Always the Last to Know(48)
The image of my first love, bringing his beautiful baby to my father, punched me in the heart. “Thank you, Noah,” I whispered. My eyes were suddenly wet. “It’s really kind of you.”
He nodded once. “Well. Enjoy your new place.”
“Thanks. Have a nice night.”
“Don’t tell me what to do.”
And there it was, that tug of a smile on his beautiful face. Then he was gone, and my house was warmer because of him. The quiet settled around me, bringing with it all the memories of how Noah and I had failed each other.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Sadie
I thought when Noah came to visit the city I was obsessed with, he’d understand. He’d never been to New York before, aside from the obligatory eighth-grade field trip. I wanted him to drink in the architecture, the life and pulse of the city. I thought he’d appreciate the glittering skyscrapers and gracious brownstones, the cobbled, uneven streets of SoHo, the thrum and rush of noise, the smells of street food and the variety, my God, the newness of every single block.
He came to visit for the first time on Columbus Day weekend of my freshman year. He didn’t love a thing. In fact, he hated it. “How can you live here?” he asked the second night, rubbing his forehead. “You can’t hear yourself think. How do you paint?”
My mouth dropped open. “I’m getting really good!”
“You were good already.”
I made a disgusted noise. “Anyone can do a pretty landscape, Noah,” I said patiently. Landscapes had been my forte in high school, and they won me those prizes at our town’s art contest (which meant nothing, I had quickly learned). “I’m really growing as an artist. It’s mind-blowing, what I don’t know yet, and how good I could get.”
I stopped in front of a gallery; we were in SoHo, and you couldn’t swing a cat in this neighborhood without hitting a posh space staffed by black-clad beautiful people who spoke three languages. “This is art,” I said, pointing to the sole oil painting in the window. “It’s so much more than a pretty picture. This says something.”
“Looks like blobs of black tar to me,” he said.
“It’s a statement on materialism and abstraction,” I said. “There’s a tension here, a grittiness and impact. It’s a dissonant whole worldview about what’s real and what we want to be real.”
“It’s black blobs, hon,” he said. “That painting you did of the blood moon rising? Now that’s beautiful.”
I sighed. “Yeah, well, I’d kill to have been the one to come up with this. You know how much it goes for?” I knew, because my class had had a field trip here just last week (hence my knowledge of dissonance and such). “Three hundred thousand dollars, Noah.”
His eyebrows jumped. “Jesus. But then you’d have to look at the goddamn thing. Whereas if someone bought one of your paintings, they could actually feel happy.”
“Noah . . . knock it off.” But I smiled, even if I felt somehow slighted by his compliment. Happiness because of a painting? How plebeian. Why not just frame a picture of your dog? (I mean, yes, I did have a picture of my dog, the late, great Pokey, who died when I was eleven.) But art was supposed to do more.
I went home for Christmas break, but only for ten days, because I was going to Venice for the remainder. And oh, that beautiful city was everything I’d imagined. It spoke right to my heart, the crumbling buildings, the canals, the decrepit, genteel beauty, the patterns of bricks, the beauty imbued in everything, even the rainspouts. I loved the garbagemen who chatted animatedly with each other, smoking, but who paused to give me an appreciative glance with “ciao, bellissima.” The riotous glory of stained glass in every church, the beautiful window boxes and brightly painted shutters. I took the water taxi to Murano and watched handsome men blowing glass, their arms brown and scarred. The beauty of the city, the foreignness of it, filled up parts of my soul I didn’t even know I had.
When I got back to school, I signed up for a summer session in Barcelona and found a waitressing job so I could pay for it.
A quick trip home, travel on break, back to New York. It became my pattern. My painting changed; the gentle landscapes that had gotten me into Pace were cast aside. Now I did mixed-media and monochromatic paintings. I tried sculpting. I started wearing only black (I know, I know). I got my nose pierced.
Noah visited when he could, which wasn’t often. He was apprenticing as a carpenter, working six days a week. When we were together, in bed, skin against skin, his light scruff gently scraping my cheek, our fingers intertwined, the red glow returned. But he kept asking about the next break, when I’d come home. When I did go back to Stoningham, I felt itchy—my mother, still the same but only on more committees; Juliet, securing her status as favorite by giving birth to a girl she and her perfect husband named after my mother.
And Noah. His love was so big and fierce it was like a dragon, waiting for me.
I could feel the resentment growing in him.
My return visits consisted of Noah and me sleeping together whenever and wherever possible, and seeing the two friends I’d kept in touch with from high school. My dad was the only one who asked me the questions I wanted to answer, who listened with real interest as I described the wonder of the Duomo di Milano’s rooftop, the hundreds of different shades of green in Ireland, that moment when I stood at the very tip of South Africa, one foot in the Indian Ocean, one in the Atlantic, and compared the shades of blue. He was the only one who didn’t ask when I was going to come home, the only one who believed I could succeed out in the world.