“That’s the kind of thing you tell a child,” I say. “I expect more from you.”
“Andrea, enough!” she snaps. “You know, you’re doing better than you think you are. You can survive without me.”
“I’m not,” I say.
“All right, even if you’re not, which I don’t believe is true, just grow up already,” she says. She flips over, and her voice is closer to me. “Handle your shit, Andrea. You’re thirty-nine years old. You can do it.”
“I’ll try,” I say.
“One more thing,” my mother says. “I see you not holding that baby. You think I don’t notice it, but I do.”
I say absolutely nothing.
“Tomorrow you hold the baby,” she says.
I’m the sick baby, I think. Me. Who will hold me?
In the morning I leave early, before anyone else in the house is awake. I write a note that says, “Work emergency,” and then I throw it away because no one will believe me; everyone knows I hate my job and I find nothing urgent about it. I write another note that says, “Dear family, See you soon, thank you, I love you,” noncommittal, truthful, sweet, then I draw a heart at the bottom. I walk out back to see the birds and the trees and the sky in the early-morning sun, and all of it is orchestral, I’m relieved that it exists, this beauty. Light music plays in the shack. I knock on the door. My brother opens it, in his pajamas. “Oh David,” I say. I hug him goodbye, and he sobs into my neck. “All right, all right,” I say. “You can have her.”
The Last Man on Earth
I go to an art show. It’s a solo exhibit for my friend Matthew. He was briefly my boyfriend when we were both in graduate school, when I was still an artist, or aspired to be one, “artist” as a job title, anyway, but that was thirteen years ago, and whatever we both were back then we are not now.
Matthew is absurdly tall, six feet five, something like that, and thin, and breakable, and a sad sack. His art reflects both his treetop view of the world and his mournful temperament: he makes a lot of paintings about looking down into centers, holes, dark depths. “Are you OK?” is what I always want to say to him when I see his work, but that’s a rude question to ask another artist unless you’re related to him, and even then it is not particularly well received.
At the gallery, I notice there are no round red stickers on any of the paintings, which means he hasn’t sold anything. Oh, Matthew. I decide to buy something. I am a grown woman with a job in corporate America who has long since paid off her college loans, and I live in a cheap apartment and I have money in my savings account. I can buy a painting if I want. I pick a rendering of a dark pit that gives the illusion of peering directly into it. It’s actually rather deft. At the bottom there’s a tiny bright white circle. Life at the bottom of the pit. I hand my credit card over to the gallery owner. I am now a person who buys art, I think. Instead of making it.
Ten minutes later Matthew and I stand in front of the gallery, two lukewarm beer bottles in our hands. “You’re looking good,” he says. “You too,” I say. We clink our bottles together in a bit of triumph. We are aging but not aged.
I ask him if he’s excited about his show.
“Well, you’re the only person who bought anything,” he says. “Which should keep the lights on for about a month, so thank you very much. But just the apartment lights, not the studio lights, so I think I’m getting rid of my studio, whoops. Also my roommate moved out last weekend, and just the fact that I even have a roommate and I’m almost forty years old has its own set of problems. And I still haven’t paid off grad school.”
“But so many people came tonight,” I say. “To your show.”
“To gossip and drink free beer.”
“I came to see just you and your art,” I say. “This beer means nothing to me, do you hear me? Nothing.”
“And that’s why you’re my favorite person in the whole world,” he says, which is definitely not true, and then he kisses me. I don’t think he knew he was going to do it or even why he did it, and he steps back after the kiss and his pupils look enormous, his eyes, also enormous, and he flaps his arms, and a little beer flies up in the air. The whole series of events catches me off guard. But I like feeling unsettled. So we sleep together.
And it’s actually lovely, sweet, slow, 1970s, West Coast, beachy sex. All his parts are in working order and so are mine. He holds himself nearly motionless in me for long stretches of time and I lie there and breathe deeply and then he buries himself in my breasts and says, “Mmm.” Then at the end he moves brusquely, and I like it. I shriek.
“You’re so loud,” he says, teasingly, when we are finished.
“That’s because I’m in pain,” I reply, without even thinking about it.
“Oh my god, was I hurting you?”
“No, I’m in pain here,” I say, and pat my chest. “It’s OK,” I say. “I’m used to it.”
Immediately he holds me.
His apartment is a wreck and his clothes are everywhere and there are paint flecks on the floor and dust on the bookshelves. Only for a moment do I consider how I would feel about this squalor over the long haul. Instead I find it a relief: I have my own kind of squalor. We’re both grown up although not necessarily grown-ups, and I don’t feel any pressure to be anything that I’m not.
I stay longer than I mean to in the morning because we end up having a nice conversation about his niece, who is an aspiring artist. “She’s better than I was at her age,” he says. He walks me to the train and we stop for coffee and he doesn’t offer to pay for me and I find myself offering to pay for him instead. Why not? It costs so little it’s almost like it doesn’t cost anything at all. “Don’t say I don’t ever do anything nice for you,” I tell him. “I didn’t and I couldn’t and I wouldn’t,” he says.
“Literally the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” says my coworker Nina, peering at an image of the painting on the gallery’s website.
“There’s a lot of interesting textures and layers to it,” I say defensively. “You should see it up close.”
“Pass.” Then: “I’m not saying it’s not good.”
“Right,” I say.
“I’m just saying it’s depressing,” she says.