Besides not being super interested in poetry readings or cake, she wouldn’t have had anyone to talk to at an event like that, with Benny and Sasha Smolnikova and Dima and Ana all scattered across the country for grad school, or tech jobs, or something else more prestigious and interesting than working at the art supply store. Not that she ever liked any of them very much, but they could at least talk to each other in English, instead of stumbling over Russian with their parents, smug about their children’s success relative to Nina. How did she end up so unacademic, so ordinary, with parents like Peter and Olga, those family friends would wonder quietly amongst themselves, before taking another slice of Olga’s Soviet-style apple charlotte cake.

Nina finished eating quickly and was about to go upstairs to her room when the door to the basement caught her eye. She went down instead, the musty dampness of the basement filling her head like smoke. 

There was a half-finished canvas she remembered working on years ago, back when she thought she was going to do a painting portfolio for AP Studio Art. Half of a still life composed of elegant objects like pearls and seashells and coral on a velvet tablecloth. The colors were fine, Nina thought, but the composition and everything else about it was unremarkable. She squeezed the remains of red acrylic paint out of the tube directly onto the canvas and slashed it around with a palette knife, making it look like the pearls and shells had been excavated out of the lining of a sea monster’s stomach. After a moment’s thought, she started to go over the pearls and shells too, swirling and distorting the objects into something else, some kind of thick, congealing fluid with a mother-of-pearl tinge to it.

It didn’t look like what she’d started with. It didn’t look much like the painting from a few days ago, either. 

It looked, Nina thought, stepping back from the canvas, palette knife shedding drops of red paint on the cement floor, like something new.

She snapped a photo, but didn’t send it to anyone right away. It wasn’t finished yet, she thought. It needed something more... Maybe mixed media? Pieces of lace embedded in the sticky paint? A real string of fake pearls? Would that look cheap, kitsch, gimmicky? 

Maybe now would be a good time to ask an art school classmate for critique. The rawness she’d felt making the first painting had scabbed over somewhat with her second, and the fact that she was reworking an old canvas helped distance it from herself as she was now. 

She sent the photo to the usual suspects, and a fine arts major from her general art history class she’d hit it off with back in freshman year. She hoped the fine arts major remembered her, but if she didn’t, maybe she’d like the painting enough to reply.

Goldie instantly fired off a string of emoji indicating awe and joy and delight, and Cory responded with “SENSUAL”. The fine arts major, Rushna, said, “Hey, good to hear from you again! I’m glad you’re doing well. This looks really cool! I think maybe the rendering on the foreground shapes could be a little tighter to separate them out from the background more— you’re going for a like, grotesque twisted still life thing, right? I think that would help clarify that concept better.”

Rushna: Glad to see you’re doing more painting now though!

Rushna: you’re near NYC now right? do you want to join a crit group I have? we meet in brooklyn every other week

Nina almost laughed as she sent back, “thanks for the advice! I’m in New Jersey though, getting to Brooklyn for me is a bit of a shlep unfortunately.”

Nina: but if you send me stuff I’ll try to help!

Rushna: it’s a deal!

Goldie called her as Nina was getting ready for bed. “You really are good at painting. You said you majored in illustration at school?”

“I thought there’d be more job prospects in it, but I don’t think it ever really clicked with me,” Nina admitted.

“Well, I think you should pursue the painting thing. I forwarded the pictures to my mom and said you’re a recent art school graduate without any contacts in the art world yet, and she wants to meet you.”

“Did you tell her we’re—”

“No,” Goldie interrupted with a laugh, “although I wouldn’t be surprised if she knew somehow anyway. I just told her, truthfully, I met you at a gallery opening and you showed me your stuff.” She sounded smug. “So, do you wanna come up here next Sunday? We could have lunch at Delany’s, it’s less busy for lunch than dinner over there, and then walk over to Chelsea with my mom and she could introduce you to people and see what happens? How does that sound?”

It sounded perfect, Nina thought. The kind of perfect that never happened to people like Nina, people without the kind of things Goldie grew up with without having to think about it. “Didn’t you say your family did brunch every Sunday? Am I really allowed to crash that?”

“Okay, when I said ‘every Sunday’ I meant more like ‘every Sunday in an ideal world.’ We’re busy people, if we can make it once a month we’re doing well.” She let out a laugh again. “So you’re in?”

“Sure,” said Nina. “Thank you. For your generosity.”

“Anything for you, darling,” Goldie said, putting on an affected Old Hollywood Diva-type accent. “Maybe your career will take off and you’ll have to move to New York, and we can hang out every day! Who knows!” She said it lightly, but there was a strange note of hysteria behind the lightness, and Nina felt something dark curl inside her.

“I mean, I don’t know if I’d want to live in New York, honestly,” Nina said. “It’s so expensive...” 

She had no idea how she could explain the intense resentment she felt for the city at times, as everything in her life was sucked deeper and deeper into its merciless orbit. Maybe she should aim to move back to Chicago, where New York’s shadow was less palpable. Or Los Angeles. Or the Moon. But she’d miss Goldie then, and it really was generous of her to introduce to her mom and her connections. She’d be an idiot to pass up an opportunity like that.

“You don’t have to live here, then,” Goldie said. “Just come up on Sunday and we can see where it goes from there.”

“Okay,” said Nina. “Okay.”

She ended the call and lay back in her bed, staring at the blank white ceiling above her. The wave of desire that had hit her as she walked back to her car after work seemed to have receded with the tide. Figures. Now that she could actually do something about her wants, the mood was gone.

She was off work on Monday while her parents were not, so Nina did laundry. She put the laundry on and looked at the painting waiting for her on its easel, looking a little brighter, a little drier in the daylight. She had no idea what had possessed her the previous night to get that much out in just a few hours. It really was almost done. She touched up the foreground shapes with a tiny brush, smoothing out the transitions between colors and adding more color. The advantage and disadvantage of acrylic was how fast it dried, which made it hard to keep fiddling with a painting over a long period of time. The paint she’d applied the night before was already dry, but she could dissolve it with rubbing alcohol and remove some of the layers in the area she wanted to rework...

The laundry machine beeped its announcement of the end of its cycle. Nina sighed, stretched her arms over her head and went to switch the loads. 

She set the canvas on the ground and cleaned up some of the spilled paint around it, wondering if she should start something else since she had the time. Should she even be meeting with gallery representatives with only three paintings she was comfortable showing them? Did she need to bring the paintings with her?

She texted Goldie, who told her not to worry about a thing and that the pictures she’d taken combined with Goldie’s mother’s endorsement were all she’d need. Which was, paradoxically, more worrying to Nina.

She went through her canvases and sketchbooks again, fanning them out on the cold gray basement floor. More unfinished work from high school. Finished work from high school. One blank canvas, but a tiny one, barely larger than one of Nina’s sketchbooks. She couldn’t do anything with that one. Unless she wanted to cut it up and attach it to something else... Somehow. Nina had never learned how to do that, mostly focusing on painting on canvases already prepared by someone else. It might be cool, she thought, to paint something on a canvas shaped like a triangle, or a diamond, or something else. But for now she’d either have to cannibalize her old work or go to her place of employment on her day off, which she always hated to have to do. She was running low on red paint, too. She should probably go to the art store. At least she got a discount there, and she knew they stocked her preferred brands because she requested them.