Free Stray Love by Kyo Maclear Page A

on your mind, Pippa?”
    She looked down at my hand and answered, “My father.”
    “What about your father? Did he go somewhere? Why do you look so sad, Pippa? Is your father okay?”
    She looked at me for a moment, and then with a strange half-smile said, “Don’t let it concern you, Marcel. My father will get better.”
    One day, when Pippa left her flat to run an errand, he checked her coat pockets, her desk, her purse. I begged him to stop but he would not. When I asked what he was doing, he said he was looking for his keys. When Pippa was home, he began listening to her end of the phone conversations.
    Once when she was at our place and in the middle of doing dishes, he informed her that he didn’t want her having dinners or parties that included men any more. “They’re all obsessed with you,” he said.
    When she said he was being ridiculous, he whipped a wet dishcloth at the window. Then he drove his fist into the cupboard door and almost broke his hand.
    While Pippa prepared an ice pack and studied the damage, he winced and moaned, “Why do you do this to me? Do I deserve this? Do you have any idea what you’ve put me through?”
    “Oliver, you know perfectly well it’s in your head. You do it to yourself.”
    “In my head?” He glared at her in disbelief. “How dare you!”
    A second later, we watched him grab his coat and stagger out of the flat, down the steps, across the street. Pippa stared after him with her hands clenched at her sides. “Don’t worry,” she said, with a weak smile. “Everything will be fine.”
    But later that evening when he hadn’t come home, she seemed less sure. “What’s
wrong
with him?” she said, staring at the broken cupboard door.
    The next morning her eyes flitted over me as though I were part of the furniture. I felt my whole body grow cold. I watchedher stand up, and make her way towards the door, and then I listened to the clang of the front gate as she walked away. Now it was my turn to cry.
    T ONIGHT , when Iris finished her book report, she wanted to know if I thought artists noticed things more than average people. Do they have stronger vision? Would they make better crime scene witnesses? I didn’t know what to say, but the question made me consider my own declining perceptual powers. I used to really look at things. I’d look and look and then I’d store details away for the future. At some point I stopped looking closely and I don’t know exactly when that happened.
    It’s a sad paradox that expertise has made me less watchful. Perhaps that’s why the wiser artists venture into unknown territory—to disrupt that fatal momentum. They know that art requires a balance of experience and mystery, control and surrender.
    Iris is grinding an ink stick against a flat wet stone while black ink spatters her arms and shirt. A few minutes ago, when I relented and opened the door to my studio, her eyes lit up immediately: the overladen shelves, the tins, sticks, brushes, my old-fashioned dip pens and best Swiss pencils and brand new Pentel colour markers. The desk, which I had custom built, runs around two sides of the room. Now she is walking around without saying much, just gently lifting and touching. She becomes reverential at unpredictable moments. The sky beyond the window and skylight is white, making everything in the studio look crisp and cut-out. It’s the look of jars of ink—glowing black potions—that always gets to me.
    I watch Iris walk over to a lightbox and run a finger arounda drawing I’ve been working on for a feature about ocean pollution.
    “Wow,” she says. “Is there anything you can’t draw?”
    I give her a modest smile and shrug. I have published thousands of drawings, ranging from tiny thumbnails in magazines to large posters in subways. I have drawn everything from plants to animals, celebrities to vagrants, the medical to the architectural. (I do not draw product images, I do not draw dead bodies.)
    She says she’d like