“I hear he moved to New York to focus on tax law,” said Gwen. “Sometimes I think, God is really on my side, saying ‘see, you made the right choice. See, tax law.’”
She had felt so sure of Reed as they stood together on the pier, as if the sea itself was presiding over their union. She didn’t want to believe that certain types could not mesh. Or that she was any type of anything. And she didn’t like to think that there were wrong choices. She never experienced what Danny called “Entrée Envy,” when after the food arrives you want what your dinner companion has ordered. Nor did she have a problem putting a book down halfway through and never picking it up again. Life was too short for bad books, or even good books that you just don’t like. That was Reed; he was The Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, he was The Waves, he was Infinite Jest. He was Jasper Johns and Eva Hesse. Something she wanted to love but couldn’t.
“Did you ever doubt your choice?” said Melissa. Gwen didn’t hear her.
She had already set to work on the square of sun on the wall just above her subject, pulling out the white bars of the iron headboard from between her golden strokes. This was the room she and Libby had shared when they were kids. She and Libby.
“Gwen?”
“What?”
“Did you ever wonder, what if I tried harder, what if I did more? Did you doubt yourself?”
Gwen pulled her brush away from the paper, laid it across her knees, and shook out her hand. She thought of those three blocks, of how she stared at the stitching on the steering wheel and wondered how they sewed the vinyl on, what kind of machine could even do that?
“Not really. That’s the beauty of choices, right? They’re endless.”
The letter she had written two months later went unanswered. He didn’t want to run away to Bali and start a new life. He didn’t want to become the friends they never were. He didn’t want any of the options she gave him. All those doors painted on the envelope remained shut. Eventually, it was a relief. She never had to tell him about the baby. She never had to show Reed how much he had lost, or how much she had taken from him.
She picked up her brush and continued to work, thinking how afraid of regret she was when it came to painting, how each stroke was a potential mistake. Sometimes she just had to move ahead, jump into a cold pool instead of wading in, because if you take it slow there is always the risk that you will turn back, that you won’t make it. She left a blank space she would fill in later for the black sconce on the wall, its two bare bulbs showing their caps of dust in the direct sun.
“I know you guys had your issues,” said Melissa. Gwen rolled her eyes, like “issues” barely covered what they’d had. “But was there anything else, was there someone else?”
Gwen had been too sad for someone else. Who can you meet at the bottom of the sea?
“There’s always someone else eventually.”
The color on her paper was still so light, like a painting already faded from years in the sun. It was as if more color had ended up in the rinse water than on the page itself. She added more yellow from a tube to her palette, tried to resist the urge to dilute it.
With art there was no relief, but also no end, no way out. Doing it was hard; not doing it was worse. Her own way of working was dark and twisted, a path in a medieval wood that existed perpetually in shadow, all hooting owls and gnarled branches. Hard to navigate, the fear almost paralyzing. But you can’t stop here, she would think. Miles to go, she would think. And yet there was no goal, there was no light in a distant window, there was only the path. She was afraid of never becoming the artist she was in her mind. She was afraid of making something good and then, in trying to make it better, she would ruin it completely. In every other part of her life it was easy to be fearless, but with a brush in her hand she flinched at every snapped twig on the path.
Gwen clinked a slim brush in the jar of clear water and made the palest pool of yellow, adding dots of red and brown to deepen it to a gold hue.
“Do you have any regrets?” Melissa asked. She wiggled the toes of her extended foot and rolled her shoulders.
“You need a break?” Gwen asked. Melissa shook her head and settled back into the mattress. Gwen began a different pool of yellow, much more red this time, the smallest dot of brown, and a large one of white, yielding a pale-peach tone.
“I’m not saying I never change my mind. Some choices are awful even when they’re the right ones. I think when you listen to yourself, the right decision is hard to ignore. I mean, what is regret, really? It’s just fear, fear of loss. Most people think that loss is avoidable. But I’m pretty sure it’s not. You just have to ride it out. Like winter. Like people who move to California for the weather. They’re leaving out of fear. And probably regret. I bet you money.”
Gwen would’ve run to California after her split from Reed. She needed to thaw out. She wanted to fly from the pale-white eye of DC for the golden hills of the Marin Headlands, the pink walls of The Mission. But she couldn’t face that much space between her and everything she was used to. After that lifeless house, she couldn’t be in another place alone. So she went back to the red bricks of Cambridge, and it was a warm kiss on the forehead; it was her sister standing in her yard like a warrior holding pulled weeds by their greens, a severed head by its hair. It was Danny curled like a dog asleep in one corner of her couch. It was even Tom, dragging her to Costco to save money on salsa.
It was her parents too. Her father had been a jovial, sometimes distant king, crowned in a ring of pipe smoke. But once she was an adult, really once she was fifteen, he was her secret keeper. He would lean toward her when she was doing dishes after a family dinner and say, “Now what do we really think about this guy?” jabbing a thumb toward the dining room as if to clarify who he meant, her date, the yahoo with the wallet chain. He always wanted the truth.
Scarlet didn’t often ask questions. Like she already knew all the answers. Once Gwen left Reed and was back in Cambridge, her mother would come over with a bottle of wine, salad ni?oise, vine charcoal, and a kneadable eraser. Together they would sit quietly and sketch. Gwen stopped thinking of Scarlet as her mother when they were able to just be women, to just be artists together. Then things worked much better. Now Gwen had one less person to tell her secrets to, and one less person who already knew them. At least she was sure she’d meet them on the other side.
The sun rose higher, grew brighter, slowly bleaching out the sepia. The down on Melissa’s earlobes, her arms, the sheen of her fingernails went from gold to white.
“What about that guy you were seeing, Libby said he’s out of the picture?”