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Alissa, one of an endless parade of college-age interns we cycled through Chef’s, joined me at my desk. She wore a sad black dress inexplicably off the shoulder, an odd choice for such a cold morning, her pale flesh sprayed with freckles. I tugged at my turtleneck, trying to remember the last time I’d even made a stab at such a casually sexy look.
“So,” I said as I pulled up the May issue, “what brings you to graphic design? Are you a closet fine artist?”
Her eyes were bright blue but oddly sparkless. “No. I can’t draw at all.”
“But you want to be a pixel pusher? A Photoshop queen like me?”
“I guess,” she said. “I couldn’t think of anything else to do.” She crossed pasty white hands in her lap and stared at my screen.
Wow, I thought, if you’re this uninspired by life at your age, you’ll be a corpse by the time you’re thirty. But I held back from sharing how I mastered graphic design in the dark ages with T squares and X-Acto knives. I’d learned through experience that kids don’t think it’s cute or even interesting—who can blame them?—that you happen to be a dinosaur. It frankly scores you no points at all.
I also spared the poor girl my history as a fine arts major at the Massachusetts College of Art, where I met my now ex-husband, Richard Allen, a printmaking student I used to make love to in empty classrooms redolent of oil paint and turpentine. I didn’t disclose to Alissa that we knew our union was forever, that we swore to be artists no matter what it took, and that we were going to change the world.
Instead, I pulled out some “before” and “after” proofs. “My job is to make the food look even better than it is—better than Suzanne can make it look, even with all her lenses and filters. See? I toned down the red in the red velvet cake here, got the frosting to glisten, sexed up the greens in the arugula, painted some dewdrops on the tomatoes . . .”
Alissa cocked her head and doled me out a real smile. “Pretty cool.”
For a second I almost felt hip, pitiful as that sounds. I shuffled the proofs into piles, sat back, and regarded her. Hell, maybe she had something to teach me. “So, have you ever been white-water rafting?”
Her eyes grew wide, and for a moment I thought I detected life there. “Oh my God, no, I would never do that.”
I felt validated, terrified. “Why not?”
“I just think it’s stupid. It’s so dangerous.”
“But—you’ve never been?”
“No. And I don’t hang glide either, or go skydiving.” She recoiled a bit. “Why, you’re not going, are you?”
“Actually, yes,” I said. “I’m afraid I am.”
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I was brain-deep in an ad for oatmeal raisin cookies around three that afternoon when a rush of mortality flooded over me. I felt my face flush as a vague nausea suffused my body. It felt almost like embarrassment, as if I were caught deleting raisins as I was waiting, at age thirty-nine, for my life to begin. I’d tasted whiffs of this particular despair in the past, but never like that day. Maybe it was the swimmer and his dead daughter, maybe it was Alissa’s horrid youth freshly in my face.
All I could bring myself to do was gaze out the window, marvel at how a few flakes earlier in the day had gathered forces into an early-spring blizzard of stunning beauty. I tried to recall—couldn’t—the last time I’d taken up a paintbrush with any joy, or for how long I’d forced the square of my creativity into the round hole of graphic design. The day Richard left, I’d stuffed my paintings--in-progress, sketchbooks, easels—every last brush and tube of paint—in the back of my closet. I wanted no more to do with that part of myself.
So I forgot about beauty—not only what bloomed in my head and wanted to be on canvas, but the wild, flawed kind all around me. In fact I’d been whoring up the imperfect for a paycheck for so long I couldn’t face the real anymore: my aging body, the crash and burn of my marriage, the unfathomable loss of my brother, Marcus.
I gathered my things, made some noises about not feeling well, and left the building.
Snow swirled around me, making magic every detail of the city. No cornice, streetlamp, awning, or tree branch had been left unadorned. Packed trains rumbled by as I trudged along Beacon Street, but I had no interest in climbing aboard—even in my office clothes and heels—to arrive at my lonely apartment sooner than absolutely necessary. Block after block, all I could think about was Marcus and how much he had loved the snow.
One winter night, when Marcus was five and I was eleven, we built a snowman together in our front yard in Lee, Massachusetts, by the light of a full moon. I picked him up in his snowsuit and held him—his face flushed with excitement—as he popped in buttons for eyes, poked in a carrot for a nose, and with profound concentration arranged pebbles in a crooked smile.