Insecure

by Ainslie Paton

  Later that night of the first art school party, when everyone had stumbled off, both of them lazy and languid, warmed by the food and company and the last of the summer on the night air, they’d made love on the balcony with the sunrise for a witness. They were so full of each other they were like ripe fruit, lush, tasty, moreish. They were stronger together now than they had been and familiarity hadn’t dulled the edge of experience. Cinta excited him, she enthralled him like nothing else. She gave him her truths and her passions with abandon and sealed herself to him with a ferocity that could make him shake at the same time as it made him feel safe.

  So Alfie with his poetry and painting could wait in line. It was going to be a long wait.

  The meeting broke up. Dillon made for Anderson; he had questions, things to learn. Mace retreated to his desk and spent the rest of the morning so focused it was later than he’d planned when he looked up. One leg had gone to sleep and was full of prickly pins and needles. He’d bypassed lunch by hours and had already eaten into his early mark. He spent the next thirty minutes checking he had what he needed for India and shut down.

  “You can’t go.” Dillon in the doorway, probably his tenth coffee for the day in his hand.

  “I’m going.”

  “You can’t. We have to work on our projection timeline.”

  “Again.”

  “There’s a hole. Actually it’s not a hole, it’s an undersea cavern. We’re sunk if we don’t fix this.”

  He groaned. “I fly out in the morning.”

  “Which means we do this now. Call her. She’ll get it.”

  She did. Telling him she’d wait up for him. It burned not to be able to eat with her, rest with her. It was after midnight before they’d dug their way out of the hole in the timeline. He was on a 6am flight. He had enough time to go home and curl up beside Cinta for a few hours before he had to leave for the airport.

  There was a BLT on the table. It was wilted but he scarfed it down, given the last thing he’d eaten was an apple midmorning. The bedside lamp was on in the bedroom and a canvas stood on an easel in the doorway. She’d painted a suitcase, an alarm clock, a passport and a lipstick kiss with the words wake me.

  She was curled on her side breathing easily, her dark hair, longer now, streaming over her pillow. She looked too peaceful to wake. He took a quick shower and managed not to disturb her. He set the alarm on his phone and slid in beside her.

  It was heaven to lie down but he was wired from the long day, from the knowledge he was only hours from leaving and he knew he wouldn’t sleep. He really shouldn’t wake her. He played a strand of her hair through his fingers and watched the sky outside lighten. He thought about the impossible deadlines in their timetable and how the hole Dillon found could’ve easily become their grave.

  She woke when his alarm sounded and climbed on top of him. She scratched her short nails over his chest. “You didn’t wake me. I painted you a picture specifically instructing you to.”

  He shut her complaints up with a long slow kiss that got serious quickly, but he had to get up, finish packing, go. She made him coffee and toast while he got ready. He told her about the timeline problem. And she gave him her news.

  “The gallery invited me to have a show.”

  He jammed his shaving gear in the bag. He was travelling with carry-on only and it was a squeeze. “What does that mean?”

  “An opportunity to fill the space with my work, to have an event and sell what I can.”

  The zipper would not shift. He checked his watch. Cab would be here in ten. “That’s great, right?”

  She pressed her hands on the top of the bag to help with the zipper. “It’s amazing.”

  He closed the bag and kissed her forehead. He should’ve woken her; there wasn’t time for this now. “I have to go.”

  She nodded and he kissed the pout off her lips. She walked with him to the door, came down the stairs in her silky dressing gown. The cab was waiting. He dumped his bag in the boot and brought her close for a hug. “I’m sorry. I should’ve woken you.”

  She wished him luck and went back inside. He waited till the cab pulled out, till she would’ve made it back upstairs, and rang her. She laughed and said, “What did you forget?”

  He said, “You,” like he’d done twice before, then she told him what it meant to be offered a show, how the school thought she was talented and how nervous it made her.

  It was the last time they had to talk properly. Time zones, work schedules, the crazy that was doing business in India left him little brain space to think about anything else but Ipseity. They snatched sleepy conversations that were frustrating for their lack of meaning.

  He knew he’d miss her, but he wasn’t ready to feel the separation so deeply. It sat like an ache, a torn muscle, a stitch in his chest. Nor was he prepared for the workload, the responsibility and the stress that came with being a funded start-up. He had to extend his stay by a week and couldn’t wait to get home.

  33: Drift

  The absence of Mace was the opportunity to focus. It was the opportunity to have a good solid panic about having her own show. It’s not like it was the most outrageous thing to have ever happened to her. Not the hardest, or the most public, or the biggest risk Jacinta had ever taken. It was none of those things.

  She was damp with fear, twisted, flung about and wrung out, full of creases that might never smooth out and dizzy with the notion that this whole thing was totally on her. It was like what she imagined being put through the spin cycle in an industrial-strength washing machine must be like.

  There was no department of artistic merit, no committee to establish trending public perception, no working party to define acceptable content, or team responsible for breakthrough subject matter. She didn’t have a boss to approve her show design, or an assistant to check off all the details. It was Cinta Worth central. No detours, no rainchecks, no refunds.

  If she didn’t sell a painting it was because they sucked. And there was no one to blame for bad market research, dodgy analysis, poor stock picking or crap taste. If her show bombed, it was because she’d tanked as an artist.

  So no biggie.

  More coffee.

  Once upon a time, she’d dressed in professional armour and led a corporate army, equipped with the latest knowledge and the resources to go into a battle and win. Now she was a strike force of one, armed with a few semesters of art class, the encouragement of her teacher and the best wishes of fellow students, with no way of knowing how this was going to shake out.

  The odds were built brick by brick into a solid wall between her and success. And yet she’d agreed to it. Being in love had clearly mucked with her reasoning and strategic decision-making capabilities. How else to explain how she ended up in her studio at 3am some mornings without a clue what she was doing there.

  When she explained it like that on Skype, Mace said, “Way to freak the fuck out.” A perfect choice of words. She’d told him it wasn’t that bad, not important in the scheme of things. He’d called her a liar and they’d both had a laugh. He’d rung off worried and she wasn’t laughing now.

  She needed at least ten, preferably fifteen, paintings to make a show. She had five she could stand to have examined, stand to part with if by some lucky accident they found a buyer. But if she wanted a successful show she needed to tie it together with a theme. That was the real stress. And even then, unless she designated the painting as not for sale, every work was out on a date, looking for love, or more specifically, hooking—hoping to get picked up and taken home for a price.

  Sitting behind a desk battling email and an out of control meeting calendar with a CEO and a board breathing down her neck had never felt so attractive as when she was standing in her studio twitchy from too much coffee, facing a blank canvas with a vacant mind.

  Procrastination never looked like such an inspired source of inspiration. She walked, did extra yoga classes, sketched. She flipped through magazines and poured over art history
books.

  Ingrid was sympathetic. Alfie teased. Margaret kept saying she’d find her source, and Jacinta found the lack of specific advice from them insanely annoying. She wasn’t a real artist, she was an imposter, a blow-in from the corporate world with all of the time and enthusiasm and none of the talent or aptitude to make anything significant happen.

  Yeah, sure she knew how to put paint on canvas. Could sketch with proficiency. Could even lose herself to the brush and the paint palette, spending hours that felt like minutes at her easel. But she knew how to slap together a few basic meals now too and that didn’t make her a short-order cook. It mostly made her hungry when Mace wasn’t around for a decent home cooked meal, and too eager too often, to shell out for take-out.

  And even if she did manage to cobble together fifteen new paintings she was proud of and sell a few of them, what did it prove?

  She tipped what was maybe her sixth cup of coffee down the sink. She’d given herself the shakes. That was the coffee, another fiendishly proficient round of procrastination, and the shock. She was bred to be a corporate animal; all her instinct and training, her family outlook and her satisfaction was bound up in the harsh and unforgiving mechanism of business and profitability. But she wasn’t born that way and if she hadn’t lost her job she might never have found the time to explore her creative self.

  And that’s why she was freaked the fuck out. Not coffee, not a pile of blank canvases, not the feeling of being without back-up, but the knowledge that what she was doing was more important than filling in time and conquering an old fear. It was much bigger than the slickest up yours to Malcolm or the most passing tribute to her mother. Being an artist was as much a part of who she was as her ability to persuade a room of hostile stakeholders to vote for controversial reform.

  She wanted this, the filled canvases, the chaos of a show, the fear of not making a sale, as much as she wanted Mace home and a new job.

  If she looked at her reflection she was same old same old, with allowances for the fact she had longer hair, dressed with more efficiency than fashion consciousness and no longer sported dark circles under her eyes from a perennial lack of sleep. She looked younger and happier. She looked like she might be a vaguely interesting person with more than one dimension to her mirror image.

  And she liked that look. It said more about her prospects for a happy future than her swanky apartment, bulging bank balance and executive suite office ever had. She went to the studio and she put all that tentative identity, fraudster logic and fledgling belief in her talent on the blank canvases.

  She had the radio on and she was in the zone, lost in the colour and the light and how it blended. She was insensible to anything else, so she screamed when his hands stole around her, when his face nuzzled into the side of her neck. She didn’t hear him come in and he was a day early. She dropped the brush and turned in Mace’s arms, sinking into the weight of his embrace. “You’re home.”

  “You smell like metho.”

  “I missed you so much.”

  “Show me.”

  She drew away to look at him. He was dead on his feet. He’d picked up a tummy bug and spent half the time in India throwing up. He’d lost weight and it showed in the pallor of skin along with the dark slashes under his eyes.

  “You need to rest.”

  “I need a shower and to get to the office.”

  “Oh no you don’t. Whatever it is can wait.”

  He shook his head. He smelled of stale sweat and airline food. He hadn’t shaved for days and he needed a haircut. He looked marvellous to her because she could touch him, smell him, look directly into his tired eyes.

  He didn’t want food and he wouldn’t sleep. They showered together and whatever weariness he carried was buried in his need for her. She’d have lain with him all afternoon but he had to go.

  He was late home that night and he didn’t wake her and that became their new pattern. She painted, happily, haphazardly, whenever she felt like it. He worked every hour the clock showed, seven days. He came home exhausted, but he was satisfied. More companies busted out of Jay’s incubator and Ipseity was still standing. Every month they made it through was another month closer to second round funding, another month closer to making it.

  But he might as well have remained in India. She missed him in the same way, as if he wasn’t really here, because he wasn’t. He was slave to the needs of Ipseity and she couldn’t compete, and she didn’t want to. She made space for him to do what he needed to do the easiest way possible.

  His chance of success was so slim, but so close, so real at the same time, there was nothing she wouldn’t do to support him. She ran their household now, oddly proud she remembered to shop, pay bills and could feed them decently. And slowly she collected work she thought good enough for a showing. It was such a different life to the one she’d expected to be leading. And apart from Mace’s absence, it was a surprise and a joy.

  She’d even gone so far as to confess her past as a high flying corporate princess to her classmates, admitting that Cinta was the name Mace had given her, not the one she’d established her CV with. They heaped shit on her in a reverse of the usual corporate sell-out argument that got levelled at an artist who went to work in advertising or animating video games.

  “So you had your own jet?”

  Alfie was sprawled on the rug, a glass of wine in his hand. He’d already asked if she had her own gold-plated bathroom, private elevator and harem of salaried minions.

  She topped up Ingrid’s glass. “No. I did not have my own jet.” Malcolm did, Tom had kept it, but there was no need to rub it in.

  “I bet you had lovely clothes,” said Ingrid.

  She was barefoot, wearing loose cotton pants and a t-shirt she probably should’ve been dry cleaning. It was slightly too short now. She laughed. “I still have them.” She didn’t say she’d be wearing them again one day. Time enough to tell them she was only slumming it.

  Carmen held her glass up. “Do you miss it?”

  Jacinta refilled it. Yes, no, maybe. Of course she did. This was fun, like being on the sabbatical she’d never had, long service leave from all her stress, but it wasn’t permanent. Mace was permanent; this was simply an adventure holiday. “The good days.”

  “But you’ve painted before now?” said Agnes. She was the youngest to Ingrid’s elder statesman and the good girl to Carmen’s tattooed, dreadlocked extravagance.

  “My mum taught me. I took art at school and dabbled from time to time, but it’s been a while and I’ve got a lot to learn.”

  “Is humble a line in your bio, like a core skill?” said Alfie.

  Carmen laughed. Ingrid said, “That’s not nice.”

  “Yes. It comes after taking the trash out,” she said, aiming a pretend kick at Alfie’s ribs.

  They were all laughing when Mace came in. It was the middle of the afternoon and a weekday. She was hard pressed to remember when she’d last seen him in daylight. He left before the sun came up and was rarely home to eat with her anymore.

  She went to him as he was dumping bags. He’d been to the supermarket and had flowers as well. She was instantly worried he was unwell or something bad had happened at work.

  “Are you all right?”

  He handed her the flowers, a huge colourful bunch, but he was frowning. He went into the lounge room, ignored the hello, how are you’s, and pulled the plug on the entertainment unit stopping their music. “Everyone out.”

  She dumped the flowers on the kitchen table. “Mace. That’s incredibly rude.” She half laughed, half chastised, trying to make this less embarrassing. “We’ve got a class at four. We’ll all be out of here in an hour. We were talking about—”

  Mace looked at Ingrid, maybe hoping for an ally. ”I’m sure it was riveting.” Ingrid laughed at him. Alfie and Carmen were on their feet. Agnes had never met Mace. She stared at him.

  “Mace.”

  He turned to her. “You’re skipping class.”

&n
bsp; “I beg your pardon.”

  “We’ll be going then,” said Carmen. “Close your mouth, Aggie.” She tried to hustle everyone.

  “I dunno, this looks entertaining. I’d like to stick around,” said Alfie.

  Mace turned cold, determined eyes on Alfie. “Out, all of you. Now.” He went to the front door and opened it. There was obviously nothing wrong with him that an injection of decent manners and a thump in the head wouldn’t cure.

  She trailed behind her guests. “I’m so sorry. I’ll come with you.” She wasn’t staying in the loft with Mace for one more second.

  Ingrid hesitated in the doorway. She ignored Mace. “Would you like me to stay?”

  He answered. “I need her, Ingrid.”

  Ingrid lifted her chin and stared him down, her expression fierce. She was approximately half Mace’s size, but she wasn’t the least bit intimidated by his Doberman to her Toy Poodle. She must’ve seen something she liked. She patted his chest, pushed Agnes ahead of her, glanced back at Jacinta and stepped into the stairwell.

  It didn’t matter what Ingrid thought she saw. Jacinta was having none of it. Who did he think he was? She stepped around him to leave and he blocked her exit with his outstretched arm.

  “Let me go, please.”

  He closed the door. “So civil.”

  When he’d been so obnoxiously offensive.

  He moved in on her, his eyes measuring, bouncing all over her face and body, his expression locked down, severe as a winter’s night. She stood her ground. Let him pull that menacing stunt. She’d faced down menacing men before. He shifted quickly, his hand coming up to cup her cheek, the tenderness of the move at odds with everything else about him. She jolted from the shock and heat flooded through her as his other hand slid over her hip to grasp her butt.

  “I haven’t seen you awake for days. I need to be with you right now.”