Chapter 47
I was walking to Nia’s studio when Milan sent me a screenshot of Jay’s Instagram Story with the message: wtf.
My skin went cold. A flash of auburn ringlets, the girl from the gallery.
Heat animated my stride. Before I could think, I texted Jay, my fingers stuttering over the keyboard.
Ur asking ME to be monogamous? Is that what u even want bc it doesn’t look like it.
I barged into Nia’s studio, confused by the picture, confused by my anger. Confused by the man who wasn’t Nia hunched over her desk.
Tristan’s back shot up. It took him a moment to register me.
I choked out, “Where’s Nia?”
“She went to get something from her car. What are you doing here?”
I didn’t even know she had a car.
“What are you doing here?”
He faced me fully. “I’m her boyfriend.”
I hated when he said that, like I wasn’t something to her too.
“I thought you—”
“Hi, hi.” Nia swept in, box in hand. Setting it on the floor, she kissed Tristan on the cheek. When she pulled away, he was staring at me like I was the biggest pain in the ass ever.
“Oh, you finished.” Nia was looking down at whatever Tristan had been working on.
He drew his eyes toward her. “Yeah, but I’ve gotta run.”
He delicately tucked her hair aside to kiss her, pushing his tongue in her mouth. It was intimate, not meant for a witness yet singularly directed at me. Heart in my throat, my eyes retreated to the ceiling, blinded by the white industrial lights.
“That was so cringe.” Nia laughed, breaking away. “Where’s that stool?”
Spotting the stool behind Tristan, I dragged it out, hitting the back of his leg. “I remember when Jay and I first got together. We kissed like that nonstop.”
It was true. We kissed even more than having sex, making out in his car, on the campus green, basking in the buildup. He hadn’t responded to my rage text. I regretted sending it.
Tristan shot me a loaded look then walked toward the door. “Love you.”
I almost said it back. Nia sang, “Love you too,” while I pressed my lips together.
Nia painted me, her features taut with concentration.
Sometimes a sound left her, like a sudden release of air.
It was relaxing, observing work, those movie montages of people riffling through files, typing feverishly on typewriters.
Or now: Nia squirting paint onto her palette, mixing it with a knife, stepping back to study me, the click of her boots.
It was a welcome distraction from the deadweight of my phone in my pocket, not making a peep.
“Push your hair back for me,” she said.
I flipped my hair behind my shoulders. “Can I take my sweater off? I don’t wanna—”
“No, no, take it off.” She stepped from behind her easel to survey my face up close. “Sorry, do you mind?”
I shook my head. The breath from her nostrils warmed my cheek.
Her expression was impartial, but I longed for a reaction, for her to be as affected by me as I was by her.
Abruptly, she turned away, clearing her space.
After drying her hands on a towel, she grabbed a denim jacket off the wall hook and headed for the door.
“Where are you going?”
She looked at me like I had three heads. “Starbucks. Where else would I be going at two in the afternoon?”
The campus Starbucks was lousy with cherry blossom imagery for March—pink floral stickers on the door, pink cups for purchase. Rumor was they weren’t even blooming this year.
We sat by the window, where the hormonal flare-up of spring was underway on the lawn, undergrads leaning too close, erupting into loud, husky laughs. Nia poured her almond milk latté into a black “Don’t Talk to Me Until I’ve Had My Abortion” mug.
“What’s your final project going to be?” she asked.
“My what?”
“Don’t all the MFA programs require a capstone project? Ours does.”
I explained to her that I wouldn’t be graduating anytime soon.
“How would you afford to stay that long?”
“I have a scholarship that covers like a third of the tuition and I pay the rest.” I knew the scholarship was good for at least four years. I could figure something out afterward.
“I’ll be sad when I graduate next year,” she said. “I hate administrations, but I love campuses. Sometimes I look at the undergrads with violent envy, prancing around this sweaty shower-slipper hothouse, living insulated lives. That’s why I want to teach.”
“I didn’t know you wanted to teach.”
“Really? I feel like we’ve talked about this?
Or maybe that was someone else.” She stared out the window like something important was happening out there before facing me again.
“Janine was the one who said I’d make a good teacher.
But I don’t know. There’s shit-tons of paperwork.
And now with everything going on with universities—”
“Is it true Columbia could lose four hundred million dollars over the protests last year?”
“Yes, but fuck them. That’s what happens when you have no backbone: You get thrown under the bus anyway. But I don’t know what this means for funding, hiring, research. It’s not good.”
I surveyed our own campus through the window as though the answer to the question of academia’s future was somewhere out there.
It wasn’t just about academia, that was the terrifying truth of it.
It was about retribution, revenge. Yet it felt like people were still waiting for an announcement that we’d tipped into a new reality.
They couldn’t fathom that all this might be more like quicksand.
You looked up and you were already in it, the silt closing fast over your head.
What I knew, of course, was that Tristan wanted to teach too.
I had never allowed myself to truly imagine them together.
Not what they talked about, not the dreams they traded.
But I could see it then: the beautiful professorial couple that everyone panted after like puppies, overenrolled classes, voices echoing through packed lecture halls—the bullish, bright wife with the singsongy name.
The darkly funny husband haunting the humanities department.
Late lunches together in the dining hall, but dinner at the chic restaurant around the corner where the chef knew them by name.
The long walk home after, slow from being stuffed, hands woven under the evening light.
If I were smart, I’d slip away long before this played out.
I imagined myself hidden somewhere in this tableau.
Maybe: a casual third staying for weeks at a time in their guesthouse.
A visiting writer on campus colliding with Tristan in the dark mahogany hallway (“Cat? I can’t believe it’s you!
You should come over for dinner!”). But even in this daydream, I didn’t quite fit.
Nia slammed a book on the table.
“Oh my God, what?”
“Where did you go? You were, like, gone.” She slid a hand across her chest, pantomiming offing herself.
“It’s okay, I do it endlessly. Daydream.
When I was little, I’d come home from school and allot three hours every night for it.
Get in bed, cut the lights, and just imagine things.
My mom thought I was emo, but I was just, I was romantic. ”
I smiled. “Me too. What did you daydream about?”
She leaned forward. I caught a whiff of her Glossier perfume.
Milan wore the same one, its notes of peppercorn, something floral, something sweet.
“I had four main daydreams. One was always about my crush, something pathetic, romantic, ‘Oh, they invited me to this deserted museum and kissed me in front of my favorite painting.’ The second, when I was in high school, it was always about my dad apologizing for everything. The third was me painting the greatest painting in the world and Rembrandt rising from the grave and being like, ‘You snapped.’ And the last one, ugh! I can’t remember. Whatever. What about you?”
I’d spent so many hours daydreaming, I wanted to pluck the perfect one for her.
“It’s always someplace on a coast, like, a lush green coast, with cliffs and water that crashes and foams over rocks.
The sun gives off that perfect warm-white light.
Me and my lovers”—I felt silly saying “lovers” in front of her, but I kept going—“and their partners go down to the beach and we’re eating crispy coconut cookies and drinking sparkling wine and talking about what we’re reading, what we’re working on, the world.
There’s this feeling of desire and freedom and safety spread over the afternoon.
I dunno, it’s like a pink-orange feeling. I think of things in colors sometimes.”
“Same,” Nia cut in. “Sorry, keep going.”
“Pink-orange is that feeling right before you’re about to kiss someone you’ve been fantasizing about.
Or that feeling when a lover becomes family, not because of kids but because you just know they’re not going anywhere, you can let go of that fear.
” My voice thinned on “fear.” More than anger, more than anything, fear is what I felt when I saw that girl on Jay’s Instagram.
Fear that he’d finally had enough of me.
That things were doomed to play out the same way with Tristan, with any man, with anyone because, when you got down to the blunt numbers, few people wanted what I wanted.
I might’ve stayed true to myself through all this, but who would be with me at the end of it?
“I can never get us to leave the beach though. Which I guess is why it’s a dream. If we leave the beach, the dream breaks off.”
Nia watched me strangely. It wasn’t the partly present, partly elsewhere heavy-lidded gaze she often wore.
It wasn’t the wide-eyed caffeinated look she had in the afternoons, four cups in.
It was a soft intensity, her attention so complete, so whole, in a way I’d never witnessed outside of her art zone.
My body went gelatinous, my heart a pounding mess, like someone desperate drilling their fist into a door, needing to get inside, now, now, now.
Her mouth parted—a string of lip gloss shimmering then snapping before the black of her throat—to speak. Maybe Tristan was wrong about her. Maybe she wanted what I wanted. Maybe she wanted me.
And then my phone rang.
I fumbled to click cancel.
It rang again.
Nia smiled as if to say, It’s okay, answer it, then lifted her coffee to her lips, her eyes peeling from mine and out the window.