I could feel a kind of hysteria taking root in my brain. I pushed it away. If Gretchen never wanted to see me again, I was going to tell her some shit she probably didn’t want to hear. Because that was what you did when you loved someone—which I still did, even though it wasn’t mutual. “Can I say one more thing? Something unrelated?”
“Can I stop you?” she said, her voice resigned in a way that made me sad.
Here went nothing. Maybe I was wrong. But I didn’t think so. And if I was right, it needed saying. “You’re using the studio as a shield. You’re using this whole businesswoman/entrepreneur identity as a shield. A distraction.”
“What thehellare you talking about?”
“I don’t think you want to be doing this.” I gestured around the room.
She didn’t say anything, just looked at me with a degree of affront that made me feel shaky. But I pressed on. “You don’t want me. Fine. But I think you want to be a choreographer.”
“Fuck you, Teddy,” she said, and I recoiled as if she’d struck me. “Go back and listen to ‘Lemon Tree.’ I’m the fruit. I’m sour. By choice. Don’t be telling yourself I’m sweet. Listen to the lyrics.”
I kept going. She had already rejected me, so I was determined to say what she needed to hear. “What happened to the hole?” I still didn’t know exactly what had been up with that, but I didn’t have to. I’d seen how it energized her. “You were on fire for a few days there.”
“What happened is that in normal life, you can’t fuck around digging holes. In normal life, you have to do your job.”
“I’m making a solo album,” I said. “I’m going to play all the instruments. I’ve got more songs than I can use. I wrote a ton over second session when you weren’t there.”
“So you were inspired by myabsence,” she shot back. “Sort of seems like I’m the opposite of a muse.”
Normally, a comeback like that would have been delivered in a bantery way. It would have delighted me, and I’d have dished something back. But there was no bantering here. She meant what she said.
So I kept pushing forward. It was all I knew to do. “These songs are completely different from Concrete Temple. They’re folk-rock.”
She didn’t say anything, just continued to gaze at me with a blank expression that freaked me out.
“I’m doing something new,” I said, in case she wasn’t getting the point. “I’m as scared as you are, but I’m doing my scary thing.”
There was a pause that felt like it lasted a year, but it was probably only five seconds, before she said, “I’m not scared. I’m busy.”
The way she was looking at me as she lied to my face: wow. She knew I knew she was lying, but she did it anyway. That was what hurt the most, more than her not wanting to be with me. To me, it said that all our frank conversations in the woods, in the lake, in bed, hadn’t meant anything. I understood the concept of camp friends, or a camp boyfriend, or whatever, but wasn’t half the point of those camp relationships that they cut out the bullshit? That without the distractions of technology, of cars and cities and jobs and family, you skipped straight to the truth? Confronted your own bullshit? Had your overdue reckoning?
I certainly had. I wasn’t the same person I’d been ten weeks ago. Some of that was down to the setting, to Wild Arts itself. But a lot of it was down to Gretchen. She floated next to me in the lake and listened. She lay in my arms—in the reverse Fruit Roll-Up and, later, in my bed—and told me her secrets. I’d thought. A prickling sensation started behind my eyeballs.
Fuck. I had to get out of here before I started crying.
So that was what I did. Turned and hightailed it out of the building in which Gretchen was preparing to imprison herself.
Jack followed. “Hey, let’s get that beer now.”
“No thanks.”
I crossed midblock, aiming for his car. When he didn’t follow, I got out my phone. “I’ll get an Uber.”
“OK, OK.” He jogged across the street. “Get in.”
I got in because it was the path of least resistance—the path that would get me out of there the fastest—but I would have preferred an Uber. My mind was reeling and my skin was hot all over. Shame, I was pretty sure. This was what shame felt like.
“Was that supposed to be your declaration of love?” Jack asked as he pulled away.
“Uh, yeah?” Jesus. Had he heard anything I’d said?
“I heard that song you wrote, that night at the fire at Wild Arts. How can you be so, to use a phrase I abhor, emotionally intelligent but also so utterly dumb?”
“Huh?”
“How can you write a song like that about the nuances of human relationships but approach your own like a caveman with a cudgel?”
