My career and my reputation mean everything to me.
My dad cared more about being a good marine than being a good father. Looks like I, too, am more committed to appearances than to being a good person.
I have to make this right with Ely. I’m not sure what that looks like, but I need to figure it out. Problem is, I’m second-guessing just about everything right now, up to and including my offer to help her one-on-one. Clearly I can’t restrain myself, even for the purpose of seeming professional at a goddamn school event.
This whole summer stretches out before me, long and full of minefields.
“Mraaaow.”
I twist to meet the gaze of my three-legged black cat, Haze, who has parked himself right in front of the misty shower door to stare at me. His little pink tongue flicks out to wet his nose.
“It’s past your dinnertime, isn’t it?” I ask as Haze continues to give me that reproachful look. “Sorry, buddy. I’ll be out in a second.”
It took me years to establish myself as an artist—there were lots of part-time jobs at record stores and fast-food joints while I tried to build some kind of portfolio. My first big break came when I was twenty-four and won a local competition that was judged by a big-name dealer. After that, it was another two years until I could afford my own studio apartment and years after that before I could upgrade to a one bedroom. But even the studio was a game changer. My mind feels larger without the encroaching presence of other humans in the same tiny space. With just me and Haze here, I feel as if I stretch wide, filling every corner. I could close my eyes and expand further still, into the streets and alleys, across the bridge over the river, my imagination swimming between the skyscrapers of Manhattan.
My art is better when I’m alone.
I spoon wet food into Haze’s bowl, his damp nose nudging at my hand again and again until I finally get out of the way and let him dive in. I scratch my fingers behind his ears, then leave him to it.
My apartment is small even for a one bedroom; I’ve appropriated half the living room into a mock studio. I don’t bring any of my final products back here—I do most of my work at Parker or at a local spot I rent in an artists’ workshop—but it’s great for rough drafts. I can experiment with paints and glues and textiles without worrying about damaging a final print. Right now, my desk is covered in the detritus from a project I just finished, a meditation on self-image and the masks we wear to construct the image we want other people to see. I’ve sculpted photos of real people into masks—laughing, angry, afraid, hopeful, sad. The collection has already found a temporary home at a gallery in SoHo. Sometimes I still can’t get over the fact that this is my real life—that actual people, actual buyers, are going to look at something I created and potentially be moved by it.
Art is a form of telepathy, really. You have an idea, or a feeling, and you try to get someone else—someone totally different from you, with different wants and fears and interests—to share your emotions, even if just for a moment. It doesn’t always work. But when it does, it’s the best experience in the entire world.
I clear off the old shit and settle in at my desk, now a blank expanse of oak with my pens lined up patiently along the top edge.
Back to the beginning: the worst and best part.
7
ELY
Dr. Zhu’s class, as it turns out, is just as good as advertised. Ava Zhu is a powerhouse, having come into photography from a totally different field—graphic design—before she discovered she liked editing her own pictures more than she liked creating logos for someone else. It’s not mixed media, but it is fascinating. Most of my work has been digital, so a part of me was worried I wouldn’t really learn anything new from a class like this. Turns out, hubris is a bitch. I have a lot more to learn than I thought. The point is to be open-minded.
That’s why I’m here, right?
(I try to ignore the voice in my head that snarkily replies, Yeah. Learn from Wyatt Cole.)
Wyatt Cole, who, it seems, has been content to ignore me ever since the welcome reception. To be fair, he isn’t ignoring just me. I’ve seen students wave at him in the hall and watched him curl into himself, his shoulders ratcheting up to his ears. I’d heard he was a bit of a hermit, but that was extra. Maybe it’s not that he hates me in particular so much as that he hates people, period.
Only that’s inconsistent with how charming and extroverted he’d seemed at Revel. He was effervescent, magnetic, as if he could be the center of any world he chose to be in.
The next time I spotted him was between classes, the two of us passing in the corridor, his gaze catching mine—at that moment, it felt like my heart had stopped in my chest from the sudden heat in his gaze. And then there was the color rising in his cheeks, the way he looked away so fast it felt like a slap. It’s not that he doesn’t see me.
It’s that he doesn’t want to.
Which doesn’t make any fucking sense. He was all smiles and snarky comments on Tuesday—so, what changed? It’s like he decides our boundaries based on some mystical kabbalah that is opaque to me.
Or maybe he’s just changed his mind.
My problem, obviously, is that I hate to lose. Because surely there’s nothing so special about Wyatt Cole that it justifies the way I’m obsessing over this man. He’s just…some dude, right?
Some dude who is the best photographer alive, who fucked me like a god and congratulated me on being sober for four years and gave me his phone number.
It doesn’t help that when I text my friend/sponsor Shannon from LA about the whole fucking-a-teacher situation, the only advice she can muster is a series of increasingly raunchy butt GIFs. As much as I hate to admit it, times like these, I miss Chaya. There was a lot about our friendship that was messed up, but also I know exactly what she’d say if she could see me right now.
Let it go. Move on. Get a life. Et cetera.
She’d ask me which is more important: my sex life or my art.
And to be honest, she’d be right. I only get one shot at making Parker work for me, and I’m not gonna miss it.
My instructors seem equally keen on making the most of every second we spend here. I’m inundated with projects and deadlines by the end of the first week, and by the time I’m packing up my materials after Zhu’s class finishes on Friday, my brain feels like I’ve pounded it into jelly. I’m rubbing at my temples when someone’s purple-skirted hip hitches itself onto the edge of my desk; I look up to find Michal smiling down at me, lips painted black matte.
“Hey,” she says. “Are you doing anything this weekend?”
“No plans. Just dissolving into stress goo. You?”
She lifts her brows. “It’s Shabbat, Ely. I’m doing Shabbat shit. Want to come?”