Inside, the building was bright, the wood floors pale and scuffed, sunlight striking across them in wide, cheerful squares. The muffled sounds of a radio and voices floated down from upstairs, and the floors groaned gently as people moved somewhere in the building. Beyond the entrance, which was being used as a gallery, the walls hung with photographs, was a long hallway of doors I presumed were studios. One of them was labeled Office, and when I knocked, a man poked his head out, keeping the door mostly closed as though he were afraid I might attack him.
“Yes?” he asked. I couldn’t help thinking of the man at the gates to the Emerald City in The Wizard of Oz, and had to cover my mouth briefly to hide my smile.
“I saw the sign? About the studio for rent?” I had no idea why I was talking like a teenager, full of half questions and knock-kneed nervousness.
“Yeah. It’s on the third floor. You want to look?”
“Sure.” Was he not wearing any pants, and that’s why he’d only stick his head out?
He disappeared for a moment, closing the door fully, and then reappeared, thrusting his arm out and dropping a key into my hand. “Number 314. Stairs are that way.” He pointed to the opposite end of the hall. “Bring the key back when you’re done.” And then he closed the door again, but not before I caught a solid view of a pair of khakis. Whatever his secret was, it wasn’t pantslessness.
Passing down the hall, I peered through a door with a large glass window in it to see a classroom. This must have been the place. It was almost as I had pictured it—light and airy, easels and stools waiting, a raised platform at the far end where a teacher or a model could stand. Putting my hand against the window, I leaned in, my breath forming a hot circle on the glass. I pictured Miss Pine jingling her way through the room. I pictured myself sitting on the edge of a stool, my feet hooked under one of the bars, my brush moving over a canvas, filling in the emptiness with everything I saw and didn’t see. There might be music as we painted, and bursts of conversation and laughter to punctuate the silence of creation, and I would feel a part of something in a way I never did no matter how many people surrounded me.
Finally, I pushed myself away and found the stairs. As I climbed, they clanged underneath my feet, the sound of music growing louder as I approached the second floor, and then fading again as I reached the third. It was warmer up here, the sun trapped by the windows deliciously greenhouse-hot, as though I were back in Magnolia. I heard people working as I walked to the far end of the hall—I passed the steady whir of a potter’s wheel and the rich, sharp smell of wet clay, and through another door I heard someone humming along with a series of steady, slow taps I couldn’t identify. And finally, I slipped the key into the lock of 314.
The warehouse had clearly been an open floor that had now been subdivided into these smaller studios, and this one was tiny—if I stood in the middle, I could have touched both walls with my arms. But the back wall was taken up by a wide, clean window, and though the light had faded, it would be bright and sunny in the mornings, and there was enough room for a table and a cabinet for supplies, and an easel or two. I imagined myself coming here early, closing the door to keep the blur and buzz of the city outside, sipping orange juice while I laid out brushes like a surgeon’s tools, letting the light paint the canvas and show me where to draw. Virginia Woolf had said writers needed a room of their own, and maybe artists needed them too. Maybe everyone needs a room of one’s own where there are no expectations, and no compromises, and you can be the person you know yourself to be.
The music coming muffled or tinny through the walls, the smell of clay and paint and charcoal, all that meant it was possible. All these people were making the things they wanted happen. I wasn’t the only one. I didn’t have to be afraid. My grandfather had been a painter, my grandmother, a writer. My creativity wasn’t a fluke. It was my destiny.
? ? ?
By the time I got home, I was late, I suppose, but we had never really had a dinner time. Phillip often ate at the office or out with clients, and I pieced together meals from bits and pieces I found in the refrigerator—yogurt and two small pieces of steak left over from a dinner Phillip had gone to, and a handful of macadamia nuts and a pickle. Except apparently that night he had expected my arrival, had been planning, bringing things home from work, and he was angry at being delayed.
“Where have you been?” he asked.
I didn’t want to tell him. He would not see my wanting to paint again as the compromise I needed to make to stay here, as the reward for enduring all the things I did not want to do. But I was done with lying. I had tried it his way, my mother’s way, and it had never worked. I couldn’t go on like this forever, not now that I knew there was the possibility of something more. “I was looking at an artist’s studio.”
“An artist’s studio?” He said this as though I had told him I had been hunting one-legged unicorns. “What for?” His confusion was understandable. I don’t think he knew any women who had hobbies, other than shopping and complaining about their daughters-in-law. And the only hobbies any of the men he knew had were golf and infidelity. I was fairly sure he hadn’t taken up either, but it was only a matter of time.
“You know. For making art.”