“Really? I feel like when I was seventeen I knew the difference…”
Lacie’s voice went all wandery, trying to remember our youth. Annoyance flicked me. Why couldn’t she just call the little girl a bitch? All I wanted from friendship was the assurance that I was right, but put-upon, that furthermore all life’s troubles were really only hilarious episodes, nothing so dark it couldn’t be reframed as a one-liner. But there I was, in that room, still trapped with myself. Earthy. Lacie wasn’t any help at all.
“Whatever. It doesn’t matter. It’s just, she’s so feminine and girly in this way that kind of mystifies me.”
“Well, at least you’re working again, right?”
“Yeah, totally.” I sipped. Something snagged: the check written out to Lacie tucked in my top drawer. “I still don’t—”
“It’s cool, it’s cool. I told you, whenever is fine.”
I sighed. “Thanks. It’s so humiliating.”
She looked away, though because she wanted to give me privacy or she actually hated this money business, too, I couldn’t tell. “What’s going on?” I asked. “What’s up with you?”
“Nothing. Ian is driving me insane.”
My mouth was suddenly too wide for my face. “What’s he doing?”
“He’s just working a lot. He’s at the studio all the time.”
“Hmm,” I said neutrally. “He’s got that show coming up.”
Lacie scowled over her glass, but the scowl already had some self-mockery in it. “I don’t like it,” she declared. “Obviously all the attention should be for me all the time.”
“Obviously.” I grinned. “Me too. All the attention all the time.”
It was like any other evening, our little routines and jokes, except that I still had something itchy in me. I still needed out of myself. “Attention is good. But not attention from a dumb teenage girl. Earthy. It sounds so musty.”
“You’re not musty.” Lacie stretched her arms overhead. “You’re fucking hot. You’re beautiful. That girl is just jealous.”
“Yeah.” Something pinchy and mean rose up in me. I wasn’t getting what I wanted from this conversation; there was something dismissive in her reassurances. I drained the last of my glass. “Whatever. I’m going to bed.”
“And earthy can be a good thing…” she called as I drifted down the hall, and I shouted back, “Yeah, totally,” and shut the door and got out my phone. Fiddled with it. No new texts, no new emails. The weather was still the weather.
The thing was, I just needed to say to somebody, “This girl thinks I’m a dirty hippie,” and have them exclaim back, like a friend, like any normal friend would, “What? Oh my God, that’s ridiculous, what a stupid rich girl; her brain has been lobotomized by Instagram. You know how it is. Kids these days.”
That’s what a friend was for. And Ian was my friend. He had told me to text him. So I did.
Descending the endless escalators at Smith and Ninth, walking past bodegas and skittery paper cups, I imagined in the swirl of sulfur lights an act of violence. A mugging. My body slammed by a city bus. The call to Lacie, her question to me: What were you doing there? To distract her I’d have to get seriously fucked up. Hurt. Hospital.
Beneath the BQE I walked, and around the projects, deep in this bad line of thought. Unlucky. I forced myself from violence to Isabel. What if she were with me tonight? I would point to the trash and the silent, dark-coated men and say, This is New York too. This is what they’re hiding from you.
At the bar Ian was wearing a T-shirt the color of sky after rain, a depthless bright blue. After my dark thoughts, and amid the steamed windows and piled coats, he shone out, fresh and cool. When he turned I tried to kiss his cheek, but my mouth ended up by his ear.
He smiled distantly. He was so big and blond; his effusions of hair and skin, his broadness, his maleness, delighted me, so rank and hairy and even slightly repellant, so corporeal. So different from my last boyfriend, Alex, who had been petite and pristine.
While I was sinking under his spell we were saying hello, I was ordering a Vinho Verde, Ian was unfolding a twenty, I was saying no, no, and he was saying yes, yes. Let me. In the back room a gypsy band jigged, and beneath their screaming fiddle and nervy tambourine there were glasses clinking, people shouting, a man’s rumbling laugh, and yet it felt very quiet to me, very quiet and slow, there in that dark, humid bar with the blue light of his shirt.
Our silence stretched like honey from a spoon.
He had dark eyes, deep and pooling, nearly black. Eyes that talked for him. He wasn’t afraid of silence. A minute after my arrival, we had already lapsed into one.
Then the conversation shuddered to life. I asked about his show; he complained about the curator. He asked about my writing; I complained about Portia. We agreed that art was a bitch. I said that I thought Lacie was a frustrated artist: all those craft projects around the house, but stuck in an office all day.
“Maybe. I’ve thought the same thing a few times.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “She can be a little scattered.”
“Well, the house is very scattered.”
He laughed ruefully. “It drives me nuts.”
I flashed on his studio at the Barn: pigment plastic-wrapped, brushes soft and clean, yellow babouches lined up by the door.
“I like it,” I told him. “Maybe it’s a little overwhelming. But it always feels like there’s stuff going on. It’s so alive.”
“Yeah, with Lacie, there’s always something happening.”
I felt then how we could make a project of Lacie. Pool our observations, fuss over her psyche, and speculate, as we had done the other day. It would make us close again, but I didn’t want to do it that way.
As if he had heard my thoughts, he said, “You too.”
“What?”
“You too. There’s a lot going on with you too.”
“Oh, thanks.” All I wanted was his praise, but getting it was too much; I squirmed away, and he leaned close.
“No, I mean it. At the Barn? You were the hardest worker. You were up before everyone else. You were in deep. We could all tell.”
“I’m a mule.” I grinned coquettishly from my wineglass’s rim. “Just plowing ahead.”
But he didn’t take the bait and flirt back. Instead he got serious, more serious, which I didn’t think was possible. With those brooding eyes and hulking shape Ian’s default was serious, so when he actually got serious, the solemnity about knocked you over. “This novel,” he said quietly, “it’s the one from the Barn?”