The Locked Studio Door

*This one's for the people who've ever gotten a little too interested in someone from a window, and for the ones who secretly hope someone's looking back. Thanks for reading. Hope it makes you smile.*

Three weeks into renting the studio above the hardware store, I finally admitted to myself, out loud, alone, with a brush in my hand, that I had been watching the man from the insurance agency every night for the better part of a month. I'm forty-two years old, I'd just come out of a six-year relationship that ended the way a loaf of bread goes stale, so gradually and then all at once, and I had moved to Grayton specifically to be nobody to anybody for a while. And then I'd gone and picked a stranger to stare at.

In my defense, his office light stayed on late. The insurance agency sits on the ground floor of the building next to the hardware store, and my studio window looks straight down onto his window, so every evening around eight or nine I'd see the warm square of lamplight come on and there he'd be at his desk, sleeves rolled to the elbow, reading policies or filling out forms with a concentration I found, honestly, a little obscene. His name is Drew. I know this because the sign says DREW HALVERSON, INSURANCE, and also because the woman at the diner said "Drew'll take care of you" when I mentioned I needed renter's insurance, in the tone of a woman recommending a dentist.

So I started sketching him. Just the silhouette at first, that triangle of lamplight and the shape of a man in it, one shoulder higher than the other because of how he propped his elbow. Then I started filling things in from memory, and that was the part that unsettled me, because it turned out I knew more about this man than three weeks of window-watching could explain. I knew the way he rolled his sleeves, two folds and then a careful third, like he'd done it ten thousand times. I knew he leaned back in his chair when he was thinking and forward when he'd decided something. I knew he took his coffee at the window and looked up Main Street while he drank it, and I knew, God help me, that he had a way of tilting his head when he read fine print that made my stomach do something I hadn't felt it do in years.

I told myself it was artistic. I told myself a lot of things, standing there in my paint-stained T-shirt at eleven at night, stretching a canvas.

The painting came faster than anything I'd done since art school, which I left twenty years ago and have been making excuses about ever since. I worked from memory and it didn't seem to matter that memory is a liar, because what came out on the canvas wasn't a portrait exactly, it was more like the feeling of being watched by someone who didn't know he was interesting, rendered in lamplight yellows and deep brown shadows, his forearms on the desk, his collar open one button too many for an insurance man in a farming town. I painted his hands twice before I got them right. I don't want to get into what thinking about his hands was doing to me by the fourth night, but I will say I painted until two in the morning and slept like the dead and woke up hungry in a way that had nothing to do with food.

"You're up late," my sister said when I called her on Thursday, because she calls every Thursday and I keep answering, which is the whole architecture of our relationship.

"I'm working," I said, rinsing a brush at the little sink in the corner of the studio.

"At eleven at night? On what?"

"A man," I said, and then, quickly, "a figure study."

There was a pause on the line, the kind of pause my sister does better than anyone alive. "Marcie. Is this a rebound situation with a man you haven't met?"

"It's a painting," I said. "It's art. Goodbye."

It was not, strictly speaking, only art. But it was mostly art, and I figured mostly counted, the way it counts in most of the decisions I've made.

The problem, as it turned out, was that Drew Halverson also noticed lights. He told me this later, that the old Miller place, which is what everyone still calls the building over the hardware store even though the Millers left six years ago, had been dark for six years and then suddenly there was a light burning at all hours on the second floor, going off at three, four in the morning, coming on again at odd times, and that in a town like Grayton an unexplained light is practically a civic emergency. He's the volunteer fire chief, which I did not know yet, which explains a lot about what happened next.

It was a Tuesday, a month in, and I had the studio door unlocked because the hardware store man had told me the stairwell was fine, nobody came up there, and I was down to my last clean T-shirt, an old gray thing with turpentine thumbprints all over it, my hair in a pencil, arguing with the elbow of the painted man, when I heard boots on the stairs.

I want you to picture the scene from his side. He came through the door with a flashlight, at four in the afternoon, into a room that smelled like linseed oil and cold coffee, and found a woman he had never met wearing what could generously be called a shirt, holding a filbert brush like a weapon, standing in front of a wall of landscapes hung at every angle to hide one specific canvas leaning against the far wall under a drop cloth.

"Oh," he said, and lowered the flashlight. "You're the painter."

"I'm the tenant," I said, which was true, and then, because my mouth does this, "Are you robbing me?"

"Fire hazard check." He nodded at the space heater in the corner, the tangle of extension cords, the rags I'd been leaving in a pile like an idiot. "Light's been on at three a.m. for three weeks. Thought the place was going up."

"You're the fire chief," I said, spotting the badge on his jacket, and then it clicked, the sign, the building next door, the desk I'd spent thirty hours painting. "You're Drew Halverson."

"Guilty." He was forty-four and built as one who carried things for a living, and up close his eyes were a color I had invented wrongly from a floor up and across an alley, browner than I'd guessed, and I felt the paint-stained shirt I was wearing very acutely. "Marcie, right? You signed the lease. I own the building."

"You're my landlord," I said, and something in my voice must have been funny, because he smiled, one-sided, slow, like he'd been waiting three weeks to use it.

"Technically. The hardware store manages it. I just collect the checks and worry about the lights." He looked around the studio, at the canvases, the landscapes, the mountains I'd painted from photographs because I don't get out much. "Can I see what you're working on? The light burning all night, I figured it must be something."

And here is where I panicked, and I'm not proud of the panic, it was swift and total and it came with a kind of clarity, like a fire drill. "Landscapes," I said, too fast, gesturing at the wall, "just landscapes, studies, nothing, you know, current," and I steered him toward the hung work with the flat of my hand on his sleeve, which was the first time I touched him and probably felt like nothing to him and like a live wire to me. He looked at the mountains. He said kind things about the mountains, the light in them, the cold in them, and I babbled something about wanting to do local scenes, and I thought I had gotten away with it, I genuinely thought so, right up until he stopped talking mid-sentence and looked past my shoulder at the drop cloth in the corner, under which the edge of a canvas stuck out, and the edge that stuck out was the exact brown I'd mixed for his rolled sleeve.

"What's that one?" he asked.

"Nothing finished," I said. "It's nothing. It's not done."

He looked at me. Not for any dramatic length of time, just long enough, and I could see him deciding whether to push, and I could see, which was worse, that he wanted to push. "Well," he said, putting the flashlight back in his jacket, "when it's done, I'd like to see it. You paint like somebody who's got something to say."

Then he checked the extension cords, told me to get a metal can for the rags, and went down the stairs, and I stood there listening to his boots until the stairwell door closed on Main Street.

I locked the studio. I dragged a chair against the door out of some instinct I didn't examine, and then I pulled the drop cloth off the canvas and set it on the easel and turned the lamp all the way up, and I worked on his hands until two in the morning, listening the whole time for boots on the stairs that never came, aware of every creak in the floor, of the light burning in the window across the alley below me, of the fact that he knew, or half knew, or would know soon, and painted the lamplight on his forearm with a care I have never given anything, including, my sister would say, myself.

He came back the next morning with two coffees and the door was unlocked, because of course it was, because I had sat up until two a.m. painting his hands and then fallen asleep at the table and woken at seven with a crick in my neck and gone downstairs in my slippers to get the good kind of creamer from the hardware store's little fridge, and somewhere in all that domestic nonsense the chair against the door had gotten moved and never moved back.

I heard his boots on the stairs and thought it was the hardware man, and I said "door's open" without turning around, and then I turned around, and it was not the hardware man. It was Drew Halverson, forty-four years old, holding two paper cups, standing in my studio in a gray flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and behind him, on the easel where I had left it facing the room like an idiot, was the painting. The whole painting. Him, in the lamplight of his own office at nine at night, shirt unbuttoned all the way down, tie hanging from his pocket, one hand flat on his desk and the other holding a coffee mug, caught in the exact private moment of a man who thinks nobody is looking, the tiredness in his shoulders and the lamp-warm brown of his forearms and the small unguarded expression I had spent thirty hours on because I couldn't get it right and couldn't stop trying.

We looked at the painting. We looked at each other. The coffee cups made a small sound when he set them on the windowsill.

"So," he said. "That's not a landscape."

"No," I said. "It is not a landscape."

He walked toward it the way you walk toward something you're not sure you're allowed to touch, and I stood there with a filbert brush in my hand and turpentine on my thumb and thought about the window of my studio and the window of his office and the month of evenings between them. He looked at it for a long time, his own face, his own hands, the moment he had never known anyone had seen, and then he said, "When did you paint this?"

"The last three weeks. Mostly. There were sketches first."

"Sketches," he said, and turned around, and his face was doing something complicated, not angry, which I had prepared for, not angry at all. "You've been watching me."

"Every night. Eight or nine o'clock, when your light's on. I moved here to be anonymous and then I spent three weeks being the least anonymous person in Grayton, apparently." I put the brush down because my hand was shaking slightly. "I was going to tell you. I was going to, eventually, when it was done, I was going to figure out some way to say, hello, I'm your tenant, I've been painting you from my window like a lunatic, and instead you found it while I was asleep."

"Is that what this is," he said, gesturing at the painting, and his voice was careful in a way that made my stomach drop, "a crush? Or is it just, the window, the light?"

And here is the part where I could have lied, and I want you to know I considered it, I stood there with the lie right there in my mouth, and then I thought about the way he had looked at the drop cloth last night and wanted to push, and I said, "Both. Probably both. I didn't plan either part."

He nodded slowly, and picked up one of the coffee cups, and handed me the other one, which I took because my hands needed a job. "You got my eyes wrong," he said. "But you got everything else right. The shoulders are dead on. That's how I stand when the day's been long."

"Brown," I said. "Your eyes. I had them gray for two weeks and then I fixed them."

"Good fix." He took a sip, and looked at the painting again, and then he said the thing I had not prepared for in any of my prepared scenarios. "You ever thought about painting from life? It'd save you the guesswork on the eyes."

I laughed, an actual bark of a laugh, and coffee nearly came out of my nose, and he grinned, one-sided, slow. "You're offering," I said. "To model."

"I'm offering. Shirt's already open in the picture, doesn't seem fair to make you invent the rest." He was already unbuttoning, and I said "yes, okay, yes," in a voice that had no dignity in it whatsoever, and he laughed and pulled the flannel off over his head and stood there in the lamplight I had painted from memory, and he was better than the painting, broader, hairier, a white scar on one rib I had never known about and immediately wanted to know the story of, and I said "sit on the stool, hand flat, like the desk" and he did it, and for ten whole minutes I was a professional, I mixed color, I laid in the shoulder, I worked.

Then he moved. Not much. His hand had drifted down to his belt, and he looked at me across the studio and said, "Question. And you can say no and we keep painting and nobody mentions it again." I waited. "Would it bother you if I touched myself while you watched? Since we're apparently doing this whole thing backwards anyway."

The brush stopped moving. I was forty-two years old and I had left art school twenty years ago and ended a six-year relationship three months ago and moved to a farming town to be anonymous, and here is what all of that added up to: a man asking permission, plainly, in a room that smelled like linseed oil and cold coffee, and me wanting it so badly my knees felt like weather. "No," I said. "It wouldn't bother me."

"Good," he said, and unbuckled the belt.

I don't know how to describe the next stretch of time except that I painted through it, badly, in some senses, and perfectly in every sense that mattered. He leaned back against the wall and worked his cock slowly with one fist while I stood at the easel with my back half turned and my head turned all the way around, and every stroke of his hand found its way into my wrist, the brush dragging the lamplight along his forearm, his thumb sliding over the head, the slow build of him, the flush climbing his neck. Neither of us talked much. He breathed. I painted. The asymmetry of it was the whole engine of the thing, I was the one with the eyes and he was the one on display and yet he watched me watching him, and that feedback loop, being seen while doing the seeing, got me so wet I could feel it through my jeans, and I painted his cock the way it actually was, thick and heavy and dark at the tip, and he saw me paint it and groaned low in his chest.

"Marcie." His voice had gone to gravel. "This is unfair as hell. You've got all your clothes on and I'm over here putting on a show."

"You could always stop," I said, and he laughed, and then he said, "Take the shirt off. Let me see you. I've been wondering for a month what's under the paint."

So I put the brush in the jar and I pulled the gray T-shirt over my head and then, because it seemed stupid to stop halfway, the jeans, the bra, everything, and I stood in my own studio naked with turpentine thumbprints on me somewhere and turned back to the easel and picked the brush up again and kept painting, nude, while he watched me and touched himself and I watched him, and my free hand kept drifting, I got the nipple of my left breast between two fingers and rolled it until it ached, and my other hand did the lay-in of his thigh with a steadiness I did not feel anywhere else in my body. When I got to his cock in the painting I rendered it wet, exactly as it was, and he made a sound and sped up, and I sped up with him, and the last thing I painted before I lost the thread entirely was his hand, because I had worked on his hands until two in the morning and I knew them better than my own.

He came first, over his own fist and his belly, with my name in it, actually my name, which undid something in me, and I got two fingers into my pussy right there at the easel and finished in under a minute, legs shaking, forehead against the canvas edge, his painted eyes looking down at me the whole time.

Afterward we sat on the studio floor with our backs against the wall and drank the rest of the coffee and then, when he went down to his office, a beer from a cooler he apparently keeps under his desk, which is the most insurance-agent thing I have ever heard.

"So," he said, clinking his bottle against mine. "You staying?"

"I might keep the studio another month," I said. "The light's good."

"It is," he said, and smiled that one-sided smile. "I'll keep my blinds open."

That was the end of it, or the beginning, and either way I slept fine.