11. #2
“I know this other place. It’s just down the hill. It’s got an amazing view of Kalim Bay and you can sit there and paint while you drink coffee. They give you the paints and all the materials you need.”
“Oh my god, perfect! Yes, let’s go.”
After we’re dry enough, we put our clothes back on and I give Mongkut a nice tip. He accepts it with a nod, the practiced grace of someone who receives them regularly but never takes them for granted. Then we’re off.
Sea Scape Cafe is maybe a five-minute drive down the main road, right on Kalim Beach.
It feels like a friend’s house—a friend who loves art and the sea and doesn’t mind you staying all afternoon.
The place is open on three sides to catch the breeze, wooden tables by the windows, and the walls are covered floor to ceiling with paintings big and small, most of them of the same view we’re seeing right now.
A big banyan tree hangs in front of the open face of the building and below it the waves lap against the rocks, close enough that you can hear them properly.
The whole bay stretches out in front of us.
A cruise ship has dropped anchor somewhere in the middle of it, big and white and sitting very still.
Thalia picks out small canvases for us and two sets of paints while I order the coffees. They bring us muffins too, without being asked, which earns the place immediate goodwill from me.
It’s inspiring stuff for an artist, which is the point.
Pretty close to useless for me though because I have no artistic talent whatsoever.
I don’t even try painting what’s in front of me, instead creating a three-eyed monster with melting yellow teeth.
The teeth are melting because I’m using watercolors, an artistic accommodation to the materials that I think actually makes it better.
Thalia, though, she can really paint. She’s had lessons at some point, or at least she’s painted with watercolors enough times that her hand knows what to do.
She takes her time, blocking in the shape of the bay first, then filling it with one shade of blue and then a deeper one where the water gets far out.
The iced coffees come and we sip them. I set aside my monster to dry and watch her. She’s totally absorbed, pausing occasionally to study the light or some feature of the landscape. A real artist. The kind who doesn’t notice you watching.
“That’s beautiful,” I say.
“It’s not like it could hang in the Louvre,” she says.
“The Louvre can’t have it because it’s gonna hang in my house.”
She grins, putting her brush down to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
“You really think it’s good?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say. “You’ve got real talent.”
“I don’t really,” she says. “That’s why I switched majors.”
“What do you mean? From what to what?”
“My first year at uni, I was a fine arts major,” she says. “Then second year I changed to business.”
“Do you want to be a banker?”
She makes a face.
“It seemed practical. And it seemed like the better option, especially with AI and everything.”
“I see what you mean,” I say. “But AI is putting finance people out of work too, right?”
Her eyes widen and even though she’s smiling her nostrils flare just a little.
“Are you trying to make me anxious? Because it’s not that hard.”
I rub her arm.
“Sorry,” I say. “Your concerns are legitimate. I’m just saying you can’t really know what things are going to look like, how they’re going to change. The good news is that there will always be a demand for artists. The bad news is that it’s the same as it ever was, which is not much.”
“What about you? You’re a working artist. Aren’t you worried that the whole marketplace will get so flooded with AI that no one can tell the difference?”
“Not at all.”
“Really? You seem pretty confident.”
“No, that’s not it. I’m not worried because it’s already happened.
I see people complaining about it online all the time.
The whole reason the Writers Guild of America went on strike was because we were afraid of AI, so the studios got their revenge by moving productions overseas.
They don’t need to automate our labor to put us out of work.
There’s always another trick. It never changes. ”
“You seem pretty zen about it,” she says. “I don’t think I would be.”
“The thing about being a writer, or any kind of artist really, is that it’s a bad bet from the start.
You’re supplying something there’s already too much of, that people expect to get for free, and then you get paid for it anyway and you’re so amazed and grateful that you just hope you can hold on and keep it going. ”
“And then?”
“That’s where I am now,” I say. “I don’t know if people are going to stop reading my novels. It’s remarkably easy to piss off your readership. And that has nothing to do with AI. It’s just the way it’s always been. You just keep going forward. That’s all there is to it.”
“You seem to have done pretty well for yourself so far,” she says.
“I’ve been lucky. But you’re always swimming against the current. The key is not to tire yourself out. That’s when the riptide carries you to sea.”
“This metaphor is getting kinda heavy, and also confusing,” she says.
“You’ve caught me in a philosophical frame of mind,” I say. “All kinds of crazy bullshit can come out of me when I’m like this.”
She laughs, revealing muffin crumbs. She’s been picking pieces off her muffin this whole conversation, eating it in small increments without realizing it. It’s almost gone.
“It makes me feel better, actually,” she says. “I have nothing figured out and listening to you, it sounds like I’ll probably survive.”
“You’ll do a lot more than that,” I say. “You’re special. You’re going to succeed. You just need to decide what that looks like.”
She rests her chin against her knuckles and stares at me, studies me the way she was studying the bay.
“I want to paint you,” she says.
“Me?”
“Yes,” she says. “You are too perfect not to capture.”
She sets the canvas she was working on aside to dry and scoots her chair back to go upstairs and get a fresh one. She wraps her arm around my neck and kisses me on the cheek.
“Don’t go anywhere.”
I sit and admire the waves. The ice in my coffee has mostly melted. The cruise ship is still sitting out there in the bay without appearing to have moved at all, which is either reassuring or ominous depending on your frame of mind. A moment later she returns with a fresh canvas.
“Okay, turn toward me,” she instructs. “And take your sunglasses off.”
I do as I’m told. It’s past noon so the light is mostly behind me anyway. I don’t know if I’m supposed to smile or look serious, and I haven’t been told, so I just try to sit and appear natural, which is a surprisingly hard thing to do when someone is staring at you.
She doesn’t say anything, just pauses occasionally to study me the way she studied the bay. I find myself wondering how she’s going to get my face, whether I’ll recognize myself in it.
“Can I see?” I ask.
“When it’s done.”
I rest my head in my palm and try to look wistful and thoughtful. She really takes her time with it. The afternoon light shifts while she works, the shadows on the water changing slowly.
“Where’d you get that scar?” she asks, drawing a line with her pinky across the top of her own forehead.
“Bar fight,” I say.
“Really?”
“No, I fell off a bench at McDonald’s when I was four years old.”
She smiles without looking up from the canvas.
“One of your ears is a little crooked,” she says.
“You think I haven’t noticed?” I say. “I’ve had plenty of time to study my flaws. I should never have given you the opportunity to sit and examine them.”
“I don’t see only flaws,” she says. “You’re too hard on yourself.”
“Say something nice about me.”
“Your teeth are—“
“Crooked?”
“—all there,” she says with a laugh. “And fairly white.”
“Okay, that’s something, I guess.”
“And you have a nice smile,” she says. “A lovely smile that makes my heart flutter when that smile is for me.”
“Well, this smile is all yours.”
“Your gums are too big, though,” she adds. “Like, it’s almost all gum.”
“I know,” I say. “When I was little I didn’t brush enough. I learned, but by then it was too late. Or maybe I was just born with small teeth. I’m not sure.”
She returns to the painting and I’m really starting to get curious.
“Are my teeth in the picture?”
“No, because you’re not smiling. You look at ease. That’s the best side of you.”
After a few small adjustments, she turns the canvas around.
I study it before reacting, trying to decide if I like it.
It looks like me, and people are harder to paint than landscapes.
It’s not Michelangelo. I look a little more like my dad than like me, but maybe that’s just because I’m starting to look more like him as I get older.
What gets me though is the expression. I can tell she’s spent real time studying my face, and not just to paint it.
The expression isn’t a smile exactly, but there’s a kind of joy in the eyes that could only have come from the last week.
It’s in there because she put it there. That means she saw it.
“That’s me,” I say.
“That’s you.”
I take the canvas and study it. Just the torso and my head, a little detail of the bay behind me.
“Can I keep this?”
“No, it’s mine,” she says. “I’m taking it with me. But you can keep this one.”
She hands me the landscape. I admire it now that it’s dry. We leave my three-eyed monster behind. If the people who run this place can sell it to some tourist for a few bucks, fine. I wouldn’t even mind if they threw it away, so long as they don’t toss it in the sea.
We hand our canvases to the guy who gives out the paints and he uses a hairdryer to set the colors before sliding them into little clear plastic bags. He does this quickly and without ceremony, like a man who has dried ten thousand paintings and has no particular feelings about any of them.
“Hungry yet?” I ask when we’re putting on our helmets.
“God, yes. Starving.”
I wrap my arm around her and we plant cute little kisses on each other’s lips.
“Let’s go get something to eat.”