The next message took longer to arrive. He determined how many canvases he could make out of the materials he had on hand—not a lot.
Caroline:Do you still want to be paid?
Adrian eyed the screen indecisively. He supposed the decent thing to do would be to go out with her a few times, chat with her about books and art, wait until she’d attracted a crowd of friends her own age, and then refuse her money. It was hardly labor to spend an evening out with a pretty woman—girl—Caroline. He’d probably feelbetter about himself if he forfeited payment, and nothing about Caroline suggested that she had thousands of dollars to throw around.
I thought this was going to be a date, she’d said, the sweet line of her mouth vulnerable.
Keeping this transaction brusque and financial would remind him to keep up important boundaries. He could handle this in a businesslike fashion.
And he was almost out of archival-quality linen.
Adrian:Yes, very much so.
Once he’d found sufficient pieces for two stretcher frames, Adrian took the wood to the shared workshop space to use the communal miter saw to cut the board at forty-five-degree angles. He ignored his phone until after he’d hunted down the nail gun and secured the frame pieces with brad nails and a dab of wood glue.
Caroline:??
He rolled his eyes, wishing she could see it.
Adrian:Just give me a check on Tuesday.
He hoped that would conclude the matter and let him focus on making canvases, which was industrious and necessary and forward-moving. When inspiration returned, he would be prepared to lock himself in his studio for days and be really productive. He went down the hall to fill his mister with water from the big stainless wash sink. It was always disgusting, splattered with paint where otherartists had cleaned brushes and half-clogged with sediment from pottery and sculpture and God knew what else. Artists were, in his experience, uniformly terrible, self-centered people. Granted, he could hardly exclude himself from that assessment, though he wiped down the faucets and knobs when he was done.
He looked at his phone again as soon as he returned with his full mister.
Caroline:Gold prices on the London fix are $1933.00/oz as of last hour. I can buy one bar. Do you have a jeweler’s saw?
Brat, he nearly replied. He had to stop himself and delete it, because that sounded like a sex thing. He absolutely could not hit on the bratty twenty-two-year-old who’d already announced that they were never having sex. So he chose not to reply while he measured linen for his new frames. The corners of his mouth were twitching despite his best efforts. She was funny, at least. It helped with how bizarre the situation was.
He was ready to cut the fabric when his phone beeped.
Caroline:I don’t have checks??
He sighed and put the utility knife aside. He hit the phone icon on her contact.
Caroline didn’t bother to greet him again when she picked up the call.
“So I could just withdraw the cash,” she said in a rush. Pop music blared in the background. “But I’d feel like a drug dealer carrying all that to the symphony. Or like someone about to give someone else a really good nightat the strip club. Even if you wear a suit, I’ll have a hard time finding somewhere to tuck a thousand bucks.”
He ignored that.
“Your bank probably gave you some checks when you opened your account,” he said, performing genial, elderly patience.
Cabinets clattered over the line, and a mysterious set of whirs and thuds followed. He hesitated.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m making goat cheese tarts,” Caroline proudly declared. “They showed how do to it onThe Viewlast week. They’reFrench.One sec, the pan’s about to go in the oven.”
He heard the oven door close, and then the noise of music receded. He sat there listening to her moving around her apartment, his impatience warring with the mental image the sounds were conjuring. At twenty-two, in his last year of college, he’d shared a big house in Somerville with Tom and Rose and three other BC students. The women among them had wandered around in tank tops and tiny pajama shorts that showed their legs, they’d all learned how to cook, Adrian had sold out his first show, and, in retrospect, it had been the best year of his life.
After a rustle of shuffling paper, his phone chirped with the sound of another incoming text.
He pulled his phone away from his ear to see the picture of a blank check with the number 1001 in the upper right-hand corner. It rested atop a faded floral duvet sprigged with little yellow tulips. Something made of orange lace, potentially lingerie, showed in the corner of the image frame. He would have pegged her for more of a white cotton kind of woman than orange lace, he thought, turning the phone to take a closer look.
Stop it.
“Yes, well done,” he said, reaching again for appropriate social distance. “You have correctly identified the checkbook.”
