"You don’t mean it,” he said.
"I do.”
"It’s worth thousands. It’s Degas.”
"He’s your favorite, not mine. Take it.”
Slowly he raised his hand and took the sketch from her.
"There,” she said. "Now we’re exactly the same. You fucked me. I paid you. This is how it works.”
His eyes were nearly red with fury. She smiled.
"You are a whore,” he said.
"Not today. Today I’m buying. So what does that make you?”
He left her then without another word.
He took the sketch with him.
Mona came off the desk. She didn’t want to put her clothes on, didn’t want to rejoin the real world. She had tried and failed. The world held nothing for her anymore. She wanted only Malcolm, but she had sent him away, ended their arrangement and she had no idea how to contact him again, how to beg him to come back.
Exhausted, spent, and sorrowful, she walked around to the book on the floor that had fallen while Sebastian had fucked her the final time. Without closing the book, she picked it up and studied the page it had opened to when it fell. The image on the page was of a painting called Der Blutende. "The Bleeding Man.” The date was 1911 and the artist was Viennese painter Max Oppenheimer, a Jewish artist Hitler had labeled a "degenerate,” according to the caption. The painting was of a young man with dark hair. He had some sort of gauzy white garment falling down his thighs, partly revealing his flaccid penis. The man’s body was curved to the side as if he were in agony. His eyes glowed with pain and he held his hands to the center of his chest where blood was spattered and spurting. Did the blood come from his hands? Or from a wound on his chest? Apparently no one knew for sure. But Mona knew from one glance that the beautiful young man was bleeding from his heart, and he had to use his own hands to hold the heart and the blood inside himself.
She touched the man’s face in the painting and loved him. How could she not love such a perfect picture of a broken heart? She wished she could crawl into the painting, hold his naked body to hers, and seal the wound in his chest with her own flesh.
"Malcolm,” she whispered. Was he sending her a message with this painting? Had she broken his heart? Was that what he was trying to tell her?
No. Nonsense. She slammed the book shut and pushed it back onto the shelf. The book had fallen off the shelf because a man had fucked her with all his wounded male pride and the earth shook when a man’s ego was wounded. That was all.
She went into the gallery bathroom and washed Sebastian’s semen out of her and off of her as best she could before returning to the back room. The bed called to her. She pulled back the covers. Sebastian hadn’t exhausted her with sex, but he’d worn her out with his tantrum afterwards. She would sleep and when she woke, she would put it all behind her.
Seconds after her head hit the pillow, she fell deeply into unconsciousness and dreamed she woke and saw Malcolm in the bed at her side. She was happy to see him in her dream, even happier that he was naked. She slid her body on top of his and took his cock inside her. He had his hands on his chest and she tried to move them but he wouldn’t let her.
"I missed you,” she said as she rode him.
He shook his head. "You banished me.”
"I didn’t mean to,” she said. He felt huge inside her and it was a relief to be filled the way she needed. "You scared me.”
"I didn’t hurt you,” he said.
"I thought you had. But you hadn’t.” She touched his face, his lips, looked into his eyes so dark as the nights they shared together. "Come back to me, Malcolm. I forgive you. Forgive me too.”
"I don’t know if I can.”
"Why not?”
"Because of this.” He dropped his hands from his chest to reveal a grotesque hole, black and red and smoking, and blood pumping from a severed artery.
She screamed herself awake.
Mona sat up in the bed. She shook all over. Clenching a pillow to her chest, she rocked back and forth, back and forth, trying to bring herself to her senses.
"Malcolm…” She said his name into the pillow as if she could conjure him with words and wanting.
Was she losing her mind? She almost thought she was. It was the only thing that made sense. Was Malcolm even real? Had she dreamed all of it? No. There were the paintings as proof. The paintings and the etchings and the sketches proved he’d been here. She had to see him again. She would die if she didn’t.
She left the bed and walked into her office, switched on the Tiffany lamp once more. In her coat closet she found a wrap sweater and pulled it on to keep her warm while she worked. She took the wine bottle she’d tossed into the wastepaper basket, uncorked it and dumped the fragments of the white card onto the desk. In her desk drawer she found tape. For the next hour she set about putting the pieces of the white card back together. The ragged tears and porous paper made the task maddeningly difficult but she didn’t stop, not even when Tou-Tou jumped on the desk and scattered some of the pieces. She didn’t know why she did it, only that she had to get a message to Malcolm. How he saw her, she didn’t know. How he watched her, how he seemingly knew she’d gone out with Sebastian to the exhibit…all mysteries. But he watched her, that much she knew. He saw what she did and who she did it with…and he’d see her message.
She had to have him back.
Finally, it was finished. Every piece back in place, taped down so that it looked like a Frankenstein card. She found her clothes and put them on, picked up Tou-Tou and put him in the large leather handbag that doubled as his carrier. She left the card on the bed and went home to her apartment.
There was nothing left to do but wait for him.
That night she dreamt of The Bleeding Man again. In the second dream he died while inside of her and the red was everywhere, on her hands and on her chest and on her mouth as she drank the blood straight from his heart.
Roman Charity
On the Ides of March, Malcolm finally made contact with her again.
She’d just closed the gallery for the evening, which entailed nothing more than drawing the red velvet curtains behind the front windows, flipping the OPEN sign around, and locking the door. Upon returning to her office to fetch Tou-Tou from his basket, she found a book of art lying open on her desk. It had been so long since she’d seen Malcolm, she’d almost given up hope he’d ever return to her. She glanced around the office, sniffing the air, hoping to catch any glimpse of him, any trace of his scent. Her body came alive merely at the possibility of Malcolm. As ecstatic as she was that he wanted to see her again, she feared to open the book. What did he want with her this time? What would he make her do? What would he do to her? What would he make her enjoy him doing to her?