of someone else. For whatever reason: out of love, or duty, or something else. As long as you give yourself to it. You don’t need to worry about anything but doing that job well, and the satisfaction, when you do, is very beautiful.”
“That isn’t what I meant at all.”
“I know,” he said, “but that doesn’t make it less true.”
Then, you see, I had in my head a certainty that I had to say something to Sirena. It was a time when everything was significant and related to every other thing, and when Skandar said this about the joys of service, and when he said I must find a way to feed the wolf, I understood these things to pertain to Sirena, or rather, to Sirena and me.
All that Wednesday at school, my hands trembled when they were at rest, as if I’d drunk too much coffee. It was a freakishly warm day, a summer’s day like a hot flash, and I sweated, too. My innards flipped and twisted the way they did before I took a plane. I couldn’t eat the salad I’d brought for my lunch. I couldn’t sit still. I thought about saying something to her, and I couldn’t imagine how she might react.
All my life, I’d shied away from things I couldn’t imagine. My basic feeling had been that if I couldn’t imagine it, it wasn’t a good idea. It was the same with my mother’s illness: imagine the worst and you can protect against it. If you can’t imagine it, then there’s no protection. Not good, not good.
This conviction was behind my renunciation of the artist’s life before I’d begun to live it. I couldn’t imagine how to be an artist in this world. Looking around at my fellow art school students, at the ones we all knew were going to make it, I couldn’t imagine pleasing the bigwigs from the galleries and museums, the fashion-makers who organized biennials. I couldn’t see myself schmoozing the way the class stars did, flattering older artists and seedy has-been critics to try to wangle an opening for their own advancement. I saw them at it and I couldn’t picture myself doing it. I could have rattled off the bullshit about fragmentation and identity and the tropes of gender, whatever the fuck they are, and Roland Barthes and Judith Butler and Mieke Bal—I could do that, they taught us how to do it, that’s what art school seemed mostly to be for, but I couldn’t do it with a straight face and I couldn’t even imagine doing it with a straight face, and that’s why I went to get my master’s in Education and appeared to myself and to the world to have forsaken my one dream.
But you see, my dream in my head of being an artist, and my dream in the world of being an artist, I couldn’t—until Sirena, I couldn’t—connect them. And I forsook the world for the dream in my head, because there, and in my second bedroom off Huron Avenue, and then finally, in that blissful year in Somerville, I could have the dream that I was an artist, it could be real, without any of the bullshit that passes, in the first part of the twenty-first century in the Western world, for being an artist. I could be an Emily Dickinson of an artist.
And here’s another thing I was fretting over, as I covered the small distance between the cake shop and the studio, the sidewalk and the studio door—did I think that Sirena was a wonderful artist because I was in love with her, or was I in love with her because she was a wonderful artist, or was I in love with some idea of her that was far from the truth, in which case should I actually be asking myself what, really, in my heart I thought of her art—what did I think of her art? Maybe I didn’t know. But the moment I became aware of the question, I knew it mattered very much to me. It mattered more than almost anything: my answer to that question would surely determine whether I was at last living in reality; or whether I was still dreaming, trapped in my endless hall of mirrors.
After all that obsessive spinning on my mental gerbil wheel, after all my worrying and reconfiguring—you know, don’t you, that when I got to the studio and opened the door and called out her name in a cheery singsong, there