Dirty Diana

Chapter 11

Chapter 11

—

I accidentally jab my finger with an embroidery needle and suck on the tiny droplet of blood until it disappears. Some of Justine’s other studio assistants wear thimbles while they work, but my fingers are too clumsy with them on. The jabs don’t hurt, just an occupational hazard of working with a fiber artist.

It’s been over a week since Marfa, and Jasper and I have spent almost every night together, meeting up at my place after I get home from catering shifts, and sometimes staying up until dawn. I’m grateful that today Justine’s loft is quiet and empty. On Friday afternoons, it’s just me and Henri, the bright blue betta fish who swims soundless laps in his burbling tank.

It had been Alicia’s idea to apply for this job, which we did together, three years ago.

We came across Justine’s flyer near the campus gym. Her listing read: Must have nimble fingers. Strong wrists. Thick skin. Be savvy enough to leave your personal shit at the door and out of my studio. Only Good Energy need apply.

“We have very good energy.” Alicia pulled a tab from the flyer. “And if she likes us, she’ll introduce us around.”

This is the hopeful trade-off made by every artist’s assistant in town: low pay, no raises, no vacation days, no health insurance. In return, the chance to be mentored by someone you admire and thrust into the orbit of art world connections.

Justine’s space is sprawling, the second floor of a two-story building. It’s above a microbrewery, so the stairwell always smells like hops, but the concrete floors are thick enough to drown out any noise from below. The small kitchen has a fridge, a coffee maker, and an endless supply of free green tea and raw almonds, the only thing I’ve ever seen Justine eat.

Justine’s work is wildly beautiful, very popular, and hugely time-consuming to produce. She dreams up the intricacy of each piece, and once she’s mapped it out, her assistants help to execute it. Some assistants last weeks and some, like me, last years. For the past several months, the same three of us have spent long days together working on a huge two-hundred-square-foot piece inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Map”: “More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.” Justine’s show is already scheduled, but this piece is not nearly finished.

Justine is using different textures of shaggy yarn in tufts of olive and golden yellow to represent landmasses, and these are surrounded by a mix of lapis and Aegean blues. I have been embroidering the tiny black letters meant to represent the names of territories labeled on a map. The words are supposed to look like something stamped onto the landscape, the ink waterlogged and bleeding into the sea.

When she’s here, Justine carefully checks our work, and when she leaves us alone, which is most of the time, the loft is like a confessional. We tell stories about our lives and trade secrets about our families and complain about how little time we have for our own work.

About once a week, Justine’s husband, Mark, trails her to the studio. On days when he brings his enormous St. Bernard, Jeffrey, whoever among us is quickest to react will grab Jeffrey’s leash and take him for a very long walk. Those who remain are stuck with Mark’s company.

Mark always looks ready to set sail on some expensive yacht. He wears shorts in any weather, blue oxford shirts that strain across his belly, and a large silver watch on his furry wrist. He likes to drag a chair into the middle of the workspace, cross his legs at his naked ankles, and regale us with mind-bogglingly dull stories of his adventures, liberally peppered with self-compliments and breezy chauvinism. There’s nowhere to run. One morning, he spent what felt like an hour breaking down the difference between a New York bagel and the “bagels you get here.” That was the day Alicia quit. She said she could handle jabbing herself with an embroidery needle, but she couldn’t take being jabbed by Mark’s toxic boringness. She said this to me. To Justine she said only, “I have carpal tunnel, sorry.” She left after lunch and never came back.

I think about quitting, too, and finding a job that pays better, but I like Justine too much. If she’s in the right mood, her stories of being a starving artist in New York City are inescapably romantic. Who cares if she actually spent a night at the Chelsea Hotel in its dingy heyday, or whether it’s true she once pelted pedestrians with water balloons from an East Village fire escape alongside Bjork?

I sit up straighter and exhale. Jasper is in my head. I focus on my stitching. I want to see him tonight. To feel his hands on me. I stand up and stretch and take a lap around the tapestry.

When Alicia first discovered how much one of Justine’s pieces sold for, she hooted with laughter. “Holy shit! Fifty thousand dollars? Can you even walk on it?”

“It’s not a rug, Alicia. It’s tufted art.”

She smiled. “Fifty points if you get down with Justine on her new tapestry. A hundred if you somehow keep embroidering while you do it.”

I hear Justine coming up the back stairs, the familiar sound of gold bangles on her delicate wrists. I stretch out my fingers and get back to work. I haven’t done anything wrong, but my cheeks flush anyway.

We call hello to each other as Justine slips off her shoes and pads across the loft. I feel her hands on my shoulders and I know she’s peering over me, watching my fingers work.

She sighs. “I wish I could clone you.”

I smile to myself but don’t say anything.

She rubs my shoulders. “Are you cold? It’s freezing in here.”

She takes off the cashmere scarf she’s wearing and wraps it around me. It’s even softer than I imagined and smells like her tea rose perfume. “Thanks.” I pull it closer around my neck.

“You look exhausted.” She sits across from me and fingers the wool, flipping it back and forth to study the work. “Do you ever sleep at all?”

Justine looks healthy and well-rested. She’s got to be at least twenty years older than I am, but her skin is smooth and dewy. I once asked Alicia how Justine managed to glow like that. “Snails and leftover penises from circumcisions,” she said. When she saw that I thought she was joking, she added, “Seriously, she uses this crazy-expensive lotion with foreskin and snail slime in it. One of my dad’s ex-girlfriends uses it too.”

It’s not just Justine’s skin—it’s also her hair, her smell, her posture. The way she moves around the loft in bare feet and no bra, her black T-shirt fitting so perfectly.

“Let’s take a break,” she says to me. “Have some tea.”

I steal a glance at the clock. Only thirty-three minutes till I can go, and I really want to finish this square.

She walks over to the kitchen area and sits on a stool, her legs crossed, looking at me expectantly. I tap on the electric kettle and pull down a teapot and two cups, all made by a ceramicist friend of hers. I imagine Justine’s home must be full of beautiful things like these.

I tip some Japanese sencha into the teapot, and then I fill a dish with raw almonds and set them in front of her. “Lovely,” she says. “So what is it? Why do you look so tired? It’s not just today. I don’t think I’ve seen you lately without purple circles under your eyes.”

Justine sounds as though she’s hinting at something, and I wonder if Jasper has told anyone about us. It’s a small circle, the art world in Santa Fe.

I burn my tongue on the too-hot tea. “Barry’s had a ton of gallery shows. It’s good to have the shifts.”

“Anything good?”

Justine has a healthy competitive streak.

“Not really.”

“Nothing?”

And then, wondering if she has heard something about us, and because Jasper has told me frustratingly little about what he thinks of Justine, just that he admires her work ethic, I bring up his name. “There was a photographer whose stuff I liked. Jasper—”

“—Green. Gorgeous, right?”

I’m not sure if she means him or his work. I blush and realize how much she can read on my face.

“Watch out for that one. He’s trouble, I hear.”

I flinch, like she’s pricked my bubble.

“You really need to prioritize yourself, Diana.” She puts a hand on my knee. “How can you nurture your art if you don’t nurture yourself?”

Ugh. Sounds like something framed above my dentist’s toilet, Alicia would have said.

“You’re right.” I know from booking her appointments what Justine’s version of “nurture” includes—her Reiki healer only accepts (a lot of) cash, same with the woman who comes to her house to give her lymphatic massages and colonics.

I shift on my stool. “I’ve been staying up too late. It’s just a money thing right now. I need both jobs…”

Justine’s forehead is scrunched.

“You’re very talented, Diana. You’re the best assistant I have. And money isn’t everything. What’s money? I slept on floors when I was your age. I ate scraps. I did nothing but my art, and now look at me.” She sweeps her arm around the room—and for a moment, her smile falters. She looks down at her hands, twists the ring on her finger. “Mark didn’t build this.”

She announces it like the answer to a question I didn’t ask. “Of course not,” I say. Is that what she thinks I think? That everyone thinks?

“No, it’s okay, I see you eyeing it.” She gives me a shy smile. She holds up her left hand, showing off her enormous diamond and ruby ring.

“When I first met Mark, I thought, No way. None of it’s for me, marriage, compromise, none of it. But then, instead of getting harder, it all got easier. With Mark came a different kind of freedom.”

She slips the ring from her hand. “Try it on. See how it feels on your finger.”

“Oh, that’s okay.” It’s as if she wants me to hold a thin glass vase and my hands are made of butter.

“Diana, don’t be shy.” Justine drops the ring into my palm.

I slide it onto my ring finger.

“You have to be practical, Diana. Yes, pour yourself into your work, but don’t make yourself sick.” Her gaze lingers on what I guess are the circles under my eyes.

“Right,” I say.

I feel the flush return to my face. Sometimes I’m not sure what Justine is trying to instigate. She gazes at me benignly. She gets up and pulls my portfolio off the bookshelf, where it’s been waiting since last month when she promised to have a look.

She places it on the counter in front of me and opens it. “It shouldn’t have taken me so long.”

“Those works are older…” I say as she flips through photographs of my paintings. I wish they were better lit, maybe they’d pop off the page more. Or maybe the colors I chose are just too muddy.

After several quiet minutes she stops at a painting of a woman named Clea, sitting next to a blank-faced man on a bench. They’re in a garden maze, two figures in color against a black-and-white background. I painted strings of words in rose-shaped formations all around them—Clea’s description of the fight they’d just had in the park. The type is so small, I’m not sure Justine can make it out. “To me, this one is the most interesting,” she says. I peer at the image. It’s one of the first in a series I’d done last summer, and the brushstrokes are too thick. Justine taps it. “This has all the energy of the others rolled up in it. Like they were all practice to get to this.”

She flips through the rest with thoughtful nods and I watch closely to see which paintings she responds to, taking careful mental notes. Then, she shuts the book with a kind of finality. “I’m so glad we had this talk,” she says. “It’s important to me to be a good mentor to the girls who work for me. To take care of you.”

“Thanks.” I rinse my teacup in the sink. “We all really appreciate it.” And by “we” in this moment, I’m pretty sure I speak only for me and Henri, swimming laps in his tank.

“Good,” she says, nodding. “Well. You should get to the dry cleaner.”

For a second, I’m confused. Does she think I work at a dry cleaner too? “Sorry?”

“You didn’t see my note? I need you to pick up my dry cleaning. I leave for L.A. tonight. I need that silly dress for an opening.” She’s already on her feet. As she walks past me, she reaches for me and for a moment I think she’s going to embrace me.

“One last thing,” she says. Then she gently retrieves the cashmere she’d draped around my shoulders. “My scarf. I need it for the plane.”