Page 37 of Dirty Diana
“All dogs like me.” He reaches out a hand and she nips him. A bright red drop of blood appears on his skin.
Jasper sits a safe distance away and snaps her picture, getting acquainted with her through his lens. She lifts her head regally, turning the most egregious spot of mange away from the camera.
He doesn’t give up. He goes back to the grocery for a pack of hot dogs, and he breaks off small pieces and feeds them to her until he can pet her without her tensing up. That afternoon, we spread our blanket out by the fire, and she hops in between us.
“Is this our dog now?” he asks. I can tell we both hate the idea of her all alone in the desert. “Because let’s be honest, no one else is going to love this dog. Ever.”
I can’t help it—my heart leaps at the idea of owning something with Jasper. I hold her up to the sky like a proud parent. “She’s pretty cute. In a horrible way.”
Jasper smiles. “She’s got charm.”
Later we give her a bath in the Airstream’s tiny sink and do ourbest to get the prickers out of her fur. Jasper squeezes some of his expensive conditioner into his palm and rubs it into her skin. We name her Pippi. By the end of the night, she’s sleeping on Jasper’s face.
“I can’t move. I live here now,” Jasper jokes.
We move her gently to a spot on the bench. And then he kisses me deeply and I climb on top of him on the bed. I’m struck by the way our bodies fit together, two pieces of a clasp to a delicate necklace. His tongue explores my mouth and I bite down on his lip, lightly. He tastes like saltwater and smells like campfire and I want to stay here forever, breathing him in.
He moves his hands up my shirt and my body responds immediately, my nipples hard and wanting. I pull my shirt over my head, then remove his. I skim my naked breasts across his bare chest and he pulls me close. Pippi starts growling. We stop what we’re doing immediately, laughing. Pippi calms down and closes her milky eyes, but as soon as Jasper pushes inside me she sits up on high alert.
“How does she even know what we’re doing? She’s got to be legally blind?”
“Pippi knows all,” I say, laughing.
“Can we not talk about Pippi while we make love?”
Love.“Sure.” I smile, an intoxicating mixture of happiness and desire running through my body. “Pippi, look away! Hide your eyes!”
Chapter 11
—
I accidentally jab my finger with an embroidery needle and suck on the tiny droplet of blood until it disappears. Some of Justine’s other studio assistants wear thimbles while they work, but my fingers are too clumsy with them on. The jabs don’t hurt, just an occupational hazard of working with a fiber artist.
It’s been over a week since Marfa, and Jasper and I have spent almost every night together, meeting up at my place after I get home from catering shifts, and sometimes staying up until dawn. I’m grateful that today Justine’s loft is quiet and empty. On Friday afternoons, it’s just me and Henri, the bright blue betta fish who swims soundless laps in his burbling tank.
It had been Alicia’s idea to apply for this job, which we did together, three years ago.
We came across Justine’s flyer near the campus gym. Her listing read:Must have nimble fingers. Strong wrists. Thick skin. Be savvy enough to leave your personal shit at the door and out of my studio. Only Good Energy need apply.
“We haveverygood energy.” Alicia pulled a tab from the flyer. “And if she likes us, she’ll introduce us around.”
This is the hopeful trade-off made by every artist’s assistant in town: low pay, no raises, no vacation days, no health insurance. In return, the chance to be mentored by someone you admire and thrust into the orbit of art world connections.
Justine’s space is sprawling, the second floor of a two-story building. It’s above a microbrewery, so the stairwell always smells like hops, but the concrete floors are thick enough to drown out any noise from below. The small kitchen has a fridge, a coffee maker, and an endless supply of free green tea and raw almonds, the only thing I’ve ever seen Justine eat.
Justine’s work is wildly beautiful, very popular, and hugely time-consuming to produce. She dreams up the intricacy of each piece, and once she’s mapped it out, her assistants help to execute it. Some assistants last weeks and some, like me, last years. For the past several months, the same three of us have spent long days together working on a huge two-hundred-square-foot piece inspired by Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Map”:“More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.”Justine’s show is already scheduled, but this piece is not nearly finished.
Justine is using different textures of shaggy yarn in tufts of olive and golden yellow to represent landmasses, and these are surrounded by a mix of lapis and Aegean blues. I have been embroidering the tiny black letters meant to represent the names of territories labeled on a map. The words are supposed to look like something stamped onto the landscape, the ink waterlogged and bleeding into the sea.
When she’s here, Justine carefully checks our work, and when she leaves us alone, which is most of the time, the loft is like aconfessional. We tell stories about our lives and trade secrets about our families and complain about how little time we have for our own work.
About once a week, Justine’s husband, Mark, trails her to the studio. On days when he brings his enormous St. Bernard, Jeffrey, whoever among us is quickest to react will grab Jeffrey’s leash and take him for a very long walk. Those who remain are stuck with Mark’s company.
Mark always looks ready to set sail on some expensive yacht. He wears shorts in any weather, blue oxford shirts that strain across his belly, and a large silver watch on his furry wrist. He likes to drag a chair into the middle of the workspace, cross his legs at his naked ankles, and regale us with mind-bogglingly dull stories of his adventures, liberally peppered with self-compliments and breezy chauvinism. There’s nowhere to run. One morning, he spent what felt like an hour breaking down the difference between a New York bagel and the “bagels you get here.” That was the day Alicia quit. She said she could handle jabbing herself with an embroidery needle, but she couldn’t take being jabbed by Mark’s toxic boringness. She said this to me. To Justine she said only, “I have carpal tunnel, sorry.” She left after lunch and never came back.
I think about quitting, too, and finding a job that pays better, but I like Justine too much. If she’s in the right mood, her stories of being a starving artist in New York City are inescapably romantic. Who cares if she actually spent a night at the Chelsea Hotel in its dingy heyday, or whether it’s true she once pelted pedestrians with water balloons from an East Village fire escape alongside Björk?
I sit up straighter and exhale. Jasper is in my head. I focus on my stitching. I want to see him tonight. To feel his hands on me. I stand up and stretch and take a lap around the tapestry.
