Martin, he wept in my ear one night, a flock of sheep that materialized unexpectedly on a dark country lane—and his siblings have been lost to alcoholism or estrangement. He knows what it feels like to wake up in the morning in a panic, feeling like someone has untethered you during the night. Like you could disappear one day and no one would even notice, because the people who love you the most are already gone.
I don’t have to feel that way anymore.
* * *
—
Also like me: His family lost its real money a while back, the steady chipping away of a dwindling family estate with too many heirs and too many expenses.
He doesn’t know we have this in common yet.
* * *
—
This is our new routine: I sleep in late in the morning, until Michael brings me coffee in bed around ten. We make love, sometimes twice. By noon, Michael is at work on his book, and I am at my sketches. We sit in happy silence like this for hours. Dusk comes early in December, so we take a break in the midafternoon and pull on our snow boots to go for a walk along the lakefront. We’ll wander down past the boathouse, onto the snow-covered pier, and then sit on the bench at the end, taking in the stillness of the lake. Sometimes we’ll bring a flask of tea and stay there, happily not talking (but not because we don’t have anything to say!), until the sun dips behind the mountains.
Then back to Stonehaven, perhaps some more writing and sketching. I’ll cook dinner for us, digging through the stacks of old French cookbooks I’ve found in the kitchen until I find something that sounds appealing: sole meunière, boeuf Bourguignon, salade Lyonnaise. My jeans are starting to get tight. In New York, in my old life, I would have immediately done penance with back-to-back spin classes, but here, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if I can’t fit into my Saint Laurent leather pants; I have nowhere to wear them anyway.
Then: cocktails by the fire, more sex, more cocktails, maybe an old movie on my laptop as we lie in bed.
The days slip past, fuzzy with lust and alcohol, everything pleasantly sticky and new.
My sketchbook is slowly filling with drawings of outfits: tops with pleats that undulate like the wind on the surface of the lake; delicate toile dresses that fly off the shoulders like raven wings; jackets embroidered with feathery spines, reminiscent of pine needles. At first, the sketches were hesitant and shaky, but increasingly they are growing bolder: a single silhouette rendered in a few, thick lines, the details shaded in with pastels. I’d almost forgotten how good it felt to draw; until this month I hadn’t held a pencil since the art classes that I took in high school. I was good at it back then, good enough to be invited into the gifted program at my school, but my parents didn’t encourage me to take it any further: Lieblings were supposed to collect art, not make it ourselves. Also, I was aware enough to know that I had some talent, but nowhere near enough. Benny was the Liebling who had something urgent he needed to put on the page, whereas I lacked the singular vision that it takes to be a real artist. If I’d kept it up, I would have ended up a dilettante, producing adequate landscapes that would be politely bought by friends, but never hung in museums.
So I let it go.
And then, Michael happened. I can tell that you have the soul of an artist even if you don’t know what to do with it. He said this to me in bed one morning, not long after Ashley left. I laughed, but his words stayed with me. And so later that day (yet another idle mountain day; a life of leisure does get dull, especially when you don’t have your phone to distract you) I thought, Why not? I had already spent most of the year sitting around Stonehaven with nothing to do, filling the time imagining a remodel that would never happen because I couldn’t afford it, fiddling with my dwindling financial portfolio. Dutifully, dully liking things on social media.