“God, I sound carnivorous. Let’s change the subject, please.”
“So …” Frank took a deep breath. “What do you do? Where are you from? When did you move to New York? Do you have brothers and sisters? When’s your birthday? What’s your horoscope? Birthstone? Shoe size?”
Cleo exhaled another peal of laughter. Frank grinned.
“Go on then,” he said. “Where are you from?”
“You really want to know all that about me?”
“I want to know everything about you,” he said, and was surprised to find he meant it.
Cleo told him that she’d moved around a lot growing up, but her family eventually settled in South London. Her parents split up when she was a teenager, and her father, an affable but distant engineer, quickly remarried and adopted his new wife’s son. Her mother died in Cleo’s last year of university at Central Saint Martins. She still had not found a way to talk about it. She had no close family back home, which left her feeling untethered but also, she added quickly, completely free.
With nothing tying her to London and a small inheritance from her mother that could cover a flight and two years of cheap rent, she’d applied for a scholarship to study painting at a graduate program in New York. She arrived when she was twenty-one. For her, that MFA meant two years in a smooth orbit from her bed, to a canvas, to bars, to other people’s beds, and back to a canvas. She’d graduated the previous spring and had been freelancing as a textile designer for a fashion brand ever since. The pay wasn’t great, and they didn’t provide benefits, but it gave her enough money and free time to rent a sizable room in the East Village, which she also used as her painting studio. Her biggest fear now was that her student visa was up at the beginning of the summer, and she had no plan for what to do next.
“Do you paint every day?” asked Frank.
“Everyone always asks that. I try to. But it’s hard.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes the process is like … Okay, you know when you’re tidying up a cupboard—”
“Is that a closet?”
“Yes, you American, a closet. First, you have to pull everything out of it, and there’s this moment when you’re looking around and it’s a total mess. And you feel like, Shit, why did I even start this? It’s worse than before I began. And then slowly, piece by piece, you put it all away. But before you can create order, you have to make a mess.”
“I’m following.”
“That’s what painting is like for me. Inevitably, there’s a moment when I’ve pulled everything out of me, and it’s just … it’s chaos on canvas. I feel like I should never have started. But then I keep going, and somehow things find their order. I know when I’ve finished because I feel … I feel this click that means everything’s in its place. It’s all where it should be. Total peace.”
“How long does that last?”
“Maybe seven-point-five seconds. And then I start thinking about the next piece.”
“Sounds exhausting,” said Frank.
“But those seven-point-five seconds are …”
She looked up at the sky dramatically. Frank waited.
“As you would say, they undo me,” she said.
They passed a man wearing a tuxedo and a green feather boa, retching over a fire hydrant.
“I think feather boas should make a comeback,” said Cleo.
“I think you are an exceptional person,” said Frank.
“You don’t know me well enough to say that,” said Cleo, clearly delighted.
“I’m a good judge of these things.”
“Then I’ll just have to take your word for it.”
They were in Little Italy, where the streets were lined with seemingly identical Italian restaurants with red-checkered tablecloths and plastic bowls of pasta stuck in the windows. Above their heads, strings of red, white, and green bulbs dropped lozenges of light onto the street below. In a third-floor apartment window, a group of people stood smoking out a window, their bodies silhouetted against the yellow light of the room behind them. “Happy New Year!” they shouted to no one in particular. Cleo and Frank passed a quiet pizza spot on the corner, where a lone man was stacking up plastic chairs for the night.
“You want to get a slice?” asked Frank.
Cleo fingered the tassels on her bag. “I don’t have any cash.”
“I’ll buy you something,” he said.
“Drop the something,” she said lightly. “And you have the truth of the matter.”
“You think I’m trying to buy you?”
“Aren’t all men trying to buy women, deep down?”
“You really believe that?”
“I don’t not believe it.”
“That’s incredibly unfair.”
“Okay, tell me why I’m wrong.”
He turned to face her and exhaled slowly. He really had just wanted to get a slice.
“I think men are taught to buy things for women, yes. Not because we want to own you or control you, but because it’s a way to show we’re interested or we care that doesn’t require much, I don’t know, vulnerability. We’re not taught to communicate the way you are. We’re given these very limited, primitive tools to express ourselves, and, yes, buying a fucking meal is one of them. But women also expect that from us—”
Cleo was hopping up and down in excitement to interrupt him, but he raised his hand, determined to finish. “It goes both ways. You say I’m trying to buy you, but you’d be offended if I didn’t offer to pay.”
“I would not!” she exploded. “And the only reason I’m going to let you pay is because I happen to be triple extra-broke right now.”
“So now I am paying? See, that’s where I call bullshit. You want it both ways. You want to be so principled and above it all, but as soon as that becomes inconvenient for you, you’re fine with a man picking up the bill.”
“Are you kidding me? Maybe I’m broke because of, I don’t know, the gender pay gap, or years of systemic sexism limiting my job opportunities, or the fact I had to quit my last job as a nanny because the dad wouldn’t stop hitting on me, or—”
Now it was Frank’s turn to hop.
“That’s not why you’re broke! You’re broke because you’re twenty-four and an artist who works part-time! You can’t blame all your problems on being a woman!”
Cleo put her face close to Frank’s and spoke so quietly her words were just above a breath. He had the insane hope she was about to kiss him.
“Yes, I can,” she said.
Frank turned and walked into the pizza shop. “You’re cool,” he said over his shoulder. “But you’re crazy.”
“Sounds better in French!” she shouted back.
Cleo lit another cigarette and stamped her feet against the sidewalk like a restless racehorse. She thought about leaving just to spite him, but she knew she would regret it instantly. There was nothing to do but stand and smoke. Frank ordered two slices of pizza, anxiously checking over his shoulder to make sure she was still outside. He’d already decided that if she left, he’d run after her and apologize. But the back of her blond head was still in view, surrounded now by a cloud of smoke.
Back outside, he handed her a slice. An amber stream of oil ran across the flimsy paper plate.