Red was the perfect person to go in Ela’s place to buy cosmetics in Germany.  As an American he didn’t need a visa to go to the European Union.  Just having his airfare and hotel paid for were enough for him; he was excited to have a chance to visit Munich.  In fact Ela couldn’t convince him that she was planning to make this offer even if he hadn’t found his ‘magic coin.’  Additionally he was happy to get out of Izmir for a while; apparently his job had taken a stressful turn.  He had a new student in one of his classes that was incredibly disruptive—Blue’s niece.

What Ela knew, which she did not say, was that Blue didn’t have any nieces.  Not in Turkey anyway.  Actually Ela was fairly sure that this alleged niece was a new lover of Blue’s.  Early on in their relationship Blue had offered free classes at his school if she wanted them.  “I’ll just tell my accountant that you’re my niece.” Is what Blue said would be his response if anyone asked why she wasn’t paying for lessons.  The revelation that Blue had a new “niece” was a painful sting for Ela.  She tried her best not to show it but Red could tell that something was wrong, even if he didn’t have a clue what that was.

After going their separate ways Ela returned home.  She wondered what this so-called niece looked like, how old she was, her height, the color of her hair.  She wondered if there was a way that she could confront Blue without revealing her relationship with Red.  Most of all she wondered how she could dispose of her rival. It was a futile exercise in hate.

Ela decided that for now the best course of action would be to do nothing.  She was not Blue’s wife, only his concubine.  He was free to see other people if he wished just as she was.  This did not stop Ela from occasionally thinking about, say, going to English Accelerated and meeting this alleged niece, but each time she pushed it back as a bad idea.  The last thing Blue would want would be two of his mistresses making a scene at his business.

Instead Ela channeled her energies towards working on the tower painting for Black.  The task seemed so daunting that she did know where to start.  So she had delayed starting on it for five days now, only making the situation worse.  Her primary excuse was that she was unsure how many floors the tower would have.  Ideas for different floors stopped flowing easily out of her head at seven, the ideas stopped completely at twelve.  This was insufficient, the tower needed to have at least twenty floors, twelve simply wasn’t enough.  Ela needed to get started though.  She took her brush to canvas.  The first thing she painted was an outline of the building.  It would be twenty-one stories high.  By planning it as such she forced herself to come up with ideas for additional floors—that was the logic anyway.

Ela painted.  She immersed herself into the hard-boiled world of her own creation.  She ate her meals in front of the painting, wondering what kind of food her various characters would eat.  She neglected her regular exercise routine, yoga was not something that people in her noir world would do so nor would she.  She laid awake in bed at night thinking about details she could add.  One morning she awoke with the vague memory that she had had a brilliant revelation the night before but could not recall what that was.  After that she kept a notebook on her bedside table.  The next morning when she looked at her notebook, sometimes she’d find a good idea for another floor in the tower.  Sometimes she’d find incoherent ramblings.  One note said “A store where you could get cash if you picked the right ticket but only cash you’d deposited.”  Another said “Broccoli smoothie/alley –in Korea?”  She had no idea what this meant.

Red went to Germany and came back.  In other circumstances she might have arranged to meet in a café to hand off the goods but Ela didn’t want to be away from her painting for so long.  She gave Red directions to her home and hoped that in the future he wouldn’t show up at inappropriate times.  When asked if he had bought anything for himself Red admitted to buying some German pornography.  He said that he had never actually bought porn before but the internet was censored in Turkey and his imagination was running low.

Red wanted to go out to have something to eat.  Ela responded no, that she had just had lunch.  Red blinked at this “I meant to have some dinner.  It’s 7pm.”  Ela realized that she had been working for hours since her last meal when it had only felt like minutes.  Still she begged off, she explained that she was in the middle of a big project and they would meet again as soon as it was finished.  Red asked for details about this project but she refused him this as well.  

She tried to go straight back to work but it was as if Red had awoken her from a long trance.  She realized that she needed to eat, to use the bathroom, to clean herself.  She did these things and then picked up her brush again.  She painted through the night and into the next day.  She obsessively stared at a crack in the wall of her house so that she might get a crack in the wall of her painting just right.

Then she woke up naked on the floor.  There was a blanket over her and a pillow under her head so she couldn’t have just collapsed there.  But why would she have chosen to sleep on the floor, without her nightgown?  Only after she had made herself some tea did Ela remember that Blue had come over.  He had wanted to go to the bedroom but she insisted on having sex there in front of her unfinished painting.  She had stared at it the entire time and was unsure of the true origin of the ecstasy that she’d felt.  She collapsed into sleep immediately after they’d finished and Blue must have covered her with a blanket rather than carry her to the bedroom away from her painting.  She looked at a clock; it was just past 3pm.  She didn’t know exactly when Blue had come over but she knew it had been the day before. 

The month passed like this.  Ela would get lost in her painting until something snapped her back to reality and she’d realize that she’d gone too long without food or sleep.  She found that it was no use to try and go to bed until she was completely exhausted anyway, otherwise she’d lie awake in bed thinking about additional details she could add.  Red called a few times but she pushed him away.  Blue came by a couple times a week, she could not refuse him.  She had stopped memorizing poems for him and soon found that she couldn’t even remember old ones that she’d learned.  Blue didn’t seem to mind though; he was fascinated by her mad frenzy to get the painting done just so.  Once when she thought she was alone she turned to see him sitting in a chair watching her.

“Motherlover!”  She exclaimed “How long have you been sitting there?” 

Blue looked at his watch.  “Almost an hour.”

“Well don’t sneak up on me like that.”  She scolded him.

“I didn’t sneak.”  Blue responded.  “I knocked on the door.  You didn’t answer.  The door was unlocked, I came in.  I called out your name, I found you in this room.  I said ‘Ela, didn’t you hear me knocking?  Didn’t you hear me calling you?’  You didn’t respond.  You just kept painting.  I pulled up a chair and watched you work.”

Ela made a face, she found it hard to believe that she wouldn’t have noticed him calling out her name.  She shook her head to wake herself up.  “Whatever.  Let’s just have sex so I can get back to painting.” She didn’t have time to pretend to seduce him today.

This made Blue laugh a little.  “How about this” Blue offered “I won’t even steal that time from you.  However, I think you should work like this.”  He reached up and grabbed her t-shirt.  It was an old thread bare thing that easily tore off her.  Ela quickly took off the rest of her clothes before he could damage them as well.  Blue sat back down, Ela returned to her painting.  She was more conscientious of his eyes being on her brush strokes than of them being on her ass.  She soon forgot that he was there at all though.  Day had turned into night when she realized that he was no longer there.  Had he announced that he was leaving or had he quietly slipped out?  Ela had no idea.  She went to the shower to wash the paint off her breasts.