Exit Party
It’s three in the morning, lights burning overhead but also a few candles lit here and there around Olivia, to improve both the light and the overall atmosphere. The atmosphere’s wrong, though, and he can’t fix it.
“Okay,” he says, “let’s stop for the night.
” This happens to him often when they’re together, a flash of irritation and a desire to be alone.
But she doesn’t respond, and when he looks, she’s fallen asleep.
He positioned her with the side of her face against the back of the couch, looking at him, and she’s drifted off without moving.
She looks softer when she’s sleeping, like a much gentler person.
It seems cruel to wake her, sleeping so peacefully, so he puts the portrait away and does what he was planning on doing once she left: he prepares a new canvas, brews some coffee, and sets up a palette in black, green, blue, and white.
Lately he’s been thinking of a painting of an ocean that he saw when he was a boy, actually a painting of a foundering ship in which the ocean was the villain, one of those epic-tragedy-at-sea situations.
Ships aren’t interesting to him, but he likes painting waves.
How cold is the water? Not very, not deadly cold anyway.
When did he last swim in the ocean? Long ago.
Lucas is not a sporting man, and this was true even before the heroin.
He likes being indoors, with his work, at night.
It’s three forty when Lucas glances at the clock again, the deepest hour.
His mother hates that he stays up all night, that’s what he’s thinking about when he resumes painting.
It can’t all be ocean. He should break it up somehow.
A person? Perhaps not a whole person. Perhaps just a person’s feet as they slip under the surface.
When he was a teenager, new to the joys of not sleeping, his mother liked to quote Edna St. Vincent Millay at him, her famous little poem about unsustainable habits:
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
“Ah, my foe,” he says aloud to Olivia, and she stirs but doesn’t quite wake up. (Also foe isn’t the right word either.) His mother always quoted the poem as a warning—it will not last the night!—but that’s a misreading, or so it seems to him.
“Obviously working this way is unsustainable,” he says, still to Olivia, “but literally no one expects that.”
“No one,” she says, startling him considerably. She stretches, blinking. “How long was I out?”
“Maybe an hour,” he says, unsure if this is true. When he’s deep in the work, time is elastic. She rises, yawning, and comes around to look at the canvas. He watches her face while she looks at the waves, and he hates that he cares so much whether she likes the work or not.
“Is it going to be all water?”
“No, there’s going to be a diver,” he says. “I think just feet disappearing into this corner, right up here.”
“Just the feet?” She’s gathering her things, putting on a red tweed coat with wine stains on the left sleeve.
“Yeah, because he’s diving.” Christ, she’s irritating.
“Not bad,” she says, and then leaves without saying goodbye, which is one of her signature moves.
She thinks it’s bold. He locks the studio door behind her, thinking about the poem again.
The point isn’t that the candle won’t last the night.
Everything is temporary. The point is that the light is gorgeous while it lasts.