The New 8 Million: Love, A Still Life

I met and fell in love with the man of my dreams on my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Later on, when I’d tell friends, they’d act incredulous. "That only happens in the movies," they’d said, and I’d say it, too, clinging to that perfect beginning, holding it up as evidence long after everything else told me to let go.

 

Two weeks before the fateful introduction, I’d moved from Ohio to New York, into a cramped Washington Heights apartment with a depressive roommate and her neurotic, hair-licking cat. The lobby of the building smelled of urine; the brick walls displayed half-hearted graffiti threats, ill-executed and faded. The day I arrived, I broke down in the grocery store when I realized that everyone around me was speaking Spanish, and despite my six years of studying, I couldn’t understand a single word.

 

I’d expected culture shock, but this shock was paralyzing.  Born and raised in the Midwest, I had always lived close to family and was used to quiet, small town life.  I wanted more.  I wanted adventure, opportunity, romance.  I came to New York under the pretense of going to graduate school, but I truly came to escape – from boredom, from judgment, from a three-year relationship with a man I didn't want to marry but whom everyone assumed I would.  Yet now that I was here, I didn't know where to begin. Instead of feeling liberated, I just felt scared.

 

So I wandered.  I spent those early days walking up and down the length of Manhattan, remaining nothing more than a spectator. An impenetrable divide seemed to exist between the participants out there, going about their lives, eating in restaurants, carrying shopping bags, laughing, arguing, touching one another, and me on the sidelines, waiting to be allowed entrance. At night, as I lay in the bed of the woman who had lived in my room before me, I listened to the bleating of car alarms and foreign shouts from the street below and felt myself disappearing.  I was young, lost, and yearning for love, but I had no idea where to find it. 

 

Then I went to the Met one Friday evening and love found me. He was too perfect, the ideal I had imagined since childhood – tall, handsome, with intelligent blue eyes, an artist. He approached me and asked what I thought of the painting. I can’t remember now which painting, but I do remember the way he bent his head, smiling shyly, pointing out the use of color with his long, elegant fingers. I felt grateful; I hadn’t had a real conversation since I’d moved to the city. I chose my words carefully, worried about tripping over my tongue. Together we explored the museum until closing time. The distance between our bodies gradually narrowed until our shoulders bumped in Medieval Art and neither one of us moved away. We took a taxi back to his place, where he showed me his own paintings, ending with the canvas – a still life, oranges – hanging above his bed. 

 

In every aspect, he was the opposite of the man I’d left behind in Ohio and exactly the sort of lover I’d imagined for my new life in the city. He even had the sparsely furnished Brooklyn apartment, complete with the fire escape out the front window, the shelves crammed with used books, the paintbrushes stuffed in mason jars, and the little breakfast table, covered in a stained white cloth, at which I ate French bread and drank black coffee while wearing his worn terrycloth bathrobe, the sleeves flopping over my hands.  

I came to know that apartment well. Over the course of our relationship, I moved three times, changed jobs four times, graduated, but that little breakfast table and the painting of oranges remained my constants. For a long time after our relationship finally ended, I used an image of the oranges as my screensaver. I found their familiarity comforting, a reminder of a time when I was still young enough to believe in fairytales.

 

After my first night with The Painter, I went home and immediately called my Ohio boyfriend to break up. Bolstered by my new romance, I wasn’t as kind as I could have been. I listened to his tears, and then I hung up and cried. I had just given up a life that promised a big outdoor wedding, a house, a family, and all of the safety and stability that come with them. My future suddenly opened up wide. I stopped crying. I called The Painter.

 

“I’m at a very confusing place right now,” he said. “But I like you. A lot. That’s the problem.”

 

I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I thought of all that I had given up just fifteen minutes before. Right now my Ohio love was cursing my existence. We’d planned to name our children Isabella and Ryan. In the morning I would have to mail back the cell phone that was part of our shared plan.

 

I chose to hear the reluctance in The Painter’s voice as suppressed passion. 

 

“That’s OK,” I said. “I still want to see you.”

 

Thus, our cycle began. Over the next four years, The Painter would leave and reenter my life again and again, and through every revolution, I held on to my fantasy of the brooding artist, the misunderstood genius, the star-crossed lover, the free-spirited Bohemian. I looked to him to define me, and occasionally he lived up to the challenge. In those rare moments, my life became our life, and everything seemed perfect.

 

When he was in the mood for romance, he could be heartbreakingly romantic. We went back to the Met, where he told me I looked like a Rosseti, and to Central Park, where we took strolls at night, stopping in the middle of a baseball field to gaze up at the stars. He surprised me with his kisses, slipping his arm around my waist and swinging me into him. Always the tall girl, I liked that I had to stand on my toes to reach his lips.  We kissed in the rain under a shared umbrella. We kissed in the middle of the street in Brooklyn, across the water from the Empire State Building. We kissed in the back of taxis and pressed against his lobby’s yellow walls.

 

And then, after a month or two, he would stop calling. I ignored the disappointment, the sharp stabs of anger, and told myself he was working. He was submersed in his art, as he should be. I didn’t want to disturb. I didn’t want to lose him. 

 

During those dry spells, I concentrated on my graduate studies, and through necessity, I began to build a life. It was a life that involved walking ten blocks to a grocery store with unspoiled produce, toting too heavy bags of dirty clothes to the dingy Laundromat where I’d seen mice and then climbing back up six flights of stairs because the building’s elevator was always out of commission. I found a job as a literary agency assistant and formed friendships that involved deep conversations in overpriced bars. Slowly the fantasy of New York slipped away, and the reality took form.

 

Yet there was one piece of the fantasy that I could not let go. I went on dates with other men, but I compared every one to The Painter. How could I form a relationship with a stocky advertiser or a gawky analyst after being held in The Painter’s strong, lean arms? And just when I would be about to resign myself to these other options, my phone would ring, The Painter’s name on the screen. 

 

“I’ve been doing a lot of painting,” he would say. Or, “I’ve been depressed.” Then the apologies came, softening the parts of myself that were beginning to grow hard, bent on betraying my heart. He held my hand on a candlelit table and asked if I’d been dating other people. When I said yes, I appreciated the hurt look on his face. “I’ll treat you better,” he said. Readily, I believed him. 

 

One midsummer morning, he said he wanted to paint me. I sat on a little wooden stool, my bare feet grasping the rungs, my hair still wet from the shower. A warm breeze blew through the window. I tried hard not to move as he squinted at me, his brush poised above the canvas. I had never felt so close to this man. I had never felt so far away. Suddenly I was an object, just like the oranges, a still life, being transformed through his hand and yet remaining distinct, separate, untouched. I wanted him to look deeper. I wanted him to possess me in a way that would make me real.

 

When he had finished, he warned me that I might not like what I saw. “I paint idealized realism,” he said. “It’s not like looking in a mirror.” Then he moved aside.

 

I didn’t recognize the woman on the page. Her eyes looked worn, tired. Her nose was too long, her thighs too wide. She was beautiful, but she was not me.

 

A year later, after yet another reconciliation, we sat on his futon with glasses of wine. The room was dark except for the single candle burning on the table. The dinner he had made was waiting. He told me that he was moving to Italy in six weeks.

 

A voice deep inside me said: Stay.

 

But the word never found its way to my lips. By then I had grown up and grown out of the dream. Instead I gripped his large, calloused hands. We stayed that way for almost an hour, neither one of us speaking. 

 

I knew I would never see him again.

 

The next afternoon, walking away from his apartment down Bedford Avenue, I sucked in my tears and took a long, deep breath. Then I looked up and noticed the bustle on the streets around me. The sidewalks teemed with real life of which now I was fully a part.