My boyfriend Ed couldn’t keep supporting me on one income. He didn’t say so, but I knew. The nights out were fewer and fewer. And he never bought new clothes anymore. He was taking any work he could get on the side — tutoring, copywriting — and he was talking about getting another teaching job on top of the adjunct situation he already had. Asking his parents for another loan was out of the question; he wouldn’t even discuss it. Apart from that, I needed money of my own for the inevitable split. It was hard to say out loud, but Maria’s success made me ashamed to go back to working in a restaurant. We were the same age, had received the same education, had come from the same place and if she walked in for dinner, at a restaurant I worked in but couldn’t afford to dine in, and I had to seat her again, I’d die on the spot. I remembered that my painting professor from Bard, Moser, had told me to call him if I ever needed help. Folksy, salt of the earth, generous. 

“I really mean it,” he had said. “You’re a good person. Let me give you a hand. I’ve got friends.” 

Naturally, I had vowed to never call Moser and didn’t believe he would help me even if he could. I was so cynical, despite all the good luck I’d had finding a boyfriend and a place to live. In the beginning, when I had told Ed I’d quit my job at the restaurant to focus on painting, I expected him to throw me out on the street, but he’d done just the opposite, embraced me and told me to take my time. We could make do with the little savings he had and what he made working freelance until I found something else. I couldn’t assimilate his kindness with my expectations that the world was a constant disappointment until you died. 

The next morning, I called Moser and when he answered, he said how glad he was to hear from me and asked how I was. The first adult who had ever really been kind to me for no reason at all. After some friendly catching up, nice talk, I told him I needed his help. Could he put me in touch with someone who might give me a job? He said he would keep an eye out and asked me where he could reach me. I gave him Ed’s landline and thanked him, goodbye. 

Two days later, Moser called me with an address for a painter’s studio in Chelsea. A young woman artist whose name sounded familiar. Moser had put in a good word. I was to go there for an interview. When? That afternoon. I needed money, didn’t I? I thanked Moser and told him I’d stay in touch. I told Ed the good news and said I’d take a cab, but he insisted on driving me. He put his work aside and we went out into the cool April day, stopping for heros on the way, drinking sodas in the car, Ed wishing me good luck and telling me to make sure to look the artist in the eye. I evaded eye contact and Ed had noticed this early on. He said it was something I should correct while I still could. In America, Ed said, eye contact is everything. When he spoke that way, I thought he’d make a good father, so absolute, sure of what was good. I rang the doorbell and a young, dark-haired woman with a middle part came down. You could see her ribs, the sharp bones beneath her cheeks and forehead. She had porcelain, almost reflective skin. There was a little dog cradled in her left arm and her T-shirt was covered in red paint, the thin cotton loose against her narrow frame. 

“Ruth?” she asked. I nodded. 

“Emily.” She adjusted the dog, and gave me her hand to shake. 

We took a big freight elevator down to her studio. It was a dark space; there was very little natural light and she made up for it with harsh, industrial clip-on lamps with flickering bulbs that needed to be changed. It’s impossible to describe Emily without noting that Adderall was very new in those days. It was only beginning to be widely available. But it was all over the news and plastered in the subway stations. Advertisements making many promises: soar confidently into the new school year, meet your true potential. Similar drugs had been around for lethargy and depression, weight loss, dread. But Adderall, “ADD for all,” with its talk of inclusion and its appeals to innate human potential, could not be more of the moment. I’d taken it only once, to finish a big art history final, but didn’t find it conducive to the work of looking at photographs in an empty corner of the library. It only made me want to go to the pub to drink and talk for hours. Adderall seemed better for partying or manual labor. It hadn’t been for me, but I could spot people on it from a mile away. College had been full of these types. Emily was one such case. Her eyes darted everywhere. There was literally writing on her walls. Large scrolls of text in varicolored ink written directly on the white surfaces. Long red lines that connected one note to the other. If I didn’t know she was a painter, I’d think she was down there writing a manifesto. There were easily twenty-five completed paintings propped up in the studio and more works in progress stacked in the back corner. Her dog’s trembling resembled her own and she spoke at a rapid clip, without taking a breath. First recalling an old boyfriend she’d had that had gone to Bard, then talking about the caged birds her grandmother kept in South Africa when Emily was a little girl. 

Emily was pale, her undertones harsh with shades of pink and blue. Her studio was that of a hoarder’s, materials piled everywhere, tall mounds collecting against the yellowing walls. That I could smell the cigarettes over the stench of oil paints with the closed windows made me wonder how Emily’s poor heart and lungs were still going. The Adderall couldn’t have helped. She had a look that was somehow both spacey and hyperfocused; her mind wandered but she always circled back to her original point.

“My old boyfriend was Moser’s student. I hated him, the boyfriend, but Moser was really fantastic. He’s a good guy. Shit painter, great guy. He spoke very highly of you.” Emily’s candor shocked me, but I smiled and nodded. I made eye contact as Ed had reminded me to do. 

“So, tell me, Ruth, do you know how to stretch a canvas?” 

“Yes.” 

“And you’re fine with dogs? And simple math?” she asked. 

“Yes, to both.” 

“I do a bit of research, so I may need help cleaning up my notes.” She pointed to the writing on the walls, the stack of books piled on the old schoolhouse desk. “Do they cover spelling and grammar at Bard?” 

“Yeah, they do,” I said, standing up straight. Looking her in the eye. 

“Just a joke,” Emily said, smiling, her yellow teeth bold against her skin. “You’ve got the job. You know, I think we’ll have a fun time. I usually work alone, but, um, you have to know when to ask for help. Isn’t that right, Guy?” she asked, petting her dog’s matted hair. As she spoke, describing the job in further detail, I couldn’t stop staring at the writing on the walls. She had all these numbered sentences piling up over one another and I knew she had written them in earnest: 

TAKE GOOD CARE OF YOUR BODY, KEEPING IT CLEAN, TUNED, AND WELL OILED, LIKE A CAR. 

EMBLEMS CONCEAL. MAKE SURE THERE AREN’T ANY “SYMBOLS” IN YOUR PAINTINGS. 

ALWAYS GET A SECOND OPINION — DOCTORS, GALLERISTS, ETC.

USE THE SHAME TO MAKE PAINTINGS THAT MAKE MONEY. REPEAT. 

FIND A VERY CRAFTY ACCOUNTANT. FIND A “GUY” FOR EVERYTHING. 

DO NOT LET SEX GET EXTREME WITH MEN YOU DON’T KNOW. 

There were easily a hundred similar sentences scrawled on the walls. Some were incoherent, while others made their own strange kind of sense. I didn’t want to write her off, or say it was just the drugs. There must have been a logic to what she was doing since it had made her able to work so athletically. If she were a man, it might not have seemed so crazy. Her scrawls might have been collected in a book of aphorisms with a serious foreword. She saw my puzzled stare and explained. 

“Those are just my ideas,” she said, as if that clarified anything.

In the following weeks, I found the work with Emily to be stable, rigid. She paid me on time and told me I could use the studio for my own work, on off days. She blasted prog rock albums over the loudspeakers and worked the same hours that I did. Her instructions left nothing to chance. She constantly asked me if she was underpaying me or overworking me and she brought me to readings and openings, on the rare occasion that she went out at all. Emily was very successful for her age. It was always a bit surprising when I remembered she was only five years older than I was, but could afford a studio and an assistant, and that she lived entirely off of her paintings. But she wasn’t megalomaniacal as one might expect. 

Once, while I was stretching canvases, she approached me and asked if I wanted to join her for lunch. Strange, considering I’d never seen her eat. Not once had she ever mentioned food. Emily took me out for dim sum in a small restaurant whose only patrons were elderly Chinese couples. She promised it was very authentic and asked me about my life on the way: where was I from, did I like New York, what sort of music did I listen to. Surprisingly difficult questions to answer. My identification with Kenya was faint. My identification with everything was faint. I knew where I had lived, where I’d gone to school, the essential facts about myself, but had little to say about myself. Living in Rhode Island and the years at Bard and my being a woman were not things that made me feel very talkative. But I liked Billie Holiday, and I liked New York when its weather was in transition: fall and spring, when we were all on the precipice of something and were fittingly romantic about the future and the past. 

Emily told me things with her ex-boyfriend from Bard were plaguing her. He was a writer and lived in the neighborhood. He popped up at events where he knew she’d be, but when she approached him to be cordial, he gave her the cold shoulder, once turning around so that his back was facing her while their mutual friends spoke nearby. He spread horrible rumors that she was a sex pest and an addict. Her ex-boyfriend was half Chinese and claimed that Emily was a racist, but how could she be? She thought Eastern cultures were far superior to Western cultures. He was doing it because she was more successful than he was. Even though, she admitted, he was the bigger talent. While explaining this to me, Emily only ate one half of a piece of shumai, but she drank enough for the both of us. Aren’t boys the worst? Emily asked. To appease her I told her an abridged version of my story with my ex-boyfriend James from Bard. I laid it on thick, drawing out his grim moods and abrupt disappearance from school, but to tell the truth, I didn’t feel anything toward James anymore. His life, his funeral, I thought, whenever he came to mind. It was a consolation for Emily to hear about the mysterious tryst with James. His big promises and lies. What I had gone through with him made her feel better about her own situation, I could tell. And because of this cheap moment of solidarity, she assured me a raise and told me she’d pay for my health insurance, too. The conversation shifted to artists we liked and, weirdly, I brought up Maria, though we hardly saw one another those days and I didn’t feel particularly qualified to speak about her life anymore. 

“Maria? The lesbian… from Cuba?” Emily asked. 

“Panama… but yes, that’s my old friend. We grew up together.” 

When Maria came up in conversation, I hardly ever explained the extent to which we really knew one another. 

“Is that right?” Emily pushed the food around her plate. “She’s a real it girl, isn’t she?”

“You know her work?” 

“Yeah, well. We have all the same friends, but when I see her out, she pretends she doesn’t know who I am. She’s got that hot girlfriend,” Emily said. 

“Oh, do you mean Sheila? Maria can be kind of… cold, but she means well.” I replied. 

“Well, good for her. Black artists are really hot right now,” Emily said, waving the server over for another beer. She became more impatient, her disposition less friendly. She started to tap her fingers. I could tell she wanted to stay on the topic of Maria and air her grievances. A part of me wanted to defend Maria and another part hated that she was someone my boss saw as an equal, as competition. 

“I don’t think Maria ever really had the spirit of an artist; she likes the attention. Privately, I don’t know if it’s real, you know,” I said. 

“She definitely doesn’t have the spirit. I mean, let’s see who’s around in ten years. When this fad dies down.” 

“Sure,” I said.

“Come to think of it, I might’ve seen you in one of her videos. In that group show a few months back. I thought that piece was really manipulative.” 

“Honestly, I had no idea she used that footage. But that’s how she is. Whatever Maria wants…. She’s always been that way since her mother killed herself and all. She’s a black hole of a person.” 

“Right, that’ll do it,” Emily said. “Step over anyone’s head…. You know, Ruth, I’d love to do a studio visit with you.” 

I looked at Emily more closely. She had a glint in her eye. I’d mistaken it for curiosity before, but it looked more like greed. I smiled and said we should plan a studio visit for the coming week. 

Ed picked me up from Emily’s studio and asked if I wanted to go out to a movie. I hoped that what I’d said about Maria wouldn’t get back to her. I knew how people gossiped. He asked me how work had gone; I didn’t want to talk about it. We walked down the narrow sidewalk full of streams of people headed out for dinner, for drinks. I felt a violent rage at all these people on the street. Anger over the fact that I was unsuccessful, doomed to return to that little apartment in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, where all the days were the same, slow torture. Rage over my jealousy of Maria and my love for her, no void big enough to store that. That I could tell Ed all these grim feelings and still be accepted was all the more reason to keep them to myself. I didn’t want to spoil our fun or scare him away. 

We saw an interesting-looking movie on the marquee and bought two tickets. He bought us popcorn and sodas. In a dim movie theater, he placed something cool and round in my palm. I squinted at it in the dark. A silver ring. I watched a silver car explode on the screen, killing a man. I put the ring on. It wasn’t possible to say yes or no in the quiet theater. We were at that small cinema in Greenwich Village where everyone in the audience was always over eighty years old and some kind of connoisseur. You felt bad if you drank your soda too loudly in a place like that. We walked out into the spring night and ducked through the traffic toward a bar on the other side of the street. I thought about the engagement. I really had no choice but to say yes. And at the same time, it didn’t feel like Ed was forcing me. He was older than I was and wanted children. If anyone I knew could afford to have a child, it was him. 

Ed was a fundamentally conservative person, risk-averse. It would have been unfair to say no and leave him stranded, having to start over at 35 with another woman after all of his generosity toward me. I believed, basically, that a person deserved to recoup on their investments. Not to mention that I loved Ed and had come to depend on him being in my life. Remember that, Ruth, that you love him. We went into a pub near the theater. I left him at the bar, where he ordered two High Lifes and shared his good news with a drunk woman in the corner. I found a pay phone and meant to dial my parents’ number, but instinctively called Maria’s apartment instead. Her girlfriend answered and handed Maria the phone. I explained it all in its simple unfolding: darkness, silver, the bang, the ring, the night. I believed I was responsible for the silence that followed, that it was mine, not hers. Had Emily already spread a terrible rumor? Or was it the engagement Maria disapproved of? I took her silence as displeasure. I saw the world’s silence as similarly watchful and unsympathetic. 

Since the ring was already on my finger and could not come off without undesired consequences, I did not stop to consider that maybe the disapproval that emerged in our silence was my own. 

“How do you feel?” Maria asked. 

“Happy,” I said.

“Well, did you say yes?” she asked. 

“Of course I did. What else would I say?” 

“You have a say in the matter, you know.” 

“How would that look?” I asked. “If I said no?” 

“How would that look?” Maria paused. “That’s the quintessential question of your life.” Then she rushed me, very abruptly, off the phone.