Chapter 15 #2
“No problem.” Jessie leans against the wall.
She is a beautiful woman, Nelle realizes.
Her blue eyeliner and sparkling eyeshadow are creatively applied, her hair short and lightly curled, her face heart shaped.
She gestures, her fingernails individually painted with different flowers, and says, “This is your spot, whenever you’re ready. I’ll be here all night.”
Nelle stands in front of an easel. With shaky hands, she picks a square canvas off the stack. The material is familiar, rough, terrifyingly empty. Her heart pounds as the white square seems to grow, a monster intent on swallowing her whole—
“Want to hear a story?” Jessie asks, her strawberry earrings glinting.
Nelle tears away from the canvas, grateful for the distraction. “Please.”
“Follow me.” Jessie disappears through a curtain of tinkling multicolored beads.
Please work. Nelle sends up a prayer to whatever magic controls her life.
She is already stretching the boundaries of what she can do by leaving the apartment without James.
The first time she went to the café by herself, she nearly burst into tears while ordering a latte.
Still, her ink has limits, and James only wrote for her to go to Jessie’s studio.
Nelle has no idea if her body will allow her to cross into the room where Jessie disappeared to.
She might freeze on this side of it, and how would she explain that?
Sorry, Jessie, but I actually have a phobia of beads. Can you tell your story in here, far away from those little bastards?
Her heart pounding, Nelle sucks in her breath and plunges into the beads. Strands of rainbow orbs cling to her as she passes through, and she sags in relief.
Paint-splattered furniture seems to be the theme in the room she steps into.
Three strangers sprawl across the couch, two playing a video game on a flat-screen TV, the other thumbing through an oversize magazine.
Their hair is dyed various shades—pale blond, rose red, black—and when Nelle enters, they all stare at her.
“Want a turn?” The redhead holds up a game controller.
“I’m good, thanks,” Nelle says.
Jessie presses a button on a single-serve coffee machine, and it starts to hum.
She leans on a colorful island, reclaimed wood muralized by myriad hands.
Nelle spots a painted mermaid with seaweed hair and small breasts.
Beside the couch, a lamp sculpted into a black cat.
Across the hardwood floor stretches a warm, polychromatic rug that appears handmade in the best way. Uniformity has no place here.
“I came out when I was sixteen,” Jessie says.
The coffee machine beeps, and she spins around to retrieve her cup.
“Leaving out all the gory details, my parents were not proud. They forced me to withdraw from my art classes, and after that, I kind of withdrew from life. Got depressed. James was there for me, even as a little kid, but I couldn’t talk to him about wanting to die when he was eleven.
I stopped painting. Is that about where you’re at? ”
“It’s about where I was. Before I met James.”
Jessie blows softly into her coffee cup. “He’s helped you then?”
“We’ve helped each other,” Nelle says.
Jessie smiles, her upper lip lingering above the rim of her mug.
“Before senior year of high school, I knew I wanted to study art in the city. I got a part-time job, did what I could to have the best grades possible, and saved up for therapy. Then I got medicated, and then I decided to start painting again. It was frustrating at first, but after a few weeks of relearning the basics, I was all in. Sometimes painting was even more therapeutic than talking to a professional. I didn’t have to try, it all came spilling out. ”
“And here you are,” Nelle says. “You did it.”
“I did.” Jessie looks at the little kitchen, the other artists on the couch, the adjacent room. “The first painting I finished when I got back to it was my submission for art school.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. But I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t tried again.”
Nelle finishes her coffee while chitchatting with Jessie and her friends. Meg is the redhead, Luke the blond, and Denise is the pixie-cut diva with neon-green makeup and black lips to match her hair.
Nelle brews another cup and pads back into the studio to stare at the canvas—that unforgiving white. It mocks her. Haunts her. Inhaling, she pulls up a stool and lifts a thin paintbrush.
Quill’s house burning.
Riding, windows down, on the highway.
Sending paper wishes across a hotel bathroom.
Dancing through puddles on a rooftop.
Jo March picking up her pen again in chapter forty-two.
The horses through her window.
The city night twinkles in through floor-to-ceiling glass. I remember.
An artist with a vision, Nelle dips the brush into her coffee cup.
When she emerges from her frenzy, Nelle first sees the sun over Williamsburg. She steps back, flexing her fingers, to observe what she created. A watercolor done with coffee, the overlapping shades of brown burnished gold by dawn.
It’s a palomino with wings, soaring above a sea of skyscrapers.
“Wow,” breathes a voice behind her.
Nelle jumps and whirls. A gorgeous stranger looms over her, transfixed by her painting. She smells like apricots, sweat, and weed. Black hair curls over the nape of her neck.
“This is incredible,” she says. “You painted this with coffee?”
Nelle glances at her work—far from the best she has done—then back at the woman.
“Yeah,” she says. “Sorry if it was your brush I used. I’m not sure—”
“Don’t stress over it.” The woman laughs. “You must be new to Jessie’s little clubhouse. I’m not an artist. I’m Lena. Jessie and I are in the same internship.”
Nelle peers over Lena’s shoulder, but the rest of the studio is empty. Sculptures and sketches have been shuffled around, but she had been too absorbed by her painting to notice anyone else through the night.
“Jessie’s in the kitchen making breakfast.” Lena reads her searching expression. “Well, she’s moving it from to-go containers to paper plates.”
Jessie emerges from the kitchen holding a tray stacked with bacon, eggs, and pancakes.
“We are celebrating today, my beauties!” She places the tray on the coffee table with a flourish. “Nelle, I—no joke—shit my pants when I saw your piece. It’s my favorite of the year. I shouldn’t have doubted you. James knows not to date a bad artist.”
“We’re not dating.” Nelle sits on a pillow at the coffee table. “And at what point during your motivational speech last night did you doubt me?”
Jessie forces down a half-chewed bite of egg. “You’re not dating?”
“No,” Nelle says.
“Have you fucked?” asks Lena.
“No,” Nelle repeats. Her cheeks go hot. “Anyway, what are we celebrating?”
“Your rediscovered artistry,” Jessie says through a mouthful of bacon. “After this, we’re going out for bottomless mimosas.”
Panic sets in.
The studio and back, that’s what James wrote for her.
“Thanks.” Nelle looks at the painting, the horse galloping midair, feathered wings flung wide. “Can we stop by the apartment and pick up James before mimosas?”
Lena perks up. “James? I want to meet James!”
Jessie drizzles syrup across her pancakes. “Fine, we’ll get James. But you better be on your best behavior,” she says to Lena. “And before we leave this room, you have to define our relationship.”
“What do you mean? We’re seeing each other.”
“Not good enough.” Jessie shrugs. “I only let family meet girlfriends.”
“All right, all right.” Lena softens as she shapes the word, more intimate whisper than voice, “Girlfriend.”
A short, silent conversation passes between Jessie and Lena, then Jessie laughs and leans over to kiss her new girlfriend.
Nelle eats without saying much. She is desperate to see more of the world before James goes back to school, but she can’t deny how happy she is here, surrounded by people who love each other, who are nice to her.
Painting her heart out with the view of the borough across the river, the morning light like fallen coins across the water.
She sits back with her coffee and listens to Jessie and Lena bicker about meeting each other’s parents, pretending that there is no ink, no journal, no Quill.
For a few minutes, she is a woman. Nothing else.