it is me, and I am naked. I erase lightly and coax one of the eels to become a slender tree. I start adding tiny starlike flowers onto the branches.
I shouldn’t be going into such detail with pencil—this is a stupid little sketch—but I can’t help myself. I used to do this a lot—sketch out the entire idea first before re-creating it as a larger painting or a sculpture—but I don’t usually do it anymore. It vexes me, but relieves me too, working in minutiae, in pencil, thinking about oils. The flowers should be a dusty pink—or would coral work better? Should there be a butterfly or two? Should they turn back into eels and come into the bed?
I do not realize how much time has passed when I look up and see that Kyuri has come in and she is standing in my doorway staring at me. Her head is hanging to one side the way it does when she is just drunk enough to say the most outrageous things, but not drunk enough to go to sleep anytime soon. I sigh. This probably means I won’t get more work done—it’s just as well.
“You know what I think when I look at you?” says Kyuri, tilting her head abruptly to the opposite side. I can practically see the fumes of alcohol wafting off her.
“What?” I say. “And hello to you.”
“I wish I had a talent that had decided my vocation for me,” she says. She sounds aggrieved. “So that there never was a choice. Of doing anything else.” What she is implying is that I am lucky and she is not.
“Art doesn’t feed you,” I say, indignantly. “So many people who are a million times more talented than I am can’t get a job, or they can’t sell their paintings. After this fellowship, who knows what I’m going to do?”
An artist’s career is a phantasm, shimmering from one angle, gone from the next. I had been told over and over in New York that I needed to be part of a community, not only for encouragement and inspiration and all of those fine things but for practical job tips. Like the best restaurants to waitress at. Ruby had made me apply for my current fellowship a few months before she killed herself.
I already know that Kyuri almost begrudges me my career—fledgling as it may be—and all of our conversations usually end up running along these lines sooner or later. It is part of what I was saying earlier, her persistence in thinking that she is a victim and others have been born under lucky stars.
“Well, you are so smart to have gotten this far then,” she says enviously. “You’re so sly, you know. You weasel your way into the best things somehow.”
This annoys me so much I feel a rush of blood in my cheeks. Usually I brush off things she says that are much worse. Perhaps it is because I am hungry, or because Hanbin went away so early.
“Why do you have to put it that way?” I say. “Are you trying to pick a fight with me? You don’t think I work hard? That I’m not terrified that I am going to lose everything any second?”
“Why are you getting so upset?” she asks, genuinely surprised. “I’m just saying I envy you! That’s flattering! Feel lucky!”
Because she is so taken aback, I calm down.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I guess I’m in kind of a bad mood today. It’s nothing to do with you.”
“Why, because of work?” she asks. “No, it’s Hanbin, isn’t it!” she says with certainty.
I shake my head, hoping she will go away. I look down at my sketch. But when I look back at Kyuri, she has such a worried expression on her face that, in spite of myself, I am touched. No matter what her wrongful assumptions are, she is, at least, a friend who cares, and I know how rare that is. Which is precisely why I cannot paint a Kyuri series right now.
But when I do start it, I will do it as a gisaeng series. Perhaps I will paint her as a