Hello Stranger(50)
But what, in the end, was my takeaway?
None of the upsides. Just the one crushingly disappointing downside: I got stood up.
That was the sentence that ticker-taped through my head all the next day.
I got stood up. By my future husband. On our very first date.
How would we spin that to the grandkids?
I mean, fine. He’d had a work emergency. I got it. I wouldn’t have wanted him to have left some Saint Bernard dying alone in the clinic.
He’d been busy doing something noble. It was a fair excuse.
But here was the problem. It was now the next day, and the admirable, flawless, and perfect Dr. Oliver Addison, DVM, had not called to apologize.
I mean, if you leave a lady sitting in a coffee shop, even for a good reason, you should call the next day and grovel a little bit. Right? Make some voice contact? Stress in real time how sorry you are? Maybe demonstrate enthusiasm by setting a new date to try again?
Nothing from this guy. Crickets.
Which forced me to wonder something horrible: Maybe this perfect man wasn’t so perfect after all.
Not fair. Hadn’t I already decided he was supposed to solve all my problems?
He was supposed to make things better, not worse. He was supposed to ease my worries, not create more of them. He was supposed to make me feel good—not frigging terrible.
Maybe he hadn’t gotten the memo?
I knew of course that people weren’t perfect. Life was messy. He didn’t even know how much I was counting on him to be the fantasy-man mirage that kept me moving through my personal emotional desert.
I couldn’t legitimately resent him.
But I resented him, anyway. Illegitimately.
He was just so disappointing.
All day long, as he continued to disappoint me, I made excuses for him—maybe he’d been up all night and fallen asleep exhausted?—while resenting the fact that I had to make excuses for him.
And while I waited, my mind drifted more and more to Joe.
Because if Dr. Oliver Addison had been disappointing … Joe, if I’m honest, had been the opposite.
Joe had been surprising. Surprisingly nice. Surprisingly attentive. Surprisingly not at all like what I would have expected a person I’d nicknamed the Weasel to be.
Sixteen
ON THE AFTERNOON before Sue was coming over for our second—and final—make-or-break attempt at her portrait, I took Peanut out for his first long walk since he got sick.
We’d been cleared for little walks almost from the beginning. But before Peanut could do his signature long, rambling, sniff-everything-in-sight stroll, we had to make sure his strength was back.
I didn’t mind. It gave me some time to think.
I’d been hoping—so hoping—that the edema would magically resolve before I really got down to the wire and had to paint this portrait for the show. Every morning I woke up and shuffled to the bathroom mirror, squeezing my eyes closed for a silent prayer before finally peeking to see what I could see.
And every morning, of course, my own face was just a jumbled pile of disconnected features.
I missed it. I missed seeing my face.
But I’d been instructed not to give up hope, and I was nothing if not obedient.
It would come back, I kept telling myself. There was a very good chance, at least.
But now I was at the point, with just over two weeks before the portrait deadline, when I had to trudge forward—fusiform face gyrus or no. I mean, even if I magically resolved my face blindness tomorrow, I’d still need time to paint the painting.
It was a make-it-work moment.
And so I’d been researching the brain. I’d been reading up on painting techniques and neuroplasticity, and how creativity worked. I’d been hunting through different strategies for making lots of different art. My best idea was to try to bypass the fusiform face gyrus altogether, if I could. To use other senses rather than sight. To sneak around my own assumption that I had to see faces the way I’d always seen them before I could paint them.
Maybe there was another way of seeing.
Maybe if Sue described her face to me in words, the words could make a new path for me to follow. Maybe I could capture her face before my fusiform face gyrus figured out what I was up to. Another idea was to try to turn Sue’s face upside down, or maybe sideways, so that my brain didn’t realize it was a face. Maybe if we just thought we were doing shapes and colors and lines, the FFG would never have a reason to cause trouble. And then, if neither of those worked, I’d turn to math. My least appealing option, since I was quite math-challenged. But artist Chuck Close had mapped photographs with faces using a grid. Who’s to say I couldn’t do the same thing on a real face?
If worse came to worse, I might draw an actual grid on Sue’s actual face.
She didn’t know that yet, of course.
But these were desperate times.
* * *
AND SO THERE they were. Countless late nights of research, distilled down into my best three ideas. Or more accurately, my final three shots in the dark. I knew I couldn’t paint the way I’d always done it. My only remaining chance was to try something new.
And what if none of them worked?
Well, I wasn’t going to think about that.
Anyway, that’s what I was planning as Peanut peed on every clover flower between my building and the bayou: all the crazy new portrait techniques I’d try tonight with Sue. I had the canvas all ready and a measuring tape and a projector with a grid. We’d start with words and go from there. Maybe it would work better than I feared. Maybe my fusiform face gyrus would surprise me.