Free The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch Page B

widow smiles and hangs the painting of the quiet, calm girl on the wall in the common room.
    The girl goes back to her labor. Every color alive.
    Hundreds of faces on wood—as if a forest of faces could come alive.

The Painter
    It’s three A.M. He’s thirsty. His jaw hurts where the fucking filmmaker tried to knock it off his face. He’s lying next to the performance artist on a futon in her loft. She brought him home with her from the hospital, and not the first time. They’ve been doing it for years. The rest of the gang may have exiled him from their little posse, but not her. As long as he stays away from them, away from the woman who used to be his wife, there’s not a goddamn thing they can say or do.
    Whatever. He looks around the performance artist’s room. She’s snoring. He needs to not think. Badly. He reaches for a half-empty bottle of wine on the bedside table and drinks the rest in a single motion. He stares at the blank wall. He gets up. The naked man pads into the kitchen, finds another bottle of wine, opens it, brings it back to the bedroom. Drinks half. He rifles through some CDs there on the floor, finds The Doors. He sticks it in the CD player. Volume low. Sleeping, sexed-up woman. He finishes the bottle. He lies back down.
    Resting there like a wetted corpse, next to this particular lover—who has always looked a little like a Nabokov nymphet to him, her pale taut skin, her pointy tits and hip bones, her girlboy frame, one of those women with an eternally twelve-year-old body—he thinks of his life as a series of women’s bodies. Women’s bodies in every room he enters, every country, every gallery, every bar, every store or post office or restaurant. Married women and single women, professional women and working girls, women in therapy and women with money and women who barely spoke English, junkie women and artist women and famous women and skid-row women and all-used-up women and somebody’s-daughter women. Women of every age. Riders on the storm. He drinks.
    He has a memory of his ex-wife. The body of her, the devouring wife love hole. He thinks of the day he left her, remembers thinking something like, It’s easy . I can leave the room, the house, the country. I can stop pretending to like Miles Davis and Nina Simone and Frida fucking Kahlo and Marguerite Duras. I can go to another house or state or country, and women who are not American might come sit on my face.
    Faces are what he paints. Abstract faces, over and over and over again. He thinks of something someone said to him at his last show, entitled “I Am Cross with God: Intimate Portraits,” a series of abstract faces, eight feet by eight feet. The person had said, “Why do the faces look like they are in pain?” It’d been half an hour into the opening, and he’d had seven glasses of wine. And he’d said back, “The next time you kiss someone you love, open your eyes. Think about what their face lookslike. That close. That familiar. So familiar you can’t bear it. Distorted.” Then he walked away, grabbing two of the wine bottles on his way like a cowboy with a pair of revolvers.
    His ex-wife’s face comes again. But this memory, it’s not like other people’s memories. It’s not a vision of the past. It’s not a flashback. It’s all inside a now . Because that’s how he lives. Inside a now. Like dreams work. An image becomes a story becomes a life becomes a man and then it’s now. The now of wine, the now of sex, the now of painting. So even though the now of her is far away, in a little white hospital room, he sees the used-to-be-them in a now.
    The writer. The painter. She used to wear his pants. He used to wear her skirts. She had a half-shaved head. His hair went down past the middle of his back. She liked it in the ass. He liked it on his back. She made the money. He cooked the food. Still life with wife.
    He sees his wife’s face. In the kitchen of their then-house. He sees the features of her face, in