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stand.
    “You never saw anything so beautiful, Merle,” he told me once, popping a beer. “That doe just came right up and browsed, so close I could’ve done like that—”
    He let his hand rest gently on my head, just for an instant. “That’s how close she was. I could smell her breath. Like sweet fern.”
    “How come you didn’t shoot?” I asked.
    He sipped his beer. “I could have,” he said after a minute. “Easy. But then I wouldn’t have been able to watch her. I decided I’d rather just look.”
    That’s how I felt about Clea. She knew a lot about artists, and I liked going with her to the Hirshhorn Museum, and listening to her talk about people I’d never heard of—weird names, Rothko, Ruscha, Miró—and some I did recognize, like Andy Warhol and Picasso. And I liked that she liked my work, though it soon got uncomfortable in my life-drawing class, where I knew some of the other students were aware of our relationship.
    Mostly I just loved drawing her obsessively, stretched across the mattress, her hair silvered with cigarette ash, sweat poolingin the declivity around her navel. She was so beautiful, and I loved it when she was asleep and didn’t even know what I was doing. It was like sketching the ocean then, or clouds, something unfathomable that momentarily could be seen through the haze of smoke and dust in my bombed-out room. I painted the walls with acrylics I stole, painted the door. Once I painted the floor around the mattress while she slept. She woke, panicked—she was late to meet Marc—and threw a fit because the paint hadn’t dried yet.
    “Goddamn it, Merle, I have to go!”
    “So wait five minutes, it’ll be dry.”
    She swore furiously, grabbed her bag, and tried to jump over the wet spots. She didn’t make it.
    “You stupid,
selfish
—” She staggered to her feet, a grid of gamboge and black across one leg of her designer jeans. “You and your redneck shit.”
    What Clea really hated was that she couldn’t take along the floor. Whenever she left my room, whatever I’d drawn that afternoon went with her—paintings, sketches, portraits done hastily on wadded-up paper bags, torn cardboard. I don’t know what she did with them. She lived in Potomac, a ritzy suburb. In all the months we were together I never saw her house, never met her husband.
    I didn’t complain, not about her taking my sketches, anyway. It seemed like a fair shake. She picked up the tab, bought my dinner at places where we wouldn’t run into anyone she knew; paid for my cigarettes and gallons of cheap bourbon from CentralLiquor, pastel pencils and drawing paper, charcoal, oil pencils, tubes of paint and brushes, Magic Markers.
    And in April, she took me to New York City for a long weekend.
    “Marc’s got a bunch of interviews in Chicago. Get your stuff, meet me at Union Station. A friend of mine’s got a fellowship at Berkeley this semester; we can crash at her place in the Village. There’s a train at five. I’ll meet you after I get done with my Wednesday seminar.”
    We arrived in a downpour. There was trash in the streets, rats humping along the curb outside Grand Central while a scummy little river rushed past, filthy water carrying cigarette butts, wads of newsprint, a child’s sneaker. The air smelled of roasted chestnuts and hot dogs, marijuana smoke drifting from a darkened doorway, the wet-laundry reek of steam hissing from manhole covers. I huddled beneath an overhang while Clea snagged a cab, ignoring the shouts of a businessman running up behind us.
    “Hey, that’s
mine
—”
    We piled inside, and she slammed the door in the man’s face.
    Clea’s friend had a loft downtown, in an abandoned warehouse turned into studio space for artists, spare steel-and-brick cages crosshatched with rooms and tunnels assembled from plywood, cardboard, rusted metal culverts, chain-link fences, all of it ringing with music pumped from dozens of boom boxes and turntables. A different beat from