They could tell each other the stuff that is easier to tell a friend than a therapist or family member or doctor. She smiles at the thought; impossible, but still soothing. The residents aren’t allowed to socialize at night. All the doors are locked. No tobacco is allowed on the premises and she doesn’t even know if Joel would smoke, but it seems a fair assumption of someone who would shoot up heroin. There are cameras around the house, some no doubt angled straight onto the terrace. She doesn’t have the vocabulary to speak to a kind-of friend about the stuff she might have needed to speak of. None of it is ever going to happen.

Elisabeth goes over to the easel by the window. She picks up the paintbrush and holds it suspended over an unfinished white patch of her painting in progress. It’s one of her trademark paintings: reds and maroons and watery pinks swirled around and layered onto the canvas in splotches and streaks. This one is called Blood Storms. Some people, probably the ones who go through life mostly with quiet, kind thoughts in their minds, assume Elisabeth’s motives are abstract floral references; an experiential interpretation of the virginal, soft inner petals of roses, or swathes of poppies bleeding into each other on a hillside. Others react viscerally to her explicit references to violence and blood and chaos; her favorite was the critic who called her work ‘hypnotically grotesque’. To Elisabeth they aren’t mutually exclusive interpretations; pain and bloodshed and that which haunts her can surely simultaneously take on a form of beauty?

But tonight she is tired of the evocative but draining imagery. She wants to bring a touch of lightness to the painting, something fun. She smiles at the thought of fun, what a luxury fun is. She retrieves a pressed leaf from inside a picture book about Judy Chicago and places it directly onto the canvas. She draws its outline lightly with a charcoal pencil, nudging its outer extremities into the carefully built layers of reds already there, smeared from one corner of the canvas toward the center. She smiles to herself and colors in the outline of the maple leaf in a bright yellow, just because the color makes her smile. The effect is strange, as if a child has walked into the room and taken liberties with her mother’s painting in an unsupervised moment, bringing an unstudied, fresh energy to the piece, and maybe on some level that is exactly what has happened. She might kick herself tomorrow for having ruined the painting, one of those she’s preparing for Villa Vinternatt’s upcoming vernissage, but tonight it feels possible to laugh by herself in the moonlight, filling in the painting’s blank spots with happy, bright shades of yellow.

23

Kristina