“Your career isn’t finished. Here, let me take this.” Gen reached out and started taking the collection of random belongings out of Kendrick’s arms and setting them on the coffee table. “There. That’s better,” she said when he’d been relieved of his burdens. “Now, sit down. Let me make you a cup of tea.” Kendrick had tea, Gen knew—he’d insisted on a particular brand that she’d had to have shipped from India.
She went into the kitchen and started rooting around through the cupboards for the tea. When she found it, she filled a kettle with water and turned on the stove. Ryan came into the kitchen and whispered to her.
“I heard a car pulling up outside. It’s the cab. What do you want me to do?”
“Get rid of him!” Gen hissed at him.
“We can’t hold this guy prisoner,” Ryan shot back.
“Just get rid of the cab! Tell him we changed our minds! Tell him … tell him Kendrick got another ride! Just get rid of him! And get out there before he rings the doorbell!” Gen shoved at Ryan’s shoulders, pushing him toward the front door.
With Ryan gone, she continued with the tea, using the task to stall for time so she could think about what to do. She poured hot water over the tea bag and thought about artists and their egos. She thought about Gordon Kendrick and his particular ego. By the time the tea was ready, she had just about settled on a strategy.
“Here we go,” she said brightly to Kendrick as she set the cup of hot tea on the coffee table in front of him.
“Oh,” he said, frowning at the tea, looking crestfallen.
“Is there something wrong?”
“You forgot to add the milk and sugar.”
“Of course.” Gen wanted to throttle the guy, but instead, she hurried into the kitchen to get milk and sugar.
“Make sure it’s the soy milk,” Kendrick called after her. “And the raw sugar. Lumps, not loose.”
She briefly considered searching in the cabinet under the sink for rat poison she could substitute for the sugar—lumps, not loose—but dismissed the idea, because Kendrick couldn’t paint if he were dead. She gathered the items he’d demanded and returned to the living room, where she prepared the tea to his specifications.
“There,” she said, when he finally sipped the tea and pronounced it acceptable. “Now, let’s talk about this.”
Ryan came back in through the front door, and Gen shot him an inquiring look. He raised one eyebrow at her, and she took it to mean that the cab was, indeed, gone, but that he was questioning the wisdom of keeping Kendrick here rather than just letting him flee like his ass was on fire.
She questioned it, too. There was a certain appeal to the idea of just letting him go, writing off the expenses, and pretending none of this ever happened. Then, the only sheets and yogurt she’d have to worry about would be her own.
But as she looked at Kendrick huddled on the sofa with his tea, his hair disheveled and his clothes rumpled, with dark circles under his eyes and the smell of bourbon drifting up from him, she realized this was about more than her business investment.
Arrogant or not, a pain in the ass or not, the guy was having a genuine crisis. She knew what it was like to feel as though your entire career was bursting into flames and burning down to a heaping pile of ash.
She sat down on the sofa next to Kendrick and her voice softened.
“Gordon. Just take a few deep breaths and tell me what’s going on.” She put a hand on his arm, and he seemed taken aback by the one small gesture of compassion.
He told her.
With Ryan leaning a hip against the kitchen counter listening in, Kendrick told Gen about his efforts out in the barn, his attempts to paint, his endless, fruitless sketches of concepts and ideas, and his ultimate, deep conviction that everything he’d produced since he’d been here had been a hot, steaming pile of shit.
He cried—not loud, showy boo-hooing, but quiet tears that slipped down his face and plunked wetly onto his shirt—and her heart hurt for him.
“I think Chicago is my muse,” Kendrick concluded, snuffling into a tissue that Gen had handed him. “I think I need to go back.”
“Gordon,” Gen began. She leaned toward him with conviction and enthusiasm. “The work you did in Chicago was good. It was very good. But you haven’t had your big breakthrough yet. You know I’m right. And as long as you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep getting the results you’ve always gotten.”
“The blender,” Ryan said from where he stood observing them with his arms crossed over his chest.
“Yes!” Gen said. “The blender!”
She explained the blender concept to Kendrick—how if he kept putting the same ingredients into his blender, the result would be an acceptable but bland smoothie that would keep his career on its same flat trajectory.
“But this …” Gen gestured to the world around her. “…The ranch, Cambria, California … It’s all new ingredients. If you put new stuff into the blender, you’re going to get something new and fresh and exciting!”
She found herself pumped up by her own motivational speech. She wondered if it was all bullshit, and she decided it probably was not. There probably was something to the blender concept.
“But …” Kendrick rubbed at his face with his hands, folded over onto himself, his knees splayed. “It’s not working. It’s not … blending. I think the blender’s broken.”
“The blender isn’t broken,” Gen said soothingly, putting a hand on his back to comfort him. “This is all perfectly normal! It’s a well-known fact that creative people sometimes have a big emotional crisis right before a breakthrough. You don’t get new growth without some pain, Gordon. It’s like …” She scrambled for a simile. “It’s like birth!” she finally concluded. “Birth is a painful, bloody process, Gordon, but at the end of it, you get new life. You get new creation. Freshness, and … and infinite potential!”
Gordon looked up from where he’d buried his face in his hands, and she saw a glimmer of something there, a hint of something in his eyes that said she was reaching him. It was time to close the deal, time to bring this train into the station.
“Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “We’re going to get you out of that barn, for one thing. The barn is great—especially with the new skylight.” She shot an apologetic look toward Ryan. “But working indoors, simulating outdoor light—it’s what you’ve always done.”
“It’s the same old ingredients in the blender,” Gordon put in, and she knew she was getting somewhere.
“Right. Exactly. So, starting tomorrow, we’re going to get you outside.”
Kendrick made a snuffling noise and sat up straighter. “I don’t know. I don’t think I’m ready for that. It just … It doesn’t feel right.”
“Will you at least think about it?” Gen rubbed Kendrick’s back with her palm in tight little circles.
“I suppose so.”
“And, Gordon? You need to stop drinking.”
“But …”
“Just while you’re here,” Gen reassured him. “Just while we’re working out your creative issues. You might have a muse in Chicago, Gordon, but I know you’ve also got one here. And you can’t hear her talk to you if you’re …” She hesitated, not wanting to choose a word that would offend him.
“If you’re lit up like a goddamned Christmas tree,” Ryan put in.