But Joe was just shaking his head. “How could you think that? How dumb do you think I am?”
“All men are dumb when it comes to Parker.”
But Joe was still indignant. “I wasn’t messing around with the stepsister who ruined your life,” he said. “I was feeding her cat.”
Confirmation. “You were feeding Parker’s evil cat? The one that keeps peeing in our hallway?”
Joe nodded. “Yep. Its name is Elvira.”
I took that in. “But you were wearing your pajamas.”
“Exactly!” Joe said. “People don’t do walks of shame in their pajamas.”
He had a point.
“Parker wasn’t even there! She left at three A.M. on a flight to Amsterdam!” he said—and now it was his turn to be mad. “You think that I kissed you last night and then turned around to have some kind of illicit tryst with your worst enemy?”
I mean, yes.
Worse things happened all the time with Parker. But his outrage was humbling.
“It wasn’t a real kiss,” I finally said.
“It was real enough.”
I shrugged, still half thinking I was right.
“How could you think that?” Joe said.
“I don’t know. People are terrible.”
“People may be terrible,” Joe said. “But I’m not.”
He really felt kind of hurt.
Maybe it was time to level with him a little. “I’m sorry,” I said then, “I’m having a very weird month.”
“Okay,” Joe said, listening.
But how much to say, standing here in the doorway of his empty apartment? Maybe just the basics.
I took a breath and went for it. “About a month ago,” I said, “I had what they call a nonconvulsive seizure in the crosswalk in front of our building. And apparently a Good Samaritan pushed me to safety just before I got mowed down by a Volkswagen Beetle. At the hospital, they did a brain scan for the cause of the seizure and found a little malformed blood vessel. They said I needed surgery to correct it, so I had surgery.”
Joe shook his head, like What? “You had brain surgery?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“A month ago?”
I nodded to confirm. Then, like a kid showing someone a boo-boo, I leaned forward and pulled my hair aside so he could see the scar behind my ear.
He peered in at it. “Wow.”
I hadn’t shown anybody my scar yet. Not even Sue.
“Yeah,” I said. “And it’s been”—here, a tremble found its way into my voice—“a weirdly hard month. Nothing’s quite right. Things that used to be easy are now … not. Especially painting.”
Joe nodded.
“The day of the seizure, I’d just had my first big career break. And I was all set to win it.” I looked down at my hands. “But I’m having trouble painting now.”
“That’s why you’re trying new techniques.”
I nodded. I was not, not, not going to tell him about the face blindness. But maybe I could tell him about what it felt like. “My whole life, my brain was always just so … reliable. But now, not as much. I keep getting things wrong. I can’t trust myself. The whole world looks different. And so the version of me that you’re getting right now is … kind of a mess. Much more of a mess than usual.”
If Joe had any sense of what a big deal it was for me to admit to anyone ever that I wasn’t A-okay, he did not show it. “You’re not that much of a mess,” Joe said, his voice softer.
“I smashed a glass door today.”
“That was a mess,” Joe conceded.
“Anyway, I’m really sorry,” I said. “Getting super mad at people over wrong assumptions is not normally my thing.”
“It’s fine. You can make it up to me.”
“How?”
Joe gave a shrug. “Just un-cancel the portrait.”
“Funny you should ask,” I said. “That’s exactly what I came here to do.”
Twenty-One
BY THE TIME Joe showed at my place for the final portrait attempt, it was do or die.
Mostly die.
Because this portrait was going to lose. Big-time.
It might turn into a really compelling piece of art. It might become a fascinating character study. It might wind up beautiful or mesmerizing or powerful.
Hell, it might even be salable.
But it would not be the kind of portrait the North American Portrait Society was looking for. It would not be the kind of painting that had allowed me to beat out 1,990 other competitors. And it would not look like the work of a twenty-first-century Norman Rockwell—guaranteed.
Which was freeing, in a way.
Knowing I was going to lose?
It meant I could lose with some style.
After Joe agreed to the final attempt, Sue gave me a pep talk.
“Do you think I can do this?” I’d asked.
“What do you mean by ‘do this’?”
“Win. Do you think I can win?”
“No way in hell,” Sue said.
“Hey!” I said. “You’re supposed to encourage me.”
“I don’t think you can win,” Sue pushed on, “but I do think you can make something interesting. I do think you have mad artistic skills and a wildly creative brain. I do think you understand color and light like no one I’ve ever met. And I also think, just from the vibes I’m getting across international borders, that you might be madly in love with your subject.”
So that she could get to her point, I chose not to argue.
“Maybe you need to let go of winning. Maybe there are all kinds of ways to win. Maybe it’s a chance for you to make your own set of rules.”
“You’re saying I should give up?”
“Don’t give up. Just shoot for a different kind of victory.”
“You can’t just not win and pretend that you did.”
“Look,” Sue said. “Maybe you can’t do your usual thing right now. What if you do something crazy and different? What if instead of trying to make a thing you can’t make, you try to do something else?”
“Like what?”
“Like try to tell the story of this moment in your life. Try to capture your world right now, cracked open, exactly the way it is. Capture the chaos and the uncertainty and the longing. And don’t forget to capture whatever’s going on with you and that guy—because there’s some kind of fire in that.”
I thought about it. “I don’t usually try to tell a story about my life with portraits.”
“But,” Sue countered, “that’s what you’ve been doing all along. Telling the story of a girl trying like hell to paint exactly like her lost mother. And maybe now, in the story, the girl has no choice but to paint like herself.”
“But this isn’t myself.”
“Right now it is.”
I thought about it.
“What if you just capture your story—right now—as it is. I’d give anything to see that.”
“I’ll try,” I said. Because what other choice was there?
“And then text me a picture.”
“Fine,” I said. “But if you text back words like ‘serial killer,’ we’re going to have a problem.”
* * *
OKAY. SUE WASN’T wrong.
Before, I’d been trying to paint a portrait. A highly specific kind of portrait.
But knowing that I couldn’t do that was a kind of freedom.
Now all I had to do was paint something interesting. Something compelling. Something that held your attention. Something true about my life.
I was going to paint the moment. My experience of Joe in this moment.
Whatever that might turn out to be.
What I didn’t have going for me, obviously, was the face.