“Your shirt don’t get along with your pants,” she tells me.

Thick accent. Thin lips. Hair a blond pile atop a narrow face. Arms blue with tattoos, like tulle, from her slender wrists to her lovely shoulders. Plus a major tattoo on her left hip, visible when she removes her leather jacket: a sideways scene of a pirate swinging from a broken mast.

“The expression you’re looking for,” I say, “is goes with. My shirt doesn’t go with my pants.”

Her history is familiar to me. When she first got into the art biz, she slept with the collectors. These days she sleeps with painters. She takes me to her condo, kicks off her cowboy boots. Her feet are a mess. She has the equivalent of five big toes on each foot. No. Five big toes that have been crushed flat.

“This is what dancing pretty does to you,” she explains.

She’d spent her earliest years on point. Spinning her toes big and flat.

She dances for me. No music in her underfurnished condo, but she dances like an angel. Rife with eros, she is.

By morning, she had me signed to her agency. Over lunch, she sellsthree of my shittiest canvasses to a youthful investment banker. Her tits are that good.

+

I have a reputation as the best behaved artist in New York City. I am punctual. I am polite. Sincere. I write timely thank you notes. I behave at parties. I am respectful to those deserving my respect and I avoid those who are not. I am generous when I am flush. I repay loans.

I am productive and an effective networker. I work eight to ten hours a day in the studio or en plein air. I pay my models triple scale for long sessions and I do not try to seduce them. Though I am still a young painter, I mentor those just starting out, guiding them through the museums and bringing them along to the right galleries.

Many of my colleagues warn me against working with Sibella. I tell them she is good to me, that she is good for my work.

She buys me clothes and gets my hair restyled. She gets me to the gym. She sells my work.

She has three lethal dimples, two on her left cheek and one high on the right cheek. Her teeth are fierce. Her eyes are too. She has a movie star’s control of her gestures. She smells like a yoga mat.

I ask her, “That first night we were together. Did you slip something into my drink? A drug to enhance my performance?”

She dismisses the question, brings me a small cup of weak tea at midnight and lures me to her bed.

+

I call her to my studio to show her a few new paintings. Bigger canvases, as she’d asked. But she is underwhelmed.

“Why so dainty?”

She wants to know why my new work is so dainty. I feel I could cry. I take her in an embrace and lead her toward the bed that I keep in the back of the studio.

She pulls away from me. “Don’t hide behind your erection,” she says.

“I want to paint you.”

“No,” she says, offering no reason.

“If I can’t paint you, I won’t paint.”

“Suit yourself.”

“If you leave me, I’ll paint you anyway and I will paint you hellish.”

“I can sell hellish,” she says.

She reminds me of the terms of our contract. I want to ask her where she has been for the last three weeks. I want to know why she ignores my texts and voicemail messages.

I break the paint brush in my hand and then a dozen more that are within my reach.

She claps her hands. “More,” she says.

I punch my fist through a wet canvas, throw it at the wall.

Her clapping becomes rhythmic. “More! More! More!” She is chanting.

I break all my brushes, snap every one of them. I stomp on my fresh paint tubes. I mean business.

She stops her clapping and goes silent for a moment. She takes pictures of my demolished studio with her cellphone.

“You’ve done well,” she says.

I feel ashamed. I make a mental tally of paints wasted, the brushes and canvases.

She begins to undress. “I want you to paint me hellish,” she says.