Canvas and Compromise

The bus let me off at the corner of Harbor Road and I stood there with my duffel bag like an idiot, staring at the giant warehouse with MCKINNON ARTIST RESIDENCY painted on the side in letters so big I could read them from the parking lot of the gas station two blocks back. Was this really the place? It looked like a fishing processing plant that gave up on life.

I'm Kaitlyn, I'm thirty-four, and I'm a nurse. My wife Tami is thirty-three, a trans woman who has been out as herself since she was twenty-one, and she's been painting for twelve years, and in all that time I had somehow never once seen her actual art world. Real life kept eating our weeks. She'd show at some gallery and I'd be working a double, or she'd have an opening and I'd be asleep on the couch by eight because I'd pulled a night shift. Four years of marriage and I'd seen her paintings on our walls and in photos on my phone and that was it.

So when she got this six-week residency and asked me, all shy about it, if I wanted to come stay for a chunk of it, I burned a week of vacation so fast my supervisor laughed at me.

I hauled my bag up the gravel drive and pushed through the big metal door, and the smell hit me before anything else. Turpentine. Oil paint. Sawdust, maybe? Some kind of solvent that made my nurse brain go, hmm, ventilation? The main floor was this huge bright space with skylights and canvases everywhere and sculptures half wrapped in plastic and tables covered in brushes and rags and coffee cups.

And there was Tami, standing in front of an easel, talking with her hands the way she does when she's excited, and I swear the whole room arranged itself around her.

She saw me and her whole face changed. "You found it! Oh my god, you found it, the directions were terrible, right? Everybody gets lost!"

"I didn't get lost, I just stood outside questioning my life choices for a minute." I dropped the duffel right there on the concrete because my arms were done. "This place is enormous."

"Right?!" She came over and hugged me and she had paint on her hands, this smear of blue across my back that I would later find on three separate shirts. She pulled back and held my shoulders. "Okay, so don't look yet."

"Don't look at what?"

"The canvas. It's not ready. You can look at the old stuff but not the new one, it's at that ugly middle stage where everything looks like garbage."

"Sweetheart, I've seen your ugly middle stages. They're better than most people's finished stages."

"Flattery. I accept it. Come on, I'll show you around."

And here is the thing I was not ready for. Watching her give the tour. She introduced me to Pedro, the residency director, twenty-nine, clipboard in hand, the kind of guy who says "great, great, great" while you're still talking. She introduced me to Damian, a sculptor she'd known for five years from a group show, who was welding something that looked like a giant metal flower having a bad day. She walked me through the kitchen situation, the laundry situation, the "the wifi dies if someone runs the kiln" situation.

She was glowing. That's the only word. My wife, who at home mostly talked about which patient I complained about that week, was in her element, and everyone clearly knew her and liked her, and I stood there holding my duffel bag feeling proud and also feeling something sharp and ugly right underneath the pride.

Jealousy. Hello, jealousy, we meet again.

Because I had never seen this Tami. Twelve years of painting and four years of marriage and I'd somehow never watched her work a room full of people who took her seriously. She was funny with Damian, quick, riffing off him about some critic who'd written something snobby five years ago, and they both cracked up like it was fresh. Five years ago! They'd known each other five years and I'd never even heard that story.

"Earth to Kaitlyn," Tami said, waving a paint-crusted hand. "You okay? You went somewhere."

"Long bus ride," I said, which was true, but not the whole truth, and she knew me well enough to file that away. She squeezed my arm and went back to arguing with Damian about whether his sculpture needed a plinth, and I unpacked in the little upstairs room while my brain chewed on itself.

Is it awful to admit I felt left out of my own wife's life? It felt awful. It felt like finding out there'd been a party going on for a decade and nobody told me I could come.

Pedro rang a bell at six, an actual bell, like a school, and announced welcome dinner, and everybody crowded around a long table made of two sawhorses and a door. There were maybe eight residents, all adults, all various flavors of paint-stained, and somebody had made an actual huge pot of soup and somebody else had brought bread and somebody else had brought wine in a box, which Tami told me was tradition.

"You sit by me," she said, pulling out a chair.

"Wouldn't dream of anything else."

Dinner was loud. Damian, thirty-one, tall, weirdly serious until he'd had two cups of box wine and then extremely not serious, told a story about Tami at that group show five years back. "She repainted her entire piece the night before the opening," he said, pointing his fork at her. "The whole thing. We're hanging work and her canvas is wet. Wet."

"It was wrong," Tami said, like that settled everything.

"It was a landscape. How wrong can a landscape be?"

"You have no eye, that's the problem. Kaitlyn, tell him he has no eye."

"He has no eye," I said, and everyone laughed, and Damian clutched his chest, and I laughed too, but inside I was doing math. He had five years of stories about my wife and I had none. He knew her laugh at gallery openings and I knew her laugh at two in the morning over bad TV. Different languages, same woman, and I only spoke one of them.

I caught myself watching her across the table, her hands moving while she talked, the light from the string bulbs up in the rafters catching her earrings, and okay, fine, I'll admit the other thing. She was beautiful and confident and in charge of this whole bright messy world, and some low-down part of my brain that I normally keep on a short hospital-appropriate leash was going, wow, hello, you are very attracted to your wife right now. Which shouldn't be a revelation! We're married! But between her shifts at the co-op gallery and my shifts at the hospital, desire had lately looked a lot like a peck on the cheek and a mutual agreement to skip the argument about dishes.

Sitting on a sawhorse bench watching her be brilliant, I wanted her. Badly. It was honestly kind of embarrassing.

"You're staring," she murmured, leaning into me.

"I'm admiring. There's a difference. Staring is creepy."

"Uh huh. You've got your nurse face on but your thoughts are not medical."

"How do you know what my nurse face is?"

"Because I've seen it for four years, babe." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "Later, okay? After dinner. I want to show you the canvas even though it's garbage."

"Even though it's garbage?"

"Because it's garbage and you'll be nice about it."

After dinner there was dish duty, which I did, because you can take the nurse out of the hospital but you cannot take the urge to sanitize surfaces out of the nurse, and Tami dried beside me, bumping my hip with hers on purpose every time, little grin on her face, and I kept almost dropping a bowl.

The others drifted off to their studios. Damian said goodnight to Tami with one of those cheek-air kisses artists do and disappeared toward his sculpture with a flashlight, muttering about load paths or whatever sculptors mutter about. Pedro locked the front door behind the last of the wine. The big room went quiet except for the skylights ticking as the night cooled.

"Okay," Tami said, taking my hand. Paint smudge and all. "Come see the garbage."

We crossed the studio floor, past everyone's abandoned stations, to her corner, where the half-finished canvas stood on its easel facing the wall, which she'd done, she explained, to keep herself honest.

"Ready?"

"Been ready since the bus."

She turned it around and, look, it wasn't garbage. It was a seascape maybe, or the idea of one, all these slashes of blue-gray and one stripe of that hot harbor orange, unfinished in a way that made my chest do something weird. Or maybe my chest was doing something weird for unrelated reasons, because she was standing there in her paint shirt with her hand still in mine, and I had spent an entire evening falling for her in a brand new way.

"So?" she said. "Garbage?"

"It's not garbage." I stepped closer. "It's you. It's so obviously you."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. And I have a confession, which is that I've spent this whole dinner being stupidly jealous of Damian and also extremely attracted to my own wife, and I don't fully know what to do with either of those."

She looked at me, and her grin went from amused to something else entirely. "Well," she said, setting down the brush she'd been fiddling with. "Come here and let's figure out the second one first."

She pulled me in by the front of my shirt and kissed me, and I mean really kissed me, the kind we used to do on her studio fire escape before we were even dating. Her mouth tasted like box wine and she was smiling into it, which is a thing I always forget she does and then remember and fall over again.

"Okay," I said when we came up for air. "That's, wow. Hi."

"Hi yourself." She tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. "You've been hovering all week, Kait. You know that, right? Since the bus."

"I have not been hovering."

"You reorganized my brushes by size. You alphabetized my, okay, nobody alphabetizes turpentine cans, there were two."

"Two cans should be in a system. That's just organization."

She laughed, that real laugh, and I felt something in my chest loosen that had been tight since like March. "I love that you tried," she said. "I do. But you're on vacation, babe. You don't have to be useful here. I didn't bring you here to be useful."

"Then why did you bring me?"

"I brought you here because I missed you and I wanted you to see this part of my life and also, selfishly, because I wanted you to look at me the way you were looking at me at dinner."

"Which way was that?"

"Like you were mad about how much you wanted me."

I do not blush easily. I'm a nurse, I've held hands with a man's fractured radius while he screamed. But I blushed. "That's an accurate reading," I admitted.

"Good." She kissed my cheek, then my jaw, unhurried about it. "So tomorrow, no cleaning. No organizing. Just be here. Can you do that for me?"

"I can try. It'll be hard. My hands will get twitchy."

"I'll give you something to hold." And she winked, absolutely winked, and led me up the narrow stairs to our room.

The upstairs room was tiny, two narrow beds pushed together years ago by some other couple probably, a window that didn't quite latch, a radiator that clanked like it was arguing with someone. We got ready for bed bumping into each other in the dark, whispered sorry, giggled, bumped again. It was like being twenty-five except my knees made sounds.

Then we were lying there in the dark and I said it before I could stop myself. "I feel awkward here, Tami. Like, really awkward. Everyone speaks this language and I just nod and hold the wine."

There was a pause, and then she laughed. Not mean. Genuinely delighted. "Babe. Oh my god. Everyone in that room is terrified of everyone else. Damian thinks Pedro thinks his sculpture is ugly. Pedro thinks the whole residency is going to fold and he's faking the budget. They're all just people who eat too much cheese at six PM and worry."

"Really?"

"Really. And you walked in and within two hours had everyone telling you their whole life story because you're warm and you asked real questions. You're not awkward, you're just the only one being honest about it."

"Huh."

"Huh," she agreed, and rolled toward me, and her movement held a different quality. Confident is the only word. She hadn't moved like that in months, maybe a year, since before the schedule madness, and it hit me somewhere low in the stomach. "Come here," she said, and pulled me to her, and kissed me like she had somewhere to be and it was me.

Her hands were still faintly paint stained and they were everywhere, my back, my hips, under the hem of my shirt. I made some kind of noise into her mouth that I will not be describing further.

"God," she murmured against my neck. "I've been thinking about this all week."

"Since the bus?"

"Since before the bus. Since you sent me that photo of you in your scrubs looking exhausted and mad and gorgeous."

"You said I looked 'fine.'"

"I was being cool. I am never cool, you know this."

I pulled her closer and we made out like the room wasn't four feet wide, like there weren't skylights over our heads, like we weren't both thirty-something married adults who had a whole conversation about the dishwasher scheduled for Sunday. Her thigh slid over mine and I gripped her hip and everything was warm and hungry and I thought, this, this is what I rode a bus here for.

Then, because we are who we are, we both got sleepy at ten thirty like responsible adults, and she fell asleep with her arm across me, snoring lightly, and I lay there grinning at the ceiling like an idiot until I dropped off too.

Morning at the residency is a whole thing. Sunlight comes through those skylights