Page 53 of Kitten

The more familiar I became with Lou’s and James’s relationship with money, the more I feared my mother had even less than I believed. They never talked about the money itself, but rather its potential, formless and adjacent. Having money meant you could have more, only how you got more wasn’t by earning it but mysteriously multiplying what you already had. “It’ll pay off, eventually,” Lou said, about her paltry salary as a gallery assistant. James’s favorite maxim: “If you don’t invest your income, you’re losing it.”

At first, it felt cruel to make my mother pay for my choice to leave home, one she didn’t want me to make. Eventually, asking my mother for money simply felt wrong, like taking from a piggy bank. I used to imitate her paintings on printer paper. Now, I went to museums and looked at the originals. There was a threshold. I had crossed it. Our lives would continue to diverge.

I pushed myself upright. In my head there was a growing pressure, numbing and total. I readjusted Silver’s unmoving body so she lay curled, as if sleeping, on my lap, and reached for my laptop. Then I began to seriously look for a job.

—

When I shut my computera few hours later, I’d sent over twenty applications. I tucked Silver under the duvet and perched her head on the pillow.

The watercolors remained where she’d demolished them by the foot of the bed. Though pierced, the paints remainedmostly full. They bore abstract, fantastical names that seemed to have nothing to do with the colors themselves: Bright Yellow Lake, Opera Rose. Where in the world were lakes yellow? Were opera houses pink on the inside?

Early in our relationship, James and I had a debate while trying to hail a cab. He said that the sky was gray, but I saw it as blue. When he pressed me to describe why I thought it was blue, I could find no explanation other than the fact that it simply was.

But James said he could prove it was gray. It was an unsaturated shade, he said, nearly the same as the clouds. I agreed. And clouds were white, he said, to which I again agreed. And white is a lighter shade of gray, not blue, he concluded, and then I looked up and saw that it was true, the sky was gray, not blue, and right at that moment it began to rain. You assumed colors were the same for everyone else until you realized there was no way to be sure.

Looking at the paints, I felt a familiar anticipation grow. There used to be nothing better than finishing a painting and waiting to show it to my mother. I was good, she knew I was good. I knew she made me that way. I filled a cup of water in the bathroom and brought it to the bedroom. Blindly I chose a color, Imperial Violet, and dipped the brush.

The pigment blossomed on the palette. The color was as beautiful as I thought it would be, but it didn’t give me pleasure. The tapered wood of the brush was soft against my fingers, and it did not give me pleasure. The paper slackened, then stained, after catching the lamplight for a flash of a second, and this, too, the extraordinary act of colorbeing transferred, the start of that private journey in which a painting became, gave me no pleasure. Inside me was a total lack of movement. With these materials my mother would’ve bent low on her knees and made beautiful things, but not me. I put away the brush and, closing the box, understood I would probably never paint again. This realization felt like a hard and fast little ball that had been making its way toward me for a long time. I was surprised to finally catch it, surprised that catching it only hurt a little bit, far less than it did to run, to believe I could still make my mother happy by doing what she did. What a childish trick.

18

James returned the next day in high spirits. What happened to his co-worker was horrible, but the silver lining was that James got to stand in for him at an important pitch with a large and popular alcohol company. He proposed an entirely new direction for their campaign. The company signed with them the next day. Before this, James had been feeling burned out. He was beginning to wonder if he should jump ship, or else take time off, go back to school. But this was an exciting win, even if making cocktails sexier than they already were didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.

In the beginning, James’s journey from Holme back to the city felt cursed. He got a ticket for speeding, even though it was the middle of the night. When he finally made it to Manhattan, he discovered we’d forgotten to shut his apartment windows, and all his things were soaked with rain. Silver’s litter, which sat just beneath the bathroom window, had calcified into one big clump. He tried his best to sleep, but the bedsheets were damp, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the litter. He broke the clump into bits andflushed them, then filled the litter box with a fresh layer. Even though Silver wouldn’t be using it for another few days, he didn’t like thinking about that smelly mass. By the time the dryer cycle ended, and the sheets were ready to use, the sun was rising. He took two caffeine pills and went to the office, where his manager told him he wasn’t needed until the next day.

With his Tuesday begrudgingly free, James went to IKEA. IKEA made him feel like a kid again. Something about furniture you could build yourself. He picked out a few things for me. A walnut dresser for my clothes, a lamp for my side of the bed, and a blue stuffed shark named BLÅHAJ, that reminded him of my sharp canine teeth. He had Swedish meatballs and cinnamon rolls for lunch. Everything improved from there: karaoke, winning the pitch. He even had time to see his colleague’s daughter, Arabella, who just started kindergarten. “You forget how small everything is when you’re a kid,” he said. “The desks, their chairs. We used to think that was normal sized.”

Arabella was super cute. She had just learned the wordobviously,and she tagged it to her every sentence, on both ends: “Obviously I’m hungry obviously.” James bought Arabella a cookie. To this, she said, “Thank you, God!” Arabella had just started going to church.

“It was so easy to make her happy, I kind of felt like God,” said James. Everybody seemed to think of James as God. Was it because he was tall, or because he was just so nice? Jameswasa little bit like God, I thought, in that his whole thing was helping the less capable. I let myself get carried away with this analogy for a bit.

James was a great storyteller. He nodded with his lips pursed when he wasn’t speaking, like it was a measure against interrupting. He only broke eye contact if you did it first. While he spoke, I felt myself laughing for the first time since he went away. Here he was, giving me the gift of laughter, not knowing my secret. He was animated and pink-cheeked, boyish, even, his hair overgrown and curling over his ears in such a perfectCthat I ached to run my finger inside it, like scraping out the dredges of tiger balm from its miniscule tin.

“You, what about you? You hung out with Isabelle?”

My mind returned to Silver. “My mother called,” I blurted.

“Oh, that’s great.” James reached for my hand. “That’s great, right? Was that okay?”

I looked at my phone, half expecting for it to still be connected, my mother listening to our conversation hundreds of miles away. “We got into a fight about money,” I said. “She thinks I’m taking advantage of you.”

“You, taking advantage of me?” James smiled.

“It’s not funny.” I was smiling now, too, though I didn’t know why. “You’re the reason I’ll still have a roof over my head in a week.”

“That’s not taking advantage. I offered, you’re my girlfriend.” James deliveredgirlfriendwith a lilt.

“But she didn’t know that. To her, you’re just this stranger.”

“You haven’t told her about me?”

“We haven’t spoken in a year, remember?”

“Yeah, to be honest, I still don’t fully understand what happened. You were in a crisis, weren’t you? You needed her, and she wasn’t there for you.”

“She was the one in a crisis.” My cheeks warmed. “I wasn’t there for her. She’s sick.”

“She’s sick?”