“That’s a really good idea.”
She sounded like she really meant it, too. Because of this, he felt bold enough to ask, “Can I see it?”
“What? Oh. The painting. You know he hasn’t seen it yet.”
“Yeah.”
“You’d be the only person besides me to see it.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, fine, but my ego is very fragile about it, so maybe don’t tell me anything bad about it. Maybe don’t say anything at all. Just grunt, and then I’ll put it away real quick.”
“Yeah.”
The high-ceilinged studio had a little half balcony; she retrieved a large canvas from it and then, making a face, turned it around at the bottom of the stairs for him to see.
Matthew looked at it a long time.
“Never mind, say something; silence is much worse,” Jordan told him, and Matthew liked this, too, because it made him feel like she cared about what he thought.
“Does Declan know what it looks like, even a little?” he asked. When she shook her head, he looked at it a bit longer and then he said, “Are you going to marry my brother?”
“Crumbs, man, you go hard. I thought you’d say the foreground was too busy or that I’d gotten his nose wrong.”
Matthew asked, “Why does he treat you like you’re real?”
Jordan looked at him for a long time, as long as he’d looked at the painting, and then she took away the portrait of Declan to the second floor again. When she came back down, she crouched in front of him and said, “Because I am real.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m talking to you, mate! Because I have thoughts and feelings of my own! It doesn’t matter how you got here. You are here.”
Matthew stared at his hands. “What if Ronan made me this way? What if he made me how I am?”
“So what if he did?” She took his hand and jiggled it. “Why do you think Declan’s got his curls? Why do you think Ronan’s an asshole? We all get handed things from our parents. We all have bodies that obey rules that we deal with. We’re not as different as you think.”
Matthew could feel himself retreating from this last sentence as fast as he’d walked away from Old Man Eyebrows.
“Look, I’m not trying to tell you it’s easy,” Jordan said. “To deal with this, with being a dream. I just mean—I just mean, if you’re thinking, This is the magic thing that explains why everything’s weird and wrong and why it’s so hard to figure where I fit, well, it doesn’t solve things like that. We’re not different in ways that matter. Your boy Declan just pretends it matters so he doesn’t have to think too hard about his mum and how he feels about that, and because he’s afraid that if you’re a real person, you’ll grow up and leave him and then he won’t have a family and he won’t know who he is. There. There’s your two-dollar therapy session, I don’t know if it’s for you or for him but maybe you can split the cost.”
“You’re pretty cool,” Matthew said.
“Aw, yeah I am.” She lightly high-fived him again. “So what do you think of my painting?”
Matthew pointed to a long orange breast on the closest canvas. “I think it’s better than that one.”
Jordan laughed gleefully. “Hey, I see a smile on that face. You happier, then?”
Matthew thought about it. “Yeah.”
It was better than happiness, actually. For the first time since he’d found out he was a dream, he felt like himself again.
Hennessy remembered sitting for Jordan in White.
Jay had spent the morning crying at a mirror on the second floor of their London row house, and Hennessy had spent the morning watching her through the cracked door. She’d drawn the shape of her mother into the shag rug she sat on and wiped it out again and again, trying to perfect the slope of her shoulders, the bend of her neck. It was difficult to tell if Jay had been truly crying or if she were crying for reference. She was taking photos of it with her phone in the mirror and then rapidly typing something into it.
After a few hours of this, Jay emerged without warning, and although Hennessy scrambled away to prevent discovery, her mother found her wrapped in the linen curtain at the end of the hall.
“Little ghost,” she said to Hennessy. “Let’s go to the studio.”
Hennessy was rarely allowed into the studio and certainly never invited, so it was with awe she accepted her mother’s hand and rode the elevator to the third-floor studio.
There was nothing quite like J. H. Hennessy’s studio when she was in the prime of her career. This secret world was accessible only via the coded elevator or via a dark staircase that ended at a door with no knob, just a key in a lock. Inside it was old and new. Elderly window sashes, sleek white walls. Old floorboards, new black and white graphic floor paint. From the ceiling hung immense light fixtures, gifts from a fellow artist, messes of lightbulbs and dried grasses and leaves. From the floor grew metal floor lamps with shades cut sharply so that they threw light in geometric, lacy shapes. Gradient thumbprints dotted every flat surface, including the white grand piano, where Jay had thoughtlessly tested new paints. And of course there were the paintings, in all states of finish. The eyes were alive. The hands were alive.
Once the elevator door had hissed closed behind them, Jay took just one moment to look out one of the studio’s windows for something and then, when she didn’t find it, she returned to make a great fuss over Hennessy. She had her try on several of the dresses she had thrown on the sofa. She posed her in multiple ways in a simple wooden chair. She messed with her hair and played at braids and put lipstick on her and wiped it off. All the while she told Hennessy how pretty she had grown up to be, how wonderful a painting they were going to make together. No! Not a painting. A series of paintings. An exhibition. It had felt like a day that happened to someone else. Hennessy sat very still in the chair, like an animal by a highway, afraid to move lest she dart from safety to something worse. She was cold in the white shift but she didn’t want to even shiver in case her mother remembered Hennessy was not usually treated like this.
But the spell hadn’t broken. They’d worked all day, all evening. The next morning, Jay was still enthused. She ordered in a very grand breakfast of pastries from one of the bakeries and then they went back up for more work, this time up the rickety back staircase that ended in the door with no knob. They spent two weeks like that, with Hennessy sitting still in the chair and not shivering and her mother painting her and takeaway and delivery bags piling up in the stairwell.
At one point, Jay put her brush down and said, shocked, “I made you. One day you’ll grow up and be a woman, and I made you.”
Jay looked at Hennessy, and Hennessy suddenly had the impression that Jay was really seeing her, really thinking about what it meant to be Hennessy, to be Hennessy’s mother.
Jay looked from Hennessy to her painting and back again, and then she said, “How wonderful you’re going to be.”
It was the best moment of Hennessy’s life.
Then there was an audible slam. The front door. Bill Dower, returning from wherever he had gone. Jay leapt up so quickly that her stool clattered on the floor. Her still-wet palette was abandoned on the piano. The elevator door was whirring closed.