“We had a whole life,” he says. “And that whole life … is gone. It seems absurd that I’m supposed to just get over that.”
“I don’t know if you are,” she says.
“But I have to,” he says. “I can’t go on like this.”
“Like what?”
“There was this quiet that came after my wife died,” he says. “This normal routine that developed that wasn’t really life but was very much like life. I could get through the day if I just concentrated on these very menial tasks. I used to love nothing more than like, just peeling potatoes for dinner. I swear I could feel okay as long as I was just peeling those potatoes. But then you asked me in the hot tub when I started to feel better, and it’s a hard thing to answer, because I’m actually not sure I’m better. I think I’ve just been stuck in that neutral place ever since. Where everything is … fine.”
He says being here is weirder than he expected.
“Everyone keeps looking at me and saying, Congratulations, you must be so happy,” he says.
“Why is that weird?”
“I’m not sure happy is a feeling for me anymore,” he says. “Ever since Wendy died, I don’t really think about what will make me happy. It’s like I decided at some point that I can’t ever be happy again, so I should just think about what will make other people happy.”
She nods. She looks out at the fireworks.
“That’s really why I went to Lila’s art gallery that day,” Gary says. “Because Jim really wanted to go. I said no, I was too bummed out. It was my wedding anniversary. But Jim kept pushing for it, and I wanted to make Jim happy. After all he did for us. I didn’t get why Jim of all people wanted to go to an art gallery. I think he thought he was making me happy, giving me something to do on a sad day. But whatever. We went.”
He walked around Lila’s mother’s gallery, annoyed with Jim, annoyed with himself. He knew the motions, the nodding of the head, the looking deeply at the colors to take in each one. But he couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel anything, and he didn’t know if this meant something was wrong with him or the paintings. It was always Wendy who was the art critic—the one who would deem them bad or good, whereas Gary always went by the price. If the painting was being sold for a hundred thousand dollars, it must be good.
“But the painting of Patricia had no price on it,” he says. “It felt like an opportunity, a test. I stared at it for so long, thinking, Is this a good painting? Or bad?”
He had felt guilty when Lila came over and started talking like she expected him to take the painting home. Started describing where he could hang it, when it hadn’t even occurred to him to buy it.
“And then Lila walks into my office a few days later,” he says. “They had come to me for a second opinion. And it felt like such a coincidence, like we were being brought together for a reason. Lila was so hopeful that I became hopeful.”
Hope is a powerful thing. He looked at the old man’s pictures from the colonoscopy, and he saw the mass, but it all looked potentially fixable to him.
“I know I save lives, but I also ruin lives. I say a few words and then watch a person go from being one thing to another thing entirely. I didn’t understand that until a doctor did it to me and Wendy,” he says. “So I suggested one more round of chemo. I suggested this could work. Or at least potentially extend his life by years. And they were so happy. Man, I loved that feeling. It was such a high. I wanted more of it. I wanted to make her happy again. So I went back to the gallery and actually bought the painting.”
“At least, I tried to,” he says. “But she insisted I take it for free. A gift for taking care of her father.”
It felt good to take the painting home. To put it in his bathroom, just like Lila suggested. It felt like the first thing he had done since his wife died. A small step back into the world, a nice gesture, a fight against the entropy, something he could do to be human to another human. But mostly it was a decision to say: I don’t know if this is good or bad, but I think this painting is meaningful.
“Because that’s the point of art, isn’t it?” Gary asks. “Artists look at the world and see opportunities for creating meaning. Wendy was always looking at her own suffering and trying to see something in it. Even at the end, when she was dying. And I think that’s why I’ve always been jealous of artists. Every day, I look at a colon and I either see … death or shit,” Gary says. “I relied on Wendy to see other, more beautiful things for me.”
He leans back.
“Honestly, it’s nice to hear you talk this way about art,” Phoebe says. “I’ve actually been a little down on art.”
She tells him how lately she worries she always read books just for the feelings they gave her in the end, and she’s not sure how this is any different from reading porn.
“Weren’t you the one who told me you were impressed by those people?” Gary asks. “Those people who will read four hundred pages just to get off?”
“Oh, you mean like you?” she says, and he smiles.
“Well, I think it’s amazing,” Gary says. “How much work we’ll do just to feel something. I don’t think there is anything more human than that.”
Phoebe agrees. She feels such tenderness for him, but she doesn’t know how to say that, so she says, “I’ve missed talking like this.”
She loves deep, winding conversations that go up and down, especially in the dead of night when everyone should be sleeping. She has forgotten the way conversations, really good ones, can change her—shape-shift her like a tree. Sometimes leave her bare, sometimes leave her fuller.
“I’ve missed talking like this, too,” Gary says. “It’s very easy to tell you things, you know. Is this the effect you have on everybody?”
“Historically, no,” she says. “Often I’ve been known to make people more uncomfortable than they were before they started talking to me.”
“I can’t imagine it,” he says. “I feel like I could tell you anything.”
The honesty of his comment cuts right through her, and she can hardly bear it.
“You’re drunk.”
“It’s not just that,” he says, and looks hurt.
She should stand up. Go back to her room. But then she thinks of Lila standing on her bed, shouting, “I don’t want to marry Gary.” She thinks, this wedding is over. This man deserves to hear something true.
“I know,” she says. “I feel it, too.”
He scratches his beard, something he does, she notices, when he gets a little nervous. Once the wedding is called off, she thinks, Gary won’t have to shave it. It’s the first time Phoebe allows herself to fantasize about the wedding being called off. About a future where she can reach out and touch his face.
In some other version of this story, she would. And they would kiss. Then wake up and feel awful about it in the morning. But Phoebe knows too much to do that now. Phoebe has had too many awful mornings for a lifetime. So Phoebe just stands there, admiring his face, even the gray at the edges. Especially the gray. She didn’t understand that this is what happens as you get older—that the same thing that repulsed her when she was young is the same exact thing that draws her near now. There is something incredibly sexy to Phoebe about Gary’s gray hairs, his exhaustion, his genuine confusion about life, and she’s not sure she even understands why. She is drawn to the exhaustion of a lived life, to the man who has loved deeply and then lost suddenly and carries on. A man who has buried his wife and walked away and woke up to peel potatoes for dinner. A man who has lived through enough to appreciate the stones beneath his feet.
“So when did Lila tell you it was a naked painting of her mother?” Phoebe asks.
It’s good to see him laugh.
