted a forest of handprints over the V’s crotch.
She stood back to admire her work,
