When the train stopped at Holborn, I exited without looking back, then hurried up the left side of the escalator and out the building onto High Holborn Street. During the two-block walk to our flat, I knew Chris had to be no more than twenty paces behind me. Half a block before our flat, I turned to face her. “I’m sorry you’re so disappointed in me. I need a few hours to myself.”
She nodded, so I veered off to the right and entered The Bountiful Cow. Sam, a black Swede working the bar, looked up and grinned. I loved Sam for his sense of humor, and because every time I saw him it was a refreshing slap in the face. He reminded me that not all Swedes were blond, an easy stereotype to develop living in Minnesota. He was as tall and slender as the bottles of vodka lined up behind him.
One of Sam’s eyebrows shot up. My reply was to nod, meaning Yes, send up a Bounty Burger with the works. Now that was taking a risk, consuming a massive burger with chopped onions, gherkin, bleu cheese, bacon, and a fried egg.
Two more flights of stairs brought me to my studio, nothing more than a small room with one window. The room held my drawing table and stool, as well as a long table with books, supplies, and printer. The only bit of comfort came from the green overstuffed chair left in the flat across the hallway by the tenants evicted for nonpayment. Chris had vacuumed it for over an hour to lift out every speck of anything living in the fabric.
While I waited for my heart attack burger, I paced the perimeter of my studio. City sounds rolled through the open window. Even though I was two floors above the pub, the smell of roasting meat and beer somehow wafted up through the floorboards. The family living in the flat between me and the pub must gain weight just by breathing.
Coward? Comfort zone? Chris’s labels stung. But I wasn’t a coward, and I wasn’t afraid to step outside my comfort zone. However, when I considered the eight light and airy watercolors tacked to my board, paintings for the most recent Mr. Froggity book, a shiver ran down my spine. Was Chris right? The book publisher’s art director had requested pastel colors, so the blandness wasn’t my fault. Still, Mr. Froggity easily fit within my artistic comfort zone.
I’d worked hard all my life and achieved more than I’d hoped, yet I was cowardly?
Chris had still been a graduate student when we met, so we needed to live in the Twin Cities. While she attended the U of M, I got a job teaching art and art history at Carleton College, a private college fifty minutes south in the sleepy river city of Northfield. I loved the slower pace of life there and had nurtured an unspoken dream of the two of us becoming Northfielders one day.
In addition to art department classes, I also taught an art class for non-majors called Art Isms: How to Sound Smart at Parties. The course proved to be one of the most popular on campus, so my star rose high enough to be short-listed for tenure. My brothers, Jake and Marcus, said I was the family’s go-getter, the super-ambitious one who fought her way up the academic ladder. But they also both held wonderful jobs. Jake ran an anti-poverty nonprofit, and Marcus was a computer programmer. We were all three pretty happy and content with our lives.
Then a few years ago, Chris discovered an obscure branch of psychiatry called cognitive neuropsychiatry and decided this was her future. She suspended her therapy practice, went back to grad school, then decided she needed to attend the University College London for one year. Our options? We could lease our house while Chris was in London and I’d take an apartment in Northfield and keep working. Or I could take a sabbatical and join Chris in London. After nine years together, the prospect of twelve months apart was too painful, so even though I was next in line for tenure, I convinced my department head to release me for a few semesters. Hopefully, I’d still be at the top of the list when I returned, but it wasn’t a given. Putting my career at risk to support Chris’s was brave. I didn’t deserve the “coward” label.
I texted my brother Jake. He was my Bullshit-O-Meter. No one got to the heart of a problem quicker than Jake. Do I lack courage? Stuck in comfort zone?
Too impatient to await his reply, I texted the same questions to Ashley. Our friendship was cemented the day in third grade when we both stood up to a kid bullying a second grader. She was my cheerleader. No matter what I wanted to do, Ashley supported me unconditionally. She thought I was the smartest, bravest person in her life. I didn’t agree, but whenever I felt a little falter in my step, Ashley made it disappear. Stout and fierce as a bulldog, Ashley defended me without hesitation.
I waited five minutes. Nothing. Then I texted Mary, my art department colleague at Carleton. The tall, outspoken black woman stood out in the mostly white river city of Northfield, but she wasn’t self-conscious. In fact, she loved playing the inner Chicago kid shocking the rural white folks. Mary was my go-to party girl, but she was also my analyst. When I had a problem, she expertly deconstructed it until we could see all the pieces and make sense of what had befuddled me.
I moved my easel to better see the view outside my window—the roofs of surrounding buildings, a few tall trees adding color. Then I jammed earbuds in and turned on my music.
I would show Chris. I primed the canvas with black acrylic, then when it was dry, I attacked with color. In a fever, I gave no thought to matching color with reality, but only matching color to emotions. The heavy bass line in my ears set the rhythm for my brush.
I took a break to eat my Bounty Burger. Soon all my fingers but one pinkie were covered in melted cheese so I used it to open and read my texts.
Jake: Don’t be stupid.
Ashley: You are much braver than I am!
Mary: Sounds like you need wine. Even if you have a comfort zone, who the hell cares? Fire truck anyone who says otherwise. Blinking back tears, I finished my burger and cleaned my hands. I didn’t tell any of them that the words had been Chris’s, since protecting her came so naturally to me I hardly gave it a thought.
It was eight p.m. when I finally stepped back. A thread of cadmium red dripped down onto the black border, adding an edginess I could feel in my teeth. Red buildings, green sky, blue trees all crashed together in a riot of color that made my heart ring like a Caribbean steel drum. Instead of delicate watercolor lines, the painting vibrated with thick slashes and broad splashes of color. Black glowered around the colors, an angry outline to the ragged buildings.
“Oh, my God.”
I jumped. Chris stood behind me, two glasses of lemonade from downstairs in her hands. “That is fucking amazing,” she continued. She’d never spent much time with Aunt Nicole.
I pressed my lips together and shrugged. I accepted the glass, then perched on my stool and waited. The only other chair in the room was the green saggy chair that sat much lower than the stool. Chris took it.
“I’m sorry about this afternoon,” Chris said.
I sipped the sharp lemonade, enjoying the cool slipping down my throat. “You called me a coward because I don’t want to let your Dr. Raj shoot me full of his GCA.”
Chris bent her head, nodding. “Yes, that was really inappropriate. I’ve been thinking this evening about why I did that, and I think it’s because I’ve been wanting to talk to you about something kind of hard, and it came out sideways.”
My heart thumped up into my throat. “Hard?”
Chris rested her head back on the chair and flashed her dark blues at me. “I’ve been trying to find the courage to ask you what you want.”
“What I want? Right now? I want you to apologize for being such a jerk. Then I want us to make up and move on.”
She smiled weakly. “No, not right now. I mean what you want out of life. What do you yearn for, Jamie?”
Because it was obviously important to Chris, I took a moment to consider, then shrugged. “I don’t really feel any deep yearning.”
“Everyone yearns. There has to be something you want that’s bigger than you, unattainable even, something that drives you.”
“Chris, I’m happy. I’m content. I have a great job at Carleton, at least I think I still do, where I love the faculty and the students. My life is full of art. And now? I’m living in London, for God’s sake, and most of the people we love have come to visit. I’m healthy. My brain works. And most of all, I have you. I have nothing left to yearn for except world peace and a rational plan to combat climate change.”
Chris pressed her lips together. “I can appreciate that you’re content. That’s not a bad thing. But…but you seem to lack ambition.”
I could feel my eyes double in size. “Chris, I work hard. I learn something new about myself, and about the world, every day.”
She struggled out of the chair and began pacing in a circle around me. “Don’t you want a painting of yours to hang in the National Gallery some day?”
“The Gallery only shows Western European art, thirteenth to nineteenth centuries.”
“Okay, then, the Tate Modern.”
I nodded toward the board on the wall. “I suppose, but it’s highly unlikely the Tate is going to devote much wall space to Mr. Froggity.”
“So that’s why you’re not trying?”
“Not trying? Chris, I’m painting nearly every day. I’m proud of these paintings. Yeah, the Froggity thing is getting old, but it’s paying my bills.”
“But you could be so much better than this.”
“Why must everyone push for the best job, the best body, the highest position? Why must you take something wonderful, like contentment, and turn it into a horrible weakness?”
“Because it’s important to me.” She stopped pacing.
I tipped my head back and drained my glass. “Well, okay, then what do you want?”
“I want to break open the field of neurobiological psychotherapy. I want to conduct history-making research.” She hesitated. “I also want you to want more than you want.”
A surprised chuckle bubbled up my throat and slipped out. “Let me get this straight. Your ambition is that I get more ambitious.”
“Yes.”
“Chris, I’ve loved you with every fiber of my being for ten years. I care for you when you’re sick. Every day I look for new ways to make you laugh. For ten winters I’ve filled your hot water bottle.” One of the strange things that had glued us together was a hatred of electric blankets, and a love of snuggling our feet up to the spreading warmth of a hot water bottle. Filling each other’s bottle had become a symbol of our love and devotion. I drew in a shuddering breath, not afraid to show her I was upset. “You think I’m unambitious, that I’m wasting my life. That’s really, really hard to hear.”
Chris’s face softened and she took my hands in hers. “Good. Maybe it will get you thinking about your future and what drives you.”
“What drives me is love and beauty and the feel of a brush on canvas. Isn’t that enough?”
We stood facing each other. Chris’s eyes were shaded in the poor light. “Not for me,” she whispered.
So. Now it was out. Chris didn’t want a contented me. She wanted an ambitious me.
Chris hugged herself. “I don’t know what to say. I can’t help wanting what I want. You are so smart and talented that I just wish you would push yourself harder.” She waved toward my painting. “Like that.”
I filled my lungs with air. “You want to know what I want? One, I want us to hold hands and be okay. Two, I want us to figure out a way through this by talking more about ambition and see where it might take us. Three, I also want all six original My Little Ponies and an Easy Bake-Oven and a Crocodile Dentist game that works. Four, I want directions to Rajamani’s lab so I can show up Monday morning at nine a.m.”
Chris’s face crumpled into tears. “I want all of that too,” she said softly. “Except for the Crocodile Dentist game. It scared the pee right out of me, literally.”
I pulled Chris into a hug and held her tightly enough that her crazy expectations about ambition couldn’t fit between us. Finally, she pulled away and blew her nose. “Let’s go home. I’d be happy to give you directions to Rajamani’s office.”
Home was a two-bedroom flat in a four-story building of brown brick that faced a small park called Red Lion Square. The view outside our windows wasn’t the park, but the apartment building next door. The narrow street between the two buildings was a shortcut for commuters walking to and from the Holborn Tube station two blocks away, so the sound of feet scuffling and pedestrians talking came with the flat.
The flat had worn mustard carpeting, cream walls, glass door handles, and white fixtures. My favorite was the faucet in the tub—the shower head rested like an old-fashioned phone in its cradle. The first time I took a bath and tried to wash my hair with the “phone,” I managed to spray everything in the bathroom but my head.
That night I lay awake for hours, puzzling through all that had been said. I’d never really stopped and analyzed my life. What if I had stopped trying? What if I’d let complacency look like contentment?
Fire truck.