“SETH DOESN’T TRUST me,” I tell the hypnotist. “It’s his Lutheran upbringing and his parents’ divorce, and then, of course, his dad died. Hit by a Mack truck. I think he blames his mother on some level and, by extension, all women. I don’t know how to leave him, or if I should, or how I even could, or how I can fix things between us. He’s moving to New York with me, which seems to suggest he loves me.”
“You love him,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Love is a trance.”
“Is that a song?”
“A trance is an ‘inwardly directed, selectively focused attention.’ It’s a story in which you become so absorbed you can’t see anything else.” She opens a drawer to her left and removes a smudge stick. She lights it and waves it back and forth until the smell of sage fills the room.
“Pretend you’re alone,” she says.
She’s obscured behind a curtain of smoke.
“THEY’RE ORCHIDS,” SETH told me that first day upstairs. He was reading my mind, brewing tea in a thick jar. He set a timer on the kitchen counter in a beam of late afternoon light. The room was dense with tendrils of hanging flowers, which I’d been admiring. “They’re not always the most beautiful, but they have bilateral symmetry, so when they bloom, they look like human faces. They watch you.”
He kept his eyes downcast, then looked directly into mine. He was taller than me by almost a foot, so I tilted my chin up to him. His cotton shirt was worn through, nearly transparent. “Do you smoke weed?” he said, inviting me to sit on the rug while he sketched. He passed the joint down to me. Chrysanthemums bloomed in the golden water of my jar. The sound of him enchanted me; his confidence convinced me he was wise. “What is art, Nina?” he asked me. “I still am not sure. What faculties does it command? Which aspects of our humanity, of ourselves? It may be easy to talk about, but it’s hard to accept. What do I want out of it? Where do I want to go with it?”
He turned on a lecture by Alan Watts, and talked alongside or over it for my benefit, filling in the details for my full understanding. The topic, coincidentally, was how to attract your soul mate. “On the deepest level, a person on the whole can get in the way of his own existence,” Watts said.
I found myself telling him about the novel I was writing. I asked him if he would read it and give me feedback. I’d begun drafting it in my notebook when I’d moved back to Florida, disconnected from the internet and unsure of what else to do with my sobriety. The story followed a college student who’d been forced to go to rehab. I brought him a copy the next day in an orange envelope. I’d written the title on the front and signed my name underneath.
“I’d like you to model nude for me sometime,” he said, taking the envelope. He held me with his gaze. “If you would be comfortable with that.”
“A TRANCE SHAPES what we see and how we respond,” says the hypnotist. She hands me a tiny bottle of water and a tissue. I’ve drooled on myself. “We’re highly receptive, much like when we’re in love. It’s debatable whether we even have full use of our judgment or our faculties.”
She tells me I need to work on my self-esteem; then she leads me through an intervention that involves tapping various parts of my body, repeating a mantra. I leave with a recording of our session that she’s burned onto a CD, which I have no way of playing. I notice I’ve been in her office for two hours. “Please don’t apologize,” she says. “I enjoy it as much as you do.”
On the way home, I bike past Seth’s apartment. His window is open. He doesn’t answer the door, which doesn’t mean he isn’t home. He could be in there choosing isolation. I sit and wait for him.
WHEN I RETURNED to model for Seth in the nude, I was surprised to find that our high school art teacher was there in his studio, drinking wine. The Stone Roses were playing in the room’s half darkness. I sat next to Mr. Kruck, a clean, gentle gay man. We were silent, as if bewitched by the presence of Seth, a sort of modern oracle. “I hear you’re a novelist now,” Mr. Kruck whispered. I couldn’t tell if he was amused. His eyes were fixed on the development of Seth’s abstract masterpiece.
“That’s my book,” I said, gesturing to the orange envelope, unopened on the floor near a stack of Artforum.
“Extraordinary. Seth, what can you tell me about this future bestseller?” he said.
“Nothing,” said Seth. “I haven’t read it.”
“You’ll have to fill him in once you do,” I said. He looked at me, then turned back around and continued painting.
“I’m not sure I can give you a proper critique, Nina,” he said. “I would like your permission to pass it on to my friend Jared. He’s a student of literature.”
“Yes, a wonderful idea,” said Mr. Kruck.
“You know him?” I said.
“Oh, yes. He was your classmate.”
Seth washed his paintbrush and laid it on a towel. He selected a pencil from a box of drawing supplies and scribbled on the back of a receipt. “This will depend on his other commitments,” he said. “But here’s his number. I’ll tell you when to text him, if he agrees. He prefers to text.”
When Mr. Kruck left, Seth resumed explicating his work in progress. “I feel that negative space and form play important recent roles. I transmute proportions of negative space onto dissimilar arbitrary portions of canvas. Thereby I explore space in painting, in particular the oppositional forces caught in the openness of absence.”
I lingered. He disappeared into the bathroom adjacent to his bedroom, and I heard him brushing his teeth. He emerged in his boxers, wearing glasses, as if ready for bed.
“So, when do you want to start?” I said.
He squinted.
“The modeling.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, I don’t have time tonight.”
“I see.”
“The demands on my time are immense. The real world steals my sanity. Here I am, constantly surveilled and manipulated by technology, reality and advertising alike pissing in my face. You understand.”
I, too, often felt attacked, put upon, pushed around. I couldn’t help but feel as if only I could love Seth enough for him to be fully open, and that only he could lend me the recognition I so needed. Falling in love with Seth was a way of falling in love with myself.
I WAIT FOR an hour for him to return or emerge; then I leave, wondering if he’s watching me through the window. I once waited four hours at a bar where he’d told me to meet him before deciding he’d stood me up. He’d forgotten. Agreements mean nothing to him. If he actually moves to New York with me, I’m convinced it will be an accident. He doesn’t answer his phone if he’s “working.” He won’t respond to texts. Days will go by and I will hear nothing from him. “I’m not married to my call log,” he tells me. I feel like an animal. Begging.
I’m a block from my duplex when a cat darts from beneath a car and runs in front of my tire. I swerve to avoid hitting it and fly over the handlebars, landing on my shoulder. I skid several feet on my face and lie on my stomach, scanning for injuries. I watch the cat watching me bleed. A silver-dollar-sized abrasion turns red on my elbow. I roll to my side and gather my bike. I limp to the grass.