PIECE: Antique map of the City of Madison, 1867.
The idea of a mandatory monthly dinner at the Colony reminded Paige of when her parents used to drag her to her grandparents’ place every Sunday. They’d eat dry baked chicken in the kitchen of their trailer, where the heat was always turned up high and everything took on a yellow tinge from years of cigarette smoke filling the home.
Paige tried to sneak out the back door on the afternoon before the first communal dinner at the mansion, hoping she could stay away and skip it altogether. But Nell saw her, from the kitchen window, when Paige was crossing the snowy lawn. Nell pushed up the sash and said, “Don’t forget dinner tonight!” Paige resented feeling like a kid who’d been caught breaking curfew, but she came back that evening in time for the meal.
Fortunately, there were no ashtrays or baked chicken in sight at that first dinner. The food actually looked really good. Paige didn’t know much about Spanish food, but she noticed a bowl of meatballs among the many small dishes lined up on the side table. Meatballs were always a good idea.
Paige’s trepidation about the meal returned quickly, though, when Nell asked her to turn her phone off, saying something about the dining room being a “device-free zone” during dinner. Paige stared at her for a few moments. Nell might as well have asked her to sit down at the table and eat naked. But Paige did what she was told, stashing the phone in a drawer in the kitchen so as not to be tempted to try to look at it under the table. A few times during the meal, she found herself patting at the back pocket of her jeans or looking down at her hands, seeking out a digital escape.
For the first Sunday dinner in January, the sky outside had already been pitch-black for an hour by the time the group sat down to eat. By the next month’s dinner in mid-February, a Middle Eastern–themed meal, the sun lingered a little longer. They watched it set in sherbet shades of orange and pink while they ate. Still, though, the artists stayed at the table conversing until long after darkness fell.
Paige didn’t contribute much to the conversations at those first couple of dinners. Compared with the others, she didn’t feel like she’d been anywhere or done anything. But Annie had lived a lot, and talked a lot, too. Paige loved hearing about her life in New York, especially the stories about Greenwich Village in the seventies.
“The guy in the next apartment was an actor,” Annie said as she sipped some tea. “Not like the movie stars who’ve got pieds-à-terre there now, but the struggling kind. In the summer, when everyone had their windows open, I’d fall asleep to him reciting lines. If he was trying out for a Shakespeare play, it could be quite soothing, with all that rhythmic verse. But a couple of times he must have been trying out for cop dramas and soap operas or something, because I’d doze off only to be woken up by someone saying, ‘Put your hands up.’” Annie laughed and shook her head. “Half the time I didn’t know if it was coming from my neighbor’s place or from down on the sidewalk. The cops were always busting things up on the corner of my block because it was a known spot for solicitation.”
“Of drugs or sex?” Paige asked. She was pretty sure she’d never even seen a prostitute. There were no street corners or back alleys where she grew up. Just a lone stoplight on the main highway through town and, past that, houses set back on acres of fields or woods.
Annie shrugged. “Either one. Both. Heroin was at what I thought was its heyday back then. But overdose deaths are way back up again, thanks in part to prescription opioids and Big Pharma.” Annie sighed and pushed food around her plate with her utensils. “Sorry to bring the conversation down.”
Everyone fell silent for a moment. Paige thought about a boy a couple of classes ahead of her from high school whom she heard had just been admitted to rehab after almost dying from a fentanyl overdose. Apparently, despite the fact that her hometown seemed like a place where nothing ever happened, it wasn’t exempt from the rest of the world’s problems.
Annie held up a ball of falafel she’d stabbed with her fork. “Did you make this, Nell? It’s fantastic.” Her voice had a forced brightness to it.
“I wish I could take credit, but I ordered it,” Nell said. “I’m forbidden from frying anything since I singed off part of my eyebrow once.”
“Well, whoever did the frying, I haven’t had falafel this good since my kibbutz days,” Annie said.
“I didn’t know you were Jewish,” Odin said, taking a sip from his beer.
“I’m not,” Annie said. “But when I was in my twenties, a friend was going to Israel to do volunteer work and invited me along, so I figured, why not?”
“Seems like you’ve been everywhere,” Paige said. “Up until I went to Providence over winter break for that RISD class, I’d never been to a state that didn’t border Wisconsin.”
“You’re still so young,” Annie said. “You have plenty of time to remedy that if you start soon.”
As if it were that simple, Paige thought. Of course she would love to travel. Wouldn’t most people? But with what money? Even with student loans, she could hardly afford to get by, which was why the residency at the Colony had been such a godsend.
“If it makes you feel better, I haven’t been many places, either,” Odin said. “I’ve been fishing in Canada, but other than that, I’ve never been outside the country.”
Odin didn’t usually say much about how he ended up in Madison. He didn’t work inside the house. His tools were too loud and his projects created all kinds of dust and fumes. The communal dinners were the only way Paige started to learn a little bit about him. He talked sometimes about a girlfriend, maybe an ex-girlfriend? Paige wasn’t sure what had happened, and she certainly wasn’t about to ask him.
Relationships were not Paige’s strong suit. She didn’t understand what made people stay together, month after month, year after year, without getting bored. Her maternal grandparents, the consistent producers of dry baked chicken, often said they stayed together out of stubbornness. Her dad’s parents were another story. They still held hands and called each other sweetie and honey. They’d met in high school—Paige wouldn’t be surprised if it was at a soda counter or a goddamn sock hop or whatever people did back then—and they’d been together ever since. The very thought of it made Paige itchy. She could hardly stay with someone more than a couple of months, let alone a lifetime.
At least her own parents had a healthy amount of disdain for each other. They drove each other crazy half the time, between her dad disappearing for deer hunting on major holidays and her mom with her knitting group. As far as Paige could tell, there wasn’t a whole lot of stitching that went on at her mom’s Stitch ’n Bitch meetings. Mostly it seemed like the members drank boxed wine and complained about their husbands, while maybe passing around a half-finished scarf or two.
Her parents’ relationship wasn’t exactly something Paige aspired to, but at least she understood it. When they weren’t driving each other crazy, they laughed a lot. Their marriage seemed to have just the right amount of dysfunction to be functional, year after year.
Paige guessed Nell knew a thing or two about marriage, seeing as she was the only married one of the group. Her husband, Josh, had come to the first meal, and went around offering people seconds of the Spanish food piled onto platters. He didn’t show up to the second dinner, though. When Annie had asked earlier in the evening where the other “token male” was, winking at Odin, Nell had just said, flatly, “He’s working,” and changed the topic.
Now, Nell started to clear away the dirty dishes and shuttle them back and forth to the kitchen. But Paige noticed that a few times she lingered at the edge of the room, listening to the conversation, especially when the artists turned to the topic of their craft.
“Does it ever happen that you’re working on something, maybe you’re even halfway done or almost finished, and then you get this idea for something else and that’s all you can think about?” Odin asked.
Paige nodded, thinking about all the unpacked boxes in her room upstairs that were full of supplies from love affairs with methods she’d abandoned—paints, pastels, collage papers. “It’s the best and the worst,” she said. “Because you’re really excited about the new idea, but you’re also annoyed because now you can barely stand to look at what’s in front of you, let alone find the motivation to finish it.”
“Well, the garage is beginning to look like a scrapyard, with all the pieces I’ve started and stopped.” Odin sighed and crossed his arms. “How about you, Annie? Any tips on staying motivated?”
“I’m having trouble with the starting phase,” Annie said. “I thought I’d be able to just pick up my photography series where I left off in New York, but with new subjects. It’s turning out not to be that easy, though. I’m struggling to find people willing to participate.”
Nell set down the platter she’d been carrying. “What sort of subjects are you looking for?” she asked. “Maybe I know someone I could connect you with.”
Annie waved away the offer. “I think I just need to be more patient. Being photographed requires a certain level of trust. And that takes time to nurture.”
“Well, if you think of anything we can do to help . . .” Nell picked up the heavy platter again.
“Here, give me that,” Annie said, getting up. “It’s late. I’m sure Josh will be wondering when you’re getting home.”
“It’s okay, really,” Nell said. “I was enjoying listening to you guys talk about what you’re working on.”
But Annie shooed her away. “You’ve done so much already. We can do the cleanup, right guys?”
Odin rose and began clearing the rest of the table, bringing an effective end to the conversation. Paige followed suit, feeling a small sense of relief, for Annie’s sake. She knew what it felt like to not want to talk about her work. When people asked Paige about hers, she often had to curb the impulse to give a truthful answer.
The truth was, if Paige could express with words what her artwork was about, then she would. She’d string together a sentence or two and be done with it. She wouldn’t spend hours or days struggling to convey her thoughts, emotions, and perceptions through a work of art. But her mind didn’t work in words. It worked in visuals. People didn’t ask novelists to paint pictures of what their books were about, so Paige wondered why so many people—professors, art bloggers, and friends—expected her to be able to translate her artwork into language.
After everything had been put away, Paige excused herself and went outside. She lit a cigarette and walked in the direction of downtown, hunching her shoulders against the assault of cold wind coming off the icy lake. A girl from Paige’s graduate-level printing class had invited Paige to a party at her apartment. Paige didn’t know the girl very well. The address was for one of the fancy high-rise apartment buildings that seemed to be sprouting up on campus in constant succession. Paige usually turned down party invitations from her art school classmates. She always ended up wedged on someone’s thrift store couch between people comparing tattoos and artistic influences. She wouldn’t mind so much, if it weren’t for the fact that those types of conversations usually ended up being a pissing match of pretentiousness, full of words like “juxtapose” and “mélange,” as well as lots of calculated adjustments to messy hair buns, sported by the men and the women alike.
Despite being on a campus of over forty thousand students, Paige sometimes felt like her world—especially her program—was very small. If she didn’t at least stop by, people would ask her a bunch of annoying questions on Monday, so it was easier just to make a short, obligatory appearance. Plus, with this party, the fact that she wasn’t very familiar with the hostess or the building made the invitation more attractive. It meant there would probably be a lot of people there she didn’t know. Specifically, a lot of boys she didn’t know.
When she reached State Street, the pedestrian mall running from the university campus to the domed State Capitol building, Paige got stuck behind a group of girls dressed nearly identically in leggings and down coats. She could hear them trying to translate the meaning of a text message from some guy. The message couldn’t have been more than a line or two long, from the sound of it, but somehow it generated a deeply analytical conversation that lasted for two blocks, until Paige ducked into the glass lobby of the apartment building.
The elevator was mercifully empty. She rode it to the eleventh floor, where she could hear music and loud voices as soon as the doors opened. She followed the sounds to the apartment number on the invitation and knocked on the door. Miraculously, someone heard it. Beth, the classmate who’d invited her, opened the door.
“Paige, you came!” Beth hugged her, even though Paige was pretty sure they’d spoken no more than half a dozen times in class.
“Please, help yourself to whatever.” Beth led her into the kitchen, where a group of people mulled around a selection of half-empty liquor bottles on a table. “Everybody, this is Paige,” she said. “She’s the one art major I know who actually might make it as an artist after we graduate, instead of going to law school or moving back in with her parents. For the record, I’ll be doing both at the same time.”
Paige could feel her cheeks burn. “I’m not sure what I’ll be doing after graduation. My residency extends a little beyond that, until the end of June, but after that, I don’t know . . . do you think your parents have room for one more?”
Beth laughed. “So you’re the one who got the residency Professor Murray told us about. Good for you. A few of us have been speculating, but hadn’t heard anything.”
“Thanks,” Paige said, feeling even more self-conscious.
“What are the other artists like?” Beth asked. “Anyone we’d know? You could have brought them along, you know.”
“I don’t think so.” Paige shook her head. “They’re older. One of them, Annie Beck, is supposedly pretty famous, but I’d never heard of her before. The other, a guy named Odin Sorenson, is a sculptor.”
“Huh,” Beth said. “Well, I’d love to meet them sometime.”
“Yeah, sure. Anytime.” Paige sensed that Beth wanted to meet the other residents about as much as Paige wanted to bring her over to the house. Which was to say not at all. But it signaled a good place to end the conversation.
Beth wandered over to another group of arriving guests, freeing Paige to mix herself a weak vodka tonic and survey the space. She must have been concentrating too much on the latter because her plastic cup overflowed, sending sticky fizz all over the table. She looked around for something to wipe it up with. A tall boy who’d been leaning with his back to the kitchen counter handed her a roll of paper towels.
“Thanks,” Paige said, tearing one off. She dabbed at the puddle on the table and noticed that some had spilled to the floor. She maneuvered around a few people who stood talking, oblivious to the waterfall, and ducked down to wipe the tiles. When she got up, she whacked her head on the corner of the table.
“Oooh,” said the boy who’d given her the towels. He raised a hand to his own head, which was covered in a knit beanie, and winced. “Are you okay?”
Paige nodded. “Other than my pride, yeah.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Some drunk girl wandered in here earlier and it took her a full twenty minutes to realize she was supposed to be at a different party on another floor.”
“I’m not drunk, though,” Paige said. “Just clumsy, apparently. And I do know Beth, though I have to admit not all that well.”
“Me neither. Just from ski club. Except that I’m not a member anymore, since I dropped out.” He took off his hat and shook out a mop of collar-length dark hair.
“Of the club?”
“And school,” he said. “It’s Paige, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m Trent.”
“Nice to meet you.” Paige stared at his hands as he worked them through his hair. She had to resist the urge to reach out and touch one of the wavy strands. Then she realized she was still holding a wad of dirty paper towels. She looked around for a wastebasket.
“Here,” Trent said, pulling a trash bin out from under the table.
Paige threw away the wet towels. Before he put the bin back, Trent fished a couple of beer cans out of it. “What the hell is wrong with people,” he said, loud enough for a few bystanders to turn their heads. “Blue means recycling. It’s not that hard.” He tossed the cans into another receptacle a few feet away.
If Paige hadn’t been smitten already by his niceness and his smile, Trent’s display of environmental conscientiousness would have won her over. The ski club thing was a little too wholesome for her tastes, but she could set that aside.
“So what do you do now?” Paige asked. “That you’re not in school, I mean.”
“I just got back from Colorado,” he said. “I’d been out there since after Thanksgiving, teaching skiing lessons to rich kids. But there’s been barely any new snow for the last month, and the conditions have been shitty, so I got let go from my job.”
“That sucks,” Paige said.
Trent shrugged. “Even if conditions were great, they probably would have only kept me on for another month or so, through the spring break rush.”
They inched their way to a corner of the room, standing closer as the night went on. They talked—about music, about Paige’s residency, and about Trent’s plans to return to school in the summer and, hopefully, pack in enough credits to graduate in December.
“I can’t think about December,” Paige said. “I’ve got enough on my plate between my classes and the residency program right now. Besides”—she looked up at him, a flirtatious glint in her eyes—“I’d rather live in the moment.”
They found excuses to touch one another in little ways. He brushed her hand when he offered to refill her drink. She declined, but tapped his wrist to look at the time on his watch.
“What would you say if I proposed going somewhere else?” she asked.
The question hung there, a shimmering line cast in his direction. She lived for these moments, when the thrill of risk thumped at her temples.
A slow smile spread across Trent’s face. “I’d say yeah. Where did you have in mind? I’d invite you to come home with me, except that my housemates sublet my room when I left, so now I’m sleeping on the living room couch until I find a new place.”
A beautiful boy with no place to sleep? she thought. The situation kept getting better.
The mansion was dark when they arrived. Paige’s cold hands, in combination with the ancient mortise lockset, made it difficult to get the side door open. She rattled her keys and jimmied the handle back and forth. The door finally swung open when she shoved her hip against it. The momentum threw her across the threshold onto her knees.
Trent burst into laughter.
“Shhh.” Paige got up, rubbing her kneecap. “I don’t want to wake anyone up.”
Trent followed her inside and paused inside the hallway. “I wouldn’t worry too much about that. Someone’s already up. Don’t you smell that?”
Paige inhaled and caught the smell of pot wafting up from the basement stairs, along with the sound of voices. “Yeah,” she said. “It just took a minute for my nose to thaw out.” She took a step in the direction of the back staircase that led to her room. “Come on, this way. My room’s all the way up on the third floor. In, like, a turret.”
“Sounds very fairy tale–like,” Trent said. “Are you some sort of princess?” He leaned forward and kissed her in a quick, teasing way, then pulled back and gave her a flirtatious half smile.
“Oh no you don’t,” she said, grabbing him and pulling him in for a longer, wetter kiss. This time, she pulled away, and laughed. “I’m the last thing from a princess.”
“Damsel in distress?” he asked.
“Maybe,” she said. “It’s distressing how badly I want to get you upstairs.”
“You don’t want to check it out down there first? Sounds like they’re having fun.” Trent nodded toward the basement and the muffled sound of laughter now drifting upward along with the smoke.
Paige shook her head. She didn’t have anything against smoking pot. And she didn’t have many rules for herself. But a big one was that when she found herself with men she didn’t know very well—which was often—she liked to stay relatively sober, sticking with no more than a drink or two and never mixing substances. She relied on her instincts too heavily to dull them. Once, in high school, she’d gotten drunk at the house party of a classmate whose parents weren’t home. Paige and a guy she thought was a friend went outside to have a cigarette. It had been a warm summer night, and the moon blinking through the evergreen forest behind the house beckoned them to take a walk. But when Paige didn’t want to make out with the guy, he’d gotten angry. The aggressive look in his eyes and the tight way he gripped her arms scared her so much that she ran off in what she thought was the direction of the party. Except that in her state, in the dark and unfamiliar surroundings, she’d gotten lost. She eventually found her way back to the party after a couple of hours of wandering and sobering up a bit, but the experience affected her enough to scare her mostly straight when she was around men she didn’t know very well.
Paige slipped her hand into Trent’s and led him up the narrow staircase. When they reached the top, she flicked on the light. Trent looked around the circular room with its large windows facing the street on one side and the lake on the other. “Wow. I bet the view is amazing from up here during the day.”
“Maybe you’ll see it for yourself, if you’re lucky and I don’t kick you out before then.”
“Hey, what’s this?” Trent bent down to look at the contents of a cardboard box Paige had found underneath the window seat bench.
“Some old maps that were here when I moved in,” she said.
“This has got to be from before World War One.” He unfolded a yellowed map of Europe and traced his fingers over the long-since-shifted borders. He unrolled another map. “And look, this one is of Madison, from the 1800s. Someone who lived here must have been a map lover.”
“I think someone else must be, too,” Paige said, giving him a pointed look.
Trent smiled self-consciously. “Sorry to nerd out on you. I’ve been interested in maps since I was a kid.”
“Let me see if I can find anything else that might interest you.” Paige flopped down on the bed and peeled off her layers—scarf, sweater, tee. Trent watched her. She noticed that he had freckles under his brown eyes and over the bridge of his nose.
He dropped the map he’d been holding. “Keep going,” he said.
She laughed, and pulled her shirt over her head.
“You know, coming up the stairs in the dark like that, I felt like I was back at the church summer camp I went to as a kid, trying to sneak over to the girls’ side. I had the biggest crush on one of the counselors.” Trent pulled his wool sweater over his head, revealing a smooth, flat stomach.
“Did you ever make it over to the girls’ side?” Paige helped him free his arm from his sweater and threw it on the floor in a heap.
“Nope. We got caught every single time. I swear our own counselor would overhear our plans and rat us out.”
“Hmmm,” Paige said, placing her hands on his bare chest. She could see black ink under her fingernails. “And what would you have done if you got over there?”
Trent grinned. “The plan was to put frogs in the girls’ sleeping bags.”
Paige pushed him, giggling, and he stumbled backward. He righted himself and closed the distance between them in one big step, scooping her into his arms before settling on the bed.
“Shhh,” she said, quieting him with kisses.