CHAPTER 15

Meeting

She met him in an art appreciation class. She’d switched to it only moments before registration closed because she had a strange feeling that she should. Originally, she’d signed up for an art history class, but on a brisk and pulsing whim she switched. How fateful that decision would be. How blissfully ignorant she was, believing herself the arbiter of her own life. No more predictable than the cinnamon she’d sprinkle on the foam of her latte, each flaking granule falling as evenly and imprecisely as she met John.

He was tall and blond, and when he spoke he seemed quiet, something she immediately liked. She first noticed him about a month into class. That morning she twisted her ankle so she took a cab to school. It was colder than it had been, and she treated herself to a hot chocolate. She held it in her hands; the heat through her gloves was mesmerizingly warm against the winter morning, so much so that she mistakenly thought the person in front of her was holding the door open for her. She walked right into the closing door, spilling the hot chocolate all over her gloves. Her hands went from hot and burning to unbearably freezing as the liquid quickly cooled the drenched wool. She pulled her gloves off and didn’t know what to do with them. They were cheap and soaked, so she threw them in a trashcan on the street corner. It was really the only practical thing she could do. When she finally made it to class, she could feel her ankle sore from the stairs (the elevators were broken), and her hands were still cold. This day is already hell, she thought.

The art appreciation class had been a disappointment. The professor was in her mid-thirties. She was a mousy woman with a bad pixie haircut who wanted so desperately to be hipper than she was. She’d name-drop indie bands that she assumed the students were listening to, and most days she’d blast Pandora through her iPhone as they shuffled into the room. Occasionally she’d mouth along to lyrics of songs by The Cure and Leda would think, Why are you trying to be so hip? Don’t you realize you aren’t hip? You are just as not-hip as the rest of us, only you are older, and it is time to let it go. Her name was Cheryll with two l’s, a fact she explained the first day of class.

“My mom named me Chantel, which I hated, so I changed it to Cheryll. Why the extra l? Honestly, I couldn’t tell you,” she said. Leda believed that Cheryll didn’t know why she spelled her name like that. She believed that there were probably many things that she did and didn’t know why. Cheryll taught the class by showing slides of different art pieces and asking whether the students liked them or not. Whatever the students said or thought, Cheryll would listen and nod and always agree.

It was slow and grating and Leda found herself for the most part chronically disengaged. Occasionally Cheryll would say something interesting about a piece or an artist, but generally it was just some student rattling off their issues with Ellsworth Kelly.

“Now, I’m very curious as to what you all think of this piece,” Cheryll said as she clicked to a slide of Vermeer’s painting Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window.

No one raised their hand, a common reaction from the bemused class.

“Come on, guys, one of you must think something about this gnarly painting.” Still no one responded.

“Well, how about we hear from someone we haven’t yet,” Cheryll said, reaching for something, anything at all.

“Laura, what do you think of the piece?”

Laura was a girl Leda’d had several classes with in the past. She rarely spoke and had a nervous laugh. The one meaningful encounter Leda had with her was being paired up with her in her modernist literature class. The two of them were meant to give a presentation on a section of “The Waste Land.” Before they began Laura said, “I’m not really good with poetry.” And that was about all Laura said. Leda was left to navigate through the presentation alone. At the end of it Laura turned to her and said, “Thanks. I’m sorry.” After that Leda made a point of never sitting next to her for fear of ever having to work with her again.

Laura looked up at the painting. She’d been drawing or writing on her notebook. Her skin was olive and shined in the overhead projector light. She looked terrified.

“I think it’s ummmmmmm. I like it?”

“Why do you like it?” Cheryll asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Come on, there’s no wrong answers. What is it you like about the painting?”

“I think ummmm. It’s ummm. I don’t really know, actually. I guess I just like it. I’m not really sure why or anything.”

“You don’t know at all?”

“No, not really, ummmm sorry.”

“Not even a little?”

“Umm, ummm.”

Cheryll, who usually by this point would concede and move on to harassing a better-prepared student, stood stock-still; her body posture was stiff and her expression resolved. Her usual demeanor was small and yearning, peppy and desperate, but it was as if a calm had come over her. As if she’d all at once been made aware of what a fool she was for wanting to be hip so badly in a group of college students who were supposed to respect her. It was as if she’d suddenly realized her life was as futile as her haircut.

“Well, you must have some idea why you like it. I mean, you’re saying that you like it. What do you like about it? I don’t think it’s a really hard question to answer.”

“Hahahahaha,” Laura nervously laughed much too loudly. “I don’t know.”

“The colors? The light? The subject matter? What? I mean, this is Vermeer. I wouldn’t call his work exactly inaccessible. I could easily tell you a thousand things I like about this painting and you can’t tell me one?”

A palpable tension fell over the class. Leda looked around quickly. Everyone seemed to be as terrified of the ensuing awkwardness as she was. She looked at Laura, who had turned purple in the impressionist glow.

“I, I, I’m, well, I’m, I, I’m—the colors?”

“What is it that you like about the colors?” Cheryll snapped back.

“They are ummm. Well, I don’t know exactly—”

“You don’t know what it is you like about the colors? You like the painting because of the ‘colors’ ”—Cheryll air-quoted “colors”—“but you don’t know what it is you like about the ‘colors’?” She air-quoted again.

“No, I—I like the way that they’re vibrant, I think.”

Good girl, Leda thought. Don’t let her rip you to shreds.

“What do you mean exactly?”

“I, I don’t know—”

“Again you ‘don’t know’? I’m not asking you to split the atom here. I’m expecting you to know why you like something. I mean, for god’s sake, if you don’t know why you like anything how can you live your life? How can you wake up and pick out what clothes you’ll wear? Or what cereal you want to eat for breakfast? Or who you want to fuck?”

The word fuck hung in the air. Leda had heard plenty of professors use the word, and Cheryll of course used it every chance she got. But this was the only time in her life she would hear it used in this way. It was penetrative and violating, stripping and vulgar. She could imagine Laura then as a child sitting at a large table dwarfed by everything around her or naked under the weight of some hideous man. Her fat rolls exposed and jiggling as the man ferociously fucked her.

And then John raised his hand. He did it in such a way that even if she wanted to, Cheryll couldn’t have ignored it, the bend in his elbow or his expression, strong and still. Leda would remember how blue his eyes seemed, how even as he was sitting she could notice his height.

“John,” Cheryll said.

“Could you tell me about that Tom Hunter painting that was inspired by this? I saw it in an exhibit once, and it was really incredible,” he said.

“That is one of my absolute favorite paintings of all time.” Cheryll’s face softened. The tension in the room instantly defused and Laura was spared. Cheryll continued on about the painting; she smiled and gestured as she spoke, enlivened by the question. Leda watched John nod in response, his face kind.

He seems like someone who would be a good boyfriend, she thought.

That night she texted Anne: “I think I have a crush on someone in class.”

She’d save that text, and years later she’d reread it to remember a feeling that was as fleeting as that girl with her letter by the window and the all-surrounding fuck.