Then I turn forty. The first thing I do for my birthday is fire my therapist, who, after nearly a decade, I have determined is useless. Then I invite a bunch of people to dinner, a few friends from childhood and college who still live in the city, some neighbors from my apartment building, Indigo, and even my mother offers to come to town. No pressure, just everyone I know in one place. I include Matthew on the invite list, of course, because he is the man in my life and he says he’ll come for a drink after, and I ask why he won’t come to dinner, and he says, “You know why.” I say, “It’s fine, I’ll pay,” and he says, “You shouldn’t have to pay, it’s your birthday,” and I say, “It’s fine,” and he says, “It’s not fine,” and I say, “All I want for my birthday is for you to not ruin another meal,” and he says, “It’s like that, is it?” And I say yes. Then we have an hourlong conversation about where we are at, and it goes from something nice enough to terrible in that hour, which is not what I thought was the reality but I guess it is now.
My birthday dinner is pleasant, if slightly forced. We dine in the candlelit basement of an Italian restaurant near my house. I have the porchetta and a thousand glasses of wine. Everyone manages to not talk about their own bullshit for a night, a real effort for some—Indigo with her bad marriage, my mother always worried about her family, an old drug buddy who keeps disappearing to the bathroom—and instead they say really nice things about me, that I am an honest and good friend, that I am strong and fair, that I have enviable hair, that I haven’t aged a day. To that last bit I say, “That’s because I’ve spent the last decade trapped in an office, the sun hasn’t touched this skin!” Everyone laughs. Then they make jokes about me turning forty, but you know what, tonight I don’t care about forty, joke away. To my great surprise I am still alive on this planet. And that’s what we toast to—to still being alive.
My mother hugs me hard at the end of the night, hugs everyone hard; she is a little drunk, and also she has befriended everyone at the table. I had hoped my brother would show up too, but no dice. He is lost to the wilds of New Hampshire. And of course Matthew does not show up for a birthday drink.
“Too bad,” says my coworker Nina. “It sounded like you really liked him.”
“Too bad,” says my mother. “I was looking forward to meeting him. It’s been so long since you’ve introduced me to someone new.”
A week later the phone rings and it’s a local number, I don’t recognize it, and I’m praying that it’s Matthew calling me from some mysterious location to tell me he’s missing me and thinking about me so that I don’t have to call him and say it myself. But instead it’s his gallery, calling to tell me I can pick up the painting of his I bought at his opening. I pick it up, but I’m no fool, I don’t hang it. That’s not how you get over someone, by looking at his artwork every day. I keep it wrapped in paper, in my closet, behind my winter boots. Someday when I’m dead, I think, people will find this hidden painting and wonder who was so depressed they could have made something like that.
A month passes and I realize I’m not thinking about him as much, just once or twice a day, and then another two weeks pass and I realize oh, I only thought about him a few times this week, and then another two weeks go by and I don’t think about him once the entire time, and then another week after that it occurs to me that I am thinking about him constantly, and before I can talk myself out of it I call him and ask him to meet me for a drink, just as friends, my treat, and he says yes.
I see him every once in a while now. The fucking we did hangs between us, but we will not return to it. Better to deny desire than to collapse from it. I tell him he’s my friend and I love him and he is a true artist and I admire him for doing what he’s doing and he shouldn’t second-guess, just let me pay the bill so he can eat. And he says, Really? And I tell him: Yes. It’s nothing. I won’t even remember it tomorrow. You eat like a bird. You should eat more. Let me feed you. Here you go. Take a bite. And another. That’s a good boy.
Felicia
An apartment in Chicago, April 2002. I sit at the feet of Felicia, the most famous instructor in our program. I am in her apartment in her Logan Square building, which she restored on her own. Like she took a book on home improvement out of the library, read it, and then just did the spackling and electrical wiring and tiling herself because it needed to be done. She dresses in all black, jeans, T-shirts, lacy see-through things sometimes, and she has an amazing body, sinewy, tough, tan arms and a tight ass, and long fairy-dust hair, blond-gray, which she wears in braids sometimes. Also she has incredible jewelry, the real stuff, diamonds and gold and platinum, most of it inherited from an affluent aunt who never had children of her own, although Felicia did apprentice with a jeweler for a while so some of it she made herself. She has three solo gallery shows in the next year, one of them in Berlin, and has been commissioned to do an installation in Brazil, where she basically was given a town square to do with whatever she likes. Nothing she owns comes from a man. Everything she touches turns into something bigger. She has made herself out of scratch. I am twenty-six and I would cut off my left tit to be her.
I am not alone at her feet. There is her boyfriend, twenty years younger. Josiah, escaped from a rainbow cult as a teen, brutally gorgeous, tall, and muscular, a welder, incredible arms. All his clothes seem to hover around his body, barely attached. Spiky hair, big lips, combat boots. My groin toils now just thinking about him.
Felicia is ranting. The Germans are being demanding. They’re fucked up in both their requirements and tone. It’s not that it’s daunting her, it’s just distressing. And she hates her students: demanding too, though differently than the Germans, always wanting her approval, needing her love, when they should just focus on their art instead. Also there’s a burst pipe and a canceled flight. Fifty things at once. I worry urgently about being one of the needy students. I want to ask her if that’s how she thinks of me. I crave it like I crave a drink. But instead I say, “Felicia, let me help you,” because that is my job.
I am her assistant on various projects, plucked from the crowd because I am smart and efficient but also a good time, young and flirty and boozy. I go wherever she wants me to go and I tell her she’s perfect without her having to ask. I met her at a party in September, at the beginning of the school year. From my seat on the sunken couch I watched her that night with another young woman, a big-eyed blonde, tall, a student from Denmark, in the corner, Felicia’s hands on her shoulders. The student was drunk, and not handling whatever was happening well. She collapsed a bit; she was sloppy. I rose from the couch to help. Together we dumped the blonde into a cab. “You,” said Felicia, a little drunk herself. “You I like.” Me. Later I find out the Danish student was Josiah’s ex-girlfriend. She returned from whence she came a month later.