I was just being polite. Doing what any good, friendly roommate would do. There was no reason at all for my heart to be racing when I imagined him reading my note after I’d gone to sleep, grinning so broadly at the way I’d signed it that it activated his killer cheek dimple. No reason whatsoever.
My heart was racing, though, all the same, when I left the note on the kitchen table five minutes later.
* * *
Because so many of the artists who shared space at Living Life in Color had day jobs during traditional business hours, the studio was always busiest on evenings and weekends. When I got there a few hours after moving back into Frederick’s apartment, it was seven o’clock and the studio was packed. There was no space left for me at the big communal table—my favorite spot to work when I made it in.
“There’s still an open carrel in the back,” Jeremy, a painter who all but lived there from what I could tell, said from his position at the head of the big table.
“Is it the one with the good lamp or the broken one?”
“Oh, Joanne got the broken one fixed on Tuesday.”
“Really?” That was a surprise. It was no secret that the studio barely earned enough money in artist rental fees to cover its rent. Joanne generally viewed any repairs that were not absolutely required to keep the building up to code as something she could put off indefinitely.
“I know, I was surprised, too.” Jeremy chuckled. “Anyway, it’s the carrel that up until Tuesday had a broken lamp but that works just fine now.”
The project I wanted to create for my submission had been coming to me in bits and pieces over the past few days. It had solidified that afternoon when I’d walked into my bedroom and saw my Lake Michigan landscapes hanging in the place where that awful oil painting of the fox-hunting party had once been.
Frederick’s old painting was hideous. But not all art depicting life in the eighteenth-century English countryside was bad—at least if those classes I took while studying in London when I was in college were halfway accurate. What if I created something inspired by that era, but without the grisly hunting stuff? A manor house, set in the Lake District, with leafy green trees in the background and a babbling brook in the foreground? I still needed to think through exactly how I’d subvert the image through found objects—how to make it modern, how to make it mine—but that would come to me. In the meantime, the sort of image I was imagining would really get me to stretch my oil-painting muscles in a way that excited me.
I dug through my bag for my sketchpad—and for my newest gift from Frederick. Normally I just used a regular old graphite pencil for my preliminary sketches, but for this project, I would draw my planning sketches in color.
TEN
Text messages between Mr. Frederick J. Fitzwilliam and Mr. Reginald R. Cleaves
Can I ask your honest opinion?
Always
What do you think of my clothes?
The way I dress, I mean.
Do I dress stylishly?
Stylishly?
Yes.
I think you dress great buddy
Good.
I do too. Thank you.
I think my clothes look very refined.
I mean I kept all your clothes carefully preserved for you while you slept right?
So I might be biased
Perhaps, but I also happen to think that in this isolated instance, you did well.
Awwww thank you
But hey why do you suddenly care about your clothes
I always care about my clothes.
Ummmmm in the three centuries Ive known you youve never once asked my opinion on your clothes or appearance
Why are you asking now?
I was just . . .
Curious.
Lolllllll u sure it doesnt have anything to do with that GIRL moving back in with u
I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.
The next evening—after the sun had set, and Frederick had welcomed me back to the apartment in person with a small smile playing on his lips—we found ourselves huddled together at the kitchen table in front of my laptop.
Frederick was scowling, arms folded tightly across his chest as he glared at my screen.
“What am I looking at, Cassie?”
“Instagram.”
“Instagram?”
“Yes.”
Frederick pointed at the filtered picture of a breakfast Sam had, according to the caption, eaten a few months ago on his honeymoon in Hawaii. “Instagram is . . . pictures of food?”
“Sometimes, yeah.”
Frederick scoffed, clearly unimpressed.
“Reginald really didn’t show you anything on the internet before now?” I asked, a little incredulous. But it was a rhetorical question. It couldn’t have been clearer that before I got Frederick’s internet up and running that afternoon, he’d never been exposed to anything online.
Frederick shook his head. “He didn’t.”
“How did you know to ask about TikTok, then?”
A pause. “I thought it was a new kind of music,” he admitted, a bit sheepishly.
I couldn’t help but smile at that. He really was adorably clueless. “Really?”
“It’s called TikTok,” he said. “That’s the sound a clock makes, is it not? I think it was a reasonable guess.”
He had a point there. If I’d just woken up from a century-long nap, I might have reached the same conclusion. As it was, I was born just a few decades ago and I barely knew what TikTok was, either.
“Well, either way, being connected to the internet is essential in the twenty-first century,” I said. “It’s the only way people get their information now.”
“That’s probably why Reginald didn’t connect me,” Frederick said, darkly. “He fed me for a century and made sure my bills got paid so I wouldn’t waste away or be homeless when I woke up. But if, upon waking, I had reliable access to information at my fingertips it would have impeded his ability to play practical jokes on me.”
I snorted. “I think I’m going to be a nicer life assistant than he was.”
“There’s no question in my mind about that.”
He turned his attention back to my laptop. Earlier, I’d explained to him that while I wasn’t familiar with all corners of the internet or all social media platforms—for example, I’d only joined TikTok for funny cat videos and barely understood it—I was regularly on Instagram and could show him around.