THE LAZIEST FORM OF REVELATION

I’m wearing only my underpants and sitting in a window seat with my back to the Hasidic grocery across the street. It’s one in the afternoon, and Misha is painting me. The embroidered cushion on which my backside rests was initially a comfort, but over the course of the past four hours, with the help of the midday sun, it has begun to feel like a very subtle instrument of torture. Inexplicably, it is itching me in a way I feel in my gut. There are those who spend their lives consciously or unconsciously courting such discomforts; I am not one of them. Something about Misha’s style makes him try to capture as much as possible of the final painting in the initial sitting, so I’m essentially on a twelve-hour fourth-date semi-naked marathon. At first I thought this arrangement might be enlightening, if not downright conducive to epiphanies—the endurance, the inner quiet, the lack of food. But thus far, the experience is more sweaty than transcendent.

“What are you working on?” I ask. Misha is silent, but I can see the color on the tip of his brush. “Are you doing my hair? My mane?”

“It’s a complicated red,” he says half-distractedly, like a combination painter-oenophile.

“Thank you,” I say. Misha says nothing. “I get it from my grandmother.”

He shifts his weight to his other foot. “Is it the reason for your name?”

“God, no. I was bald when I was born. That’s just an unfortunate coincidence.” I then proceed to tell him the story of my paternal grandmother, Florence—“Torchy,” they called her in college—whose hair was so red that as a little girl, she wasn’t allowed to sit as close to the fire as her sisters were. Her mother was afraid her head would ignite out of sympathy with the flames. Misha seems to like this story.

“Okay,” I say. “Now you have to tell me a story about your grandmother.”

He dips his brush and continues painting. “What if I don’t have any?” he says. I make a pout, even though I’ve been instructed to maintain an approximation of equipoise at all times. When he gets to my face (apparently he saves this for last), I won’t be allowed to speak.

“Then make one up.”

He answers while painting, his eyes fixed on the canvas. “My grandmother was a Jew,” he says. “My mother, Zdena, was born inside a concentration camp. Once I asked her how it was possible for an infant to survive in such a place, but she just shook her head, and we never spoke of it again.” He utters these words with a perfectly blank expression, in monotone, and I have the strange feeling he isn’t making it up at all.

“Is that true?” I say.

He shrugs.

“You shouldn’t joke around about things like that.”

“Who says I’m joking?” he says, momentarily lifting his focus from the canvas to lock eyes with me. His eyes are as beautiful and opaque as polished stones.

Misha and I met two months ago, when he was walking his dachshund in SoHo. I would later learn that he’d been there to drop off his portfolio at a gallery, and that the dog was on loan from a friend who’d gone home to Ukraine for a week. A blonde in a black fur coat made ooohs of excitement and bent down to pet the animal.

“It’s a wiener dog!” she said.

Misha examined her coolly. “ ‘Wiener dog,’ madam, is a racial slur.”

I was standing nearby, holding my bike, about to text a friend to see if she wanted to join me for coffee. Upon hearing this, I started to laugh. I reached into my backpack and asked if it would be all right if I gave the dog a piece of beef jerky. Thirty minutes later, Misha and I were having espressos at Café Luxe, and I had agreed to go on a date with him. When he told me he was a painter, I think I knew that I would one day consent to sit for him.

It should have dawned on me then how breathtakingly boring it would be. The one saving grace is that Misha is actually quite good. The Marlborough Chelsea recently showed his work, and reviews called his paintings—especially the oil portraits—extremely accomplished and well-conceived. But what I like is they have an unfinished quality that makes them look alive. Still, in spite of a frequently exercised inner life, I’m restless.

“Let’s play a game,” I say. Misha takes a sip from a water glass on the stool beside him. “Name something you regret,” I say.

He swallows and puts down the glass. “I’m not sure I want to play this game,” he says.

“Well, I’m not sure I want to sit here this long.”

He appears dissatisfied with whatever he sees on the canvas. “I regret everything,” he says.

“Interesting,” I say, quietly hoping he doesn’t mean anything particular to me or my person. “Name something you’re afraid of.”

“Falling microwave ovens,” he says, then reconsiders. “Cilantro.”

“You’re afraid of cilantro.”

“Allergic is probably a better word.”

“I see,” I say. I’m waiting for him to crack a smile, but he doesn’t. “When was the last time you were genuinely happy?”

“I’m always happy,” he says.

“Take the game seriously, please. Or I’ll be forced to come over there, and sit in your lap, and all will be lost.”

He smiles, then thinks for a moment. “Once I was at the seashore with some friends, and we made a fire and drank for many hours and then passed out on the beach. One guy threw up next to my face, and mosquitoes were eating me all night. Meanwhile the tide was coming in around us. I didn’t sleep a wink. When the sun came up, it felt like the end of the world—a beautiful end of the world.”

“That was when you were last genuinely happy.”

“Yes.”

“That might be more the European version of happiness than the American one.”

He stops painting and examines me. “You doing all right?” he says. “Do you need some water or anything?”

“I’m all right,” I say, trying to impress him with my ascetic skills. I ignore a spontaneously itchy kneecap. “Now it’s your turn. Ask me anything.”

He holds his brush midair, considering. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s considering my question or the painting. His hair and eyebrows are as black as squid ink, and standing by his easel, staring pensively into the middle distance, he almost looks like a painting himself.

“What are your weaknesses?” he says. This seems an unusual choice, given the panoply of options, but I’m willing to roll with it.

“Physical or metaphysical?”

“Both.”

“I care too much what other people think,” I say. He asks what else. “I don’t like my calves.” He makes a humming noise, taking it in. Then we’re both quiet for a while, and he paints.

Here’s a weakness I chose not to articulate: I lack restraint. I push things, even when everything is going well. I can’t help myself. I know it’s unbecoming, but it’s as if I have an appetite for something, only I won’t know what it is until I hear it. I look at the clock and decide not to say anything for an hour.

“Teach me something about painting,” I say two minutes later.

At first, Misha is silent. Then he says: “The tendency is to make the bodies too small. Too small for the heads.”

“What’s the hardest part?” He doesn’t reply, so I ask again. I’m hoping he doesn’t say: “The hardest part is getting your subject to shut up.”

“The hardest thing is painting the part you find most beautiful.”

“What’s the most beautiful part about me?” Seems logical enough.

He smiles broadly. “It’s all beautiful,” he says.

“Come on.”

“Your calves.”

“Don’t be mean. Be serious.”

“I’m always serious,” he says.

I wonder if he is serious. He has the blunt candor of foreigners, and he doesn’t censor himself around me, which I like. But there’s a lot he doesn’t say. I tell my friends he’s a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a blintz. On our first date, I took him to a Persian movie about a boy on a bicycle trying to buy a pair of sneakers for his sister. Afterward, his eyes were bloodshot.

“Did you like it?” I said.

“As a matter of fact, I did.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I don’t like many movies,” he said, slipping his ticket stub into his back pocket. “But that was a good one.”

The next time we went out, we had drinks with some newlywed friends of his; the previous month, they’d gotten married in Slovenia at a castle whose name sounded like “mock rice.” Tiny white lights were twisted through evergreens while we huddled around a heat lamp drinking flavored vodkas. Toward the end of the night I made the mistake of calling myself an open book. Misha burst out laughing and thumped his hand on the table.

“No one who refers to herself as an open book can actually be one,” he said.

“But I am,” I insisted. His friends were smiling politely. “Whereas you are …”

The wife answered for him. “Misha’s a closed but readable book,” she mused, which at the time I took as a challenge.

On our most recent date, we went dancing. “I’m pretending I wouldn’t rather be dead!” I shouted, making fun of the fact that I don’t really like to dance, but Misha couldn’t understand me over the music. He tilted his head and mouthed, What? Later in the evening, this became a private joke between us. I would put my lips next to his ear and whisper what I was going to do to him. He would pretend not to understand, and each time he mouthed What? I would lean in and say something steamier, softer.

The next morning, a blinding light flooded his Williamsburg apartment, where we’d slept next to a stack of bare canvases. He commented on the empty bottles of wine in the window seat, complimenting my tolerance.

“We all have our gifts,” I said. In truth I felt as if I were wearing an infant-size bike helmet. “Although that last glass might have been gilding the lily.” He laughed and suggested “the gilded lily” would be a great name for a cocktail, maybe something with orange juice. A short while later, we set out in search of fried eggs and coffee and a newspaper. But while we ate breakfast, I only pretended to read my section of the paper. Really it was the last thing I was interested in.

“When were you first in love?” I ask. I’m not sure how much time has passed, but the light in the room has frayed, and Misha’s water glass is empty.

“That question presumes a couple of things,” he says.

“Have you ever been in love?”

His eyes circle the canvas. “Yes,” he eventually says. “Once. You?”

“More than once,” I say. “Many times.”

“Many times?”

“The first time was my sophomore year in college. I adored a junior who lived upstairs from me. I’d climb the steps to his dorm room every night, and we’d talk until the sun came through his circular window. I’d never met anyone so smart. He understood everything. I remember he had this poster of a bullfight on his wall,” I say, then cut myself off. I can see from Misha’s face that he isn’t listening, or rather, he’s listening through me, waiting for me to stop. So I do. That bullfight poster had the most vivid colors I’ve ever seen; the artist must have invented a special pigment to capture the yellow of the sun, the red of the cape. It almost hurt your eyes to look at it, yet you couldn’t look away. The junior who lived upstairs from me died of a drug overdose the summer after he graduated. But he taught me one thing I’ll never forget: We all desire the cut of truth.

When I stop talking, the room is silent. In another minute, I’ll notice the children’s voices down in the street, and the car horns, and the bleating of a delivery truck backing up. But for the moment, everything is still. I watch the illuminated dust particles caught in a nearby shaft of light. They’re floating, they’re flawless, and in some people, they might produce a feeling of peace. For me, it’s just the opposite. I know I should keep quiet, but I can’t.

“What’s the truest thing you’ve ever been told?” I say.

At first there’s silence. It feels like an unfriendly silence. “The things we’re told are never true,” Misha says. “The truth must be revealed.” He hesitates. “That’s our problem here.”

I try to keep my forehead from bunching. “What do you mean, ‘our problem here’?”

“The difference between you and me.”

“I didn’t know our difference was a problem.”

Misha’s weary; he’s been working hard; I can see the fatigue in his posture. “Maybe not now,” he says, turning away. “But it seems … possible. Probable.”

“A problem seems probable.”

“Yes,” he says, and when he turns to me, I can see everything in his face. I feel something behind my rib cage collapse, but I’m careful not to let it show.

“Ask me anything,” I say again. I’m sitting with my back straight and my hands folded neatly across my lap. My expression is perfectly neutral; I’m afraid that if I try to smile, I’ll cry.

Misha’s eyes wake up and his body freezes. “Hold it,” he says, putting one hand out as if to stop traffic. His expression has the restrained excitement of a person who has found what he was looking for. “I’m doing your face.”

When Misha breaks through, this will be one of his first paintings to sell. It will go to a drawing room on Embassy Row, and my incredulous friends will ask: “Don’t you mind sitting naked in front of all those strangers?” But the truth is, I really don’t mind being naked. Being naked is the laziest form of revelation.

Misha and I won’t break up on this day. He will apologize, excited by his new understanding that the painting is going to turn out well, and he’ll hug me, and kiss my hands, and we’ll go for crêpes at an old-style Parisian restaurant down the street. But in my mind, this is the day we break up. Things are born in the dark, beneath the soil, in secret.

The actual day we broke up was years ago now, but the thing that has stayed with me most is the irony of that portrait, of having been painted by someone who never really saw me. I complained about this recently to a friend, this disconnect between who we are and how others perceive us. I said: “The trouble is, I’m a fish, but everyone thinks I’m a rabbit.” The friend just looked me in the eye and said: “Then why do you surround yourself with people who can only give you carrots?”

The dust particles continue to dance in their column of light. The cushion has finally stopped itching me, and the Hasidic grocery is closing up shop. I’m not sure what I’m thinking about—the Persian movie or that bullfight poster or my grandmother’s hair catching fire—when it finally registers that Misha is speaking to me.

“Ruby,” he’s saying. He pulls me to my feet. He’s hugging me, happy. “Ruby.” He takes my hands, and I look into his face, momentarily confused, trying to shake the feeling that I’m gazing into the face of a stranger. “It is finished,” he says, and we both take a step back, to better see what we have made.