A chill pooled beneath my skin, running every which way like a spilled glass of water. I took my leg back and stood up. Our eyes met—holding for a long second—until he did the same, pulling his hands back into his body, and then the moment was gone, absorbed into the blackness of his house.

“Thank you so much for dinner,” I said. “But—my back is killing me. I should get some sleep”—and then I was out of there, running to my cabin, nearly slamming the door behind me.

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Eleven

A dagger. Or a striper—or a sword. In any supply store, whatever the name, it’s the same kind of brush. I like dagger best. The bristles of a dagger are four to five inches long (about the distance from your middle finger to your thumb), and when you dip them in liquid, they show you what a twirl looks like. Sign painters use them, as do custom automotive painters, because the dagger line is lyrical—wetly calligraphic, capable of becoming both delicately fat and softly thin. Not unlike a marker line, but with more…puddle to it.

They are ultimately not my aesthetic. Still, I sneak them, for compact baby swoops, for a little pizzazz on a rainy day, an orange slice kind of feeling. Then nine times out of ten they are squeegeed down later. Occasionally one of them stays—usually a little ombré gradient with a star on it, something that looks like part of an airbrushed t-shirt—a little hello from Florida no bigger than a square inch. I like to think they are messages to other painters through the vacuum of our collectors’ living rooms: I made this for you. I made this for me. I made this for us.

Daggers are tricky to use. You’ve got to have a hand for them, because otherwise you’re slopping all over the place, and the medium has to be the right kind of refrigerator-temperature olive oil. (You can’t be working with Marmite-ish beeswax or watered-down gouache—not with a dagger. The paint needs to run heavy, like cold blood.) Gorky used them—then de Kooning—then Whitten—and now, me.

Five years ago, two years before she died, Carey Logan had a show at Eliot&Sprain titled YOKEFELLOWS, of bodies curled up together like cats. It was her last sculptural show before she moved to performance work. She was so astonishingly realist in most of the forms, despite (maybe because of?) the classical nature of the materials, that when I spotted a paint line—a long draggy river along a calf—I actually clapped my hand over my mouth in the gallery. A dagger line. It made me smile. Nobody can resist daggers. They are so musical.