TEN YEARS EARLIER
“I think I’ve looked at this one too much,” my best friend Renee says to me as we come around the corner and find what I suspect is Magritte’s most annoying piece. It’s got the same strong lines and supreme confidence of his most famous work, The Son of Man, the fancy guy with the bowler hat with a green apple floating in front of his face. But the subject matter of Time Transfixed is very different—a flat fireplace in a streamlined drawing room, with the perspective angled from lower-left corner to upper right, so you know the room is a room, not a box. And of course, the ultra-black locomotive made out of a steam pipe thrusting out of the fireplace. Like it’s … you know.
“Yeah, me too,” I agree. “Or maybe the idea of Time Transfixed is just not sitting well with me right now,” I say. It is the day before art school graduation. Four years living with my best friend and making art and looking at art and eating, sleeping, drinking up art, and tomorrow it is all over.
Time is most certainly not feeling very transfixed.
“Magritte preferred a different translation for the French,” she tells me. “Something about stabbing time with a knife. It’s a lot more aggressive, more active that way.”
“I wish I could stab time with a knife.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Easy for you to say. You’re going off to law school after graduation. Law school, Renee. You’re going to be a lawyer, and make tons of money, and wear suits.” I pause at that. “Have you really thought this through?”
She laughs warmly at me. “Of course I have! It’s going to be great. I love arguing. And you don’t have to wear suits unless you’re in court.”
“Do you even own a suit?” I ask her.
She laughs. “Just the one I bought for the interview. And it was separates so I don’t think it counts. Don’t worry, Lily. I’m still me even if I’m going to be a lawyer. Law school won’t change the fact that I don’t wear pantyhose.”
“When will you sculpt?”
Renee shrugs. “There will be time. Or I can always set it aside for a little while, come back when I’m more inspired. It hasn’t really been as fun for me since … well, since I started planning my future.”
I look at her sideways, thinking, That is what you get for always worrying about your future.
“I don’t think you’ll survive without your art.”
Renee tilts her head at me, looking away from the Magritte for the first time. “Or maybe that’s more you than me. You need to be covered in paint every hour of every day. You are the one who’s talented. You’re the one with the passion.”
“You’re talented! You have passion!”
“Remember what they said to us at orientation freshman year?”
“No,” I say honestly. “Something about reporting date rape?”
“Besides that. They said, if you can do something besides art, you should.”
I open my arms in question. “Well, that’s everyone, though. I can do lots of other things. I can sort of play the piano. I make a good espresso. And a good martini.”
“They meant do any other job. They meant if your soul wouldn’t die from not making art, don’t make art.”
“I think that’s a lousy litmus test,” I say. “Soul death is kind of an extreme bar to set.”
“And yet for you, I think you meet it. You are destined to do this.” She gestures at the museum, as though I am supposed to end up in a place like this. When, much more likely, I’d be lucky to get paid to paint the side of a barn.
“So I’m destined to be poor and tortured for at least the next fifty years, and you, my best friend in the whole world, are destined to sue people for a living?”
Renee smiles mildly. “Well, that’s what I’m hoping.”
I gesture to the Magritte. “I am the fireplace. All out of whack and stagnant. And you are the locomotive, doing useful things and plowing ahead.”
“Actually, I think the locomotive is supposed to be his penis.”
I snort. “You think everything in art is genitals.”
Renee shrugs. “It isn’t?”
We laugh. But my laugh is melancholy. Four years in art school together. Four years living together as best friends, telling each other everything, seeing each other at our absolute worst and absolute best. How can it be over already? How come time isn’t just a little more transfixed?
“There’s room for you to stay in my apartment any time you visit,” I tell her. “It’s such a sweet place; you’re going to be so jealous.”
“I’m just jealous that you don’t have to live in South Bend, Indiana, for the next two years. Promise you’ll visit every weekend you don’t have to work.” Renee grabs my hand. “I can’t believe we won’t be living together anymore. I don’t even know how that’s supposed to work. About seventy-five percent of my clothes are actually your clothes. I’m going to have to go shopping. Promise when you come you’ll bring your Seven jeans for me to wear?”
“Of course. Me, tequila, Seven jeans. I won’t even call first.”
“Perfect. See, things don’t have to change that much. It’s only a few hours in the car. Plus, I’ll have all those law school hotties rounded up for you to date.”
“You are the best friend, Renee. Let’s trade keys tomorrow before the ceremony starts.”
“If you haven’t locked yourself out before then,” Renee says, speaking of my truly extraordinary ability to trap myself out of cars, dorms, studios, and apartments.
I ignore her. “And then when law school is over you can move in with me.”
“I might meet someone, you know,” she says vaguely. “Fall in love. Move to the suburbs.”
“Don’t even joke!”
A shadow crosses Renee’s face. I work very hard not to see it. It feels like the shadow of the locomotive. “Anyway,” she says eventually, “you think you’ll still be in that apartment in two years?”
“Renee, I am going to die in that apartment. In eighty years they will find me in there surrounded by bad paintings, half-eaten by cats. And you know what? I’m pretty okay with that.”
“Well,” she says, turning on her heels and making for the Miró. “As long as you have a plan.”
Copyright © 2016 by Kelly Harms
