I feed my sourdough starter. I watch YouTube tutorials so I can cut Finn’s hair. I have another session with Dr. DeSantos. I FaceTime Rodney and we dissect the new email we received from Sotheby’s, saying that we will continue to be furloughed through the summer.
The United States crosses a million cases of Covid-19.
I stop using my quad cane. Although I get tired if I am on my feet too long and even one flight of stairs leaves me winded, balance is no longer an issue. I go to put Candis away in my closet and when I do, I remember the shoebox with my old art supplies inside.
Carefully, I tug it loose and set it on the bed.
I peel back the cover and find acrylic paints and a crusty palette and brushes. My fingers sift through the cool metal tubes and my nails catch on dried bits of paint. Something unfurls in me, like the thinnest green shoot from a seed that’s been buried.
It has been so long since I painted that I don’t have an easel, I don’t have gesso, I don’t have a canvas. The wall is the perfect surface to work on, but this is a rental and I can’t. Finally I manage to tug the dresser away from the wall. It’s something we picked up at a secondhand shop and primed with the intent of repainting one day—but we never got around to it. The wood on the back is smooth and white and waiting.
I sit down on the floor with a pencil and begin, in rough, sweeping strokes, to draw. It feels otherworldly, like I’m a medium channeling from somewhere else, watching the unlikely manifest before my eyes. I tumble into the zone, blocking out the sounds of the city and the occasional ping of my phone. I squeeze a rainbow of color on the palette, touch the tip of a brush to a carmine line, and draw it over the wood like a scalpel. There’s a sense of relief at having made contact, and anxiety at not knowing what comes next.
I don’t notice the sun going down and I don’t hear Finn’s keys in the door when he comes home. By then, I have covered the back of the dresser with color and shape, sea and sky. There is paint in my hair and under my fingernails, my joints are stiff from sitting, and I am thousands of miles away when I realize Finn is standing in front of me, calling my name.
I blink up at him. He’s showered and a towel is wrapped around his waist. “You’re home,” I say.
“And you’re painting.” A smile ghosts over his lips. “On our bureau.”
“I didn’t have a canvas,” I tell him.
“I see.” Finn moves to stand behind me, so that he can view what I’ve done. I try to stare at it, too, through a stranger’s eyes.
The sky is an unholy cobalt, with breaths of clouds like afterthoughts. They’re mirrored in the still surface of a lagoon. Flamingos goose-step across a sandbar, or sleep with their legs bent into acute angles. A manchineel tree squats like the old crone in a fairy tale, poison at her fingertips.
Finn crouches down beside me. He stretches out a hand toward the art, but acrylics dry so quickly I know he cannot smudge anything. “Diana,” he says after a moment. “This is … ?I didn’t know you could paint like this.” He points to two small figures, far in the distance, so tiny they would easily be overlooked if you weren’t paying attention.
“Where’s this supposed to be?” Finn asks.
I don’t answer. I don’t have to.
“Oh,” he says, standing again. He takes a step away, and then another, until he has found a smile to wear. “You’re a very good artist,” Finn says, keeping his voice light. “What else are you hiding from me?”
By the time we go to bed that night, Finn has maneuvered the dresser back into position so that the lagoon I’ve drawn is flush against the wall, hidden away. I don’t mind. I like knowing there is a side to it that nobody would ever guess is there.
Finn, coming off a forty-hour shift at the hospital, is asleep nearly as soon as his head hits the pillow. He clutches me against him the way a child holds tight to a stuffed animal, a talisman to keep the monsters away from them both.
The first night Finn and I slept together, as he trailed his hands over my skin, he told me that you can never really touch anything, because everything is made of atoms, and atoms have electrons inside them, which have a negative charge. Particles repel other particles that have a similar charge. This means when you lie down in bed, the electrons that make up your body push away the electrons that make up the mattress. You’re actually floating an infinitesimal distance above it.
I had stroked my hand down the center of his chest. So you’re hallucinating this feeling? I said.
No, he replied, catching my hand and kissing it. Or so I felt. It’s our brains working overtime. The nerve cells get a message that some foreign electrons got close enough in space and time to repel our personal electromagnetic field. Our brains tell us that’s the sensation of touch.
You’re saying this is all make-believe? I asked, rolling on top of him. This is why I shouldn’t date a scientist.
He held my hips in his hands. We’re all in our own little worlds.
Come visit mine, I had said, and I let him slide inside.