I saw her as often as I could, once or twice during the week, while on weekends I was essentially living in the share house, one of several others, significant or otherwise, who wound up staying in the building.
It's hard to know what to say about her. She wasn't particularly nice, or even very considerate. She got ruinously drunk and talked dirty in bed. She liked dancing and she was good at it. She was fun at parties, sociable, independent, and flirtatious. She complained about her boyfriend, telling me how much better for her I was, while simultaneously managing to circumvent any attempt I made to "define" us, or to talk about the future. What happened when she went back to the capital wasn't something she was prepared to think about. She was in town to work, and that's exactly what she did. Everything else – where she was, who she was with – only existed in relation to that. Insofar as being with me was exciting and liberating after 8 years with the same guy, it was a good thing, but if I got in the way, causing her to sleep late or fuck for longer than she'd intended, I was a burden.
None of this bothered me. I didn't make many demands on her; after a long, barren, single year I was happy with whatever she was prepared to offer. That attitude might have been a mistake, but I think if I'd pressured her for something more, to leave her boyfriend for example, all I would have accomplished was to make her miserable. I enjoyed being with her, and that was enough for me, at least at the time.
The most surprising thing about her was the way she worked; as a young artist, I expected her to keep odd hours, waking up whenever she felt like it and working for as long or as little as her mood allowed, but she treated painting like a 9-5 job, going to her studio and coming home at the same time every day. This devotion to a routine didn't fit with the rest of her personality, which was somewhat erratic; she was prone to mood-swings, often and without warning swinging from one emotional extreme to the other. She was impulsive, trusting the "feel" of a moment as opposed to thinking things through (a good example of which was hooking up with me.) Again, none of this bothered me, and in some ways I enjoyed it. I liked the fact that I was seeing an artist, someone who took their work as seriously as I took my writing, and then I saw one of her paintings and realized that comparing my work with hers was arrogant to the point of being insulting.
"Painting" is a shallow word for what she did; she worked with light, exposing photo-sensitive paper to dozens of different sources. These could be anything from street lamps to moonlight, or even something as simple as a television screen. She only made use of what she called "found light", never setting up a lamp in a studio or artificially manipulating the environment. To produce different effects she used custom-made silk-screens which allowed her to blend and soften the light. Afterwards, she would paint on top of the prints, faint ghostly shapes that might have been streets filled with people, or the landscape of a dead city, or may have been something else entirely. The painted forms drew the eye, but it was the wide, light-washed stretches of canvas that were most interesting, the pale colours that she somehow managed to blend and fade together like the tenuous connections between dreams.
As brilliant as these prints were, for her they were only a kind of practice. What she called her "true" work was done using sheets of wafer-thin material composed of specially designed solar cells with the ability both to store and reflect light, the result of which was to turn the piece itself into a light source. The effect dimmed within a matter of days, but she made twice as much selling those as she did with her paintings.
So she was a talented artist. On top of that was the sex, which was intense, if not exactly fulfilling: there was a desperation in the way we came together, and also something pathetic. We spent ourselves on each other's bodies, fucking like people who've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and when we were done her hips would go on working, grinding into me, and her nails dug into my back as if she was pleading with me or with the world not to be finished yet. Time was a constant pressure between us, a massive stone wheel that ground our days into a dust of memory. Each night that gave way to the morning, every weekend that ended was one less we'd ever have, and as a result our conversation was as frantic as our sex life. We moved from one topic to another, talking of everything or nothing, desperately trying to describe ourselves with the naïve belief that in doing so we were making the best possible use of what little time we had left.
What else is there to say? She wasn't perfect, but headcase that I am, I thought she was perfect for me.