Roses and Rot (9 page)

I shrugged. “It’s usually not hard. Except today, when I can’t make anything get stiff.”

Ariel snickered.

I stared.

“You heard what you just said, right?” she asked.

I paused, realized, and the two of us dissolved into laughter, far more than my inadvertent innuendo deserved, red-faced, tears streaming from our eyes. When we had gotten ahold of ourselves, Ariel stood up. “Right. I’m staging an intervention. For the both of us.”

She poured two shots of whiskey, then handed one to me. “Here’s to the losers.”

“You too?” I asked.

“Me too.”

We clinked glasses and downed the shots.

“I haven’t ruined my clothing, but I’ve been writing like shit the past week or so myself,” Ariel said. “It pisses me off. Here I am in this amazing place, with this prestigious opportunity, and I can’t do a goddamned thing with it. And I’m sure that’s part of why I can’t write a decent song right now, because there’s suddenly all this pressure to be worthy, to live up to being chosen to be here, to not waste my time, but knowing that is one thing and actually being able to not give a fuck and write songs is another.”

“I thought it would be easier, being here,” I said. “Like, all the things I told myself were getting in the way before would be gone. The only thing left to worry about would be my writing. Instead, I’ve picked up a whole new bunch of things to worry about. Like, what if I’m not taking enough advantage of working with Beth? Maybe I should be working on a collaborative project while I’m here. Am I somehow doing residency entirely wrong?”

“What if I’m good, but being here proves that I’ll never be great?” Ariel said.

“And that’s the big one.” I pushed my glass to the side. “Good to know that insecurity keeps pace with ambition.”

“It’s weird, being here,” Ariel said, sliding our glasses around the
table like some version of a shell game that had our talent hiding beneath.

“Yes. Yes, it is. Good weird, but weird.”

“I mean, I was giving piano lessons and working as a barista back home so I could pay rent. Grabbing gigs when and where I could, and being grateful if I got enough box office to pay the gas money. Here, I check a box for whether I want my dinner to be organic microgreens or a nice salmon risotto,” Ariel said. “And I’m sure as fuck not complaining about that, but you know, I always told myself that if I could just succeed enough not to have to worry about whether I was going to be able to pay my bills each month, then I’d have the space in my head to stop hustling and really make something. Something great.”

“And here we are, the luckiest of the lucky, with our organic microgreens, and what if we’re still not good enough?” I said.

“Right. I have the space in my head, and instead of ideas, it’s full of doubt. Everything they tell us about being here is how this is a place where we are meant to just focus on our art, to create for ourselves without worrying about anything else, but I have never in my life felt more like everyone is watching me work, and it’s paralyzing.”

“Like we’re not making art for ourselves, but to represent Melete. All that tradition, everyone who came before us, and sometimes it’s wonderful—look who I belong with!—and sometimes it just feels like a longer list of people to let down.” I raised my empty glass, toasting Helena, who had just come in. She glared at us as she set the kettle on for tea.

“Also, I keep feeling like someone is literally watching me work,” Ariel said. “I mean, obviously, they’re not, because my studio has no windows, but I swear I feel eyes.”

“Me too!” I said. “I’ve decided it’s the weight of expectations and/or my own guilt manifesting.”

Helena slammed the cupboard so hard it bounced open again.

“Do you have something you’d like to share with the class?” Ariel asked.

“You’re both idiots. Of course you’re being watched. We all are. You think they don’t care about which one of us is the best, that you’ve made it to the top just because you got in?”

“I’m sure they do, Helena, but no one from Melete is going to be looking in my windows at night while I’m writing,” I said.

“I wouldn’t be so sure.” She stared into her mug like she was using it to divine the future.

“Helena. I live on the third floor.”

Ariel snorted out a laugh.

“Laugh all you want,” Helena said. “But if you’re smart, you’ll pay attention to those feelings. Getting in here was only the beginning.”

October had come to Melete, and brought apple cider weather with it. The air wasn’t truly cold, but sharp and bright, the knife-edge promise of oncoming winter. The leaves were a quiet conflagration on the trees, but every day more and more dropped, baring the skeletons of branches to the darkening sky. The days were shorter, and slid through each other faster.

Melete was no longer new. This was our place now—we knew the paths under our feet, knew the sounds and the scents that surrounded us. It had become home, become very nearly ordinary. All of the strangeness, all of the things that astounded us, that we had exclaimed over when we first arrived, were now commonplace. As we began to see things as ordinary, we saw the cracks in the perfection, and the cracks in ourselves as well.

When you go somewhere to be alone with yourself and your art, the problem becomes that you are alone with yourself and your art. For some people, that aloneness becomes the abyss, staring back. It wasn’t the kind of thing that got advertised in the promotional materials, but every year there were people who chose not to finish their residency, and left Melete early. We had our first in early October, a painter.

“I didn’t know him, but Ali, the woman who has the studio next to mine, lived in the same house as he did, and she told me he spent, like, three days just walking around outside, not eating or showering or anything,” Marin said. “Then he went back to his room, packed up everything except his paints and canvases and stuff, and declared he was unworthy of his muse.”

“His muse?” I asked, shaking my head. Ridiculous.

“That’s where things get really interesting,” Marin said, leaning against the railing of the porch stairs. The late-morning sun was warm, casting gold over everything. “Because it seems like his muse was more than just metaphorical.

“Ali also said there was a woman—some utterly gorgeous supermodel-type—who had been coming around at all hours to see him. And they had a fight. Like, a loud screaming fight. Ali overheard her calling him worthless and mediocre. She said his art was no use to her, and so he wasn’t either.”

“Ouch,” I said.

“Right? Still, if you leave for no reason other than your maybe-girlfriend says you suck, you probably weren’t going to have much of a career anyway. I mean, how do you get to the point of being good enough to get in here without also learning how to say ‘fuck you’ to the people who tell you you’re not? Or did he just live in some magical world where he never got a rejection or a bad review?” She shook her head.

“Probably the latter,” I said. “For those of us who don’t audition, who work on our own when we want to, instead of in required classes, this may be the first time we’ve had to think about how good we are, and how much we’ll have to work to get to where we want to be. Whether it’s even going to be possible for us to work hard enough to get there.

“Maybe,” I continued, “this was the first time someone had ever told him he wasn’t a modern Michelangelo, and he couldn’t take the criticism. You know, you find out that you’re not perfect, and so instead of figuring out how to get better, you quit because you’re not good enough.”

“I guess that makes sense,” she said. “I remember the first time I didn’t get something I’d auditioned for. It was a couple of months after you left, an open call for Ballet New York.” She set down her coffee mug and looked out into the forest. “I was so desperate for them to pick me.”

This was a story I didn’t know. Ballet New York was the company that Marin had been with from the time she left home to when she quit to come here. I’d always assumed she’d gotten in right away. “What happened?”

“To this day, I don’t know. I even asked, after they did hire me and I’d been dancing there for a while, and they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me.

“I’d had what I thought was a good audition, made it through to the last round of cuts, then ‘wasn’t what they were looking for.’ No other reason. I almost quit dance.”

“Really?” I couldn’t imagine a Marin who didn’t dance.

“I felt like, if they couldn’t even tell me what was wrong with me, it obviously wasn’t fixable. I just wasn’t right.” She looked lost, as if there was a part of her that still heard that voice.

“What made you keep dancing?”

She laughed, sharp and bitter. “Our mother. She had paid for classes, after all, and I was going to take them. So she wouldn’t let me quit until she’d gotten her money’s worth. And the next audition call was during that paid-up window, and I got it. It was the one time she’s ever helped my career.”

“I got fifty-three rejection letters before I sold my first story.”

“Seriously?” She looked at me.

I nodded. “Fifty. Three. I probably have hundreds by now, if I were ever masochistic enough to count them all.”

“Do you ever wonder why we do this to ourselves? Spend ninety percent of our lives being told we’re not good enough?” Marin tied her hair back for practice, and picked up her bag.

“Sure,” I said. “It’s for the ten percent of the time we know that we are.” I picked up my mug and went back inside to write.

Walking back from Beth’s that afternoon, I cut across the Commons and through the studios, first wandering along the forest edge to see if Marin was in hers.

It had been an uncomfortable meeting. Beth had asked me for pages, even though we had agreed that she wouldn’t. “Proof of work,” she called it, and said she wanted to be sure I was pushing myself.

“What happened to protecting my art?” I asked. I had finished work, of course I did, but she had promised, and I had trusted her.

“That’s fine, Imogen, but you also have to learn to accept feedback. If you wanted to work in an echo chamber, you didn’t need to come here to do it. I’m not asking for everything, or for something that’s still in draft. But I want to see two or three of your more polished sections. I can’t help you if you don’t show me what you’re working on, and in case you’ve forgotten, the entire reason I am here is to help you.”

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll do it when I get home.” I had left then, cutting the meeting short. I had been on the verge of tears, and I didn’t want her to see me cry. Part of me felt her request like a betrayal, like the rules had changed midgame.

But I was also angry at myself, because I knew better. I knew feedback was part of the process, and Beth had said during our first meeting that she wouldn’t let me waste my time here. We had been in residence for six weeks now, and I hadn’t shown her anything, hadn’t taken advantage of her expertise. And not for any good reason, but because I couldn’t shake the feeling that what she would tell me was that I wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t now, and never would be.

Marin wasn’t in her studio, so I kept walking, curious to see if I could find Evan’s. I was still too pissy to want to be alone with myself.

The studio buildings were loosely organized according to need, so the large, open ones for dancers were clustered together, separate from the musicians and the visual artists. Most people had decorated their doors or hung signs, some sort of expression of who was in there. Marin was tying all of her worn-out pointe shoes to the tree in front of her door. They danced like a corps de ballet of ghosts when the wind blew.

I circled past a door covered in painter’s palettes and another with glass mosaicked on the front steps. The paths seemed to loop back on themselves, and even trying the labyrinth trick of only making right turns didn’t work—I knew I had passed the same doorway three times now. It was covered in crinkled silver foil, reflecting the light, scattershot, everywhere. There was no one out working, no one I could ask for directions. My head ached with frustration.

I turned again, and there he was. I knew his walk, that shade of red-gold hair. “Evan!” I called, running after. But he kept walking, turned a corner.