Margery Bayne is a librarian by day and a writer by night. She is a published short story writer and an aspiring novelist from Baltimore, Maryland, USA. In 2012, she graduated from Susquehanna University with a Bachelor of Arts in creative writing and is currently pursuing a master’s degree in library science. When not reading and writing, she enjoys running, origami, and being an aunt. More about her and her writing can be found at www.margerybayne.com.
Chip creeps up like a fog.
“You want something to drink?” he asks loud enough and close enough to be heard over the heartbeat thump of the music.
You tell him the same thing you do every night.
From the VIP balcony you watch the crowd of a hundred-plus people pulse like one organism below. Dancing among them, like a neon splotch, is a girl in a hot pink tube top, who is definitely too young to be in here.
Chips spider-fingers graze your arm as he passes you the glass of bourbon. Had he left and come back already? Or had he come prepared?
There was a time when you took pleasure in being the only person Chip would get a drink in his own club.
Below, the lights go down and the crowd roars. It’s 11 o’clock. It always happens at 11 o’clock. The band frontman yells: “Are you ready to get down tonight!” An electric guitar squeals.
The air tastes tangy and oppressive with sweat. Overhead, an air duct churns to life, spurting your shoulders with cold.
“You could join us,” Chip says into your ear.
Behind you are a pool table and leather couches, and a party of the exclusive selection. They’re alumni of Chip’s same business program, or his father’s friends’ sons, or some other distant collaborations, plus plus-ones.
There was also a time when you played hostess. You would laugh. You would charm. You would curl your hand around Chip’s arm like touch was desirable.
But you feel like someone at some point has taken a paint stripper to you, and all that’s left is faded out and smudged. Maybe you did it to yourself. You paint on your face now instead: eyebrows and eyelashes, contour and blush. An imitation of a person you don’t have the energy to pretend to be. If your face is pretty, you don’t have to expend the effort to be a pretty soul, or a soul at all. People will take you at face value and extrapolate.
He’s gone. You’re gone. You drink. You taste nothing.
The band descends into its first song of the genre pop-y, danceable, and forgettable. Except for a harmonizing voice. It’s familiar. You blink at a distant face on stage. You know that man on the guitar.
After the set, you totter down a narrow staircase in dangerously high heels.
A green room. A knock. An admittance. Eyes meet.
“Kris.” He says your name like it’s a note that never fits on any scale.
“Nick,” you say back, a million greetings, an impossible history, all fit into his name.
A whole lot of words pile on after this — ‘how are you’ and ‘I missed you’ and ‘how long has it been?’ and ‘ten years’ and ‘wow, really, ten years?’ — and it doesn’t matter who says which part.
What’s ten years and small talk platitudes between two people who used to share ‘I love yous’? An impassable chasm and also a single step forward into a familiar embrace.
He pens a phone number on your hand in blue ink like an extra set of veins rising to the surface.
“Where’ve you been?” Chip asks when you reappear in the balcony like an assistant in a magic trick.
“I wanted to talk to the band.” An answer that’s an equal part mystery. It’s been a long time since you’ve wanted to do anything.
But it’s 2am; the club is closing. Chip cellophanes an arm around your waist as if to test your sustainability, and leads you to the car, to the penthouse, to the bedroom, to sleep.
#
You awake some time north of noon and glide around undead for a few hours after. The phone number is a readable blur on your left palm after sleeping, washing hands, and forgetting. Was that written there last night? Two nights ago? Or just a few hours back?
You call. Hang up at three rings. Wait forty five seconds. Call again.
“Hello?” A curious voice. His. Probably pitched at a note he could identify.
“Hey.” A reply. A drone, but he knows you.
A plan is set: coffee, today, soon. You need a shower first.
Because you’re bad at time, because it slides past you like cement and also sometimes skips forward outside all rules of relativity, you arrive twenty-three minutes late. Regardless, Nick stands when he sees you, like this isn’t just a coffee shop with vinyl tables, vinyl chairs, and vinyl pastries. People stand for judges and queens. Not for perpetually 29 year old unemployable women who haven’t even picked up a paintbrush for six (seven? nine? thirteen?) months.
No gallery showings, no awards, no sales, no contests or acclaim. No paintings are even being made.
Forget all hypotheticals about trees and forests and sounds the real inquiry is this: if you’re an artist that doesn’t make art, are you still an artist? Or is the pure ambition enough? Because if you do it and fail, you’re a hack or a sell out or the bullshit dreamer everyone hates. Get a real fucking job, amiright? If you stop painting, you can’t fail, and you might just save your pure artistic soul from unoriginal damnation.
He asks about the painting, after the lattes are brought, the biscotto is split. Of course he asks, because ‘art’ in its hallowed glory was your shared religion, once upon a time in the beginning, although you were in the denomination of the visual and he a worshiper of the sound.
You deflect, take a sip of that over-sweat coffee-like drink, say, “Oh, it’s… coming along.”
“I know how that feels,” he says, but you deny him this common ground. No, no. He was on stage last night (two nights ago? Just a few hours back?). He was hashtag making it.
“Well, it’s… it’s…” He is embarrassed, but he’s glowing from the inside. “It’s not exactly what I’d do with all the creative freedom in the world, but it’s getting paid to do what I love. It’s an audience caring… I can never hate the frets under my fingertips.”
You close your eyes and instead of darkness you see goldenrod yellow.
#
The girl in the hot pink tube top is back. She weaves through the crowd like that is its own sort of dance. You watch her. She never goes to the bar, never lingers long with any one partner, and doesn’t seem interested in finding someone to leave with.
She’s just here to dance.
Not for fame. Not to seduce. Just for the existence of the dance itself.
“When was the last time we danced?” you ask Chip when he comes over to deliver your drink. Did your mind skim over and forget him asking you what you wanted, or was he the one that skipped his part?
“Did you want to?”
You shake your head in a tiny shimmer of ‘no.’ Dancing feels young, and you feel too old. And tired. And weary. Like it’s perpetually winter.
But you do… want. Not dancing. Just — in its various sensations — want.
#
The studio had been a gift easily given by Chip: a spare room in a spacious place. Chip was good at supporting when it came to financial things. Studio, supplies, shrinks. And it was good to have a pretty girl who had something on her mind to talk about at dinner parties.
Before you – a stool, an easel, and a blank canvas are already set up from the last time you entered. The last time you left without making a mark. When your desire to make that first stroke of the perfect vision in your heart had been constricted by the limitations of the brush, the acrylics, the talent.
Today you pool paint in your palm and smear it across the canvas. This isn’t art. It’s evidence. The cool paint is like congealed blood in your hands.
When you’re done, you’re covered. Yellow and green, chartreuse up your ring finger, periwinkle across your wrist.
You don’t need art right now. Not art as it’s become, choking you with pretension and expectations and the ever pounding, anxious need to be great. And the ever pounding, anxious fear that you never would be; that it was already too late.
No, you just need creation. Something that didn’t exist that now does, with you being that chemical factor. Just you and the canvas and the monstrosity smeared on it.
You hear a knock on the door. Chip leans in the frame in his daytime business button down.
“It’s been a long time since I walked in on you in here,” he says. “I like it.”
You blink, think: pretty girls with something on their mind to talk about at dinner parties. A girl that paints on canvas is better than a girl that just paints on her face.
He steps closer, looking past you, to the canvas. “Would that be… abstract expressionism?”
Oh, you think.
Because Chip hadn’t known anything about art until he met you, and then gallivanted across the city to every museum and gallery you wanted, listened to you talk, and (most important) remembered.
Oh.
You’ve judged him too harshly. You had fallen into a living nightmare illusion where you were unlovable and unloving, so you absorbed what everyone else saw and spat it back out. What else could the magnet attraction between a rich guy and a pretty girl be but tactical self-service?
“I guess,” you say. “Kind of… Joan Mitchell-like.”
“I’ll have to look her up,” he says. You know he means it.
Just because love was something you’ve forgotten the shape of doesn’t mean he had too. You had loved him once, back when you saw everything full hue instead of deeply tinted with gray. Maybe you could again, if you could push far enough through the smog.
You say, “I haven’t been very nice to you lately, have I?”
“You’ve been depressed.” He meant that with a capital D.
You press the back of your hand to your mouth, transferring paint to your lips by accident, the taste base and chemical.
“I want to love things again,” you say, although want, in itself, isn’t enough. You can “want” out of your allergies or back pain, but that doesn’t heal you. But want is more than what you had yesterday, this morning, an hour ago.
He looks at you with a softness in his eyes. Yesterday, this morning, an hour ago, you would’ve interpreted it as a vacant look, looking beyond you, his mind busy with elsewhere more interesting. Right now, because you’re feeling good enough (not good, not better, but good enough) you had remembered what the little dip in his eyelids meant: he wasn’t just looking at you now, but at you past, present, and future. You hadn’t been able to accept yourself as even a paint smear recently; how were you to believe someone else saw you as the Louvre?
“What’s different today?” he asks. “From other days.”
From yesterday, this morning, an hour ago.
What answer do you have to give? Maybe your brain is on your side today, balancing out. Or maybe the medicine is kicking in. Or maybe a melodious echo from the past reminded you who you used to be and who you used to want to be. Or, a fortuitous combination.
You turn back to your painting-creation. This is it. Every meal your mother ever cooked you. Every laugh a friend ever dragged out of your chest. Every memory imprinted in your head, and every one you imprinted in someone else’s: a bad painting, a catchy pop song echoing in your ear, a dance just for the sake of dancing, all the things that exist because you make them exist.
You say, “I wanted to know I was still alive.”
This is it.