Radiant Days Read Online Free PDF Page B

the Corcoran; not to eat, anyway. Instead she took me to rib joints, an Ethiopian place in a storefront out on Georgia Avenue, a Japanese place where I ate sushi for the first time. Occasionally I’d hang out with people from school: another painter named David Fletcher; Tiny, a heavyset red-haired girl a year older than me who partied with a local band called the Bad Brains.
    “So you got some kind of thing going with Clea Anersson, or what?” Tiny asked me once in the Corcoran’s lobby. “I thought she was married.”
    “We just hang out,” I said. “I like to draw her.”
    Tiny squatted on the floor beside me. She poked her hand into my bag and withdrew my makeshift portfolio, two pieces of cardboard tied together with a typewriter ribbon I’d found on the street. She undid the grimy ribbon and began to examine the scraps of paper and brown paper bags inside.
    “These are all yours?” Her brow furrowed as she gazed at a portrait of Clea, naked, her body striated like a zebra’s. “They’re really good. They’re like—I don’t know what they’re like. This thing you always do—”
    She pointed from one torn sheet of paper to the next. On each I’d superimposed a blurred charcoal image over the original pastel drawing, so it looked like a double exposure, or as though the page had gotten wet. “That’s really cool. Like a broken mirror or something.”
    “When I was little I had a bad astigmatism. Seeing double. I had my eyes operated on but I can still see things that way. Like this—”
    I let my eyes go out of focus so that the world shimmered and split, Tiny’s face superimposed upon the wall behind her even as she laughed and raised her hands.
    “Stop, stop! You’re crossing your eyes!”
    “I know.” I grinned and let my vision snap back into focus. “I used to think I could do magic like that. Like curse people. The evil eye.”
    Tiny laughed again, then looked over at me, puzzled. “Why aren’t you ever in class? I thought maybe you just didn’t have the chops for what we’re doing, but…”
    Her voice trailed off. She stared at the sketches in her hand, finally slid them back between the cardboard covers, returned the bundle to me, and stood. “You should be teaching that life class. Not her.”
    Week after week, Clea and I looked at paintings, not just at the National Gallery but also the Washington Project for the Arts and d.c. space. Divey places where we could drink and where I ate more stuff I’d never heard of: hummus and spring rolls, mussels in garlic and white wine.
    “What, did you live on Fritos back in Norville?” Clea shook her head, sipping her wine while I scarfed down papadums and vindaloo at the Taj Mahal.
    “Pretty much. Pancakes and Karo syrup—my mom used to make that for dinner a lot.”
    “What’s Karo syrup?”
    “And fried potatoes. I dunno what Karo’s made of. Sugar? And potato chips smashed up in cottage cheese. That’s really good.”
    “White trash food.” Clea laughed. She leaned across the table, close enough that I could smell her, jasmine and cigarette smoke. “Right? You little white trash wild girl. Give me some of that vindaloo.”
    She paid for everything. Afterward we’d lie in my squalid room on Perry Street, the window open to let in the scents of car exhaust and honeysuckle, kids from the nearby projects carrying boom boxes that trailed funk and go-go, a bass pulse that kept time with the beat of my blood. The truth is, I didn’t care much one way orthe other about sleeping with Clea; what I wanted was to capture that sleek, detached beauty on a wall or page or fold of canvas. I thought of my father deer hunting back home, before my mother left: how he’d be gone for a day, sometimes an entire weekend, only to return empty-handed, his old Remington cradled in his arm like a puppy. He never bagged anything, but he never looked happier than when he’d seen a buck in the woods, or spied on a feeding doe beneath his tree