Caroline:When?
Anticipation made him nearly light-headed.
Adrian:The second weekend in December
He pictured Caroline’s golden hair reflecting the light off the water. Her first taste ofgoodcoffee from a Cuban ventanita. Caroline in a swimsuit on the beach. It would be warm, even in December. She was from Texas; she’d probably miss the heat by then. He was getting ahead of himself, but the images were coming to him in a whirlwind, like the inspiration he’d been missing for months.
His phone buzzed again.
Caroline:Not that weekend
Caroline:That’s the weekend before finals
Caroline:But any time during winter break I could go
Caroline:I’d also love to go to Paris
Caroline:Or London
Caroline:Mostly Paris
Caroline:Or anywhere, really
Caroline:If Switzerland is where the art shows are, we’ll go to Switzerland first, but maybe we could see the other cities too?
The disappointment shouldn’t have come on so fierce for a plan that was barely ten minutes old. He mentally shook himself by the scruff of the neck. It couldn’t be that easy.
Now that he was no longer a twenty-two-year-old prodigy but rather a known quantity who had been stagnating in Boston for years, there was no reason for galleries to throw themselves at him. He had to get in line with theanonymous masses of starving artists and toss his résumé at impersonal application pages like everyone else. He belatedly realized that he had not responded to Caroline, who, of course, did not know that the December Art Basel show was in Miami, not Switzerland.
It was possible that part of the crushing disappointment was instead guilt that he’d proposed going on vacation with a woman whose finals schedule was the major impediment. Of course she should want to go to Europe, but he was not a necessary part of the trip. And Caroline didn’t need or want to go anywhere for an art show; he was just being self-centered.
Adrian:You should definitely go to France if you’ve never been
Adrian:Boston College used to have alumni trips abroad curated by the art history department
Adrian:They will have at least one to France this year
Adrian:I can tell you about those
The typing icon bounced on his phone for several minutes until Caroline sent him a thumbs-up emoji. Adrian grimaced and put his phone away. There weren’t any shortcuts. He just needed to get on with fixing things.
Adrian looked over at the two damaged paintings he’d brought into his studio that morning. He’d perilously transported them on the T, glaring at anyone who approached him and his two unwieldy cardboard boxes. The rest were with Caroline.
If he hadn’t been able to paint anything new for months, at least he could fix these. Adrian grabbed his mister bottle and went to work on the battered canvases. He’d spend the rest of the day repairing the dents in his life he could reach.
Caroline pressed her phone to her chest, nearly dizzy with delight. France! She could go to France! Going on vacation had been on the list of things that she’d thought she could do with her newfound free time and money, but it had not occurred to her that she could just... go. To France.
She wouldn’t have wanted to go by herself. So finding someone who wanted to go with her to France—or anywhere, she could go anywhere, any city she’d ever read about or seen as the backdrop to a movie—had been a necessary first step. Which she’d now taken—Very good job there, Caroline—even if it hadn’t occurred to her that she could askAdrianto go on vacation with her. It had either been a very good decision or very good luck to hire a man who hadgo to Europein his repertoire of date ideas. Perhaps she was discerning. Perhaps she had just been waiting to meet the kind of people who liked to travel to Europe and visit museums.
Adrian was, of course, the kind of person she wanted to go to France with. He’d know about the museums and the operas, what she ought to wear to them, where they ought to eat and whether snails were actually delicious or just a long con played by the French chefs’ union. Adrian probably spoke French. She’d never heard him speak French, but she sensed that he did, that he was the kind of person who impatiently awaited situations where speaking French might be appropriate.
Caroline could go to France over Christmas, even, and completely avoid the question of whether she’d go home to Templeton. No, she couldn’t go to her uncle’s house to open presents, because she’d be in Paris, eating a baguette in front of the Bastille or something.
The thought was happy enough to give Caroline strength to open her other message string from that morning. Her mother had never texted very often. Presumably she’d texted so that Caroline would have the space to choose her reply with care.
Mom:If you’re not coming home at all for Thanksgiving, can your dad and I come up and see you that weekend?
Mom:We could walk the Freedom Trail. Maybe do some Christmas shopping.
