Fiction
My Portrait
“Come over, I’ll make you some spaghetti.” I had no money when I got back from Mexico. “It would be an honor for me to paint your picture.” For hours, you’re looking, finding the blue in the skin under my eyes, and while I was doing nothing, nothing but sitting, I had to look at you. “Include me in your prayers, Edward.” You wore a red flannel shirt and blue jeans every day. You shaved your head. “The eyes are the hardest most important.” “The eyes, the eyes,” you would softly repeat. I was begging for you to take off my clothes, without saying anything. You pulled up a chair, used it to lean on, to pray. I still think I see you on street corners. You had candles, a crucifix, the rosary in your fingers. “I’ll pray for you for every hour you pose. That’s how you can pay me back.” In October after that summer I went to Mexico I couldn’t make rent. You wrote me a check for two hundred dollars. “It’s nothing, Jill Magi.” You would say my full name. We had broken up four months earlier. I had brown boots that year and wore them in every season. “Wear your green sweater. Bring over the red one just in case you need to change.” We were not supposed to make love but it was too late for me to go home. The warmth in your bed, there, next to you after sitting for my portrait, it was impossible not to embrace. I teased you: You’ve got yourself an apartment in Bushwick; the realtor told you Williamsburg; the boy from Edmonton gets bamboozled” and I laughed. Your basement, filled with canvases, a desk piled high with sketches, paper stiff with gesso. The charcoal let in only candlelight. “Remember Vermont?” You watched me swim. You watched me dance on the porch. That picture you snapped with my camera; my open face. But you looked concerned. You were plotting our break-up, weren’t you? “Just let me hold you.” Sitting for an hour, thinking, am I beautiful? I hope you have made me beautiful. We both hated The Piano, the movie. Our kissing was automatic on that first night. It was too late for me to go home. “You would have moved to Edmonton for me? You would have converted?” “Yes.” The Lucien Freud show, we go and you are shaking your head at the paintings. “There’s so much depravity, Jill Magi.” “The misuse of the body, Jill Magi.” Until I pay back the debt, these visits, these sittings go on. “Call in sick, Jill Magi. Stay with me today.” “When you paint someone the truth is sometimes unbearable.” “I’ll stay, Edward.” That November day we walked around the city and said good-bye at the subway. The hours ran out, the debt was paid, I never saw you again and I never saw my portrait.
Contributor
Jill MagiJill Magi works in text, image, and textiles. LABOR will be out in September 2013 from Nightboat Books, and her other books are Threads (Futurepoem), SLOT (Ugly Duckling Presse), Cadastral Map (Shearsman), and Torchwood (Shearsman). She was a 2012-13 visiting writer in the MFA poetry program at Columbia College Chicago and an instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Gaby Collins-Fernández: To A Portrait
By David WhelanDEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen
Gaby Collins-Fernándezs solo exhibition To A Portrait unraveled my defenses. Borders give me a sense of calm and control, but the six wall-height paintings on view at Anonymous escape these boundaries, giving a broader dimension to ones psychic, emotional, and bodily life. Words and images entwine and stretch past their limits, shattering into fragments of human desire. The work sneers at my guarded caution in its excess, passing up my small world for one with much more fascinating, beautiful complication.

Isolde Brielmaier’s I Am Sparkling: N.V. Parekh and His Portrait Studio Clients
By Noa WynnSEPT 2022 | Art Books
This book offers a counter-narrative to engaging with African photographic archives as well as photographic histories at large. Challenging the history of canonizing and prioritizing photographers, Brielmaier instead shifts the focus to Parekhs sitters, particularly women, as a crucial part of the image itself.
Julian Schnabel: Predominately Natural Forms, Mexico, 2022
By Alfred Mac AdamOCT 2022 | ArtSeen
Julian Schnabels inventive exuberance shows no signs of flagging. Whether harvesting the awnings from the stands of fruit vendors in Troncones, Mexico, where these paintings were made, and transforming the irregular shapes into spectacularly asymmetrical shaped canvases, or, as here, using velvet as his surface, he finds ways to impose his abstract will on whatever medium he chooses.
Assembly 1: Unstored, Contemporary Sculpture from Mexico
By Hovey BrockJUL-AUG 2022 | ArtSeen
Much of the sculpture in this maiden exhibition has a post-Minimalist vibe that feels right at home in the spare elegance of the former showroom space, but even those pieces that skew toward something more figurative benefit from Assemblys spaciousness and natural light. If youre heading upstate this summer, put Assembly 1: Unstored on your itinerary.