“Why does that not feel likely?”
“If you’re so worried, go knock on his door.”
Knock on his door?
I hadn’t thought of that.
Cut to me: Sixty seconds later—knocking on his door.
No answer.
Could he be stomping grapes in Sicily?
I mean, it wasn’t impossible.
But as the silence wore on, even optimistic Sue had to admit it wasn’t looking good. “I’m losing hope on the Italian grandmother,” she said, during yet another processing session.
“Right?” I said. “This is not a friendly miscommunication. Plus, I know he’s in town because I saw him in the elevator, and he saw me heading for it—and he did not hold the doors.”
“Maybe he didn’t see you?”
“He definitely saw me.”
“Looks like it’s time for interpretation B,” Sue said.
“Which is?”
“He hates you.”
“But why would he?”
“Maybe he overheard you saying something mean about him?”
“I haven’t said anything mean about him in weeks.”
“Not holding the elevator door is definitely a maximum-hostility move.”
“Maybe he just got his eyes dilated at the doctor, and he couldn’t tell it was me.”
“That only works for close objects.”
“Oh.”
“There’s no way of knowing if he won’t talk to you,” Sue said.
“My point exactly.”
“But if I had to guess? He’s an asshole. And he went after you for the thrill of the chase. But then he caught you and lost interest.”
I didn’t want that to be it.
But of all the options, this one seemed the most likely by far. Certainly more plausible than the sick grandmother. But here were the bare facts: 1. He was still in the building. 2. He was not responding to any of my attempts at contact. 3. He did not hold the elevator doors.
Plus, racking my brain did not yield anything—at all—that I might have done to him to push him away. I’d been worried that seeing his final portrait might make him run off screaming—but he hadn’t even seen it yet. And other than that, I hadn’t yelled at him or lied to him or—god forbid—asked him for help.
Wait—I hadn’t let myself need him, had I?
I’d let myself want him, but that wasn’t the same thing.
Unless asking him to sit for the portrait counted.
But wait—I hadn’t asked him to do that! He’d offered!
Weren’t those different things?
Should I never have accepted?
I could have asked these questions all night.
But Sue needed to get off the phone. She and Witt were headed to the dinner car for a jazz concert. “Guess what the Canadian cocktail of the day is called?”
“What?” I asked glumly.
“The Angry Canadian.”
“Joke’s on you,” I said flatly. “There’s no such thing.”
“That’s what I said!” Sue responded, maybe hoping we could talk about something, anything, else.
But no luck.
At last, in conclusion, Sue said, “Maybe we’ll get lucky. Maybe he’s got a terminal illness.”
* * *
BUT I KNEW better than to hope for a terminal illness.
And I just couldn’t seem to believe that he was a bad person, either.
It had to have been me.
Desperation over the art show had made me needy. I should’ve kept my distance. Stayed aloof. Said no when he offered to be my model. What was I thinking? Of course he’d glimpsed my life and bolted. Who’d want to get anywhere near it?
In the end, I took the portrait to the gallery without ever showing it to Joe—or seeing him at all. And then I spent the next two days being ignored and obsessing over why that was happening.
In the meantime, I rearranged my paints. Organized my canvases. Restacked the dishes in my cabinets. Painted Peanut’s toenails with glitter polish. Watched a video tutorial about how to make one large T-shirt into twelve different outfits.
And stewed. Emotionally.
Oh, and I googled “Why men don’t text you back.”
But it wasn’t very helpful.
I also had another brain scan to check my edema. And that wasn’t helpful, either.
Dr. Estrera reported that, shockingly, according to the scan, the edema had now largely resolved. He compared last week’s scan with this week’s scan—both of which looked quite similar to me. “We’re seeing an eighty-one percent reduction in swelling in the area,” Dr. Estrera said proudly.