Perfectly Impossible by Topp Elizabeth

Author:Topp, Elizabeth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-10-31T16:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

February 10

Over the next two weeks Anna wondered if she had assassinated the best relationship she’d ever had for a nebulous and ultimately self-involved reason in the late afternoon of her reproductive life. There were even stretches where she could not remember what it was, exactly, they had fought about. Still, she remained convinced that if she was the first to cave in or call or head home with her tail between her legs, it would mean on some irrational metaphysical level that her art was no longer central but somehow had been shunted to the side.

And this was the opposite of her lived experience. Dutifully, Anna went to her studio every night for at least a few hours of solid work. She fell back in love with her shared workspace, where each artist rented a ten-foot-square plot on a giant, paint-splattered former factory floor. There was almost always another person there, scratching away at an etching or swiping bright watercolors onto thick paper. And just being around that energy made it easier to conceive of something new.

For her final large work, Anna had started on a purely geometric shapescape inspired by the glue trap, which she had carefully shredded already. But she’d trashed that a few days in. It was as incoherent as her understanding of what had happened between Adrian and her. Then she considered the Magritte pulp, taking it out of its little plastic box, a hardened dime-size mound, like papier-mâché. But it conjured nothing in particular. The sketch might have been a valuable possession, and yet no one would really care about it in the end.

Finally, she turned to a few dove-colored cashmere strands taken from a thick Hermès coat Mrs. Von Bizmark had given her offhandedly one afternoon, saying, “It’s just not working for me.” She had purchased the piece only three weeks prior for $27,320. The price tag still dangled from the sleeve. Anna had kept the extra threads encased in a tiny brown-and-gold Hermès envelope in the pocket and sold the thing on eBay. When she thought about the Von Bizmarks’ careless generosity and her position in its direct flow, it generated a confused feeling of privilege and servitude. The piece would comprise a dysfunctional marriage of two worlds: a traditional, romantic, floral still life in oil, with a stark modernist overlay she still had not quite figured out. Once she had committed to this plan, the work poured out of her.

As the opera approached, she worked more and more intently, sometimes staying up until two or three in the morning tweaking a single detail. For that time, she was free of concern, doing exactly what she had always wanted to do, deeply in the flow of creating a piece of art with a real purpose in mind. Everything seemed manageable when she was engrossed in the canvas. She was an artist, goddamn it, and screw Adrian for suggesting it could or should ever be otherwise.

When she left the studio, the creeping anxiety icicles resumed their prodding.

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