“Sure, but what do the apples represent?”
“They represent apples,” I say. “I don’t know, I failed out of art school twice.”
“You went again?”
“And failed out again,” I say, and look up at him. “Ta-da, double art school dropout, right here.”
I give a small curtsey, and Seth rolls his eyes.
“They fucked up and this is great,” he says.
“This mural took twice as long and cost twice as much as it was supposed to,” I admit. “I had to paint over a week’s worth of work because I had no idea what I was doing and when I actually looked at it, it was absolutely awful. I still have no idea why Marcy didn’t fire me on the spot.”
“Probably because you were willing to paint over the thing and start again,” Seth says. “I think a lot of people would have just kept on with the ugly frog and acted like it was supposed to be that way.”
The metaphor doesn’t escape me.
“How do you paint something that big?” he asks, after a moment.
“I used a grid,” I say, waving my other hand at the side of the barn. “First I drew it on a piece of paper with the same dimensions, but a grid on that, and transposed it square by square to the side of the barn. It was very methodical. Sort of like a spreadsheet for art, you’d like it.”
“I can appreciate art without spreadsheets, thanks,” he says.
“But do you appreciate it more with them?”
“No comment.”
We stand there for another moment: frog, apple, sunset, trees. I lean my head against his shoulder, the wool of his coat slightly rough against my cheek.
“What’s it like to get things right on the first try?” I finally ask.
“What do you mean?”
I mean that his life seems charmed to me: he went to college and graduated, came back to his hometown, started a business with his brother. One, two, three, done.
“I mean you didn’t fail out of art school twice,” I say.
“I probably would have if I’d attended art school.”
“Come on.”
He pauses a moment, adjusts his hand in mine.
“In college I almost got a degree in literature, but talked myself out of it because what use is that?” he asks.
It’s a rhetorical question. I don’t answer it.
“I started an application to study abroad in London for a semester, but never sent it in,” he says. “I graduated with a degree in economics, moved back to my hometown, took a job like I was supposed to overseeing the finances of a small mining company, and I hated every minute of it but they paid me well enough so I stayed. Because that’s what happens, right? Hate your job and make a living?”
I nearly say you never told me you wanted to study abroad, but change it at the last second.
“I didn’t know you wanted to go to London,” I say.
Seth’s quiet for a moment, his fingers flexing against mine.
“I decided I didn’t want to be that far from my girlfriend,” he says, after a long pause.
I think of all the things that I could say, but I don’t say any of them. I want to tell him that I’d have wanted him to go, experience the world, then come back to me, but I know that’s not what I’d have done.
At twenty, I’d have talked him out of it and into staying in Virginia. I’d have been afraid that he’d leave and find someone better than me, because I was insecure and selfish and felt like I was flailing my way through life.
I just watch his face from the side, but he doesn’t look at me. As Seth talks he’s just looking at the mural, his eyes drifting over it like he’s committing it to memory.
“And after college, Levi was off, in the woods, doing his mountain man thing,” he goes on. “Eli moved away for ten years, and we’d get phone calls from Thailand and postcards from Australia. Daniel found out one day that he had a ten-month-old daughter, and a month later he had full custody. Caleb followed his dream and went to grad school. And I was the stable one.”
I don’t know this man.
Standing there, in the cold, by the barn, the weight of that realization settles on me like snowfall: that all these years I’ve spent thinking I know Seth, I’ve been wrong. All I’ve gotten since we broke up when we were twenty-two has been glimpses into him, skewed snapshots of his life at any given time, like taking a picture of a funhouse mirror.
To me he was wild, reckless, intense. He was the man who’d answer my calls at any time of night, who’d drive hours for a booty call. He was the man who’d call me, voice rough, ask if I could be at some motel by sundown.
He talked dirty, fucked hard, broke my heart more than once, and I had no idea what the rest of his life was like.