The Last First

The gallery opening was one of those free wine and cheese things my coworker Pat dragged me to because he hated going alone. I'm Fred, thirty-four, medical device rep, recently divorced, and at that point in my life my idea of a good Tuesday night was a burrito and my couch. But Pat had promised to drive and I'd had a long week, so I went.

The gallery was in a converted dry cleaner's off Main Street in Erickson, which is a college town that smells like fallen leaves and overpriced espresso nine months of the year. There were maybe forty people packed in, all holding plastic cups of wine and pretending to understand a series of paintings of boats. Not boats exactly. Boat shapes. Very blurry boat shapes.

And that's where I saw her. Not her face first, actually. What I noticed was that she was standing in front of one painting for a really long time. Like, four minutes at least. Everybody else was doing the move-along shuffle, three seconds per painting, nod, sip, next. This woman just stood there with her arms crossed, looking at a blurry boat like it owed her money.

I'll be honest about how I approached her, meaning I didn't plan it. Pat had drifted off to talk to a guy about fishing, and I sort of orbit-drifted until I was standing next to her.

"Is that one good?" I asked. Smooth, right? Real smooth.

She turned and looked at me. She was thirty-one or thereabouts, I'd find out later, with brown hair pinned up with what appeared to be a paintbrush, which turned out to be an actual paintbrush. She had paint on her wrist too, a smear of yellow. She didn't look annoyed at the question, which surprised me.

"It's the best one here," she said. "And everyone's walking past it."

"Why do you think they're doing that?"

"Because it's uncomfortable," she said, turning back to it. "Look at how the horizon line is crooked. It's crooked on purpose. It makes you feel like you're on the deck. People don't like feeling like they're on the deck at a wine event."

I looked. The horizon was crooked. I had genuinely not noticed that in the four minutes I'd been standing near it, mostly because I'd been working up the nerve to say something about boats.

"Okay, that's actually true," I said. "I feel a little seasick now. Is that the goal?"

"That's a bonus," she said, and she smiled. "I'm Catherine. I did my thesis on maritime painting, which is a real field, no matter what my mother says."

"Fred. I sell knee replacement parts to hospitals. Which is a real field, no matter what my mother says."

She laughed at that, a real laugh, not a polite gallery laugh. We ended up walking the rest of the show together, and she talked about the paintings the way other people talk about sports, fast and with strong opinions about specific players. I mostly listened. My ex-wife used to say I was a good listener, and she meant it as a criticism, but standing there it felt like a skill.

The wine ran out around eight and the gallery people started giving us the herding look. Catherine shrugged into a canvas jacket covered in more paint smears.

"I'm getting coffee," she announced. "Do you want coffee? There's a place two blocks down that stays open late and doesn't play music, which I care about a lot."

"I do want coffee," I said. "And I also care about that. The music thing. Coffee shops think we all need a soundtrack and we don't."

"Right? Like, sometimes I just want to hear the espresso machine and my own thoughts."

So we walked two blocks to a place called Steadman's, which had mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu and, blessedly, no music. She ordered a mocha with an extra shot and I got black coffee, and we took the table by the window because she said she liked watching people walk by in the cold, checking their phones, hunched up like turtles.

Here's the part where I should probably explain where I was at, emotionally, that night. My divorce had been final for about eight months. I'd married at twenty-four to a woman I met in a hospital cafeteria, and we'd been fine, mostly, until we weren't, and the whole thing came apart with almost no yelling, which in some ways was worse. And since then I'd done the apps, the way everyone does the apps, and I'd had a handful of dates that all felt like job interviews where both parties had already decided to hire the other one and were just waiting for the paperwork.

"So why are you at gallery openings with a coworker you don't like?" Catherine asked. She'd figured out the Pat situation fast. I'd said maybe four words about him and she'd caught the tone.

"I don't know. My friend group dried up after the divorce. Married couples don't invite the divorced guy to things. It's like you're contagious." I turned my cup around on the saucer. "So I say yes to stuff. Gallery openings, a trivia night, someone's cousin's housewarming. Mostly it's fine."

"Mostly?"

I could have deflected. I thought about deflecting. But she was looking at me with actual attention, not the app-date attention where they're checking your teeth for warning signs, and something in me just went for it.

"Mostly it's lonely in a specific way," I said. "And I keep meeting people who want to skip to the end. Like, we meet, and there's this script. Drink, flirt, go home with someone, decide later if you regret it. And I did that once, a few months ago, and I felt worse after than before. I felt like I'd been returned to the store."

Catherine stirred her mocha slowly. "Returned to the store," she repeated. "That's a good way to put it."

"What about you? What brings you to wine events where you look at one painting the whole time?"

She smiled down at her cup. "Free caffeine beforehand is part of it. But also, my advisor makes us go. Networking, she calls it. And I like the paintings, obviously. But yeah." She took a breath. "Can I say something kind of heavy for a weeknight?"

"Please. I came here from a knee conference. Heavy is an improvement."

"I've never actually slept with anyone," she said.

I will admit I blinked. She was gorgeous and funny and twenty-something, or so I'd guessed, and she'd clearly dated, she mentioned an ex named Tom within ten minutes of knowing her.

"Not for lack of wanting," she went on, talking faster now, the way people do when they're bracing for a reaction. "I had a boyfriend for two years in my mid-twenties, Tom, and we did some things, short of that. Every time it got to that point I'd freeze up, and he'd get this face, this patient-but-not-really face, and eventually I'd say forget it and we'd stop, and it felt like a failure every time, and I stopped wanting it at all, and then we broke up about a guy thing, a stupid guy thing, and I haven't really tried since."

"Freezing up isn't a failure," I said. "That sounds like your body telling the truth and somebody not listening. That sounds like the opposite of the whole point."

"Right? And every therapist I've had says the same thing, which is that I need someone who won't treat slowness like a problem to be solved. And every guy I've mentioned that to has nodded and then lasted about two weeks before the face came back." She looked at me. "So there it is. You now know the weirdest thing about me. Your turn."

I sat with that for a second. The espresso machine hissed. Outside, a guy in a puffer coat walked by checking his phone, hunched like a turtle, and Catherine pointed at him with her chin and we both almost laughed, and then it got serious again somehow.

"The weird thing about me," I said, "is that my marriage was ten years of the most careful, polite, scheduled sex you can imagine, and I thought that was just what it was. And I'm afraid I'll do it again. Pick someone available instead of someone I actually want, and go through the script, and end up back at the store."

"So we're both terrified of the same thing from opposite directions," she said. "You're afraid of rushing. I'm afraid of being rushed."

"That's a weird amount of overlap for a Tuesday night."

"Isn't it?" She grinned. "Okay. Here's a wild idea. What if we just... don't do the script? What if we hang out and see paintings and drink bad coffee, and nothing has to go anywhere, and if it does go somewhere it goes slowly, like, embarrassingly slowly, and we say so out loud whenever either of us gets nervous?"

"That sounds like the least sexy plan I've ever heard," I said, "and also the best one."

"Deal?" She held out her hand across the table, paint smears and all.

"Deal," I said, and shook it. Her hand was warm and there was a callus on the middle finger from holding brushes, and I remember thinking, this is the first handshake that ever felt like a promise.

So the deal held. We hung out. That was literally the word we used, "hang out," like we were twenty-two instead of thirty-four and thirty-one.

That Friday she texted me a photo of a half-finished canvas and the message, "Come judge my shipwreck." I was at a cardiology trade thing in Worcester until four, so I told her six, and she said fine, bring snacks, I have no food, I have paint and one dying banana.

Her studio was the attic of an old house on Gomez Street, the kind with a steep roof and a window at each end. She'd rigged up two lamps and there were paint tubes everywhere, on the windowsill, in coffee cans, one open on the floor like it had made a run for it. She had her hair pinned up with a brush again. I think that's just how her hair works.

"Okay, don't be nice," she said, standing aside. "Be honest. My advisor is going to destroy this in a seminar on Thursday and I want to know now."

It was a maritime painting, obviously, but not the boring kind. It was a storm, mostly gray and green, and in the lower third there was a lifeboat with about nine figures rowing away from something you couldn't see. That was the part that got me. The thing they were fleeing wasn't painted. Just light where it would be.

"It's the not-painted part," I said. "That's the best part. It's scarier because it's blank."

She turned around and stared at me. "Fred. I have been staring at that spot for two weeks. Two weeks! And I couldn't figure out why it worked. And you just walked in with a bag of pretzels and fixed it."

"That's what I do. I sell knee implants and fix paintings."

"You absolutely do not fix paintings." But she was laughing, and she crossed the room and hugged me, quick, paint-smelling, and then stepped back like she'd surprised herself. "Sorry. Pretzel instinct."

"You can hug me. We established that when you shook my hand like a senator."

"Did I do that? God!" She flopped onto her paint-stained futon and I sat on the one chair without a drop cloth on it, and we talked about her seminar and my knee conference and whether pretzels count as dinner, and at some point the light through the windows went from gold to blue to nothing, and neither of us turned on more lamps, and the room got kind of dim and warm, and I noticed I was relaxed. Actually relaxed. Around a person. That hadn't happened in a while.

"Can I ask you something?" she said from the futon. "You can say no!"

"Ask."

"When you got divorced, was there a moment where you knew? Like a specific moment?"

I thought about it. "Yeah. Our ninth anniversary. My ex said, 'Well, that's nine,' the way you'd say a parking meter expired. And I thought, we're both just watching the clock run down. That was it." I looked over at her. "Why, does that sound awful?"

"No, it sounds honest. I keep waiting for a moment like that with my whole degree, honestly. Like, at what point do I admit I don't want to be a professor, I just like looking at paintings?" She sat up. "Everyone acts like you're supposed to know the ending before you start."

"That's the script thing again. Dating, careers, everything. First drink, first kiss, first whatever, all pre-decided, and you're just checking boxes."

"First kiss," she repeated, and then went bright red, I could see it even in the dim. "Okay. Wow. That just came out."

"It did."

"Fred, I'm going to say something and you're allowed to laugh." She took a breath. "I've never been kissed in a way that felt like a beginning. Tom's first kiss with me was in a car and he kind of just went for it and I bit his lip by accident and it set the tone for the whole relationship, honestly."

"So what would a good one feel like?"

"I don't know. That's the problem. Something with an actual moment in it. Where you can tell the other person is asking even if they're not using words."

I sat there with my heart doing something noticeable. Then I said, "Can I kiss you?"

And she smiled, this huge unguarded smile, and said, "Yes. Oh my god, yes."

So I got up out of the no-drop-cloth chair and crossed about four feet of studio floor and sat down next to her on the futon, and it was brief and it was electric, that's the only way I can describe it. Just a few seconds. Her mouth was warm and her hand came up and landed on my chest, and I pulled back first because I wanted to see her face.

"Okay," she breathed. "That was. Okay. Wow."

"Good wow or bad wow?"

"Good wow. Are you kidding?" She touched her own mouth like she was checking it. "That had a moment in it. Did you feel the moment?"

"I felt the moment."

"We should probably not do that again tonight," she said, very seriously. "Or I'm going to want to do more than that and it's day four of a slow plan."

"Agreed." It was not agreed. My entire body voted no on that motion. But we shook hands on it, which is our thing now apparently, and it was somehow the most ridiculous and nicest handshake of my life.

We ended up walking because neither of us wanted to go home. Erickson at night in October is all wet leaves and porch lights and one guy at the corner of Main playing guitar badly but with total commitment. We walked from Gomez down to the Common and around it, and then around it again, and she had her hands jammed in this enormous green coat she wore like a tent.

"So here's my question," I said, somewhere on the second lap. "And I've been chewing on it since the studio."

"Uh oh."

"What are we actually doing? Not what are we doing tonight. Like, the project. You and me. Because I keep thinking about the script thing, and I think the reason the script fails isn't the order of the steps. It's that nobody says what any of it means. You just do the steps and hope the meaning shows up."

She was quiet for half a block. A bus went by, mostly empty, lit up as a fish tank would be.

"Okay," she said. "Say what you actually mean. Out loud. Embarrassingly slowly, remember."

So I said it. "I want our first time to be the last first. Not the last first anything creepy, I mean..." I stopped and restarted, because I could hear how it sounded. "Every first I've ever had was a rehearsal for something. First date as an audition. First kiss as a checkpoint. And I did a first wedding that