PIECE: Dale Chihuly, Seaform, circa 1997. Blown glass sculpture.
By the time Paige got off the bus, she was already twenty minutes late for the meeting her advisor had set up. She probably could have walked faster if she hadn’t felt so jittery, which, in turn, made her need a cigarette. She fished one out of her pocket, but couldn’t find a lighter. A boy at the bus stop stood smoking, so she asked him if he had one.
He nodded and leaned forward, cupping the flame as he lit her cigarette. Paige noticed he was cute in the way she liked best—shy and soulful, all dark hair and skinny angles under his army surplus jacket. She inhaled, then stood back and smiled. “Thanks.”
“What’s in the folder?” he asked, nodding toward the nylon portfolio that hung against her hip.
Paige didn’t usually like small talk, but she made exceptions for men she was attracted to. “Some prints I was working on earlier,” she said. “I don’t like to leave my stuff in the shared studio up at school. Is that weird?”
He shrugged. “It’s your stuff. Are you an art major?”
She exhaled a stream of smoke, savoring the exquisite emptiness within her lungs before answering. “Yeah.”
“You sound hesitant about it.” He toed a clump of snow with his boot.
“Do I?” she said. “I’m not. I mean, it’s the only thing I’m good at.”
“I’m sure that’s not true.” The boy looked up and held her gaze for a fraction of a second before looking back down at his shoes.
Paige saw potential in that tiny opening, a momentary break in the dark clouds that usually muddied her mood. The clouds shifted only when she stood over a canvas or print, or sat with a sketch pad on her lap. Or, like now, when she felt the glow of a boy’s attention. They weren’t always boys, though. Sometimes they were much older men.
She felt the strap of her portfolio growing heavy on her shoulder, a reminder of just how late she was for her meeting. “Shit,” she said. “I’ve gotta go. Thanks for the light.”
She stomped out her cigarette on the sidewalk and, before she left, pulled a pen and scrap of paper out from the side pocket of her portfolio. She scribbled down her number, then stuffed it in the boy’s pocket before turning and hurrying down the sidewalk.
The address she’d copied down from her acceptance letter from the residency program matched up with an honest-to-God mansion set back on a deep lakefront lot. Her parents had waterfront property, but it was nothing like this, at least from what Paige remembered.
Going “up north” when she was a kid meant sleeping in a trailer parked on forty acres of swampy woods abutting a river that attracted deer, geese, and all other sorts of hunting prey that kept her dad and older brother busy on fall weekends. She could never get used to firing a gun, so she’d stay back at the trailer with her mother or venture out on hikes with her sketchbook. Once, when she was fourteen, her mom caught her drawing a picture of a buck carcass, shading its bloody, matted fur with a red colored pencil. Her mom tore the page out and showed it to the high school guidance counselor, which set off a slew of meetings, evaluations, and a psychologist referral. Paige hadn’t gone up north since.
The white mansion in front of her now was so foreign, it sent Paige searching for another cigarette. The brief reprieve afforded by the one she’d had at the bus stop had already worn off, leaving her nerves as jagged as the icicles hanging from the porch roof. But then she remembered she didn’t have a lighter, so she rang the doorbell and picked at the paint underneath her fingernails instead.
The woman who came to the door looked to be in her thirties, maybe, with brown hair pulled into a low ponytail.
“Hi, I’m Nell,” she said, extending her hand. “You must be the student from the university.”
Paige shook her hand. “Paige Jewell. Nice to meet you.”
She noticed that instead of looking her in the eye, Nell seemed to be staring at Paige’s hands. Paige looked down and realized that the cuff of her quilted flannel coat had crept up to reveal a pink, puffy mark across her wrist.
Most of the time, she forgot about the scars. They had long since healed over and, now, held no more of her attention than the mole on her left cheek or the closed-up hole where she used to have a belly button ring. She forgot, though, that other people noticed.
Paige pulled her hand back and yanked down her sleeve.
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I just found out about this meeting today from my advisor. I was in the studio up at school and totally lost track of time. I’ve been trying to finish this screen print before I leave tomorrow. But I’ve got five different screens and I can’t seem to figure out which order to use them in. Each sequence produces a totally different end result.” She stopped, realizing that she’d been rambling.
Nell nodded and said, “It’s okay. Come on in.”
Paige stepped into the foyer and stomped out of her combat boots, dripping dirty slush on the rug. She tilted her head toward a crystal chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling. “Wow,” she said. “Do you live here?”
Nell shook her head. “No, I’m just the director of the program. But you and the other artists will stay here. The house was Betsy Barrett’s—the woman who set up the residency program. She loved the arts, so she left her home and estate to an arts foundation she set up.”
“I bet her kids were pissed.” Paige set her portfolio carefully on the ground, leaning upright against the wall.
“I’m told she didn’t have any children,” Nell said. She gestured toward the living room. “If you want to come have a seat, I can tell you a little more about the program.”
Paige shrugged out of her coat. She meant to ask if there was somewhere she should hang it up, but then she got distracted by a pair of glass objects displayed in a wall alcove in the hallway. She dropped her coat onto the rug next to her boots and walked over to inspect the items at closer range. One of them looked, to her eye, to be an ancient Asian vase made from white and blue porcelain. Beside it stood a more modern blown glass bowl that resembled a sea creature—a coral or anemone.
“Huh,” Paige said. “I wouldn’t have thought to put those two pieces together, but it works.” She took out her phone and snapped a picture. Then she realized that Nell was standing behind her, and that what she just did might have seemed weird.
“I hope that’s okay,” Paige said. “I like to take pictures of things that are beautiful or unusual or unexpected. You never know what might inspire something later.”
“It’s fine,” Nell said. “This will be your home for the next year. Take as many pictures as you’d like.”
Paige followed Nell into the living room then. Nell sat down in an armchair and gestured for Paige to have a seat, too, but Paige walked over to the fireplace, where a large abstract painting hung above the mantel. She studied its thick black and gray brushstrokes and the white spaces between them that stared out at her like eyes. And then she felt her phone vibrating in her hand. She looked down at the screen. There was a text from an unknown number: This is Dylan. From the bus stop. What’s your name?
Paige felt the sun break through the clouds. She smiled and typed back: Meet me somewhere and I’ll tell u. As she hit send, a rush of excitement drowned out the soft, but nagging, voice of caution in the back of her head.
Paige lived for the adrenaline buzz of meeting someone new and, when it came to art, creating something new. These two things made everything else around her seem more interesting and alive. In the throes of a new relationship, her senses heightened. Colors became more saturated, even within winter’s limited palette of grays, whites, and blues. She noticed nuances in music she’d never heard before, expanding the range she perceived between the low and high notes. Her artwork, in turn, got a jolt of inspiration. It had become a habit of hers to dive headlong into whatever medium she was working in, just as she dove into a new love interest. And then, when she became bored with a lover (because she always, always did), she became tired, too, of whatever type of work she’d been doing.
When she’d been sleeping with a software engineer that spring, she’d been heavy into graphic design work. The graphic design obsession came first, which led to her spending a lot of time in the fancy computer lab at the engineering school, where she hit it off with the only other person who stayed as late as she did. But they parted ways after he made the mistake of introducing her to someone as his girlfriend. Paige was a lot of things, but a girlfriend was not one of them.
She swore off graphic design shortly after that. She told her advisor it was because she didn’t want to end up designing corporate logos for a living. Then she moved on quickly to oil pastels after she started having sex with a guy she met at the skate park. She’d been sketching the skateboarders as a study on movement, and he’d had the good luck of missing a landing, sending his board skidding toward where she sat cross-legged near the chain-link fence. She spent a lot of time at the park that summer, and at the boy’s apartment nearby, but broke things off in the fall when classes started back up and her focus shifted to watercolor painting and to a shy vet student. She’d since given him up, too, and the break led her to her current obsession with screen printing.
Now, Nell’s voice pulled Paige’s attention away from her phone.
“Do you have anything you wanted to ask me?” Nell said. “About the program or anything?”
“Sorry,” Paige said, stuffing the phone into the back pocket of her jeans. “Um, how many other artists will be here?”
“Just two. I don’t have all the details yet, but they should be arriving within the next couple of weeks.”
Paige had assumed the woman in charge of the program would know a little more about it. Her advisor had insisted that being chosen for the residency was a big deal, but now Paige wasn’t sure what to think. She was grateful, certainly, for the room and board. But she was less excited about the prospect of living with two strangers whom apparently even the director knew next to nothing about.
She felt her phone vibrate again. She ignored it, though it took a lot of willpower to do so. She felt naked, listless without something tactile to occupy her hands—a paintbrush, a cigarette, the prickly stubble on a boy’s cheek.
“I know you must have more questions than that,” Nell said.
“Can I see my room?” Paige asked.
“Sure, I can take you upstairs. I have to be honest, though. I haven’t been up there myself yet.” Nell gave her a sheepish smile. “I was just hired this week to replace someone else, and haven’t had a chance to, um, settle in yet.”
At least that explains some of her cluelessness, thought Paige. She walked behind Nell up the curved staircase, taking the opportunity to pull out her phone and read another message from Dylan: I have to work till 9 tonight. How about tomorrow?
Another girl might have just suggested they get together when she got back from her trip. Another girl might have just let it go altogether. But then again, another girl might not have given her phone number to a stranger at the bus stop in the first place—might not be in the habit of looking for connections whenever and wherever she could.
Paige paused on the landing and responded: Leaving tomorrow for a week. Where do u work? I’ll meet u when u get off.
She put the phone back into her pocket and took the last leg of stairs two at a time.