I thought, If I had the energy I’d leave him, and then I folded up that little thought, wrapped it in gauze, and swallowed it.
And yet no married woman I knew was any better off, so I determined to carry on. After all, a person can be grandiose without being a clinical narcissist. And I was a control freak, a neat freak, a crazy person. A long time ago, in my twenties, I’d even spent ten days on a psych ward after a hospit…
I’d found someone for whom making art was central and being in a relationship was incidental. I loved sitting in a room with John, both of us on our laptops, working silently, fiercely. I could feel our energies awake and together. We didn’t need anything else from each other.
But by then I knew…
And then after all that fuss of anticipation she didn’t much like the paintings. They bored her: that possibility hadn’t occurred to her, it really was a surprise. There was no danger of her shedding tears. It wasn’t that she thought they were false or pretentious exactly: she could imagine the ver…
