The Shining Girls

Catherine ^{9 JUNE 1993}

Catherine Galloway-Peck paces in front of the blank canvas. Tomorrow she will take it down to Huxley and sell it for twenty bucks, even though that’s what the stretching cost alone. But he’ll feel sorry for her, and give her a hit too. She might have to throw in a blowjob. But she’s not a whore. It’s a favor. Friends help each other out. You can help a friend feel good.

Besides, art is supposed to be fuelled by depression and substance abuse. Look at Kerouac. Or Mapplethorpe. Haring! Bacon! Basquiat! So how come when she looks at the blank canvas, the weave of it plinks in her brain like an out-of-tune piano stuck on one note?

It’s not even a matter of starting. She has started a dozen times. Boldly, brilliantly, with a clear idea of where this will go. She can see the whole thing unfolding in her head. How the colors will layer over each other like bridges that will take her all the way to the end. But then it all becomes slippery. It skids away and she can’t keep hold of it and the colors become muddy. She ends up doing half-baked collages of pages torn out of old trashy novels she got for a dollar a box, painting over them again and again, obliterating the words. The idea was to make a lightbox out of them with pinpricks spelling out new sentences that only she would know.

It’s a relief to open the door and find him standing there. She’d thought it was Huxley, perhaps, pre-empting her need. Or Joanna, who sometimes drops off coffee and a sandwich, although she has been coming less often, and her eyes grow harder every time.

‘Can I come in?’ he asks.

‘Yes,’ she says, and pulls open the door, even though he is holding a knife and a pink bunny hairclip from what, eight years ago, if she does the math, but which looks like he bought it from the store yesterday. She realizes she has been anticipating him. Ever since she was twelve years old and he sat down next to her on the grass during the fireworks. She was waiting for her dad to come back from the portapotties because chili dogs never did agree with him. She said she wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers and she would call the police, but actually she was flattered that he was interested in her.

He explained that she was brighter than the explosions that boomed in the sky above the buildings, reflected in the glass. He could see her shine from all the way over there. Which meant he would have to kill her. Not now, but later. When she was all grown-up. But she should watch out for him. He’d reached up and she’d flinched away. He didn’t touch her, or only to take the clip from her hair. And it was that, more than the terrible inexplicable thing he’d said to her, that left her weeping inconsolably, to her father’s consternation, when he finally returned, pale and sweaty and clutching his stomach.

And isn’t that what set her on this course, this downward spiral? The man in the park who told her he was going to kill her.

That’s a terrible thing to say to a child, she thinks, but what she says is, ‘Would you like a drink?’ playing the polite hostess, as if she has anything to offer other than water in a paint-smeared glass.

She sold her bed two weeks ago, but she found a broken sofa on the sidewalk and inveigled Huxley to help her heft it up the stairs and then baptize it, because, c’mon, Cat, he wasn’t going to do that shit for free.

‘You told me I shone. Like fireworks. At the Taste of Chicago. Do you remember?’ She does a pirouette in the middle of the room and almost falls over. When was the last time she had something to eat? Tuesday?

‘But it’s not true.’

‘No,’ she says. She sits down heavily on the sofa. The cushions are on the floor. She had started tearing the seams up, looking for crumbs. A scrap of rock she’d missed. She used to have a Dustbuster so she could vacuum the cracks between the floorboards and pick through the bag when she got really desperate. But she can’t think what happened to it. She stares numbly at the discarded paperbacks with half the stories ripped out, scattered around the floor. It’s been cathartic, tearing the pages out, even if she’s not painting them. Destruction is a natural instinct.

‘You don’t shine any more.’ He holds out the hair clip for her to take.

‘I’m still going to have to go back,’ he says, angry with her. ‘To close the loop.’

She takes the clip, numbly. The pink bunny has her eyes closed, two little Xs and another for her mouth. Catherine thinks about eating it. A communion wafer for consumer society. That would be a good idea for a piece, actually. ‘I know. I’m sorry, I think it’s the drugs.’ But she knows that’s not true. It’s the reason she takes the drugs. Like her vision for her artwork that skids away, she can’t get a grip on the world. It’s too much for her. ‘Are you still going to kill me?’

‘Why would I waste my time.’ It’s not even a question.

‘You came. Didn’t you? I mean, you’re here. I’m not imagining this.’ She wraps her hand around the blade and he pulls it away. The burn in her palm makes her feel alive in a way she hasn’t in a long time. It’s clean and fierce. Not like the needle biting into the skin between her fingers, the crack mixed with white vinegar to make it injectable. ‘You promised.’

She grabs his hand and he sneers, but momentary panic glances across his features mingled with distaste. She knows that look, she’s seen it in people’s faces when she spins them her story about needing bus fare because she was mugged and she has to get home. Isn’t this what she’s been waiting for? Killing time. Because she needs to get to the place where the pictures in her head make sense. She needs him to take her there. Blood spattered on the canvas. Take that, Jackson Pollock.