Life Penalty by Joy Fielding

her.
    It was a beautiful October day, the trees surrounding them with brilliant shades of red and orange. “Just what do you know?” She said nothing. “How old are you?” he asked. “You can’t be very old.”
    “I’m nineteen,” she replied, somewhat defensively. “What’s your name?”
    “Gail. Gail Harrington.” She struggled with herself to look directly into his eyes, lost, and focused her gaze on her lap instead.
    “What are you so afraid of, Gail?” he asked, his eyes mocking her. “You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
    “No,” Gail answered, terrified.
    “Do you want to come up and see my etchings?’ he asked, and promptly burst out laughing.
    “I see enough etchings at home, thank you,” she replied, resolutely serious.
    “Oh?”
    “My father’s a painter,” she said, and then looked back at her lap, wondering why she had told him that. She had never told anyone that before.
    “Has he ever painted you?” Gail shook her head. “I’d like to paint you.”
    “Why?”
    “Because you have a very attractive quality about you, a stillness you surround yourself with that I’d like to try to capture on canvas.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because …”
    “Because what?”
    “Why do you want to paint
me
?”
    “I already told you. A more interesting question is why you don’t want to let me?”
    “I don’t know you.”
    “And you don’t like what you don’t know?”
    “I just don’t think I’m your type, that’s all.”
    “Who said anything about type? I don’t want to make love to you. I just want to paint you.” He paused to let this last line take effect. “For such a shy kid, you’re pretty conceited.”
    Gail shook her head, embarrassed now more than ever, wishing he would go away, terrified he might. “All right,” she said finally, when it became obvious that he would say no more. “All right,” she repeated, nodding her head up and down. “All right.”
    Mark Gallagher had overwhelmed and frightened Gail. She felt the danger of the man even as she walked along the street beside him. He radiated a certain static that manifested itself most clearly in his paintings, wild moving swirls of violent color. Unlike her father’s art, which was primitive, almost childlike, but innately well balanced, there was no discipline to Mark’s work, no structure, no limits. One color ran into another. The combination of hues was no less disturbing, even alarming, setting one color into conflict with its nearest neighbor, almost deliberately undermining what with a little more thought could have been a much more satisfying painting. But Mark Gallagher was not a man given to a great deal of thought, and he was interested in satisfying only himself. His portrait of Gail was strange and otherworldly, frightening in its lack of definite boundaries, her skin spilling out into the background of the wall behind her.
    When Mark was called up before the draft board—and he threatened vociferously to flee to Canada if he weredrafted—he was turned down on the grounds that he was hopelessly,
dangerously
color-blind. For Mark the knowledge that he was not producing for others the vision his mind was creating, and that his erratic genius was the result of a physical handicap and not a product of any wayward artistic spirit, caused him to abandon painting. He turned instead to photography. Portraits and landscapes. Black and white only.
    Very early in the marriage Mark took to spending more time than he should with several of his subjects, and after half a decade of grand gestures and casual infidelities (he bought her a baby grand piano with the money he had made from a number of the subjects with whom he was carrying on affairs), Gail called it quits. She had never confronted him with any of his indiscretions; it would have been too painful. Instead, she busied herself with taking care of Jennifer and with her piano playing. When she moved out, she took only those