27. Hudson
He should behappy that he was here, Hudson told himself again on the thirteenth day of the retreat. This was the kind of thing he had dreamed about. This sort of validation should have had him coasting on happiness for the next four weeks and one day. But he was too busy worrying about Alana.
Sure, she had promised him she was fine, that her period was finished, and she was back to business as usual. And sure, he may have also asked JP to check in on her, even though he knew JP would tease him about it for the rest of eternity.
And JP had promised that not only was Alana doing just fine, but she and Jazmine were now attached at the hip, and half of the songwriting sessions were taking place in JP’s studio/apartment. Jazmine had said it was the residual Hudson vibe that lingered even though he had never lived in that apartment, but Hudson knew it was Alana, because she was just magic like that.
The people at the residency were all great, and he was spending his time live texting the crazy sexual tension of the two people he was sharing a cabin with to Alana, who delighted in every update, regardless of what time he was sending it.
It was a good thing the internet was crappy, otherwise Hudson would have spent all his time on FaceTime with Alana, and none of it attempting to make art.
He had tried to rationalize it at first, but what was the point of lying to himself? He loved her and he missed her, and he hated the fact that she didn’t know that, and hated the fact that she didn’t feel the same way that he did.
Hudson was overthinking art supplies when Naomi, a petite Black woman who he shared his studio barn with, sidled over to him. “You’re staring in the art closet like it has the answers to the universe,” she said. “Does it?”
“Don’t think so,” Hudson replied. “I keep on hoping I’m wrong, though. Because listening to Marco and Renee has not sparked any creativity, and I’m running out of options here.”
Naomi leaned forward. “How’s that going?”
“You know how it’s going.”
Naomi laughed, big and loud. “Oh, I absolutely do. God, what a wonderful horny mess this all is.”
“No thank you,” Hudson said, shuddering. Having to share a cabin like that for a month and a half? That would have been hell.
Which was technically what he had been doing with Alana, a little voice in his mind reminded him.
But there were places for both of them to escape to that wasn’t the middle of the woods, so him sharing an apartment with Alana wasn’t actually the same.
“That much repressed sexual tension isn’t your jam?”
“I’m married,” Hudson blurted out. “So. I guess not?”
“Damn, you are?” Naomi looked shocked. “You hadn’t mentioned a spouse at all, and we’ve been here for like, two weeks. Your bio doesn’t say anything about a spouse, either.”
Fuck. His bio didn’t say anything about a spouse. Which made sense, it wasn’t like he was going to have one for long. But did it make him a bad fake husband for not acknowledging her? It wasn’t like she was a dirty little secret. Hell, if it was up to him, he would have taken out every billboard along the route from his apartment to the art studio he was currently avoiding, all with signs talking about how much he loved his wife.
Hudson sighed. “It’s complicated,” he said, because how else was he supposed to explain everything that was the story of him and Alana without it sounding like he was just making up an incredibly elaborate and stupid story?
Naomi nodded sympathetically. “Were they upset about you coming here?”
“Nah, Alana’s pushed me to come.” He looked at Naomi, who was the picture of confusion. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Low key I kinda hate you for that,” she said. “Would be nice to have someone say that about me.”
“I’m not gonna say there are plenty of fish in the sea,” Hudson said, “because I have seen some of those fish.”
“So have I.” Naomi shook her head. “But since you’re married, I’m gonna pretend you’re a relationship expert, and fill you in on my drama while we both get the art supplies.”
“Maybe don’t think I’m an expert, but I am ready and willing to listen to all your drama.” Hudson leaned back. “It’s not like I’m getting any work done now. My brain has peaced out for the day. Week? Month. I dunno.”
“Hopefully not a month.”
“God, I hope not.”
(He missed Alana.)
“So, there’s this person that works in the coffee shop that I go to sometimes, and I’m pretty sure I’m pining.”
The relief of problems and gossip that had literally nothing to do with him was a waterfall of relief. Add to that a coffee shop? Hudson was far from a relationship expert but at least he had some background that would be helpful. He turned toward her. “Okay, tell me everything.”
“We may have to get your wife?” Naomi paused for Hudson to clarify what type of spouse he had.
Hudson nodded.
“Your wife to weigh in on this. Just for a feminine perspective.”
Hudson checked the clock. “Pretty sure she’s in a meeting, but I can text her after.”
“Would she be down to hear this? I don’t know her, and especially if things are weird with the two of you, I don’t want to make them weirder.”
“I promise she would be furious if she missed this.” Hudson paused. “Would things be less weird if I told you a little about her?”
Naomi’s eyes lit up. “Tell me everything.”
Hudson laughed.
“She’s the happiest disco ball you’ll ever meet,” Hudson said, not knowing why that was what he chose to start with. “She says thank you to the turnstiles every time she swipes her MetroCard and tells every pigeon that she sees that she loves them.”
“Pigeon?” Naomi asked.
“Every single one. She never knows any of the lyrics to any of the songs she’s singing along to, she will try almost anything once just to say she did, and she knows more about cybersecurity than anyone I know. She seems to have a terrifying sense of when I’m about to spiral when it comes to work, and saves me from myself, usually by distracting me by finding the most ridiculous Reddit question she or the internet can find. She’ll do the ‘if I was a worm would you still have married me’ thing, but her questions get increasingly more strangely specific, and sometimes they’re just web developer jokes that I do not get but then she spends like fifteen minutes laughing at herself and it is the best part of the day.”
“Her being happy is the best part?”
“She’s iridescent, Naomi. How can that not be the best part?”
Naomi was quiet for a moment. “Listen, I can’t say I know everything about what’s going on between the two of you, but the way you describe her…” she paused. “Hudson, the way you describe her, there cannot possibly be something so big and bad that you two can’t fix. If Alana loves you even half as much as you love her, you can figure it out.”
“If only it was that simple.”
“Is love ever that simple?”
“I dunno, sometimes I feel like it is for some people.”
“And I’m sure some people look at you and your wife and say the same thing about y’all.”
“You know, they might,” Hudson allowed. Granted, they’d done quite a bit of training to have people think that.
But what about the times where nobody else was there? If you still acted married in the middle of the forest where nobody could hear you, were you still married?
“Not that I’m a person who should be giving relationship advice, because, absolutely not, but what’s the worst thing that can happen?”
Hudson stared at her. “Naomi, did you just ask me, a person with a diagnosed anxiety disorder, to tell you what the worst thing that can happen?”
Naomi burst into laughter. “You too? Brain twins!” she held out her hand for a high-five, which Hudson gladly obliged. “Okay. Uh. Is Alana anxious?”
“Only about normal people things.”
“Okay. What would Alana say if we asked her what the worst thing that could happen would be?”
“I think it would end with someone almost getting eaten by a bear.”
“I thought you said she was worried about normal people things!”
“She is. And she would absolutely try to befriend the bear, whichever bear it was, and to be honest, she probably would end up becoming best friends with the bears like some weird Catskills Disney Princess, but she would still be concerned about someone getting eaten. Not her. But just, I dunno. A person.” He shrugged. “I didn’t say her catastrophizing was more rational than mine was, just that it’s not anxiety-based.”
“Is it weird that I really like your wife?”
“Not even a little,” Hudson replied. “She has that kind of effect on everyone.”
Hudson sat on a fallen log in the forest, and wondered what the fuck he was doing. Which was different than every other day he’d been here, when he also sat on a fallen log in the forest, or maybe if he wanted to switch things up, on a mossy rock in the forest, and wondered what the fuck he was doing.
This was supposed to be an incubator for him. Some sort of magical transformation where he was going to suddenly once again have the ability to make great art, and not be an active disappointment for all the people who believed him.
And maybe this was the kind of incubator that took a while to kickstart. Maybe it was like sprouting beans, a thing Hudson had recently learned more about than he had ever wanted to know, thanks to David’s second daughter who had just completed a gardening unit in her preschool, and had wanted to tell all the cousins about her ‘plant speriment’.
According to Meira (and probably Meira’s preschool teacher), the bean was changing on the inside but for a long time you didn’t see anything different. And you couldn’t just give up on the bean, even if everyone else’s bean had already sprouted. Because maybe your bean needed another few days of watering before it sprouted.
Maybe he was Meira’s kidney bean, which now had several long and spindly roots, and the littlest snub of greenery poking up on time.
Or maybe he was a butterfly.
Maybe he had to completely destroy everything he was and had been to become whatever the next version of himself was. And not in the cute Pinterest way, but in the ugly, goop-filled bloody birth version that was actual butterfly births. (Meira’s older sister Sasha had learned about butterflies the year before, and none of them had fully recovered from her regaling them with the gory details.)
Auntie Ev had called it his Saturn Return, and Hudson had told her that all planets returned.
In retrospect, Saturn was the planet known for rings, and Hudson was choosing to believe that it was all a coincidence. And anyway, Saturn returning meaning that suddenly his life upended itself wasn’t Saturn, it was the statistical probability of turning thirty.
You know what else had rings? Trees. His wife.
Fuck, this was not actually helping.
What if he just moved into the forest and became one with the moss somehow, and wrote it all off as a performance art piece?
Except Hudson wasn’t a performance piece kind of artist, and that wasn’t changing. He was grasping straws, but there were no more straws left to grasp.
Maybe he’d call Alana and see how her day was.
That would make him feel better.
“Well, I’m glad Annoying Richard is on vacation,” Hudson said later that night, leaning against the wall of the cabin in desperate hopes that he would keep the signal. “Does that mean you guys are going to be frantically going to try to get as much as you can done while he’s not here to get on your nerves?”
“The to-do-list is like, four times longer than it would be on a normal week and we’re all kind of thrilled about it,” Alana replied. “Going to have so much overtime when he finally gets back to the office, which will work out well. He’s going to be coming back two weeks before I leave for surgery. And then I’m going to be working with limited access after that for a while, so it might be a whole quarter that I don’t have to talk to him.”
“The dream,” Hudson agreed.
“For real. If he ever wanted to take the job that he keeps bragging about that a nameless company wants to offer him, I don’t think any of us would mind.”
“Maybe it will happen when you’re out for surgery.”
“God, that…the best thing to come…”
“You’re breaking up again,” Hudson said.
“Huh?”
“You’re…breaking…up…”
“Can’t hear you,” Alana sang. “Text…”
Hudson ended the phone call with a sigh.
‘Maybe I should switch phone providers,’ Hudson texted Alana. ‘This sucks.’
‘You’re also staying at what could be the next location of another Blair Witch Project movie,’ Alana responded, the text coming through fifteen minutes later. ‘At least, I think it’s a Blair Witch Project. I’ve never watched the movie.’
‘If it makes you feel better, neither have I.’
‘Perhaps yes.’
‘I miss you,’ Hudson typed.
Stared at it.
Deleted it slowly, and sighed.
Some days things went well. The days when Hudson buried himself in art, in taking all of his pent-up emotions and making things. Not the art he promised his Patrons, not the art he had been making for his ongoing projects and commissions. The art he made just because.
It was hard to replicate the feeling of freedom that he used to feel when making art as a kid in therapy. The wonder and joy of taking his feelings and letting them all out by slapping shit on a page, by wildly cutting and pasting and rearranging, and then, just as a test to see what the therapist would say, if she would still say that his work was wonderful.
Art therapy had been the shit that had saved a sad and stressed-out Hudson, when he was still in and out of hospitals for the surgeries that eventually fixed his heart. Somewhere along the way in the past twenty-odd years, he had forgotten that the part of art that made it magic was the part where you just made things for you.
What would Baby Hudson do?
And, more fittingly, what would Alana do? What would she tell him to do?
If he really thought about it, Hudson realized, one night after spending all day wandering slowly through the nearby forests, it was what she had told him to do before.
Worry about everyone else later and make the things you want to make now.
Everything else will fall into place.
So he grabbed some new supplies, went into the studio, locked the door, turned the volume for his playlist as high as it would go, and flew.
“Have you come up with a project yet?” Naomi asked him a few days later, when he stopped in the kitchen to grab some food.
“I think so.”
“Have you chosen a medium?”
“All,” Hudson replied.
Her eyebrows shot up. “All?”
“I’m not narrowing anything down yet. I’ll see what happens.”
“Can I ask what it’s about?”
“It’s called the Pre-Divorce Heartbreak Album.”
She was quiet for a minute.
“It’s that kind of complicated, huh?”
“Yes and no.” Hudson tucked the sleeve of crackers under his arm. “Gonna get back now. Things are working.”
“I’m so glad.”
“Same. For a minute there I thought I would have to try to refund them.”
She laughed. “I have those moments every now and then.”
Hudson scoffed. “Everything I have seen of your work is museum-quality shit. You’ll be fine. Promise.”
Naomi grinned. “Thanks for the pep talk.” She finished doctoring her coffee and took a sip. “God, caffeine was a great invention.”
“The funner kind of life-saving drug.” Hudson paused. “Hmm. That’s a thought.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m glad whatever it is, it’s working for you.”
Hudson nodded, only half-hearing as he hurried out.
Was this how JP felt? All the time?
Fuck.
This was magic.
He pulled out his phone. “Not sure what will happen,” he texted JP, “but if I need someone to write a breakup song...”
“OMG,” JP responded. “You just made Jaz’s day. Week? Month? Year.”
Hudson snickered. “Takes so little.”
“True.”
“How’s Alana?”
“Your beautiful wife is doing great. Also, I’m pretty sure she is moping because she misses you.”
“LOL.”
“I did, in fact, mean it, but okay then.”
“She probably misses having me there to reach the top shelf.”
“She’s currently curled up on my couch with Jaz and she is wrapped in that crocheted blanket that your dad made for you. I don’t think it’s your height she misses.”
Hudson stared at the message for a solid five minutes.
What was he supposed to do with that information?
How was he supposed to process the possibility, the slightest maybe, that he wasn’t the only one in this relationship who was just obsessed with the other person?
He dropped the sleeve of crackers on the table and looked at the canvas that he had lying out.
He had painted a Victorian-era locket painting of Alana, and was slowly layering over it, wearing it down and building it up. He was waiting for the current layer of paint to dry so he could apply some fire-engine red lipstick, courtesy of Naomi, and use it to add kisses to the painting.
It was as much modeled after Russian saint iconography as it was a photo in a locket and a worn-down poster of a rockstar hanging in a teenage girl’s bedroom.
Nobody would be able to look at it and wonder how Hudson felt about Alana.
Maybe he would paint over her face, hide it somehow.
Should he start over and have her back facing the viewer? A side profile?
He had been using the project as an excuse to pull up reference photos of Alana, to print them out and hang them up in the studio, so when you walked in it seemed equal parts love letter and stalker.
This shit was unhealthy, he told himself.
It was unhealthy because it was only him who felt like this. Alana, he knew, was not currently redecorating their apartment with one of those It’s Always Sunny murder walls full of pictures of him.
At least he now had a name for this specific piece.
Childhood Bedroom, Hudson Asher Miller. AU.