it’s provisional. But what seems fun at first can get old quickly, and soon my head hurt and my feet were tired and I found my customers demanding and rude, so I bought a suit with money sent by my parents, and I started interviewing for business jobs, and to my surprise got an offer from this management consultancy, and once something like that was offered, how could I say no?
And then I must have changed. I certainly wasn’t painting any pictures. In those days, the early nineties, art seemed pointless, and it was exhilarating to have money for the first time … I can’t explain it entirely—it’s as if it happened to a different person, and I look back and see who I was then and she looks like nobody I would ever have known. But because I became this person, and because Ben was deeply accommodating and because he loved me, he felt he needed to change, too. I’d say things like, “We’re not kids anymore—it’s time to get serious,” and in time, he signed up for law school at NYU, which is exactly the sort of thing you do when you feel it’s time to get serious but have no clue what that might entail. Needless to say, he also packed in the band, which in some way he didn’t need anymore, because he had me in his free time. We were living together by then, in a tiny, dully respectable low-ceilinged postwar box east of Gramercy Park, a no-man’s-land, vibe-wise, a few blocks from the Arts Club but a million miles from any art. I barely looked at art; I thought my plan to become an artist had been a fantasy of the powerless, and that with money of my own—with power!—I had no need of it.
My office was on the thirty-fourth floor; I went everywhere by taxi; I flew on planes and sat in airports and stayed up tapping at my computer late nights in hotels. I was only twenty-five, and owned four pairs of Christian Louboutin shoes. I possessed a fancy oversized white sofa and the most expensive comforter money could buy, from Sweden (an item I still enjoy). And when Ben asked me to marry him—over a dinner so rich in a restaurant so elaborate that we were the youngest patrons by twenty years and probably the only ones without gout—I realized—not straight away, but in the weeks that followed, with the diamond bright and heavy on my finger (what use had I for a diamond?)—that Ben the white-collar criminal defense lawyer bored me, sweet though he was, and that I didn’t care about the sofa or the shoes or even the comforter, and that I didn’t even like fancy food, which either made me constipated or gave me diarrhea.
You didn’t expect this of the Woman Upstairs. I had a love, and a love affair with a worldly life, and I left it. If I’d married Ben and moved to Westchester (you know, don’t you, that we would have moved to Westchester?), then, years later when my mother got ill, I wouldn’t have given myself over to her as I did, because there would already have been children (you know, don’t you, that there would have been children? Just as you know that eventually, inevitably, there would have been a divorce), and at least one of my life’s exam questions would have been properly answered. But there would have been no art, no oxygen; and there would have been those jobs, and all the things that went with them, and there would have been Ben, who, guileless as he was till the last, I came to despise for his very malleability, his likeness to myself, almost, and to look upon—quite wrongly, I now see—with contempt.
I don’t know where he is now, more than a decade later, Ben Souter (“My suitor Souter,” I joked in the beginning), but I hope for his sake that he married happily and has bonny children and a big house, and I hope he’s raked in his millions while remaining ever sweet.
Nor was he by any means my last, all those years ago. I don’t need to enumerate them to you—briefly the married man; for much longer, the weary graduate student; the boy ten years my junior who told me—the only person in my life I think actually to say this to me—that I was sexy. This perhaps makes me sound defensive. Which I suppose I am. Because before