I KNEW, OF course, that I couldn’t trust my perceptions.
I knew that my brain was having a rough month. But it was so strange to witness it correcting itself. I really wasn’t okay. Not yet.
The only Hazel was gesturing at me to move out of the way now so she could sweep. I started to tiptoe my way over the broken glass in my dumb strappy sandals … when an arm clamped around my waist to help guide me.
Joe.
I knew it before I knew it. I felt him in an instant.
Then one side glance brought confirmation: Yep. The bowling jacket. “Let’s sit you down,” Joe said, starting to walk me toward a bench.
But when we got back to the safe shore of the glass-shard-free sidewalk, I sidled out of his grasp.
Joe. Pajamas. Parker. Nope.
He did not need to rescue me. Not today. Not after whatever he’d been up to with the defining bully of my lifetime. I could rescue myself, thanks very much.
Mostly, I was angry at Parker. I was angry at the man who’d shot me the bird. I was angry at the imaging tech who hadn’t found any reduction of the edema. I was angry at my blister and my understocked grocery store and my dead phone battery. And at myself for my own inability to navigate my life—and the way I’d just brutalized that innocent glass door.
But right then, all that anger just crystallized at Joe.
How dare he cavort with my evil stepsister like that and then show up acting like a good person?
It wasn’t just poor choices. It was a deep betrayal. And the fact that he didn’t know that?
That just made it worse.
An image of Joe stepping out of Parker’s door in his pajamas lit up in my head like a neon sign. Who did he think he was?
“I’ve got it,” I said, my voice distant. Joe hesitated. “Can I—”
“No, thanks.”
“Are you—” he tried again. “I’m good.”
There was no bouncing back here. There was no redeeming this moment. Or this day.
I started walking toward our lobby doors. No way was I taking the shortcut through Bean Street. I might never get coffee there again.
As the rage receded in my consciousness, delayed humiliation took its place. I walked faster, trying to escape as soon as possible.
But that’s when Joe called after me. “Are you okay?” I just kept walking.
Joe called after me again. “Are you mad at me?” No response there, either.
One final question from Joe. “Do we still need to finish the portrait?”
That one, I needed to answer. I stopped and turned. “The portrait,” I called back, looking near him but not at him, “is canceled.”
 |
CANCELED.
The word ricocheted around in my head as I rode the elevator, climbed the rooftop stairs, served a plate of croissant morsels to Peanut, and then draped myself over my bed.
Canceled.
That felt surprisingly good.
I didn’t have to do any of this.
The idea misted me with relief. I didn’t have to just endlessly suffer and suffer and suffer.
I could just … quit.
That was a victory. Kind of. Wasn’t it?
An act of self-respect: Not forcing myself to endure a contest I knew I couldn’t win. Not suffering through an endless art show where I didn’t belong. Not painting the portrait of a disappointing man.
I could become a family therapist. Or a scuba instructor. Or a chef. Or a handbag designer. Was there some rule somewhere that the dream you picked for yourself in college had to be the dream you kept forever?
Peanut finished his repast and joined me on the bed, and the two of us lounged there together for a while, feeling victorious.
The joy of quitting. Who knew?
I could just stop trying. I could just never paint again. I could be free.
The raw power of saying no felt so good, we just stayed like that— enjoying our perspective shift—until we both accidentally fell asleep and drifted into one of those deep, peaceful, underwater naps.
|
WHEN I WOKE up, I had a text from Sue.
She’d found an article about an artist who had severe face blindness whose entire body of work consisted of drawings she’d made of her own face—by feel. Thousands and thousands of portraits of her own face—done with her eyes closed as she moved her free hand around her face and took in visual information by touch.
LOOK! Sue shouted—all caps—in the text. THESE SELF- PORTRAITS ARE AWESOME!
Self-portraits are not allowed, I texted back.
Just read the article, Sue said.
I read the article. It was long. It told the story of this artist’s life—of how her severe lifelong undiagnosed face blindness had led her parents, teachers, and schoolmates to think every bad thing they wanted about her. From being called stupid to uncooperative to obstinate, she’d been misunderstood and blamed her entire life, as if she suffered from an attitude problem. Or a bad personality. They blamed her and disliked her—and she blamed and disliked herself … until she discovered the practice of drawing by feel.
She couldn’t perceive her own face, and so the process of drawing self- portraits had become a way of finding herself. She had thousands and thousands of them by now—all of them ethereal and poetic and mysterious, like she was glimpsing herself through a deep fog. I couldn’t see the faces, either, when I looked at the images of the article, but I could see the smoky pencil lines, I could feel the sense of mystery, and I could read the exquisite details.
And I realized, looking at the images, that I was seeing them in a special way. Most people, I realized, saw her face itself—and her attempts to render it. But I couldn’t see the face. All I could see was the emotion. The artistry. The longing.
It was like getting the inside view.
By the time I finished reading, my perspective had shifted. The artist described her self-portraits as “healing,” and that was the only word I needed to hear.
I grabbed some paper and some charcoal pencils, sat straight down, and started working on a self-portrait by feel of my own.
Two seconds later, two hours had gone by.
I looked up from the finished drawing and saw the darkening sky.
Then I turned back to the self-portrait I’d just drawn—that jumble of features that I couldn’t see—and I just knew, very simply, that it was good.
I texted a photo to Sue and said, This is good, isn’t it?
She texted back: OMG. It’s amazing!
I had barely “liked” it when another text came from her.
Do that to Joe!!! Then, Maybe this is the brain hack you’ve been looking for!!!
But, I texted back, I just decided to quit the competition. Too bad, Sue said. Unquit.
|
NOT QUITTING MEANT I had some groveling to do. With Joe.
I went down to his apartment and knocked on the door.
“I’m sorry I was weird before,” I said when he opened the door. “I had a colossally bad day—and you were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Really?” Joe said.
He didn’t believe me? “Really,” I said. “It wasn’t personal.” “It seemed kind of personal to me.”
“I had just shattered a glass door,” I said. “I was having a moment.” “But the way you glared at me…”
Had I glared at him?
“I walked away wondering what I had done.”
“You didn’t do anything.” Not true—but I didn’t want to get into it. I didn’t want to hear any confessions or apologies about Parker. Because I’d never be able to be around him, or tolerate him, or put my hands all over him the way I was about to ask to do if he told me he was dating her.
Then I’d really need a new model.
The point was, I didn’t want to know. I needed to keep it all professional. No confessions. No truths. Just a pleasant apology and one last portrait attempt before I gave up on all my dreams.
Joe went on, “And so I thought about it. Pretty much all day. What had I done to piss you off? And then I got it.”
“You got it?”
Joe nodded. Here it was. Confession time. “We don’t have to—” I started.
But then Joe said, “The kiss.” The kiss?
“Right?” he went on. “It must be the kiss. You were just trying to help me out, and then I turned it into a whole other thing. I don’t have an excuse for that. I just—I guess it was the surprise of it. And I hadn’t kissed anybody in a long while. And there was definitely some sweet revenge mixed in. But mostly it was just … so unbelievably nice.”
Really? That’s what he thought I was mad about? A swoony kiss? Who gets mad about a swoony kiss?!
In that second, my goals shifted. He wanted to have this conversation?
Fine. We’d have this conversation.
It might ruin everything. But I guess that’s the thing about anger. I suddenly didn’t care.
“Not the kiss,” I said. “Not the kiss?”
“What else might I be mad about?”
Joe hesitated.
I was going to force him to say it now. He’d started this, and I was going to finish it. “Rack your brain,” I said.
But Joe just shook his head.
And that just made me madder. “What am I mad about? What am I mad about? It wasn’t the very nice accidental sweet-revenge kiss.” I took a second to shake my head incredulously. “It was your walk of shame.”
“My walk of what?”
“Out of Parker’s apartment. This morning. At the crack of dawn.”
Joe thought back. Then he remembered. Then he protested. “But that wasn’t—”
“Are you saying you didn’t slink guiltily out of Parker’s place this morning?”
“I mean, I walked out. But I didn’t slink.” I narrowed my eyes at him.
“Is that what you’re thinking? That I got up to no good with your evil stepsister?”
“Prove me wrong.”
But Joe was just shaking his head. “How could you think that? How dumb do you think I am?”
“All men are dumb when it comes to Parker.”
But Joe was still indignant. “I wasn’t messing around with the stepsister who ruined your life,” he said. “I was feeding her cat.”
Confirmation. “You were feeding Parker’s evil cat? The one that keeps peeing in our hallway?”
Joe nodded. “Yep. Its name is Elvira.”
I took that in. “But you were wearing your pajamas.”
“Exactly!” Joe said. “People don’t do walks of shame in their pajamas.” He had a point.
“Parker wasn’t even there! She left at three A.M. on a flight to Amsterdam!” he said—and now it was his turn to be mad. “You think that I kissed you last night and then turned around to have some kind of illicit tryst with your worst enemy?”
I mean, yes.
Worse things happened all the time with Parker. But his outrage was humbling.
“It wasn’t a real kiss,” I finally said. “It was real enough.”
I shrugged, still half thinking I was right. “How could you think that?” Joe said.
“I don’t know. People are terrible.”
“People may be terrible,” Joe said. “But I’m not.” He really felt kind of hurt.
Maybe it was time to level with him a little. “I’m sorry,” I said then, “I’m having a very weird month.”
“Okay,” Joe said, listening.
But how much to say, standing here in the doorway of his empty apartment? Maybe just the basics.
I took a breath and went for it. “About a month ago,” I said, “I had what they call a nonconvulsive seizure in the crosswalk in front of our building. And apparently a Good Samaritan pushed me to safety just before I got mowed down by a Volkswagen Beetle. At the hospital, they did a brain scan for the cause of the seizure and found a little malformed blood vessel. They said I needed surgery to correct it, so I had surgery.”
Joe shook his head, like What? “You had brain surgery?” “Yeah,” I said.
“A month ago?”
I nodded to confirm. Then, like a kid showing someone a boo-boo, I leaned forward and pulled my hair aside so he could see the scar behind my ear.
He peered in at it. “Wow.”
I hadn’t shown anybody my scar yet. Not even Sue.
“Yeah,” I said. “And it’s been”—here, a tremble found its way into my voice—“a weirdly hard month. Nothing’s quite right. Things that used to be easy are now … not. Especially painting.”
Joe nodded.
“The day of the seizure, I’d just had my first big career break. And I was all set to win it.” I looked down at my hands. “But I’m having trouble painting now.”
“That’s why you’re trying new techniques.”
I nodded. I was not, not, not going to tell him about the face blindness. But maybe I could tell him about what it felt like. “My whole life, my brain
was always just so … reliable. But now, not as much. I keep getting things wrong. I can’t trust myself. The whole world looks different. And so the version of me that you’re getting right now is … kind of a mess. Much more of a mess than usual.”
If Joe had any sense of what a big deal it was for me to admit to anyone ever that I wasn’t A-okay, he did not show it. “You’re not that much of a mess,” Joe said, his voice softer.
“I smashed a glass door today.” “That was a mess,” Joe conceded.
“Anyway, I’m really sorry,” I said. “Getting super mad at people over wrong assumptions is not normally my thing.”
“It’s fine. You can make it up to me.” “How?”
Joe gave a shrug. “Just un-cancel the portrait.”
“Funny you should ask,” I said. “That’s exactly what I came here to do.”
