That night, he’d given me a debit card to his checking account. After paying for the moving truck down from Cambridge, I had less than forty dollars in the bank. If I hadn’t had Nate, I would have had to return to Houston, since I wasn’t strong enough to hold a full-time job. I put my head in my hands.

“They find out you were in a psychiatric hospital and that’s their reaction? They should be getting on the next plane,” he said, drying his hands on a kitchen towel. Nate didn’t go into lab after dinner anymore. His life before me had consisted of waking up before eight; eating something ascetic for breakfast; cycling into the physics department; after a light dinner, relaxing before heading back to lab, where he worked until one or two in the morning. But now, because of me, he stayed home.

His uncharacteristic judgment surprised me and confirmed that I had to leave my parents behind. I had already started with the Stew. Could I finish it? I had tried so many times, and it was always too painful. It was easier to embrace them while it pricked, a flower with thorns. I reached for them in my weakness, toward some time, perhaps in my imagination, when I felt entirely loved and content. But the memory was a mirage, shimmering and distant.

2.

WHEN OUR SUBLET ENDED, WE moved to a shabbier apartment above a bakery. Nate had spent most of his savings supporting his parents the year before, and me now, so we lived on a budget. We had no idea the attic apartment—a Puccini-style bohemian garret—was infested with chihuahua-sized rats so audacious I woke up to one scurrying across the bedsheets. The ceiling sloped down at the edges of the apartment, so we knelt on a stool to do the dishes. One warm day, I smelled shit and discovered the wastewater line had been routed with the sewer, which off-gassed into the shower.

Despite all this, I remained hopeful. The import of the Stew was dawning on me, and I realized I had nearly died. Reentering life, I was propelled by the dramatic change in environment, and I vowed I’d never return to any place like McLean. Whatever allowed me to survive—and perhaps thrive—was what I would do, even if it meant going off script.

I tacked a note with my phone number on tear-away strips to the neighborhood coffee shop corkboard, plastered in business cards and yoga flyers. “Two Ivy League Tutors, Educated at Princeton, Harvard,” the note advertised. That afternoon, our first client called, a billionaire from the next town over. The friendly, easygoing man—if self-made billionaires can be at all easygoing—was originally from Boston and wanted to know how I had liked the town. “It was okay. The summer was best,” I said weakly. Over the weekend, I drove to his home and began to tutor his children.

Nate took up odd jobs, like setting out the daily department tea and cookies for the faculty and graduate students for seventeen dollars an hour. A star in the department, he shouldn’t have been washing coffee tins and picking up after the other students, but he did everything without complaint. In the meantime, I brushed up on the SAT and GRE and was hired as an instructor at the Princeton Review. I also got an internship at a catering company that paid seven dollars an hour. I didn’t mind—the wage was a windfall; I simply wanted to work, learn, and be creative. I re-created every recipe at home for Nate. I learned how to make a ganache, tie a filet mignon, bake a roasted pear and almond tart, and cook anything with blue cheese, because it was the rage then.

Besides groceries, I spent my earnings on painting classes and art supplies. I painted eight hours a day in a corner of our attic apartment which I turned into an art studio, a real—not dream—iteration of the white room I’d been searching for when I’d left college my sophomore year. In the late afternoon, I tutored. In the evening, I cooked and baked. Soon, I quit the catering company when I realized I preferred painting and could make up the money teaching. Three mornings a week, I took painting classes at the arts center in town. When the assignment was to make an abstract self-portrait, I went to the library and read about Abstract Expressionism and Cubism before I made the paintings. For every assignment, I did four or five more paintings to experiment. I also took classes at the community college, where I was the oldest among the eighteen-year-olds getting associate’s degrees, while at the arts center I was the youngest in a sea of retirees. Wherever I was, the painting never felt like work. It only felt like difficult, freeing play.

I had intended to keep up with my Latin and ancient Greek, but month after month, the texts remained untouched. One day, as I moved my old grad school notebooks to another shelf, the drawing from the Stew fell out.

“Make a drawing,” the therapist had said. “Show where you are in life and what you want in the future.” Show what you want.

“This is me, right now, in the darkness,” I had shared with the group. “I’m trying to get to the other side of the bridge.” I pointed to where Nate and my family waited. Behind them was a star. Now that drawing was stuck between The Metaphysics of Morals and What We Owe to Each Other on a shelf in the rat-infested apartment.

You are not an artist, I had reminded myself in the Stew. You are a philosophy student, and philosophy is hard. Law school had been hard, too, but in another way; it had been about rules, like the rules of my mother, and so, too, had philosophy, except the rules were about living and thinking. In art, there were no rules, just the chance to listen to myself and express what came. In it, I found a sacred space for my idealism and the visibility I’d always yearned for.

As I embarked on an artistic life, from time to time I revisited the drawing of the black bridge, which appeared so crudely rendered now. In the Stew, I thought depression was on one side and health on the other, but maybe it wasn’t that. Maybe it was oughts I was stepping away from and something else I was moving toward. And what was the star? Worth, but perhaps not based on previous notions of success and external visibility. It gleamed yellow and bright, but in reality, it was mysterious. Nate said someday I would realize the Stew was not the end, but rather the beginning. Maybe that was part of the star, too.

Jon Peter had one magnificently long eyebrow hair that shot up out of the rest in a decorative flourish for his face. Unlike Salvador Dalí, for whom a similar ornamental stroke added frisson and focus, it served to soften Jon Peter and rendered him more approachable.

In some ways he was the art teacher with whom I had the most in common. Unlike my other painting instructors who were decades older, Jon Peter was my age. He wasn’t a hippie who pitted art against academia. Nor was he a Freudian like my portrait instructor, a curmudgeonly Russian who loved scandalizing his students’ suburban sensibilities by declaring that all painting was sex. Jon Peter was also the first person I grew close to in the world who hadn’t attended a traditional college, which of course was a religion in my family. After high school he trained at a small art school in Minnesota where he learned how to make a realistic portrait out of just four colors. This alchemy was what he was trying to impart in “Techniques of the Old Masters.”

I felt tremendously capable in front of my paints. At twenty-six, I was young enough to possess some blind confidence, but old enough not to take for granted any opportunities, since I had a share in creating them. When I painted, I heard only my voice, no one else’s. The feeling of completion and utter wellness that accompanied drawing when I was a child pierced through like a pinprick of light. I laid out my palette with generous squeezes of paint. From Jon Peter’s table of still life objects, I selected a vase, a platter, and two clusters of red grapes. I arranged the objects as artfully as I could in the black box he had us construct, and clamped on a light which threw a shadow onto the back in the shape of a midnight crescent. I unpacked a large canvas and, using my hog-hair brush, etched out the world that was darkness from the world that was light.

The class broke midway into the three hours. The other students milled about with coffee, but I wasn’t tired—I never was when painting.

“You might rest. You only have one arm after all,” Jon Peter said, coming up behind me. A couple of months earlier, I’d hurt my right arm while scoring stained glass.

“One arm, which I need to save for painting, feeding, and washing myself,” I said.

“Looks great though.” He pointed at my painting, which was all reds and magentas. Because I couldn’t blend finely with my left hand, I placed each brushstroke down as decisively as I could, letting it sit on the canvas, and the strokes together formed a sculptural texture.

“The grapes are good,” he went on. “I see you got the form shadows on each one of those. The highlights are going to be less pronounced because the fruit is fake, not wet and juicy.”

“I’m going to set this up when I get home and buy some real grapes. See what the difference is.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jon Peter studying my bandaged arm.

“Are you a righty or a lefty?” he asked with mock suspicion. “I wouldn’t have guessed you weren’t a lefty except for the sling.”

“Righty. I am getting better at painting with my left. I can be more precise once my arm heals.”

He furrowed his brow, and that one dramatic eyebrow hair drooped. “You seem fearless,” he said. “My guess is you don’t require instruction from me, I just need to get out of your way. Whatever you need, tell me, and I’ll make sure you get it.”

The long hair popped up again.

3.

A YEAR AFTER THE STEW, I opened my eyes, and the clock next to the bed read seven thirty. I had slept through the night.

I was healing myself.

4.

THE NEXT SUMMER, FOUR YEARS after I graduated from college, Nate and I married.

My parents wanted us to have the wedding in Houston so Umma could help plan. But Houston and a two-hundred-person wedding of mostly Koreans meant nothing to Nate. “Irving and Lorraine got married at city hall in the morning. They had lunch and went to the movies. By dinnertime, he was back at lab.” Nate quietly alluded to his advisor and his wife as I selected menus and signed food-and-beverage contracts. I suppose this is how he thinks you become successful in life, by engaging in zero unnecessary hoopla and putting your time into work and not people. But then I immediately chastened myself. Nate, of course, had put time into people. I tried to accept his participation would be limited to his appearance on the wedding day, but whenever I heard him joke to his friends that he was going to be a guest at his own wedding, I got mad. As for me, as the day approached, I was tying more bows and counting more RSVP cards than I was painting or drawing.

Someone besides Umma who took an interest in the wedding was my cousin Tae Hyun. Despite his divorce, he still believed in the promise of marriage and offered to have my wedding hanboks made.

“Tae Hyun says he hopes Nate will like his! The pastels are very on-trend right now!” Umma yelled from the other room, where she was on the phone with Seoul. In a giddy voice, she admonished her nephew for spending too much. It was the toys and food at Lotte World all over again.

One searingly bright and cloudless summer afternoon, Nate and I changed: I out of my dupioni gown, he out of his tux, on the lapel of which was pinned a single gardenia. I dressed in my bright magenta chima and Nate in his peach pants and cobalt-blue jeogori, in preparation for the Korean bowing ceremony. We were changing, from man and woman into man and wife, from a Western couple into an Eastern one. An hour before, Father Ko from years past officiated the English, Korean, and Latin wedding mass.

During the hour-long service, I tried to breathe. I was stressed from arriving late at the church and wondered whether my aggressively hair-sprayed bangs would look crunchy in the photos. As Father Ko intoned above, I clenched my hands together, but I wasn’t praying.

If I had the chance to relive that moment, I would pray though. I would give thanks that God had used the Stew to short-circuit the path I had barreled down. Two years at Harvard—just two years of the wrong life, and my life would not be a compromise. In that time of sickness, Nate had stepped into the void to give me the kind of love I understood: warm in intention, dutiful in practice. This was the love I’d learned from my parents.

This was all I knew.

5.

JON PETER LENT ME ARTBOOKS and introduced me to the work of living artists. I studied him as well: an artist at work on his own life. He helped me find a small painting school in Manhattan I could afford. The Monday after Nate and I returned from the wedding, I knocked on a door on the Upper East Side. It opened, a portal to another existence. I stepped in, and began my life as an artist.

During that first year of working and commuting from Princeton, art was my world, a world that my marriage made possible. While painting, I could hold many things at bay—the noonday demon, the clawing of my mother.

The following summer, Nate graduated with his PhD. He completed the degree on time, despite the year in Bozeman with his parents. At his defense, his mentor, Irving, and the other professors drilled him. His tall, slim form strode over to the front of the room. With a faint smile on his face, Nate worked. Neat lines of numbers and symbols trickled down the chalkboard. When he finished, we all clapped.

We celebrated with pizza and champagne in the department. Among the crowd was Nate’s classmate Gerald. A prodigy and teen graduate of MIT, Gerald had also completed his PhD and was returning to MIT for a professorship. The sight of him made me wonder whether, if it hadn’t been for Nate’s choice to care for loved ones, his genius might have catapulted him to similar heights. Nate was staying on at Princeton for a postdoctoral fellowship, a coveted position he was happy about—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that meeting me hadn’t been very good for his dreams.

At the beginning of August, school let out for vacation. August in New York could be miserable, which was why everyone tried to leave the city. But I took the first day of the month to walk the neighborhoods closest to Penn Station.

A broker took me past Tenth Avenue on the extreme western edge of the island. In a dingy walk-up, the shower stall abutted the kitchen sink, taking advantage of the same water line. Doorless, the toilet sat on a raised throne in the corner of the living room.

“Am I supposed to do dishes in the shower?” I exclaimed. From my bag I pulled a tennis ball I used as the end of a mahl stick to keep my hand steady when painting small details, and placed it on the scuffed floor. The broker and I watched as it rolled with growing speed from one end of the room to the other.

After a few places like that, I was thoroughly dejected and bid goodbye to the sweat-drenched broker who was glad to loosen his tie. The sidewalks emanated the heat of hell, and from the sewer grates hot air blew up my blousy shorts. Around Ninth Avenue in the mid-Forties, I came across a prewar building with a covered awning advertising itself as “the Whitby.” Some of the unsavory elements in Giuliani’s Times Square cleanup had been thrown to this patch of Hell’s Kitchen, littered with gentlemen’s clubs and sex shops. Women loitered in front of the nearby Aladdin Hotel. Across the street, an establishment calling itself “Private Eyes” had rolled out the red carpet. Here goes nothing, I sighed, and passed under the Whitby’s wide green canopy.

It was cool and dark inside the lobby. I inquired about vacancies, and the office manager and I rode the elevator to a surprisingly serene one-bedroom on a high floor. I walked to the back of the apartment where the windows looked out toward Central Park. Everywhere was light.

I turned toward her. “I’m interested,” I said.