Chapter 7

Real Estate open houses have two purposes. The first is to convince the sellers that the agent is doing something to market their house. The second is to get leads and new clients that are usually sold other houses. Only rarely—less 1% of the time—does an open house result in the sale of the property that is being shown.

So it was logical that on the one weekend that I'm too self-absorbed to sit at my own opens, a rookie agent with no listings of her own would clinch a deal for the house I listed.

That's not such a bad thing. It cuts my commission in half, but that's the half an agent normally expects to get. A 7% commission is split between the selling agent and the buying agent. Of course, that half is split with the broker who holds the agent's license. Still, 1.75% of $750,000 is still over $13,000. Not bad. Especially since it was my second closing in 30 days. I would be banking most of it, just so I'd have something over the off-season in the winter. The chance of making a sale between November 1 and March 1 was less than half that of the rest of the year. I knew agents who had separate businesses in Arizona and closed up shop in the North to spend the winter there.

On the other hand, my prospects for winter were looking up. After our soul-baring weekend, Rita had continued to come to me for instruction in the art of love, but as often as not, we simply met as lovers. We had made a deeper emotional connection. We hadn't had the talk yet—the one about the future and commitment. I'd been pretty shy about committing to any woman since my college Freshman girlfriend that I thought I'd be with forever left me. Oh, she didn't leave me during our Freshman year. She left me the summer after graduation, exactly two months after our first wedding anniversary. I was shell-shocked at the time and almost missed my first week of graduate school because I hadn't emerged from my funk yet. The reason she was leaving me, she said, was that multiple orgasms simply weren't enough for her. Apparently I got an "A" in sex and flunked marriage. For the first time since then, I was allowing myself to become attached. It was a frightening though rather pleasant thought.

And so it was that we found ourselves in the studio one Saturday afternoon with Rita posing as my model.

The pose featured her as a woman clinging to her lover who was turning away. In order to get the setting right, I'd positioned a male manikin facing three-quarters away from my chaise. I had Rita lie on her back on the lounge and then twist her upper body to fling her arms around the manikin. It was a delicious and erotic image when I just stood there to look at it. It didn't hurt that I'd positioned her with my hands, paying special attention to the exact position of her breasts and pussy. All the time I'd given her strict instructions that she had to stay perfectly still as I caressed her, just as her manikin boyfriend did. I'd left her moist and panting as I went to my easel and began laying in the sketch on canvas.

"This would be a lot more fun if Studly here was better equipped," Rita said as she stroked her left hand up and down the manikin's featureless crotch.

"Well, perhaps we can find a substitute for 'Studly' when the posing is over," I said. This was our fourth sitting for this portrait and I was about finished. "That's enough for today. I think we're pretty much done with this."

"Can I see it now?" she asked as she stood up and stretched. I clicked a mental photograph of that position. Her hands were stretched above her head as she went up on tiptoe and arched her body back and forth. I could almost see the scene in front of me.

"Yes, I suppose so." I hadn't let her see the development of the piece and wasn't all that sure I wanted her to see it now. I'd never felt uncomfortable showing my work to a model before. She padded over to me in her bare feet (and everything else) and looked at the canvas. I stood aside. Her brow creased. She tilted her head to one side in a reflection of the position she had held over the course of two weekends and four sittings. The expression on her face was not one of rapture.

"Uh. Doc. I know I'm not an art critic, but..."

" ... but you know what you like," I said finishing the cliché that I'd heard repeatedly over the twenty years of my career.

"No. I know when something really sucks. This is terrible." The passion of her comment shocked me. After painting the canvas of Allison, I'd decided to do a series I'd mentally captioned "Burning Love." I'd laid in a flaming background, repeating the themes from the earlier work with flame dripping from the cock. But Rita was not through with her scathing criticism yet. "Is that how you see me? With your artist's eye am I truly such a bitch? It's not just that it doesn't look like me, it's that it makes me look so awful! I don't ever want to sit for you again!"

"Rita. It's not a portrait of you. It's a portrait of something in my head. The model is just a reference point. I wanted to make a series out of the canvas I did of Allison. I don't think of you personally that way. Lots of artists use the same model for all kinds of works. Just think of Picasso. His mistress was his model, but no one would suggest that his paintings 'looked' like her."

"You've told me about Picasso," Rita said. She was pulling her clothes on angrily—not just the robe she usually slipped into, but dressing to leave. "Where's that book?" I assumed she meant my book of Picasso. I retrieved it and she dragged me over to sit and look at the book. My style was nothing like Picasso, but I'd always admired his work. She began turning the pages, focusing on the paintings of his famous model, Marie-Thérèse Walter, the mother of one of his children. "Look at these," Rita said. "They don't look like her but they look..." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "They look like he loved her."

I opened my eyes. I'd collapsed in bed after Rita left and just thought about what I'd painted until I was so exhausted from my own confusion that I fell asleep. I could see it. I knew what I'd done. I'd simply used Rita as a placeholder as I attempted to paint Allison again. And I hadn't done a particularly good job of it. My original painting had been free. The new one was deliberate and controlled—an inappropriate theme superimposed on an incompatible subject. None of what I'd captured in the earlier painting was present in the second. It was mechanical, not passionate. It showed flames, but it was cold. That fleeting grasp of something that was truly a breakthrough in my art now looked like an unhappy accident that I'd never reach again.

It was late. The room was dark. But something had awakened me. At first, I thought it was just an aftershock of Rita's tearful departure, but something else was nagging at me.

I heard a rustle in the room and reached to turn on the light, but my hand was arrested by a soft but firm grasp on my wrist.

"Rita?"

"Shh. Trust me." It was whispered, but, yes, I was sure it was Rita. I lay still, only moving slightly to help her remove my clothes. The one time I reached for her soft skin, she firmly returned my hand to my side. I couldn't figure out what she was up to.

She pushed me over onto my stomach and then arranged my arms straight down at my sides and my legs straight out with my feet together. Apparently I'd rolled onto a fresh sheet as she tugged a fold edge out from under me and then pulled the opposite edge over my back and tucked it in at my side. She pulled at me and rolled me onto my back again. I was effectively strapped in. I started breathing a little rapidly. I was sure I could get out as long as she didn't tie anything around me. But I didn't know what she had planned. She'd been angry when she left. Was she about to take revenge on me? That simply didn't fit with Rita's character. I was sure she had a purpose, but I still couldn't still my heart racing. I relaxed slightly as she positioned a comfortable pillow beneath my head in exactly the position I like it when I sleep.

Rita, I still assumed it was Rita, placed a sleeping mask over my eyes. It was heavy. A bag filled with some small grain like rice, slightly warm and not uncomfortable, but sealing my eyes closed with no chance of a stray flicker of light impinging on my sight. I could see the burst of colors behind my eyelids that always accompanies pressure on the eyes—mostly reds and oranges with tinges of blue fading into the black at the edges. Gradually the color subsided and there was no signal sent to my optic nerve at all.

Again, I felt her breath on my face as she leaned near my ear. I could feel the goosebumps rising on my flesh as the gentle breeze blew across my neck.

"Trust me?" came the whispered voice in my ear again. This time it was more of a question than a command. A request for confirmation—for permission. I didn't say anything. I couldn't trust my voice to make the right sounds with my heart beating so rapidly. I merely nodded slightly. "Then relax," she whispered.

I felt a pair of earphones being placed over my ears. I moved slightly to get them comfortable expecting to begin hearing pleasant music, or perhaps even a gentle voice through the headset lulling me to sleep. Instead, everything went silent. There was a very slight white noise stimulating my eardrum, but like the colors behind my eyes, I wasn't sure if it was from an external stimulus or if it was simply my nerves filling in blanks that I normally wasn't aware of.

If you plug your ears with your fingers, you might effectively block out most of the ambient sound that surrounds us all the time. Sounds of the house, the furnace, the refrigerator, water in the pipes, outside traffic. You find these sounds replaced gradually by an awareness of your own internal sounds. Your breathing, the rustle of fabric against your hair, your own heartbeat. But the silence that descended on me was complete. I couldn't hear my own body. I could hear nothing outside it.

And time was suspended.

I am an artist, and while that is not synonymous with "drug addict," I have had my occasional brush with mind alteration. There comes a point when smoking a little weed that time slows down. Or perhaps it is that your awareness of time is suspended. Everything moves in slow motion and until you emerge from your stupor, you have no concept of time's passage. You may be surprised when you look at a clock to find that hours have passed, or that only a few minutes have crawled by.

As I lay in my bed with no more movement possible than a twitch of my fingers or toes, no sight or sound perceived, the same feeling of time suspension descended upon me. I had no idea how long I lay there. My heart rate and breathing slowed. I could no longer feel the thudding in my chest, but assumed that I was still alive. After I stilled my racing thoughts and relaxed enough to stop being curious about what she was doing, I discovered I was really quite comfortable. In fact, I drifted back into sleep.

I awoke to featherlike touches on my crotch. I started, suddenly not sure if I was awake or simply lost in a dream of deafness and darkness. My heart started to race again when I realized I couldn't move and just before panic set in I remembered Rita's whispered words. I was in sensory deprivation.

I've dreamed before of losing my sight and remembered being in a huge cave once when the guide turned out the lights to give everyone an idea of what it was like to be in complete silence and darkness underground. The silence was short-lived as people began to shuffle and titter almost at once. But the darkness was complete and awesome. For a few moments, your eyes play tricks on you and you think you see lights, realizing that it is nothing more than your retina repairing itself and your optic nerve still sending the signals that originated before the lights went out. But those afterimages eventually fade. The result, surprisingly, is not blackness. The rods and cones in the retinal layer continue to fire somewhat randomly, even in darkness. The result is what I can only describe as texture. I've tried repeatedly to capture that randomness on canvas, but something about the canvas itself and the reflectivity of the paint overwhelms the texture I remember seeing.

As I attempted to open my eyes beneath the mask on my face, I felt the lids scrape against the fabric. It was uncomfortable and resulted in no more light information than when they were closed. Rita was clever to use the rice or sand bag as a sleep mask. Its satin cover was gentle but unyielding when my eyelids fluttered and the compression of the grains molded the mask tightly to my upper face. There was no chance for light to leak in.