I was his gift, to use as he pleased. But despite my longing, he would not take me.
Chapter Nine
It was the day before the end of the week. I was his gift for another twenty-four hours, and that would be all.
As usual—strange, how quickly things can become usual—he got ready to leave in the morning.
“Paint,” he said. “I left you a gift in the studio.”
With that, he was gone.
When I walked into the art studio, a terrycloth robe draped around my naked shoulders, I gaped at what I saw. A huge canvas, fifteen feet on all sides, lay flat on the floor. I’d filled up most of the smaller canvases in the room, and what had been a room of total white was now cluttered with my pieces. But this canvas was perfectly untouched, and so large that for a moment my mind dizzied with the possibilities.
“Think,” I murmured to myself. “Think.”
My hands gathered their materials as I thought. There had been a painting I wanted to try for a long time. In my mind, it was two forms that looked like trees, growing together intertwined. I didn’t know if this was the right canvas to try it on, and I didn’t know if I could pull it off, but I could try, couldn’t I?
As I painted, my frustrations grew. The painting was so big that I couldn’t get a good look at the whole of it, and I was relegated to painting it in parts, bit by bit.
Lunch came and went. Jake had taken to having one of his servants stop by to drop off a sandwich at the door of the art studio, but when they knocked this time I shouted for them to leave me alone. Stupid food. Stupid art. I wasn’t hungry. I could eat after I’d finished.
I used rollers to put in the background colors, but when I stepped back I frowned in dismay.
No. Not quite like that. The light wasn’t right. Everything was the same value, nothing stood out.
I backed away from the huge canvas and tried on a smaller one, a rectangle. I sketched out the crude lines of what I had in mind, then blocked in the colors. It took me about an hour to get the shapes the way I wanted them. I squinted at the smaller piece. It looked alright, but the large canvas was square, and I didn’t know quite how to crop it down.
“Square canvases,” I said, riffling through the canvases I had left. None of them were perfect squares—I’d used up all of those. I looked at the pieces I’d already done, but it hurt me to think about painting over them.
Then I looked over at the black door.
Storage, he’d said. What if there was a square canvas in there I could use?
No. He’d specifically told me not to go in there. I shook my head and turned back to the painting. I tried a different shade of blue for the background, something a little lighter.
It took a while just to cover up the parts I’d already painted, stepping carefully around the parts that weren’t dry. Finally I put the last block of color in and set my brush aside. I went to the bottom of the canvas and stared at the damned thing.
“ARGH!”
It was wrong, all wrong. Jake had given me this gift, and I’d wasted it. The afternoon was almost over, and he would be back soon, and I had nothing, absolutely nothing to show for it. I sat down with a thud on the edge of the canvas, looking balefully over my paintings.
Today was the last day. Would I even get to keep these? Where would I put them, even if he did let me keep them?
Useless, completely useless. And, just as quickly as I’d realized my painting was worthless, anger seized me.
“Junk!” I cried, shoving the paintings by the handful into the corners. I went through all of them, one by one. Some of them were flowers, abstract and curving. Some were names, my tag mostly, and these I threw with force against the wall.
It was all useless junk, anyway. I had no real talent. I had no eye for this. I hated that I’d wasted all of this time painting, but mostly I hated that I’d wasted all of these materials.
I slammed my hand against the wall, then kicked a canvas that had fallen over to the floor. In a fury, I went around the room, kicking aside all of the paintings that I hated so much. I went to kick one in front of the storage door and stubbed my toe against the door. A shooting pain stabbed through my foot.
“Shit!” I screamed, not even caring that I was swearing. And then I was slamming my hand against the black storage door, screaming every curse word I’d bottled in for the past nineteen years. I screamed them all, and made up some new ones, and it was only when I heard a clatter of metal that I stopped.
The padlock had broken off to the side. It dangled uselessly on a hinge. God, had I hit the door hard enough to break it? For a split second, I thought idiotically that Jake would make me pay to fix it.
Then I noticed something through the crack in the door, and forgot everything else.