Always the Last to Know(53)

I made him a pastel, one of those easy skyscapes that virtually anyone could draw, and wrote on the back, “I still love you, too.”

So we weren’t quite apart, even if we weren’t together.

When we saw each other the next time I went to Stoningham, we were practically strangers.

“How’s teaching?” he asked as we sat in his mother’s kitchen.

“It’s really nice.” It was so strange to feel awkward around him, of all people on earth. We seemed to be having trouble making eye contact.

“Painting going okay?” he asked.

“Yep.” I didn’t tell him about the galleries and rejections and meh feedback, not wanting to give him ammo in his argument for me to come back home. “How’s carpentry going?”

“Good.”

“Great.”

We’d never been like this before. He drove me to New London to get the train, and when I got my ticket, he kissed me, hard and fierce and beautiful, and if we’d kissed like that when we first saw each other, maybe things would’ve been different.

I still waitressed downtown. I grew to hate Mala, who never even tried to be nice. I cleaned up after Sarah, who was a pig but pleasant. I painted and critiqued my own work and painted more, still not able to pinpoint what I was trying to accomplish with my work, other than make somebody see its value.

But something started to happen. Two years out of college, no longer shielded by my student status, I was becoming a New Yorker. I knew which subways to take, which street would be clogged with tourists, how to avoid the Yankees fans swarming to the stadium for a day game. I didn’t worry about what to wear and knew which boutiques were cool and cheap. I painted all summer, and my work was getting better. I even sold a few pieces at those studio open houses where you paid to play.

Then one of the moms at St. Catherine’s approached me. She was an interior decorator and wondered if I’d do pieces on commission to match the rooms she was doing. It was too hard, she said, to find art that matched exactly right. Maybe she could give me some paint colors and fabric swatches, and I could make something that would fit on the wall she had in mind?

I didn’t hesitate in saying yes. Why the hell not? Would Aneni? Never.

My first piece for Janice, the decorator mom, was a ten-by-five-foot painting for over a couch. “Here’s the couch fabric, and the throw pillows,” she said, handing me swatches of fabric. “Make it with some texture in it, swirly, you know? Like that one with the stars in it by the dude who cut off his ear? Super! Oh, and sign it. My client will love having an original piece.”

So I made it—an oil painting in sage, apricot and lavender with swirly brushstrokes (like Van Gogh, you betcha). Was it a complete sellout? Yes, it was. Did I earn five hundred bucks? Yes, I did.

Janice was thrilled. She came back to me again, and then again, and then it became part of her selling point: original artwork made just for your house. It gave me an idea, and I contacted half a dozen more decorators. Selling out, with the emphasis on sell. I was loyal to Janice and kept my prices low, but I asked for triple that with the other folks, and they didn’t blink. Apparently, some artists were quite fussy about being told what to do and how to do it. Not me.

Later that year, I quit my waitressing job (which never did produce any contacts) and ditched the horrible little apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, Mad Mala and Sloppy Sarah. Juliet alerted me to a “motivated seller” with a place in Times Square (the worst neighborhood in all five boroughs to any true New Yorker). But the apartment was affordable, and nicer than I could’ve gotten in any other neighborhood. Juliet loaned me the money for a down payment (we artists had no pride), and just like that, I had a one-bedroom place of my own, lit up at night by the garish lights of enormous, flashing advertisements.

I still tried to paint more than just the couch paintings, as I took to calling them. I still took the occasional class, still entered contests with influential judges, still sent e-mails to those galleries that could make a career. I was still young. But however mundane, I was also selling art . . . made, alas, to match comforters or bathroom tile. Between that and teaching the little darlings at St. Catherine’s, I was making a living. At painting. Not a lot of people could say that. Not even Zach of Cincinnati.

Besides, it would make another great story, I told myself. Philip Glass had once been a cabdriver. Kurt Vonnegut had sold cars. David Sedaris had been an elf at Macy’s. Oprah Winfrey had worked at a grocery store.

“This is an early Sadie Frost!” someone might brag someday of my couch paintings. That purple-and-blue horror I’d done to cover a sixty-inch flat-screen TV? It might sell for millions.

Noah still came to visit, but I could sense his heart hardening toward me. It almost felt like he wanted me to fail. He viewed my apartment as proof I didn’t want to get married, but for crying out loud, we were twenty-four years old. I didn’t want to get married! Not now! I was getting tired of his broody bullshit. He was an artist, too, though he hated when I said it. Only in bed did we recapture that beautiful, fierce glow and remember why we were together.

I settled into this new phase of my adulthood, one in which I could pay my bills and go out for dinner once in a while, get cable, if not HBO. Carter lived on the Upper West Side (family money) and he and I hung out a lot. One of Janice’s clients asked to take me to coffee to thank me for her “stunning” watercolor, and we started going to yoga classes together. Alexa, the sixth-grade math teacher, and I both loved to wander through the New York Botanical Garden, which wasn’t far from St. Catherine’s.