Inked In Scars: My Ex-Husband's Regret

This was the twenty-seventh time my husband had brought his mistress into my studio.

His buddies were placing bets in the outer room, wagering on whether I would throw a jar of turpentine in their faces this time.

I didn't. My brush came down steady and sure.

Until that woman simpered and asked for the signature on a painting.

"On what grounds?" I challenged her out loud for the first time.

He flicked his cigarette ash and answered, offhand:

"It's just a signature, isn't it?"

It wasn't just a painting. It was ten years of relentless practice.

I laughed. Ten years-and I had finally given up on him for good.

"Then go ahead and sign the divorce papers while you're at it."

Chapter 1

In six months, this was already the twenty-seventh time my husband had brought his mistress into my studio.

Derek Bruce pushed open the glass door of Briar Studio, and the brass bell overhead chimed crisply. He had his arm locked tight around Alondra Clemons's waist, and trailing behind him came his hedge-fund cronies-three men clutching overpriced iced coffees, laughing shamelessly.

The entire studio fell dead silent in an instant.

Maya, my apprentice, was penciling the underdrawing on a canvas. Her brush stopped dead. She stared at me, eyes wide with worry.

I didn't stop. I rinsed my brush in the cleaning jar and kept outlining a portrait on the canvas. Bristles loaded with a mix of ochre and titanium white glided steadily across the linen. The air smelled of turpentine and linseed oil.

"Look at her," Julian, Derek's friend, muttered-not quietly enough for the whole room to miss it. "Five hundred bucks says she douses him with a whole jar of turpentine today."

"You're on," another guy sneered. "I say she's in tears inside two minutes. She endured the first twenty-six women, but this time Alondra's moved into his penthouse."

My breathing stayed even, my rhythm unbroken. I laid down one last clean stroke, scraped the excess paint off the canvas with my palette knife, and set down my brush.

Derek came straight toward my easel. He wore a bespoke charcoal-gray suit that cost three months of this studio's rent, his hair slicked to perfection, his jaw set with insufferable arrogance.

"Clarissa," he said. He didn't ask how my morning was going, and he made no mention of the four straight weeks he'd been coming home at dawn.

"Derek," I replied evenly, slipping off my paint-stained canvas apron and hanging it over the back of a chair. "What can I do for you?"

"Alondra wants a painting," he said, pulling her closer. She was only twenty-two, swimming in one of Derek's oversized cashmere sweaters, staring at me with wide, deceptively innocent eyes.

"Not today. My bookings run through the end of November."

"Cancel them," Derek ordered. His voice was level but laced with contempt-the same imperiousness he had demanded of me with absolute obedience throughout ten years of marriage. "Paint her. Now."

"I'm with a client."

Derek pulled a heavy gold money clip from his pocket, casually peeled off a few crisp hundred-dollar bills, and tossed them onto my client's lap.

"Get out," he told the client. "Come back next week."

The client looked down at the money, then at the unfriendly faces blocking the door, scrambled off the chair, grabbed his coat, and fled.

Maya flushed red and stepped forward. "Derek, this is completely out of line-"

"Maya, go take your lunch break," I cut in softly.

She hesitated, shot Derek a vicious glare, grabbed her bag, slammed the door, and marched out into Brooklyn's drizzle.

Without asking, Alondra hopped straight onto my height-adjusted leather drafting chair. She swung her bare legs and surveyed the brick walls hung with my sketches, studies, and international exhibition awards.

"Derek, it's so dark in here," Alondra pouted. "We should paint these red brick walls white and put up a few pink neon signs. My socials would look so much better."

Derek gave her a tender smile. That smile used to belong only to me-the way he used to look at me when we were twenty, sitting on the floor of our first empty apartment, splitting a twenty-dollar takeout order.

"Whatever you want, sweetheart," Derek doted.

"What does she want to paint?" I asked.

Derek blinked. "A full-length portrait. Signed with her name. For the emerging-artist show at the Chelsea gallery next month."

"In what style?"

Alondra leaned forward with a sugary smile. "That contemporary-art look that just screams expensive. Oh-and put a line of fancy script across it: 'Derek's Girl.'"

The room went dead quiet. His buddies craned their necks, waiting for me to scream, to hurl a palette, to break down in tears.

I walked straight to the supply cabinet, stretched a fresh piece of linen onto a frame, and squeezed titanium white, ultramarine, and ochre into my palette dishes.

"Come sit over here," I told Alondra.

She sprawled onto the modeling platform, tugged open the collar of the cashmere sweater to bare one shoulder, and struck a pose she clearly thought was seductive. I blocked in the underdrawing with a charcoal stick, my hand steady as bedrock-not a tremble. Ten years of professional painting had carved unshakable precision into my muscle memory.

I picked up a No. 2 round brush, loaded it, and touched it to the canvas.

Stroke after stroke, the color built and blended across the linen. Alondra touched up her lipstick in the mirror three times and fidgeted impatiently through poses, while Derek leaned against the window, watching me with an unreadable, appraising look.

Forty minutes later, the portrait was done.

I stepped back and studied it. Delicate brushwork, crisp layers of light and shadow, the line of Alondra's collarbone handled just right, the folds of the cashmere carrying an air of languid luxury. Sent to the Chelsea emerging show, this painting stood a real chance of taking a prize.

"Done," I said.

Alondra hopped off the platform and leaned in for a look, the corners of her mouth curling up, evidently pleased.

Then her gaze slid past the canvas to the red brick wall beside it.

The wall was densely hung with my awards and exhibition certificates-a Whitney Biennial selection, a MoMA PS1 Emerging Artist Award, an invitation to a Chelsea group show, Sotheby's spring auction sales records. An entire wall, every inch of it a résumé I had painted stroke by stroke from age twenty to thirty.

The smile slowly drained from Alondra's face.

She tilted her head and studied the certificates one by one, lips pressed thin. Her eyes lingered on the awards for a long time-from Whitney's bronze-framed certificate to the Sotheby's auction record, she read every single one carefully.

"These are all yours?" She turned around, her voice giving nothing away.

"Yes," I said.

"You were in the Whitney Biennial?" She looked up at me, and for the first time something real flashed through those wide, innocent eyes-not coyness, not sweetness. Jealousy.

"Yes." A faint prickle of unease stirred in me. Why was she suddenly so fixated on me?

Alondra was silent for a few seconds.

Then she reached out, picked up my No. 2 round brush lying beside the palette, wiped the bristles on her apron, and walked to the canvas.

She took a palette knife and scraped away the words I had signed in the lower right corner-Clarissa Bruce.

In the very same spot, stroke by stroke, she wrote her own name-Alondra Clemons.

"What do you think you're doing?" My voice cracked for the first time.

"It's my portrait, isn't it?" Alondra tilted her head at me, the picture of entitlement. "So of course it bears my name. Right?"

"I painted it."

"But the face is mine," she said, blinking those big innocent eyes, her tone saccharine. "The emerging show is taking my work, so of course it gets my name."

I felt something detonate in my chest.

Ten years. I had endured ten years. Twenty-six women-I had endured them. His nights away-I had endured them. Bringing his mistress into my studio-endured. Throwing money at my clients and driving off my apprentice-endured all of it.

But this time, what she meant to steal was not money, not the studio, not the house.

She meant to steal my painting.

My name. Something I had built stroke by stroke. The only thing in this world that belonged to me and me alone.

"Change the name back." I heard my own voice trembling.

Alondra turned to Derek and pouted. "Derek-she's being mean to me."

Derek walked over from the window, looked down at the scraped-off and rewritten name on the canvas, and frowned.

"Clarissa," he said, in that condescending impatience I knew far too well, "it's just a signature. You've painted so many pieces-what's the harm in letting Alondra have this one? She's just starting out. She needs this break. Think of it as helping her."

I whipped my head around and stared at him.

"Helping her?" My voice shook-not from fear, but from something snapping inside me.

"What are you making a scene about?" Derek's face darkened.

"A scene?" I took a step forward, my voice finally breaking free of my control. "I put up with you bringing her here, driving off my clients, making me paint her! But now you're letting her steal my painting? Steal my name as a painter?"

"Steal?" Derek's voice rose too. "She is the mother of my child! What's one painting to you? You live in my house, drive my car, spend my money-isn't painting one little portrait for her the least you owe?"

"Your house?" I laughed, and the laugh was full of tears-I hadn't even realized I was crying. "Derek, I rented this studio when I was twenty, with the money from my first painting sale. Back then you were fetching coffee at your father's firm. Not one award on that wall was won by Derek Bruce. I spend your money? You were penniless when I married you! My paintings are the only thing in this family that has ever made money!"

Julian and the other two exchanged glances, stunned by the scene unfolding before them.

Alondra stood beside the canvas, her face flushing red and white by turns.

"You-you're insane!" she shrieked. "It's one lousy painting! Derek, look at her!"

"Shut up!" I rounded on her, so loudly I startled myself. "You want my painting? You want my name? Can you even read that wall of awards? Do you know titanium white from ultramarine? Do you know how many steps it takes to take a painting from underdrawing to varnish? You can't even hold a brush steady-what gives you the right to sign my name?!"

Alondra shrank back a step under my tirade.

Derek's face turned livid. He lunged forward and seized my wrist, grip like an iron clamp.

"Enough!" he said through his teeth. "What is wrong with you? Making a spectacle of yourself in public!"

I looked down at the hand gripping me. That hand, when I was twenty, had gently held mine on the floor of our first apartment and said, "One day, I'll take care of you."

Now that hand held me like I was an enemy.

Slowly, finger by finger, I pried his hand off me.

"Derek," I said, and my voice suddenly went calm-not the anger-suppressing calm of before, but a calm with nothing left in it, "I want a divorce."

Derek froze.

"My lawyer will deliver the divorce papers to your office on Monday." I walked to the supply cabinet, lifted the freshly finished canvas off its frame, rolled it up, wrapped it in kraft paper, and held it against my chest.

Then I walked up to Alondra and shoved the paper roll into her arms.

"Keep the painting," I said. "But the name is mine. If you dare put your signature on my work and send it to any exhibition, I will find a way to end your name in the art world for good."

Alondra clutched the roll, too frightened to say a word.

I untied my work apron and hung it neatly on the wall hook-still stained with ochre and titanium white, the colors of my ten years.

I picked up my leather shoulder bag and walked straight for the door.

Derek shouted something behind me. I didn't turn around.

I pushed open the door and walked out into Brooklyn's icy rain. Down the concrete steps I went, heading for the old silver Honda Civic parked at the curb.

Before I could fish my keys out of my pocket, two thugs in dark jackets shot out from around the corner, one of them swinging a heavy steel crowbar.

Two savage blows. My windshield instantly shattered into a dense spiderweb. The other man kicked the side mirror clean off its plastic housing.

"What are you doing?!" I shouted, rushing at them.

Derek strolled out of the studio with Alondra clinging to his arm, his friends trailing behind to enjoy the show.

"This car was bought with joint-account money," Derek said flatly, flicking his dead cigarette butt onto my hood. "Since you insist on a divorce, don't expect to touch my assets. Hand over the keys."

Julian snatched the leather bag off my shoulder, unzipped it, dug out the car keys, and hurled the bag down at my feet.

Alondra looked me up and down, her eyes landing on the black designer wool coat I wore.

"Derek," Alondra murmured, shrinking delicately in the cold wind, "her coat is so pretty. That's the limited-edition Burberry from last winter, isn't it? You promised you'd buy me one exactly like it."

Derek glanced at my coat, then fixed me with a merciless stare.

"Take it off, Clarissa," Derek ordered.

Five years ago, I would have thrown a hysterical fit. I would have screamed at him, demanded to know how he could humiliate his wife in broad daylight on a public street, and fought him with everything I had.

But now, all that was left inside me was bone-deep exhaustion.