completely in your own little bubble. To be like her, filled up with herself to such a degree that she doesn’t need to concern herself about anyone else. I really wonder what she’s doing here. Perhaps it’s a real disease? But Dr. Sharm doesn’t see the sick, only us: the vain. The lion knows that I’m looking at her, she must feel it, but she twists her head a little to the right and looks out through the window. That profile…I know her! I recognize her from somewhere, but I can’t think of where it is. It will come to me. All good things come to those who wait, but it comes faster if you do something about it, as Papa always says. The two nurses in reception are shuffling papers. One is an ostrich, the other might be a hyena or a dog or possibly some kind of bear. I’m not good at types of animals, I never have been.
There are some newspapers on the coffee table. I pick one up and leaf through it. This is waiting. I hate waiting. A large painting is hanging on the wall behind the nurse in reception. Expressionism, or whatever it might be. Brushstrokes in an explosion of color. I’ve never liked art. I don’t know how I came up with the studio. A little white lie that led to another and then, presto, I was an artist with a studio. It was just perfect. I avoided making up pretend friends, I avoided coming up with false explanations about real friends who might have revealed me afterward. I’m not the housewife type, never have been, and when the studio was really there I realized that it was exactly what I needed. I was free. I could come and go as I wished. I avoided a lot of demands, always had a valid excuse if Papa wanted to see me or if I wanted to see someone. Life with Eric Bear was, and is, perhaps not the world’s most exciting, and the fabrication of being an artist gave, and gives, me every possibility.
The first time Eric was going to come by and look there were a few hours of panic. First I was forced to acquire an apartment. Papa had several, all around the city, I don’t want to know why or what he used them for. But he let me have one of them, it was good enough to serve as an artists’ studio. Then I rushed around up in Lanceheim an entire morning, buying paintings in every single antiques store I could find. They thought I was crazy. I asked the antiques dealers to give me only the paintings themselves, the canvases that is, because I didn’t want the frame. A few refused, but most of them did as I asked, because I never tried to haggle over the price. Into a taxi and back to the newly acquired artist’s studio, it was down by Swarwick Park. There I set the canvases carefully around an easel I’d also found in an antiques store, and it looked rather nice. I breathed out and sat down on the couch that Papa had surely purchased, for it was leather and enormous and black just as he liked, and then I saw. Eric would ring the doorbell in exactly one half hour, and there were neither paints nor brushes in my so-called studio. I set off again into the city, and by pure chance discovered a store with artist’s materials as we went past light-blue Up Street. Into the store, make a real raid, and then back to the apartment again. I completed the image of a hardworking artist who was occupied with her new masterpiece by “spilling” a little paint on my slacks. At the very next moment Eric rang the doorbell. Fortunately, it was an old pair of slacks.
I’ve never had anything against Eric Bear. It’s not about that. He’s a nice bear with social ambitions, and I provide him with extra credibility by pretending to be an artist. He is less superficial, thanks to me. He acquires a little depth and heft. I’ll gladly offer him that. He doesn’t bother me, he cooks on the evenings he eats at home, and when he cleans he puffs the cushions on the couch, something I hereby confess that I’ve never done.
“Isabelle Lion,” says the dog or the hyena in the reception in a loud voice.
Isabelle Lion. As she gets up and without a glance