She comes to to me in the afternoon, my old smock, shyly, "Can I. May I use the? And the yellow? I was looking at the sun." "Yes," I say, "You'll need the red, too, the sun is orange." I say, hiding my bitter teeth, "No," she's lost in it already, "the sun is a broken yolk, drooling all over the burnt field," she bites her bottom lip, "can I borrow the browns too?" "They are yours," and I want her to go so, "a five letter word for slowly?" and she smiles and runs away.

We met at a showing, her professor, my old companion, who drifted off to Montana, and came back sun burned and needing to teach. I took her hand next to the Melted Circus, "This one needs friendship," I said, and later when we broke apart and marveled at the cold sweat glistening on our chests she said she trusted me because my fingers were strong and dry. Another cold midnight and she shrieks, I don't have to crawl out of mattress and blink at naked bulb to know she's knocked the easel down, kicked it, is standing on it, and stabbing it sobbing with her fists bloody with oils, thinner, the dry flakes on her arms, face, her visions overwhelming her turning her hair the white of titanium. I find her asleep on the floor shivering amid smears of tired blue streaks of broken oranges.

"Tell me," she says between shaking rum in dusty shot glasses. "Tell me." So I tell her about the tiny galleries in soho, a friend of a friend of a friend, room enough for a small frustrated sculpture and six, maybe seven canvases hanging, one of them mine, sneered at by art students from out of town, and very old gay art collectors in wool suits and winter ties. Then three were mine, then all of them, then bigger galleries, and then, "Don't rush this part," she says, removing her blouse, her flowery skirt, no underwear because she used them to clean her brushes so I go slower, "And they gave me a grant, the NEA, and I was painting all night, I bought new shoes, I ate egg creames and caramels and cut my hair," I drool rum oily gold onto her belly, trace my forgetful fingertips over her hips, the places where she changes color, "And they paid me to make prints, to number them and sign half." "And then?" "And then," she arches her back, "I repaid student loans, I took my father out to lunch, I bought my mother-" but she can't listen to me now, can't hear me and my fingers have gone limp again, my wrists and elbow weak, and so I must use different parts of me, and I cannot speak.

She wanted to cut her hair off like mine, she wanted to shave her head, so she can roll her face around, her scalp in the pigments. She reported me a nightmare she had as we searched our rooms for lost cigarettes. "I was painting, a landscape but it was a self portrait and then I touched the brush to it but it went in and so did my fingers, my arm, I couldn't pull them out." I found one, lit it from the kitchen stove and leaned against the door. She smelled the smoke and walked to me, took it from my lips and I could see the dried purple on her eyelashes and brows. "That's some dream" I said, didn't tell her to dread when the paint runs off the canvas, no matter how thick you make it.

Last week an incident at the bank. I couldn't write my name I had to tell, had to lie, had to show everything in my wallet to buy her flowers, new shoes her first show is in two months.

She paces all day glancing sideways at and old easel where's she's primed unstretched canvases, and smoking, running her clean white fingers through the white in her hair, at dusk exhausted, she sits on the floor in the corner staring at it, gazing and I go to bed, bury my face in the pillows. At dawn she pulls me out by my arms, my hair, "I need more red," as I shuffle stumble into the room where she's thrown chairs at the walls scarring, broken glass all over the floor, my feet crunch into one, almost sweet the sting and my toes are wet, she holds my hand her eyes black and wide, kisses my palm slices one open with a shard of green glass, I am numbed by the sudden handful of blood, she pulls me to her canvas and smears me my red over the top half, my knees are weak because I cannot do this and then I see in the smear a man standing on a rock next to the ocean screaming at its depthlessness, and I begin to trace my thumb over this man but she is shoving me away, trying to work my blood in with the blue and the yellow so I have to push back and finally throw my elbow in her face breaking her nose, blood brighter than mine but I don't care, the man is screaming on the rocky beach.