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I thought I could see before. I’ve made millions of dollars, billions, on being able to choose evocative pieces. Sorting the wheat from the chaff, as it were, though I’ve never touched an actual stalk of wheat in my life. With Daphne, I have senses I didn’t have before. A sense of my life as something other than a collection of bleak milestones. This showing. That purchase. Home. Home. Home. An endless loop of panic and escape.
I’ll never feel grudging about it again.
I swim back out. Daphne grins at me over her sketchbook. Her smile is bright in the last of the light. Her gear will take care of her until I’m there again. If she gets cold, then fuck the surfing. I’ll take her inside and make her come in the bath.
Maybe I’ll do that anyway.
There’s time.
I can’t remember wanting time before. Only wanting the hours to die. To be gone. To leave me alone. I used to imagine an artist painting a knob on the wall, some pseudo-magical thing that could be twisted to speed up time. It never worked.
Daphne makes minutes go by at the right pace. Too quickly, if anything. I need lifetimes with her. I could hold her in my arms while she paints for several eternities. Galleries forever.
Watching her paint, feeling it, is as much of a gift as the finished pieces. She flits around the canvas. You can’t see a hummingbird’s wings when it’s in flight, and you can’t see how the painting will turn out when she begins. You can’t imagine what the forms will become. It looks like nothing at first. Like pure contrast. Darkness and light.
And then.
It becomes.
I surf another wave. The water is cold, but it doesn’t feel like punishment. It feels like being alive. She came back to me. I showed her everything. The ways I’m like my father. The weaknesses he despises. The way the world quickly becomes intolerable. She chose me anyway.
The end of the day’s light is gentle on her face. She’ll be breathtaking in the summer, too. We could come here when it’s warm. I would give anything to see her in a bathing suit, laughing in the waves. I’ve never been much for swimming, except as a means to an end, but I’d swim with her.
Another wave.
She’s opening up possibilities like a new sketchbook, right here at my house. I never knew the boundaries could expand like this. Even the ocean has been a boundary. The trouble with being on the shore is that I have the urge to swim out and never return. Surfing has clear parameters. I go out, catch a wave, and return. I do it for as long as I can stand, and then I go back inside.
We could have more than that.
It’s the same as the fifteen-block rule. I worked hard for every one of those. It was a special kind of hell in the beginning. Mortifying helplessness. Sin had to walk with me at first, because that’s the insidious part of the panic. When it sets in at my core, I’d rather die than feel it. It’s that painful. That insistent. The body tries to protect itself by swimming out into oblivion or running in front of a speeding car. I haven’t explained it in so many words to Daphne yet, but I think she would understand.
It’s more common in artists. I’ve seen echoes of that feeling in paintings. I’ve seen renderings in my own mind. In a dark, locked closet, there’s very little entertainment. I would imagine every brushstroke of nonexistent work. Frame the canvas. Hang it up. I would consider it from different angles. Think of how this stroke or that would change the painting entirely. I would think and think and think until the whole world was in my head. Until I was caged there, too. Until it hurt too much to be outside.
We moved so often that I hunted down stability in other places. The first place to feel familiar enough to stay was the Met. I’d seen pictures of it, but it didn’t seem real until I walked through the doors. It mimicked my mind so accurately that my body didn’t recognize it as a threat.
And now there’s Daphne.
The past is fading, now that she’s here. I could leave it behind. Lock the gallery door. Walk away without looking back.
My little painter blows me a kiss on my way out for the last wave.
When I’m finished with this, we’ll go in together. I’ll finalize hiring for the security team. I don’t particularly want it, but she’s too valuable to do anything less.
This wave is going to be a good one. A big one. My timing is perfect. I swim in front of it for one perfect moment and catch it. Stand up tall. Look for her.
She’s all I want to see in the world. I could part with all the other pieces in my collection. Not her. Never her.
There she is on the shore.
She’s not alone.
Adrenaline hits my veins with enough force to throw me into the water. My muscles lock, keeping me on the board.
There’s a man on the beach.
My father is on the beach.
Something flashes in his hand. A gun. My soul rips out of me and flies across the empty space, but the body doesn’t follow. I’m at the mercy of the wave. I can’t go faster than it can carry me.
