He closed the bag and kissed her forehead. He should’ve woken her; there wasn’t time for this now. “I have to go.”
She nodded and he kissed the pout off her lips. She walked with him to the door, came down the stairs in her silky dressing gown. The cab was waiting. He dumped his bag in the boot and brought her close for a hug. “I’m sorry. I should’ve woken you.”
She wished him luck and went back inside. He waited till the cab pulled out, till she would’ve made it back upstairs, and rang her. She laughed and said, “What did you forget?”
He said, “You,” like he’d done twice before, then she told him what it meant to be offered a show, how the school thought she was talented and how nervous it made her.
It was the last time they had to talk properly. Time zones, work schedules, the crazy that was doing business in India left him little brain space to think about anything else but Ipseity. They snatched sleepy conversations that were frustrating for their lack of meaning.
He knew he’d miss her, but he wasn’t ready to feel the separation so deeply. It sat like an ache, a torn muscle, a stitch in his chest. Nor was he prepared for the workload, the responsibility and the stress that came with being a funded start-up. He had to extend his stay by a week and couldn’t wait to get home.
33: Drift
The absence of Mace was the opportunity to focus. It was the opportunity to have a good solid panic about having her own show. It’s not like it was the most outrageous thing to have ever happened to her. Not the hardest, or the most public, or the biggest risk Jacinta had ever taken. It was none of those things.
She was damp with fear, twisted, flung about and wrung out, full of creases that might never smooth out and dizzy with the notion that this whole thing was totally on her. It was like what she imagined being put through the spin cycle in an industrial-strength washing machine must be like.
There was no department of artistic merit, no committee to establish trending public perception, no working party to define acceptable content, or team responsible for breakthrough subject matter. She didn’t have a boss to approve her show design, or an assistant to check off all the details. It was Cinta Worth central. No detours, no rainchecks, no refunds.
If she didn’t sell a painting it was because they sucked. And there was no one to blame for bad market research, dodgy analysis, poor stock picking or crap taste. If her show bombed, it was because she’d tanked as an artist.
So no biggie.
More coffee.
Once upon a time, she’d dressed in professional armour and led a corporate army, equipped with the latest knowledge and the resources to go into a battle and win. Now she was a strike force of one, armed with a few semesters of art class, the encouragement of her teacher and the best wishes of fellow students, with no way of knowing how this was going to shake out.
The odds were built brick by brick into a solid wall between her and success. And yet she’d agreed to it. Being in love had clearly mucked with her reasoning and strategic decision-making capabilities. How else to explain how she ended up in her studio at 3am some mornings without a clue what she was doing there.
When she explained it like that on Skype, Mace said, “Way to freak the fuck out.” A perfect choice of words. She’d told him it wasn’t that bad, not important in the scheme of things. He’d called her a liar and they’d both had a laugh. He’d rung off worried and she wasn’t laughing now.
She needed at least ten, preferably fifteen, paintings to make a show. She had five she could stand to have examined, stand to part with if by some lucky accident they found a buyer. But if she wanted a successful show she needed to tie it together with a theme. That was the real stress. And even then, unless she designated the painting as not for sale, every work was out on a date, looking for love, or more specifically, hooking—hoping to get picked up and taken home for a price.
Sitting behind a desk battling email and an out of control meeting calendar with a CEO and a board breathing down her neck had never felt so attractive as when she was standing in her studio twitchy from too much coffee, facing a blank canvas with a vacant mind.
Procrastination never looked like such an inspired source of inspiration. She walked, did extra yoga classes, sketched. She flipped through magazines and poured over art history
books.
Ingrid was sympathetic. Alfie teased. Margaret kept saying she’d find her source, and Jacinta found the lack of specific advice from them insanely annoying. She wasn’t a real artist, she was an imposter, a blow-in from the corporate world with all of the time and enthusiasm and none of the talent or aptitude to make anything significant happen.
Yeah, sure she knew how to put paint on canvas. Could sketch with proficiency. Could even lose herself to the brush and the paint palette, spending hours that felt like minutes at her easel. But she knew how to slap together a few basic meals now too and that didn’t make her a short-order cook. It mostly made her hungry when Mace wasn’t around for a decent home cooked meal, and too eager too often, to shell out for take-out.
And even if she did manage to cobble together fifteen new paintings she was proud of and sell a few of them, what did it prove?
She tipped what was maybe her sixth cup of coffee down the sink. She’d given herself the shakes. That was the coffee, another fiendishly proficient round of procrastination, and the shock. She was bred to be a corporate animal; all her instinct and training, her family outlook and her satisfaction was bound up in the harsh and unforgiving mechanism of business and profitability. But she wasn’t born that way and if she hadn’t lost her job she might never have found the time to explore her creative self.
And that’s why she was freaked the fuck out. Not coffee, not a pile of blank canvases, not the feeling of being without back-up, but the knowledge that what she was doing was more important than filling in time and conquering an old fear. It was much bigger than the slickest up yours to Malcolm or the most passing tribute to her mother. Being an artist was as much a part of who she was as her ability to persuade a room of hostile stakeholders to vote for controversial reform.
She wanted this, the filled canvases, the chaos of a show, the fear of not making a sale, as much as she wanted Mace home and a new job.
If she looked at her reflection she was same old same old, with allowances for the fact she had longer hair, dressed with more efficiency than fashion consciousness and no longer sported dark circles under her eyes from a perennial lack of sleep. She looked younger and happier. She looked like she might be a vaguely interesting person with more than one dimension to her mirror image.
And she liked that look. It said more about her prospects for a happy future than her swanky apartment, bulging bank balance and executive suite office ever had. She went to the studio and she put all that tentative identity, fraudster logic and fledgling belief in her talent on the blank canvases.
She had the radio on and she was in the zone, lost in the colour and the light and how it blended. She was insensible to anything else, so she screamed when his hands stole around her, when his face nuzzled into the side of her neck. She didn’t hear him come in and he was a day early. She dropped the brush and turned in Mace’s arms, sinking into the weight of his embrace. “You’re home.”
“You smell like metho.”