The real answer was that none of it was on purpose. My work was not the result of any artistic choice or intellectual legacy; instead it was the result of my inability to make any choices at all. Painting was a compulsion that I could barely control. I was no better than, as he’d said, the people who built houses out of bottle caps or covered their yards in cement garden gnomes, and if I’m being honest, the only threads that separated me from a life among the bottle-cap people were woven into the borrowed suit jacket of class distinction. Like Carey, I was a compulsive fanatic who found success purely by chance. I was nothing like Tyler—I had no journey. I had no critical growth. I didn’t deserve to be successful.

“I don’t exactly know,” I ventured, telling the only part of the truth I could bear to admit. “When I’m making a painting, the rest of me is defenseless. And…it is hard on me. Sometimes I feel the moods and pulses of other people’s feelings so strongly that it makes me physically sick. My skin gets so thin you could slice it open with your fingernail. It’s…I’m absorbent.” I trailed off. “I don’t know how to be different.”

“That sounds terrible.”

“I’m a saint,” I offered, in a self-effacing deadpan, “bleeding from my eyes.”

“You’re a something,” he said, and then I could see he wanted to say something. Instead he paused, his eyes caught by someone behind me.

Jes walked down the beach in a black bikini, her long hair wound atop her head and her skin gleaming with drops of lake water. As she passed the Mission, she didn’t turn to acknowledge us, though we were plainly visible. At first I assumed she hadn’t seen me, but when she crossed through a bungalow three doors down, her head turned our way—stamped with a look of unadulterated malice—and a chill ran through me. Trespasser, an imagined voice whispered. Pretender. Fraud. You don’t belong here. You don’t belong with us.

I said my usual good night and goodbye after that, and so did he.

And then—the next night, he was gone, a note tacked to “my” chair on the deck that said Went to Vilnius early to install, back next week, good luck.

The note hurt much more than I wanted it to.

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Twelve

The hours I’d been filling with Tyler’s company now, in his absence, felt like days. I’d grown used to having something to do after the workday was done, something to stave off the loneliness.