I begin to skip classes whenever Felicia calls me. I don’t even think to say no. Studio time, reading the things I need to read, contemplating my critiques—I am unconcerned with all of this. For the past decade of my life I had painted, blindly. La Guardia for four years, and then a small scholarship sent me to Hunter. Waiting tables, smelling fumes. It was the only thing I knew to do with my time besides drink and eat and screw. It kept me company. And now here was this woman suggesting I spend time with her instead. She would be my company.
Across town, I hate my roommate, this twenty-two-year-old rich bitch from Winnetka, who thinks she’s slumming because she’s living with an artist. It’s her apartment, meaning she owns it because her parents bought it for her, and she rents out the extra room. She basically doesn’t have a job. She gets weekly manicures. She says “Ta” instead of “Thank you” because she spent a year abroad in England. Also she has a lover, a married lawyer, one of her father’s friends, and he fucks and leaves, sometimes before the dinner hour is over. Like I’m eating dinner and they’re having sex in the other room. He has children. “It’s a secret,” she says to me giddily. “You can’t tell anyone.” You don’t have anything to worry about, I tell her. Because I don’t care about your secrets. It doesn’t take much of a push for me to want to spend all my time with Felicia.
In November, one night, upon finishing a second bottle of wine with Felicia:
I’ll tell you a secret.
Tell me.
I don’t think any of you have talent. I’m just trying to pay my bills.
You don’t think that, I say. You’re kidding, right. Please tell me you’re kidding, Felicia.
I grab her arm.
I’m just kidding, she says. I’m just messing with you.
I become more interested in her work than in my work. Her projects feel innovative and important. My paintings feel basic and insignificant. In truth, they are. I have a good sense of humor and there’s a cleverness to my work and I understand color and I know how to choose interesting subject matter, real-life people, places, things, and before I got to grad school I had the necessary discipline, but I wonder, daily, if I have enough hunger. To be an artist means a lifetime of being told no, with the occasional yes showing up just to give you enough hope to carry on. I am beginning to realize I don’t want to be rejected my entire life. Felicia has never accepted the rejection, though. Felicia is always hustling. Felicia spits on your no. If I stay with her long enough will I learn how to be like Felicia? I swirl my whiskey, I drink my beer, I write in my notebook, I think about Felicia.
Another night in November:
But do you think I have what it takes?
You’re nascent, you’re a baby, you’re a puppy. Don’t worry, just do your work. You’re on your way.
We work hard all day. Josiah is devoted to Felicia, obsessed with her projects, but with his own art, too. In my memory he appears as someone who is constantly lifting heavy objects. Meanwhile, Felicia’s on the phone at all hours. Time zones have destroyed her life. No one is sleeping. The air is tense and full and exciting. I have convinced myself I am learning far more by spending time with Felicia than listening to lectures, which is probably not inaccurate. I am still painting, though. I go early in the mornings and I stare at the blank canvas until it is full. Staring and painting. Trying to figure something out. Did I have what it took? Did I belong there? Why did she even like me? I abandoned those paintings when I left town so I’ll never know if they were any good. But I think they were all right. They weren’t bad, those paintings. Doesn’t matter anyway—they’re lost now.
In December my mother runs out of money. Her lights are shut off for one weekend, and she can’t pay her rent. Her new boyfriend has been covering all the bills while she works for another low-paying nonprofit. He hits her, just once, but no fool my mother, she knows once is enough, once always leads to twice, and he’s out of her apartment immediately, his things waiting for him on the street when he returns from a night in jail. I send her a check so she can pay her rent for a few months. My brother and his girlfriend offer to foot the bill for her expensive therapist. I don’t think about how I’ll pay my own rent, but by Christmas I realize I’m broke myself. I tell Felicia. I don’t tell her why. I don’t want her to know about the weakness of my own mother. I let her think I’m the fool instead.
With great enthusiasm we agree I should move into the Logan Square apartment, at least for the spring semester. What a terrible idea. I mean, whose idea was it, anyway? I really want to remember but I can’t. It was dumb, but I wanted to be there, with the two of them, not for any reason other than I enjoyed the closeness we all had. “It’ll be nice to have you around,” says Felicia. “I like a full house.” This last bit is so charming. It’s almost as if she’s admitting a weakness, a loneliness like the rest of us have. I like seeing it but also I am torn, because I liked the idea of her not needing me too, not needing anyone at all, because that was perhaps the thing that impressed me most of all about her.
I fully stop going to classes, my dirty little secret, but surely she must know, because I am nearly always around the apartment, hiding from the Chicago winter, dashing out only for more liquor supplies, wearing three sweaters and two scarves and long johns. The booze keeping me warm, keeping us all warm.
I can hear them in the night. I see him in the morning, shirtless. It is hard not to look at Josiah shirtless. I admire his beauty, but I don’t desire him then; I only desire him in retrospect, now, as a forty-year-old woman. Still, I’m sure she catches me looking. But how could I ever explain to her, though, that she was the one I loved?
Felicia, in the morning, on a phone interview:
I traffic in the real. How can you ignore what’s right in front of your face?
Felicia, over my shoulder, looking at my work on her work:
Close, but not quite.