Free The Life Room by Jill Bialosky

where a boy floated in the pool on his stomach with his face in the water, leaving the viewer uncertain if he was alive or dead. The painting was called
Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Boy
.
    She smelled the pungent scent that overwhelmed Adam’s studio for the three hours she sat for him each day, a scent deep and muscular.
    When she turned to acknowledge Adam, the heat and sweat of his body breathed on her skin. His smile illuminated his dark green eyes and his discolored front tooth, snug against the other whiter tooth. He was sunnier once he was out of his studio. Instead of baggy painter’s pants and an oversized T-shirt, he was dressed in a black turtleneck sweater and black jeans. Eleanor experienced that strange disconnect of seeing a person in a setting different than usual. As she looked at him in a new way, no longer simply defined by her relationship to him as his study, she was overcome with admiration and another darker, more unpleasant and powerful feeling: that she wanted him. She quickly tried to bury the sensation.
    “Relax,” he said. “You’re so tense.” He placed his hands on her shoulders and massaged them. “I’m glad you’re here.”
    She continued to study the paintings, particularly the haunting image of the young boy lying with his face half submerged in water.
    “What do you think? Does he compel you?”
    He moved closer, so that they were touching, nearly pushing her forward with the breadth of his body, and inhaled her perfume. She felt the tickle of his breath on the back of her neck. She thought she should not let her feet move from the wooden floor of the gallery or else she would fly forward into the painting. Adam lifted the hair from her neck and piled it into his hand, as if he were drawing it into a ponytail, and then he let it go. A chill ran down her back before he disappeared into the crowd.
     
    At home in her studio apartment, she wondered whether she had felt Adam’s groin push against her or whether she had imagined it. She flushed. She saw his paintings in her mind, that naked little boy alone in the tub. She ached with desire.
     
    The next day in his studio she let him unbutton her blouse, and he painted her showing just the hint of her bra. She wore a kilted navy blue skirt and stockings. At the end of three hours, after the alarm went off, she dressed, put on her coat, and said good-bye. When she arrived home she felt she could still smell the fumes on her clothes from the oils in his studio. She thought of the canvases against his walls in various stages of completion. She undressed, sat on her bed in a tank top and underpants, and held the blouse she had worn in his studio to her face. She was supposed to finish a paper that was due that week, but she couldn’t bring herself to work. She thought about Adam undressing her in his studio. The smell of paint intoxicated her. She remembered his words. “It’s this strange twilight zone between rationality and unreason where the artist hunts,” he had said, looking at her ravenously. His hands were rough and chapped from the strong soap he scrubbed with after he finished painting for the day, and they had been cold against her skin, sending a charge through her body. She held the longing inside her until it had reached its finest luster. In bed she thought about him a long time before she fell asleep. She felt a pain in her chest, as if it had cracked open just slightly, and her eyes filled with unexpected tears. She did not once think of William.
    But William was in her dream, and in her dream she loved him the way she loved herself, so when he was gone she was missing. In the dream she felt vacant to herself, a stranger, and the long great tide of missing him formed a central artery inside her.
     
They were skating round and round in a large circle, feeling the wind tear at their face, and they circled the rink at least a hundred times—she had that many circles inside her with the boy
,
that many hours