Excerpt: Untitled as of Now

How had these two people come, so fully formed, into my sister’s mind? And that frenetic flow that she had been writing against, where had is been leading? What happened to these two? Why did Magdalene start to write their story? What happened to the girl, to the artist? Did the girl really love the artist? Did the artist die? Were there children and a house in the country and more paintings and portraits? Did the girl even live with him or was this an illicit affair she was having without the permission of her strictly Catholic parents? Would she find true love in a man much younger, an idealistic journalist perhaps, and leave the artist who would crumble away without the solid presence of her body in his studio and die in the arms of a prostitute wearing red silk stockings with a tear in one heel? Would the girl fall into depression, resenting his other women, and would there be furious fights, shouting matches where plates were thrown and paintings were destroyed, culminating in kisses full of desire and panting on the thin bed they shared in a corner of the studio? Would he grow old under her gentle care, and when he no longer knew who or where he was would he still sketch her face, and would she walk down to the sea hand and hand with him to eat ice cream cones, and would she stroke his wasted chest at night and make love to him carefully simply to see the smile on his old face?
I stroked the page and breathed in the world that was painted on those pages and wondered, wondered so hard that I no longer saw the apartment walls and was in a different world. The bronze urn sitting in front of me seemed replete with mystery. If Magdalene had been there, sitting across from me at the table, would she have told me that the story she had written ended in a way I hadn’t thought of, a way I could never have foreseen? The lights from the Reina Sofia were throwing dusty spots of luminescence on the walls and I realized that I didn’t know how much time had passed, that I was sitting there with my fingers barely touching a story that my sister had scribbled, my other hand clutched the pages of the letter I had written to my dead sister, staring at the bronze urn that contained her ashes. We had burned her body, and now there was absolutely no way that she might suddenly come alive again, get up and tell me what the rest of the story was. For a moment I pondered unscrewing the lid, mixing her ashes with water to try to reconstitute her like a packet of Cup-o-Noodles, in hopes that she might spring back to life. Instead, I folded the ragged edged notebook pages of my latter and stuffed them into the envelope. I cut my tongue licking the edge of the flap and it stung with the salty taste of blood. Closing the envelope firmly I tilted the urn to one side and tucked my letter underneath.
Then I rose and went into Magdalene’s bedroom, turning on the light. The morning after I had arrived in Spain, Magdalene had showed me the full length mirror she had installed on one of her closet doors just the week before.
“I think it is necessary to get a good look at yourself once in a while,” she said, studying her outline in the reflection. “I’ve been walking around naked all week.”
I closed the curtains on the window into the Plaza and then open the closet. Magdalene’s red dress, the one she always looked so good in, was hanging in between a pair of jeans and a long grey cardigan. I stripped down to my underwear and bra, then slipped the dress over my head and feel the deliciously soft fabric slide down the sides of my body. It smelled faintly of cigarettes. Magdalene must not have washed it since the last time she went out. I stepped back to look at myself in the mirror.
The dress still did not fit. It swam around me instead of hugging my figure, yards of fabric where I should have had hips, breasts. I tried pulling the fabric tight around my torso, gathering the extra in my fist at my side, but then it just looked stretched strangely over my frame. Sighing, I pulled it up over my head and hung it back in the closet, in between the jeans and the cardigan. Stepping back again I looked at my body, thin and almost bony, small-breasted, with almost no butt. I traced my fingers along my collar bone that spreads like wings above the inadequacy of my chest, the most beautiful thing about me, and wondered if anyone will ever look at me with desire. I closed my eyes and pretended my fingers are a man’s fingers, touching my tingling collarbone, caressing the lines of my belly, running down my shoulders and arms and raising goose bumps on my flesh. I saw Raoul’s dark eyes in my mind, his chin and lips, and I strained towards them, breathing more quickly. The air was full of musk and lavender and there was cool breath on my neck.
My eyes flew open, but there was no one in the room except my reflection.