“Herpetologist? She studies herpes?”
Joe sighed. “Herpetologists study reptiles. She, in particular, studies the effects of climate change on snake coloration.”
I stared down the hall at her closed apartment door. “That’s not the profession I would’ve guessed.”
“She was just featured in Science magazine. She’s brilliant.”
“So…” I said then, just to irritate him. “You’re dating a brilliant herpesologist.”
“Herpetologist,” he said, making a couple of tuh, tuh noises afterward to emphasize the T. “And we’re not dating.”
That perked me up a little, though I’d never admit it.
It perked me up so much, in fact, that I did not submit any follow-up questions—on the chance that he might follow “We’re not dating” with something ghastly like “We’re just sleeping together.”
Don’t ask, don’t tell. What he did or didn’t do with the snake-a-tologist was his business.
“I can’t pay you,” I said then. “Not with money, anyway.”
That got his attention. “What will you pay me with?”
“Well,” I said, “I can’t give you the portrait itself, because they’re auctioning those off.”
“That’s okay,” Joe said, all deadpan. “I have too many portraits of myself already.”
“So,” I went on, businesslike. “Let’s just say you can have whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want?” he asked, like it was too good to be true.
“Within reason,” I said. “If you want me to paint something for you, or if you want me to buy you dinner or give you an art lesson, maybe. Whatever you can think of.”
“Are you giving me a blank check?” he asked.
“No!”
“Sounds like a blank check to me.”
“I’m saying you and I can find a mutually agreed-on form of payment at some point.”
“So in other words,” Joe said, the delight of teasing me pretty clear in his voice, “a blank check.”
Eighteen
SUE’S ELOPING WAS a bummer for many reasons.
One, I’d be missing my best friend’s wedding.
Two, all the stuff I was about to do to Joe was nerve-racking to say the least. He had no idea what he was in for.
And three, Sue had promised to be my date to the art show.
Which was the worst bummer of all.
Because when you have to do something genuinely scary, it’s nice to have a friend.
I’d be all alone. Just standing straight and brittle with crazy eyes and a quavery smile all night while I waited for a bunch of portrait critics in tortoiseshell glasses to render judgment on my talent, my value as a human being, and my entire future.
So, yeah. Was eloping to Canada really more important than keeping me from dying of misery?
I could see both sides.
Anyway, Sue had been fully on board to help me survive it all.
Until she got kidnapped, that is.
I suppose it was possible I’d astonish us all and win this art show.
But I didn’t love my odds.
That said—I had just enough hope to keep going.
That’s the dark underbelly of hope that nobody ever talks about. How it can skew your perspective. How it can keep you in long past when any reasonable person would’ve been out. How it can land you in your own apartment on a random Tuesday night—annotating your downstairs neighbor’s nose-to-lip dimensions with a tape measure.
“You don’t have to hold your breath,” I kept telling Joe.
“Right. Got it.”
He was more nervous than he’d expected to be. I could tell from his posture. And how very scrubbed clean he was—like maybe he’d taken a shower and a half. Even from the cautious way he’d walked across the rooftop toward my door. Almost like he had half a mind to turn around.
“It’s harder than it seems, huh?” I said.
“Trigonometry is hard. Climbing El Capitan is hard. Landing on the beaches of Normandy is hard. This is just … sitting here.”
“Sitting here while a total stranger measures every square inch of your face.”
“You’re not a total stranger.”
“You’re right. I’m worse. You know me just enough for this to be super awkward.”
“I don’t feel awkward,” Joe said.
“Yeah, you do.”
I’d made a graph on a canvas and I was dividing his face into one-inch sections, trying to treat each square as a different landscape. Maybe if my brain didn’t know it was a face, it wouldn’t cause trouble.
I worked my way from top to bottom. So far I had the hair, the hairline, the forehead, and the eyebrows. It had gone pretty well, but now we were coming to the eyes, and for some reason I didn’t understand, ever since the start of the face blindness, the eyes were my hardest thing to look at.
But these weren’t eyes, I told myself. These were dots and lines and color. I just had to think about it that way, and I’d be fine. Maybe that was the trick to it all. Abstract it out. Make the face not a face.
Easy.
But of course Joe didn’t know his face wasn’t a face. He kept rubbing his eyes and sneezing and looking back at me. Every time his eyes met mine, I got a jolt of something physical, like I was looking into a bright light.
“You can look down,” I kept saying.
“Sorry,” he’d say.
Mostly, though, he sat still.
Mostly, the problem was me.
This just wasn’t how I was used to working.
I’d been painting portraits since high school. I’d patterned my techniques and methods into my brain like deep grooves.
This felt like trying to read a book upside down. In another language.
At no point did I ever just get caught up in the flow—the way I always had before when I was painting. There was no flow. There was no getting lost in the moment. The math and the struggle and the shockingly close presence of Joe’s actual live human body just right there, inches away from me—breathing and generating heat and leaning in whenever I got close—kept me anchored to reality.
I blame Joe.
And that torso of his.
And don’t even get me started on the imaginary judges I kept hearing in my head: “Did she use a grid for this? What is this, paint by numbers?”
I could feel myself losing. In advance.
I had a bad feeling. I took a picture of the portrait so far and texted it to Sue for her professional opinion.
Her reply was immediate: Nope. Creepy.
Salvageable? I texted back.
Not a chance.
“I don’t think the grid is working,” I said to Joe.
Joe shrugged. “Okay. What’s next?”
I consulted my list of ideas. “Let’s turn you upside down.”
So that was our next attempt. Joe lay on the sofa, hanging his head backward over the arm, and I turned the canvas upside down and tried to sketch him like that.
Sue’s response to this one was a simple two words: Police sketch.
So we moved down the list. I tried having him describe his face to me and painting with my back to him.
Maybe the third time would be the charm.
But no.
Sue’s final response was the worst of all: Serial killer.
Okay.
We were done here.
I set my brush down and took a second to rub the kinks out of my hand. Had I ever cramped up while painting before?