The light falls in gold slats from the boards overhead, and she is standing barefoot in their midst, one foot curled behind the other, a dried streak of cadmium paint running up her ankle where she absentmindedly wiped the brush over her skin. Her hair is loose and she has some of it braided, a pencil lying across it, and the house smells heavily of turpentine and sun-baked wood and the sweat at the nape of her neck, and you haven't heard from her in hours.
She hums something to herself, off-key, and doesn't correct herself. She rocks forward and back on her heels as if she were inside the thing she's painting. She scratches a red mark into her hip and looks right at it as if it might be a different color. A brush goes into the water and she already has her hand on the next one.
You're standing in the doorway, hard, and you wish you could explain it.
None of this is for you, and that is why it is happening to you.
Males, historically, have been providers, and most of their efforts at it have been bought and sold, and you pay for the mortgage and in return get a polite interior and a woman who can be had, roughly, in a certain reliable condition, whenever the truck pulls up to the driveway. You can hear it in the woman's voice, in the careful tones she uses when speaking to you in a house paid for by another's labor. There is a certain texture to the peace of a woman being delicate around a man, and the debt gets settled and something else is owed, and the two of them can hear it in the hush of the hallway without either needing to say it out loud.
Whatever it is that you want to buy, though, is much stranger, and infinitely more expensive. You want her body to forget. You want a woman who has spent her life calculating rent to think, somewhere deep in her marrow, that survival is not a viable alternative. You have spent nights lying next to her, listening to her make calculations in her sleep, her fists knotting at her ribs, her jaw working like she's chewing steel, her toes curling under the sheets as if she's trying to leave through her feet. Fear is a fantastic motivator. It is also an absolutely terrible basis for anything resembling beauty, because a body wound up and tightened around a spike of adrenaline cannot, by definition, ever be asked to do anything slowly, and every great work of art ever created was made possible by someone standing, motionless, in front of it for a long, long time. Slow is a luxury available only to the fed and the assured.
Her genius, in other words, is an aberration. Other men want to be needed by her. You want to be unnoticeable by her. You want to be a parenthesis in her life, which is not precisely something men usually ask for. You want to hear her curse at a canvas through the wall, you want to hear the scratch of the chair as she turns around, you want to hear the long, expectant pause that follows before she decides to speak to you at all, and when she does come out from her room, you want to look into the still-gold oil on her fingers and let the slight delay before her pupils find your eyes be enough to make you feel like some new kind of person has entered the room. Her attention is the first thing this world has ever taken from her, and it starts young. Rent eats it up. The second job devours whatever is left. Everyone has a claim to it, and she was made to give it before she had any idea she was being asked, and whatever is left over is the only raw material she has to make anything of substance with, and most women spend their lives right up until the end without ever having a moment to spare. You buy her attention back, in other words, and you give it to her, and you receive nothing in exchange for any of that.
No one is going to hire her for this. No one issues degrees in it. Her résumé will show a great, gaping hole where those years were spent, and the only proof of their existence will be the thing itself, and the looks on the faces of the people who walk away from it afterwards.
The whole endeavor has a sort of built-in betrayal at its root, which is that it is you, basically. Fund her and score and you've made a nicer cage and hung her paintings around the walls, and the whole point of requiring gratitude from her is that you've bought something outright, and she will feel the invoice in every magnanimous thing you do for her, and she will start being careful around you, and the hush of the hallway will return. The whole thing is a test, basically, and the terms of said test are that you need to survive her becoming free enough that she no longer needs you, and the men who fail that test are busy financing their own essential needs and calling it devotion.
There is the other way in which money buys things, though, that everyone neglects to mention, because it's much harder to quantify. A woman not depleted by the constant slow erosion of her own resources touches you differently. She comes to bed with something left over in her veins. Her hands move more slowly, more languidly, and explore places you didn't think needed exploring. She doesn't keep as obsessive an inventory of the things she feels she is owed the second she wakes up, and she lies half over you with paint-stained fingers and presses her mouth against your collarbone for no particular reason, and no particular destination, really, just wanting nothing, going nowhere, and you want her pleasure to be routine, to be something that comes and goes like meals do in houses where there is always food on the table. You want to hear her come and know she isn't manufacturing anything for you, not even happiness, and then hear her fall asleep under your touch in under a minute, and that, too, is a testament to the environment you've created.
Lingerie is a costume for being looked at. She looks fabulous in it and there's nothing wrong with that.
What gets you, in the end, is the look of her shoulders as she stands barefoot in the light falling in gold slats from the boards overhead, not seeing you at all, her paint-streaked ankle drying while she forgets you completely, making something nobody asked for and nobody is paying for.
Fund that. Fund it without being thanked.
