As soon as Bengoa was gone, Susana stuck her head out of the kitchen and said, “Don’t pay any mind to that asshole.” With a knitted brow she rummaged through the bag the doctor had brought, as if it were full of shit. “They’re paying him to take care of you, Argenis, not to shame you.” When she tossed the bag and its contents onto the table she didn’t look anything like the person who had run downstairs, smiling, after giving him the book the week before. “What is it you feel when you use it? What is it about it that you like?” she asked. No one who wasn’t an addict had ever asked him that. “I feel good,” Argenis said. “When I shoot up I don’t need anything else.” She had no advice, just looked at him free of judgment, as if he had told her his shirt size. Standing, she pulled her hair into a ponytail and went back to the kitchen. A few minutes later the pot whistled, and they drank the coffee with toast smeared with the peanut butter from a jar he had opened just for her. Then he put on Crosby, Stills & Nash, and she liked it almost as much as the peanut butter. She spoke to him about things she’d seen on her way there, unimportant things like the stuff his mother had told him as a kid to keep his mind off a skinned knee. Argenis examined her face in feigned tranquility, searching for a hint of contempt in her empathy. But Susana wasn’t like that. She came from a reality light-years away from his, one where his addiction was just another phenomenon, and not a scandal.

As Argenis gathered up the breakfast plates, which Bengoa was paying Susana to wash with his father’s money, he said he didn’t want her to clean anymore today and invited her to take a walk instead. Without thinking twice, she slung her purse over her shoulder and put on her shoes. They went down the five flights in an uncomfortable silence that Argenis broke when they got to the street, to offer her a cigarette. They took the route Argenis used each day to go to the Malecón and she told him her father had gone to Florida in the Mariel boatlift and she’d never heard from him again. Susana had studied art history because she loved art but had no talent for drawing. “Neither do most contemporary artists,” he said, and she laughed with her mouth open, choking a bit and throwing her head back. She stopped all of a sudden, as if something about Argenis had been revealed to her mid-laugh, then asked him, “Why don’t you paint anymore?”

“Painting is over,” he explained. “What people want now are Japanese toys, video loops on twenty walls, women who stick barbed wire up their asses.”

The laughter returned, and then, her face serious again, Susana said, “I understand about the public, but what about the pleasure?” The pleasure of painting: the pleasure of dipping a brush, of smearing it onto the canvas, of wetting, crushing, spreading, filling, of smelling something coming to life, the physical exertion of stretching canvas across a frame.