Super Host

by Kate Russo

  “Come on,” Bennett says, taking Claire’s hand like he’s leading a small child. Adding as they step out into the garden, “I hope things are okay with your husband’s family, Emma.”

  Emma shrugs. “Not really, but what can you do?” The phrase “her husband’s family,” registers with her. It feels that way. Despite their marriage, Theo’s family isn’t hers.

  * * *

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  Back in the master bedroom, she sits down at her drafting table, but doesn’t want to pick up a pencil. She just stares at the barely started drawing. She tries calling Theo, but it goes straight to voicemail. Unable to concentrate, she switches Bennett’s laundry from the washer to the dryer when she hears the machine buzz. An hour later, he knocks on the back door.

  “Thanks, Emma,” he says, sheepishly, opening the door when Emma waves him in. He’s holding a bottle of wine, which he forces into her hands as he enters. “For the trouble.”

  “That’s alright,” she says, looking down at the label—Bordeaux.

  “Claire knows her wine, she assures me that it’s good. I have the palate of a pillock, so . . .”

  “Thanks.” Emma’s surprised to feel a smile come across her face. “I actually put the duvet in the dryer for you. I hope you don’t mind. I heard it ding.” She looks at the timer—two minutes. “It’ll be done soon.”

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he says, running his hand over his hair.

  “I thought you were probably busy.”

  “Thank you. Yeah. I’m working on this painting. Lost track of time.”

  “A painting of Claire?” She hasn’t seen the canvas since he coated it in yellow paint, but Claire reminds her of the kind of woman that modeled in Emma’s life-drawing classes in college—gutsy and a little overly theatrical.

  He nods. “It’s been a while since I’ve done a portrait. It’s challenging.”

  “Well, I sucked at life-drawing class.”

  “Of course, you’re an artist.” His tone is slightly patronizing.

  “Trying to be,” she says and leaves it at that, thinking that tracing the crack on his bedroom wall is probably closer to vandalism. She doubts he’d find any artistic merit in it.

  “You’re young,” he says, “you’ve got time.” It comes out entirely unconvincing. Of course he asks her nothing about her work. Typical.

  Finally, the buzzer goes off. Bennett steps into the laundry room and crouches down in front of the dryer. Opening the door, he pulls out the duvet, but drops it on the floor quickly when he realizes how hot it is. “Mind if I borrow the basket?”

  “Go for it.”

  He groans as he stands up, basket in hand, attempting a half-smile. “Back to work, I guess. Can’t hide from the painting.”

  “Or the model,” she says. It just comes out, but thankfully he smiles for real this time.

  “True.” He looks down at his bleach-stained duvet cover and sighs.

  * * *

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  Ten minutes later she’s looking up at The Crack, bulging and throbbing in front of her—open bottle of wine in one hand, the sixty-first colored pencil in the other. She wonders if Bennett is really challenged by his painting, like, actually frightened that it might be no fucking good. What’s he really, truly afraid of, she wonders. What problem can’t he bear to face?

  “Why are you so frightened of cracks and tears?” Dr. Gibson asked her at their first therapy session.

  She cringed. Jesus, if she knew the answer to that question, would she be paying a hundred-and-fifty dollars an hour for therapy? “I just don’t like them. They remind me of disease.”

  “Have you ever had a visible disease or known someone that has?” the doctor asked.

  “No,” Emma said, shaking her head fiercely at the thought of it.

  “I think if you got one, you’d be able to handle it,” Dr. Gibson said encouragingly. “Our fears are often worse in our minds than they are in real life. That’s what you’re here to learn.”

  Emma shook her head again, unsure.

  “Are you worried about something in particular?” Dr. Gibson asked, leaning forward in her high-backed armchair. “If you or if Theo had, say, shingles, how do you think you’d cope?”

  “We won’t. I made sure we both got the vaccine.”

  “Okay, but say it doesn’t work.” The doctor treads carefully, seeing Emma’s face go ashen. “Sometimes we get the flu even when we’ve had a flu shot. How would you cope if Theo got shingles?”

  “Badly.”

  “How badly, Emma?”

  “I’m worried I’d skin him alive,” she confessed.

  * * *

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  When all the wine is gone, she’s traced The Crack with all one hundred and twenty colors. She still tries to convince herself that it was a “good challenge.” She should be proud of herself for confronting something that scared her, even though it’s actually more terrifying now. It’s meant to be frightening, she reminds herself—that’s how she learns. Most importantly, she assures herself that this is nothing like what happened three years ago, when she traced all the veins on her arms and legs with a ballpoint pen, every day, for weeks, until her skin bruised and cracked. That was compulsion. This is therapy.

  She turns her back to The Crack, sitting up against the wall, sliding her socked feet along the white-painted floor. The herringbone pattern is only visible through the intervals where the floorboards meet and the paint dips ever so slightly into the joint. She traces one of the floorboards with her finger. Finally a text comes through from Theo: Horrible Day. Charlie ditched us. Got on a train to fucking Manchester to buy black market Vicodin. We’ll go after him tomorrow. I’ll call you in the morning. Just need to sleep. XXX.

  She reaches up to her drafting table to pull down the indigo pencil. She draws a light, thin indigo line on the short end of one of the planks. It fits ever so snuggly in the dip.

  “Don’t, Emma,” she whispers to herself.

  * * *

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  In the morning, as she pours her granola, she stares at Bennett’s studio. The blackout curtain is finally pulled back. He’s alone today, working on the painting of Claire. The yellow canvas from a couple of days ago is now full of color. Claire’s naked body is cross-legged in a rocking chair with one hand on the arm of the chair, the other holding open a book; Emma can’t make out the title. She knows he’s not finished yet, but Claire looks somewhere between human and porcelain doll, not exactly the woman she met yesterday—not loud or theatrical, but still, inorganic, classical. Her fair skin seems to glow with light purples and cool pinks, contrasting and complementing the yellow background. It reminds her of a lecture from art school, when her professor showed the class an image of John Singer Sargent’s Madame X—one of his most famous paintings—a woman with her flesh so pale against her black dress, it was cool as ice. The lesson, she remembers, was that skin tones are inherently cool; the blood coursing through our veins is blue, not red. Maybe Bennett does know what he’s doing with that yellow, after all. It’s remarkable how much he’s been able to accomplish on the painting in just forty-eight hours. How does he work every day with such ease and confidence? He works like it’s no challenge for him at all. Maybe last night’s insecurity was just an act. She thinks about her own drawing upstairs, how she’s barely touched it. Inspired by Bennett’s work ethic, she wants to push forward on her real drawing today, but she knows she’ll have to move her drafting table; she won’t be able to concentrate with The Crack pulsing above her.

  * * *

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  She drags the base of her table down the staircase to the second floor and into the small bedroom, where she’s been sleeping for the last two nights. She rebuilds the table next to the door of the room, in a tight sp
ace that’s not much wider than the table itself. The overhead light glows weakly with one of those eco-bulbs. It’s dark, too dark. Still, claustrophobia and darkness are preferable to The Crack. It’s frustrating, not gaining any momentum, she thinks, laboring back upstairs to fetch her colored pencils. She wants to blame Theo’s brother. If he could just stop being so selfish, if he could just get into rehab, if she could have her husband back, then maybe she could get some work done.

  * * *

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  Three years ago, after Theo and Emma got married, they were still living in Providence, where Emma was waiting tables at one of the Italian restaurants on Federal Hill and Theo was working as a darkroom technician at RISD. They were ships passing in the night that year; Theo worked days and Emma evenings. She crawled into bed at one a.m. and he got up at six. For Emma, daytime in their tiny apartment was hellish. She’d set up her drafting table in their living room, but the room shared a wall with their neighbor, a jazz pianist, who spent the afternoons practicing his craft, sometimes playing the same riff a hundred times a day. At the time, she was working on a series of grid drawings, all done with ballpoint pen. Mornings, she’d sit at her drafting table, playing David Bowie or Leonard Cohen on her headphones—anything with lyrics that she could get lost in. In one hand, she held a ruler and in the other, a Bic pen. Placing the ruler on the paper, she’d line it up with the light pencil marks denoting where the ink lines would go. Then, she’d breathe deeply, regard the wall she shared with the pianist, and drag the pen down the edge of the ruler from one marked point to the next. If the pianist didn’t make a sound, she’d draw another line. This is how it went all day, every day. After a few months of this routine, Bowie and Cohen were too mellow to drown out the pianist or, more importantly (as Dr. Gibson would later point out), the fear of the pianist, so she started listening to the Pixies and Sonic Youth, which produced the wall of noise she was craving—a strong barrier between her and the jazz man. The problem was, she couldn’t draw. All that sonic distortion didn’t exactly provide for visual clarity. And her head hurt.

  “Doesn’t it strike you as ironic that you need sound to drown out sound?” Theo asked her on one of those rare nights when they were both at home, curled up on the sofa. Emma had the night off and piano man was out playing a club. She had his website bookmarked on her computer, so she always knew when he had gigs and scheduled her nights off accordingly. He was out of her ears, yes, but not out of her mind.

  “I can’t concentrate when he’s playing,” she responded, defensively. To her, this was a fact, no matter how strange or ironic Theo found it. “Why can’t he find someplace else to practice?”

  He put his arm around his wife, sensing her need for comfort. “He probably can’t afford to. Same as you can’t afford a studio.”

  “Yeah, but I’m not bothering anyone when I draw. What he does affects other people.”

  “You’re both artists. Maybe you should collaborate. You said he’s really repetitious, right? So are you!” Theo actually seemed excited by his idea. “Maybe try to draw the music he’s playing. Make it visual.”

  “Oh, so I should give up everything I’m doing for him.” She pulled away from him. “He wins?”

  “I didn’t realize it was a competition. It was just a suggestion.”

  “Then go ‘suggest’ to him that he practice his music somewhere else.”

  “Emma,” he said, cupping her face in his hands and squishing her cheeks together the way he still likes to do when she’s acting nuts. “I don’t know how to help you.”

  “Did I say I needed help?” she chirped back through fish-puckered lips.

  He didn’t answer, kissed her instead. Every marriage, Emma remembers thinking, goes from kissing being an act of passion, to an act of shutting up the other person before you clobber them.

  Emma had needed help, even if she couldn’t admit it. Headphones weren’t working, venting to Theo wasn’t working, even escaping the apartment wasn’t working. She took long walks all over Providence with a sketchbook in her bag, hoping she’d find a place to draw, though she never did. She just walked and walked, getting angrier and angrier and obsessing about whether the jazz man would still be playing when she returned. On these walks, peculiar things started to happen. First, she started stepping over pavement cracks. It was a silly thing really. She just noticed she was doing it one day. Except that when she tried to stop, she realized she couldn’t. She started to feel superstitious about what would happen if she did step on them. What was that old saying from her childhood? “Step on a crack, break your mother’s back.” She didn’t think that was going to happen, but she started to wonder what would. Would the piano man start practicing earlier in the mornings? Would a drummer move in downstairs? One day, just to prove to herself that she could, she jumped up and down on a big pavement crack eight times. She had to do it an even number of times, because an odd number felt unfinished. After that, she avoided cracks by searching out routes that had fewer cracks in the sidewalks. On one new route, she passed a house that had a big football-size rock leaning up against the mailbox. On any given day, she would decide whether she was having a good or a bad day based on whether she wanted to throw the rock through one of the house’s bay windows. Most days she wanted to. Most days she wanted to shatter everyone’s windows with that rock. She wanted these people to notice her, to ask her what was wrong, to assure her that her fears of cracks and her hatred of the piano player were understandable and not at all irrational. But nobody ever came out of their homes, which made her resent them, those lucky bastards with their own houses, their own four walls that they didn’t have to share with anyone. They were all assholes, every single one of them. How could they live with themselves, knowing the paint was peeling around their attic windows, that their roof tiles were falling off? The bastards didn’t deserve their own houses. If she had a house of her own, it would be a temple. She would never forget, not even for a second, how lucky she was to have it. So she changed her route again, this one comprised of houses she liked, that she could picture herself living in, that made her feel safe. The other houses, the ones with the peeling paint and loose roof tiles, didn’t just make her angry, they frightened her. The bubbling paint reminded her of boils, the peeling paint of open wounds, the loose roof tiles of welts. If all those ugly houses and the cracked sidewalks and the fucking jazz pianist were to disappear, she told herself, she’d be okay.

  Within a few months, she was walking a very specific route to a tiny park with just a couple of benches—the kind of space that people pass through but don’t stay. There Emma would sit, always on the same bench, headphones on, staring at her feet. On the fourth day, after sitting there for an hour, she pulled a ballpoint pen out of her purse. She missed having a pen in her hands. She had her sketchbook, too, but she left it in her purse, and instead started tracing the lines of the veins on her arms. By the following week, she was tracing the veins on her legs, too. People would walk past and they’d look at her strangely, but in Providence, a town full of artists, very few things caused genuine alarm, least of all a white girl drawing on herself with a ballpoint pen. Back home, she’d take a shower and scrub off all the ink with a loofah. After a few weeks her skin was dry and rough from all the scrubbing. Even so, the ink marks were becoming permanent. She started to panic about the possibility of ink poisoning, which she looked up online. Google provided plenty of photographs of what the extremely rare condition would look like. In most, the skin was red, bumpy, blistered, but the worst photo was of an arm with raised black veins and capillaries, like the rotting roots of a tree. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind. She saw it each time she closed her eyes and she begged herself not to trace her veins the next day on that park bench, though she always did.

  Theo, who saw so little of her, didn’t notice the changes. She bought pajamas with full-length sleeves and pants, so he couldn’t see her skin. They
basically stopped having sex; their competing schedules made intimacy difficult, and Emma’s anxiety made it worse. Sensing she was recently getting more anxious, Theo thought a night at their old grad student bar, the site of their first date, would loosen her up. He even called the place beforehand and asked the barman to hold their favorite booth for them.

  “Come on,” he said, pulling her into their old vinyl bench, its big, gaping, polyester-foamy wound staring up at her.

  “Can we sit somewhere else?”

  “What? This is our booth.” He smiled, but she could see he was hurt.

  “There’s barely anything left of it.” Pulling herself out of the booth, she searched for another place to sit, pointing to a small table with two rickety wooden chairs. “How about there?”

  He regarded her strangely. “That’s way worse. I want to curl up.”

  She buried her head in his chest to signify she wanted to be near him, just not the torn vinyl.

  When two frothy beers arrived at their small wooden table, Theo took her hand. “I’m worried about you, babe.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, unconvincingly. “Things just aren’t how I imagined.”

  “They’ll get better,” he assured her. “You only just graduated. In a couple years, you’ll have more exhibition offers than you know what to do with.” He squeezed her hand and craned his neck so he could meet her downcast eyes. “You’ll be much busier, way more successful than the piano man. You won’t even notice him.”

  Later, back home, they’d talked about the future and everything they wanted in life: a house with a big backyard, galleries to represent them, and universities where they’d one day teach. When they fell into bed together all Emma could think about was how lucky she was to have this wonderful man who loved her so much. She would stop all this craziness for him, she told herself. Tomorrow was a new day. He took off her shirt and tossed it on the floor. Holding her close, he rolled her over onto her back, straddling her, locking her arms under his thighs so he could tickle her neck, an activity that never failed to unleash an incredible barrage of laughter. But when he finally looked down at her arms, which were bruised and chapped, he stopped cold. Blue and black lines appeared and then faded away. Her skin was rough and peeling. There were cuts, scrapes, and dry, scaly patches. He climbed off her and turned on the light. When he threw back the covers to examine her legs, she burst into tears.