Read Online Radiant Days by Elizabeth Hand - Free Book Online

well, I’m really happy.”
    I stared at her, too stunned to say anything. The furtive smile grew smug. She tucked a curling strand of hair behind one of her feathered combs, and added, “I know—I don’t look it, but I’m eating like a pig. I’ve gained seven pounds.”
    “I don’t get it. You’re—you said you hated him. And now you’re—”
    I shoved my chair back. People turned to stare at us.
    “Stop,” hissed Clea. “Don’t make a scene, okay?”
    “A scene? You don’t want a scene?” I grabbed a plate, saw a security guard observing me from the other side of the room. I set the plate down. “I want my pictures. All of them, whatever you hid away. Get them.”
    Clea laughed. “What, you think they’re in my bag?”
    “I don’t care where they are. I know you kept some hidden away someplace. I want them.”
    “I really don’t think I have anything, Merle, but if they turn up while I’m packing, I’ll mail them to you.” Her voice sounded prim and high-pitched. “I mean, if I can even find you. I guess I can always send them to your father back in Dogpatch.”
    From the corner of my eye I could see the security guard heading toward us. For a moment I stood there, trying to summon adevastating comeback that would make Clea swallow that simpering smile and tell me it was all a joke.
    I knew it wasn’t. Clea had used me, just as I’d used her. The last year had been like some prolonged game of chicken. Somewhere in the back of my head, I always thought that I’d pull away first, and that would somehow make me the winner.
    Instead I’d lost my scholarship, my squat, most of my work, and now Clea. And at that moment I realized what had mattered most.
    “You should get a job, Merle. Get a decent haircut and some clothes, go home to Norville. There must be an art store or someplace like that. Maybe in a year you could enroll in community college.”
    “I have a job.”
    “Vandalizing vacant lots isn’t a job, Merle. Drawing on walls isn’t a job. Teaching is a job. Washing dishes is a job. You don’t need a BFA for that.”
    “Bring my drawings to the house.” I was so angry my voice shook; it was an effort to keep from throwing my coffee in her face. “They’re mine and I want them back.”
    I turned and walked out of the cafeteria. Janis, the last of my roommates, had taken off that morning, having finally convinced her boyfriend to let her live with him in Adams Morgan. I’d left my bag back at Perry Street; the drawings I’d done most recently were in it, some sketches of Clea along with a few detailed, mandala-like images, eerily beautiful refinements of the rayed eye I used as my graffiti tag.
    But I was too upset to return there right away and face an abandoned house. I could admit that most of my passion for Clea had been fueled by my obsessive desire to paint her. What was harder to accept was that I had cared for her, too: her knowledge of painting and sculpture, the way she’d laugh and gently correct my mispronunciation of words I’d only ever seen on the page; her generosity in sharing the cultured world she’d had access to for her entire life, with its foreign films and exotic food, the sinuous music I had no name for but learned was Miles Davis.
    Most of all, the fact that she alone in the entire world had seen my work and understood it in a flash, without needing any explanation or excuse for what was on the page before her. She thought my paintings and drawings were not just beautiful but important, enough so that she was still trying to keep them.
    In some way that I could neither wholly understand nor articulate, I believed that was a far more powerful bond than mere love. And yet it was a betrayal as well, because we both loved my paintings and drawings more than we ever cared for each other—a perverse love triangle: Clea, me, and my work.
    I didn’t understand yet that it was possible to love someone
through
art. I only knew that I was alone, even if it was