I FINISHED THE painting a day early, emerging from a blissful state of flow and texting Joe: Your portrait’s done.
When I didn’t hear back, I decided to get more explicit. Want to come see it?
Still no response.
Maybe he was busy? Was this the busy season for pet sitters? Could some of Dr. Michaux’s snakes have escaped the den? Was everything okay with Joe’s hundred-year-old grandmother?
I told myself not to text Joe all these questions, but then I texted them all, anyway.
Plus a few more.
Where the heck was he?
I demanded that Sue call me from Canada, and then I said, “I think I just dumped my fantasy fiancé for a guy in my building who’s now ghosting me.”
“I’m sure he’s not ghosting you,” Sue said.
“I’ve sent him seven texts in the past twenty-four hours and he hasn’t replied to one of them.”
“For god’s sake, stop texting him! Have some self-respect!”
“I just want him to text me back.”
“He’s clearly unavailable.”
“I want to show him the portrait before I take it to the gallery.”
“Can’t always get what you want.”
“But why isn’t he replying?”
“Just give the poor man the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his grandmother’s sick.”
“You think they don’t have cell service where his grandmother lives?”
“Maybe! You don’t know! Maybe she’s an ancient Sicilian lady on a remote island where there are no phones. He could be stomping grapes right now, trying to keep the family vineyard going while she fights for her life in a charming Italian ICU.”
“Why does that not feel likely?”
“If you’re so worried, go knock on his door.”
Knock on his door?
I hadn’t thought of that.
Cut to me: Sixty seconds later—knocking on his door.
No answer.
Could he be stomping grapes in Sicily?
I mean, it wasn’t impossible.
But as the silence wore on, even optimistic Sue had to admit it wasn’t looking good. “I’m losing hope on the Italian grandmother,” she said, during yet another processing session.
“Right?” I said. “This is not a friendly miscommunication. Plus, I know he’s in town because I saw him in the elevator, and he saw me heading for it—and he did not hold the doors.”
“Maybe he didn’t see you?”
“He definitely saw me.”
“Looks like it’s time for interpretation B,” Sue said.
“Which is?”
“He hates you.”
“But why would he?”
“Maybe he overheard you saying something mean about him?”
“I haven’t said anything mean about him in weeks.”
“Not holding the elevator door is definitely a maximum-hostility move.”
“Maybe he just got his eyes dilated at the doctor, and he couldn’t tell it was me.”
“That only works for close objects.”
“Oh.”
“There’s no way of knowing if he won’t talk to you,” Sue said.
“My point exactly.”
“But if I had to guess? He’s an asshole. And he went after you for the thrill of the chase. But then he caught you and lost interest.”
I didn’t want that to be it.
But of all the options, this one seemed the most likely by far. Certainly more plausible than the sick grandmother. But here were the bare facts: 1. He was still in the building. 2. He was not responding to any of my attempts at contact. 3. He did not hold the elevator doors.
Plus, racking my brain did not yield anything—at all—that I might have done to him to push him away. I’d been worried that seeing his final portrait might make him run off screaming—but he hadn’t even seen it yet. And other than that, I hadn’t yelled at him or lied to him or—god forbid—asked him for help.
Wait—I hadn’t let myself need him, had I?
I’d let myself want him, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Unless asking him to sit for the portrait counted.
But wait—I hadn’t asked him to do that! He’d offered!
Weren’t those different things?
Should I never have accepted?
I could have asked these questions all night.
But Sue needed to get off the phone. She and Witt were headed to the dinner car for a jazz concert. “Guess what the Canadian cocktail of the day is called?”
“What?” I asked glumly.
“The Angry Canadian.”
“Joke’s on you,” I said flatly. “There’s no such thing.”
“That’s what I said!” Sue responded, maybe hoping we could talk about something, anything, else.
But no luck.
At last, in conclusion, Sue said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he’s got a terminal illness.”
* * *
BUT I KNEW better than to hope for a terminal illness.
And I just couldn’t seem to believe that he was a bad person, either.
It had to have been me.
Desperation over the art show had made me needy. I should’ve kept my distance. Stayed aloof. Said no when he offered to be my model. What was I thinking? Of course he’d glimpsed my life and bolted. Who’d want to get anywhere near it?
In the end, I took the portrait to the gallery without ever showing it to Joe—or seeing him at all. And then I spent the next two days being ignored and obsessing over why that was happening.
In the meantime, I rearranged my paints. Organized my canvases. Restacked the dishes in my cabinets. Painted Peanut’s toenails with glitter polish. Watched a video tutorial about how to make one large T-shirt into twelve different outfits.
And stewed. Emotionally.
Oh, and I googled “Why men don’t text you back.”
But it wasn’t very helpful.
I also had another brain scan to check my edema. And that wasn’t helpful, either.
Dr. Estrera reported that, shockingly, according to the scan, the edema had now largely resolved. He compared last week’s scan with this week’s scan—both of which looked quite similar to me. “We’re seeing an eighty-one percent reduction in swelling in the area,” Dr. Estrera said proudly.
Big news, I guess—but it didn’t do me much good if nothing else had changed.
And nothing else had changed.
After the scan, Dr. Nicole gave me a battery of facial recognition tests to compare to my baseline. And I was exactly the same on those as I’d been a month ago. The same identical numerical score.
I knocked my head against the table at the results.
“Please don’t do that,” Dr. Nicole said.
“How can I be exactly the same?” I whined.
“These results are to help you—not make you pound your head on the table.”
“Well, they don’t feel very helpful.”
“Now that the edema is resolving, you should start to see some changes in your facial perceptions,” she said, like that might cheer me up. Then she added, “No guarantees.”
But I wasn’t in the mood to be cheered up. I flopped down on her sofa in despair. “Nothing is going right.”
“Maybe you need to broaden your definition of right.”
“Don’t throw that cheery nonsense at me. My life is a shit show.”
This right here felt like my lowest moment so far. I thought I was supposed to be getting better, not getting worse. Learning to cope, at least. What the hell was going on?
“Tell me what has you feeling down,” Dr. Nicole asked.
“Everything?” I asked. Like, did she really think she could handle that?