I dreaded it all day long, staring at the canvas’s empty white face hole. By the time Sue arrived, I was ready to quit.
“I don’t want to find out for sure that I can’t do this, you know?” I said. “I’d rather only suspect that I can’t do it. Doesn’t that sound better?”
“No. That doesn’t sound better. Because then you’re not painting. And you always get really crabby when you’re not painting.”
She wasn’t wrong.
“Even painting something bad,” Sue said, “is better than not painting anything at all.”
“Is it?” I asked. Guess we were about to find out.
“Maybe you’ll surprise yourself,” Sue said. “Maybe portrait painting is another brain system like reading emotions is. Or maybe you’re so good at this, you don’t even need your face area thingy. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”
I nodded.
“Just jump in,” she said. “I really suspect that the worst possible choice is to not even try.”
I suspected that, too.
And so I tried.
I stood in front of the canvas, looking down at the dear face of my dear friend who I’d known so long, who I’d painted so many times … and I saw nothing but unintelligible nonsense.
But I pushed on.
My best strategy was to divide the face circle on the canvas into mathematical sections, and mark, in general, where the eyes and nose and mouth should be, and then focus on one puzzle piece at a time, plugging them in where each one ought to go.
It was a good plan.
But it didn’t work.
When I finally finished the pencil sketch, I stepped back and realized that now it, too, looked like puzzle pieces.
I had just drawn that picture. But now I couldn’t see it.
I asked Sue to check it and see if I was on the right track. She got up all eager, but then slowed way down on the approach.
I couldn’t see her expression, but I could definitely read her emotion. And that emotion was “Huh.”
“Tell me,” I said.
“Do you want me to be honest?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know.”
“It’s a little funky,” Sue said at last.
“What does that mean?”
She paused. “It’s not photorealism.”
“We knew that already. What are you saying?”
“It’s a little bit like a Salvador Dalí painting.”
“Oh my god, is your face melting? Like a Dalí clock?”
“No … the pieces are all technically kind of in the right place. Ish. It’s not surrealism, exactly. It’s just…”
“How bad is it that you can’t even find the words?”
“It’s a little ghoulish.”
“Ghoulish!” I had my answer. “Ghoulish is super bad. Ghoulish is a catastrophe.”
But she came over and hugged me.
“It’s certainly eye-catching,” she said, trying to accentuate the positive. “Nobody’s going to be bored looking at this thing.”
But eye-catching wasn’t going to cut it. Not bored wasn’t what the judges wanted. And don’t get me started on ghoulish. This was a puppies-and-kittens type of organization.
These North American Portrait Society folks were about following the rules—not breaking them.
I stared at the painting and tried to see what Sue was talking about—or any face at all. But I just couldn’t. I squinted and concentrated and tried to make the pieces click for so long that frustration finally burst up out of my body like a geyser. I slammed my fist down on the paint table, accidentally hitting a book … that hit a glass jar of brushes … that went flying and shattered on the concrete floor.
“Shit,” I said, deflating.
I moved to start picking up the shards, but Sue stopped me. “Go sit down. I’ll get this. Take some breaths.”
I did as I was told.
Sue found a broom and a pan. “What about Chuck Close?” she suggested. “He was a portrait artist with face blindness. How did he do it?”
I’d been reading up on him. He was a face-blind artist who painted enormous photorealistic faces. But I shook my head. “He superimposed a grid over a photograph. But for this competition, it has to be a live model. No photos allowed. It’s in the rules.”
“What do other face-blind portrait artists do?”
“Shockingly, a search of ‘techniques of face-blind portrait artists’ does not turn up a huge number of results.”
“You’ve tried it?”
“Many times.”
“Well, then,” Sue said, frowning again at the painting. “We’ll just have to get creative.”
* * *
I ASKED DR. Nicole about it when we had our first meeting outside the hospital.
I’d been supposed to start twice-a-week sessions with her the day after I came home. But in my Pajanket stupor, I’d missed that first appointment. And then the next two. And I was seriously considering just never going at all when she started calling me—stalking me, really—until I finally gave in.
I Ubered to her office.
Which wasn’t an office at all. It was a 1920s bungalow in the Museum District.
It’s not a stretch to say that I fan-girled Dr. Nicole with the same intensity that I was now madly in love with Peanut’s new veterinarian. This whole brain surgery thing seemed to have really turned up the volume on my emotions.
In the hospital, she had seemed to glow with comfort and compassion. Now, here in the real world, as she opened the door in a belted maxi dress, dangly gold earrings, and open-toed flats … she was even better. Her short, naturally graying hair seemed to ring her head like a halo.
“Hello, Sadie,” she said, taking my hand and giving it her signature squeeze. “Come in.”
What was it about her? She was so damned together. Her voice. Her calm. So balanced and solid and like she had it all under control.
The opposite of me, basically.
Especially now.
“I’m sorry I missed all those appointments,” I said, now that I was finally here. “I didn’t want to leave my apartment.”
“I understand,” Dr. Nicole said.
I’m not going to lie. My life lately had me questioning everything. And Dr. Nicole Thomas-Ramparsad, Ph.D., just felt like a person who had all the answers.
“Nobody has all the answers,” she said when I told her that. “I’m just here to help you ask the right questions.”
Exactly what someone who had all the answers would say.
Her office was bright and breezy. It had a little bit of an Old Hollywood vibe to it, with plaster walls and a wrought-iron staircase rail. Big windows. A lazily spinning ceiling fan with basket-weave blades. Potted palms and rubber trees all around—and, outside the window, positively basking in the sunlight, a cheery forest of birds-of-paradise everywhere.
Dr. Nicole made us tea and brought me a slice of coconut bread—warm with melting butter. Did neuropsychologists bake bread for their patients? Was this a thing?
No matter. Dr. Nicole clearly made her own rules.
Plus, I was so starved for comfort, I didn’t care. My eyes filled with tears at my first bite.
“How is the facial perception?” she asked. “Any changes?”
I shook my head. No change at all.
“It may take some time,” she said. Then, “How are you coping?”