This is an excerpt from Johanna Hedva’s novel Your Love Is Not Good, forthcoming from And Other Stories on May 23, 2023.
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the diffusion or seeping of paint or pigment at the edges; often a defect
Finally, I was painting every day and they were new, long afternoons in the studio, stretching into the nights, and time felt like a warm bath. I’d go till dawn, sleep at my studio on the old couch, and wake at noon with a placid hangover. I’d bought an espresso machine for the studio with some money from a sale a few years ago, so there was no reason I had to leave during the day. I woke up and did nothing else but paint.
It had been weeks since I’d seen her, but that didn’t matter. Image upon image, I had her in front of me, for me, in.
Some nights, Cal would text or I’d text him, and we’d meet for a drink, and then I’d go back to his. I associate his futon on the floor with that hot autumn. His white skin and lean arms would amalgamate into the Twin’s in my dreams, the lithe white limbs snaking through my paintings.
Alexandra was calling me every day, in the way gallerists do in the lead-up to the opening, where they play at being a friend who is there for you in a time of need, concerned and indulgent, “Do you have everything you need?” but what they actually want is to confirm that you will deliver what they expect you to, which is, in the end, a product they can sell. Gallerists are not your friend, though they perform a sort of friendship, it’s closer to that of an invasive, needy, oversharing kind of boss who calls you at three in the morning to say, “I just had a dream of you dying. Tell me you’re okay.”
Yves once explained it to me, “Gallerists like to blur the boundary between employee and friend because it’s what puts you to work for them all the time. You can never clock out. If you’re unfriendly to them, you’re suddenly doing a bad job. And since gallerists never have a life of their own, some of them actually think their artists are their friends. But the power is fucked. It’s like a queen who calls her maid her best friend.”
“Are we doing frames or no frames?” was Alexandra’s reason to start calling at the end of summer. I’d never used frames on my paintings before, but something about this show, its lofty colors, its poise and exaggeration, how it gestured toward a classical tradition of painting, made them fit. I decided I wanted the ornate golden ones, coils upon coils, of the Rococo period. Once I suggested this, Alexandra had to call multiple times a day to go over the details. “So, we’ll do the two bronze on the first wall—the bronze is better than the gold for those. I love the one with scrolls for the more abstract pieces, I just think they cushion so well. What are your thoughts on the floral pattern I sent over? So gilded, right?”
On her latest call, she remarked, as if to herself, “Since we’re going full baroque, we’ll have to look the part. A good, big, fuck-you necklace. And a gown—definitely a gown.”
I hung up and texted the Twin. “Hey, I’m going shopping for something to wear to my opening. Wanna come?”
An hour later, she replied, “I’d be down to go to Barney’s.”
It was our first time meeting outside of my studio, but it was still for a purpose in service to me. I noticed this on the drive over and it made me wince. I decided I’d offer to buy her something if she wanted, but I thought of Zinat and I winced again. And if she’d suggested Barney’s, maybe she already had money. I decided I’d invite her to Berlin, not just for the opening but for the months before, so we could work together. I’d already decided I’d keep painting her for the Berlin show. Alexandra had loved the work when I brought it to her, it would be significant, it would be significant, she kept saying, she couldn’t wait to take it to the fair, and I’d emailed a few images to my Berlin gallerist, who had also responded eagerly. What I’d hoped for was happening, the Twin’s presence in my work, her pride and beauty and white, heart-shaped face, was lifting it and me into a new realm of universality. It was a hunger that didn’t have to fight for what it wanted, ambition that wasn’t predicated on survival. It could debase itself while staying clean.
I’d never been to the Barney’s in Beverly Hills, though I’d driven by it countless times when I used to take Wilshire to UCLA for a couple months of adjunct teaching. The facade of the building was an overworked impersonation of an Italian villa, fake bricks and potted topiary shrubs. The only parking option was twenty-dollar valet in a structure that had fountains near the elevators and curved molding along the ceiling. The valet, a squat, perspiring man, peered into my truck, assessing the empty water bottles and food containers scattered over the floor and seats before climbing in daintily. He tried to drive hovering an inch above the seat to keep his uniform clean.
I lifted my chin a little, put on my sunglasses, and marched toward the glass doors of the entrance. This is how artists are. It’s the world that needs us.
I found the Twin browsing a rack of coats. She was wearing an oversized men’s blazer, heavy brown tweed, threadbare at the wrists, with one pocket safety-pinned on. How she was not wilted by the heat, I didn’t understand, but her hair was a matted mess. She looked homeless, yet her big chin was thrust out. Her sense of purpose, of belonging here, filled the room without even trying.
“The fall line,” she said to the rack when I arrived beside her.
I trailed my hand across the shoulders of the coats, slipped it between the rich wool to glance at a price tag, $3,500, the same amount Alexandra had just spent on a frame for me, added to the sum of what I owed her, but moved on as soon as possible, as if the price had been as relevant a piece of information as the fact that there was air in the room.
“My gallerist told me to get a big fuck-you necklace.”
“The new Givenchy might be good for that,” she said without looking at me. She pronounced it Gee-van-chay, which I knew was wrong, but I simpered at her little rebellion. It seemed of the same spirit of her taking my drawing.
“I wanted to ask you something,” I said. Following her lead, I didn’t look at her, I kept scooting hangers across the rack. “For my show in Berlin, I want to continue this series.”
She made no indication that I was talking.
“I’d like to bring you,” I said, “to keep working together.” I could feel the heat of her body next to mine, but now she was looking away. “I can pay for you to come out. And—and I can probably put you up in your own place.”
“Yeah, I’d need my own place,” she said.
“Okay. I can find something.”
“When?” she said and pulled on a garment, fanning out its fabric.
“I’m leaving a couple weeks after my show here. Berlin opens in summer, so a few months before would be good.”
“I can’t come until February. Maybe April. At the earliest.” She moved away to another rack. She passed a mannequin and dragged her hand across its torso, and I felt it as if she were touching my own breast.
“Okay, great. That would be great.”
She made a little shrug that I took to be a confirmation, then she floated away around the floor. She came to a slim, shift-like gown cut straight to the floor with long sleeves and a high neck. It was made of something diaphanous that looked like voile, delicate and expensive, the color of bone.
“You’d look great in this,” she said to me. She pointed at my head. “With your hair like that, you’d look like one of them.” She pointed at the faceless mannequins.
“I love the color,” I said. “It’s the color of my show.” Of you, I wanted to say.
Kay Sage, one of my favorites, died by shooting herself through the heart. It is said she did this because she was devastated at the death of her husband. He was abusive and violent, there are stories of him chasing her through parties with a knife. She’d attempted suicide once before, shortly after he died. She’d worked to make a comprehensive catalog of his work, then took an overdose of pills.
“Try it on,” the Twin said. She looked around for help, then whistled with her finger and thumb, the fat one, in her mouth, like men do to call dogs or each other. A saleswoman came over, her eyebrows raised. “She wants to try this,” the Twin shoved her chin at me.
“Of course.” The saleswoman grimaced.
Alone in the dressing room, I loved the dress. It was dignified and collinear, covering my feet, but it was semitransparent, my underwear and nipples clearly revealed, like the thin washes of white I’d used on a few paintings, as if raising a fog from their depths. It cost $1,500. I had one credit card left for emergencies that I could use, I’d have to max it out, I calculated in my head how much I owed the bank, Alexandra, my new promises to the Twin, but the numbers didn’t take shape, they washed out in the fog too. I used to be uncomfortable in spaces where the art world’s money took up all the air in the room, when I walked in, I felt the number of my debts blaze above my head in scarlet, but once I started buying very expensive clothes, telling myself that they were materials like my paints and stretcher bars and canvases, it made me feel as if I was enough of who I was supposed to be, of who I wanted to be, in that world.
I stepped out into the dressing-room hallway, where the Twin was sitting in a chair with curved wooden arms. She was sipping from an espresso cup. The saleswoman fidgeted behind her.
“It’s perfect,” the Twin said. “I think it’s obviously a yes.”
The saleswoman took this as her cue, rushing me and clucking her tongue. “Now, you can pull this off,” the saleswoman said. “Not everyone can.”
“Have you ever not said that?” the Twin snapped at her. Of course she was a top.
Once the saleswoman’s speechlessness had persisted a few beats, the Twin spoke to me. “It’s rad it’s so see-through. Will you shave your pussy?”
“We have plenty of nude lingerie that would go nicely,” the saleswoman said.
“None would also go nicely,” the Twin said.
“What about a slip? A long slip, to the floor?” I said.
“Of course. Let me check what we have,” the saleswoman said and disappeared. “Nudity is not my look. I’m not a model like you,” I said.
The Twin looked as if a sound had buzzed in the distance. She watched me in the mirror. I felt her eyes slide around my body. I put my hands on my hips and posed. An exchange passed between us. We’d been inverted.
“That dress could easily be wrong,” she said. “Like, if you tried to make that yourself, it would look awful.”
“Why would I try to make this myself?” I said with too much ferocity. I thought of my mother’s lumpy homemade dresses.
“All women artists go through a making-their-own-clothes phase,” the Twin said.
“I didn’t,” I said, remembering how Marina’s stolen, hand-dyed dresses had felt swelling around me.
“You’re smart, then.”
I twisted my body around and looked at myself from different angles. I emitted the kind of sigh I’d heard wealthy people make, as if I were tired from a long day of manual labor, though I’d just been standing in front of a mirror.
“Yes, it’s perfect. Okay,” I said.
I started to move toward the dressing room, but the Twin reached out and grabbed the dress. She pulled me close to her and whispered in my ear, “I know how to remove the tag so it won’t buzz when we leave.”
Mirrors surrounded us, and I looked at our position reflected in multiplying fragments, heads together, hers tilted up toward mine, me bent over to be closer. I could feel the heat of her face on mine like when she’d kissed me three times, it was not just our bodies being near to each other, but combinative, referential, and I felt as if I understood it somehow, where the heat came from, what it made her want to do.
“I can’t do it today, though, didn’t dress the part.” She made a face of regret. “It’ll have to be you.”
I looked at her. Her beauty could not be disguised by an old men’s jacket and uncombed hair.
“I can’t do it either, though,” I whispered. “Not, um, not dressed for the part either.” I swept my hand around my face, trying to communicate that my whole body was wrong for the part.
“What do you mean?” she said.
Did I have to say it? I don’t look like you. I may be able to pass as white, but that didn’t entitle me to its perquisites, and I could never pass as beautiful, and not, though I tried, as rich either. I’d worn an old T-shirt and jeans, a dirty tote bag slung over my shoulder, the haircut I’d given myself, the round, fleshy face that looked like a swollen moon, washed every night with drugstore cleanser. And if I got caught, I wouldn’t be able to cry my way out of it.
But in that moment, while she looked up at me in a beseeching sort of way, I wanted the world she lived in to be mine too. How I looked revealed nothing about me, other than that I ought to be protected by everyone. Who needs who?
Resolved, I looked around to see if anyone was watching us. I must have done it wrong, though, because the Twin sighed and shook her head.
“No, no, you blew it,” she said. “So obvious.” She made a moue of distaste.
“I can afford it, though,” I said. I made myself smile, as if I’d accomplished something.
The Twin released the gown. “Oh, okay, then,” she almost shouted. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.”
Recognition, I realized on the drive home. I’d wanted to see recognition in her face, she looking at me, me looking at her, both seeing something familiar. A magic mirror of, not facsimiles, but what was possible. Why did I feel like I’d failed, and not both of us?
That night in my studio, I worked on the largest painting of her, part of a diptych, the last pieces to finish for the show. My desire troubled me. That we recognize each other, an impossible thing to want. In the painting, I made the light come from below, casting shadows near the top of the frame, which made it seem as though she stood on a plinth, above the viewer. She did. Stand above us all. This was how it felt best to me, the most inherent. The painting was taking me weeks, using everything I knew about underpainting to get the most radiant light and shadows, to make her flesh tactile, using green underneath to make her alive with rufescence. But I itched to mar the beauty I was coaxing out of my paint, something to collide with it, it couldn’t be too easy. I mixed charcoal dust with water and sprayed it around her eyes. I did it over and over. It made it look dirty. I stepped back and looked at it, looked at her. The impossibility of seeing, the stygian fog between us. I wasn’t seeing the way I ought to, I wasn’t seeing what was clearly there. I didn’t want to see it. It was a dazzling misunderstanding, voltaic in its wrongness, what it brought to life. Maybe she had seen me. A me I wasn’t yet. A me which, through her, for her, could be like her. She would take me there, but it wasn’t enough only to want her to.