Chapter 9
Nine
I always thought I’d have my life figured out by now.
Hilarious, right?
I’m about to turn thirty-three. And yes, from the outside I seem to have the bare minimum of functionality—I have a place to live, I have a car. I have a lovely cat and a calling. I have a girlfriend, and I have money coming in, in fits and starts, but still. I can pay my bills, when I remember to pay them.
And yet I look around and wonder what the hell I think I’m doing because in so many ways it feels like I’m treading water and there’s no dock, no beach, not even a life preserver in sight.
So often it feels as if I make decisions because of what I don’t want. I don’t want to be like my dad. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to get a nine-to-five job. I don’t want to be alone.
But lately, no matter the fact my girlfriend and I have been together for ten years, I feel oddly alone.
I thought my mom might understand. She’s on the other side of the world at the moment, an anthropologist researching her latest book in Australia. She’s been divorced from my dad for two decades and has been single ever since. But when I bring up my general state of confusion with her in our every-other-week phone call, she suggests I go to therapy. When I talk to my London-based therapist about it in a video call, he asks me if I’m so afraid of living my life in the negative, maybe I should try defining what I want, in the positive.
What do I want?
It scares me that the first thing that occurs to me isn’t money, or success, or watching Ivy get big with our hypothetical child—something we used to talk about and haven’t mentioned in at least a year. It’s not even words—only a face.
Kingston James’s face.
I have a secret.
I’m supposed to be working on Kingston’s commission. He wanted a tidy picture of his country cottage to hang on his wall, and I started painting it—I truly did. But then I was looking through the prints of the photos I took at his house, and I kept returning to the one I took of his face, his umber skin naturally lit by the spring sunshine coming through his living room window. He was so beautiful that day. Whenever I look at that picture, that’s what I see—a beautiful soul, grieving the loss of his father, striving to make it seem as if he doesn’t hurt.
So I started painting something else. A portrait. Of Kingston. And I haven’t been able to stop.
But wanting to paint Kingston James isn’t the same as wanting him. Is it?
And the fact that Ivy hasn’t touched me in months just means she’s been preoccupied by getting ready for her show.
But the real red flag is that I hadn’t even noticed she’d stopped touching me. Not until my therapist brings it up.
“Have you two talked about the future lately?” he asks.
“Sure,” I answer automatically. “Her showing is this fall. And we’re trying to figure out if we should go back to London for the holidays. I know it’s only June, but if we want a good itinerary, we have to plan ahead.”
“I mean the future of your relationship. Marriage? Kids?”
“We always said marriage was for other people,” I answer. “You know I personally don’t put much stock in the institution.” Divorcing each other was the only good mutual decision my parents ever made.
“It’s true you don’t have to be married to be committed. But all relationships need to be worked on. They need care and attention. When was the last time you two went out together, had a date night?”
Date night? He makes it sound like we’re middle-aged fogeys who need to inject some artificial romance into our lives.
But when I struggle to remember the last time the two of us did anything together, except move around each other in the kitchen while making our separate breakfasts, or discussing the day’s work over dinner, I realize that since we moved to Rosedale, our comfortable cohabitation has become a situation more akin to roommates than lovers.
And I don’t think a couple of date nights are going to repair a crack in our foundation that I didn’t even realize was there.
I gaze at my therapist’s face over thousands of miles and the two-second delay of the internet. “What if the distance between us isn’t something we can fix?”
“Then you two talk about it. You decide what to do next.”
The thought of Ivy not being in my life anymore makes me terribly sad. She’s my best friend. But I’m starting to wake up to the fact that maybe that’s not enough. That maybe there could be more for me, and more for her. And I’m holding both of us back by continuing to tread water when I could be building a boat to weather the next storm, if I’m allowed to mix metaphors.
I leave my therapy session feeling a mixture of dread and sadness. I know it’s a mistake to go in and blow everything up, but I’ve been taking the tiniest baby steps for so long that if I don’t take a full stride, I might as well give up.
When I bring it up to Ivy later that night, because I’ve always been able to talk to her about anything, the expression on her face tells me more than her words. She’s already been thinking about this—it’s clear. It’s not news to her that we’ve become distant. The knowledge pricks at me. Why didn’t she say something?
We’re sitting on the sofa in the living room, turned toward each other but with a careful two feet of space between us. Luna hops into my lap and I appreciate having something to do with my hands. I stroke her silky fur, and she settles onto my thighs.
Ivy’s eyes are dry, but her mouth is sad. She tucks her legs underneath her, her oversized sweater practically drowning her torso.
“Look, Toby,” she says carefully. “You chose me because I was safe. You stayed with me because you were determined not to reenact the Nathan Wheaton show, a different person on your arm every season. Well, you’ve proved you’re not like him. And you’re my best friend. But I’ve known for a long time that’s what we’ve become—just friends.” She plays with the bracelet on her wrist, a gold cuff speckled with flecks of clay. “You’ve been playing it so safe that you’ve hobbled yourself in life, in love, and especially in your work. I thought I was helping you by letting you take your time. But maybe I was only protecting you from making the hard choices.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you should be the one mounting a show in the fall. You should be displaying your work, not taking penny-ante commissions you could do in your sleep. You’re a once-in-a-generation talent, Toby Wheaton, and you’re hiding out in this small town.”
Her vehemence startles me. “Why didn’t you say something before?”
“I suppose I wanted you to figure it out on your own,” she says. “I thought maybe coming to Rosedale would change things. It certainly invigorated our work. But while our art has been developing, our relationship has stagnated. And that’s okay.” She smiles sadly. “Some people aren’t meant to be together forever.”
It’s sinking in that this is real. We’re really breaking up. It’s happened so fast my head is spinning. “But we’ll—” I say, completely unable to get through the sentence without breaking down. I wipe my eyes and take a shaky breath. “We’ll always be friends, right?”
She presses her lips together in a hard line, but I don’t see any tears fall. “Of course, babe. We’ll always be friends.”
So we consciously uncouple, or whatever the ridiculous phrase is. I sleep on the sofa that night, and for the first time I realize that I’m going to have to get over myself and have a damn show, if only so I can afford a place of my own.
Growing up at thirty-three. It’s not too late for me, is it?