“I’m sure that’s not true.”
“It is. He always goes into work when he needs to get away. Even on Thanksgiving.”
I actually knew that was the truth but I kept my mouth shut.
She placed her pert little chin on her knees and looked down at her perfectly painted toes. “Things were fine before he went to Mexico. I swear. I mean, we weren’t having sex much but he never seemed to mind before.”
“What,” I cleared my throat and fought to be there for my sister despite the absurdity of the situation. “Why do you think things changed?”
She shrugged. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Have you asked him?” It was too surreal, to be having this conversation with her, my sister and his Darling. A small nefarious part of me wondered what would happen if she ever found out that it was me, that her belittled younger sister was the one that had changed things between them. Would she think back to this conversation and hate me even more for guiding her through a storm of my own making?
The obvious answer was a resounding fuck yes.
“He said Mexico woke him up, that he had been numb for years and he missed pain.” Elena scrunched up her perfect nose. “Who misses pain?”
I shrugged as if I didn’t understand. “Some people think that pain amplifies life, that it heightens pleasures that would otherwise seem mundane.”
My elegant sister snorted.
“If you think about it for a second, it makes sense,” I tried to explain, suddenly eager to make her realize how pivotal hurting was, that it was an essential part of the human experience. Maybe if I was eloquent enough, she could finally understand me. “Why would God give us so much misery if it wasn’t for a reason?”
“We aren’t religious,” she argued, with the second-nature exactitude of a lawyer.
“I was just trying to help.”
“Yes, well, as pretty as the words are, they don’t work. Not when I’m in so much…” She waved her hand around, unable to even articulate the messy, passionate mass of feelings clogging her systems like so much hair in a drain.
“I think you should call Cosima or maybe even Mama.”
I clearly wasn’t the one to talk with her about this.
She looked off over her shoulder into the city beyond the windows. The apartment over looked the meticulously maintained Gramercy Park, a private garden accessed by fewer than 350 keys and one of New York’s first attempts at city planning. It was the reason Elena had been drawn to the house, I knew even though she hadn’t told me. The beautifully tempered greenery and exclusivity of the place would have appealed to her obsession with prestige and control.
“I want you to paint me.”
“Pardon me?”
“I want you to paint me,” Elena reiterated, turning to face me with a face made of granite. “I want you to paint me like this, like I am right now.”
“Elena…” I hesitated, not only because of the space she was in at the moment but also because I didn’t know how to depict this sister on canvas. She was an enigma to me, something unknown and frankly terrifying. I could paint her in four hundred different ways and it still would not do justice to the contrary nature of her personality. I only understood one thing about Elena and it was this, she was so desperate to be everything at once, perfect in all ways, that she had no definitive identity.
She visibly deflated at my hesitation but my sympathy, my villainy, wasn’t enough to make me paint her. I refused to dishonor my art and us both by combining the three.
“One day soon,” I promised. “When you are feeling better. You obviously had a terrible sleep and I would need you to hold a pose for hours.”
She pursed her lips but seemed to believe me, sagging back into the couch cushions like a discarded wind-up doll. My heart throbbed with the echo of hers, a sympathy beat that made it difficult to catch my breath.
“Are you all set for Thanksgiving tonight?” I asked, fully expecting Miss Organized to have everything ready to go.
“I ordered everything from Dean & Deluca, they should be here by four o’clock to deliver it.”
“Did you order desert?”
“A pumpkin pie. Why?”
I stood up and walked over to her, offering my hand with a smile. “Come on, why don’t we make tiramisu?”