Chapter 80
She wanted to meet for dinner before she left for New York. I didn’t want to go, but my husband, ever the free spirit, said I should go just “to see.”
She was twenty minutes late, and when she did show up, she arrived like a weather event.
I watched from the hotel bar as the revolving door stalled, her stuck and shoving it with her shoulder.
A handsome man rushed to her aid. Free, she emerged from the glass cage, laughing.
He was clearly trying to find an angle to shoot his shot, but she was already walking toward me.
“Oh, you got yourself a drink,” she said. “Smart.” Flagging the bartender, she ordered an espresso martini, then dropped her purse on the counter and turned to smile at me.
We studied each other, recalibrating our perceptions to fit this new setting.
“How are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m great.” She accepted her martini, singing “thank you” to the bartender. “Life’s a ride, isn’t it?”
I wondered if the whole night would be filled with empty expressions like this (“Everything happens for a reason!” “Love wins!”). I smiled, not knowing what to say. It was a particular pain, the realization that someone you once knew was a stranger you’ll likely never know again.
“So,” she said. “You’re married.”
“Mm-hm.”
“To who? Would I know them?”
I hesitated, then told her. She offered a neutral smile. When she raised her drink, I noticed she was wearing a mood ring like it was the nineties. It was black, which I guessed meant, deep down, she still hated me. After a pause she said, “I just never thought you’d get married.”
I sipped my Riesling and offered my own platitude. “Life rarely turns out the way you think.”
We smiled at each other. So much smiling. The only thing about her that had truly aged were her eyes. It could’ve been imagined, but there was a touch of resignation in them and yet they were brighter than I remembered.
“How’s it feel to be an art-world darling?”
“Ugh.”
A little too quickly, I added, “You were profiled in New York Magazine.”
“I’ve always found profiles nauseatingly curated.”
It took a few drinks, but we relaxed. She laughed at something I said. I couldn’t even remember what, only the warm relief of it. I slid my fries to her. She ate a handful. Ravenous, we ordered the lobster bisque and a large mussel soup to share, our spoons clinking.
She said, “Do you still daydream about the cliffs and the coasts? The sweet, crunchy coconut cookies on the beach?”
Was this some kind of riddle? “What?”
“You told me” is all she said.
“I haven’t thought about that in a while.”
She wiped the edges of her mouth with a table napkin. “You never said what you thought of the portrait.”
“It was stunning.” I wasn’t lying. I was stunned. Her eyes searched me for more. I looked away, watching night fall in real time through the window. Finally, I asked, “Why a silhouette?” What I really meant was, Why would you do that to me?
“I worked on your portrait even after everything for a long time.” She plucked the olive from her martini and swallowed it.
“I couldn’t get it right. Then one day I was walking around Paris and this woman passed in front of me.
I saw her shadow first. She had on one of those big sun hats with the thick ribbons.
Everything I needed to know about her was in her shadow.
When I looked up and saw her, something was lost.
“A silhouette cut to the emotion quicker. What do we fear more than what we can’t quite make out? I painted what I felt in your writing. Not what I read in it. It’s one of my most popular pieces.”
I gripped my glass to feel something, anything, other than the bitter envy I felt then.
She met my eyes with that keen, painterly observance. “What happened with your writing?”
It was the least interesting story in the world: I worked on the same project for years and couldn’t get it published. Wrote another novel that no one wanted, including myself. Then, like all failed writers, I became a journalist. It wasn’t even worth explaining so I said, “I gave up.”
She watched me with compassion. “If you read that profile you know I didn’t get a break until I was thirty.” She added softly, like a little girl speaking to another in a slumber party fort made of bedsheets and chairs, “The dream isn’t dead until you are.”
I laughed without meaning to. But then my laughter died, and I went still with understanding.
I had stopped searching for the story that would solve everything a long time ago; it was this search that had powered my desire to write, this hope that I might explain what eluded explaining, what I knew was real and urgent and needed to make people understand was real and urgent.
But now I saw what I missed, what was right there, hovering on the edges, waiting for me to turn around.
What did I understand as a little girl when I didn’t know the difference between a story and a dream? Dreams aren’t real, you’re told. No one told you that stories aren’t real either.
But our own crude dreams—the places we went when utterly disarmed—those were places no one could enter, with doors locked even to ourselves. And wasn’t that scary? What couldn’t be shaped, what resisted formation, what couldn’t be sold unless crammed into a story to sell?
Maybe I would’ve found what I was searching for sooner had I recognized dreams as forms in their own right, just like a play, a novel, a painting.
Like the most profound art, dreams led us down paths of abandon.
We flew in them, we fell without ever hitting the ground, we resurrected the dead.
We woke still in their mist. They made reality feel flimsy, like something we might rip a hole through, like something we might change.
Dreams brought together what did not belong.
Invented a bright new logic. A dream didn’t care about being legible to anything but itself.
And I’d been chasing dreams my whole life. A journey that had resembled a loop more than an incline. The body’s first and final story. The story you don’t tell, but that tells you.