The next week Matthew invites me over for dinner at his apartment. I text him and ask if I can bring anything. He texts back: “Just yourself.” An hour later he texts me and asks if I can pick up a bottle of wine. Fifteen minutes later he texts: “And maybe some bread?” I bring an expensive bottle of Cabernet and an enormous loaf of sourdough bread, which I know we’ll never be able to finish, so he’ll have some for lunch the next day. I also bring a small bottle of bourbon and a round of goat cheese. And a bar of dark chocolate. All of these things I would want to eat and all of these things I know he will not have.
We eat everything I have brought and also power grains and vegetables from his CSA farm share. One of the vegetables is tough. We chew and chew. “What is this purple vegetable?” I say. He sighs. “I don’t even know. I was just guessing on how to cook it. I was trying to use up the rest of my farm share. The recipe called for eggplant. I should have just bought an eggplant. I have no money right now, though.” “I know you don’t have any money,” I say quietly. He stands abruptly and stalks to his freezer and swings it open dramatically. The freezer is crammed with Tupperware containers. He tells me he cooks whatever’s left over every week and freezes it for later meals. “Thrifty,” I say. “I am living on last month’s vegetables,” he says. “I can bring an eggplant,” I say. “Next time, eggplant’s on me.” “Is this any way to live?” he says. “Come on, sit down,” I say. “We were having such a nice meal.”
I can’t stand when a meal is ruined. I have slept with many men, don’t ask me their names, but I can’t eat anything casually. Don’t fuck with my food, I want to say to him.
“Come here, baby,” I say instead. I kiss him and he kisses me and we laugh and we are close and I believe so deeply in that moment that I can tolerate his bullshit. I tell him about my family when I was growing up, how my mother used to make us rice and beans and call it Mexican night and say we were having a fiesta and teach us Spanish words at the table and play flamenco albums. “But I promise you we were just eating rice and beans because we had no money in the bank,” I say.
“You don’t care?” he says.
“I don’t care,” I say.
“Then let’s eat,” he says.
We have sex instead, and it is even deeper and closer this time, as if he has crawled up inside my womb and nestled there for safety. I hold his face in my hands, and we look at each other and don’t speak, and the room closes in on us, I feel it, the world is shrinking, and there is just him and me, physically connected, as close to being one as we can be. Gross.
In the morning, lazy, we talk to each other as friends, catching up on old times, years lost. Matthew asks me what happened when I left grad school. It’s better than talking to anyone else about it, better than my therapist, better than any of my New York City friends, because he was there, even if he didn’t know what happened.
“I didn’t really understand it all,” he says. “You were there and then you were gone.”
“My mentor dumped me,” I say. She broke my heart. It was not a man who sucked the life out of me. It was a woman.
“I remember her,” he says. “She’s still there. She never went anywhere but there.”
“She’s still great,” I say, always protective of her, even as I carry an active wound she carved into me. “I saw one of her pieces in a group show last year.”
“Well, I don’t know about great,” he says.
“What do you know?” I snap.
A few days later I am in a bad mood because I hate my job, my meaningless fucking job, and I meet him at a bar halfway between our apartments and we have a drink, well, three, and I barely manage not to be a cunt to him the entire night.
“Just because she dumped you doesn’t mean you had to stop making art entirely,” he says. “I could never give up painting, ever. I don’t know what I would do without it.”
Are we still talking about this? We are still talking about this.
“Because I didn’t have it in me,” I say. “The minute I felt unsupported I gave up. I saw that to be a painter meant a lifetime of not being supported.”
“That’s correct,” he says. He’s proud of himself for his capacity to handle rejection. He is comfortable living in the realm of failure and struggle.
“And I didn’t want to feel that way,” I say. “I have a hard enough time being me, not pulling myself apart every single day. And if it wasn’t just my personality and my life choices, but then also my art too? I would die.” I would probably be dead by now, I don’t say, but I know that’s true; I know how close I came to it then.
We hold hands in public. This is a thing now, the two of us.
I call my mother in New Hampshire, in the small town where she has been living for nine months with my brother and his wife and their sick baby, and I tell her I’ve started dating a man. “What’s he like?” she asks. I give her the highlights: he’s an artist, he’s poor, he’s kind, he’s sensitive, when he’s not feeling depressed he makes me feel good about myself. “You know who he sounds like?” says my mother. “Is there any way the answer to this is not my father?” I say. “Let’s have a different conversation,” says my mother.
“What do you want to talk about?” I say. My mother breathes through her nose, a deep, yogic breath. I’ve already taken one wrong turn in this conversation; it’s on me to find a right turn. “How’s New Hampshire?” I say. “Is your presence there helping at all?” “They’re still fighting,” she says. “Your brother is so quiet. I want to blame her for something, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be anyone’s fault. Sometimes things just go wrong.” “How about the baby?” I say. “Can you help there?” “No one can help that baby,” says my mother. “I help and I help and I help, and none of it makes a difference. She’s going to die someday soon.”
“Let’s go back to talking about how I sleep with men that remind me of my father,” I say. “I actually think that’s a better conversation.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” says my mother. “Tell me about what you did today. Tell me about New York.” So I do, I tell the lifelong New Yorker who chucked it for the woods about the streets of the city: how the subway was so crowded this morning I had to let four trains pass in a row and I was a half hour late to work; how I had a meeting in Times Square and I saw an army of painted topless women posing with tourists for money; how I saw two people dressed up as Disney characters get into a fistfight; how I ate a hot dog from a stand after my client meeting bombed and when I finished it I ate another, on one of the chairs scattered in Bryant Park. A string quartet was playing nearby, under a sponsor banner. “The music part was the part that saved me,” I say. “All of it would have saved me,” says my mother.