Class - Cecily Von Ziegesar [62]
“There. Snug as a bug.” She rested her hands on her hips, waiting for Patrick to speak. He was the worst conversationalist she’d ever met. “I put some blankets and some clothes in the pack. My dad’s a little smaller than you, but a sweater is a sweater.”
Patrick cracked open a bottle of beer and slurped it greedily. “Mmmm,” he murmured.
Tragedy sat down and picked up Dianetics, paging through the book without reading it. Her hands needed to keep busy and she’d forgotten her Rubik’s cube. “You don’t care how I knew you were in here or why I’m, like, feeding and clothing you, or how come I’m even wandering around at night when I’m supposed to be at home eating drumsticks and dancing to Saturday Night Fever?”
Patrick watched her hands as they worked the pages of the book. “That’s my book,” he said.
Tragedy glared at him. “So?” She put the book down. “There, you happy?”
Patrick cracked open another beer.
“Did you know it was a leap year?” she demanded.
Patrick just sipped his beer.
“Freaky things happen in a leap year.”
He shrugged his shoulders. Every day was pretty much the same to him.
She stood up. “Okay. Well, I guess I’m off. It’s been real.” She pulled the flap back in the doorway. “It’s Thursday night, by the way. Thanksgiving. So relax. Enjoy. You’ve got, like, two or three more nights before the kids get back.”
Not far from the yurt, Tom was locked in his room, painting. The Grannies had sold him enough E to last the weekend. He had six tabs left.
For a project of this size, floor space was key. He’d tipped both beds on end—he couldn’t sleep when there was so much work to be done—but there was still hardly enough room for him to move around. The mini fridge in the corner was chock full of milk. That’s all he needed. E and milk. Food and sleep and social interaction had become irrelevant, especially if the painting was going to be finished by next weekend.
He’d decided to do Shipley’s portrait on small eight-by-ten prestretched canvases purchased at the college bookstore. He’d bought out their whole supply, all forty of them, and laid them on the floor on top of strips of double-sided tape to form one giant rectangular canvas. His aim was to complete the portrait exactly as he’d photographed it, head to toe, Macy’s bag included. Then he’d shift around the canvasses and remove some entirely, so that the final product would look like one of those little puzzles where you move the squares around, after it had been scrambled up. So far he’d completed four canvasses—the two red squares that formed the lower half of the Macy’s bag, and Shipley’s breasts. Now he was working on her hair where it hung below the bag, spaghetti-length strips of plum and black and cream and tangerine.
“I feel it! I feel it!” he shouted, egging himself on. Naked, he squatted over the canvas and blotted his brush on his bare calf. “Nice and easy,” he said, remembering that Nice ’n Easy was a brand of shampoo or hair color. He’d seen the ads on TV.
The phone rang out in the hall. It had been ringing all day. He was pretty sure it was his parents, but he couldn’t very well talk to them when he had so much work to do. And he didn’t trust himself to talk to Shipley. He was too excitable. Oh boy, did he want to kiss her! He’d already made out with her Polaroid. He’d even tried to kiss his own penis, and found he wasn’t flexible enough. Just this week of solitude—long enough to get the painting done—and he’d put the bed back where it belonged, let Shipley in, and show her how much he’d missed her.
He took a step back to admire his efforts, his jaw working as he gnawed the end of his paintbrush. Everything he’d painted before was bad because basically all he’d been doing was sending a big fuck-you message to Eliza, telling her to put some clothes on and stop annoying him. With this one he wasn’t trying to make a statement or tell anyone anything. He was just showing what he saw. It wasn’t about him, he was just the vehicle.